Singapore Tourism Board Research Articles

Restaurants in Little India, Singapore: A Study of Spatial Organization and Pragmatic Cultural Change

Food is not culturally neutral but strongly associated with identity, prestige, social place, and symbolic meanings. In Singapore's Little India, food has been commercialized as a public good of consumption, integral of a broadly defined ethnic Indian identity and representation. Over the years, within the spatial setting of Little India, the ethnic Indian cuisine has been adapted for rapid change in new environments. These include the impacts of the government's policy to use it to promote multiculturalism, the Urban Redevelopment Authority's earmarking of Little India as a conservation area in 1 989, and the Singapore Tourism Board's campaign to attract international tourists. For restaurant operators, it is the pragmatic business adaptation and cuisine hybridization that is most essential for survival. Consequently, the outcome of this process of accommodating change has produced a new breed of cityscape in a systematically identified zone of the increasingly cosmopolitan Singapore. Food has an array of representations that make it far from being culturally neutral, even though it may appear otherwise. It is strongly associated with identity, prestige, social place, and symbolic meanings (Narayan 1997, p. 161). Frequently, food possesses inherent characteristics that are a habitually accumulated outcome of a long social process. As a social and cultural product, food can thus be domesticated as ethnic cuisine through which representation is established and fully inscribed with ethnicity (Chua and Rajah 1996). Hence, when food is represented symbolically as part of the cultural traits of an ethnic community, it carries a collectivized identity. Nevertheless, food being a basic commodity for public consumption,