The 1870s is an attractive vantage point from which to start a discussion about an intensification in the exchange of “modern” cultural expressions between South Asia and the Malay world. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had brought a host of new people and a variety of new products to the East, and the rapid development of steam navigation facilitated new patterns of their circulation across the Indian Ocean. First landfall in Asia would often be Bombay, which by then was part of a network of profitable steam shipping lines transporting goods and people further east. The unprecedented global economic expansion of that period had far reaching effects on South and Southeast Asia, where colonialism and entrepreneurism shaped the creation of new spaces for cultural production and exchange. An increasingly vast land area was cleared from forests to make way for plantations that needed an enormous influx of labourers to work them, while the products were shipped from port towns that grew into urban centres populated by an amalgam of immigrants seeking new fortunes. It was in these urban centres that small enterprises were established to tap into the dynamics of this new economy. The situation thus gave rise to the circulation of a wide range of new material and cultural products, ranging from bicycles and Swiss-made watches, to newspapers, shows by Indian snake charmers, and British professors giving public lectures about new inventions such as the telephone and gramophone.

The following advertisement from the late 1880s, published in a Malay newspaper nicely captures the opportunities that opened up for people in rapidly expanding towns such as Singapore:

In many ways this advertisement epitomizes the multicultural and commercial character of popular art forms in the Malay world and the contacts it had with the South Asian subcontinent at the end of the nineteenth century.