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Intermarriage in colonial Malaya and Singapore: A case study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Roman Catholic and Methodist Asian communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2012

Abstract

Colonial race relations are regularly portrayed in light of the attempts to divide and rule colonialised Asian communities. While this article does not challenge this view, it attempts to uncover a hitherto hidden level of interaction and even intermarriage at the grassroots level in colonial Malaya and Singapore. With the exception of the various Peranakan communities that predated British rule, little to no evidence exists to show that interaction and especially intermarriage existed within early first- and second-generation migrant communities during the British colonial period. The findings show how colonial attempts to encourage a heightened sense of race and its frailties may have fallen short among some sections of the Asian community.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2012

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References

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42 Also known as the Melaka Portuguese or Kristang.

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44 Fr. Rene Nicholas (Mission Étrangères de Paris), A Chronology of the Catholic Church in Malaya and Singapore (Singapore: unpublished, 1996), p. 3.

45 Ibid., p. 4.

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64 Tan, Protecting women, p. 5.

65 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

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68 Ibid., pp. 20–1, 92, 114, 122–4. These examples also include incidents from boys-only orphanages.

69 Ibid., pp. 123–4.

70 ‘Application from Roman Catholic Convent, Taiping, for aid towards maintenance of orphans’, 12 Jan. 1900, High Commissioner for Malay States 636/1900.

71 Hwa, ‘Bound by the covenant’, p. 3. These boarders were separated into first- and second-class boarders.

72 Blackmore, ‘Miss C. Nind Deaconess Home’, p. 27. Second-class boarders paid a monthly sum of $5. The average boarder at St Xavier's paid around $25 to $30 per month (early to mid-1920s), depending on the costs incurred. Cash Book of St. Xavier's Institution Boarding Department 1918–28.

73 ‘Register Bidadari’ (various dates), Singapore, E.C.C. 051, National Archives of Singapore (hereafter NAS). The different children were listed as dying from: bronchitis (1), malaria (2), convulsions (4) and marasmus (malnutrition; lack of protein and carbohydrates) (1).

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76 Williams, ‘The church in West Malaysia and Singapore’, p. 103.

77 ‘Application from Roman Catholic Convent, Taiping, for aid towards maintenance of orphans’, p. 2. The author of the application, Sr Marie, refers to the convent's duty to ‘bring up these children and make good housewives and good Mothers of them’.

78 See Kalmijn, ‘Intermarriage and homogamy’.

79 Van Kirk, ‘From “marrying-in” to “marrying-out”’: 2.

80 Ibid., p. 3.

81 Tan, Protecting women, p. 5.

82 Van Kirk, From “marrying-in” to “marrying-out”, p. 3.

83 ‘Baptism register of the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, Singapore’, N.A. 033, NAS; Marriage records of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul (Singapore), N.A. 033, NAS; Interview with Ms Teresa Goh Mui Imm [1913–95], Singapore, May 1988. Such detailed case studies are only available from family sources, as Church archives are presently not accessible or do not contain this much detail. Within certain circles in Singapore and Malaysia, unwillingness to disclose this kind of information makes such accounts extremely rare.

84 ‘Baptism register of the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, Singapore’, and ‘Marriage records of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul (Singapore)’, N.A. 033, NAS.

85 Kalmijn and van Tubergen, ‘Ethnic intermarriage in the Netherlands’.

86 Kalmijn, ‘Intermarriage and homogamy’.

87 Aiyer, From colonial segregation to postcolonial ‘integration’, citing Purushotam, ‘Disciplining difference’.

88 Interview, with Mr Robert (b. 1935), Bukit Rotan (Selangor), 19 Oct. 1997.

89 Tan, Protecting women, p. 6; Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia & Singapore, p. 69; R.N. Jackson, ‘Pickering: Protector of Chinese (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 92.

90 Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia & Singapore, p. 67; Indian Labour: XIV: How to increase efficiency’, The Indian Pioneer (Kuala Lumpur), 3, 12 (29 Mar. 1929), p. 2Google Scholar; Straits Settlements Annual Report 1935, Singapore, pp. 802–4; Ferguson-Davie, C.E., In rubber lands: An account of the work of the Church of Malaya (London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1921), p. 60Google Scholar; Tan, ‘Health and welfare’, p. 340.

91 Tan, Protecting women, p. 11.

92 The term, ‘convent girl’ used in Roman Catholic Church records, was used to denote if a girl was from the local convent orphanage. See ‘Convent, Register of Births (Assumption Cathedral, Penang): Sept. 1893–Dec. 1894’, ‘Dec. 1894–Aug. 1895’, ‘Aug. 1895–Apr. 1896’, ‘May 1896–Nov. 1896’, ‘Nov. 1896–Sept. 1897’, ‘Aug. 1898–Feb. 1904’; ‘Baptisms, Church of St. Francis Xavier (Penang): Aug. 1890–28 Sept. 1891’, ‘21 Jun. 1897–11 Jul. 1901’, ‘28 Jan. 1912–Oct. 1914’; ‘M, 2.4.1923 to 12.7.1936’ (Marriages), St. Anthony's Church, Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur; ‘Baptisms, Church of Our Lady of Lourdes (Singapore): 14 May 1884–15 Sept. 1895’.

93 Tan, Protecting women, p. 28.

94 Kalmijn, ‘Intermarriage and homogamy’, pp. 396–7.

95 Xin and Gregory, ‘Intermarriage and the economic assimilation’, pp. 166–7; Qian and Lichter, ‘Social boundaries and marital assimilation’: 70.

96 ‘Marriage Register of the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul (Singapore)’; Interview, Teresa Goh Mui Imm (1913–95), Singapore, May 1988.

97 Caplan, Lionel, ‘Caste and castelessness among South Indian Christians’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 14, 2 (1980): 218–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Policies of the different churches reflected their attitudes to caste practices. Generally, the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, while not condoning the practice, did not outlaw it. However, many Protestant churches, especially the Methodist, advocated strongly against caste. In Malaya and Singapore, ‘high’ castes, such as the Vellalar, Naidu, Chetty, Mudali, Mudaliyar and Agambadiar caste groups, to an extent were endogamous and probably operated at times as a larger ‘high-caste’ bloc. The slightly lower Odaiyar/Vanniyar groups were accepted into this ‘high-caste’ fold, on the proviso that a suitable educational background, occupational status and the social suitability of the family had been met. A similar dynamic was created with the so-called lower-caste groups such as the Pariah, Pallar, Adi-Dravida, Vallangai and persons of unknown caste groupings. Rerceretnam, ‘Black Europeans and the Indian coolies’, pp. 235–48.

98 Tan, Protecting women, p. 5.

99 Blackmore, ‘Miss C. Nind Deaconess Home’; Yap, Convent Light Street, p. 55.

100 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 67, 22Google Scholar.

101 Williams, The Church in West Malaysia and Singapore, p. 106.

102 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 44–5. Literary-based regimes already existed within local Methodist Churches, many of which transcend Church-based issues, as early as the late 1890s. Rerceretnam, Marc, ‘Anti-colonialism in Christian churches: A case study of political discourse in the South Indian Methodist Church in Colonial Malaya, 1890s–1930s’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 25, 2 (2010): 234–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Straits Settlements Blue Books, 1918 and 1919. Out of the 11,079 pupils in 1919, 5,576 (1918), or over 50.3 per cent, were attending mission schools.

104 Cooke, D.F., ‘The mission schools of Malaya, 1815–1942’, Paedagogica Historica, 2, 2 (1966): 397Google Scholar.

105 Interview, L.S. Rajoo (b. 1921), Singapore, 21 Nov. 1996; Education Department Circular 8/1938 (Director of Education 370/38), 1 June 1938, file D316; ‘Untitled answers to the Legislative Council by Bro. Lothaire, principal of St. Joseph's Institution [Singapore]’, undated: c. 1880s, file D201, doc. i. De La Salle Provincialate, Petaling Jaya; ‘Untitled letter from Bro. James to the Inspector of Schools [Penang]’, 12 March 1928, p. 2. file B298, De La Salle Provincialate, Petaling Jaya. There is no doubt that the school education system was used as a tool of indoctrination to create support for British colonial hegemony. However, this is outside the realm of this study and will not be discussed here.

106 Interview, Mr Gabriel Lourdes (b. 1925), Singapore, 1 Sept. 1997; Rev. Bethune Cook, J.A., Sunny Singapore: An account of the place & its people, with a sketch of the results of missionary work (London: Eliot Stock, 1907), pp. 134–5Google Scholar. The anti-Roman Catholic tone and mood of Rev. Cook's (Anglican) book illustrate the inherent rivalry between the Churches. However, this attitude seems generally absent in surviving Methodist literature. Caplan, ‘Caste and castelessness among South Indian Christians’: 221.

107 ‘Marriage: St. John's Cathedral (Kuala Lumpur) 6 Apr. 1891–29 Jan. 1906’; ‘Marriages: St. Anthony's Church (Kuala Lumpur) 2 Apr. 1923–28 Jan. 1950’.

108 ‘Baptisms, Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, 14 May 1884–15 Sept. 1895’, Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, Singapore.

109 Loomba, Colonialism/postcolonialism, pp. 125, 127.

110 The captive nature of estate employment as well as the race and caste specificity of estate populations were not conducive to interracial contact.

111 No one Chinese dialect group predominated. ‘Marriage: St. John's Cathedral (Kuala Lumpur) 6 Apr. 1891–29 Jan. 1906’; ‘Marriages: St. Anthony's Church (Kuala Lumpur) 2 Apr. 1923–28 Jan. 1950’.

112 It is highly probably that such intermarriages did exist in Singapore prior to 1937. If they did, they were obviously not officiated under the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, Singapore. Several cases of Indian–Chinese marriages are documented at St. Anthony's Church (Kuala Lumpur), dating back to the first decade of the twentieth century. These were usually urban liaisons.

113 ‘Marriage: Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, 7 May 1884 –27 Feb. 1922’, ‘4 Sept. 1922–11 Sept. 1956’, ‘9 Jan. 1941–7 Apr. 1947’, ‘9 Jan. 1942–12 Sept. 1942’, Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, Singapore.

114 This can be seen in the practice of muitsai, which involved the buying of Chinese children by Indian families, who were then brought up as part of the family and later married into the family. ‘Chinese children bought by Tamils’, Tamil Murasu (Singapore), 16 Oct. 1952. A correlation could be drawn between the desire for social mobility and Indian/Hindu concepts of varna (colour). By marrying a ‘fairer’ Chinese, the next generation would not be condemned to endure the stigma of a dark complexion.

115 These so-called ‘light’ Eurasians were usually more recent additions to the ‘Eurasian’ communities. Many were descendants of immigrant Anglo-Indian clerks from India who filled the lower ranks of the civil service throughout much of the nineteenth century. Others were the illegitimate offspring of European liaisons with local women.

116 ‘Marriage: Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, 7 May 1884–27 Feb. 1922’, ‘4 Sept. 1922 –11 Sept. 1956’, ‘9 Jan. 1941–7 Apr. 1947’, ‘9 Jan. 1942–12 Sept. 1942’, Church of Our Lady of Lourdes, Singapore.

117 A larger proportion of ‘poor’ estate workers resided in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur. This contributed to the poorer or weaker image of the Indian community among the other urban-based communities. ‘Marriage: St. John's Cathedral (Kuala Lumpur) 6 Apr. 1891–29 Jan. 1906’; ‘Marriages: St. Anthony's Church (Kuala Lumpur) 2 Apr. 1923–28 Jan. 1950’.