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Singapore Temples and Festivals
Singapore's immigrants commonly made their religious
congregations a form of social organization. From the
foundation of
the city, colonial authorities had avoided interfering
with the
religious affairs of the ethnic communities, fostering an
atmosphere of religious tolerance. It was characteristic
of
colonial Singapore that South Bridge Street, a major
thoroughfare
in the old Chinatown, should also be the site of the Sri
Mariamman
Temple, a south Indian Hindu temple, and of the Jamae or
Masjid
Chulia Mosque, which served Chulia Muslims from India's
Coromandel
Coast. The major religions were Chinese popular religion,
commonly
although inaccurately referred to as Daoism or Buddhism;
Hinduism;
Islam; Buddhism; and Christianity. Other religions
included smaller
communities of Sikhs and of Jains from India; Parsis,
Indians of
Iranian descent who followed the ancient Iranian
Zoroastrian
religion; and Jews, originally from the Middle East, who
supported
two synagogues.
The Chinese practiced Chinese popular religion, a
distinctive
and complex syncretic religion that incorporates some
elements from
canonical Buddhism and Daoism but focuses on the worship
of gods,
ghosts, and ancestors. It emphasizes ritual and practice
over
doctrine and belief, has no commonly recognized name, and
is so
closely entwined with Chinese culture and social
organization that
it cannot proselytize. In Singapore its public
manifestations
included large temples housing images of deities believed
to
respond to human appeals for guidance or relief from
affliction and
use of the common Chinese cycle of calendrical festivals.
These
occasions included the lunar New Year (in January or
February), a
festival of renewal and family solidarity; Qing Ming
(Ching Ming in
Wade-Giles romanization), celebrated by the solar calender
on April
5th (105 days after the winter solstice), to remember the
ancestors
and worship at their graves; the fifteenth of the fifth
lunar month
(April or May), in Singapore known as Vesak Day and
celebrated as
marking the birth of the Buddha; the festival of the
hungry ghosts
in the seventh lunar month, a major Hokkien holiday,
marked by
domestic feasting and elaborate public rituals to feed and
placate
the potentially dangerous souls of those with no
descendants to
worship them; and the mid-autumn festival on the fifteenth
of the
eighth lunar month, an occasion for exchanging gifts of
sweet round
mooncakes and admiring the full moon. All Chinese temples
held one
or more annual festivals, marked by street processions,
performances of Chinese traditional operas, and domestic
banquets
to which those who supported the temple, either because of
residential propinquity, subethnic affiliation with a
particular
temple and its deity, or personal devotion to the god,
invited
their friends and business associates. To prevent the
disruption of
traffic and preserve public order, the government limited
the
length and route of street processions and prohibited the
use of
the long strings of firecrackers that had previously been
a
component of all Chinese religious display. Some festivals
or
customs that had little religious significance or were not
practiced by the southeastern Chinese migrants were
promoted by the
government's Singapore Tourist Promotion Board for their
spectacular and innocuous content. These included the
summer dragon
boat races, originally held only in China's Chang Jiang
(Yangtze)
River Valley, and the lantern festival in which paper
lanterns in
the shape of animals or other objects are carried through
the
streets by children or, if especially impressive,
displayed in
parks and temples. In China the lantern festival is
celebrated in
the first lunar month at the end of the New Year season,
but in
Singapore it is combined with the mid-autumn festival.
Canonical Buddhism was represented in Singapore as
Sinhalese
Theravada Buddhism. This form of Buddhism prevails in Sri
Lanka and
mainland Southeast Asia and differs from the Mahayana
Buddhism of
China, Korea, and Japan in both doctrine and organization.
Theravada Buddhism was brought by Sinhalese migrants from
Ceylon
(contemporary Sri Lanka), who also influenced the
architectural
style of Thai and Vietnamese Theravada temples. These
latter were
staffed by Thai or Vietnamese monks, some of whom were
originally
members of the overseas Chinese communities of those
countries and
served a predominantly Chinese laity, using Hokkien,
Teochiu,
Cantonese, or English. Singapore was also home to a number
of
Chinese sects and syncretic cults that called themselves
Buddhist
but taught their own particular doctrines and lacked
properly
ordained Buddhist monks.
Hindus have been part of Singapore's population since
its
foundation in 1819, and some of the old Hindu temples,
such as the
Sri Mariamman Temple, were declared national historical
sites in
the 1980s and so preserved from demolition. Singapore's
Hindus
adapted their religion to their minority status in two
primary
ways--compartmentalization and ritual reinterpretation.
Compartmentalization referred to the Hindus tendency to
distinguish
between the home, in which they maintained a nearly
completely
orthodox Hindu pattern of diet and ritual observance, and
the
secular outer world of work, school, and public life,
where they
did not apply categories of purity and pollution.
Singapore lacked
the tightly organized caste groups of communities found in
India
but replaced them in large-scale temple festivals with
groups
representing those of the same occupation or place of
employment.
The major Hindu holidays were the Hindu New Year, in April
or May;
Thaipusam, a festival during which penitents fulfilled
vows to the
deity Lord Subramanya by participating in a procession
while
carrying kavadi, heavy decorated frameworks holding
offerings of milk, fruit, and flowers; and Deepavali, the
Festival
of Lights. Deepavali, a celebration of the victory of
light over
darkness and hence of good over evil, was a national
holiday.
Seven of the ten national holidays were religious
festivals;
two of them were Chinese, two Muslim, two Christian, and
one Hindu.
The festivals were the Chinese New Year; Vesak Day; Hari
Raya Haji,
the Muslim pilgrimage festival; Hari Raya Pusa, which
marked the
end of the fasting month of Ramadan and was a time of
renewal;
Christmas; Good Friday; and Deepavali. Citizens were
encouraged to
learn about the festivals of other religious and ethnic
groups and
to invite members of other groups to their own
celebrations and
feasts. Public ceremonies such as National Day or the
commissioning
of military officers were marked by joint religious
services
conducted by the Inter-Religious Organization, an
ecumenical body
founded in 1949 to promote understanding and goodwill
among the
followers of different religions.
Data as of December 1989
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