Singapore
Singapore
Where Sikhs arrived first as exiled prisoners and then as colonial policemen, and where the Central Sikh Temple grew out of a police gurdwara at Pearl's Hill.
The first Sikh known to have reached Singapore came in chains. Bhai Maharaj Singh, who had led resistance against the British in Punjab, was exiled here with his disciple Kharak Singh in 1851 and died in confinement at Outram. His shrine is still visited.3
The community that followed came in a different capacity entirely. From the 1870s the British recruited Sikhs heavily into the police and paramilitary forces of the Straits Settlements and the Malay States — a colonial preference for so-called martial races that put Sikh men in uniform across Southeast Asia, guarding tin mines, railways and ports. They worshipped at police gurdwaras, including one at Pearl’s Hill, established inside the force rather than by a civilian congregation.1,3
In 1912 the community bought a bungalow on Queen Street to build something of its own, helped by Sindhi merchants and by the Straits Settlements Police. It became known as the Wadda Gurdwara, the big temple, and is the ancestor of today’s Central Sikh Temple.2
The same pattern shaped Malaysia, where Sikhs entered as police from 1873 and worked on the railways; a gurdwara built on Brick Kiln Road in Kuala Lumpur in 1899 was for a time the largest in Southeast Asia. Malaysia’s Sikh population today is around 100,000.1,3
It is an uncomfortable origin and worth stating plainly: a good deal of Sikh settlement across Southeast Asia and East Africa exists because the British Empire found Sikhs useful for policing and building other people’s colonies.1,3
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