Intermarriage in colonial Malaya and Singapore: A case study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Roman Catholic and Methodist Asian communities Marc Rerceretnam Colonial race relations are regularly portrayed in light of the attempts to divide and rule colonialised Asian communities. While this article does not challenge this view, it attempts to uncover a hitherto hidden level of interaction and even intermarriage at the grassroots level in colonial Malaya and Singapore. With the exception of the var- ious Peranakan communities that predated British rule, little to no evidence exists to show that interaction and especially intermarriage existed within early first- and second-generation migrant communities during the British colonial period. The find- ings show how colonial attempts to encourage a heightened sense of race and its frail- ties may have fallen short among some sections of the Asian community. Introduction The British colonial practice of divide and rule of the major ethnic communities — the Malays, Chinese and Indians — and its legacy dominates historical studies of Malaya and Singapore. 1 While recognising the generally exclusionary nature of colonial society, this study finds evidence to show that the perception of an ethnically divided society is contradicted by evidence of intra-Asian marriages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of the literature and data used did not come from the colonial records. Successive colonial governments ignored registration of lower-class intra-Asian marriages. To colonial governments, any proliferation of the Asian population merely ensured a constant pool of cheap labour and was therefore deemed Dr Marc Rerceretnam is a freelance academic author, a researcher within the non-government commu- nity sector and an affiliate of the Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). He has a special interest in social and political trends and movements in colonial and present-day Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. Correspondence in connection with this paper should be addressed to: marc@hwy.com.au. I would like to thank Dr Merete Bjorkli, of the College of Health and Science, University of Western Sydney and Dr Christina Ho of Social Inquiry, UTS, for providing invaluable feedback. 1 See, for instance, Collin E.R. Abraham, Divide and rule: The roots of race relations in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Institute for Social Analysis, 1997), p. 13; Syed Hussein Alatas, The myth of the lazy native (London: Frank Cass, 1977), p. 7; Michael D. Barr, ‘Lee Kuan Yew: Race, culture and genes’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 29, 2 (1999): 145–66; Michael Stenson, Class, race and colonialism in West Malaysia: The Indian case (Brisbane: University of Queensland, 1980). Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 43(2), pp 302–323 June 2012. 302 © The National University of Singapore, 2012 doi:10.1017/S0022463412000070