For my SE1101E Fieldtrip Report. Thought it’d make an interesting blog post as well.

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Little India is a small area near downtown Singapore, which, as its name suggests, houses the various facets related to India in its locale. I took a walking tour of Little India on a Sunday evening, and found certain characteristic of old as well as contemporary Southeast Asia (SEA) in Little India. In my report, I will present these characteristics in the order of how and when I encountered the sights and sounds of Little India while on my walking tour.

The first sight I observed was the multitude of advertisements offering global calls at discounted rates.

The ominous-sounding acronyms of ‘STD’ and ‘ISD’ as seen in Fig. 1 actually stand for ‘Standard Trunk Dialling’ and ‘International Subscriber Dialling’ respectively.

Fig. 1 also shows the various calling cards, used to make calls worldwide, on sale. I felt this reflected the connectedness of Singapore to the world through global communications, bringing an aspect of SEA into Singapore in an abstract sense – Singapore is a small part of a larger global community, which also includes the community of SEA. Telecommunications is thus necessary to bridge the divide of land and sea separating us from other countries.

Fig. 2 shows an aspect of how SEA can also be found in Little India through religion.

When I asked around, I found out that Tamil Indians visit the Masjid Angullia to perform their religious rituals because it is one of Singapore’s few Tamil-speaking mosques. Islam was the dominant religion in this region of SEA, taking over from the dominance of Hinduism in the fourteenth century. The practice of Islam here depicts the continuation of a religious tradition that has been around for the last six hundred years. That Islam is still practiced alongside Hinduism, the dominant religion of Indians in Little India, also says something about the religious tolerance (which is usually, but not always) common in SEA.

In Figs. 3 and 4, we see the various aspects of leisure and culture in Little India, which also reminds one of SEA, albeit in a more contemporary sense. Shopping and entertainment are definitely global activities practiced worldwide, but in Little India, we see how they have evolved to suit the modern consumer.


Roadside stalls selling meat and vegetable produce are reminiscent of the street bazaars of yore, and along with the eponymous ‘Mustafa Shopping Centre’1 selling almost everything from electronics to incense, they serve to illustrate the modern consumer lifestyle of SEA – fast-paced and on-the-go, but still rooted in certain traditions in terms of the demand for essential products and religious items.


Some stalls offer games that depend on the luck of the draw, while others sell music and films direct from Bollywood, representative of the continued tradition of entertainment, and SEA’s strong traditions of acting, song and dance, which have also evolved to cater to the taste of the modern consumer.

Last but not least, Fig. 5 shows the culture of food and eating in SEA. There were numerous restaurants and coffee shops, serving everything from Muslim, to Bengali, to Pakistani, to North Indian and to South Indian cuisine, demonstrating yet again the multi-cultural aspect of SEA and the region’s tolerance for diversity.


That the restaurants also incorporated the term ‘Raj’ or ‘Raja’ reminded me of how the term is also used in SEAsian languages to denote the word for ‘King’ – a linguistic remnant of the ancient Sanskrit language brought into SEA, and reminder of SEA’s connection with India and by extrapolation, the world. I could not resist grabbing a quick bite of rice – a SEAsian staple, as explained by Dr Mrazek in his lecture – along with some curry – evocative of the spice trade in SEA, where traders used a sea-route in SEA for the business – before heading back to complete this assignment.

1Now open 24 hours, seven days a week, as the sign proudly proclaims.