Mapping Shifting Formations: A Socio-Economic History of the Early Baweanese Community through Kampung Boyan

Abstract

This paper attempts to reconstruct a socio-economic and urban history of Kampung Boyan beyond the common narratives of the early Baweanese community in the region as merely labour migrants. It challenges dominant modes of representation of the indigenous landscape by examining how colonial documentation in the form of colonial maps, census and newspapers reflected a viewpoint, which led to biases in the way of seeing and, by extension, gaps. It supplements these sources by considering indigenous-contemporary sources and those beyond colonial boundaries. It then attempts to map against the monopoly of authoritative narratives to reveal a spatial logic that underpinned the physical arrangement of urban wards and settlements in Singapore Town. It finally argues that these closely linked and mutually reinforcing sources hold an explanatory power and may form an analytical framework beyond colonial mapping conventions where micro-communities such as the Baweanese lie beyond the map's grasp.

Introduction

Figure 1.

Kampung Boyan by the banks of Rochor River in 1905 (Source: National Archives Singapore).

Above is the only archival image of Kampung Boyan, named after the Baweanese, a diasporic community originating from Pulau Bawean.¹ Colonial administrators commonly used the term "Boyan" in Malaya since the 19th century. This term, however, is increasingly resented by some in the community who claim that its usage is inextricably tied to various negative stereotypes, which include the community constituting an unskilled, uneducated working class tied to poverty.² This stereotype can perhaps also be linked to the over-reliance and preference for British sources in the narration of the socio-economic and urban history of the early Baweanese in Singapore, which often articulate narratives of how the ethnic group interacted economically and socially with Europeans, as well as their position within the colonial economy as labour migrants into Malaya.³ However, British colonial documentation of the early Baweanese community and cartographic representations of Kampung Boyan only provide a brief insight into this early history, with significant biases and gaps. Historically, while there were early Baweanese whose presence in Singapore was indeed tied to contract and indentured labour for Europeans, they were seafarers and active traders in the region in the community's reminiscences of the past.⁴ Major Baweanese labour migration into Malaya focusing on Singapore began only in the late 19th century.⁵ Clues to this early community's socio-economic history might instead lie in the urban history of Kampung Boyan, which has had a presence in Singapore since its early years as a British trading post.

This paper attempts to reconstruct a socio-economic and urban history of Kampung Boyan to go beyond the common narratives of the early Baweanese community in Singapore. It first examines the biases and gaps in British colonial documentation of the early Baweanese and cartographic representation of Kampung Boyan. It then attempts to supplement these biases and gaps with sources that are not restricted by arbitrary geographic and historiographic constraints, as well as indigenous and contemporary sources. It then arranges the information gleaned from these sources in mapping. Finally, this paper attempts to situate Kampung Boyan through the lens of entrepôt cities and urbanism traditions, which accounts for its shifting settlement history and the settlement's role within the urban economy. In doing so, this paper argues that instead of seeing colonial and indigenous sources in opposition, they should instead be treated as supplements while accounting for their inherent limitations as historiographical sources. Finally, using mapping as a method may reveal the spatial logic underpinning the physical arrangement of urban wards beyond colonial mapping conventions where micro-communities such as the Baweanese lie beyond the map's grasp.

Gaps and Biases in British Colonial Documentation of the Early Baweanese Community in Singapore

The built environment has been utilised as a vehicle by various social theorists to discuss conceptual frames of asymmetrical power relations through subtle means inscribed spatially in architectural and urban spaces.⁶ Colonial documentation reflected lenses by which the colonised were understood and thereby governed. They can reflect how colonisers resort to what Timothy Mitchell refers to as "enframing" the colonised world.⁷ Thus, such sources reveal a colonial viewpoint in which to "order things" tends "to circumscribe and exclude".⁸ The colonial census, for instance, can be understood as a colonial perspective to "order" their socio-cultural observations of the colonised, which simplifies, reduces and omits from an existing reality. Early British censuses in the colony of Singapore (1824–36) did not record the first arrivals of the Baweanese due to the imprecision of classifications based on vague ethnic-racial traits and geographic locations of origin.⁹ It was only in 1849 that the British census distinguished the Baweanese as a separate category.¹⁰ Additionally, colonial sources also tend to be tied to a system of representation of what Swati Chattopadhyay refers to as "colonial uncanny",¹¹ which emphasised a lack of "control". This representation obsessively articulates and accentuates certain types of differences between "natives" and Europeans.¹² An example of this bias is a desire to chart sanitary and health concerns meant to underscore a "lack of order" to legitimize colonial efforts to regulate, improve and establish order.¹³ This bias can, for instance, be found in early English-medium newspapers that served Anglophone commercial enterprises. These newspapers often emphasized the lack of order, sanitation and health in the colonies. The earliest mention of Kampung Boyan in a newspaper was in 1847 when The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser reported it as a "squatter settlement" with attap houses for more than 20 years.¹⁴ The same newspaper reported in 1858 that the Municipal Commissioners had requested residents of Kampung Boyan to either build brick houses or have wooden roofs to meet fire safety requirements.¹⁵

Another form of colonial documentation, through maps, similarly reflected the lenses by which the colonised were understood and thereby governed. Beyond being mere charts or plans of a territory, maps are invariably tainted by their socio-cultural perspectives and biases, as the cartographer decides what to include or exclude. Two modes of cartographic representation may reflect this. The first is representation through toponyms. Naming can be read as a means of asserting an asymmetrical power relationship between the colonisers and the colonised. The process of naming holds the power to invent, categorise and even compartmentalise a place in language. A form of this hierarchical restructuring can be seen in the early colonial maps of Singapore Town. Chattopadhyay notes how terms such as "black" and "white" towns reflected the "way of seeing" for English residents in Calcutta.¹⁶ While these terms are also reflected in colonial maps of the city, they were a misreading of "reality".¹⁷ Likewise, under Raffles' instruction in December 1822, the Singapore Town Plan drawn up by Lieutenant Philip Jackson intended to mark out distinct areas on both sides of the Singapore River for government and commercial use as well as an ethno-spatial layout of the town, allocating recognisable containers in the form of urban wards for the various ethnic groups (Chinese Campong, Chulia Campong, Arab Campong and Bugis Campong). Again, a significant number of other groups were left out.¹⁸ In reality, the Arab and Bugis Campong around Sultan Hussien's court at Kampung Gelam, Kampung Rochor and the Rochor River were settled by regional-indigenous trading groups, which would have also included the Baweanese.¹⁹ Moreover, while early surveys of Singapore Town (1820, 1829, 1842) mapped out some of these urban wards, various others were also left out, such as those within Kampung Rochor, including Kampung Sumbawa, Kampung Jawa, Kampung Palembang and Kampung Boyan. Furthermore, even if these places were officially named and referred to by the colonial authorities in maps, the place names used by its regional-indigenous residents often greatly differed and are not reflected in colonial maps. Beyond its ethno-spatial character, an urban ward (labelled campong/kampung) would, in reality, also be named after the socio-economic or religious activities for which it was known. For instance, urban wards named after traders' centres in Kampung Gelam, such as Kampung Kaji (for pilgrimage trade), Kampung Intan (diamond and gem trade) and Kampung Tembaga (coppersmith's trade), are often not reflected in colonial maps.

The second mode of cartographic representation is through parcels of physical property and buildings. This can be seen in cadastral maps, which were drawn up by colonial authorities to document and demarcate property boundaries that came under their control and aid in collecting tax and revenue. This way, these maps were fundamentally a statement of what was within colonial power and control. Thus, landholdings and property ownership that preceded colonial arrival and those on the periphery of colonial control were omitted.²⁰ Early maps of Singapore would often only map both sides of the Singapore River bounded by the Rochor River towards the north. Additionally, these early maps often only documented and demarcated brick buildings (shophouses and compound houses). Vernacular house typologies built of timber with thatched or tiled roofs, which were often thought of as a "colonial uncanny", being poorly constructed structures and a fire safety hazard, were not represented in such maps. Kampung Boyan first appeared in an 1854 cadastral map of Singapore Town,²¹ based on an 1842 survey. It labelled a seemingly empty plot of land along the Rochor River between Jalan Sultan and Victoria Street as "Campong Boyan" (Figure 2). While this cadastral map had documented and demarcated property boundaries in many urban wards in Singapore Town, it only focused on brick buildings. It thus neither indicated property boundaries nor building outlines in the plot labelled "Campong Boyan", which at the time would have been populated by vernacular attap houses.

While cartographic representations of Kampung Boyan in early colonial maps of Singapore Town can be problematised, these maps nevertheless adhered to some reality in order to fulfil their primary function as representations of an area in the first place.²² Indeed, they are the only sources that have precisely recorded and mapped Kampung Boyan as one of the earliest urban wards in Singapore Town, even if it is an incomplete record. However, it is here that these sources reach their limits. These sources tend to portray Kampung Boyan, like other vernacular attap house settlements, as merely a settlement peripheral to urban life and entrepôt trade. This is perhaps why Kampung Boyan tends to fall out of the picture in the narration of the socio-economic and urban history of the early Baweanese in Singapore.²³

Narratives Reconstructed Through Alternative Sources and Mapping

While the built environment can be approached as a reflection of the colonialist's intention to change society, it is often negotiated from below. Consequently, various scholars have attempted to challenge dominant modes of representation by colonialists of the indigenous landscape and reconstruct an emic perspective through a spatial history of the colonial city.²⁴ These works have also deployed a wide range of sources that are not only in the colonial language but also in local and regional languages to resist reducing the colonial city to an image constructed by colonisers. Beyond relying solely upon British colonial sources, a narration of the socio-economic and urban history of the early Baweanese community in Singapore may be better illuminated by expanding the geographic and historical scope of sources. The Baweanese had regional trading and migratory routes from before 1819, which transcended the colonial boundaries of British Malaya. Thus reports from the Dutch East Indies provide further insight into the connections and boundaries of former economic and cultural spheres that extended across the region and their relation to Singapore. Additionally, Malay literary sources from the 19th and early 20th centuries, when printers and publishers emerged in Singapore,²⁵ which are a form of indigenous-contemporary sources that have tended to be dismissed as sources of historiography with less value,²⁶ provide a different perspective and insights into various regional-indigenous trading communities' economic activities and how they interacted within the colonial milieu.

The works of Chattopadhyay and William Glover attempt to resituate colonial histories through the lens of the colonised by drawing on more minor-scale histories of daily life. This focus on quotidian practices moves beyond colonial power and control, providing instead alternative perspectives from below to counterbalance or offset the previous monopoly of authoritative narratives. For example, vernacular attap house settlements are often characterised as rural settlements peripheral to urban life and entrepôt trade. However, Iskander Mydin argues that such settlements were indeed urban-linked kampungs with inhabitants who held jobs in the urban economy.²⁷ A crucial clue to Kampung Boyan's role in the urban economy lies in the fact that all three of these areas lie along the Rochor River, demonstrating the settlement's dependence upon the relationship between the river, shore and land.

It must be noted here that enigmatically colonial maps up to the 1920s would see Kampung Boyan shift and eventually refer to three different areas along the Rochor River. Chattopadhyay and Edward Van Roy have further utilised mapping, building upon existing information provided by colonial maps to reconstruct and reveal the otherwise unseen spatial logic underpinning the physical arrangement of patterns and ethnic settlements.²⁸ Iskander, however, suggests that shifting Malay settlement history was common among older traditions of entrepôt cities, and urbanism should be understood as a "fluid development"²⁹ where kampungs co-existed with others, and newer ones were established and commonly resettled, further interweaving the relationships between various sites over time.

Figure 2.

Map redrawn by author based on a part of Town of Singapore and Its Environs, 1854 (NAS SP006420). Grey: 1854 Map annotations; black: author's annotations of selected urban ward names and landmarks within Kampung Rochor (Source: National Archives Singapore).

Kampung Boyan's Shifting Settlement History and Its Role in the Urban Economy along the Rochor River

Early newspaper articles and colonial maps indicated that Kampung Boyan was initially located between Victoria Street and Jalan Sultan along the Rochor River.³⁰ Kampung Boyan's location suggests that it was part of the larger Kampung Rochor area, a thriving cosmopolitan trading centre with Bugis, Javanese, Banjarese and people from Palembang, first established in the 1820s.³¹ Place names that reflected these other regional-indigenous trading groups within Kampung Rochor, such as Kampung Sumbawa, Kampung Jawa and Kampung Palembang, were not found in early colonial maps (Figure 2). These communities were part of the older and more extensive regional trading network of which the Baweanese were a part. Various Dutch records note that by the mid-18th century, there were trade routes for opium and other items outside that of the Dutch East India Company's that linked Pulau Bawean to Java, Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Riau and Malaya.³² Around the same time, the Baweanese also began to form a commercial diaspora in East Java,³³ with eventual strongholds in cigarettes and weaved textiles (such as traditional hand-woven pandan mats from Pulau Bawean called tikar Bawean).³⁴ Ahmad Haji Tahir's Shair Saudara Boyan³⁵ from Malaya Press narrates that trade was the primary motivation for the migration of the early Baweanese community, who came to Singapore from Surabaya. The shair hints that this was likely a continuation of their commercial diaspora in East Java, capitalising on the existing knowledge of trading networks and migration routes to Malaya established by earlier migrants.³⁶ It was also possible that the Baweanese were co-opted into Bugis networks that linked Sulawesi, Bawean and Riau.³⁷ As a result, like other traders who arrived from the ports of the northern coast of Java and Makassar, it was highly probable that colonial enumerators had categorised the Baweanese in the early British census under umbrella terms as "Javanese" or "Bugis, Balinese, etc.". By 1858, an article by The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser referred to this area as "old Kampung Boyan" (Kampung Boyan Lama).³⁸

An 1881 newspaper article by the Straits Times Overland Journal notes that "Campong Boyan Lama" referred to an area where the "Boyanese used to live" and that the present "Campong Boyan" was part of what was known as "Campong Kapor", which was located on the opposite bank of the Rochor River (Figure 3).³⁹ Kampung Boyan Lama might have been relocated after coming to the Municipal Commissioners' attention various times as a potential fire hazard to the town. Thus its relocation away from the town where they could rebuild their attap houses was perhaps a means of protection against fire.⁴⁰ A colonial survey map dated c. 1860, which showed districts

Figure 3.

Map redrawn by author based on a part of Singapore Residency, c. 1860 (NAS D2016_00348). Grey: c. 1860 Map annotations; black: author's annotations of selected urban ward names and landmarks (Source: National Archives Singapore).

and lot numbers, referred to the plot of land along the Rochor River bounded by Jalan Besar (around present-day Larut Road and Pitt Street) as "Campong Boyan".⁴¹ This is the first map that generically outlines the built-up areas of vernacular attap house settlements: Bugis Village (Kampung Bugis) and Campong Boyan (Kampung Boyan) (Figure 3). Shair Kampong Boyan di Makan Api⁴² by the Malay weekly newspaper Jawi Peranakan details the destruction of this Kampung Boyan fortuitously by a fire in 1883. The shair notes that the fire razed about 200 houses in the settlement, including a Ponthuk Dhuen,⁴³ leaving many homeless.

Figure 4.

Map redrawn by author based on a part of Singapore, 1923 (NAS 2016_00407). Grey: c. 1923 Map annotations; light grey: 1893 Map annotations of industries along rivers; black: author's annotations of known ponthuk locations and significant locations for the Baweanese community (Source: National Archives Singapore).

As a result of the fire, affected residents from Kampung Boyan were relocated and granted permission to rebuild their houses over the mangrove swamp between Syed Alwi Road and Jalan Besar under certain restrictions.⁴⁴ However, various archival building drawings showed that there were Baweanese who continued their landholdings and property ownership in the fire's aftermath even as new roads were laid out in the area in the subsequent years (Figure 4). For instance, the house of Hadji Mohamed Tayib Bin Raden Palebar along Weld Road from 1895.⁴⁵The term raden is a Javanese title of nobility which implies that the holder is of noble descent. Within Baweanese culture, the term raden refers to the descendents of Maulana Umar Mas'ud, the first Muslim ruler of Pulau Bawean.⁴⁶ Hadji Mohamed Tayib would later commence the building of Masjid Kampung Kapor, later renamed Masjid Bawean, in 1903,⁴⁷ in the compound in front of his house. This was the only mosque named after the Baweanese in Singapore. Another example is ten Baweanese micro tenements, between Dickson Road and Upper Weld Road along Lorong Boyan from 1891. These tenements were possibly used as temporary lodging houses for traders who stopped over in Singapore, waiting for the seasonal change of monsoon winds before continuing their trading journeys.

Unlike earlier maps, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, colonial general reference maps (1893, 1905, 1923) began to meticulously map out vernacular attap house settlements along the Rochor and Kallang rivers such as Kampung Bugis, Kampung Laut, Kampung Kallang and Kampung Rokok. These maps also refer to the area between Syed Alwi Road and Jalan Besar at the end of Jalan Boyan as "Kampung Boyan". A general reference map from 1923 and various archival building drawings from the 1900s⁴⁸ clearly mapped out the layout of Kampung Boyan in specified freehold regular-sized land plots along roadway reserves (Figure 4). This is Kampung Boyan that was photographed in 1905. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser in 1922 describes this Kampung Boyan as "an entire village erected on piles in the water … of half-a-hundred Malay and Chinese families … living only just off a main thoroughfare in the water".⁴⁹ These general reference maps highlight various colonial industrial developments along the Rochor River, such as rattan processing, rice and sawmills, with the river itself being a passageway for the shipment of these goods. However, this riverine world was much more vibrant, being a source of economic activities for the regional-indigenous groups who settled along the Rochor and Kallang rivers. This included the shipbuilding and trader's settlement at Kampung Bugis and the various other Malay kampungs that saw petty trade as well as ferrying services in perahus and sampans, which these maps do not highlight (Figure 4).⁵⁰ In addition to its inhabitants being participants of these economic activities, it is also possible that Kampung Boyan's location along the Rochor River would have made it easier for Baweanese traders to moor their trading vessels and transfer their goods to the ponthuk for storage.⁵¹

Beyond this riverine world, Shair Saudara Boyan records that the early Baweanese traded in areas referred to by place names not found in colonial maps, traced to the Kampung Gelam area where other regional-indigenous groups settled and traded. For instance, the early Baweanese sold the tikar Bawean in Kampung Jawa⁵² (Arab Street) in exchange for the Javanese spice, tamarind (Asam Jawa). Indeed, Kampung Jawa was where the Javanese crafts-men and merchants were known to have established a trading centre dealing with metal- and leather work and traded in cloth and spices.⁵³ The shair also notes that the early Baweanese would later venture into selling clogged sandals (atap terompah) and coconut grates (parut) in exchange for copper cups (cepu tembaga).⁵⁴ The shair further records that by the 1930s, Baweanese from Ponthuk Téguh sold weaved coasters for pots and pans (lekar) and baskets (raga) in Kampung Tembaga (Bussorah Street), which complemented copper implements and utensils produced by Javanese artisans and smiths in the urban ward. The shair also mentions that the Baweanese were able to acculturate and assimilate with the Malay population, integrate into the mainstream Malay lifestyle and set up businesses in Kampung Kapor (bounded by Serangoon Road and the Rochor River).⁵⁵ Amongst the trades that the shair notes that the Baweanese specialised in was the nipah palm-thatched roof (attap), which they learnt from Malay builders and were bought by Chinese merchants.⁵⁶ The shair also mentions markets visited by the Baweanese community such as Pasir Gembur (Jalan Sultan) and Pasar Besi (Clyde Terrace Market) (Figure 4).

In 1911, a Government Gazette was passed to initiate the Kampung Kapor Improvement Scheme, which redeveloped the area between Jalan Besar and Serangoon Road, from Dunlop Road to Syed Alwi Road. By the 1930s, the mangrove swamp on which Kampung Boyan was relocated was filled and drained as part of the scheme. In a colonial survey map dated 1931, Kampung Boyan no longer existed.⁵⁷ Shair Saudara Boyan notes that by the 1930s, the Baweanese predominantly settled in Kampung Kapor (between Jalan Besar and Serangoon Road), an area that saw a large concentration of ponthuk occupying shophouses (Figure 4). However, there were also many ponthuk clusters in other urban wards in Singapore Town that similarly date back to this period in Kampung Rochor (around Surau Minto Road), Club Street, as well as on the fringes of the city—Orchard Road, River Valley Road, Kampung Pasiran and Thomson Road.⁵⁸

Challenging Dominant Modes of Representation of the Indigenous Landscape, Reconstructing an Emic Perspective through Mapping

This paper has attempted to reconstruct a socio-economic and urban history of Kampung Boyan to go beyond the common narratives of the early Baweanese community in Singapore. It challenged dominant modes of representation of the indigenous landscape by examining how colonial documentation reflected a viewpoint, which led to biases in the way of seeing and, by extension, gaps. Focus was given to how two modes of cartographic representation in colonial maps may result in the portrayal of Kampung Boyan as merely a settlement peripheral to urban life and entrepôt trade. This paper thus attempted to supplement British colonial documentation with sources beyond the restricted geographic and historical scope of British Malaya and indigenous-contemporary sources. These sources provided an emic perspective of the colonial city, revealing emotional bonds with places such as social and religious institutions, markets and settlements. These sources provide mappable information such as place names and significant locations that can be arranged in relation to information provided by colonial documentation and maps of Singapore Town. This process makes visible the ways local stories, practices, relationships, memories and rituals consti-tute meaningful locations.

An attempt has been made to map against the monopoly of authoritative narratives by demonstrating how vernacular attap house settlements, like Kampung Boyan, were urban-linked kampungs, drawing inter-riverine settlement and urban wards links through evidence of economic activities of the various regional-indigenous trading communities. Furthermore, Kampung Boyan's shifting settlement history co-existed with other kampungs, the establishment of newer ones further interweaving the relationships between various sites over time. This mapping method revealed a spatial logic that underpinned the physical arrangement of urban wards and settlements in Singapore Town beyond the colonial confines of the siloed ethno-spatial layout of the town cut off from the larger riverine landscape. However, this mapping still depended upon colonial sources that have precisely recorded and mapped Kampung Boyan across three different areas along the Rochor River. This paper thus suggests that these sources are closely linked and mutually reinforcing and may be seen as supplements, instead of opposition, while accounting for their inherent issues as sources of historiography. Together, these approaches hold an explanatory power and may form an analytical framework beyond colonial mapping conventions where micro-communities such as the Baweanese lie beyond the map's grasp and by which the temporal logic of Singapore Town's ethnic and socio-economically diverse landscape may be expressed.