Full of Small Mouths

By Samira Hassan

Moskee te Singapore (Nagore Dargha), c. 1900. Photo-postcard by GR Lambert & Co (Singapore). Leiden University Library, Southeast Asian & Caribbean Images, KITLV, image 3649 (Public Domain), Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.
Image description: Sepia-faded photographic postcard, circa 1900, showing a building at a three-quarter angle built in the Indo-Saracenic architectural style, with a minaret on each of its four corners and Corinthian capitals supporting the entrance doorway. Inscribed in block letters on the lower left corner is the caption: MOHAMEDAN TEMPLE, S’PORE.67.

There he was, crouched over a water-lily white notebook in an equally blinding shirt. Still body, hands moving across paper. He was impossible to miss in a clattering city—especially in Telok Ayer, where starched shirts aggregated to the point of blur. Every shift, every movement slips past before your eyes can catch it. 

When I walked past him, I could not help but eavesdrop with my eyes. On the pavement he sat, drawing the thick columnar structures of the Nagore Durgah before him, each stroke fracturing into tiny suggestions of a line. 

I had walked past this street countless times before, eyes glazing over the buildings each time. 

That day, under the late afternoon light, the walls of the shrine demanded attention, though the sun made them almost painful to look at directly. My eyes darted back and forth between the man’s paper and the shrine. Under that light the walls had lost their edges, the shimmer of the chunam dissolving into a flat, aggressive white—the building a two-dimensional cutout of itself against the sky. 

What made the walls impossible to look at directly was not the sun alone. The Nagore Durgah is skinned in Madras chunam, a mélange of egg whites, jaggery, burned coral, limestone, and seashells, polished for hours until it took a light that was almost divine. The crushed shells left a faint iridescence on the surface, as though the walls remembered being underwater. 

Slick with coconut oil, 18th-century Chulia labourers leaned their weight onto the stone, scrubbing away with rounded agate stones and rock crystals, hands moving over the surface until the caustic grit of burned coral became something close to marble. Under close enough light, the chunam holds the faint ridges of those hands. Hours of smoothing had left, ironically, traces of the smoothing itself. But no matter the labour expended to produce a faultless surface, the chunam made it porous, full of small mouths.

The chunam began to fail from within. Conservators in the 2000s found, upon close inspection, that the walls had been drawing in moisture for over a century, salt working its way through the pores of the limestone. Wounds bloomed dark where once gleamed white. The building was thirsty in a way that made no immediate sense. 

The Nagore Durgah no longer stands at the seafront. It hasn’t for a long time. Singapore’s coastline has been pushed outward year by year in a land reclamation saga that spans the early days of the British colonial administration to the modern period. Sand, imported from neighbouring countries, was and continues to be deposited over what had been sea, over the mangroves that once defined Singapore's ecology, over the reefs whose corals had once been folded into the chunam. 

But the pores of the chunam do not know this. Salt still seeps through them, the building reaching toward a mirage of the coastline. 

The last homage to the sea left on that street is its name. Telok Ayer. Water Bay. 

The actual shoreline was at least a thirty-minute walk away. The afternoon sun had grown to a blaze and I was sweating, thirsty. I stood there a moment, looking for water. A 7-Eleven appeared, as they always do. I crossed the street. There was only traffic, and the shrine, and the man still crouched on the pavement behind me. 

*** 

In the 19th century, the Shia community, composed of both South and Southeast Asian Muslims, poured into Telok Ayer Street, Market Street, Kling Street (now known as Chulia Street) and the surrounding areas in procession for Ashura. They carried Tabuts, multi-tiered structures of bamboo and wood that rose above the crowd like swaying pagodas, built to resemble the tomb of Imam Husayn ibn Ali, the Prophet’s grandson and the third Shia Imam, who was martyred at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. Plastered in translucent coloured paper and small mirrors, the surfaces of these Tabuts caught the equatorial light and threw it back, their tinfoil skin shivering in the heat. Under that sun, sheeted in silver, the streets became a procession of white and shatter. The crowds roared and surged, viscous. Through the humid air of the Straits, the Tassa drums of Hindustani origins that had crossed the Bay of Bengal met the gendang of the Malay Archipelago, amalgamating to create a percussive thundering felt in the sternum.

The British East India Company began restricting the remembrance processions by the 1850s. Too disorderly, too loud, too many bodies moving through streets that trade needed clear. Lurking beneath this was another nascent anxiety: colonial administrators started viewing the local Indian population as a menace in light of mounting challenges to British authorities in other colonies, foremost of which was the Indian Rebellion in 1857 that eventually brought an end to the Company’s rule in India. In February that year, a dispute between Tamil-Muslim celebrants and two European policemen during a festival in Telok Ayer only crystallised this tension. Attempts by policemen to prevent the celebration were resisted by the community—since they had already obtained the necessary permission to gather—leading the police to discharge their firearms and kill two Tamil-Muslims and wound several others. Contentions around Muharram gatherings, marked by anti-Indian sentiments, continued over the next decade, until the Tassa drums and gendang were eventually silenced by the Peace Preservation act of 1867, both ritual and revolution buried. 

The law may have demanded silence, but ghosts are not so easily surrendered. Thirty years before the Peace Preservation Act, the Mohideen brothers had brought in granite and limestone from the Coromandel Coast, sealed them in the egg-white-and-jaggery skin of the chunam, and, as if in prophecy, built the ritual into a building—its tiers, its arches, its upward-tapering form petrified into architecture, polished until the building itself began to shimmer. A stone procession that refused to be cast into the sea.

When I exited the 7-eleven rehydrated and cool, the sun had moved past its afternoon height, the light softening, a breeze finally coming through. The tiers of the Durgah rose above me in diminishing arches. I stood there long enough that I almost thought I could see it sway. 

*** 

The Chulia community, who had come to this part of the world as traders and shopkeepers, had carried their saint across the Indian Ocean before they carried him to Singapore—by the 19th century, dargahs dedicated to Shahul Hamid of Nagore had already taken root in Penang and in Tamil Nadu. Westward, the Chulias were part of the wider Madrasi community shipped to Caribbean plantations in response to the Slavery Abolition Act. Facing a labour shortage, plantation owners and colonial administrators turned their eye to the South Asian subcontinent, gathering  indentured workers from the Coromandel Coast alongside their counterparts from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Oudh, and Bengal. Carried within these labourers, Muharram rituals crossed the Atlantic and found another kind of home. 

During the mid-19th century in Trinidad and Tobago, in the days of Hosay, the Caribbean iteration of the Shia festival commemorating Imam Husayn’s martyrdom, the Tassa drums too arrived before everything else—the high-pitched urgency of the treble drum answering the bass, an acoustic skin that wrapped itself around the procession and would not let go. The bearers of the Tadjahs carried on their shoulders these multi-tiered, pagoda-like structures that shared the same silhouette as the Tabuts once carried through Telok Ayer. The Tadjahs were built of bamboo and tissue paper and tinfoil that now caught and scattered the Caribbean sun. The paper tombs swayed with the movement of the bodies beneath them. 

Even then, Hosay was not legible as a single religion's ritual. Afro-Trinidadian drummers had folded the polyrhythms of Orisha traditions, blending the interlocking voices of three drums and the cadence of metal percussion into the Tassa beats. Akin to the Hindu custom of visarjan, in which devotional representations of deities are immersed in a body of water at the end of religious festivals, Tadjahs were also dipped into the sea and eventually dissolved. The language of the festival was a mélange of Bhojpuri, Urdu, English Creole, from which emerged the creole corruption of Husayn that gave Hosay its very name. For days on end, an amalgamation of bodies and drums and devotion pressed together until the mixture could no longer be separated back into its parts.

In a similar fashion, the British colonial government passed ordinances restricting Hosay processions from entering the main towns of San Fernando and Port of Spain in 1884, also known as the 1884 Hosay Regulations. The ritual was to be kept in plantation space, contained, legible, away from the centers of commerce. On October 30th, thousands of Indian laborers—both Muslim and Hindu—and Afro-Trinidadian drummers marched toward San Fernando anyway, carrying their Tadjahs. The British police opened fire into the crowd. Into paper and bamboo. Into the Tadjahs themselves, which could not fire back. Historians contest the official death toll, veering somewhere between 9 and 22. Over a hundred were wounded. Many of the workers that were wounded crawled into the cane fields to avoid arrest and consequently died there in secret. In the Caribbean, this is known as the Jahaji Massacre. 

There is a kind of knowledge that changes the texture of things—the street, the building, the drums you can no longer hear. 

In Singapore, the bullets at Telok Ayer certainly came first, though the colonial government eventually wielded the law as a longer-term instrument—gradually restricting the processions and Tabuts. In Trinidad and Tobago, it was the converse—they used the law to corral the processions, and the bullets arrived to fortify its edges. But limestone, like the human body, is porous. It does not consist only of clean lines. The processions leaked into each other across oceans, leaked into the bodies of people who had never heard of Karbala, leaked into drums and dances that were far from where they began but were there anyway. They leak still, into the chunam walls drawing in salt air, into the Hosay that Trinidadians and Tobagonians from all different ethnicities still celebrate, into the Durgah that wears the silhouette of a paper tomb and the people who stand—or sit—in its shadow—observing, remembering, refusing to surrender. 

At the end of Hosay, the Tadjahs are carried to the water and pushed in. The tissue paper peels first, its colors bleeding into the salt. The tinfoil follows. The bamboo frame, slowly waterlogged, sinks. What had been built over weeks, through devotion, the pressed-together labor of many hands, descends through the water column and settles onto the sea floor, accumulating, one layer inextricable from the next. The Tadjah does not disappear. It sediments, creating pores and possibilities of leakage: of values, practices, memories; across language, oceans, borders. Nowhere else do we feel this more than in the patois of sound that connects Telok Ayer to the plantations of Trinidad and Tobago.

When I finally looked back, the man was still there, crouched over his notebook, sweat darkening the collar of that white shirt. The afternoon had deepened around him without his noticing. 

In person, the columns of the Nagore Durgah stand straight and impenetrable, hard-edged, certain of themselves in the way that only things made of stone can be. On paper, they had come out crooked, slightly tilted, leaning into each other as if for support. More provisional. I understood the man’s instinct: there is something about the act of looking closely at a thing that reveals its yielding, even when the thing itself will not yield. 

His line strokes were meticulous, fine and deliberate, and yet the new colours he had deposited on paper had done something else entirely. In reality: sand and maroon, limestone and red. But on his paper there was blue to the Durgah—azure bleeding into the beige, softening the reds, the colours moving into each other in the way that wet things do. I squinted at the painting. The colour that sat in the middle, where the blue and the beige met and pressed against each other, became something else altogether. 

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Samira Hassan is a researcher, writer and facilitator working across issues of migration, ecology, and spatial justice in Asia. Her work has appeared in PR&TA: Practice, Research and Tangential Activities, New Naratif, Kontinentalist, the Asian American Journalists Association, and academic publications like Migrants and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Communication, Inequality, and Transformation.

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