New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. xxix, 325 pp. (Tables.) US$55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-809929-1.
In this rich volume, readers are treated to an encyclopedic assessment of Indian presence in Singapore. From the Raffles treaty with the Sultan of Johor in 1819, and the more formalized incorporation of the island into British commercial horizons, through to the defeat of Japan in World War Two, the book utilizes an impressive array of primary sources to weave a textured narrative. Much of the tale and its methodological underpinnings are familiar to those engrossed in the now weighty literature on Southeast Asia’s Indian-origin communities and diasporas, but this engaging synthesis should be popular with students and citizens interested in the nation’s historical ethnic tapestry. It may prove slightly less appealing to a wider academic audience hungry for innovative transnational histories of the vibrant, networked Indian Ocean world, of which Singapore was a key node. Still, this attractive book is an admirable piece of scholarship that tells the reader a great deal about the diversity and multi-layered identities of Singapore’s Indian communities.
The book is broken into three chronological parts. Part 1, “Pioneers at the Frontier,” takes the narrative from Raffles to the 1867 transfer of the territory from British East India Company control to Crown Colony. Part 2, “Diasporic Transformations in the Age of Mass Migration,” ups the pace to the 1940s, with the shorter final section focusing on the well-studied period of Japanese Occupation and the Indian National Army. One might quibble that a work subtitled “diaspora in a colonial port city” could have played around with more counter-hegemonic chronologies, but the structure is generally helpful in orientating the reader through the long timeframe. Within its own Singaporean and transnational terms the book soon progresses on a dense and thematically rewarding journey. It summarizes well the changing contexts and historiography of nineteenth-century imperial militarism, colonial labour and independent commerce that brought Singapore into various scales of “Greater India,” “Greater Madras” or even “Greater Punjab,” at the same time as Southeast Asia itself impacted the social, economic, and demographic history of rural India. Rai’s attention to detail is impressive, for example in explaining the stages of linkage between the Madras Presidency and Singapore. He expertly describes the ebb and flow of British anxiety about Indian mobility and agency, especially from the 1860s to the 1920s. Rai is notably strong in evoking a teetering sense of colonial control and its attendant authoritarian turns, which emerge forcefully in his narrative with the 1867 Muharram procession (in the context of Chinese secret society activity) and the 1915 Singapore Mutiny (inflamed by the globalized Indian radicalism of the Ghadr movement).
The volume shines further as it delves into the socio-cultural arena, vividly presenting urban spaces as diverse Indian communities bedded down into agglomerations such as Serangoon Road into the twentieth century. Analysis of the taxonomies of communal difference, as well as trans-ethnic collaboration, is interesting and apt. The most original section is chapter 5, which engages the complexities of Indian associational culture. This fills a scholarly lacuna, even if the short sections and prose dictate a rather staccato style. The connections to Indian nationalist and regional ethnic politics tether nicely to the book’s conceptual ambitions and are informative, even if such Southeast Asian scholarship at large arguably lags behind comparable work on Africa and “Greater India” by scholars such as Isabel Hofmeyr, Jim Brennan, and Sana Aiyer. The final section, “The Japanese Occupation and the Indian National Army,” provides an excellent Singaporean (as opposed to wider Malayan) treatment of this most emotive episode in Singapore’s South Asian history. It is a good first port of call for those interested in the period and underlines Rai’s copious bibliographical industry within canonical and more unusual sources.
“Diaspora” is at the centre of Rai’s analysis, but in some senses, notwithstanding excellent source endeavour and conceptual flourishes book-ending the volume, he does not go far enough in dissecting and theorizing the cacophony of diasporic voices and transnational bonds across the Bay of Bengal. He is astute in consistently seeing the port city as a “porous site of confluence,” flux, and multi-directionality of connection (280–285). Colonial infrastructure intentionally and inadvertently sustained such webs, as well as regulated them, as Rai incisively observes. But for a book so explicitly concerned with “mobility and circulation across nodes spread over vast regions … best understood within the transnational networks frame” (xix), one might have expected deeper methodological liaison with Indian (and other Indian Ocean) sites that produced some of this transnational noise in Singapore, as well as new cutting-edge secondary literature. The excellent monograph cited in the introduction as influential in moving us beyond a “plantation frontier” and “homeland” focus of South Asian mobilities, Claude Markovits’ The Global World of Indian Merchants (Cambridge University Press), is now fifteen years old. Since then an effervescent body of Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian interventions—a driver of the latest avatar of the “transnational turn”—has also been directly preoccupied with Rai’s own task of assessing how dialogues of imperial, Indian, and Indian Ocean worlds in colonial port cities consistently re-negotiated a range of local, transnational, and global identities. With the supple analysis of multivalent print cultures, carceral archipelagos, pilgrimage networks, revolutionary undergrounds, and the permissive global languages of self-determination, scholars such as Sunil Amrith, Clare Anderson, Enseng Ho, Eric Tagliacozzo, Su Lin Lewis, Mark Ravinder Frost, and Tim Harper are building a sophisticated vista of connection, cleavage, and even cosmopolitanism within and beyond Empire. This book is pulling on the same rope and does so with empirical diligence. Its strength is a focus on the peculiarities of Singapore’s transnational porousness, which Rai states has been understudied. Yet, Rai’s diasporic focus would have been enriched conceptually by engaging more deeply and comparatively this newer work on regional connection and wider registers of permeability. As it stands, this fine book on Singaporean exceptionalism and regional relations misses certain historiographical tricks. Nevertheless, this busy synopsis does move us forward in addressing Indian diaspora in Asia. Anyone interested in the contingent ways in which Empire and migration shaped the “elaborate texture” of Singapore should digest its content.
Gerard McCann
University of York, Heslington, United Kingdom
pp. 705-707