S Rajaratnam’s Writings Before 1959: A Preliminary Annotated Bibliography

S Rajaratnam’s Writings Before 1959: A Preliminary Annotated Bibliography

Sinnathamby Rajaratnam is best known as Singapore’s first Minister for Culture and, after independence in 1965, Singapore’s first Minister for Foreign Affairs. In these two positions, and in other offices in a long subsequent political career, Rajaratnam theorized Singaporean multiculturalism, and developed a national foreign policy. His speeches and commentaries while in Government are well known, and many have been reproduced in two collections, The Prophetic and the Political, edited by Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq, and S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality, edited by Kwa Chong Guan. Rajaratnam’s short stories, written during his sojourn in London during the Second World War, and six radio plays he wrote in the 1950s, have also been collected in Irene Ng’s The Short Stories and Radio Plays of S. Rajaratnam. The majority of Rajaratnam’s writings before he entered the first People’s Action Party cabinet on 5 June 1959, however, were published in newspapers and magazines during his career as a journalist. Few of these are listed in bibliographical sources: Gandhimathy Durairaj and Linda Yip Seong Chun’s S. Rajaratnam: A Bibliography, for instance, makes scant reference to material before 1959.

This bibliography attempts a preliminary listing of Rajaratnam’s print publications before Singapore’s achievement of self-government in 1959. During his time in London from 1935 to 1947, Rajaratnam published articles and short stories in magazines in Britain and in the United States, and journalism in left-wing newspapers in London, as well as an early article in a Penang newspaper. After his return to Singapore in 1947, he worked first for the Malaya Tribune, and then from 1950 onwards for the Singapore Standard. After an abortive and financially ruinous effort to found Raayat, “a magazine for educated Malayans,” Rajaratnam began working for the Straits Times in early 1955, resigning in election year in 1959.

The bibliography only lists articles that carry Rajaratnam’s byline, or which can be definitively identified as being by him from other contemporary sources. A large body of his work does not carry bylines. In London, Rajaratnam cut his journalistic teeth writing news articles for publications such as Reynold’s News, and he also served as London correspondent for the Bombay-based Free Press Journal. In Singapore, he wrote many editorials and other articles without bylines in the Tribune and the Standard, and also acted as a correspondent for the London-based Observer and its international news service. In this bibliography I have been extremely cautious in including articles without a byline. I have only listed such articles which, from contemporary sources, are clearly identified as being by Rajaratnam. An example of this is Rajaratnam’s December 1949 review of University of Malaya Economics professor Thomas Silcock’s Dilemma in Malaya, which is unsigned, but whose authorship emerges during the acrimonious debate that emerged from Silcock’s letter in response. Following this principle, I have also excluded anonymous or pseudonymous editorials and longer articles from the magazine Raayat which are clearly in Rajaratnam’s style, and pseudonymous articles, again distinctively in his style, from the People’s Action Party publication Petir during his tenure as editor. I have been unable to examine a full run of Petir, and so some articles published under Rajaratnam’s byline may still be missing from the bibliography as it stands. Finally, in the absence of contemporary external evidence, I have not included the many news articles and editorials from his period at Singapore Standard that were likely written by him, and which contributed to his eventual resignation from the Standard when he refused to align his politics with that of the newspaper’s proprietor, Aw Boon Haw. For an account of some of this journalism, see Irene Ng’s The Singapore Lion: A Biography of S. Rajaratnam, especially chapters 7 and 9. In the case when an article or short story is subsequently reprinted, I have only included details of its first publication.

Philip Holden, May 2024

References

Durairaj, Gandhimathy. S. Rajaratnam: A Bibliography. Edited by Linda Yip Seong Chun. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.

Ng, Irene. The Singapore Lion: A Biography of S. Rajaratnam. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010.

---.     S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality. Edited by Kwa Chong Guan. Singapore: World Scientific, 2006.

---.     S. Rajaratnam: The Prophetic and the Political.  Edited by Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq. 2^nd ed. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.

---.     The Short Stories and Radio Plays of S. Rajaratnam. Edited by Irene Ng. Singapore: Epigram, 2011.

Click on the link to view and download the bibliography:
Bibliography of Articles and Short Stories

About the Compiler

Philip Holden worked for 25 years at Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore. His scholarship in auto/biography studies includes the book Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity and the Nation-State, and articles in major journals such as biography, Life Writing, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. He has published widely on Singapore and Southeast Asian literatures, is the co-author of The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English, and one of the editors of Writing Singapore, the most comprehensive historical anthology of Singapore literature in English. He is now an independent scholar, researching Singapore intellectual and educational history, and also works, as a counsellor, at the intersection mental health and storytelling.