Naraina Pillai
Inaugural Excellence Award For Community Service
A socialite, and Tamil businessman Naraina Pillai is a legend in Singapore’s historical annals having had begun work in Penang before coming to meet Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, the East India Company’s most senior official during the early 19th Century.
Their association was one based on mutual interests and an affinity borne out of a common purpose for the furtherance of Singapore’s interests. It was this joint interest and common desire to effect a lasting and historical relationship that laid the building blocks we today see in Singapore.
Naraina Pillai never had liveried background. Before stepping foot on Singapore’s shores he was just but a humble clerk in British ruled Penang. In 1819 he was attracted either by choice or design by the vision of anew settlement for Singapore, by Raffles. Both men sailed together and where the only other Indians on board the ship were those of the Indian police (Sepoys).
Over in Singapore, Pillai was thrust into anew environment with brand new surroundings and a sense of urgency. To begin what he set out to do, he secured employment in the Treasury. The rapid clip of housing and development made Raffles and Pillai realise that a new commercial opportunity was in the offing. To facilitate that, he quickly began building kilns at where now Tanjong Pagar stands and counselled of the need for bricklayers and clothes merchants, thus sealing his name and reputation as Singapore’s first-ever contractor from South Asia.
Pillai was an entrepreneur writ large. He retailed in cotton, established an unenviable name for himself and the influx of Europeans and other nationalities into Singapore only but helped to foster his name and his business. For a while everything was going on well for Pillai just in the way he wanted. But a ferocious fire sometime in the 1820s gutted all of his fortunes and his hopes and sank him reeling into debt. That was when he excited the sympathy of British merchants and lo and behold he turned to the very man he had always trusted: Raffles.
With a new lifeline he could ill-afford himself, Pillai was back to where he started but this time, with a ‘vengeance’ to even out the scores he sustained. Apart from his business acumen Pillai could even be said to be of the unknown progenitor in the growth of Singapore’s nascent Indian community. He had always wanted to build a Hindu temple but issues over the suitability of some sites and fresh water supplies put his dream to pay. But on his third time, he turned lucky. By some fortuitous stroke Pillai found a spot in South Bridge Road from where he began the first founding blocks to what is today known as the legendary Sri Mariamman Temple. That momentous event in 1823 was soon to reveal Pillai, the philanthropist who with a steely determination organizing Singapore’s Indian community by seeking to educate boys and embarking on other social endeavours.
Truly and surely Pillai won recognition, not out of design but by accident. The British made him chief of the Indians and that gave me a moral authority to settle disputes amongst the Indians who settled in Singapore. As could have been ordinarily the name of Pillai rang out with an alacrity. Apart from just being immortalized, the legacy of Pillai stands out not just in his temple but as a refuge it created for Indian immigrants who among other things, had their marriages solemnized. Even a road, named Pillai Road was Commemorated in his memory Off Paya Lebar Road.