Despite his claim to an insight and understanding of the Malay character, Raffles was on occasion remarkably insensitive, as seen in his savage reaction in March 1823 when an Arab, Sayid Yasin, escaped from prison and ran amok, killing a police peon and wounding Farquhar. The Resident's son killed the attacker on the spot, but there was pandemonium among the panic-stricken Europeans, who at first suspected the temenggong's men had perpetrated the outrage. Refusing the sultan's request to hand over the body, Raffles had the corpse carted around the town in a bullock cart and then hung up on display for a fortnight in an iron cage. The Muslim community watched in sullen fury at this desecration, and subsequently Sayid Yasin's grave at Tanjong Pagar became a holy shrine. The incident hung like a menacing shadow over Singapore for a long time, both European and Chinese merchants fearing Muslim retribution and conscious that the tiny garrison could leave them little protection. (Mary Turnbull)Footnote 1
Mary Turnbull's interpretive efforts on the two periods of British imperia in Singapore from 1819–1942 and 1945–1963, rely almost exclusively on colonial archival material. Her considerable efforts underpin the prevalent historiographical perception that Singapore's British colonial pasts have been adequately historicised.Footnote 2 Turnbull, an early and still dominant interpreter of the political aspects of the British colonial period, agreed with colonial era commentators that just several years short of a century of the East India Company (EIC) acquiring rights to operate a factory on this island, ‘All live at peace and prosper abundantly under the Union Jack, and the statue of Raffles looks down benignantly on a scene so much in harmony with the aspirations and policy of the original founder of the city’.Footnote 3 Turnbull's persistent interpretive hold on the unfolding of British colonialism from the inception of company rule into the twentieth century before the Great Depression also has the effect of embalming the discourse she generated on colonial Singapore as lexically manifested in the positive perceptions of notions like free trade, growth, progress, prosperity, development, improvements in public sanitation, disease management, provision of formal elementary schooling and British justice. Further, it also seems to have had the effect of insulating perceptions of Singaporean British coloniality from some of the historiographical growth and realisations witnessed in other imperial contexts, where notions like unequal treaties, larceny, oppression, injustice, racism and physical and structural violence are more discursively blatant.Footnote 4
Writ thus, the implications of an underdeveloped British imperial historiography of Singapore are potentially very serious and manifold as they affect how those pasts are perceived and engaged. Two hundred years after the British arrival in Singapore, the task of responding to a possibly glaring dereliction of intellectual and historiographical, arguably even moral, responsibility needs to be commenced.
One way of provoking a historiographical freshening can be commenced by paying careful attention to the excerpt quoted above, which is taken from the final edition of Turnbull's magnum opus. Both the historicity and narration of Turnbull's very brief description of violence at dusk, and post-mortem bodily desecration and its aftermath, are replete with significance and meaning. Scrutinising its scripting closely can potentially offer meaningful paths out of a historiographical closet. Abdullah bin Abdullah Kadir's Hikayat Abdullah offers the longest and most detailed description of Stamford Raffles’ involvement in this gruesome episode. The historiography of Abdullah, which mainly centres on the last three decades of his life, coincides with the first thirty years of EIC rule in Singapore. The recent literature on Abdullah, taken alongside some of the broader musings of the new imperial historians, engenders a criticality from which to better historicise early British coloniality in Singapore.
Historicising Abdullah
It is estimated that Abdullah probably turned 42 in 1838. Born to a literate father and paternal grandfather who made a living off their language skills and abilities in Malay, Abdullah followed in their footsteps. From an allegedly early age,Footnote 5 Abdullah worked for British and American arrivals, first in Malacca and later in Singapore as a Malay language teacher, translator, informant and publishing assistant until just before his death while on Islamic pilgrimage in 1854.Footnote 6 However, notwithstanding this early start and a steady supply of work from Christian missionaries and other arrivals in Malacca and Singapore, if Abdullah had died at any time before 25 May 1838, as will be explained below, it is probable that he would have left no cache of writings that has since been relied on by generations of scholars of Abdullah and early colonial Singapore. The only possible exception to this counter-factual scenario could have been a posthumous publication of a handwritten manuscript dating to 1830, Syair Singapura Terbakar, in which Abdullah offers his comments on a prominent tragedy in Singapore,Footnote 7 the great market fire of 1830.Footnote 8 It is the only known work that precedes May 1838.
One can only imagine how different the historiographical terrain might have been without the emergence of Abdullah and the bulk of his writings. For instance, his well-known so-called autobiography, Hikayat Abdullah (1843) and a travelogue recounting his journey from Singapore to the polities on the east coast of the peninsula, Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah (1838), continue to inform commentators seeking to shed light on various matters pertaining to aspects of the first thirty years of EIC's Singapore. These can range from the treaty signed between Raffles and Tengku Hussein, detailed description of influential colonial figures of the period, the roadworks and labour force behind the physical reshaping of the north and south banks of the Singapore River, to the iteration of the threats to life and property in early colonial Singapore, namely Malay pirates, Chinese secret societies, urban fires and unprovoked wildlife attacks, including the crocodile that lunched on Farquhar's dog. The Hikayat also remains central to discussions on nascent Malay nationalism and studies on the Malay language, and mnemonic pre-literate and literary practices.Footnote 9
However, the realisation that Abdullah's published writings only emerged across the last decade-and-a-half of his life beginning in 1838 had never even received historiographical mention, much less extended reflection, until 2005. In the first of Amin Sweeney's epic three-volume transliteration of Abdullah's writings, Karya Lengkap Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, he discusses the emergence of Kisah in 1838 and how the latter's publication led to the Hikayat's appearance in 1843.Footnote 10 On 27 March 1838, a deputation from Singapore to Kelantan took to sea. Headed by Grandpre, an employee of the EIC in Singapore of Portuguese origin, its mission was to seek the release of several sea vessels owned by merchants in Singapore. These vessels had been detained in Kelantan due to the outbreak of a civil conflict over succession between the sons of the late ruler of Kelantan. The members of the mission from Singapore were under instructions to deliver letters containing formal requests to the warring factions and merchants there. These letters requested the release of the boats and payment for their cargo. Two translators and several boat hands accompanied Grandpre. Abdullah was the Malay translator with one C.T.B. Kohann, the Chinese translator. The travelling party safely returned to Singapore on the evening of 24 April 1838.Footnote 11
In his editorial comments in the Malay language, Sweeney noted how Abdullah discovered that a version of events of what transpired on that trip had been published in a Singapore-based English-language newspaper, the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, on 3 May 1838. This rival version was penned by Kohann, who had written to the editor to declare the mission to secure the release of vessels caught in the Kelantan civil conflict a failure. In his letter, he disparaged Abdullah's role and conduct as the mission's Malay language translator and intermediary. One of Abdullah's responsibilities had been to personally deliver letters to a ranking member of one of the warring factions, and Kohann claimed that Abdullah had failed to do so.Footnote 12
Sweeney noted these events to historicise, to the extent possible, the context surrounding the emergence of Kisah and goes on to note that Abdullah's first published (lithographic) work was the Kisah and how the contents of this work were, at least in part, targeted to counter rival interpretations of what transpired on that sea-based mission.Footnote 13
Thus Abdullah's Kisah was published after he responded to a perceived threat to his livelihood. For someone who had actively worked with incoming Western missionaries for much of his life, it was probably Abdullah's blossoming association with the American, Alfred North, since the latter's arrival in Singapore in 1836 and his ability to present an account that appealed to North's anti-despotic American sensibilities that contributed to the Kisah appearing in print within about a month and a day of his return from that northeasterly sea journey on 25 May 1838. A one-month turnaround should be deemed impressive for anyone who had never been published before in a colonial context where there was virtually no commercial or any form of discursive space for Malay language publications.Footnote 14
Even if there is some lingering doubt over the details of Kisah's emergence, it is difficult to deny that any effort to make sense of Abdullah and this work cannot ignore these events. It is knowledge of such details that allows one to historicise an influential Malay language source. Such an awareness enables us to go beyond what Abdullah said and learn more about who published the text, when and where it was published, and also to consider why, how and for whom Abdullah would have constructed such a work. It should also be noted that the path for the emergence of the historiographically influential Hikayat in 1843, the still largely ignored Syair Singapura Terbakar (even after Sweeney's recent transliteration) in 1841, and the marginally considered Ceretera Kapal Asap in 1843, all stem from North's encouragement after the Kisah had seemingly whet his appetite for the production of more Malay language materials to be used to teach incoming Europeans and Americans the language.Footnote 15 The gradually established pedagogical publishing dimension of Abdullah's relationships with North and his missionary successors eventually led to the emergence of two other, and now more increasingly well-known, works of Abdullah.Footnote 16
Beyond the interstices of empire
In such efforts to historicise Abdullah's works, there is no explicit effort to conceptualise, much less theorise, empire. Instead, the missionaries are taken to be a manifestation of empire, and in the realm of the publishing infrastructure in Singapore, they were utterly dominant. Besides publishing their own materials, mission presses were relied upon to print EIC materials and also sold their services to nascent merchant-focused English language periodicals. In this way, these presses wielded considerable power over the written output in the emerging port city. Abdullah, if he wanted to gain a hearing through publication, was distinctly subject to the power of these presses and he needed to appeal to the sensibilities of their decision-makers to give himself any chance of appearing in print.
This state of affairs reflects a web of networks between political power, religious bodies and the aspirations, beliefs and attendant commercial and other motives of their publishing arm and the colonised intermediary, who at any one time may play several roles of an informant, service provider, hired labourer and other roles as the need arose. As explained by the new imperial historians, webbed connections work as bridgeheads and linkages to make possible empire within the contingencies of the everyday life and happenings in its outposts spread around the world.Footnote 17 Even if both Sweeney and I did not mention this newish development in the study of empire, our respective efforts to historicise Abdullah's life and writings cohere closely with its explanatory trajectories.Footnote 18
However, even the explanatory dynamism of new imperial history does not help bring into focus a crucial awareness about Abdullah's predicament when his reputation was assailed. While Abdullah was connected to these missionaries and earned his keep in empire-created spaces, it was most likely not a relationship of equals. Abdullah, in this instance, was dependent on North for his livelihood. Further, Abdullah, unlike Kohann for instance, had yet to gain access to empire linked-discursive spaces like English language periodicals where he could directly air his grievances. To further contextualise Abdullah's lesser standing, Grandpre, the head of the mission on Abdullah's voyage to the eastern states in 1838, published his personal record of the mission on the same day as Kohann's letter. It appears that Grandpre had handed over his travel diary of the said journey to the editors of the Singapore Free Press.Footnote 19 Unlike his two fellow voyagers, Abdullah had to grapple with North as a specific manifestation of imperial power to gain a hearing. Abdullah needed to pander to the latter's suspected sensibilities to get published and thereby hopefully counter English language press-circulated impressions of him.
Abdullah may well have a measure of recognition in the historiography of early colonial Singapore where he is usually cited as a witness to the unfolding of empire in the port-city. Further, he is also recognised as the father of modern Malay literature, with his writings used to instruct generations of Malay school-goers in the colonial era and even present-day Malaysia. However, when more closely historicised, it is his relative powerlessness within an imperial context that first greets us. This sense of subjection to specific networks and spaces of empire is what precedes Abdullah's emergence in print. His first published work, the Kisah, arrived about a month after his return. While the latter is quite blatantly targeted to save his own skin, this publication only emerged once Abdullah, in his desperation, had genuflected before imperial power.
Implications of the historiographically dominant Abdullah
A bowed posture and existential duress, then, instead of the oft-attributed intellectualism and sharp criticism of Malays and their rulers, is what should be borne in mind when reading Abdullah's works that emerged from this compact with North (and even his successors) unless it is evidentially debunked. Notwithstanding such efforts to contextualise Abdullah's writings, the dominant understanding of the man and his work remains Anthony Milner's Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya (1995).
Milner had taken Abdullah's criticism in Kisah of the Malay rulers encountered on his journey to the eastern Peninsula states as oppressive tyrants, and their followers as indolent, unhygienic and under-educated, quite literally. More importantly, Milner viewed these pronouncements as an instance of Abdullah offering a liberal critique of the Malays, rulers and ruled. Milner then locates Abdullah and his reformist exhortations at the head of a chain of Malay-language writers and writings that saw the emergence of modern politics in British colonial territories in and around the peninsula.Footnote 20 While Milner is widely recognised as a prominent historian and his scholarly efforts tend to be approached as histories, doing the latter would be tantamount to misunderstanding a scholar who has more recently explicitly indicated that much of his lifelong efforts in handling Malay texts are better characterised as efforts in historical anthropology and not history.Footnote 21 Milner's social-scientific preoccupation to detect the emergence of nascent Malay politics makes it understandable why Invention of Politics does not provide deep context nor historicise Abdullah and his writings.
However, the emergent categorical understanding of Abdullah as a liberal critic at the head of a chain of critics of Malay backwardness has significant historiographical consequences. In emphasising the ideological linkages of Abdullah's criticisms to independence-seeking denizens of later British Malaya, Milner disengages Abdullah from the contextual intricacies of nineteenth-century Singapore, leaving historiographical space for Turnbull's laudatory coloniality. In fact, it might even be argued that Milner actually bolsters Turnbull's positive estimation of empire's influences when he approvingly describes Abdullah's allegedly imperially gleaned liberal pronouncements. While Milner's Abdullah does speak of exploitation, oppression and the abuse of power, he does not implicate empire as a perpetrator of such, alongside supposed oriental despots.
Unfortunately, Milner's all-important social-scientific approach to Abdullah's writings is barely, if ever noted, by numerous commentators who premise their contributions on or related to Milner's Abdullah and the latter's works.Footnote 22 This lack of awareness needs to be acknowledged to avoid confusing Milner's theorised conception of Abdullah with a historicised Abdullah. While the dominance of Milner's Abdullah continues, it is hoped that Sweeney's and my efforts to better historicise Abdullah when compounded by the efforts of Ian Proudfoot, Jan van der Putten and Sanjay Krishnan as discussed below, will facilitate fresh approaches to the study of early colonial Singapore.
British justice?
In the historiography of Abdullah, Ian Proudfoot is the only historian to have explicitly raised questions about Abdullah's positive portrayal of aspects of empire in an article which discusses one of the latter's encounters with British justice. Proudfoot contrasts Abdullah's positive estimation of empire with the very different experiences found in another indigenous account.Footnote 23 According to Kisah, on Abdullah's return from the eastern states, Abdullah was not compensated for his month-long efforts as contracted. After several failed personal appeals, Abdullah recorded that he took his Baba Chinese promisor to court on the advice and support of a European friend. This European friend was acquainted with the magistrate and wrote Abdullah a letter to be handed to the said court official. Once an official complaint was filed, this letter was read by the adjudicator and Abdullah swiftly benefited from the operations of British justice. He was paid his due.Footnote 24
Abdullah's success as recorded in Kisah allows one to imagine empire as more than merely benign. It seemed to have supported Abdullah's just cause. Perhaps such a portrayal of empire is also offered as a stark contrast to life under the oriental despots detested by North. However, like an overwhelming number of episodes mentioned by Abdullah, there is no corroboration of his positive experience with British justice. For all we know, Abdullah could have made it all up. Nonetheless, it can be plausibly imagined that the inclusion of this episode in the Kisah, even if true, was yet another part of his efforts to restore his reputation with Europeans and Americans who were potential customers of his Malay language-based services. Given that his reputation was threatened, Abdullah was probably trying to counter such aspersions by ingratiating himself with potential customers through speaking highly of British justice.
However, Proudfoot's article was not written to air Abdullah's supposed positive encounter with British justice. Instead, Proudfoot wanted to juxtapose Abdullah's experiences with the observations of one Tuan Siami. In the 1970s, the position of Abdullah and his writings as the only substantial repository of non-colonial perspectives on early colonial life and times in Singapore had been marginally altered. There was a discovery of three pieces of Malay writing from the early colonial Singapore period in a French archive. Two of these sources were from the hand of Siami, a low-level administrator in the EIC. In one piece, Siami spoke about witnessing British justice in early colonial Singapore.Footnote 25 Given the almost total lack of contextual information and corroboration for these newfound sources, Proudfoot's methodological options were severely limited. Hence, he chose to juxtapose the contents of Siami's account against that of Abdullah's Kisah to raise questions about perceptions of British justice and by extension, Abdullah's writings.
Briefly, in Siami's account of British justice, a visiting European ship captain loses his suit against a Chinese defendant for non-payment of goods received not on its merits but because of cronyism. The oriental party appealed to an occidental contact who knew the magistrate personally and apparently leveraged this connection to prevail. It is instructive that this veritable leveraging of influence to compromise legal proceedings occurred across cultural lines. It indicates the importance of contacts and networks tethered toward commercial profit and not the blindness of British justice. Cognisant of Sweeney's then emerging efforts to contextualise Abdullah's earliest published writings like the Kisah and Hikayat, and persuaded as to how Abdullah probably slanted much of the contents in the Kisah to please North to give himself a platform to counter Kohann's besmirching of his reputation, Proudfoot raised the possibility that Siami's recording of an instance of British justice may have been less partial than that of Abdullah's.Footnote 26 Even if Siami's account is one day historicised to be otherwise, Proudfoot's efforts underscore the need to bring to bear a healthy hermeneutic of suspicion when it comes to Abdullah and his writings. Further support for exercising suspicion came shortly after the publication of Proudfoot's comparison of Siami's and Abdullah's experiences of British justice when Proudfoot discovered and made available online an edited version of North's journal.Footnote 27 North's journal shows that he was explicit in his anti-despotism toward oriental rulers and that Abdullah's depiction and criticism of the tyrannical rulers of the eastern states closely mimic North's comments.Footnote 28
Proudfoot's prudent use of an alternative, even if contextually impoverished non-colonial, source raises some initial questions through the historiography of Abdullah as to the positive facade of empire in early colonial Singapore. At the very least, Proudfoot's juxtaposition makes one question whether Raffles’ touted claims of how British rule of law and justice undergirded the free trading ethos of EIC Singapore that is strongly put forward by Turnbull had anything more than rhetorical and aspirational purchase.Footnote 29 Even within this prominent recent development in the historiography of Abdullah, the questioning of received perceptions of empire is much needed, and can hopefully be enhanced if eventually better documented. Further, a shift in the sensing of interpretive possibilities brought about by Proudfoot's suggestion may open one to read the colonial archive more critically to tease out hitherto hidden, neglected or even censored (self and otherwise) contours of empire.
Greed?
Besides British justice, success as a thriving and ascendant entrepôt is a recurrent trope of British imperialism in Singapore. To further accentuate and explain colonial Singapore's stellar success as a trading settlement, Turnbull and Edwin Lee pointed out that the EIC's Singapore did more than subscribe to the idea of free trade with ‘no taxes on trade and industry’. In fact, by 1824 the release from fetters on trade in Singapore was not limited to freedom from tariffs typical of entrepôts, but extended to freedom from port charges like anchorage, wharfage and pilotage.Footnote 30 These incentives were expectedly a boon to Singapore's merchant and trading communities.
However, Jan van der Putten, a prominent contributor to the recent historiography of Abdullah, has indicated that support for a virile economism was not limited to merchants and traders, but also encompassed the missionary arm of empire. Van der Putten is a literary scholar of historical Malay literature and the focus of his article on Abdullah and the missionaries was to counter growing suggestions that the Hikayat is best thought of as a discourse of dissent against indigenous Malay rulers, with Abdullah being significantly influenced by Malay writing traditions. Instead, van der Putten argues that Abdullah's association with missionaries and their worldviews had a significant impact on how he thought and wrote. Van der Putten suggests that a close study of Abdullah's language indicates that he was quite aware of the duplicitous agenda of his ‘new White Rajas’. In short, while perhaps not to the extent understood today, Abdullah was not unaware of some of the ends of missionary education: proselytisation, to develop a more-easily manageable population, and closely connected, to have a workforce that could be better employed toward empire's economic ends.Footnote 31 In his study, van der Putten reveals that even the missional tentacle of empire was twined with its economic agenda. It is unsurprising that the mercantile ethos of profit was hardly ever hidden as communicated in popular taglines of imperialism like ‘God, Gold and Glory’. And if on occasion, even the imperial proponents of ‘God’ did so with ‘Gold’ explicitly in mind, it would be remiss for historiographers of early colonial Singapore to be slow to consider if ‘Greed’ in lieu of ‘Gold’ would be a better and more accurate, tagline of empire. Two hundred years after the fact, it is long overdue for historiographers of colonial Singapore to deepen their investigations of empire and identify some of its less than laudatory features. They should then go on to label them more accurately.
Guns and gore
While any effort to learn more about empire as manifest in EIC's Singapore would surely be enhanced by furthering the paths traversed by Proudfoot and van der Putten and the pioneering efforts of Sweeney, Sanjay Krishnan's theoretically rich efforts offer yet another meaningful avenue. Krishnan's study gestures strongly against the machinations of a capitalistic global empire to further the dialogue generated by Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Janet Abu-Lughod on the centrality of Europe in historical discourse and how it may be decentred in pursuit of ‘alternative pictures’ of the past.Footnote 32 Methodologically, Krishnan ‘activates’ the Hikayat to show how scholars need to pay ‘greater attention to how the world is brought into view’.Footnote 33 More specifically, Krishnan tried to exemplify ‘how reading can transform the practice of the investigating subject, particularly as such a practice might productively interrupt or supplement the much-needed projects of producing alternative or counterhegemonic narratives’.Footnote 34 Even further, Krishnan wanted to show that ‘we draw on the matter of representation to see how the world is coded, not simply to provide a better or alternative “picture,” but to see what interruptive strategies it may enable’.Footnote 35
Even though Krishnan does not appear to be aware of Sweeney's efforts to historicise the emergence of the Kisah and by extension the Hikayat, his findings cohere with those of Sweeney's.
Krishnan thinks that in the Hikayat, Abdullah models ‘his writing on the representational modalities of a colonial order intent on establishing a global civil society founded in imperial trade and commerce’ and that ‘Abdullah's narrative’ demonstrates ‘the intrinsically truthful nature of this seeing or to justify the worldviews it serves’.Footnote 36 And in the second of the two interruptive discussion points raised by Krishnan, he refers to aspects of the particularly gory episode of Syed Yasin's desecration from 1823, so briefly described by Turnbull.
According to the Hikayat, on the afternoon of 11 March 1823, one Sayid Yasin, a trader from Pahang, had judgment entered against him by Colonel William Farquhar for non-payment of a debt to a trader from Palembang, Pangeran Sharif Omar. Yasin was consequentially placed in a makeshift debtor's prison and at five o'clock that evening, asked permission of the magistrate who was responsible for his gaoling if he could be allowed to visit his creditor to negotiate fresh terms of repayment so that he could be released. However, Yasin's actual intention was to injure or kill Omar with a keris he had smuggled into the gaol under his coat without detection. The magistrate, Mr. Bernard, agreed to Yasin's suggestion and asked a sepoy to accompany Yasin to Omar's house. On seeing Yasin approach his house, Omar sensed that his life was under threat and ran out from the back of the house toward Farquhar's house. Once Omar had explained matters to Farquhar, the latter mobilised himself, his son Andrew and four sepoys to search for Yasin. In the meantime, the sepoy who had accompanied Yasin, not hearing from Yasin as he had waited at the outer gate while Yasin approached Omar's house, called for Yasin to return to the gaol as it was getting dark. On that moonless night, Yasin returned at the sepoy's bidding only to stab and kill him with his keris. Yasin then hid under a pavilion adjacent to Omar's house, waiting for the latter's return. When the Farquhar-led search party arrived, they searched the premises, including the pavilion, but Yasin was nowhere to be found. After a short walk in another direction, Farquhar returned to the pavilion and prodded under its platform. Yasin stretched his hand out from beneath the pavilion and struck Farquhar across his chest, drawing blood. In response, Andrew drew his sword and killed Yasin.
Soon, the Europeans who were alerted to this incident arrived and took turns to stab and mutilate Yasin's corpse to the point that no one in the vicinity could identify the disfigured dead man as Yasin. Three or four hundred sepoys, under the command of Captain Davis, soon encircled the Temenggong's residence with guns and twelve canons as it was suspected that he and his men were behind this attack (the Temenggong was one of the resident Malay rulers and signatory to the agreement to allow the EIC a factory space on Singapore). Shortly after, Raffles arrived at the scene and learned that an unidentifiable Malay-looking-man was responsible for the injury to Farquhar and the death of a sepoy. Not long after, however, at Raffles’ instruction, the guns were stood down when the magistrate who had agreed to release Yasin from goal identified his body, thereby delinking the stabbing of Farquhar from the Temenggong and his followers.
Raffles, still seething with anger at the magistrate, then called for the blacksmiths and ordered them to work overnight and build a cage-like metal encasement wherein Yasin's body would be placed before its eventual gibbeting at Telok Ayer Point the next morning. Further, on the night of the incident, and even before being encased, Yasin's body was tied and dragged along the ground before being thrown into an open space and guarded by sepoys through the night. The next morning, after a meeting between Raffles, the Sultan and the Temengong, Yasin's body was paraded on a bullock cart to Tanjung Malang, the place where he was hung in the freshly made cage for between ten to fifteen days. Yasin's decomposing body was eventually reduced to its bare bones before the Sultan gained Raffles’ permission to take it down to be buried.Footnote 37
Krishnan argues that Abdullah, ever concerned to justify and ameliorate Raffles’ role in such a brutality, noted how at the morning meeting, Raffles had explained to the Sultan that while it was Malay tradition to kill a treasonous perpetrator and his family for such wrongdoings, British justice would spare the family as they had not transgressed. Further, Krishnan goes on to show how Abdullah did not mention how Yasin's eventual grave at Tanjong Pagar came to be a well-visited site of Muslim pilgrimage after his burial, thereby memorialising British colonial savagery.Footnote 38
Beyond Krishnan's comments on Abdullah's omissions and their significance, what is particularly notable about this episode is that, unlike much of Abdullah's observations, the uncomfortable details of this episode are adequately related in other colonial era sources. While it would be remiss to uncritically deem all of them as corroborations of Abdullah's account, given their uncertain provenance and the fact that none are by independent eye-witnesses, all these sources mention the post-mortem display of the body, with Charles Buckley mentioning Muslim remembrance of Yasin through an attachment to his grave site.Footnote 39 Abdullah, on the other hand, as argued by Krishnan, was more concerned to please his anticipated British reading audience by removing some of the aforementioned details from his version of events.
Of further historiographical intrigue is the fact that while Buckley appeared very willing to recount even more post-mortem details than Abdullah's longer account, Turnbull only needed about one-fifth of a page to briefly narrate this episode in Singapore's early colonial history.Footnote 40 Unlike Buckley, Turnbull failed to mention how Yasin's body was mutilated and dragged along the ground. While she did note the panic of the British residents in the wake of this incident, she did not link the initial mutilation to the inability to identify Yasin. She also did not record how these circumstances led to suspicions about the Temenggong being behind the attack and how these events at twilight almost led to an attack on the Temenggong's residence. That Turnbull contented herself with so little elaboration and did so without adequate attribution raises even further concerns and questions as to her motivations in redacting this episode.
However, even in the short space dedicated to this incident, Turnbull saw it fit to commence her account by noting that while Raffles usually dealt sensitively with the Malays, his savagery on that night was exceptional and out of the ordinary. It almost seems that Turnbull was forced to record this episode in her survey textbook history of Singapore because of its undoubted historicity and not doing so would have been a significant dereliction of responsibility and raised questions as to her impartiality. However, she seems equally intent to minimise its impact on wider estimations of Raffles, the heroic figure of empire in Singapore.
Historicising early colonial Singapore
The historiography of the first three decades of EIC's Singapore, even with due acknowledgement of the relative richness of the English colonial archive and Turnbull's trailblazing interpretive efforts, could be decidedly enhanced via a dialogical encounter with the recent historiographical developments related to the writings of Abdullah. However, it marks a high-water mark of oddity, if not disciplinary embarrassment, that explicit efforts to historicise the writings of such a historiographically significant figure of empire are relatively recent and come mainly from the efforts of a non-historian like Sweeney. Further, the unpleasant underbelly of empire has also been brought into focus by two non-historians, van der Putten and Krishnan. Proudfoot is the only historian with a similar, if circumscribed, contribution to make.
This brief survey of the more recent historiography of Abdullah and its intersections with empire indicate that much more can, and should, be done to reconsider other established historiographical positions pertaining to Abdullah and early colonial Singapore that may well suffer from inadequate historicisation. There is every possibility, even reasonable probability if cognate colonised contexts are anything to go by, that the instances of structural inequality, crony-linked injustice, physical violence and excessive retribution referred to above are but several instances of some, if not many, other such episodes in the history of early colonial Singapore. The experience of British colonial rule in Singapore, even if some 200 years old, and seemingly much mentioned, discussed and commemorated if not celebrated, may still need much more work than hitherto imagined. Correction of the historical record needs to be rigorously, and ideally, swiftly, pursued. It cannot be differed to another milestone anniversary. Recent developments in the historiography of Abdullah suggest that meaningful representation of early colonial Singapore should only be acknowledged when ‘God, Gold and Glory’ are, at least to begin with, adequately historicised, and complexified, alongside ‘Greed, Guns and Gore’.
