Singapore reiterates commitment to Tamil as its official language

Iswaran’s remarks appeared in an interview published in The Tamil Community and the Making of Modern Singapore, a book on the South Indian community, launched by Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan on Sunday.

“The government’s policy position and support for Tamil is clear. The rest is in the hands of the community, especially our youths, to embrace the language, use it in everyday life and make it a living language,” Iswaran said.

“The ‘Tamil Language Festival’ is one way to achieve this by engaging and involving the younger generation and wider community in this effort to celebrate and promote Tamil language and culture,” Iswaran, the minister in charge of Trade Relations as well as Communications and Information, said.

The book has been co-authored by NRIs Soundara Nayaki Vairavan, editor of ‘Online Voice’ with five other books to her credit, and A P Raman, a veteran local journalist .

Tamil is one of Singapore’s four official languages used in Parliament, in schools as mother’s tongue subject and supported by print and broadcast media as well as in all other officials events. It is also printed on currency notes along with English, Chinese and Malay.

The book documents early days of Indians arriving in Singapore, some as sepoys, labourers, traders, money lenders, civil servants, among others.

The colonial government had been sending Indian convicts to Bencoolen in Sumatra since 1787 and to Penang in northern Peninsular Malaysia, since 1790, according to the book India had been the British rulers’ main source of unskilled labour and indentured labourers were used to build infrastructure and buildings in Singapore during the early days.

According to the book, as Singapore economically progressed after the colonial rulers left, the Tamil community progressed along and became part of the prosperous society.