Feb 21, 2010
ON WORDS
A place by any other name...
By Janadas Devan, Review Editor
The iconic National Theatre - with its cantilevered roof and
five-pointed fa�ade - opened in August 1963 at Fort Canning, but was
torn down in 1986 because it was deemed structurally unsafe. The name
died along with the building. -- ST FILE PHOTO
Singapore was fortunate that its first Minister of Culture, Mr S.
Rajaratnam, actually did know something about his portfolio: culture.
Because a cultured man was in charge of culture when the country
achieved self-government in 1959, Singapore was able to avoid some of
the cultural excesses that newly independent countries of that time were
prone to.
Take the wholesale renaming of buildings, streets, even of cities that
post-colonial societies indulged in: Mr Rajaratnam urged his colleagues
to avoid any such thing in Singapore.
In a paper to the Cabinet on Oct 26, 1960, reports Ms Irene Ng in her
recently released biography of Mr Rajaratnam, he argued that such name
changes 'would cause unnecessary confusion in the minds of the public'.
Instead, he proposed 'to rename only those buildings or institutions
which had a 'bearing on the political and constitutional progress of
Singapore''.
Thus Victoria Memorial Hall, Collyer Quay, Connaught Drive, MacRitchie
Reservoir, even Percival Road (named after the British General Arthur E.
Percival who surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942), remained as
they were. Only a few symbolically charged places - among them, Raffles
National Library which became (and remains) the National Library and
Raffles Museum, the National Museum - were renamed.
As Ms Ng notes: 'It was significant that, of all the buildings in
Singapore, (Rajaratnam) considered the library and the museum the most
worthy to bear (the) symbolic mantle' of 'National'. Stamford Raffles'
statue - 'at first earmarked for removal', according to Ms Ng - was
allowed to stand, with his arms folded, by the Singapore River, but the
museum and the library were no longer to bear his name.
Mr Rajaratnam was nationalist enough to want to claim the commanding
heights of culture for the new nation; and cultured enough to know that
one shouldn't proceed as though the landscape were a tabula rasa.
(Another 'National' - the National Theatre - no longer exists. A major
project of Mr Rajaratnam's, it opened in August 1963 at Fort Canning,
with the public contributing $786,000 to its $2.2 million cost and the
Government the rest. The distinctly designed theatre, with its
cantilevered roof and five-pointed fa�ade symbolising the Singapore
flag's five stars, was torn down in 1986 because it was deemed
structurally unsafe. We should have tried harder to save it, considering
its role in the history of independent Singapore. Demolishing it - both
the building as well as the name - was an impious and hasty act.)
Once-colonised countries, including ancient ones like India, have no
alternative but to negotiate with their colonial inheritances. Take the
very name 'India': It isn't in fact Indian. It derives from the Sanskrit
Sindhu, to be sure, which means 'sea' and was the name of the great
river on the sub-continent's north-west in what is today's Pakistan. The
Persians changed the river's name to 'Hindu' - so that isn't Indian
either - having converted the initial 's' into an 'h' sound; then the
Greeks came along and changed 'Hindu' to 'Indus', as the river is known
to this day; and it is from the Greek Indus that we get 'India', a term
that the inhabitants of the sub-continent themselves never used to
describe their land till fairly recent times.
The Indian Constitution today implicitly acknowledges this fact by
referring in its first article to 'India, that is Bharat, shall be a
union of states' - 'Bharat' being the ancient Sanskrit word by which the
land was known to its inhabitants. Still, few Indians today, unless they
wish to make a political point, would refer to India as 'Bharat', even
if they were speaking an Indian language. (Incidentally, barat in Malay
means 'west', probably because the first traders in these parts came
from Bharat, which of course is to the west of the Malay archipelago.)
The Chinese do not have to conduct similarly intricate negotiations with
their colonial inheritance for the good reason China was not colonised.
Just as 'India' isn't Indian, 'China' isn't Chinese either, having been
derived probably from Sanskrit. Nor is 'Sinic' Chinese for it comes from
the Latin Sinae from the Greek Sinai from the Arabic Sin.
But none of this matters to the Chinese, for they have always known
their land as Zhongguo or 'Middle Kingdom'. No Chinese today, speaking
Mandarin, would refer to Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo, China's official
name, as the 'People's Republic of China'. 'China' and 'Sinic' are
Western; Zhongguo and Zhonghua Minzhu ('the Chinese nationality') are
Chinese; and the Chinese seem quite content that at least in the matter
of nomenclature the twain shall never meet.
Not so Singaporeans. We can't go back to 'Singapura', unless we are
speaking Malay, let alone to 'Temasek'. 'Singapore' it has to be - and
the pragmatic compromise that Mr Rajaratnam worked out in the matter of
nomenclature has to remain our guiding principle: Don't kick over the
traces of the past but do not neglect to take possession of the
commanding heights.
Have we abided by these principles? In some respects, yes. All those
places named after now unknown Englishmen remain undisturbed. More
importantly, we have retained a string of native proper names, from
Sengkang to Choa Chu Kang.
Where we haven't done well consistently is in the naming of the
commanding heights. 'Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay', an advertising
slogan not a proper name, doesn't have the dignity of a 'National
Theatre'. 'Marina Bay' is insipid - not to mention derivative, for there
are dozens of Marina Bays strewn across the world. Compare 'Marina Bay'
to the whimsical 'Telok Blangah', which means 'cooking pot bay', because
it was shaped like a cooking pot. Why couldn't we have called Marina Bay
'Temasek Bay', say? As Somerset Maugham said of Mandalay, the falling
cadence of such a lovely name would have 'gathered about itself the
chiaroscuro of romance'.
Oh, we need another Rajaratnam.
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