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2004-04-09 - 3:09 p.m. The Istana Kampung Glam, which is probably the last vestige of Malay royalty on the island, is very soon going to open its doors to the public. As a museum. Showcasing Malay heritage. This might be cause for celebration for some members of the Malay community, especially since it involves a sense of monumentalisation, and importantly for them, visibility. Now they have a museum, a proper edifice housing History and Identity to lay claim to, as stark counterpoint to the Potemkin Malay village in Geylang. The latter consisting of facades of kampung houses, whose interiors hide modern-day capitalists and entrepeneurs, peddling souvenirs of brass, batik and baskets. An ironic inversion of the time when kampung houses sheltered Communist insurgents, their eyes darting by the light of kerosene lamps. I digress, as usual. Frankly, I don't think it is a good idea at all to have a Malay museum. Why should a museum have such an overt cultural character and designation? Why can't we have a musuem, say of archeological artefacts unearthed in Singapore (apart from the measly one at Fort Canning)? Why can't Malay historical artefacts be displayed alongside those at the Asian Civilisations Museum--at which point the attempt at self-grandiosity conceals a veiled insult--because the Malays didn't have a civilisation to begin with. My point is, the more we entrench ourselves in such reductive and essentialist notions of culture and ethnicity, the more we will never escape the mentality that gave us self-help groups, SAP schools, touristy self-representations, CMIO racial stereotypes. Are the Indians going to have their own museum? (Until very recently in NUS, there were departments of Chinese/East Asian Studies, as well as Malay Studies, but not South Asian studies) Will it be occupied more by Tamilian artefacts than those from North India, like Mughal paintings? What about Eurasians? Will the museum be our new signifier of how a community has arrived (in the past, it was PSLE top-scorer, celebrity, sportsman, cabinet Minister, MRT station name, etc)? And does anyone want to point out the conversion of the istana into a museum was an astute political strategy? The government did not want to come across as a hostile party that seized something from the Malays, so building a museum was a way of 'giving something back to the Malays'. I haven't seen the museum yet, so it is too early to judge, but I suspect that there are deadly prescriptive aspects to this compensation. Through acts of curatorship and such, Singaporean Malays will be taught their new histories--that their roots lie 'elsewhere', in bigger hinterlands and archipelagoes, that Singapore was simply a kind of vacuum that attracted immigrants from China, India and for the Malays--Malaysia and Indonesia (never mind that the two latter countries only came about as early as the last century). Who knows the extent of obfuscation and dissemblement the visitor will experience, standing in a house that until late 1999 bore the final trickles of a royal, indigenous Malay genealogy? If both Bugis Street and Chinatown, 'conserved' to the point of annihilation, suffered from the museumisation of the ghetto, the Istana Kampong Glam will stand as an example of the ghettoisation of the museum.
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