By Asad Latif
May I be so bold as to claim that I travelled in the footsteps of Sir Stamford Raffles? That agent of the East Indian Company’s visit to Calcutta (as it was known then, and for much later, till it resumed the phonetic spelling of its original name), led him to set up Singapore as an English trading settlement in 1819. “Footsteps” would be the wrong metaphor, of course. “Seasteps” would have been accurate, since Raffles travelled to Calcutta by sea and arrived water-borne to Singapura (as it was known then). In my case, however, I arrived in Singapore sky-borne, in an aircraft that conveyed me from what was then home to what would become home. Footsteps, seasteps or airsteps, I arrived in Singapore. The year was 1984. I was 27.
Today, at 65, I remember my passage from back home to this home as if it occurred yesterday. I had worked in Hong Kong briefly in 1984 and had been exposed to life in a successful British colony that was in the throes of its return to Chinese rule. Singapore was different. It had merged with the Malaysian Federation in 1963, had separated from it in 1965, and had gone on to carve out an extremely successful space for itself in the international sphere.
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was a household word in Singapore. Not everyone loved him, but no one could deny his singular agency in having created a magnificent city-state that could sustain its independence in spite of its lack of natural resources. To arrive in Singapore was to embrace the possibilities of time.
Calcutta, too, was a historical city par excellence, but its rundown buildings and potholed streets, to say nothing of its potbellied children living on homeless streets, belied the promise of the future. To arrive in Singapore, it appeared, was to have exchanged failure for success.
That was an illusion, of course. All expatriates suffer from a global disease: They latch on to what they love in their countries of arrival by trying to erase what had loved them in their countries of departure. Take the potholed streets of Calcutta, for example. They had conveyed me to College Street on that glad day in 1974 when I joined the English Department of Presidency College. Without that first footfall in the corridors of the greats, I might never have come to Singapore, never got my Chevening Scholarship to Cambridge, my father’s university, and never won the Fulbright to Harvard. The potholes of Calcutta are not as numerous as the culturally blind allege them to be. Nevertheless, they led me on the way to be myself, wherever on earth I would ultimately be.
The way I see it, no matter how far or close wanderings might lead, one migrates ultimately to oneself. Hence, when I left my Calcutta for what would become my Singapore, I did no more than search for a version of my selfhood that would extend my material and imaginative boundaries. In the course of my journey, I discovered that the only borders lie within, borders between being and becoming. In the process of becoming by winnowing the unwanted aspects of being, one returns to a renewed if only autumnal sense of being. Time passes. One passes with it, letting go of the distant past as much as one does the receding immediate past. To live is to gather the passage of time within oneself, hoping that all borders will merge into a lasting apprehension of oneself in the expanding fullness of a single world.
Calcutta and Singapore are two sides of me. These two great imperial cities have outlived their provenance. Calcutta was once the capital city of colonial India: Today it remains the nation’s cultural capital but political power resides in Delhi (naturally) and there are at least two economic capitals, Mumbai and Chennai. This is why I, along with many of my hapless fellow-Bengalis, suffer from an incurable cultural fetish for the past. That was when the Almighty spoke Bengali – He appears to be switching increasingly to Hindi – and was busy creating top-class poets and formidable social reformers in Bengal. The divine supply of poets and composers has not ebbed but the demand-side having moved to Mumbai, many of the best composers have shifted there and to make a name for themselves. Never mind. Their names remain Bengali, and their fame spreads the vintage mystique of Calcutta like a lingering perfume in India and beyond. I feel happy for the Calcutta part of me.
Singapore, a great trading post, is a now a city-state. Statehood has allowed the nascent nationalism of the colonial era to flourish and grow into a genuine sense of political self. Sovereign Singapore was not expected to survive, but it has done so with a definitiveness that makes the prognoses of the 1960s laughable today. The national self-confidence of Singapore gives me confidence in my decision to take up Singapore citizenship in 1999. It had not been an easy decision, but I took it when I realised that I would be giving up my Indian citizenship but not my Indian-ness. My Singapore Identity Card records my race as Indian. I could keep the Calcutta part of me intact while adding to it a new Singaporean me.
So, yes, I am grateful that Raffles travelled to Calcutta to set up Singapore. Obviously, he did not do so with my fortunes in mind, but the umbilical connection that he created between the two great port cities has made it easier for me to migrate from India to Singapore. Ultimately, I have done nothing more than migrate to me.
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Asad Latif is a Singapore-based journalist. He can be contacted at badiarghat@borderlesssg1
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