Singapore Comes to Terms with its Malay Past: The Politics of Crafting a National History

ABSTRACT

Ethnic tensions were central to Singapore’s birth as an independent republic, and they left the government in a quandary: how to talk about the country’s history when its birth was mired in contention between its dominant Chinese population and its large Malay minority? The surprising answer to this dilemma involved crafting a new national narrative that started in 1819, with the arrival of British imperialism. This move had the intended effect of excluding earlier centuries of Malay agency completely from the record, thus delegitimising the claims of one of the main communities in contention. The key element in the construction of the new national narrative was the implicit acceptance of colonial claims about Singapore’s achievements during the colonial era: that they were British achievements, building upon terra nullius. This mythology gave no credit or recognition to the Malays who had lived and traded in the region and on the island for centuries. This article explores the shifting politics of Singapore’s official historiography, paying particular attention to the role of scholars and education professionals in facilitating and reforming the national narrative. It posits that academic collaboration has been an overlooked feature of Singapore’s national myth-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Singaporean history
• history teaching
• ethnicity
• Malays in history
• nation-building
• national identity
• historiography
• politics

Acknowledgements

Thanks go firstly to Associate Professor Helen Ting of the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS) at the National University of Malaysia (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia). It was Helen’s invitation to attend an international workshop in Malaysia on ‘Negotiating Ethnic Diversity and National Identity in History Education: An East–West Comparison’ in February 2020 that triggered my current research trajectory. Thanks also to my colleague, Peter Borschberg, who read an early version of this article and generously offered his advice. Thanks also to ASR’s Editor-in-Chief, David Hundt, who allowed me to submit this article despite being a member of the Editorial Board. David ensured that I had no contact with the refereeing process, and Robbie Peters (Regional Editor for Maritime Southeast Asia) arranged for my paper to be subjected to a more rigorous refereeing process than usual. On that note, I wish to express my gratitude to the five anonymous referees who offered comments on my manuscript. Between them, they have refined and somewhat redirected the scope of my article, sharpening my analysis in the process. I am very grateful for their collective input.

Notes

1. There were almost no Tamil schools. Most Indian children attended English schools (Murugaian, 2018, Chapter 9). Indians were the third-largest ethnic community in Singapore.

2. The question of whether the government or the academics were driving these developments is obscured by the reality that Wong was a PAP Member of Parliament while he was Head of the History Department, and then he left academia to become Minister for Home Affairs.

3. These research limitations and outcomes were typical of historians who were trained or worked in the colonial and early post-colonial era (Milner, 1987).

4. This survey excludes group photos that depict a mixture of races or where the race is indistinguishable.

5. Despite being first published in 1984, it was not adopted as the main history textbook until 1994.

6. This claim is based on conversations with academics in the NUS History Department during my PhD research in 1996.

7. For instance, in 2005, the NUS History Department and the Asia Research Institute sponsored the ‘Paths not taken’ workshop, which was explicitly devoted to challenging Singapore’s foundational narratives. It was a high-profile seminar, attended by around 200 university staff, students and other visitors. It is inconceivable that such a workshop would enjoy comparable institutional patronage today.