Introduction
Toddy consumption in British Malaya features as a plantation problem in most historical works on the subject. According to Arasaratnam, toddy drinking amongst estate labourers had long been ‘a social evil’, the magnitude of which could have been greater in British Malaya than even South India owing to the colonial government's patronage of the industry.Footnote 1 Kernial Singh Sandhu's attention to the appearance of the toddy shop in rural Malaya provides insights into the localization of the toddy trade, whilst Andrew Willford's work has contributed further anthropological perspectives on toddy drinking in contemporary Malaysia.Footnote 2 In contrast, the colonial government's administration of the toddy trade in the Straits Settlements and the contestations that it engendered have been hitherto neglected areas of historical enquiry. In particular, toddy's social life in Singapore surfaced a unique set of concerns and tensions about the regulation of urban space in the port city. The historical association of South Asian labourers with alcohol consumption and potentially dangerous behaviour was evident in the aftermath of the Little India riot of 2013 as well. The riot spurred the government into action in regulating migrant workers’ access to alcohol in certain designated recreational spaces—a political response that appeared to stem from racialized understandings of deviance.Footnote 3
The intellectual landscape of Singapore's social history for the pre-war and war periods is rich and varied. Some of these works have studied key developments in the city's history, while others have positioned the urban physical environment itself as a canvass of social change.Footnote 4 Several works have focused specifically on working-class sociability and the colonial government's attempts to regulate the recreational impulses of this class.Footnote 5 The built environment, working-class sociability, and political ferment have not been treated as hermetically sealed categories in the most notable of these works, which have instead sought to forge critical connections between these areas of inquiry.Footnote 6 In so doing, historians have probed the lives of some subaltern groups on whose blood and toil the modern city-state was forged.
However, the current body of scholarship surfaces two distinct limitations. The first is a general dearth of non-elite Indian perspectives. Although some contemporary studies have sought to trace the impact of migrant labourers’ recreational spaces on Singapore's physical, political, and cultural landscapes, social history writing has generally been cleaved along the lines of the plural society model, wherein various ethnic perspectives continue to co-exist without really mingling.Footnote 7 This discernible lack of dialogue between ‘mainstream’ and ‘ethnic’ histories has inspired a scholarly turn towards the exploration of ‘Singapore's social and cultural history from the bi-cultural perspective’, although this approach is still at a nascent stage where working-class histories are concerned.Footnote 8 While various social experiences have been explained with reference to Chinese experiences, working-class Indian realities and perspectives remain largely relegated to the purview of diaspora studies. With their emphasis on the minority community's politics of representation, these studies typically run in parallel to representations of Singapore's social history. John Solomon's recent book is commendable for the insights it provides into the everyday lives of subaltern Indian groups, although here, too, wider social issues are overshadowed by parochial concerns; alcoholism, for instance, features as a concern for the Tamil labouring community and the Indian leadership primarily as it evoked uncomfortable associations of caste backwardness.Footnote 9 While these were indeed very legitimate concerns, it would be productive to locate them within a broader conceptualization of social anxieties. The Indian leadership's reformist impulses intersected with the colonial government's modernizing project in important and interesting ways where toddy provision was concerned. Toddy's stigmatization as an affliction of the blue-collar Tamil labourer or toddy mama Footnote 10 notwithstanding, the debate about the alcohol transcended the racial divide to include non-Indians who contributed to the controversy surrounding it either as its consumers or as its critics.
Secondly, studying the provision and consumption of a contentious commodity would shed new light on processes of social change and how these were negotiated by different groups. While coffee shops or kopitiams have received significant scholarly attention as sites of sociability, the toddy shop has been rendered conspicuous by its absence in representations of Singapore's past. This scholarly neglect derives perhaps from toddy's association with the plantation economy. At any rate, the neglect carries echoes of the government toddy shop's actual marginalization as the cursed bar of the South Indian bacchante.
The racialization of alcoholism, and more generally of vice, has been the subject of numerous scholarly works.Footnote 11 After all, the trope of the original drunk ‘Injun’ emerged in connection with an alcohol excise policy that facilitated colonial control over native Americans whose subsequent confinement in reserves far removed from white society was justified in moral as well as medical terms.Footnote 12 Alcohol provision has also been shown to intersect with class distinctions in significant ways in the context of colonialism.Footnote 13 The demonization of certain plebeian drinking establishments and behaviours directly owed to paternalistic government policies and social attitudes. Toddy's treatment as the Tamil's alcohol of choice gave rise to demands to isolate the toddy shop from ‘respectable’ urban spaces. The increased visibility of the government-controlled industry in the open world of the port city rendered it the subject of strident criticism. Demands for increased attention to working-class welfare intensified as the tide of modernization picked up pace after the Second World War. Toddy provision and consumption thus became central to numerous, often competing imaginaries of modernity. Toddy can still be enjoyed in neighbouring Malaysia while the industry was phased out in Singapore in the late 1970s, which begs the question of why an imported cultural institution that thrived all over British Malaya in its heyday followed such different trajectories eventually.
The reason has to do partly with colonial toddy policy in Singapore, which underwent critical shifts between 1900 and 1959. Following decolonization, a string of problems plagued the industry, culminating in its eventual demise. While the opium trade was abolished in 1943 and other types of alcohol were distributed according to market demand—a ‘curious relic of the liquor monopoly’ persisted with the provision of toddy.Footnote 14 Toddy production and distribution in the Straits Settlements, which had previously been leased out to the highest bidders, were gradually brought under government control in the 1930s. These changes enabled the industry's continuation, albeit with the colonial government's direct and active involvement as its moderator.Footnote 15 This article will examine the intersections between working-class sociability, contestations of urban modernity, and control of the built environment. Its intent is not to trace political change through alcohol control, but rather to probe the considerations that underpinned colonial toddy policy in Singapore from the beginning of the twentieth century and to evaluate toddy's role in informing notions of modernity at different points over the colony's transition to full internal self-governance. In so doing, it hopes to draw attention to an aspect of Singapore's working-class history through the lens of toddy provision and consumption. Of the sources used, which include colonial office records, oral histories, and newspaper articles, the latter two sets of historical evidence are particularly valuable, as they offer insights into the polarizing emotions and opinions that the toddy issue often surfaced amongst different segments of society.
The colonial government, toddy provision, and the social world of Tamil labourers in Singapore
Toddy's cultural impact on Singapore society was perhaps matched only by its indelible physical imprint. The city's Ord Bridge, for instance, was also referred to as Toddy Bridge as it was flanked by shops hawking the drink.Footnote 16 In the late nineteenth century, the competing uses to which toddy was put rendered it the site of a bitter dispute between Singapore's toddy farmers and bakers, the latter of whom used it as a substitute for yeast in their manufacture.Footnote 17 Whilst toddy sellers insisted that all toddy should be procured from them, the bakers demanded that they should be used to allowed to use toddy directly obtained from their trees. The resulting standoff led to a compromise wherein the bakers were allowed to take the toddy they required from their own trees after paying the farmers a tax of 15 cents per tree per month.Footnote 18 Toddy's utility in the making of ‘bludder cake’—a confection that graced Eurasian tables at Christmas time—meant that it had to be procured from toddy shops.Footnote 19 Whilst toddy thus seeped into different cultural spaces in Singapore, it was foremost a poor man's cheap drink.
The centrality of toddy to Tamil social life was first established in the Madras Presidency, India, wherein the widespread use of the drink informed colonial knowledge of toddy as an indispensable aspect of the Tamilian's culture and constitution. Whilst toddy had had an important place in Tamil social history,Footnote 20 it was with colonial rule that its consumption was organized, collated, and reified into an irreducible (South) Indian difference. The notion that toddy was the Tamilian's poison of choice led to novel experimentations with temperance and teetotalism in the Madras Presidency, such as with the establishment in 1920 of a labourers’ social club with the declared aim of providing a ‘counter-attraction to toddy and liquor shops’.Footnote 21 Colonial discourse assigned a place for toddy in Indian society that was ambiguous to begin with. While it was a type of alcohol, toddy was also considered a less harmful alternative to other types of alcohol, especially the distilled varieties, hence prompting the colonial government to differentiate between ‘toddy and liquor’. At the height of temperance agitation in Madras, some Legislative Council representatives of business interests argued that as labourers had to have some kind of alcohol to ensure productivity, that alcohol might as well be toddy as it caused the smallest amount of physical harm.Footnote 22 Alongside the widely held official opinion that the continued provision of toddy would militate against the consumption of more deleterious local liquors like arrack or samsu, the colonial government experimented with measures to counteract intoxication by providing labourers with sobering hot drinks instead.Footnote 23
Although toddy entered colonial knowledge as food par excellence of Tamilians in the Madras Presidency, it was developed into a systematic tool for the management of the Indian migrant labour force in Malaya.Footnote 24 The habit of consuming alcohol crossed the dreaded kalapani and entered Malaya as part of the cultural inheritance of Tamil labourers toiling abroad.Footnote 25 Toddy thus accompanied Tamil labour immigration into Malaya, wherein the notion that the infantile Tamil coolie was biologically addicted to it became firmly entrenched in colonial society largely as a consequence of planters’ observations. Toddy contracts and licences, along with the right to farm cannabis, or bhang, were invited from Indian Tamils.Footnote 26 In fact, several wealthy Indian Tamil entrepreneurs, crowned ‘toddy kings’ in local society, owed their fortunes to the thriving trade in toddy.Footnote 27 Profits from the toddy trade were even donated to support Britain's war effort during the Second World War.Footnote 28 In fact, Singapore's first foreign minister, S. Rajaratnam, was the son of Sabapathy Pillai Sinnathamby, an enterprising Tamil man who had ‘flourished as a toddy contractor and (who had) shared this growing business with several relatives who also took up toddy contracts’.Footnote 29 These wealthy toddy merchants and their equation with the government were often worlds removed from that of the humble toddy drinker.
Compared to the situation on Malayan plantations, where toddy was often the only real legally sanctioned recourse that existed within walking distance for the tired labourer, a tippler could purchase any kind of alcoholic beverage he wanted in Singapore, limited only by his spending power. As an agent of sociability and recreation, toddy was as preferred by urban blue-collar workers as it was by plantation labourers. It ranked amongst the cheapest alcoholic beverages, and hence offered unskilled and semi-skilled city labourers a good compromise between the cheap, but often deadly samsu and costly beer.Footnote 30 Moreover, toddy was often more accessible to the coolie in the port city as compared to the plantation frontier, which tended to isolate the toddy drinker and the related problem of toddy dependence within the estates.Footnote 31 The city toddy shop served as a prime meeting place for urban labourers, who used its premises to share news pertaining to the homeland or to just unwind and catch up after putting in a hard day's work. Although toddy shops in Singapore were patronized largely by South Indian labourers, it was not unusual to find Punjabi, Chinese, and occasionally even Malay men interacting within its premises, often in racially segregated groups.Footnote 32 Up until the abolition of Singapore's toddy industry, some working- and even middle-class South Indian families regularly presented small quantities of the alcohol as an offering to the warrior deity, Madurai Veeran, in their homes or in local shrines.Footnote 33 Toddy drinking appears to have been prevalent amongst bachelors and married men alike, some of whom apparently frequented government toddy shops every evening.Footnote 34
Indeed, toddy shops were deliberately located in close quarters to labour lines to make them accessible to Tamil labourers.Footnote 35 Several oral histories surface the notion that toddy was an Indian industry through and through, with one of these accounts stating that the supply of toddy and the related activity of coconut picking, along with cattle-rearing, constituted the main occupations of Singapore's Indian population.Footnote 36 Toddy shops were staffed with Tamil toddy servers—an occupation that was apparently detested by all other ethnic groups owing to the ‘kind of smell’ the drink emitted.Footnote 37 The industry's racialization was reinforced with the sale of complementary goods, especially kajang and curry, near toddy shops.Footnote 38 In fact, the sale of curry near these shops reinforced the view that toddy shops were breeding grounds for a myriad ailments from dysentery to cholera. A press commentary noted in 1931 that ‘the rowdy and bacchanalian scenes enacted in front of toddy shops (are) due to Tamil women who sit near such places and sell to their “revellers” their over-spiced curry stuffs’.Footnote 39 Recounting his impressions of the Ord Road shop, Pakirisamy recalled that the establishment was approximately 60 by 70 feet wide and could accommodate 20 to 30 tables.Footnote 40 The toddy was contained in large drums and was served in worn metal or plastic cups.Footnote 41 There was a glaring lack of proper sanitation and seating in these establishments, and it was common to see poor labourers standing hunched over their drink or crouched together on the dirty floor in overcrowded spaces.Footnote 42 Despite, or perhaps because of, its alterity in the colonial urban landscape, the toddy shop sometimes inspired the formation of rather favourable impressions about Tamilians. One European observer, whilst passing by the Exeter Road toddy shop, recalled having been pleasantly surprised by the loyalty that a ‘large crowd of Tamils’ showed to the late King George V upon his demise when they set down their glasses and stood to pay their respects as the first cannons were fired.Footnote 43
Toddy consumption, Tamil labourers, and the racialization of vice
While opium was perceived to dull the senses of the ‘hollow-eyed, emaciated Oriental stretched out on his pallet, pipe in hand’, toddy in the colonial gaze was a drink capable of exciting rowdy and fiendish behaviour in an otherwise docile and malleable labour force.Footnote 44 A letter that was addressed to European overseers of Tamil labourers read:
The Tamil, in spite of effort to convert him, is at heart a child, and whether his grievances are real or imaginary let him get them off his chest …. Put him off, however, and the probability is that he will repair straight to the Toddy Shop, where under the influence of liquor his grievance will to him assume gigantic proportions.Footnote 45
In 1932, a commentary on ‘the incomprehensible ebb and flow of Asiatic life and customs’ described a Tamil funeral in Singapore in these terms:
The mourners with long black hair flying, dance and joke …. Smell now the indescribable sour smell of fermenting toddy, see the jet black faces and wild eyes of those South Indian bacchantes who a few hours since were patient toilers in the Municipal Roads Department or coolies at the Wharves.Footnote 46
The association between Tamil labourers, alcohol, and violence was concretized by two riots that yielded a discourse not altogether different from how the Little India riot of 2013 was discussed. In 1931, police forces were attacked in a clash involving ‘two rival clans of South Indians’ at a toddy shop in Upper Serangoon Road. In 1936, toddy drinking was blamed for another disturbance that took place among coolies at the Sungei Road toddy shop. In both cases, press reports attributed deviant behaviour to the labourers’ seeming weakness for toddy. The riots served to reinforce the seemingly irreducible difference that distinguished these workers, typified as an inebriated and unruly lot, from a civilized and modern society.
The alcohol's disruptive potential notwithstanding, the provision of toddy to labourers was justified on the basis that a regulated amount was necessary to ensure productivity. As Arasaratnam argued in his work, the rationale that toddy was the least harmful alternative justified its continued provision to labourers—a situation that closely paralleled that in the Madras Presidency.Footnote 47 An estate toddy-shop manager in Singapore opined that ‘the Tamil drank toddy before the English drank beer or the Scots drank whisky and as a result of over 25 years’ experience of Tamils I know they must have their toddy’.Footnote 48 In fact, a wage reduction was opposed during the Singapore Municipal budget meeting of 1931 on the grounds that it would make it difficult for the South Indian labourer to procure essential food items. Proponents of this view insisted that, as the South Indian labourer could even do without rice but not toddy, as the habit had been acquired from childhood, ‘expense on toddy drinking was, in this country, an inevitable item in the budget of an average South Indian labourer’.Footnote 49 While there were 11 government toddy shops on the island at the beginning of 1932, ‘a heavy decline in consumption’ forced the closure of three of these shops by the end of the year.Footnote 50 For its part, the government insisted that ‘the substitution of Government shops for licensed shops has led to a vast improvement in the quality of the toddy sold for consumption’.Footnote 51
Moreover, concerns that the adulteration of European liquors or samsu by unscrupulous Chinese merchants rendered them not only cheap, but potentially lethal, were rife. During the Singapore Methodist Conference, it was observed that, as the Tamilian was especially susceptible to dysentery ‘and one would not care to say how great a percentage of the cases of this malady is directly caused through indulgence in the poisonous liquid sold in the guise of brandy and gin’, it was preferable to ensure that he had a steady supply of toddy all the time.Footnote 52 Policing of toddy sales led to numerous arrests of this nature, such as that of May 1933, when a Chinese liquor-shop owner in River Valley Road was charged with having sold samsu to Tamil labourers.Footnote 53 The discipling gaze of the colonial government yielded efforts to criminalize the sales to Tamilians of other types of alcohol, which normalized toddy consumption amongst this group of labourers even further. The question of whether toddy and beer ought to be included in the list of spirituous liquors, the sales of which were forbidden to Tamil coolies, was even raised in the House of Commons.Footnote 54 To this extent, the toddy policy was maintained as a natural and necessary one by the colonial government.
The prominence with which the toddy shop featured in the urban labourer's social world meant that it was never removed from the public spotlight. Alarm about the social ills of toddy consumption and, consequently, demands for a greater degree of state intervention over toddy provision were first raised by representatives of the Indian community. In 1929, the Indian member of the Malayan Legislative Council, Singapore's H. H. Abdoolcader, claimed that toddy was to Indian labourers what beer was to their Western counterparts.Footnote 55 He argued that the regulation of the toddy trade, with reference to such issues as the prevention of adulteration or the protection of women and children from its sinister charms, was much more effectively carried out in the Federated Malay States than in the urban milieu of the Straits Settlements. He demanded therefore that ‘the beverage of the working class of people should be under the control and monopoly of the Government, as (was) done in the FMS [Federated Malay States]’.Footnote 56
According to Derek McKay, who had worked in the Malayan customs service, two-thirds of all toddy shops in British Malaya were administered by the customs by 1934.Footnote 57 Whilst a hotchpotch of systems continued to exist in the FMS, Singapore's toddy trade was eventually brought under the sole control of the government. Even then, Abdoolcader's concerns about lack of regulation continued to plague the administration. The appalling state of the toddy shop notwithstanding, the labourer was left with little choice but to patronize it, as toddy could only be consumed within the premises of these establishments within stipulated business hours. Even though the toddy's physical deterioration was indeed a concern, the legislation constituted—to quote Foucault—‘a specific technique of power’, which enabled the state to subject the toddy-drinking labourer to a ‘normalising gaze, a surveillance that (made) it possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish’ when his drinking was contained within toddy-shop premises.Footnote 58
The Japanese Occupation of Singapore marked a watershed in most aspects of local society, including toddy provision. The toddy trade flourished with Japanese encouragement at a time when the dearth of imported liquor alternatives was keenly felt. In wartime Singapore, toddy was even substituted for communion wine in some churches.Footnote 59 Paul Kratoska's work shows that toddy also gave rise to ingenious adaptations and applications; whilst urine and pineapple juice proved to be unsuitable raw-material substitutes for rubber production, toddy proved to be a successful candidate.Footnote 60 Moreover, it was quite commonly used as medicine owing to its purportedly high vitamin B content. Although toddy consumption was often associated with a rise in the incidence of cholera, some observers maintained that the beverage could actually be nourishing to labourers—an observation that gained credibility during the Occupation when the Japanese supposedly encouraged toddy consumption as a cure for beri-beri.Footnote 61 Toddy thus acquired a degree of social acceptance during the brief interregnum of the Japanese Occupation between 1942 and 1945.
In the postwar period, toddy provision in Singapore—much like the colony itself—was brought under renewed British colonial control. The desirability of increasing the price of toddy was hotly debated, fuelled by concerns that adulterated toddy was being sold in government toddy shops, and the imperative of supporting ‘the postwar policy of increasing yields from indirect taxation to offset costs of social services’.Footnote 62 The Comptroller of Customs pointed out that beer, rather than samsu, was the likely and costlier alternative that Tamil labourers would turn to if their toddy supply was rendered more expensive. After all, ‘the sale of samsu by liquor shops and retail liquor shops to Tamils (was) illegal, but anyone (could) buy beer in any sundry goods shop at a price four times as great as that proposed for toddy’.Footnote 63 The Comptroller of Labour, on the other hand, warned that a price hike could have the effect of provoking criticism about the government's motives and so strengthen the hand of prohibitionists. He pointed out that, whilst Singapore's Tamil labourers were not the lowest-paid group, their ‘monthly earning would be less than one quarter of the earning of the average (steady) beer drinker. It should be borne in mind that the real wages of Indian labourers on estates are higher than those of the Indian labourer in Singapore’.Footnote 64 To this end, he recommended a moderate and gradual price increase, which could be justified as enabling toddy contractors to pay more to their tappers, whilst reducing the risk of adulteration. He suggested this course of action after testing possible reactions through informal consultation with the trade unions, whose members were ‘likely to be principally affected’ by the emerging black market in toddy.Footnote 65
Eventually, the price of toddy sold in Singapore was raised from 15 cents to 20 cents per pint. It was bolstered by the explanation that the closure of toddy shops would induce Tamil labourers to consume stout, beer, or spirit, all of which cost three times the price of toddy, and that, even with the proposed increase, the cost of toddy in Singapore and the Straits Settlements was still ‘absurdly cheap’ compared to Federation prices.Footnote 66 A more interesting racial rhetoric also accompanied the increase in price:
For some time now, toddy has been consumed by other than Tamil labourers. A fair proportion of customers at Toddy Shops are Chinese who would not have dreamt of drinking toddy pre-war but do so now being attracted by the extremely low price; incidentally, they are often able to visit the shops earlier than the Tamil labourer is and the labourer often gets there to find the shop sold out.Footnote 67
Singapore's racialized class hierarchy was thus reinforced through the deliberate manipulation of consumption patterns in this instance. Toddy prices were adjusted as much in defence of Tamil labourers’ welfare as on the grounds that the Chinese could—and should—pay more for their drink. Following the announcement that the price of toddy was to be increased, The Straits Times reported an appeal from Singapore's toddy drinkers to the government asking that the proposed policy be repealed.Footnote 68 Their plea notwithstanding, the (re)production of colonial knowledge crystallized into reality the notion that Tamil labourers could not live without their toddy. Ironically, this reasoning was used to justify the provision to these labourers of more expensive toddy on the grounds that it was still preferable to the other alternatives whose consumption supported the colonial economy.
Toddy, urban space, and the struggle for modernization
Brenda Yeoh has argued that colonial Singapore's urban-built environment became a ‘medicalizable’ object, moulded as it was by concerns pertaining to health and sanitation.Footnote 69 The built environment became the focus of numerous attempts at intervention that were motivated and backed by ‘scientific’ claims that were made not only by the state, but also by various segments of civil society.Footnote 70 Spaces where the underclasses of society gather over a drink or two have historically engendered social censure and attempts at control—an argument that has previously been made with respect to the English public house, which was ‘subject to social controls of a ferocious kind and not simply licensing constraints’.Footnote 71 Likewise, the city toddy shop yielded more negative than positive opinions about Tamilians and modernity in urban Singapore. Government toddy shops became prime sites for processes of ‘other’-ing as fears concerning health and sanitation became conflated with social anxieties pertaining to safety and ‘respectability’.
Although toddy shops generally had the most rudimentary amenities before, during, and after the Second World War, concerns about their condition became particularly pronounced in the postwar period. The deplorable state of toddy shops was not lost on the colonial government, which undertook efforts to maintain a degree of cleanliness and hygiene in these establishments. The Public Works Department ‘redecorated’ all the shops in the colony, provided glasses and mugs, and purchased tables and benches for customers’ use.Footnote 72 Yet these measures appear to have been a case of too little, too late, as the government toddy shop had by then become the subject of numerous demands for reform, if not outright abolition.
Solomon has argued that ‘untouchables were the subject of various stereotypes, focused on their alleged propensity for drunkenness, violence and uncouth behaviour’, which in turn yielded elaborate rules of spatial segregation within the Indian community.Footnote 73 He raises the point that Chinese coffee shopkeepers were also incited by caste Hindus to discriminate against untouchables based on a set of Adi-Dravida attributes that they had learned to identify.Footnote 74 The ostracism that untouchables faced was mirrored in the disdain and disgust that toddy shops frequently elicited. Attempts to discipline the differences that these plebeian drinking establishments represented found expression in demands for their removal or relocation away from respectable spaces. An enraged letter to the press had expressed this sentiment as early as in 1931:
Unlike other liquor shops, Toddy Shops are a source of trouble to the surroundings not only because of the sickening smell of the toddy, but also because of the rabbles frequenting the shop. Such people, the scums of the societies, usually use derogatory and abusive expressions in public. Then what obscene words escape through their lips when under the influence of this intoxicating liquor can best be imagined …. Since the opening of a Government Toddy Shop in Race Course Road in the midst of a decent set of family people who had for years been leading a quiet life, unmolested there, they are put to considerable difficulties. The ladies cannot come out for shame as they meet with obscene sights and hear filthy words. Their children cannot safely go out to play since the five foot way and the road are always crowded by hawkers and drunken people …. Will the authorities, therefore, be good enough to take cognisance of these grievances and remove the shop to a more fitting place?Footnote 75
The ‘scums of the earth’ were also called ‘toddy mamas’. These were drunken and disorderly Indian men, who, having had one drink too many, ‘terrorized’ the neighbourhood of the toddy shop in a state of frenzied excitement.Footnote 76 In his article on the rationalization of diet, Bryan Turner suggested that ‘the health and dietary practices of the working class are likely to be of interest to the dominant classes only if’ at least one of three preconditions were met. The first of these are the dirt and squalor that are present in urban working-class districts—conditions that are often perceived as constituting a grave public-health threat.Footnote 77 The associations reinforced one another; toddy was the drink of the dirty, the destitute, the underclass of society; the fact that this class of people was especially fond of the alcohol rendered it and the physical establishments in which it could be enjoyed conspicuous blots on a progressive urban social order.
The imperative of ensuring a degree of respectability in toddy shops led to the installation of boards at the entrance of toddy shops explicitly forbidding women and children from entering their premises.Footnote 78 At any rate, it was expected that ‘respectable’ women would be naturally repelled by the gendered space of the toddy shop with its heady mix of male conversation, sour stench of toddy, and the ill effects of intoxication, although female road sweepers and coolies could sometimes be seen loitering near its premises.Footnote 79
By the 1950s, toddy shops in Singapore were located in places such as St George's Road and Jalan Besar, where the government employees of the daily rated grade (DREs) had their quarters.Footnote 80 The shops were often ramshackle structures constructed of wood or concrete, with zinc roofs—a design element that was responsible for the unpleasant heat that patrons often had to endure.Footnote 81 As a precursor to their total abolition, the Government and Labour Union of Singapore asked for these shops to be relocated to ‘distant suburbs’—a place from which they would, presumably, no longer be an easy temptation for workers.Footnote 82 In 1954, drunken brawls near the government toddy shop on St George's Road sparked an outcry from frightened residents who petitioned the government ‘to move the toddy shop to some other place’, whilst trade union leaders echoed these demands on the basis that ‘making them (the labourers) walk a little will have a deterrent effect and save residents a lot of nuisance’.Footnote 83 However, exactly what constituted a more fitting ‘other place’ for the relocation of city toddy shops was a matter that could never be answered to the satisfaction of everyone involved. The issue of government responsibility was a recurrent theme in these expressions of social protest; it was only right that the onus for the proper regulation of toddy shops rested with the government, since it had taken charge of their administration.
Drawing inspiration from the struggle for prohibition in India that intensified in the late 1920s and 30s, some reformers demanded the complete eradication of the toddy industry in British Malaya as a precursor for heralding a culture of teetotalism for the diaspora. They sought to redeem Malayan society by purging it of what they deemed to be an archaic and regressive institution. The Self-Respect movement's firebrand leader, E. V. Ramasamy ‘Periyar’, had been requested by the Malayan Indian leadership to talk about the problem of toddy drinking amongst South Indian labourers during his visit in 1929.Footnote 84 Subsequently, toddy drinking, and alcoholism in general, became subsumed within a wider reformist preoccupation of achieving self-respect for Malayan's downtrodden Tamil labourers. These efforts were helmed by several representative bodies that were largely based out of Singapore. At any rate, toddy featured prominently in attempts to reform the state of Hinduism in Malaya. Following a ban initiated by the Tamils’ Reform Association (TRA) on such ‘superstitious’ practices as the sacrifice of live poultry and the offering of toddy at Singapore's South Bridge Road Mariamman temple, a reader wondered whether fire-walking would follow before Hinduism in the city could be properly reformed.Footnote 85 Emboldened by Periyar's visit, the Singapore Indian Association resolved to abolish toddy shops and replace them with night schools through which it sought to ‘educate our less fortunate countrymen, instruct them in methods of right thinking and right living’.Footnote 86 Dinesh Sathisan has argued that the Malayan Tamil newspapers Tamil Murasu and Tamil Nesan carried articles condemning the drink habit, although they were not above publishing Tiger Beer advertisements on their pages.Footnote 87
The strong emotions that the toddy shop provoked about urban space and modernity amongst segments of local society coalesced with the Malayan Indian leadership's politics of representation. Toddy was an important focus of India's diaspora diplomacy, in which the labourer's addiction constituted a powerful symbol of the subjugation that Indians had to endure abroad.Footnote 88 Stenson has pointed out that the prevalence of toddy consumption in Malaya caught Nehru's attention during his Malayan tour of 1937 when the leader spoke about the pressing need to protect labourers from the alcohol's pernicious reach.Footnote 89 The influential Tamil newspaper Swadeshimitran, which was published in Madras, similarly lamented that toddy drinking in Malaya was increasing by leaps and bounds owing to the sheer number of toddy shops in the colony.Footnote 90 The colonial government's homogenization of the Indian community in Malaya, with scant regard for the differences between its labourers and the middle class, had already contributed to a heightened sense of anxiety for the Malayan Indian leadership.Footnote 91 In spite of the public interest in city toddy shops that found expression in English newspapers, toddy addiction in rural Malaya was a more poignant symbol of backwardness and malaise for the leaders of the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC).Footnote 92 At any rate, the MIC demanded the abolition of the toddy industry throughout Malaya in line with the stance adopted by the Indian National Congress.Footnote 93 Yet, even the MIC was not unanimous in demanding the end of the toddy trade. V. M. N. Menon, the Indian representative on the Malayan Union Advisory Council, voted against a council motion in 1947 that recommended the abolition of toddy shops—an act that contributed to his subsequent expulsion from the party.Footnote 94
Whilst calls for prohibition were raised by political parties, there were also observers drawn from the ranks of civil society who demanded dietary reform in line with Malayan needs. These proponents of modernization advocated the transformation of toddy shops into sanitary, modern, and, above all, respectable spaces that would accommodate Tamil labourers’ social needs. Their demands picked up pace in the 1950s in tandem with the march towards decolonization. A proponent of the toddy shop's retention and modernization in Singapore wrote that he ‘would like to see premises in existence, with a few tables and benches, if not chairs, with clean glasses instead of dirty tin mugs, where the poor man could sit over a glass of toddy, like the Tuan Besars in their hotels’.Footnote 95 Alluding to the illegal private toddy shops in operation, he added that it would be terribly unwise to try and eradicate toddy drinking, which he warned would only force the industry underground. Another commentary, which stated that toddy was sold in ‘shops with dark frontages, insanitary interiors … and out of the way places’ that made it an anomaly to city life, argued that, instead of trying to abolish the industry, the leadership of the MIC strive to make toddy drinking more ‘fashionable’ instead.Footnote 96 It argued that the modernization of city toddy shops would generate more revenue for the country and added that denying labourers their equivalent of the coffee shop would be unfair.Footnote 97 These demands surface alternative notions of modernity and ideas about the labourer's place in the emerging nation. These reformers demanded the toddy shop's modernization on the grounds that an integral aspect of working-class culture ought to be preserved and incorporated within the national framework.
Over the course of the 1950s, fears that government toddy shops could no longer be policed effectively fuelled demands for modernization even further. According to the Comptroller of Customs, egregious malpractices plagued the supply chain; a powerful toddy contractor who operated as ‘a virtual monopolist’ in the colony had been found guilty of allowing some of his tappers to retain a portion of the toddy that they collected as a supplement to their wages.Footnote 98 The government had its hands tied for fear that taking action against the contractor could lead to reprisals, including its ‘being unable to obtain any toddy at all, at least for a time’.Footnote 99 The situation was aggravated by the black market in toddy. By the mid-1950s, Indian and Chinese gangsters had acquired control of this thriving industry. They seized the toddy before the shops opened and sold the adulterated alcohol at private dens or at a steep profit outside the toddy shops themselves—a situation that prompted a representative of the Singapore Government Workers’ Union to demand the installation of telephones in the shops in order to ensure effective regulation.Footnote 100 Illicit toddy could be procured with relative ease along a belt spanning ‘Raffles Quay and Colombo Court, behind the Municipal buildings and other busy streets in the city’.Footnote 101 Alarmed about this matter, a letter to the press exclaimed that ‘with the exposure of the corruption in toddy shops, the statement that nothing can be done about that extra 50 per cent charge on a pint of toddy by a Customs official is really shocking’.Footnote 102 Oral historical accounts corroborate the sheer extent of the black-market menace, one of them recounting that, by the mid-1950s, toddy was sold at a profit of 10 cents, and that people with ‘inside connections’ could get their fix without having to queue up at the shops.Footnote 103 By 1957, the Federation customs collected M$7.5 million from toddy, while the collection from urban Singapore was relatively low, at a little over M$0.5 million.Footnote 104 These statistics prompted McKay to attribute the toddy industry's continued justification by the state to health—as government regulation prevented adulteration—rather than wealth.Footnote 105 Indeed, even in 1959, the government was resolute in maintaining that ‘the Customs Department manages a Government Toddy Monopoly which provides a wholesome beverage at low cost’ in Singapore.Footnote 106
At the same time, toddy shops became implicated in wider political contestation. Just as toddy-shop premises became places where labourers could catch up on daily news, it appears that they became sites of political discussion. During the landmark elections of 1955, an observer remarked that the Singapore's toddy shops were ‘becoming canvassing centres’ and asked ‘if it would not make for a fairer election if all toddy shops in Singapore were closed down till election day?’.Footnote 107 In 1962, the Liberal Socialist Party followed in the footsteps of the prohibitionists when it called for the abolition of toddy in Singapore. Yet, instead of being outlawed, toddy continued to inspire new entrepreneurial ventures under the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) government, whose attitude towards the city-state's toddy shops was predictably pragmatic. It was from Singapore that the beverage tycoon Yeo Hiap Seng pioneered canned toddy in 12-ounce beer cans in the hopes that ‘even those people who wouldn't be caught dead near a toddy shop will have a chance to taste this cool, refreshing drink’.Footnote 108 Although canned toddy fizzled out soon thereafter, the idea represented a bold departure from the past, wherein the toddy industry had been administered as a government monopoly.
By 1976, there were four toddy shops in Singapore catering to the needs of 2,000 to 2,500 customers per day.Footnote 109 The association of toddy with Tamilians had become so watertight by then that it prompted a survey by medical students who arrived at the rather unsurprising conclusion that ‘there was nothing concrete to account for the apparent proneness to alcoholism and other alcohol problems among Indians’.Footnote 110 By then, Singapore's toddy industry was already on its last legs. Alongside old criticisms, new problems had surfaced in the 1960s. In a context of radical trade unionism, the most serious of these challenges was posed by the Singapore Toddy Tappers’ Union—a powerful group that exerted pressure on government toddy contractors for higher wages and improved working conditions.Footnote 111 Ultimately, Singapore's toddy industry fell victim to a dispute in November 1979 that transpired between the customs service, the sole remaining toddy contractor, and the toddy tappers who were working for him. More than this immediate trigger, toddy had become, in the long run, a casualty of the city-state's quest for modernity and development. To borrow the words of Singapore's last Toddy King and contractor, G. Sathasivam: ‘Indians nowadays think it is low class to tap toddy.’Footnote 112 Toddy drinkers were disconsolate that their access to the alcohol had been abruptly stopped; they could neither switch to beer or stout, which were significantly milder, nor drink samsu at prices two or three times higher than that which they had previously paid for toddy.Footnote 113 The labourers’ internalization of the racialized toddy rhetoric rang loud and clear from a letter of appeal that was published in an English newspaper. Protesting the closure of their toddy shops, a group of dock workers wrote: ‘We are Port of Singapore Authority workers working in the hot sun everyday. Drinking toddy is relaxing and is good for our health. All of a sudden our toddy shop was closed and for more than two weeks we have been without toddy.’Footnote 114 The labourers pleaded for the reopening of the shops, even if it meant that toddy prices would have to be raised, as they could never afford beer with their limited means. Their appeal, however, fell on deaf ears as the remnants of the toddy industry were rapidly dismantled.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this article has argued that toddy, which was of vital importance to British Malaya's plantation economy, was no less important in the social history of Singapore. The city toddy shop offers a fascinating metaphor for the marginalization that Tamil labourers experienced in colonial Singapore society. The industry yielded the trope of the exploited labourer on the one hand, whilst enabling the rise to riches of enterprising government toddy contractors on the other. Moreover, Singapore's toddy industry followed a trajectory that was markedly different from that in Malaysia. The reason for this rested partly with differences in colonial policy, although it derived in equal measure from the social contestations that toddy drinking engendered in an urban Malayan context. Colonial policy with regard to toddy in Malaya yielded its racialization, although toddy drinking traversed the limiting racial category into which it was slotted as it was the cheapest alcohol that the poor could legally procure in Singapore. Such issues prompted changes in colonial policy that were tailored specifically for Singapore's toddy industry. The physical proximity of Singapore's toddy trade to ‘respectable’ public spaces was a grave social concern in Singapore. Toddy shops offended urban sensibilities as they could not be ignored as a distant problem of the rural interior. Indeed, toddy and toddy shops became synonymous with degradation, malaise, and disease in the public gaze as the industry was minimally equipped to cater for the needs of the urban poor. Over the course of the 1950s and 60s, Singapore's toddy industry surfaced serious problems of management. These issues led to the intensification of demands for reform, if not outright abolition, and paved the way for the closure of Singapore's toddy shops in the late 1970s.
