For decades, urbanization has been a major focus of research in Southeast Asia, with much of that research in sociology and geography focused on the ways that booming, urban growth since the 1960s has transformed traditional cultures and economies. As former colonial capitals have turned into megacities and former hill stations have become crowded tourist towns, cities continue to draw scholarly attention for the many ways they figure into colonial and postcolonial constructions of national identity.
The two books considered in this review, Rashesh Rai's Indians in Singapore and Eric Jennings's Imperial Heights, fit into the less traversed realm of urban history, and both make many novel contributions with a particular focus on the negotiation of race and space in colonial and postcolonial cities. As a global trade hub and a former hill station, the cities lie at opposite ends of the spectrum; nevertheless, as constructed, imagined landscapes built to support colonial empires, there are some common features.
Indians in Singapore is finely tuned to the growth of a small but diverse community of Indians that figured into the building of Singapore as a political division of British India before 1867 and then as a diasporic community in the crown colony until 1942. The book is organized chronologically, with divisions following the major political transitions in British Singapore and through the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945. One of the book's strengths is the manner in which Rai, a descendant of the Indian diaspora in Singapore, takes special care to break apart for the reader the many different castes, regions, and religious practices that defined these migrants. Most books detailing colonial cities in Southeast Asia follow the racialist logics of those in power. We learn of British groupings, for instance a discussion of the governor general's preference for “Klings” (Tamil Muslims) and Bengalis to serve as the colony's police force to keep in check Chinese “secret societies” (p. 24). However, Rai takes us far beyond these European views of “Indians” to the individual streets, shops, and associations that mark a much more intricate geography defined by caste, region, language, and religion. There was not one stream of Indian migration to Singapore but many layered one over another. Contrasted with British perspectives on “Indians” as one of several non-European populations, Rai presents us with Adi Dravida laborers living on one side of a road while Kaunder Caste (caste-Hindu) residents lived on the other. He explains the origins of Serangoon Road, the main thoroughfare for Little India, as a path taken by dairy farmers to pastures lying beyond the old city, and he explains that Parsis often lived and worked in the European quarter, unlike other South Asian migrants.
Following the first half of the book, the discussion of interwar history (1915–45) in Indians in Singapore shows how the Indian community in Singapore focused both as a microcosm of nationalist politics in India and as an important expatriate platform for exiled Indians. During World War I, in 1915, the eruption of a Sepoy rebellion highlighted the problematic coupling of particular communities—Muslims in this case—to the politics of the Ottoman Empire against the British. At the same time, rival Hindu and Muslim associations attempted to bridge older divisions of caste and region by pulling newer migrants from such different areas as the Punjab and the Coromandel Coast into common action. This ranged from global politics to making certain religious holidays such as Deepavali into colony-wide, government holidays (pp. 146–47). By the late 1920s, a cast of Indian nationalist lawyers and others took to producing English-language and Tamil-language newspapers in Singapore to advance a host of platforms: trade unions, non-cooperation, and even Dravidian populism. The Japanese conquest of Singapore in 1942 amplified ongoing Indian debates about a postcolonial India by placing Indian communities in Singapore and Bangkok in the unusual position of leading an Indian National Army and an Indian Independence League opposed to British India.
In describing Japanese-occupied Singapore in 1943, Rai delivers a fascinating window into a diverse, relatively small diasporic community now overwhelmed by Japanese-supported ambitions for a Provisional Government of Free India with an Indian National Army comprising over 10,000 regular soldiers and 20,000 irregulars. Here on the streets of Singapore we find a past president of the Indian National Congress, “Netaji” or Subhas Chandras Bose, building the provisional government and reaching out to representatives from various religious and regional groupings. While Japanese authorities boosted the efforts of Netaji and other Indians, they subjected British and Chinese residents to severe deprivation, imprisonment, and forced labor. Returning to the issue of race in the city, the colonial hierarchy had in some ways been turned upside down.
Both in its treatment of the late nineteenth century and the interwar period to 1945, Indians in Singapore shows how Singapore's proximity to British and post-British India shaped the city-state's history and how the place of “India” in Singapore was fluid and contingent on world events. In some instances, British concerns over security led to modifications in the flow of Indian migration; meanwhile, British fears of the Chinese majority and “secret societies” produced an overwhelmingly Indian police force. Rai shows in great detail how many Indians living in Singapore for generations struggled to negotiate these paradoxes in the colonial city as well as their own identities in Singapore versus a real or imagined national homeland.
In Imperial Heights, Jennings sets out to map the workings of a very different imagination, that of French colonial planners intent on building a little piece of France in the temperate highlands of Vietnam. In his treatment on race in the city, Jennings takes us deep into the politics and exchanges of a white French minority confronted with the medical and psychological challenges of living in the tropics. French soldiers sent to enforce colonial control in Indochina succumbed to malaria, dysentery, and cholera. One particularly brutal French officer, Victor Debay, claimed that his killings and beatings of laborers enlisted in his expeditions were due to a kind of tropical madness produced by months of heat, humidity, and sickness. These worries, expressed in the highest circles of French society, produced the effort to construct a temperate “oasis” where such “mad” Frenchmen and women could go to regain their wits and their health. This effort resulted in a fifty-year, fitful campaign to build parks; a full-service, luxury hotel; and chalet-styled villas in a city named after an upland minority place-name, Dalat.
Imperial Heights is one of the most colorful, nuanced studies of French colonial culture in Indochina, and Jennings is at his best weaving a tapestry of impressions from sources on hunting to poetry intended to seduce settlers from France to go directly to the strawberry fields of the Liang Bian plateau. This almost comedic view of colonial programs and pastimes contrasts sharply with that of upland minority groups displaced by the effort. While Jennings does not make the experiences of the highland groups a focus of his study, he finds new ways of exploiting French-language sources to highlight this bitter contrast. In one case, he presents terms from a French-Lat-Koho phrasebook authored by a missionary, Father Castaigne, in 1930. Writes Jennings: “Though rudimentary, the phrasebook taught these colonial audiences to issue such orders as ‘Shut up!’ ‘Hurry up!’ ‘Get out of my way!’ ‘Wake up!’ ‘Leave!’ ‘Be seated!’ ‘Make way!’ ‘Chop down this tree!’” (p. 102).
Like Rai's Indians in Singapore, Jennings's French in Dalat are far from a monolithic group of colonial actors. He breaks down this equally small group of city officials, missionaries, soldiers, and explorers along a variety of ideological, regional, and class lines. Born largely out of their fears of Vietnamese nationalism in the lowlands, French politicians played a key role in advancing Dalat as a possible capital for an autonomous “montagnard” territory.
The latter chapters of the work are likely to be especially rewarding for students of modern Vietnamese history because they posit the city as an important center for Vietnamese “third force” politicians, beginning with King Bao Dai's arrival in 1949. Besides Bao Dai, one of the most (in)famous residents in Dalat at the time was Ngo Dinh Diem's brother Nhu and his wife, future first lady of South Vietnam Madame Nhu—Tran Le Xuan. With such well-known residents, Dalat became a laboratory for Vietnamese, French, and others to fashion a postcolonial, noncommunist future. Due to restrictions on Republic of Vietnam records at the time, very little of this post-1945 story makes it into the book. Since the publication of Imperial Heights, the Vietnamese government has opened Archives Center #4 at the former villa of Madame Nhu in Dalat, with collections of regional and southern governments' pre-1975 records. Imperial Heights, however, offers many openings for future scholarship and an excellent base in French archives and literature.
As with Indians in Singapore, I found Jennings's discussion of racial politics during the period of Japanese military occupation (1940–45) to be one of the most interesting as a history of racially segregated sites in Southeast Asia for the ways it shows fine cracks in French racialist thinking and also the rapidly evolving ideas of racial and national identity for Vietnamese and indigenous populations. As with the Indians in Singapore, the French Vichy regime in Indochina was caught in between Japanese military appeals to the “Asian masses” on one side and those of Vietnamese nationalists attacking French imperialism on the other. Jennings, like Rai, makes us acutely aware of the many problems created by these historic, legally binding racial categories. One of the most poignant in the book centers on the story of a School for Eurasian Children of the Troops—a military boarding school established for mixed-race children born to French military fathers and local mothers. Established in 1939 along with an orphanage for Eurasian children some years earlier, the school prepared young boys for service in the French military after 1945. French government exchanges highlighted pivotal questions, including whether these children of French men would be afforded French citizenship and also whether as children largely raised by local mothers they might harbor deeper loyalties to Vietnamese nationalism. One picture in the book, showing three young boys at the school in 1950, standing in uniform under the French tricolor and staring into the camera, is haunting given the fighting that followed (p. 191). From Dalat, they might have served in Vietnam, in Algeria, or in a dozen other conflicts.
Comparing these works, I am especially aware as a historian of the ways that the terms of our own backgrounds, where we live, and how we have been trained shape our experiences of cities and our sensitivity to debates over national and racial identities. French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre spoke of his native Paris like a seashell where so many layers had been accreted one upon another, the most recent being the high, modern buildings and suburban developments post-1945. A veteran of the Paris Commune, he pointed to the power that underlying layers—exposed in spaces—exerted on this new industrial capitalist overlay.Footnote 24 The principle value that historians such as Jennings and Rai bring to the study of urban spaces and urban society is an excavation of these old layers woven into the urban fabric of Singapore and Dalat as well as the ways experiences of these places shaped people's identities. Both books serve to remind us that “Little Indias” and “Little Switzerlands” are not ethnic or architectural enclaves, floating out of time and space, detached from the main currents of national life. Rather, they are historically and socially embedded spaces—fabricated from the imagination and suffering of those who built them. Instances of comedy and amusement are juxtaposed with episodes of cultural annihilation and state-sanctioned violence. Both histories remind us, too, that the work of building cities and urban societies is far from complete. Their treatment of nationalist movements, especially around 1945, points to questions for mixed-race and diaspora communities that (sadly) are still current today.
