Q1.
Seeing that Tamil is one of Singapore’s official languages, what does this suggest to you about the relationship between south India and Singapore?
Answer
It suggests that the link with south India is very old, very large and officially recognised — not a recent or minor connection. A country makes a language official only when a substantial number of its own citizens speak it, so Tamil's place beside English, Mandarin and Malay is evidence of a long-settled Tamil community.
What the chapter lets us conclude
- The contact is ancient. Like Thailand and Malaysia, Singapore “had close cultural and commercial ties with India, with Buddhist monks as well as traders visiting the region a few centuries BCE”.
- The name itself is Indian. Singapore comes from ‘Singapuram' or ‘lion city', the name of an ancient kingdom just off the southern tip of present-day Malaysia.
- The community is real and sizeable. About 9 per cent of Singapore's residents are of Indian origin, many of them living in an area of the city called ‘Little India'.
- It is a settled, respected part of national life. Fig. 2.23 shows an ordinary public safety sign — “DANGER – KEEP OUT” — printed in all four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay. Tamil is used for everyday public information, not just for ceremonies.
- The traffic runs both ways today. Singapore is now one of the largest foreign investors in India, many Indian companies have offices there, and Singapore receives large numbers of Indian tourists and students.
Why it happens: south India faces the Bay of Bengal, and the sea route from the Coromandel coast to the Malay Peninsula is short and well-known. Traders, monks and later workers used it for two thousand years. The chapter notes the same pattern in Malaysia, where large numbers of workers “mainly from south India” migrated in the 19th and 20th centuries and where 9 per cent of the population is of Indian origin today. A language on a road sign is what that history looks like after two millennia.