Indian Heritage Cooking

Indians in Singapore are mostly the descendants of migrants who came from the Indian subcontinent and the peninsular of Malaya during British rule. These early immigrants came seeking opportunities to work and trade. They yielded generations of locally-born Indians who considered Singapore home even as they kept ties with their ancestral land where some still have relatives.

In the 1990s, Singapore welcomed a new wave of Indian immigrants with government policies that made it attractive for foreign professionals to live and work here. At the same time, growing demand for labour in the construction and cleaning industries pulled in low-wage workers from India and other countries in the region.

The descendants of the early Indian immigrants and more recent immigrants from India together number just over 348,000 in Singapore. This makes up slightly more than 9 per cent of the local population, according to a population census taken in 2010 by the Singapore Department of Statistics, making the Indians the nation state’s third largest ethnic group.

When Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of modern Singapore, first arrived on the island in 1819, his entourage included a troop of sepoys—Indian soldiers employed to maintain law and order in Malaya and assist in conquests—and a contingent of Indian civilians looking for work, largely as dhobis (washermen), milkmen and domestic servants.

The British also shipped in convicts to ease the burden on India’s prisons. These convicts played a significant role in the infrastructural development of the island, clearing jungle and constructing roads and buildings. Roads such as College Street (now Bras Basah Road), North Bridge Road, South Bridge Road, Serangoon Road and New Harbour Road (now Keppel Road) and structures such as Cavenagh Bridge, St. Andrew’s Cathedral and the Horsburgh and Raffles lighthouses were the products of convict labour.

A minority of the early Indian immigrants were businessmen and entrepreneurs, the most prominent being Narayana Pillai. He came on the Indiana with Raffles at the East India Company officer’s request and became Singapore’s first building contractor; he was credited with erecting the Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road in 1827. Another major figure in the Indian community in colonial Singapore, although he arrived almost a century later, was Govindasamy Pillai. He bought over the provision shop where he worked and expanded his business to include a textile shop selling saris and dhotis, eventually establishing branches in Malacca and Penang.