Moral of Serangoon

Moral of Serangoon

Rahul Goswami (COCHINCHINA) / 1 March 2014

One day, the veil that globalisation wears was torn in Singapore

The popluar idea of Singapore ends at the frontiers of a large rectangle you will not find marked on any map of the island city-state. This rectangle is bounded to the northeast by Race Course Road and Tessensohn Road (that name signalling the cosmopolitan imprint of old Singapore, before it deviated towards technology and finance), to the northeast by one arm of Balestier Road (a Myanmarese name) and the charming Lavender Street (where once sailors vied for the sultry attentions of taxi dancers).

This quadrangular zone is bounded to the southeast by Jalan Besar (which extends from Bendemeer Road) and connects at a right angle to the Sungei Road, whose wide carriageways accommodate the Rochor canal, a narrow watercourse surprisingly clean. Here on Sungei Road was the thieves’ market of old, which until even 10 years ago was a thriving flea market whose vendors gathered every weekend to sell curious odds for dubious ends.

Through the middle of this largish quadrangle, from southwest to northeast, runs Serangoon Road, and it is at the centre of Singapore’s Little India. To this place came the immigrant Indians, brought across the unruly Bay of Bengal by a series of circumstances that had linked the freebooters of Mergui, the British East India Company, and two high officers of a powerful Malayan sultan: The temenggong of Johor and the bendahara of Pahang.

Along the side lanes that led outwards from the colourful stem of Serangoon Road were the sheds and spaces that gave rise to the cattle industries (Kerbau Road had been so thick with them that a century later, when modern Singapore was building its newest underground line in the vicinity, engineers found sedimented buffalo and cow dung, and an old aroma filled the warm evening airs in a way that made the grandmothers retell their stories with that much more vigour).

Along Kerbau and Belilios Roads they plied their trades: Cattle herding, milking, slaughter and meat-vending. Some tales and a few old lithographs are the city’s record of that place in those years. Not long did those early immigrants confine themselves to the labours of animal husbandry, but quickly became goldsmiths, practitioners of ayurvedic medicine, makers of garlands for the temple offerings, textile merchants, purveyors of fresh cooked food and suppliers of the ingredients for those tasty dishes.

And so they made their homes and compiled their modest inheritances, all within the boundaries of the quadrangle outside which the Republic of Singapore questioned itself with dollars and pound sterling, and answered with cheap manufactures, quick trade and an ambition to make money above all else. But inside Little India, contented competence was still practised and valued and the growth of these activities — more community than individual — was the essential element that served, consolidated, defined and swelled the population around and beside Serangoon Road, It enfolded the zone with a most distinctive and quite self-sufficient character that marked it as being different — culturally and economically — from Singaporean society in its careening rush away from its colonial past.

In these times, as they did four generations ago, the new immigrants make their leisurely way to Serangoon Road on Saturdays and Sundays, there to congregate by the thousand. They are South Asian — from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal as much as from the many rural regions of India — and find their freedoms, one day of the week, from the tiresome homogeneity of the rest of Singapore when they cross the invisible threshold of the old quadrangle, welcomed by the aroma of familiar foods, enlivened by the prospect of making new friends, reading letters from home, despatching small savings to distant districts.

Here it was on December 8, 2013, a Sunday, that violence broke out. Official Singapore made not the feeblest attempt to connect the rioting of the immigrant workers with their alienation, poor working conditions and low pay. Educated and privileged Singapore society flailed about to find suitable explanations for the disorder, fearing first and foremost the impact on the stock market and on ‘investor sentiment’.

Forgotten amid the fear were the reasons for Serangoon Road and its sambrani-scented sidestreets to have survived, its cultural heritage largely intact and its spatial relationships respected, amidst the crowded symbolism of Singapore outside, the bullying language of globalisation, of ‘growth’, ‘development’ and ‘progress’.

Rahul Goswami is an expert on intangible cultural heritage with Unesco

For more news from Khaleej Times, follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/khaleejtimes, and on Twitter at @khaleejtimes

Moral of Serangoon