Imran bin Tajudeen. 2012. “Beyond Racialized Representation: Architectural Linguæ Francæ and Urban Histories in the Kampung Houses and Shophouses of Melaka and Singapore.” PDF

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8 Beyond Racialized Representation: Architectural Linguæ Francæ and Urban Histories in the Kampung Houses and Shophouses of Melaka and Singapore Imran bin Tajudeen y op Melaka and Singapore, situated astride the international maritime crossroads that is the Straits of Melaka, present an interesting ...

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8 Beyond Racialized Representation: Architectural Linguæ Francæ and Urban Histories in the Kampung Houses and Shophouses of Melaka and Singapore

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Imran bin Tajudeen

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Melaka and Singapore, situated astride the international maritime crossroads that is the Straits of Melaka, present an interesting juxtaposition of heritage narratives constructed around stereotypes of two diasporic groups, “Malay” and “Chinese,” whose architectural and cultural (mis)representation reflects various colonial prejudices and postcolonial/ national racial policies. “Kampung houses” and “shophouses” are two ubiquitous building types in the Straits region that proliferated with urban and suburban expansion during the colonial period, and which present distinct architectural developments. As I will demonstrate, they are respectively derived, in typological terms, from Malay and Chinese architectural antecedents. Yet both forms early on developed syntheses that problematize purely “Malay” or “Chinese” categorization, and that bear out multiethnic involvement in their production and use and reflect the complex history of both groups in the region. Despite this complexity of origins, the architectural and socio-cultural narratives constructed for kampung houses and shophouses have tended toward entanglement with colonial assumptions on race that have enjoyed continued currency in national-heritage projects. Such racialized narratives gloss over the complex and nuanced social and architectural histories these building types embody, and instead assume direct correlations between race and built environments that are consequently imputed with binary stereotypical associations. More importantly, these colonial stereotypes stem from conditions that arose precisely from the very different effects that European imperialism and colonization had on Malays and Chinese, and on the differential treatment and separation of the two communities. Today the tendency toward racial stereotypes in urban and architectural heritage representation can be traced not just to colonial discourses on race but also to specific urban historical processes embodying the links between Chinese economic and demographic dominance, Malay economic decline, and European economic imperialism and conquest. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd

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In this chapter I first provide a descriptive overview of actual examples of kampung houses and shophouses in Melaka and Singapore and the histories of the heterogeneous urban environments in which they were built—socio-spatial units called kampung wards. I then examine texts on architectural and urban history that present stereotypical equations between race and habitation, and I retrace the histories of the two main diaspora groups involved in the construction and use of kampung houses and shophouses in relation to socioeconomic transformations set in motion by Dutch and British colonization. Following this, I examine the urban heritage projects begun since the 1980s, in which kampung wards and houses have been presented as rural tableaux, and in which formerly more heterogeneous shophouse districts have undergone processes that I term “Chinatownification.” Moving from exposition to analysis, I discuss the utility of racialized discourses of kampung houses and shophouses for the state and for community actors in Singapore and Melaka, which bolster claims that resonate with racial biases in Singaporean and Malaysian national ideology. I further relate the exacerbation of these biases to a racial turn in national policies by the Prime Ministers of both Singapore and Malaysia, which incidentally also occurred in the 1980s. I conclude that the representations in heritage projects that present racialized stereotypes of kampung houses and shophouses are today based not on any actual conditions from the colonial or even precolonial periods, but on imagined pasts that reflect national ideological anxieties. As such, they justify affirmative action for Malays in Malaysia, and legitimize the dominance of Chinese in Singapore, while naturalizing the predominance of Chinese in key historic urban areas of both Melaka and Singapore. Interestingly, the same binary identification—kampung house as exclusively Malay and therefore rural, and shophouse as urban and thereby naturally Chinese—resonates with what are ostensibly very different political setups. I review the reasons for this curious situation. Finally, I discuss the premises for reimagining race and nation through the recuperation of histories that highlight multiethnic involvement in historic built environments.

Malay and Chinese in Architectural Types

The ethnic appellations “Malay” and “Chinese” in the architecture of kampung houses and shophouses refer to specific typological characteristics and model variations defined in spatial, formal, and structural terms. I will first explain these characteristics and then present specific built examples and model variations from Melaka and Singapore. Several historical inquiries have been made into the ethnogenesis of Malay identities (Vickers 1997; Reid 2010; Cummings 1998; Barnard 2004; Kahn 2006; Andaya 2008), including a number documenting and discussing the Malay diaspora community in the emporia of Makassar in South Sulawesi under native Makassarese (c. 1520s–1659) and Dutch colonial (1659–1945) rule (Abdurrahim 1956; Cerpokovic 1998; Sutherland 2001). These studies are unanimous that the term “Malay” historically denoted a trade diaspora that included acculturated non© Ashgate Publishing Ltd

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Malays. The early genesis of Malay culture in the Straits region can be traced to two Buddhist Malay trading kingdoms known as Malayu and Srivijaya in Jambi and Palembang, southeast Sumatra, polities from which precolonial Singapura and Melaka descended (Wolters 1970, 1986; Andaya 1982). Its language—which had lent itself to intercultural communication for trade and diplomacy and for literary works since at least the seventh century—was an integral part of its open culture, with numerous dialect variations among the acculturated communities that adopted it. Malay house architecture, while possessing numerous regional model variations, can likewise be defined in specific typological terms. Two aspects define Malay-type kampung houses: the layout, or plan, of its core module; and its overall structural-formal characteristics. The “Malay Plan” consists of a basic core spatial module with regional variations, whose features can be synthesized from overlapping definitions and observations provided by Dumarçay (1987), Hilton (1992), Gibbs (1987), and numerous other works (Figure 8.1). Extensions could be made to this core unit according to specific rules, while additional building units could be added to the original core house and connected either by abutting the roof eaves or adding roofed passageways. The Malay Plan bears remarkable congruence across lowland Malay-speaking communities from Sumatra’s coast, the Malay Peninsula, and coastal Borneo—incorporating, for instance, the formally distinctive aristocratic houses of Palembang and Banjarmasin and the relatively simpler dwellings of Aceh and the Sumatran lowlands and the Malay Peninsula, including Melaka. The Malay kampung house as a type can also be defined in structural-formal terms. Construction features that are often highlighted include its economic use of timber and complex carpentry joints that allow a house to be modified or dismantled and reassembled at a new location after being sold or inherited. The house is also raised on a timber or bamboo floor platform, called panggung, allowing the resultant undercroft space, kolong, to be used for storage or work space. The structural and formal aspects of Malay house architecture have been defined in precise detail by Hilton (1956, 1992) and Pelras (2004), and also discussed by Noone (1948), Sheppard (1969), Abdul Halim Nasir (1985), Abdul Halim Nasir and Wan Hashim Wan Teh (1996), Dumarçay (1987), Gibbs (1987), and Lim (1987). Malay kampung houses, seen in terms of their characteristic construction and distribution throughout lowland and coastal areas of the archipelago, can be clearly distinguished from the “Southeast Asian type” as defined by Schefold (2004) that is characteristic of highland societies, such as the Batak and Toraja, and features heavy logs and timber structural members of large dimensions and massive roofs with upswept gable ends. In the precolonial emporia of the Malay archipelago, also known as the Nusantara region, kampung houses constituted the primary building type. They were built in wards called kampung (whence originated the English term “compound” as a morphological unit—although the original transliteration in English and Dutch colonial documents took the form campong/campond). Such wards were found in the fifteenth-century emporium-capital of the Melaka Sultanate (c. 1400–1511) and © Ashgate Publishing Ltd

© Ashgate Publishing Ltd

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8.1  Kampung house and shophouse variations. Top and middle row: various single-story kampung house models and variations in the Malay plan. Bottom row: shophouses and townhouses and two models of two-story kampung houses. Drawings by author

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other Malay-speaking emporia preceding and following it. They typically provided a home for aristocrats and merchants and their extended families, followers, and “slaves” or bondsmen. Materials for kampung houses ranged from thatch for the walls and roofs, with finely woven split-bamboo walls in humble homes, to prized hardwoods for columns and walls, with roof shingles or clay tiles and carved embellishments in the abodes of the wealthy and of nobility. Earth and brick or stone were also used to construct fireproof subterranean warehouses or storage chambers in precolonial Melaka (Pintado 1993: 253). These were called gudang, whence the English term “godown” is derived. Bamboo or timber structures were usually erected atop these brick chambers. In later developments, rumah gudang, or warehouse-dwellings, had brick ground floors occupying the kolong or undercroft space. And by the nineteenth century brick was also used in the construction of some Malay kampung houses. In most such cases, it was used to construct piers to hold up the panggung or raised floor. But there are examples where whole columns up to the roof line— and even walls (meaning practically the whole house)—were built of brick, at the same time that the other spatial and formal features of the Malay house were retained. The category “Chinese” would appear, at first glance, to be self-evident. In Singapore, Malaysia, and Southeast Asia in general it denotes people coming from the political unit called China. However, this gloss risks oversimplifying a complex socio-cultural (and political) entity. The Chinese communities of Singapore and Malaysia, like those in Southeast Asia in general, hail from China’s southeastern coastal region and its immediate hinterland—the Minnan and Yueh cultural regions, encompassing the Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese groups from Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan (Unger 1944; Sandhu 1983: 103). Southern Chinese are today generally seen as “sojourners and settlers” par excellence in the Southeast Asian context (Reid 1996). Yet the Chinese phrase hui ban cheng indicates that this migration was not a one-way phenomenon. It was applied to Quanzhou during the Southern Song and Yuan periods (twelfth to fourteenth centuries) to denote the fact that half its urban population were foreign Muslims (Fan 2001: 315, f40). Indeed, maritime trade was conducted to Chinese shores primarily by Arab, Persian, Indian, and Malayo-Javanese traders—including pre-Islamic Malay traders from Sriwijaya and Malayu (Wolters 1970, 1986; Guy 2001; Kearney 2004; Heng 2009)—who sailed to southern Chinese ports regularly and in large numbers, and also settled in urban quarters there (Clark 1995; Schottenhammer 1999; Chen and Lombard 2000). The timber shop-cum-dwellings that are unique to the coastal ports of the Minnan and Yueh regions such as Quanzhou and Guangzhou are said to derive from Dutch antecedents in the seventeenth century, and developed also in the Dutch colonial city of Batavia founded in 1619 in today’s Jakarta, Indonesia (Viaro 1992). These hybrid forms are in turn commonly thought to form the typological bases for what developed into the various shophouse, humble rowhouse, and grand townhouse models in Malaya and Singapore, and which further developed to include Malay timber ornamental design and European Neoclassical details © Ashgate Publishing Ltd

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rendered in plaster (Seow 1983; Lim 1993; Lee 2003b; Knapp 2010) (see Figure 8.1). These building forms are collectively referred to as “shophouses” in Malaysia and Singapore. They were constructed beginning in the eighteenth century in Melaka and the nineteenth century in Singapore not only by Chinese but also by various other communities to provide living, working, and storage spaces in the densely built-up areas of Southeast Asia’s colonial cities. In southern Chinese port cities the timber shop-cum-dwelling formed the lower city, which lay outside the walled imperial city containing the courtyard houses of the nobility. And when initially built in Southeast Asia, they were likewise of timber, though brick may sometimes have been used. However, the birth of the shophouse as it is generally found today in Singapore and Malaysia occurred with the introduction of two colonial building regulations: those concerning fire safety, and those regularizing property lines—which together led to the use of brick “party walls” (brick partitions acting as fire breaks) to separate successive narrow units in regular terraced rows. A further characteristic of this urban form was that the width of the shophouse lot was generally determined by the greatest distance that could be spanned using timber beams between brick party walls to support the upper floors and the roof (see Chu, in this volume). In such a narrow street front configuration, shophouses were typically expanded by adding units to the back of a core unit; and in the long dwellings that resulted, space was punctuated by air wells. An ordinance by the colonial officer who established British rule over Singapore, Thomas Stamford Raffles, further led to the creation of the now ubiquitous streetlevel covered arcade colloquially known in Malay as kaki lima, or “five-foot-way.” This continuous gallery ran across all units on the ground floor, sheltered by the upper floor. Its genesis prompted one historian to refer to the resultant building type as the Shophouse Rafflesia (Lim 1993).

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Linguæ Francæ Forms: Kampung Houses and Shophouses Since the Nineteenth Century

The various models of the Malay kampung house and the dwelling-cum-shop today referred to as the Chinese shophouse were historically built, used, or lived in by Malays, Chinese and a host of other ethnic groups. In reference to this multicultural aspect of their construction and use I refer to them as architectural linguæ francæ. The Malay kampung house preceded the shophouse as the basic building type for both dwellings and rows of shops in the early emporia of the Nusantara region. The urban landscape of Melaka under Sultanate rule and in the Portuguese period (1511–1640)—and during the early development of British Singapore (Pearson 1973b)—was thus characterized by timber buildings roofed with either atap (palm thatch), genting (terracotta tiles), or less frequently, sirap (ironwood shingles). As mentioned previously, the widespread use of brick appeared in the construction of shops and townhouses only after the introduction of colonial regulations stipulating the use of noncombustible materials. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd

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Malay kampung houses in Melaka, Singapore, and the Straits region in general can be divided into several models. The first was the traditional vernacular, or customary model, whose construction was associated with various symbolic associations, taboos, and rituals. It was characterized by an extended gable roof in two pitches, with a steep upper pitch called bumbung panjang lipat kajang (literally, “long roof with awning fold”) (Lim 1987; Al-Mudra 2003). This model was consequently called rumah bumbung panjang (“long-roof house”—not to be confused with Bornean communal “longhouses”). It also featured distinctive cantilevered roof beams and multiple inclined gable panels, as well as changes in floor level to denote a hierarchy of spaces. Melaka’s version of this model is called Rumah Serambi Melaka, or the Melaka Verandah House. It displayed a remarkable conservativeness in its retention of the gable-roof form and traditional Malay spatial vocabulary—aspects that were modified in most other regions. Yet it simultaneously incorporated several nonMalay architectural elements. One was a raised courtyard of brick or cement in place of a timber platform between the main house and kitchen. The kitchen, walled on three sides, opened out onto this yard as a pavilion, and in this sense was reminiscent of Central Javanese and Chinese courtyard dwellings.1 Two other elements were of Portuguese derivation. These were jendela, or fulllength windows, adapted to the Malay woodworking tradition, and an entrance consisting of an elaborately tiled flight of steps constructed of brick or concrete (Figure 8.2a). In addition to the traditional vernacular model mentioned above, Jacques Dumarçay, in The House in South-East Asia (1987: 30–32), drew attention to “a particular kind of Malay architecture” that “spread throughout mainland Southeast Asia and Sumatra,” an architecture which was “under the inspiration of colonial architecture though separate from it.” He referred in particular to two new “Rumah Limas” (Hip-Roof House) models that utilized either the hip or Dutch-gable roof form. When the various sources that mention these models are put together (Abdul Halim Nasir 1985; Abdul Halim Nasir and Wan Washim Wan The 1996; Sheppard 1969; Hilton 1992; Parid Wardi Sudin 1981; Pelras 2004), they form a coherent picture that indicates that these new house models, called Rumah Limas Perak/ Riau and Perabung Lima, originated from the Straits region and were developed by two eighteenth-century indigenous trade polities: the emporium of Riau, ruled and run by Wajo’ Bugis merchant-princes, which connected Bugis and indigenous networks with Chinese and British country traders in defiance of Dutch monopoly orders; and the tin-exporting state of Perak.2 Consequently, both Riau and Perak had uneasy, often antagonistic relations with the monopoly-seeking Dutch in Melaka and Batavia (Jakarta) (Lineton 1975; Vos 1993; Andaya 1982). Yet, 1 Conventionally, it has been surmised that this feature points to Chinese precedence. However, the Javanese, who were very numerous in Melaka during the Sultanate period, possessed a similar house layout arranged around courtyards, especially at the rear of the house with the kitchen and bedroom/ ancillary outhouses. 2 The Bugis and a related group, the Makassarese, were from South Sulawesi, and were important traders and shippers in the region, particularly after the eighteenth century (see Lineton 1975; Hamonic 2000). © Ashgate Publishing Ltd

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8.2 Malay kampu...