Introduction: A genealogy of colonial nationalism in Singapore

This article examines the unusual history of a national idea in late colonial Singapore from the 1930s to the early 1950s before the attainment of partial self-government in 1955. Using two different concepts, namely ‘colonial nationalism’ and ‘imperial citizenship’, it provides a genealogy of nationalism in Singapore, which calls into question the applicability of prevailing theories of nationalism to the Singapore-in-Malaya context.

An obvious lacuna in the existing literature on nationalism is neglect of the role played by the coloniser in fostering nationalistic belonging to the putative nation. Given the seeming incompatibility of colonialism and nationalism, the portrait of the coloniser as nationalist defies intuitive understanding. Yet, Singapore's history at the critical moment of transition from colonialism to independent statehood demands precisely a re-think of anti-colonial nationalism. Focusing on the unlikely creature of colonial nationalism, the article cautions against presumptive understandings of languages and cultural practices associated with their declared value. By tracing Singapore's English-mediated official multiculturalism to its colonial past, I argue for the need to move away from assumptions about the purported racial neutrality of the English language. Instead, the historic emergence of English-scripted multiculturalism cannot be divorced from shifting colonial priorities, ideologies and practices of governance and challenges to British authority on the island.

Historians Christopher Bayly and Timothy Harper use ‘colonial nationalism’ to describe how a post-1945 generation of British officials and educators had embraced the task of ‘nation-building’ on Malaya's behalf with ‘an evangelical fervor’. Bayly and Harper paint a bizarre picture of the erstwhile colonisers ‘dressed in the borrowed robes of nationalism’ for it had become ‘axiomatic to the British that before the war there was no local patriotism in Malaya’ and they were duty-bound to create it.Footnote ¹ The new political entity called the Malayan Union (MU), which the British inaugurated immediately after the war in 1946, was the most concrete manifestation of their nationalist vision. Comprising all former administrative units (except Singapore) of British Malaya, the MU was conceived as the putative Malayan nation-in-the-making. Although Singapore, which used to be part of the Straits Settlements (SS), was excluded from the MU, its eventual inclusion within the imagined Malayan nation was part of the work-in-progress. Central to this nationalist vision was education. True to the educative nature of European colonialism, the British saw colonial nationalism ‘in terms of a culture of a responsible middle class, united by English education and the values it carried’.Footnote ² The English language and English-medium education occupied a privileged place in British colonial nationalism as English was promoted as the common language of the Malayan nation and an instrument for what was conceived as ‘non-communal’ civic nationalism. In the first decade following the end of the Second World War and before partial self-determination in Singapore in 1955, there were four milestones in British policy-making in the field of education through which the British sought to establish the primacy of English. These were the implementation of a Ten Year Plan for Education in 1947 (TYP), the promulgation of a Five Year Supplementary Plan (FYSP) in 1950 and the 1953 White Paper for Bilingual Education and Increased Aid for Chinese Schools. The establishment in Singapore of an English-medium University of Malaya in 1949 was the fourth milestone that completed the proposed establishment of a comprehensive educational system in the English language stream. In the British scheme of things, education was thus a privileged site for the making of the prototype Malayan citizen. By focusing on education, this article aims to shed new light on colonial nationalism and multiculturalism in Singapore.

Of the legacies the British bequeathed to Singapore, education in the English language ranks highly as one of the most valued. While the British interpretation of English and its primary role in Singapore's ‘non-communal’ nationalism dominates lay as well as academic understanding of the republic's multiculturalism, their involvement in the development of that nationalism and multiculturalism has not been seriously contemplated in the existing scholarship. In Race and multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, Daniel P.S. Goh and Philip Holden suggest that the tendency to analyse the development of multiculturalism in ‘the West’ apart from ‘the Rest’ has caused scholars to ignore the possibility of a conjoined history of multiculturalism. They caution particularly against holding up an implied Western-centric liberal multicultural model as the norm against which practices of multiculturalism elsewhere must inevitably be judged, arguing that ruptures and continuities in the recasting of colonial race/culture by independent postcolonial states deserve further investigation.Footnote ³ I suggest that British colonial nationalism in postwar Singapore and Malaya constitutes one meeting point of this conjoined history of multiculturalism.

Analyses of nationalism in Singapore and Malaysia are certainly not lacking. However, the academic literature tends to reinforce discrimination between an implied British-inspired civic nationalism model and a model based on ethnic nationalisms. This approach is flawed for two reasons. First, we can hardly expect this approach to help us appreciate the race-inflected understanding of multicultural nationalism championed by the British when it recycles the analytical lens created and perpetuated by colonial rule itself. Presumptions about the purported ‘race-neutral’ quality of British multicultural nationalism lie at the heart of the problem. The British believed that the creation of a multicultural nation united in common usage of English in Singapore and Malaya would neutralise the race factor, so realisation of this multicultural nation was one of the British preconditions for decolonisation. Adopting a benign interpretation of this position, the existing scholarly literature attributes the failure of the MU to the tenacity of Malay ethnocentrism while justifying its autocratic implementation in Singapore on grounds of entrenched Chinese ‘chauvinism’. The implication of this argument is that whereas the British became ‘non-communal’ at the moment of decolonisation, the colonised were somehow condemned to their primordial racial natures, which had the added effect of justifying persistent control and regulation of race relations by the respective postcolonial states in Singapore and Malaysia. This charitable view of decolonisation expunges British-engineered multiculturalism from a long history of colonial governance via the creation and management of racial categories and absolves the British from charges of politicising cultural and educational issues, chief of all English-medium education during the postwar period. As such, scholarly attention remains fixated on the inevitably ‘raced’ nature of Malay and Chinese ethnonationalisms in Singapore and Malaysia as root causes for the non-realisation of a multiculturalism presumed to be initiated by the British.

Second, by postulating two opposed models of nationalism (i.e. multicultural versus ethnic) it is easy to attribute British attempts at developing multicultural nationhood to traits of ‘Britishness’, which misses completely the historical development of multiculturalism in Singapore and Malaya. I argue that postwar British multiculturalism must be studied as part of Singapore's colonial past because it evolved within the hierarchical power structure and relations that characterised colonial paternalism. As William Blythe, who was Secretary for Chinese Affairs in Malaya in 1948 and Colonial Secretary in Singapore between 1950 and 1953, concluded, there was simply ‘no prospect, for a long time to come, of the emergence of a strong independence movement, and that it will be the lot of the British, if we retain the power and the will to do so, to keep the ring until a closer fusion of the two races (the Malays and Chinese) is produced’.Footnote ⁴ Clearly, reaffirmation of colonial privilege constitutes both the premise and consequence of this embryonic project in multicultural Malayan nationhood to such an extent that officials such as Blythe arrogated the right to declare multiculturalism a key objective only to proclaim the impossibility of its achievement in the same breath. The British formulation and execution of multiculturalism was by no means a result of their penchant for civic nationalism, but was dictated by the exigencies of maintaining power and control. This was obvious from the ways in which the British engaged with spontaneous expressions of multiculturalism traceable to the 1930s.

Recent histories on pre-Second World War Singapore emphasise the presence of an articulate and active multiethnic community that struck back at the empire even before its demise. Chua Ai Lin describes this multiethnic community as an ‘Anglophone Asian’ community, emphasising their multilingual and multiracial character albeit with an outlook centred on British imperial identity and anchored in the use of English as its primary language. Chua demonstrates that by the 1930s, the community had developed political critiques of colonial policies and practices and should therefore be regarded as rightful predecessors to the generation of post-war anti-colonial nationalists in Singapore and Malaya.Footnote ⁵ Examining the discourses of different nominated Anglophone Chinese leaders in the Straits Settlements Legislative Council (LegCo), Daniel Goh labels their discourses as already ‘postcolonial’. Goh explains that they are ‘postcolonial in the sense that the discourse contended with colonial power and crafted nascent imaginations of the nation which sought to resolve the complexities of cultural, racial and class distinctions that were functional for colonial rule’.Footnote ⁶ While agreeing with Chua on critiques of colonialism developed by prewar Anglophone Asians, Goh adds that their multiethnic discourses continued to be influential even after the 1960s, shaping collective memory and the official scripting of history well into contemporary times. Recent work on Singapore and Malaysian history also stress parallels between the colonial and postcolonial states.Footnote ⁷ It is necessary, therefore, to trace the genealogy of colonial nationalism and Singapore's postwar English-scripted multiculturalism to the prewar period. Examination of this genealogy, I argue, demonstrates that postwar British appropriation of multicultural discourses first proposed by Anglophone Asians during the 1930s represented a major intervention in the development of multicultural nationhood in the island-state.

The 1930s was a crucial moment when issues over education and the creation of a distinctive Malayan nation became flashpoints of keen debates about local identity in Singapore. Expressions of ‘imperial citizenship’ were articulated by Anglophone Asians, but were dismissed by the British and were forgotten again during the postwar period. This failure in British historical consciousness is striking considering that expressions of imperial citizenship bear close parallels to the ideals of multicultural Malayan citizenship they espoused after the war. Key elements present in both were the privileged place of English in uniting the different ethnic communities, the importance of education as a tool for producing Malayan citizens, and partiality to British influence. That the British were averse to Malayan claims of imperial citizenship in the 1930s while championing a revamped version of it in the 1950s points to the need to take into account colonialism as a crucial element in the history of multiculturalism in Singapore.

Historically speaking, imperial citizenship was put forth by a group of British imperial ideologues as a means of consolidating unity and commonality in the amorphous empire between 1895 and 1920.Footnote ⁸ This attempt at rationalising the empire was futile not only because ‘the imperial citizen’ was a vague and unsatisfactory notion, it was narrowly applied to ‘the white portions of the empire’ only.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, it proved impossible to persuade those in self-governing white settler colonies eager to protect their political and citizenship rights to accept the populations of large swathes of the dependent territories as fellow imperial citizens. Yet, the rest of the dependent empire was not deterred from using this defective idea to generate claims for greater political rights and civil liberties.

Sukanya Banerjee argues with reference to India that the limitation of juridical rights of imperial subjects motivated Anglophone Indians to claim citizenship rights ‘not so much in the realm of statutory enactment as in the cultural, imaginative and affective fields’.Footnote ¹⁰ This was most evident in the ways they recast Queen Victoria's 1858 Proclamation to articulate their desire for citizenship in the last decades of the nineteenth century, no matter the elusiveness of the Sovereign's promise.Footnote ¹¹ Banerjee thus stretches imperial citizenship conceptually to focus her examination on the ‘languages of citizenship’.Footnote ¹² Resort to alternative modes of articulating citizenship was perhaps clearest in the affective register of ‘loyalism’, which was ‘central to rhetorical notions of imperial citizenship’.Footnote ¹³ The idea that allegiance to the Crown would be reciprocated with the Sovereign's protection was extended to include the idea that her subjects would be granted particular liberties. Loyalism thus gave rise to a ‘hybrid citizenship model of subjecthood’,Footnote ¹⁴ making it possible for Anglophone Asians in India and Malaya to believe they were entitled to political rights by virtue of their loyalty to the Crown. Notwithstanding its specificity to the British Indian context, Anglophone Asians during the interwar years in Singapore also invoked the same Proclamation to argue that it held a promise for more citizenship rights.Footnote ¹⁵ Using imperial citizenship, Anglophone Asians in prewar Malaya transacted in the currency of loyalty to demand for greater freedoms, more development, greater uplift of subject populations and empire-wide equality.

There is one final reason for retracing the colonial origins of multiculturalism in Singapore. Most scholarly treatments of decolonisation and national formation in Malaya concentrate on analysing the behind-the-scenes negotiations and jockeying for power amongst the British, local politicians, groups and political parties with vested interests in the nation-building process.Footnote ¹⁶ Mapping the genealogy of colonial nationalism from imperial citizenship helps shift our lens from high politics to an appreciation of Singapore's ‘social imaginary’.Footnote ¹⁷ Since Singapore's attainment of independence in 1965, the anti-colonial nationalist model was laid to rest when Singapore aligned itself with the Euro-American capitalist bloc and concentrated on accelerating economic development. Over the years, an orthodox national history positioning the People's Action Party (PAP) as the sole legitimate nationalist force, fighting not so much the colonisers but the Communists, has become entrenched in the island-state. Instead of anti-colonialism, the leitmotif of Singapore's national history before independence is anti-communism. The hegemony of this official orthodoxy in Singapore today has resulted in a collective inability to evaluate the significance of colonialism as well as anti-colonial nationalism. These are now minor subtexts relative to the main plot of the PAP leading Singaporeans to national triumph after 1965. Such failures of Singapore's historical imagination arise not because of a lack of scholarship which is critical of official history.Footnote ¹⁸ However, the focal points of these critiques are directed at challenging the PAP's version of national history and its top-down approach to nation-building than at expanding the scope of analysis to include examination of the national idea and cultural practices central to projections of nationhood. By probing the genealogy of colonial nationalism in Singapore, this article has the larger objective of prodding scholarship towards reconsidering the study of nationalism in Singapore, Malaysia and the post-colonial world in general.

Deploying imperial citizenship in Singapore in the 1930s

In 1934, Singapore Governor Sir Cecil Clementi stepped down following a deeply unpopular ‘Malayanisation’ campaign in education. Clementi's proposed educational reforms entailed putting education policies across the SS and the Malay States on the same footing as part of a larger attempt to create greater administrative uniformity across the political units. Announcing the Malayan Educational Policy on 25 October 1933, Clementi delimited the government's fundamental responsibility in education as the provision of free elementary Malay-medium education and affordable (but not free) elementary English-medium education, the aim of which was to create ‘a permanent Malayan population’ that could assist in Malaya's development.Footnote ¹⁹ As he elaborated,

Since elementary Malay-medium education was prioritised, Clementi stated that ‘secondary and high school and college education should be at the expense of the individual, and not at the State's expense’.Footnote ²¹

Clementi's educational policy disappointed the Anglophone Asian community in the SS. Chua describes the development of a localised Malayan identity amongst Anglophone Asians between 1930 and 1941. Reflecting the community's ethnic diversity, key spokesmen and leaders espoused a multicultural Malayan identity rooted in English as the common language. Clashing with Clementi's Malay-centred Malayanisation, Anglophone Asians urged the government to do more for English-medium education while respecting the need for vernacular language education. Their embrace of English was not attributed to economic pragmatism or access to political representation, but encompassed elements of cultural identification with the British empire as well. The Malaya Tribune (henceforth, MT), an independent English-language newspaper serving the community, even positioned English as the cultural glue which held together the empire. As ‘the Empire's language’ the MT argued that English permitted ‘all British races here’ to develop a common ‘imperial citizenship’.Footnote ²²

While Clementi's educational reforms and their provocation of local response is well-studied, an important agitation campaign for a university in Malaya which unfolded from 1936 onwards and that culminated in 1937 has been all but forgotten. This is despite contemporaneous commentaries describing the Malayan university as ‘the dominating issue in local politics for 1937’.Footnote ²³ It was even ‘fashionable’ as student publications note, to comment on this ‘momentous subject’ because the Malayan public had become ‘immensely University conscious’.Footnote ²⁴ By the 1930s, British Malaya was served by two main institutions of higher education — King Edward VII Medical College and Raffles College, which taught arts, humanities and social science subjects. Although the foundation of a university for Malayan residents had occasionally been debated, the immediate trigger for the intensification of local demands for a full-fledged Malayan university in the 1930s was Clementi's Malayanisation policy. Significantly, the agitation campaign went beyond challenging Clementi's reforms to expose fundamental assumptions of colonial rule and privilege, thus providing us with a clear view of the critical edge of the imperial citizenship idea.

On 26 October 1936, with memories of Clementi's policy still fresh, the public waited with keen anticipation for the new governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, to speak on the colony's education policy in the LegCo for the very first time since he assumed office. The governor gave up Clementi's insistence that the SS had to coordinate its educational policy with that of the Malay States and assured the colony that its education policy could develop independently. Be that as it may, the maxim of full funding for only elementary Malay-medium education in British Malaya remained. Responding to the government's new education policy, one Captain Noor Mohamed Hashim rose to ask ‘when the Medical College and Raffles College are likely to be given university status’ because according to the captain, ‘there is a widespread demand that Medical College and Raffles College should be given University status as soon as possible’.Footnote ²⁵ Captain Hashim, who served as the representative of the Malay-Muslim community in the council, defied prevailing perceptions that his community was not in favour of an English-medium university, eventually becoming the leading figure of this public campaign.Footnote ²⁶ In fact, it was the government's inept handling of Hashim's question that directed public attention to the university issue.

Born in Penang in 1880 and educated at the Penang Free School, Captain Hashim enjoyed an illustrious career as a civil servant in the SS and the Malay States. He was one of the first Malay officers to be appointed to the European-dominated Malayan Civil Service. The captain began his career in 1898 when he was appointed Malay Student Interpreter at the Police Courts in Penang. In 1910, he recruited the first Malay Volunteers and created the first Malay Company for the Singapore Volunteer Corps. In what would be the clearest demonstration of his allegiance to the British Crown, Captain Hashim led the Malay Volunteers to assist the British in quelling the Singapore Mutiny as well as the Toh Janggut Rebellion in Kelantan in 1915.Footnote ²⁷ The captain's loyalty was rewarded in 1919 when he was appointed Acting District Officer of Balek Pulau and Assistant District Judge and Magistrate for Penang. From 1922 until his retirement in 1935, Captain Hashim served in the Federated Malay States. In 1936, the government appointed him to the SS LegCo as Unofficial member, a position he occupied until 1941. As a member of the Anglophone Asian community, the captain was certainly exemplary.Footnote ²⁸

It was during Captain Hashim's post-retirement years that he distinguished himself by speaking aggressively on the university and other education-related issues. When the newly minted Unofficial legislator raised the university issue in October 1936, the Director of Education, F.J. Morten, and Governor Thomas were caught off guard. Morten stated that the government was not in principle opposed to the formation of a university, but it was the government's position that ‘the time had not yet arrived’.Footnote ²⁹ He then pointed further to the problem of inadequate finances to caution against making hasty pronouncements on the issue. After Morten spoke, Governor Thomas claimed he was ‘completely unaware’ of widespread demand for a university since ‘if there is a great demand, it has not been, since I have been here, been voiced in any local paper or by any local assembly’.Footnote ³⁰ The terse official position failed to satisfy those troubled by the government's apparent nonchalance toward the colony's aspirations for a degree-conferring institution. As MT's editorial opined, the choice between a degree-conferring university and a college offering higher education but no degrees was clear-cut. ‘Instead of saying that there is a demand that the college should be raised to university status, it would be more correct to say that there is a lack of demand for the facilities for education that the college provides’.Footnote ³¹

Confronted with public disaffection, Governor Thomas felt compelled to provide a full account of the government's position on the university issue during an annual dinner for Raffles College.Footnote ³² His speech consisted of three interlocking arguments and is a classic example of the coloniser's prerogative in prescribing Eurocentric standards upon which colonised societies are judged and found wanting. First, Thomas dismissed widespread demands for a university degree. Implying that this demand stemmed from unrealistic expectations that the government was obliged to hire all university graduates, he stated that until local employers in Malaya realise the advantages of hiring well-educated employees such as in the case of ‘businesses and professional firms in England’, there was ‘little justification for a University in Singapore’. Without such substantive support from local employers, the Governor argued that a change from ‘diploma’ to ‘degree’ would be a change in name only.

Second, Thomas cited the experiences of other countries (India, but of course!) where universities were established before the time was ripe, stating that ‘to be of any value, a degree must be won by merit, and a good diploma is much better than a bad degree’. Thus, the governor raised the issue of educational standards in a highly patronising manner: he did not simply mean that the colleges were not good enough to be universities, but urged the public to be contented that its colleges, at the very least, gave its graduates a ‘good diploma’. Third, Thomas repeated the mantra laid down by his predecessors that ‘the most important duty of Government in education is to provide cheap elementary education for all’. Since this objective had yet to be achieved and the government was already heavily financing the two existing colleges, he argued that the government could not prioritise higher education.

Public reaction to the governor's speech came fast and furious. The MT launched a media blitz on the issue. It lambasted the official position in its editorials for weeks on end, printed readers' letters supporting the call for the university, extracted articles and commentaries from student magazines of the two colleges and gave extensive coverage of events and public speeches that lobbied the government for a university. For instance, when the influential Straits Chinese British Association (SCBA) held its annual meeting on 20 November 1936, its members urged the association's leaders to press the government on the university issue. The SCBA reminded the government that the committee set up to celebrate the centennial of Singapore's foundation had submitted in 1918 that the best memorial was a scheme providing for advancement of higher education that would lay the foundation for a university.Footnote ³³ The alumni association of the medical college challenged the government to ‘impose any standard (it) deemed equal to the dignity of the university’ for ‘Malayan brains compare favourably with those of the West as shown by the successes of our Malayan students in the universities in England, America and other countries’.Footnote ³⁴

In general, the Anglophone Asian community made three main arguments for a university. These three threads demonstrate how the community drew the substance of its opposition by reformulating the covenant between the British Crown and its subjects in overt expressions of imperial citizenship. The first thread addressed the problem of finances. The community rejected outright the government's argument that it did not have enough funds to finance a university. As the president of the medical college's alumni association opined, this was a ‘trump card’ that had been used too often by financiers and politicians to obfuscate laymen.Footnote ³⁵ It was impossible for laymen to understand why such ‘a rich and prosperous country such as Malaya could not support a university’.Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, the finance argument could cut both ways since it did the government little credit to argue that Malaya could not afford a university. A particularly fierce MT editorial entitled ‘Falling Short’ wondered aloud if the government had been naïve in playing the financial card over and over again ‘in good times and bad that it is no longer able to do the trick’. As the editorial lamented, they did not understand ‘why the imperial principles made from time to time to improve the social and educational prospects of Colonial subjects cannot be implemented in Malaya to the extent it has been done in other colonies’, even when there were ‘ample surpluses’ in the country.Footnote ³⁷

Second, the community developed arguments that struck an entirely different register from the government's concern with funding and employability of university graduates. Rising above the coloniser's petty pragmatism, the community emphasised the special significance of a university in the scaled development of the colony towards political maturity. Outside the LegCo, the indefatigable Captain Hashim took to giving public lectures to raise awareness of the importance of a university for Malaya. In one such lecture, he explained that a university was necessary for greater local autonomy in political development. The existence of a university, he stressed, had symbolic significance because without one, Malaya would always be seen as politically backward. Education since ‘the beginning of civilization’ had always been ‘one of the qualifications for one to claim the right of citizenship’.Footnote ³⁸ An MT editorial had also made a similar argument connecting higher education to the promotion of citizenship. It wrote:

The third strand of the community's argument was a response to the government's imposition of Eurocentric standards. The community pointed out that the British had been inconsistent in imposing these standards. It argued that local colleges were already similar, if not on par with other colonial universities especially Hong Kong University to which Malaya was losing her best and brightest students. Yet, they were denied university status. Furthermore, the community argued that the government must be held accountable if Malaya's colleges were not good enough to be made universities. As Captain Hashim charged in eloquent language, the British had governed the SS ‘for not less than one and a half centuries. The Colony cannot yet produce a sufficient number of local men for the higher branches of the (civil service). We can hardly be proud of this!’Footnote ⁴⁰

In contrast to the much publicised and well-studied foundation of the University of Malaya in 1949, this earlier moment of local agitation for a university has not been documented. Anthony Stockwell's otherwise excellent account of the foundation of the university does not mention this campaign at all. Instead, he tracks its final establishment in 1949 to fundamental shifts in British official thinking on tertiary education in its colonies and dependencies.Footnote ⁴¹ Following public agitation for a university, the government announced that they had commissioned an academic to look into the establishment of a school of engineering at the Raffles College in June 1937. In the LegCo, the colonial secretary stated to applause that this was a move ‘towards the ultimate establishment of a university’.Footnote ⁴² In October 1937, Governor Thomas announced ‘the appointment of a Commission of Investigation that should visit Malaya as soon as possible to report, not only on the administration of Raffles College but also on the lines of which higher education in Malaya should be framed’.Footnote ⁴³

Historians such as Joseph Hodge describe the 1930s as a time when colonial governance was changing in the direction of encouraging more development in the colonies for the moral and material advancement of subject populations. What was novel about colonial developmentalism in the 1930s was the unprecedented reliance on scientific and technological knowledge to address problems of managing the empire. More than ever, science and technical knowledge were seen as ‘tools of empire’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Hodge describes this phenomenon as the ‘triumph of the expert’Footnote ⁴⁵ and refers to the interwar years as the time when ‘the expansion and consolidation in technical expertise [in the Colonial Office] began in earnest as new areas of advice were added in education, agriculture, animal health, fisheries, nutrition and labor’.Footnote ⁴⁶ New champions for higher education for the colonies emerged in the form of ‘subject specialists’, ‘expert advisors’ and ‘advisory committees’ who were able to influence policy-making in the colonies by offering their ‘professional opinion’ to the Colonial Office. Professor H.J. Channon and Sir William McLean, who made up the first commission appointed to study the establishment of a university in Malaya in 1938, were two such ‘expert advisers’. Channon was an academic by profession with no colonial administrative experience whereas McLean was a retired bureaucrat with a professional background in engineering and city planning. Although the 1938 Commission did not recommend the immediate establishment of a university in Malaya, it broke some taboos when it clashed with Governor Thomas and recommended the establishment of a university college as an intermediate stage in preparation for a full university in Malaya. The 1938 McLean report was followed by a subsequent memorandum filed by Channon after his Malayan sojourn which set the basis for a transformed general policy on higher education in the British colonies and dependencies. Channon's memorandum echoed key arguments put up by the Anglophone Asian community. He explored the notion of a reconfigured colonial partnership that had the ultimate objective of bringing about self-government to colonised populations. Universities were accordingly a central component of this partnership since these institutions would train local peoples for leadership positions in their respective countries.Footnote ⁴⁷

The connection between higher education and political development in Malaya was only fully endorsed by the Carr-Saunders report after the war. This report recommended that Malaya should by-pass the university college stage and that an autonomous university must be established right away. There was a sense of urgency behind this recommendation. The report emphasised that the new university was not going to be a colonial university, ‘an inferior institution tied to the apron-strings of a far-off grandmother’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Instead, it would ‘provide for the first time a common centre where varieties of race, religion and economic interest could mingle in a joint endeavour’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In view of the exigency of nation-building after the war, the main task of the university, the report went on to elaborate, would be ‘to foster the growth of citizenship’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In a speech commemorating the university's Foundation Day, Malcolm MacDonald, Britain's Commissioner-General in Southeast Asia, first Chancellor of the University of Malaya and long-time champion of higher education for the colonies, lauded the university as ‘the crucible of the Malayan nation’ and ‘a cradle where a truly non-communal nation is nurtured’.Footnote ⁵¹

Planning the education of an imagined community

British claims of practising non-communal multiculturalism after the Second World War rest on their promotion of English as the common language within the planned postwar education system. In August 1945, the Malayan Planning Unit (MPU) in the Colonial Office laid down fundamental policy guidelines for education in the MU and Singapore in a document titled ‘Malaya's long-term policy directives: Educational policy’.Footnote ⁵² The document stated that the objective of postwar educational policy would be directed towards ‘fostering in the MU and in Singapore, a sense of common citizenship and of partnership within the British Commonwealth’. To this end, planners paid special attention to the ‘breaking down of community barriers by more association of children of the various communities in work and play’ and found that ‘the attainment of this aim can be assisted by promoting a common language, which in the circumstance can only be English’.Footnote ⁵³ This document displaced fundamental principles guiding prewar British educational policy, altering radically the symbolic and practical functions of the English language. First, the British moved away from its position that the Malay language was the lingua franca of Malaya and now accepted English as the de facto lingua franca. Second, the British were now ready to extend its prewar programme of providing free primary education exclusively for Malay-medium schools to all language streams.

Posing as Malayan nationalists, British planners envisaged a ‘Malayan’ and not ‘anglicised’ nation. The novel element in this nationalist imagination was the use of English as the vehicle for ‘localisation’ rather than ‘anglicisation’ by pairing English-medium education with a commitment to the preservation of vernacular languages and cultures. Along with its promotion of English as common language, the directive enshrined the principle of parity of all language streams. Two concrete master plans for education in the MU and Singapore were drawn up on the basis of the directive. The plans committed the British to financing schools instructing in vernacular languages with the proviso that students from these schools must learn English as a compulsory subject. Conversely, schools instructing in English must also teach a vernacular language.Footnote ⁵⁴ Also important was the strategy of creating ‘regional rather than racial’Footnote ⁵⁵ schools. To create conditions for interethnic interaction, the plans envisaged that vernacular schools would be located in regional schools where children from different ethnic backgrounds and language streams would be able to interact outside of the classroom.

The government's commitment to supporting vernacular language education was backed by expert advice.Footnote ⁵⁶ As Singapore's first postwar Director of Education J.B. Neilson explained to the Advisory Council in 1946, the TYP had adopted the resolution on the best medium of instruction passed at imperial education conferences which affirmed that ‘the language best known and understood by the child on his entry into school is from the educational point of view the most effective medium of instruction in the primary stages of school education’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The TYP even exceeded this principle by supporting instruction in vernacular languages beyond the elementary school level.

The education master plan for the MU was promptly rejected by Malay nationalists on the peninsula following MU's replacement by the Federation of Malaya (henceforth, the Federation). Because of this dramatic rollback of British colonial nationalism in the Federation, scholars do not realise that Singapore's TYP, which was drawn up in close conjunction with the education plan for the MU, remained in place after the MU's demise. The TYP is a key document in the genealogy of an English-scripted multiculturalism in Singapore. The policy marked the formal beginnings of an ambitious project to create new value for English as Malaya's common language, beyond its narrow prewar economic and political functions as the dominant language of commerce and officialdom, in other words, the language of empire. This project entailed disassociating English from the colonisers, but it was clear that the colonisers' choice of English was riddled with contradiction. Given the long history of intimate connection between racial governmentality and language in Singapore,Footnote ⁵⁸ English could neither be racially nor politically neutral, all the more so when the British had actively discouraged promoting English as a medium to build fraternal bonds before the Second World War. It was no secret that Britain was invested in using English to maintain its influence in its former colonies and had made it explicit that the putative Malayan nation should become an entity within the British Commonwealth. The purported neutrality of the proposed multicultural model unravelled, its roots in colonialism exposed in debates over the TYP and when it was actually executed as policy. Events following the TYP's implementation demonstrate that, although it appeared shrewd and timely for the colonisers to don the garb of Malayan nationalism, their attempted reinvention of English put them in a quagmire: the more the British perceived English to be integral to their post-empire interests, the less likely they would be able to maintain equal support for English-medium and vernacular language education and the less successful the British would be in distancing the language from imperial interests in the public eye. Against an uncertain time-table for decolonisation, the hurdles in implementing the TYP underscored the enormity, not to mention contentiousness, of the coloniser's attempt to play nationalist by forging fraternal ties amongst the colonised by using the language of the colonial order.

In the first place, much of the ideological reworking necessary for this effort was not initiated when the TYP was implemented. Combining old attitudes towards languages and education in Singapore with visionary statements on would-be Malayan nationhood, the TYP was an awkward document. One major problem left unaddressed in the TYP was what to do with existing privately-funded vernacular schools that had served the ethnic communities in the colony for decades. Reflecting long-standing British suspicion of these schools, the TYP envisaged that the government's provision of free elementary education for all language streams meant ‘practically the introduction of a new system rather than the extension of an already widely based one’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Existing vernacular schools were excluded from the TYP as the government was not optimistic it could convert and draw them into the new system of regional schools given their ‘alien influences’ and ‘political outlook’.Footnote ⁶⁰ No systematic attempt was made to draw these schools into the new system created by the TYP. It was not until the early 1950s when the government realised it did not possess the resources to create a new system of regional vernacular schools that it contemplated the problem of how to convert the existing ones.

The government's approach to popularising English-medium education was also curiously archaic and paradoxical. Neilson turned away from the opportunity to expand English-medium education on a massive scale. He stuck to the prewar practice of admitting students from English-speaking families to English-medium primary schools, only expanding the criterion to include those whose families had a history of associating with English schools after representatives from the different ethnic communities in the Advisory Council protested.Footnote ⁶¹ C.C. Tan, who was representative of the Chinese community in the Council, found the professed objective of cultivating commonality via English and exclusion of those who had no ‘family connections’ with English-medium schools inconsistent and unacceptable, especially when ‘English remains the most important language in the country’.Footnote ⁶² Describing imposition of any admission criterion to English-medium schools as the creation of ‘a bar’, Tan argued that ‘any restriction to the admission of children into Primary English Schools will also be a restriction against free intermingling of school children and as such is a retrograde step in view of all our efforts to engender local civic-mindedness and patriotism’.Footnote ⁶³ Unlike Neilson, Tan was prepared to take the ‘non-communal’ quality of English-medium education to its logical conclusion. He succeeded in amending the TYP, which gave parents the choice to enrol their children in English-medium schools irrespective of their linguistic background.

C.C. Tan's amendment of the TYP was criticised by his contemporaries and scholars alike.Footnote ⁶⁴ Tan was taken to task for making unsound pedagogical arguments and for undermining the possibility that vernacular education could be better protected and promoted if parents were denied the option of English-medium education. Veteran educationist and former Director of Education for the MU, H.R. Cheeseman, was particularly harsh. He warned that the amendment would result in English becoming the ‘language of the Colony’ with the ‘ultimate extinction of the other tongues’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Cheeseman's rationale was that parents would choose English-medium education on utilitarian grounds alone, but ‘one day there will be an awakening. It will be discovered that the mother tongue is being neglected’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Cheeseman's reaction to the amendment highlights the challenges of reorienting English-medium education within the TYP's proposed multilingual setting.

C.C. Tan's intervention could be better interpreted. Tan, who clearly lacked sympathy for vernacular language education, accused the British of promoting it at the expense of English-medium education. Nevertheless, he did identify a potential source of discrimination as children from non-English-speaking backgrounds could be denied a major avenue of socioeconomic advancement. A member of the Anglophone Asian community, Tan had interpreted postwar educational policy changes with prewar lenses and suspected the British of wanting to regulate the expansion of English-medium education by using parity of language streams and pedagogy as excuses. Tan was not entirely mistaken. Early MPU drafts reveal that planners may have been desirous of making English the common language, but could not get around old-fashioned worries of encouraging ‘excessive English education’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Planners thus cautioned that it was ‘unsafe and mischievous to allow indiscriminate teaching of English’ because ‘the lamentable results of indiscriminate English education upon Asiatics and upon Asiatic communities are, or should be well-known but unfortunately they are too often ignored’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In further discussion and consultation with the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (ACEC), however, planners realised that the directive should not convey the impression that the government conceived of education mainly in commercial terms. Thus, they adopted alternative descriptions emphasising the value of using English to forge common ground ‘in contrast to the conception that the main advantage of knowledge of English is for the purpose of obtaining higher paid employment’.Footnote ⁶⁹ As an ACEC member noted ‘if English is universally taught as a second language, it will cease to be a sign of class distinction as feared by MPU and become a means of common understanding which is the aim of the Malayan policy of education’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The debates within British and local policy-making circles on the merits of using English as a unifying language, the flawed translation of this objective in Singapore's TYP, and the controversy surrounding C.C. Tan's intervention, underscored the tentativeness of these moves to pry English loose from its intimate connection with the coloniser's identity.

Educating an imagined community under emergency conditions

A far more critical factor inhibiting smooth implementation of the TYP was the British declaration of the Malayan Emergency in 1948. In that year, the British banned the Malayan Communist Party and declared a state of emergency in the Federation and Singapore, embarking on a more than decade-long crusade against the Communist movement. The impact of the Emergency on the TYP and educational developments in Singapore cannot be underestimated. Overnight, the Education Department under a new Director, A.W. Frisby, swung into combat mode. The centrepiece of Frisby's directorship was the FYSP launched on 1 January 1950. Described as a plan ‘of an emergency nature’,Footnote ⁷¹ the FYSP targeted provision of free primary education for Singapore's children at a mind-boggling rate. The plan aimed to build 90 schools in five years to accommodate an additional 90,000 children so that in addition to the TYP, all of Singapore's children of school-going age would have places in schools by 1954. This could be accomplished if in each year of the plan beginning from 1950, 18 new school buildings were completed to accommodate 480 to 500 students in double sessions; every building would be able to accommodate 960 to 1,000 students, bringing the total possible enrolment to 18,000.Footnote ⁷² The FYSP was thus a hurried attempt to create a new education system from scratch, one that could replace all existing vernacular schools and induct all of Singapore's school children into a system the British could regulate. The FYSP worked hand in glove with the hardcore surveillance, policing and detention measures which the British also used to control the existing private vernacular Chinese schools.Footnote ⁷³

For all intents and purposes, the FYSP was an early Singapore version of the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. If massive relocation of rural Chinese populations into government-controlled ‘New Villages’ characterised the Malayan Emergency in the Federation, the expedited creation of elementary schools to educate all of Singapore's young would define Singapore's experience of the Emergency. And if in the Federation, rural fringes and ‘New Villages’ were key battlegrounds during the Emergency, schools were the sites of combat in Singapore. The Emergency added great urgency to British plans to create a non-communal Malayan nation as a means of countering the Communist movement's anti-colonial nationalist credentials. During these nervous years of the Emergency, British politicisation of English-medium education became overt. Not only did official propaganda harp on innate connections between English-medium education and a range of qualities that would purportedly rollback the spread of Communism — values such as interracial mingling, democracy, civic-mindedness and a loyal citizenry — the British abandoned their support of regional vernacular schools. Most revealing of British thinking on the political function of languages and education was their readiness to surrender the previously upheld pedagogical principle of beginning instruction in the students' home languages. After 1949, new regional schools built by the government would only implement English-medium education with a vernacular language taught as a compulsory subject.Footnote ⁷⁴ As Frisby explained, the Emergency caused a transformed situation so that ‘the premises on which the TYP was based are not now completely applicable’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The government realised the desirability of using vernacular languages as languages of instruction, but argued that ‘the need of literacy in English in a polyglot population, such as Singapore, (had become) overriding’.Footnote ⁷⁶ What the FYSP put in place was thus an English-plus-vernacular language education model, one strikingly similar to the English-plus-Mother Tongue model currently adopted in Singapore's schools today.

The government's adoption of militarised language to describe policy-making in education during this period reflected the extent to which the political imperative of the Emergency had been normalised as part of official-speak and was by no means metaphorical. Huge resources went into propagandising the FYSP. The organisation of Singapore's first ever Education Week in May 1950 was one fine example. Education Week featured a series of high-profile activities such as an arts and crafts exhibition at the Victoria Memorial Hall, a concert by the Junior Symphony Orchestra and a huge Youth Rally at the Padang. Frisby described Education Week as a showcase of the government's philosophy and achievements in education. According to Frisby, the government placed great importance on educating ‘sturdy, healthy children’ who knew ‘how to live with their fellows in a true democracy’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Reporting to the Secretary of State for the Colonies James Griffith, the Singapore Governor Franklin Gimson wrote that the objective of Education Week was ‘to emphasize the opportunities open to the children of Singapore without restriction of race or creed’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Gimson estimated that some $3,000 was spent on Education Week but added that ‘its value as propaganda for democracy and consequently against practising Communism is immeasurable’ as some 350,000 people came into contact with the government's schools.Footnote ⁷⁹ The climax of Education Week was pure political pageantry at the Padang where 14,000 children from 300 schools performed before 50,000 spectators in what was touted as ‘Singapore's biggest and most impressive parade’ since 1945.Footnote ⁸⁰ One month after Education Week ended, James Griffith visited Singapore to officiate over the opening of the first school completed under the FYSP. In a speech lauding the success of Education Week and the government's educational policy, Griffith underscored again why education was an essential weapon in ‘the worldwide battle against evil and disruptive forces in our society’.Footnote ⁸¹ Griffith went on to declare the school open ‘as a token for others to follow and commend the determined resolution with which the Emergency is being fought in the schools as well as in the jungle’.Footnote ⁸² The notion that schools were a battleground of the Emergency in Singapore was as literal as it could be. The first Education Week in 1950 was so successful the Education Department organised another one in 1951.

The watered-down multicultural model of the FYSP did not balance emphasis on English with the principle of parity of all language streams or reverse perceptions of outright anglicisation. The Chinese community in Singapore reacted to the FYSP with calls for the government to rectify its unequal treatment of vernacular education. Newspaper reports and editorials in the Chinese press repeatedly emphasised the unacceptable inequality between the amount of aid students in the English-medium stream received (about $108 per student), and that allocated to students in a Chinese-medium school (between $12 and $18).Footnote ⁸³ An editorial in the influential Chinese language daily, Nanyang Siang Pau (NYSP), warned against marginalising the Chinese in any attempt at nation-building in Malaya: should the British fail to win over the Chinese communities in the two territories, particularly in Singapore, the Chinese would merely become passive bystanders and the feasibility of the new multicultural nation would be in doubt.Footnote ⁸⁴ Other reports in the Chinese press highlighted the problem of poor pay and benefits for teachers in Chinese-medium schools, which affected the quality of education students were receiving in these schools. This was exacerbated by unintended effects of the TYP and FYSP. The government's aggressive recruitment of teachers had lured teachers who taught English or were capable of teaching in English to government-funded schools where they were paid higher salaries than in private vernacular Chinese schools.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1951, the government increased its funding to Chinese-medium schools albeit not to the same level as its financial support of English-medium schools. It also bore the costs for the teaching of English in Chinese-medium schools.Footnote ⁸⁶ These minor concessions failed to convince the Chinese who continued to see inadequate and unequal official funding to their schools as an index of discrimination against the community.

It soon became clear, however, that the FYSP's school expansion programme could not keep pace with the government's political ambition. Almost as soon as Education Week in 1951 was over, the government announced that it had to suspend building new schools. While 1950 saw the targetted completion of the planned eighteen supplementary schools, only five were completed in 1951 and only one of the five was operational in that year.Footnote ⁸⁷ A 1952 official assessment of the feasibility of the FYSP was sobering. The report cited three challenges to the successful implementation of the FYSP, namely, identifying suitably located and large sites, teacher training and supply as well as rising construction costs. All three challenges presented difficulties which, according to the report, could not be easily resolved in the near future. The existing Teachers' Training College, for instance, was much too small and had to be expanded to cope with the increased demand for qualified teachers.

Given these setbacks, the British could no longer afford to ignore the problem of how to induct existing vernacular schools into the proposed education system in a more holistic manner. In September 1953, Singapore's Governor John Nicholl wrote to Christopher Cox of the ACEC in London stating that he was ‘considering a revision of Education Policy’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nicoll's rationale was that the majority of the Chinese still looked to China rather than Malaya ‘which makes a nonsense of our talk of Malayisation’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Most significantly, he admitted that ‘the time has come when we can no longer avoid contributing much more substantially to the education of the Chinese section of the population’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Historian Sikko Visscher reports that a series of negotiations between the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce (SCCC) and the government took place in the early 1950s which led to a revision in the government's policy towards vernacular Chinese schools. He refers to an attempt made by Colonial Secretary William Blythe in 1953 to work by proxy through a committee made up ‘of qualified individuals of the highest integrity from among the Chinese community’Footnote ⁹¹ (most probably SCCC leaders) to advise on the improvement of Chinese schools. Such a committee failed to materialise, but the negotiations produced a broad consensus on a ‘bilingual policy’ by July 1953. The ‘bilingual policy’ entailed a quid pro quo exchange whereby the government proposed to increase funding to Chinese-medium schools which were obligated to adopt a ‘bilingual and Malaya-centred curriculum’ dictated by the government.Footnote ⁹² The outcome of this behind-the-doors agreement was the ‘Memorandum on bilingual education and increased aid to Chinese schools’. The government promised to fund up to 100 percent of the income of Chinese-medium schools. In return, schools accepting official monies must adopt the following conditions: they must increase the teaching of English and other subjects taught in English to at least one-third at the elementary school level, one-half at the Junior Middle School level and two-thirds at the Senior Middle School level; it was recommended further that Arithmetic, Mathematics and Science were subjects that could be taught in English. Finally, schools must use textbooks that addressed a local Singapore and Malayan background at the elementary school level before moving on by stages to the Far East, the Commonwealth and the world.Footnote ⁹³

To avert perception of unilateral action and governmental interference, the British took great pains to portray its new bilingual policy as a response to a request initiated by Chinese community leaders for more financial aid. Introducing the motion in the LegCo, the Education Director McLellan deliberately began by emphasising that this was ‘not a policy dictated by Government’, but one ‘proposed spontaneously by responsible and representative members of the Chinese community’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The government was described as reacting in good faith to the community's initiative. As a gesture of its sincerity, McLellan promised to provide substantial aid in advance so that schools would possess the means to make improvements rather than have them qualify for aid after changes were made.Footnote ⁹⁵ Anticipating opposition, McLellan assured the community that if what was deterring schools from accepting the policy was ‘their fear for Chinese culture … let me repeat … that this Government has neither the wish nor the intention to destroy Chinese culture or to eliminate from our schools the teaching of the Chinese language on which that culture is based’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The British were not oblivious to possible opposition from the community. Their interpretation of the nature and source of this opposition, however, was off the mark. Believing that hardcore Chinese communalism was the main stumbling block to bilingualism, the British located potential opposition to its policy in the endemic and entrenched ‘conservative’ elements within the Chinese community. Nicholls, writing to Cox, had noted that opposition came particularly from the so-called ‘old conservative element’ in the SCCC ‘which dislikes any sort of change’ but are ‘very influential people’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Using the same terms of description as Nicholl, Cox replied that he was not surprised that there was ‘strong opposition from conservative elements among the Chinese’.Footnote ⁹⁸ As public reaction panned out, their interpretation proved erroneous.

The proposed changes to vernacular Chinese education triggered an outpouring of criticism from the community. A careful reading of public discussion within the community as reflected in the influential Chinese presses reveals a far more sophisticated understanding of how the policy would impact their schools and community. Newspaper reports, articles and editorials were particularly upset with the government's lack of empathy for and misunderstanding of Chinese-medium education with critics presenting logically-argued and damaging indictments of most, if not all of British assumptions about the purported multicultural or bilingual nature of the proposed changes.

The community took great offence with what was seen as the ‘pretext’ of the government's reform of Chinese-medium education that is, making their schools ‘bilingual’. Newspaper articles argued that this ‘pretext’ gave the false impression that Chinese schools were monolingual, did not teach English or devalued its importance. They pointed out that Chinese schools in Malaya were already ‘bilingual schools’ since they had a long history of experimenting with teaching both Chinese and English.Footnote ⁹⁹ A series of editorials in Sin Chew Jit Poh (SCJP), another influential mainstream Chinese daily in Singapore, even claimed that Chinese-medium schools were ‘pioneers’ of bilingual education in Singapore and Malaya. In its editorial on 21 December 1953, the newspaper commented wryly that Chinese schools were placed in an absurd situation of having to defend themselves against the charge of being ‘monolingual’ when most were in fact teaching English as a subject. It pointed out that the teaching of English was taking up 20 percent of the curriculum from Grade Three onwards in primary schools and 30 percent at the middle school level. The government was charged with being disingenuous by ignoring the existence of English language instruction in Chinese schools.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

From the perspective of the community, the crux of the issue was not converting their schools into bilingualism, but how to improve the state of bilingual instruction in existing schools. NYSP argued that the proposed reforms imposed assumptions and a politicised agenda on Chinese-medium schools which would not alleviate the problems their schools were already saddled with in attempting to implement bilingualism.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The requirement of increased hours for English language instruction, for instance, was frequently criticised in the press as the government being presumptuous. The community argued that simply increasing the number of hours of instruction would not improve English language standards in Chinese-medium schools because with the existing bilingual curriculum, students could barely cope with the stipulated number of hours for learning English. The chronic lack of good teachers and teaching materials — not insufficient exposure to English — was identified as the main cause of poor English language standards, but this was a problem that could only be solved with robust finances, which they charged was not forthcoming from the government.Footnote ¹⁰² The displaced TYP returned to haunt the British in 1953.Footnote ¹⁰³ Prominent businessman and community leader Lee Kong Chian urged the government to fulfil the TYP's declared objective of providing free primary education for children in all language streams. Reviewing the history of the community's negotiation with the government over the funding issue, Lee said that the TYP was implemented exclusively in English-medium schools.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In his opinion, the cause of bilingualism would be better served had the government taken a more holistic view of the problems confronted by the Chinese schools and not focused single-mindedly on English language instruction. The community's criticisms of the proposed reforms demonstrate that it was definitely not on the same page as the government on the central premises of bilingualism.

British bilingualism in the eyes of the Chinese community was neither ‘non-communal’ nor ‘neutral’. The community reciprocated the government's suspicion of Chinese-medium education by openly accusing the government of being politically motivated itself. An editorial in NYSP on 8 January 1954 called upon the government to ‘set aside political considerations and adopt an objective perspective in order to understand the need for the existence of Chinese schools’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To the community, tying increased funding to a slew of conditions smacked of such political considerations. While the community welcomed increased funding, tying aid to increased hours for English language instruction complicated the manpower issue. Schools would have to grapple with the double burden of an insufficient supply of teachers who could teach in English and managing the existing corps of teachers who could only instruct in Chinese. Recall that even the government was unable to supply enough teachers to its own schools under the FYSP. Chinese schools would therefore have to compete with English schools for a limited supply of teachers if the new policy was implemented. A cynical editorial in the NYSP on 12 December 1953 claimed that the policy might pretend to aid Chinese schools but would in effect bring about the ‘anglicization of Chinese schools and the loss of livelihoods of many teachers’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Crunching the numbers, the editorial alluded to British cunning, for even with increased funding, aid for English-medium and Chinese-medium schools remained unequal so it was ‘most economical’ for the government to channel only one-twenty-sixth of the education budget to turn the Chinese-medium schools — where more than half of Singapore's school-going children were enrolled — into what were effectively English-medium schools. In spite of the best efforts of the British, the shrill cry of ‘elimination of Chinese-medium education and culture’ invariably surfaced.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The reaction of the Chinese community to the FYSP and the ‘increased aid-for-bilingualism’ policy exposed the predicament that the British had put themselves in when they tried to pass as Malayan nationalists under Emergency conditions. The Emergency made propagandising the non-communal, civic and democratic qualities of English-medium education politically expedient. At the same time that the government raised its rhetoric several notches, their single-minded perpetuation of English-medium education to the neglect of vernacular schools curtailed the persuasiveness of their non-communal slogan. Instead of neutralising long-standing identification of English with the colonisers and their protected classes in Singapore, the aggressive move to expedite the creation of an education system integrated in common usage of English provoked the majority Chinese population into taking up cudgels against the British in the name of defending their schools, language and culture. The existing scholarship has yet to recognise how the Emergency led the British to politicise English-medium education blatantly or how its English-scripted multiculturalism emerged from a situation of abnormality shaped by the political imperative of fighting Communism. Consequently, the purported values attributed to English-medium education and the negative labelling of moves to protect existing vernacular school as ‘conservative’ or ‘chauvinistic’ are often accepted as historical givens and not analysed as controversial elements of a British-projected nationalist imagination.

The work of integrating Chinese-medium schools into a unified education system was not completed in time when the British handed over the education portfolio to a partially-elected local government in 1955.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Bilingual vernacular schools continued to exist well into the 1970s. In 1979, the PAP government released a ‘Report on the Ministry of Education’. Produced under the direction of Goh Keng Swee, who is widely perceived as the brains behind Singapore's economic success, the ‘Goh Report’ inaugurated social engineering practices that continue to shape Singapore's educational landscape. It ended instruction in vernacular languages and by 1987 brought about a unified education system with English as the sole medium of instruction and where vernacular languages were taught as ‘Mother Tongue’ or second languages. Students were promoted and ‘streamed’ into different courses of study based on results they obtained in uniform national examinations to be held at specified points in time as they progressed through the system.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It bears highlighting that the Goh Report marked Singapore's coming full circle to the FYSP.

Conclusion: ‘Whose imagined community?’

In 1965, Singapore separated from Malaysia, ending a brief experiment in Malaysian nationhood that lasted no more than three years. In official orthodoxy in Singapore, its ‘expulsion’ from Malaysia is attributed to the PAP's insistence on the principles of non-communalism and a truly equal multiethnic polity which, it claimed, conflicted with assertions of ethnonationalism by Malay supremacists in Malaysia. Multiculturalism is, therefore, the raison d'être of Singapore's independent nationhood. Accounts of Singapore's post-colonial existence tend to attribute its success as a nation after 1965 to its ability in surpassing its colonial masters. Tony Stockwell recounts an evocative anecdote meant to illustrate how PAP leaders ‘consciously forged the nation-state on the anvil of the colonial legacy’ after ‘rising from the ashes of the Malaysia experiment’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As the anecdote goes, Margaret Thatcher had marvelled at Singapore's progress, to which Lee Kuan Yew reportedly replied: ‘We have applied the lessons which the British first taught us and then themselves promptly forgot’.Footnote ¹¹¹ But Lee's response does not startle all. Analysing Lee's memoirs, Philip Holden argues that Lee is characteristic of Third World national elites who, on achieving independent nationhood, embark on producing national cultures through disciplinary projects, especially educative ones that ‘outdid those of the colonial state’.Footnote ¹¹² What seems peculiar to postcolonial projects of nation-building, Holden argues further, is how leaders like Lee recast a specific configuration of tradition and modernity using a reinscribed colonial template. With a nod to Chatterjee's insight on Third World nationalisms, Holden explains that such reinscription typically involves reworking the distinction between the ‘private-versus-public spheres’: the more successful national elites are in mimicking the colonisers in acquiring Western skills, knowledge and technology in the ‘public sphere’, the greater the need to emphasise the distinctiveness of their traditional cultures in the ‘private’ realm.Footnote ¹¹³ As Chatterjee argues, before formal processes of decolonisation were set in motion and state power passed into their hands, nationalists had imagined the ‘private’ sphere as the site where traditional cultures reigned supreme and from where they had wrested power away from the colonial state before the formal end of empire.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Indeed, Holden and other critics have commented on the Lee government's periodic campaigns to cleanse Singapore's body politic of ‘Western pollutants’ in a bid to assert ‘inherent Asianness/Chineseness’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Chatterjee's argument about Third World nationalisms is directed specifically at Benedict Anderson's influential work on the origins of nationalism. Disagreeing with Anderson, Chatterjee asks: ‘if nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from …… left to imagine?’Footnote ¹¹⁶

My argument here has not been about nationalist elites choosing from an array of modular nationalisms and exceeding disciplinary projects in nation-building jump-started by the colonial state, however. In fact, by tracing British colonial nationalism to earlier expressions of imperial citizenship in the thirties, this article describes a trajectory which reverses the direction of colonial mimicry. In doing so, it reveals an aberration in Singapore's recasting of a colonial template along the lines of tradition and modernity. If Third World nationalists such as Lee authenticate the origins of their nations in supposed ‘inner’ recesses of traditional cultures, the location of multicultural nationhood scripted in the language of an erstwhile coloniser is harder to demarcate. This difficulty seems productive of multiple amnesias in Singapore's imagination of multicultural nationalism.

The first forgetting revolves around propositions of multiethnic co-belonging scripted in the language of imperial citizenship put forth by the Anglophone Asian community in the 1930s. The second forgetting involves British appropriation of imperial citizenship, which was recast as colonial nationalism when the imperial citizenship idea lost its critical import with decolonisation after 1945. The final nail in the coffin is, of course, Singapore forgetting the colonial roots of its English-scripted multiculturalism. Afflicted with these amnesias, perhaps it is appropriate after all for Singaporeans to take Chatterjee's cue and ask: Whose imagined community?Footnote ¹¹⁷