Singapore from / Temasek to the 21st Century ] i Faculty ot ris & Sovial Soe | Edited by Karl Hack and Jean-Louis Margolin, with Karine Delaye ERE NEN SEINE CHR LS WLCHAPTER Temasik to Singapura: Singapore in the 14th to 15th Centuries Jobn Miksic Singapore was a city before it was even called by this name. Long before the settlement was revived by Stamford Raffes in 1819, the north bank of the Singapore River was linked to regional flows of people, culture, religious ideas, and trade. This chapter asks: who were the inhabitants of 14th- to 15th-century “Singapore” (or Temasik, Banzu, or any of its various other names)? Did they think of themselves as Singaporeans or ‘Malays or did they think of themselves as having other identities? Did these inhabitants imagine that they could make this island a centre of importance in the world they inhabited? Singapore appears in Malay, Chinese, Javanese, and Vietnamese records as a place of some significance, What sort of singularity, uniqueness, or comparative advantage, did the island and its inhabitants have? By trying to answer these questions, this chapter may provide a feel for what it was like to live on the island we now call Singapore in the period from the 14th to the carly 17th centuries. ‘Many people still assume that ancient Singapore belongs to the world of fable rather than history.’ Enough archacological evidence has been_ Join Mise collected since 1984 to confirm the hypothesis that by 1330, Singapore was already a going concern, Hundreds of thousands of artefacts, local and foreign, especially pottery sherds, broken pieces of pottery unearthed from ancient urban contexts, leave no room for doubt that 500 years before Thomas Stamford Raffles made a pact with local Malay rulers, a forerunner to the hypermodern metropolis now occupying this island already existed. This new information allows us to reconsider ancient written records, and integrate Longyamen, Banzu, and Temasik into the history of Singapore. In the absence of any effusive documents, attempts to imagine how the people of Singapore actually thought of themselves, what emotional connection they felt to this piece of land, in a word their identities, must be speculative. How did inhabitants of “the-place-now-called-Singapore” of the 14th century perceive their place in the world? Would they have called themselves Singaporeans? It might be more prudent to leave these questions alone, since no definitive answer can ever be given, but the undeniable interest these subjects now raise can be cited as reasonable justification for describing a range of answers, and presenting reasons why some answers are more plausible than others. This chapter sets the stage by discussing places with comparable characteristics to Singapore, thus allowing us to form some conjectures regarding the probable composition of Singapore's population in 1350 and its ethnic diversity. We can reconstruct with some degree of confidence a picture of how vatious groups came to Singapore, and how they perceived their relations with their fellow residents who came from different origins. Next, we can imagine how people here saw theie place in an international context. They were certainly concerned about relations with Java, Sumatra, Vietnam, Siam, South Asia, and China. The conclusion of these deliber- ations is that some relationships and identities were surprisingly similar to contemporary concepts of Singaporeans as people with both local and slobal points of reference. Simple words like “identity” set off ficrce debates among sociologists and anthropologists. Ideas about ethnicity and culture were very different in the previous centuries. It is inadmissible to project modern definitions of ethnicity 700 years into the past, and highly unlikely that all criteria used today to determine who belongs to what group would have been ‘meaningful to peuple den. The concept that natal or birth community confers permanent ethnic identity, which some people still believe today, hhas not always been taken for granted in the past.? Robert Hefner proposed ‘Temaik 1 Singapura: Singapore nthe 14¢h to 15th Contes 105 the term “permeable ethnicity” to refer to the case with which people in the Straits of Melaka and elsewhere in Southeast Asia could switch ethnic identification. A.C. Miller went further, arguing that “it may be misleading to read the concept of ‘ethnicity’ in any form back into the precolonial archipelago world. To speak of civilisational communities or groupings may be more helpful"? A wide range of group identities and aflliations was available for early Southeast Asians to choose voluntarily, many more ethnic groups existed in the past than today, and fragmentation was associated with a highly variegated range of symbols of group membership. : It might be tempting to see Singapore's 14th-century inhabitants as ‘Malay, but that would be misleading. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the terms “Malayu”, “Melayu”, and “Malay” were increasingly used as a general term to refer to people domiciled in the Straits area. It is also tue that in the 14th century, a Sumatran dynasty established itself first in Singapore, and moved to Melaka around 1400, where it became the key reference point for “Malay” culture and genealogy. The term “Malay” has experienced many shifts of meaning in the relatively brief time since Rafifes came to Singapore. In the 18th century, Malay identity underwent significant changes due to the breakup of Melaka’s successor kingdom, Johor and the immigration of people from other parts of the archipelago to the Straits of Melaka.‘ For example, the inhabitants of Siak, east Sumatra, who formerly considered themselves Minangkabau, may have negotiated the meaning of being Malay in order to claim the mantle of johor’s successor en ‘Andaya summarises contemporary thoughts on the possible origins of the term “Melayu”. ‘The conclusion is that we cannot equate Singapore’s indigenous population of the 14th century with the identity today glossed as Malay. The customs, language, and religion which are ‘badges of membership in that group today were not linked in the same way in the 1th century. The people of Singapore, as the Malay Annals (Seiarah ‘Melayu in Malay)” makes clear, were not then Muslim; and neither was the dynasty which a Sumatran noble moved from Palembang to Singapore.* Their religious orientation will be discussed below. Within ancient Singapore, there was not one but two groups of indigenous inhabitants who lived just a few kilometres apart, but displayed major differences in dress and lifestyles. People in the Straits of Melaka seem to have valued membership in groups identified with very specific localities.