Place · port city · Singapore

Singapore

Also known as Singapore — Temasek & Singapura

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

1.290, 103.850

Worth knowing

There are no lions in Southeast Asia. The name, the Sanskrit title, and the claimed descent from Alexander through an Indian king are all part of a Malay royal genealogy that borrowed Indian prestige wholesale — which is how most Southeast Asian dynasties described themselves.

Connections (6)

• Power passed toPalembang / Srivijaya

  The Malay Annals make Singapura a foundation of Sang Nila Utama, a prince of Palembang claiming descent through Alexander from an Indian king, who named the island for an animal he took for a lion. There are no lions in Southeast Asia. Fourteenth-century Chinese sources call the place Temasek and archaeology on the Singapore River confirms a real trading town. The Sanskrit name, the title and the genealogy are borrowed Indian prestige, which is how most Malay and Javanese dynasties described themselves.

• CampaignKangla Fort, Imphal

  The INA was raised at Singapore in 1943 from captured Indian troops and from the Tamil and Malayali plantation communities of Malaya, and its objective was Imphal — about four thousand kilometres away by the route it actually took, through Burma and over the Chin hills. The advance reached the outskirts of the town in April 1944 and stopped there. It is the only sustained military campaign of the Second World War fought on Indian soil.

• Power passed toTrowulan

  The Malay Annals make Singapura a foundation of a Palembang prince and its fall the work of Majapahit, after which the survivors founded Malacca — which is the Malay account of the fourteenth-century shift of power from the straits to Java and then back again. Archaeology on the Singapore River confirms a real trading town of that date, with Chinese ceramics and glass, destroyed or abandoned about when the chronicle says.

• TransmissionMaharadia Lawana

  The Maranao Maharadia Lawana reached Lanao through the Malay world — the Hikayat Seri Rama and the trade that carried Javanese and Malay literature through the Sulu and Celebes seas — and it got there before Islam did, which is why a Muslim community in the southern Philippines sings a Ramayana. Juan Francisco recorded and identified it only in 1968. It is the furthest east the story travelled as a living oral tradition.

• Site withinCathay Building, Singapore

  On 21 October 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Āzād Hind Sarkār, Free India) from the ground-floor theatre of the Cathay Building at 2 Handy Road, Singapore — assuming the offices of Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of War. The cabinet included nine ministers and eight representatives of the Indian diaspora; Japan, the Axis powers and six satellite states recognised it within a month, and it declared war on the United Kingdom and the United States that December.

• Headquartered atSubhas Chandra Bose

  Subhas Chandra Bose arrived in Singapore in July 1943 via Japanese submarine, assumed command of the Indian National Army at a Padang rally on 5 July, and on 21 October proclaimed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind from the Cathay Building — his working headquarters as Head of State, Prime Minister and Minister of War. Singapore remained the Azad Hind capital until the INA's march on Imphal in early 1944; the Memorial to the Unknown Warrior of the INA that Bose consecrated at Esplanade Park was dynamited by the returning British in October 1945.

On these journeys

• India and Southeast Asia — scripts, Sanskrit and sacred kingship
• INA — Southeast Asia to Imphal

Sources

Wikipedia, “Singapore”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.

• Wikipedia — Singapore