Introduction

As a cosmopolitan port city under British colonial rule, Singapore was (and still is) a key site of cultural interaction not only in terms of East meets West but also between the many Asian diasporic communities who populated the island. Colonial Singapore society was richly diverse and complex, first because of its many component ethnicities and, second, because different waves of immigration created communities with varying degrees of attachment to their land of settlement. The main racial groups in the 1930s were the Chinese, comprising nearly three-quarters of the population; Malay peoples from the surrounding peninsular and archipelagic region, making up just over 12 per cent; and Indians who comprised the remaining nine per cent. By the early decades of the twentieth century, there were significant numbers of non-Malays whose families had been living in Malaya for generations among those who had decided to settle permanently in Malaya. In an era of new Asian nationalisms, the Chinese and Indians in Singapore found themselves forced to conceptualise their identities—national, racial, and linguistic—in the context of their status as transnational communities. It was precisely in contact zones like Singapore, away from the centres of Chinese and Indian civilisation and far from the imperial metropole, that hybrid lived experiences forced the redefinition of ideas which prevailed in both Asia and Europe.