Transcript

Jimmy
What exactly is a keramat? 

William Gibson
So, I mean, I think most people today associate it with a mystical grave, miracle-working grave. 

Jimmy
It’s not just a grave, it’s a miracle-working grave. 

William Gibson
Yeah, and it was important. So, a magical grave, if you want to put it that way because whoever was buried had certain powerful properties. These concepts predate the coming of Islam to Nusantara. And there’s a strong tradition of nature keramat, which also has this power. Usually a spirit living in a tree, a rock, a whirlpool or something like this. Animals could be keramat. 

Jimmy
Oh, I did not know that. 

William Gibson
Usually, but not always, like large predators. And often they were albino. So white tigers and crocodiles. And these would be appreciated by people before they went to the forest or before they went fishing because these were real dangers to these people. They could be eaten by these animals. So, you find a spirit incarnation of it. 

And the word used for these was keramat. 

[Music playing] 

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating. 

The story of Badang the Strongman is a children’s folktale that has also become part of the mythology of modern Singapore. This charming story involves a slave who swallows the vomit of a demon, gains incredible strength, and eventually hurls a rock from Fort Canning down to the mouth of the Singapore River. That rock is the Singapore Stone, a monolith with mysterious writings, now destroyed. 

At least that’s the version you’ll find in the children’s story. However, the story that this children’s version comes from is actually much more complicated, as William L. Gibson has found. He’s done a deep dive into the literature to look at the origins of the Badang myth, and he’s also wandered around the region looking for traces of Badang. William, of course, is no stranger to fans of this podcast. 

He's previously been on the show to talk about a German girl shrine on Pulau Ubin and a shrine on Kusu Island. You can basically call him the Shrine Guy. An author, scholar, and National Library research fellow, his latest book is Keramat, Sacred Relics and Forbidden Idols in Singapore, just published in 2024. Welcome back to the show, William. How are you? 

William Gibson
Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I’m very happy to be here again. Good to see you. 

Jimmy
What’s the latest shrine that you’ve been able to visit? 

William Gibson
Well, I’ve been changing my focus a bit out of Singapore and spending a lot of time down in Jakarta, where I used to live. I’m looking at a lot of interesting shrines on the North shore of Jakarta, which have parallels with some of the things you can find here in Singapore. 

Jimmy
It sounds really interesting. Okay, let me take you back. From exciting Jakarta to boring Singapore. I gave a very short, very abbreviated version of Badang but maybe for the people who are not so familiar with the tale, do you want to tell us about Badang? 

William Gibson
Yeah. I mean, I think for a Singapore audience, there’s a certain amount of familiarity that comes, as you were saying, from exposure via, children’s illustrated histories of Singapore, National Day parades. He’s been featured a few times. And he’s become a kind of national icon, which is interesting because he didn’t start that way. The stories that we have of Badang come from the Malay Annals and there are different editions and versions of the Annals out there. 

And his story is more or less stable across those, but not always, there are changes. 

Jimmy
Oh, there are changes? Like what? 

William Gibson
His origin sometimes gets changed. Whether or not he was what they call Orang Benua, which was a kind of Orang Asli people, sometimes that origin shifts a bit, sometimes different events associated with him. And toponyms associated with him appear in later versions of the Annals. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
But the ones in the story that we know, this kind of distilled story, comes from the Raffles 18 recension which scholars seem to think is the most authentic. It’s datable. The go-to for people who want to talk about the Annals. In my own research, because I can’t read Jawi, I’m limited to the English and the Rumi editions, of which there are still quite a number that I was able to refer to and look at the way there’s variations in that story. 

Jimmy
So, tell us a bit more about Badang. 

William Gibson
He seems to be an aboriginal person, which immediately starts interesting conversations about identity. Why was he projected this way? Was he ever a real person? And this has become a kind of mythology that’s built up around a real individual at some point. If you go back and look at the stories of him and the sites associated with him, they are across what we could call the Malacca-Johor Sultanate, which of course, now is three separate countries: Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia. 

At one point in time, he was kind of a local hero within that regional group. And different groups within that area, whether they were Bugis or Malay, would pick up those stories and try to take Badang as their own. So, whoever he was, or if he only began as a kind of myth, he became a very important hero figure. 

And you can read that in a few different ways. I mean, maybe the strength that he was able to show that he could do that. There’s been interpretations where, as a slave, he was able to improve himself and rise up and become a military figure. So, there’s a kind of parable there that might appeal to people. 

So it’s hard to say exactly why I think he became as popular as he did across that region. And then through time, because the Annals were picked up by the British as an important document for the history of the region, and you have an English translation come out, I think as early as 1821 or 1822. 

That’s the Leyden edition, and the Badang story was excerpted from that and reprinted in magazines in Europe. So, the Gentleman’s Magazine in London prints that in like 1822, 1823. So for some reason that story really resonated with the British as a kind of, quintessential Malay, folktale that they could then take. 

So, it was very much in the British mind. You know, this figure of Badang who was out here, and that hasn’t ended. I mean, it’s interesting that he remains this popular figure within Singapore, especially [one who’s taken] on as this kind of national icon because of his appearance in the Malay Annals. 

Jimmy
I think he must be eating the vomit. That seems like a very... 

William Gibson
It’s a very peculiar symbol. Well, it’s very unappetising. So, shall we say, in the original versions, he’s laying fish traps in a river. And this spirit, the versions I saw used the word hantu. Do you see other translations that use genie? Kind of like demon.

So, a supernatural figure steals his fish and he catches this figure stealing his fish. And the figure says, “Look, I’ll grant you a wish. What do you want? But to get it, you got to eat my vomit.” And what he wants is, you know, super strength. 

A kind of Incredible Hulk kind of figure, you know? 

Jimmy
The original Incredible Hulk. Except not green. 

William Gibson
And he doesn’t have to get angry to be buff. So, he eats the vomit and probably turns green after eating the vomit and he becomes super strong. And because of this, you know, he comes to the attention of the king of Singapore, at the time, Singapura. And he’s elevated into a military figure to a military officer, Hulublang, I believe that’s how it’s pronounced. 

And from there, he starts performing these feats of strength and the feat of strength that everyone seems to know that’s been picked up and mythologised for Singapore national patriotic purposes is him tossing this rock, from what we call Fort Canning to the mouth of the river. And in the original versions of this, this is literally two sentences. 

It’s not some long drawn-out incident in the annals. I mean, it’s like there was a big rock, to prove his strength, he picked it up and tossed it, and it wound up at the mouth of the river. 

So, from those two sentences, we get this explosion of Badang within the kind of Singapore national consciousness, which I find really fascinating. 

Jimmy
What is really interesting to me is that in your article for BiblioAsia, you point out that actually in the Malay Annals, there is no mention of any writings of any sort on this rock, which is what the Singapore Stone is primarily known for. 

William Gibson
So, the Singapore stone as it’s called, which is a post-independence name for it, becomes a kind of totem of patriotism within Singapore. There was an effort made after independence to find a past for Singapore as distinct from Malaysia and Indonesia. And what makes a Singaporean. 

And they kind of took what was in the 1950s, a British interpretation of pre-colonial Singapore, based on a very select reading of a very few select texts. And from that created this story of early Singapore, which is still with us. I mean, I think scholars have been chipping away at that and trying to point out places where it’s no longer an accurate version, but because it’s been enshrined in National Day parades and kids’ books, it’s become part of a kind of curriculum. 

It's become conventional wisdom, the accepted story. So, this Badang throwing the Singapore stone is what people know him for doing. But yeah, if you go back to the Annals, there’s no mention of any writing on the stone before or after. And so, you ask yourself, where does this come from? 

And it comes from a British source, a fellow named Peter Begbie who wrote a very important book, The Malayan Peninsula in 1834. 

It’s a very important record of the era. And it is in that book that we first find this mixing of the Singapore stone and Badang. And to understand that you have to take a step back and understand what the Singapore Stone was and where it was found. 

So, it was this large, engraved rock that was at the mouth of the Singapore River, which seems at first glance to match the Badang story, because he threw the rock and it landed at the mouth of the river, right? Unfortunately, that rock was located in a place called Rocky Point because there were lots of rocks there. 

It wasn’t the only rock at the mouth of the river, which, I think in people’s minds it was like, oh, there was the mouth of the river and there’s this thing – and it wasn’t. There were lots of rocks around there, including other rocks that were considered sacred by Orang Laut and other people. Munshi Abdullah in his autobiography describes Rocky point very carefully. 

So, we’ve got a good idea of what it looks like. And amongst these rocks, the British came across the one with engraving on it, which is what we know as the Singapore Stone. They blow it up and we only have fragments left. Scholars still debate what language it’s written in and what’s actually written on it. But Begbie, back in the early 1830s, somehow either someone told him or he was confused, but it winds up in his book that this is the rock that Badang threw, and  that’s what’s written in his story. 

Jimmy
Right.

William Gibson
Which causes some issues because in the Annals, like we said, there’s no writing on the rock that Badang throws. There is, however, writing on a grave that was made for him after he died. 

Jimmy
Okay... 

William Gibson
So, Begbie mixes up three separate rocks that are associated with Badang and that mix up has kind of never been undone. So, we wind up still with a story that Badang threw the Singapore Stone. Which seems to be a colonial era invention. You know, the British themselves came up with [the story] or maybe after the stone was discovered, some of the local people made that connection themselves and told the British. 

Jimmy
Right. 

William Gibson
But it doesn’t at least exist in the Annals. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
Or before Begbie. So, we really can’t say where exactly that story arises from, but we can say, it doesn’t have a kind of deep historical resonance. Yeah? 

Jimmy
So, we have two stones, there’s one stone that Badang threw. There’s the other stone, the Singapore stone, the rock with the words, and there’s a third stone, which is his gravestone? 

William Gibson
Yes. So, in different versions of the Annals, it’s the same story, but there’s some details that change. Essentially after Badang died, you know, his fame was so renowned that the Tamil king, they called him the King of Kalinga, sent an engraved monument to be put over his grave. Which, where is the grave? 

The Annals say he was buried by the Buru people. And then you have to start asking, well, where was Buru? In some versions, it was not one stone, but two. So, it looks like an Islamic grave lies on the grave with the two stones on either end. In other versions, it’s only one. But all the versions say this is still visible today. 

Jimmy
Yes. That's interesting. 

William Gibson
It's interesting when you put it in perspective that the Annals that we’re referring to were written in the 15th century. So that was visible in the 15th century. It may not be invisible by the time the British show up. So going and looking for this becomes maybe quixotic. Nonetheless I did, because I wanted to, you know. So yes, it kind of just begs the question, you know, where is this monument? And where is Buru? And you start looking in the Annals and you realise very quickly that Buru is a bit ephemeral. Very hard to find exactly where it is. Now, some places that are mentioned in the Annals and the British in the 19th century were very interested in doing this as well, like finding places that are mentioned in the Annals, to kind of legitimise it. 

They went around, found these ruins right exactly where they should be. And there’s graves here where they say there should be graves. But Buru, they felt, was on a tanjong which goes down into the entrance of Selat Tebrau. Which they call the old Singapore Straits. The modern name of that is Tanjung Piai – P-I-A-I. Piai, if you want, but that’s not the PIE, that’s the very congested expressway. Don’t confuse that with that. 

Jimmy
Don’t get into PIE. 

William Gibson
That’s not a name that was in the Annals at all. However, older charts of that land call it Tanjung Buru, but then they start calling it Tanjung Barus. And then, by the 19th century, you see all three names appearing, sometimes on the same chart. 

Jimmy
Right. 

William Gibson
So, the British in the 19th century look in the Annals, they see the name Buru and they say, it must have been this Tanjung where Badang was buried but there’s nothing there today. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
So, they went to look for this, too. They want to find this rock with Tamil writing on it. They can’t find it but they’re convinced this is where it was. Now if you look in the Annals again and it’s like, okay, if there are other clues about Buru. Some versions of the Annals are given as a war prize at one point and it is said to have 40 warships. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
And these warships would have had very large crews. So, we’re not looking for a small place. I mean, it would have been a fairly large property that they could feel that or it could have been a group of Orang Laut. 

Jimmy
Which makes sense, yeah. 

William Gibson
It does, but then they’re in the ocean. So, Buru would be someplace they were near. Right? So now you have another candidate which is Pulau Buru, which is an island just south of Pulau Karimun. 

Jimmy
Ah okay. 

William Gibson
Which is also not too far from the entrance to the Straits. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
And there is now a grave on Pulau Buru, which is said to be the grave of Badang. 

Jimmy
So that’s it, we solved the problem! 

William Gibson
But we haven’t, because we can only trace that back to about the 1960s. It’s actually the earliest reference to that grave being in places in the 1970s. So, I went to Buru. 

Jimmy
Okay. Was this purposely to look for the keramat? 

William Gibson
Purposely to find Badang’s grave. It’s on Google maps. It’s not hard to find, but it’s a bit remote and so great fun getting there. And you get there, we got to photograph this site and talk to local people. How long has this been here? The 1960s or so we think, because this is already going back. These guys are already in their 50s, so they don’t have a lot of memories of this. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

William Gibson
What was here before? Well, there was a rock with writing on it. Now, this should stop you in your tracks, right? Okay. Now, what was the writing? Nobody knows. So, there’s a few references to writings on Buru. One of them is in a scholarly work which shows up in a footnote as there is a rock on Buru with Buddhist scriptures. Now no one there knew about this when we were there. In other versions of this, it was Hindu writing, whatever that means. Sanskrit, I guess? But that’s the word they used. Hindu writing on the stone. So, there’s always a mysterious man from Malaysia who could read this Hindu writing and told the local people, this is the grave of Badang. 

Jimmy
Right. 

William Gibson
So, we’re there. We look at the stone. There’s no writing on the headstone. 

Jimmy
It’s all been eroded. 

William Gibson
Maybe it’s eroded. Maybe that stone was taken away at some point. Maybe it never existed. I mean, there’s really no way to [know]. Unless someone has a photograph, we find more textual references to that? So, the site itself has been around since at least the 60s. Maybe, I could track it back to 1972. 

The first mention of it, which again raises all sorts of strange questions. What is this thing? So, it could have started as a nature shrine. And then identity was important. It could have started out as an Orang Laut shrine. This particular thing is located on a rise. And this was an auspicious place, Orang Laut would place graves or grave shrines to their potentates. 

So, it could have started as that and the identity shifted, or it could have just been someone had a dream and Badang presented himself or it could be something else completely. 

Jimmy
Or it could be Badang’s actual... 

William Gibson
Or it could be Badang’s actual grave. You know, all the above are possibilities you can entertain. With varying degrees of probability attached to each one of those. Now, there is a large tree there called the Garwood tree, which has long been a sacred tree because it creates a very fragrant wood which is used in both Buddhist and Hindu prayer beads and to make icons and carved wooden icons. 

So, the presence of that tree next to this shrine might be a tip off it was a nature shrine. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
Or a Datuk Kong Shrine, which then took on this identity of.... And the signage on site calls him Datok Badang. 

Jimmy
Datok Badang? Okay. 

William Gibson
Which might be an indication and my own preference. IMO, as they say online these days. I just realised what that actually means. In my opinion, IMO, it’s probably... 

Jimmy
IMHO.. In my humble opinion. Did you not know this? You’re old, man... 

William Gibson
Dude, I’m out of touch, spending too much time on this. 

Jimmy
In your humble opinion. 

William Gibson
In my... IHMO, it probably started as a nature shrine and or was a very old grave. Had it had an old stone on it, like a Batu Aceh stone or something. That stone just isn’t there anymore. It’s been completely rebuilt because it was designated as a cultural site by the Riau government, as kind of a tourist draw. 

And so they put concrete around it and it’s been nicely done. 

Jimmy
So, all that work was done by the local government? 

William Gibson
Yeah, that’s right. And only in the last, I think from the 1990s. That’s in the Biblioasia article. You can see photographs of that. And I did track when that was built. And how long it’s been considered an important cultural site by the Riau government. For a while, they’ve been trying to turn Buru into a kind of cultural draw. 

And there’s cool stuff there. There’s an old mosque, there’s an old Chinese temple. There’s an old Bukit Cina, Chinese cemetery on the site. And it’s really not well investigated. So, it’s a cool place to go if you can make it there. And this Badung’s site is one of those cultural attractions that they’ve set up. 

Jimmy
I have to ask, how did you get there from Singapore? What’s involved? 

William Gibson
You have to take a ferry to Karimun and spend the night in Karimun, which is fun. While you’re there, you can go see the Kuraman inscription, which is a famous, Sriwijaya era Buddhist inscription. Which is also connected to Badang. I can come back any moment. Then you got to take a smaller ferry down to Buru. 

You have to negotiate with the local people and get on a motorbike. They drive you through dirt roads, up through the fields and into the woods. And you end up at this site right in the middle of nowhere. It’s a blast. I should thank the Urban Explorers of Singapore who went with me in 2023 to visit that site. And they’d been there before, and they knew how to get around. So that was very useful. And also to interview the local guides, you know, who took us to other sites as well. 

Jimmy
Okay that sounds very fun, but you mentioned something about a Karimun inscription. 

William Gibson
Inscription? Yeah. So, in the great search for Badang’s grave. You start looking for stones that have writing on them that would be either Tamil, because they say it’s a Tamil King, or writing that may have been considered Indianised. So it could be, you know, Sanskrit or something. I guess the local people wouldn’t be able to read it, but they knew it came from India. 

So, one of the sites that I found that might have been misconstrued or changed through the folktale into that is this Karimun inscription. Going back hundreds of years. But it’s on the base of a large granite kind of cliff face, and there are indentations going up that cliff face that have been interpreted as foot stone. 

Jimmy
Footholds? Steps? 

William Gibson
Yeah, if you want to. The idea is that they’re footprints. They have been pressed into the stone by a figure. Now, in some interpretations of the actual inscription on the stone, they are footsteps of Buddha when he passed through. Other interpretations of that have it being another Buddhist holy man’s […] historical tracks of having visited this area, but another version, which is one of the local versions which I could track back to the 70s at least, was that those are the footprints of Badang. So Badang was there and he stepped on this and he was so strong that his feet pressed into the stone. And then this inscription memorialises that event, because if you can’t read the inscription and you think those are Badang’s footprints… And these are not the only stones with footprints in them in the region. They have been associated with these kinds of semi mythological figures. There’s one associated with the Malay hero Hang Tuah, which is up in Cape Rachado, near Port Dickson. And there’s a great big rock with this kind of impression on it. 

In my humble opinion, it’s a naturally occurring formation but sometimes they really do look like footprints. 

Jimmy
Yeah. Okay. 

William Gibson
There’s another one in Penang in a Chinese temple called Sam Poh Kong, which is associated with Admiral Cheng Ho. And again, that one really does look like a footprint. So, they built a temple around it. So, this is not a unique phenomenon to Karimun. So, one of these associations then is with Badang, another stone associated with it? 

Jimmy
Right. Okay. Well, in addition to Pulau Buru, there other places, like in Perak, I think you were saying, there are other places that could be Buru or Pulu. 

William Gibson
Yeah. There’s another in Sumatra in a place called Beruas – is how they transliterated that now. There are actually Tamil stones that date back to, like, the ten hundreds. 

Jimmy
Wow. Okay. 

William Gibson
Yeah, a thousand years over. They’re now in the National Museum in Jakarta and there’s no disputing the fact these were in place by Tamil traders and they match very closely the description of Badang’s grave in the Malay Annals, as far as it being a kind of pillar with, you know, Tamil writing on it. 

So, those do exist in the region and if you look in Jawi, which I have a very imperfect understanding of, admittedly, but the kind of phonetically the way the words sound, the way you write Buru, or Beruas, or Burus are very similar. 

Jimmy
So easy to.... 

William Gibson
Well, so you start thinking, okay, there’s a few explanations for this. Number one, remember these are hand copied manuscripts. So, it could be a copyist error. And in one edition of the Annals, I think it’s the Raffles 18, that error persists. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
So instead of writing Buru, they write Beruas. 

Jimmy
Okay, okay. 

William Gibson
Yeah. Beruas. I think I’m mispronouncing. Beruas, is what I should say. And so, the editors have always attributed this as an error. Maybe it’s not an error. Maybe that’s the original word that was being used and as these stories moved to the peninsula, they changed to Buru from Beruas. 

Jimmy
Right. 

William Gibson
That’s one explanation. Another explanation is that Badang was buried in Sumatra and not near the entrance to the Straits. So, trying to find that exact spot, even trying to find Buru itself becomes sort of like looking for Atlantis. 

It seems like there may have probably been something there at one point. And then it becomes like Atlantis. No, I mean, seriously, there’s been enough, I think, archaeological work to say there probably was an island with the city on it that sank in the Mediterranean and that became this undersea city of Atlantis. You know, this pre-civilization of Atlantis, which is still a myth that persists today. 

Jimmy
Okay. Although Aquaman was not. Speaking of Aquaman and stories, you’ve also done some research into other stories that are similar to Badang. 

William Gibson
Yeah. So, if you start looking at him as a folktale, and again, the vomit thing is important because that’s if you want to find, you know, a folktale, you look for different elements, so you break a tale down into its elements. And obviously, this emetic element of eating vomit is something that, okay, we’ll find other stories where people eat stuff. 

Jimmy
Is that very common, I mean, eating vomit? 

William Gibson
I wouldn’t say common. 

Jimmy
Okay. So that's good, right? So, it’s not like everybody did it to gain power. 

William Gibson
It wasn’t a popular thing, it wasn’t on trend. There was no TikTok back then. 

Jimmy
We could start a new trend from it. 

William Gibson
In my research, I didn’t find other folktales where, you know, stuff gets up-chucked and eaten and there’s always something about the Badang story that seems very Hindu. And given that time frame, when they would have been Muslim, it would have been a Hindu, you know, setting. 

And so you think, well, maybe the story has kind of migrated from India. And I did find a story, which is set in modern-day Bangladesh by the Burua people. Another odd, maybe coincidence, is that there is a story about a fisherman who catches a fish. So, there’s another parallel. This fish turns out to be the fish king who rides about on a cow. 

So he’s got a sacred mount. And he winds up – I can’t remember exactly how the story goes. It’s in the article, but at some point, he winds up capturing a mythological beast who chucks a gold ring. And by taking this ring, it makes the fisherman incredibly rich. And he has a house of gold now, so you find these kinds of stories of the transference of power from the supernatural creature to human via this emetic means. So as opposed to casting a spell, you actually have to ingest something from that. 

Jimmy
It’s very, very powerful. 

William Gibson
Yeah, it is a strong metaphor and it shows up in other stories. There was another one from, I believe, Perak. The story of a woman, Nenek Payung, I believe her name is. And she winds up meeting these two village girls, spitting in their mouths. 

And from that, they learned the methods of cultivating rice. So, this mother nature figure. Nenek means grandma. And so, she winds up coming and sharing agricultural knowledge via spitting in the mouth. So, these are parallels you can find with this Badang story of eating vomit. 

Jimmy
Right. So, actually, now, you’ve been doing a lot of research into keramat. For the people who may not have listened to your earlier podcasts, what exactly is a keramat? 

William Gibson
I think most people today associate it with a mystical grave, miracle-working grave. 

Jimmy
It’s not just a grave, it’s a miracle-working grave. 

William Gibson
Yeah, and it was important. So, a magical grave, if you want to put it that way because whoever was buried had certain powerful properties. These concepts predate the coming of Islam to Nusantara (Malay World). And there’s a strong tradition of nature keramat. Which also have this power, usually a spirit living in a tree, a rock, a whirlpool or something like this. Animals could be keramat. 

Jimmy
Oh, I did not know that. 

William Gibson
Usually, but not always, like large predators. And often they were albino. So white tigers and crocodiles. And these would be appreciated by people before they went to the forest or before they went fishing because these were real dangers to these people. They could be eaten by these animals. So you find a spirit incarnation of it. 

And the word used for these was keramat. And when you get to Islamic traditions, then it overlaps with a lot of Sufi traditions, of ideas of awliya, friends of Allah, who were, for lack of a better term in English, saints, Islamic saints. Modern forms of Islam that were practiced now in this part of the world, in some countries, looked very much askance at this as a form of polytheism, which is not allowed in Islam. 

And it’s a very touchy subject for many Muslims. On the other hand, in Indonesia, that issue doesn’t seem to be as broad as it is in Malaysia and Singapore. And worship at these keramat, or makam is the Arabic word, a grave of a high person, is very common and so happens very frequently to the point that it becomes a kind of industry. 

There are religious tours. People get on buses and drive, and they’re taken around all of Java or all of Sumatra to visit these sites, specifically to pray at them. And it becomes a kind of good luck tour, and very lucrative for the people running these tours. So, the sites I’m looking at in Jakarta, you know, participate in those kinds of tours. 

And so these individual sites, if you go and study them and study their folk stories, you can find a lot of truth that runs underneath it, and it allows you to build a kind of map, an extraterritorial map of trade routes, cultural influences, even to the point of maybe when they arrived on the scene, which historians can find very interesting. 

Now, this is a bit tricky because we’re working with folktales. It’s sometimes hard to sort fact from fiction. But nonetheless, I think in recent times maybe only the last 10, 15 years, scholars, people at NUS even, have started looking at these things in a very different light, as opposed to just kind of disposable folk culture. 

Roadside shrines mean nothing. So, they’re like, wait a minute, there’s actually a lot of value here because they offer us a lot of insight into these historical events and moments, which otherwise we might not be able to have. So, there’s been that shift as well, and the importance of keramat was to preserve them and not just destroy them as a kind of, old fashioned superstition. 

Jimmy
I just want to turn and talk about your book that you’ve published. What’s the title again? 

William Gibson
The title of the book, which I’m holding in my hand is Keramat, Sacred Relics and Forbidden Idols in Singapore. 

Jimmy
It sounds like it’s obviously going to be a bestseller. 

William Gibson
It is. It already has made me rich and famous. 

Jimmy
And, you actually, I think you did a lot of that research while you were a fellow at the National Library. 

William Gibson
Yeah, the Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship in 2022, I believe. Yeah, that was a key moment for me in that research, which, you know, it allowed me to spend time to focus just on that and not have to earn money elsewhere. 

Jimmy
As the expert on keramat. How many keramat are there now in Singapore? 

William Gibson
I mean, it’s hard to say. At one point, in the 1950s it was over 100. 

Jimmy
Over 100? 

William GibsonYeah, so studies in the 1950s, people undertook, you know, listed them. There were maybe two dozen really well-known ones in the 1950s. Yeah, by the end 19 – before independence. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

William Gibson
And the development and now redevelopment that’s been going on in Singapore. The British destroyed a few, but they tended to keep them. Mostly because they had trouble finding people who would be willing to demolish them because it brings you bad luck. You risk death if you demolish. 

And so, then the British, like, you know, if it’s not really in the way… 

Jimmy
We’ll work around it. 

William Gibson
We’ll leave it. If it’s in the way, we’ll blow it up. Very British solutions to these things. Yeah. In the independence era, there was a tendency to say everything is going to go, it doesn’t matter. You know, temple, mosque, village, whatever, it’s going to be redeveloped and it was and there was not a lot of study done on those sites. 

So, a lot of them were lost in that period. Of the 25-odd that were around in the 1950s, you’re probably down to about five or six now. That are well-known and accessible. There’s a few that are less well-known and are inaccessible because they’re on state land or private land. Which I had to make a great effort to access and find. 

So, you know, I think within Singapore, you can probably name a few that are well-known. There’s Kusu, Habib Noh is the most important. Now, I’d like to talk, if we have time, I’d like to talk about him a bit more later. Iskandar Shah, which is in Fort Canning.

And you also have in Siglap, you’ve got the founder of Siglap, who is Tok Lasam. 

Jimmy
Oh, I didn’t know there was a keramat. 

William Gibson
Yeah, there is. This is in a little field on a street called Jalan Pedang Sang. Which is right in the heart of Siglap, right where all the fancy restaurants and tapas bars are these days. That originally had been Kampong Siglap. And when that was destroyed, the cemetery around it was removed except for those graves. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
Which are still there and I was able to track that very, very specifically. And he was an actual person. His name shows up in the newspapers. He was the penghulu of Siglap. So, there’s a real history behind that. Yeah, but these are the ones that I think are best known that still exist. There’s some that linger very strongly in local memory. 

There was a keramat up at Bukit Timah Road at the 8th milestone. Which was very important not just for Muslims, but for Hindus as well. And that was destroyed, and moved to be reburied, whenever they found it was reburied in Pusara Abadi, which is in Choa Chu Kang. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

William Gibson
And it’s still visited. So, does it still exist or not? Yes. That’s an interesting question. The original shrine was destroyed. It’s been moved. It’s very hard to get to now. You have to drive all the way out to Choa Chu Kang cemeteries but people do make the effort to go there. 

Jimmy
This is interesting. 

William Gibson
Even though it’s been migrated and the identity is shifted a bit with that one. But that was a very important site in Singapore. It’s kind of surprising they were allowed to destroy that. 

Jimmy
What was that one called? 

William Gibson
It had a lot of different names. If you look for it now online, you usually find it under Batu Lapan but because it was at the 8th milestone. Yeah. The Lapan, it’s a short form or just sometimes just the Bukit Timah keramat and it was incredibly popular. At one point in the 1950s, it was as popular as Habib Noh. 

Jimmy
Speaking of Habib Noh. You said you wanted to talk about Habib Noh. 

William Gibson
Yeah, if you want to talk about the importance of keramat across the spectrum, as a heritage marker, as a very important monument to history, as an archive of things in the past. If you want to talk about mythologising real figures because he really existed. And if you want to talk about preservation issues, Habib Noh captures all of those. 

I’m very happy that I’ve been asked by the mosque that oversees that shrine to participate in the team that is writing an official biography of Habib Noh, as well as an official kind of biography of the shrine itself. The makam, as well as the masjid next to it and the historical figures involved with the founding of that mosque. 

Jimmy
Is that Masjid Habib Noh? 

William Gibson
No, Haji Muhammad Saleh. Masjid Haji Muhammad Saleh, which is the name of the man that founded... and which seems to be in the research we’re doing, actually knew Habib Noh. And I have to say, the research team I’m working with is just astonishing. I feel like a guppy amongst whales a lot of the time. 

These guys are just incredible. One of them is an NUS professor who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Malay culture and history. Another one is very active in the local Sufi community. And has this incredible ability to track Arab families that came into Nusantara, through Palembang, through Kedah, and he just has a map in his head of where all these people were because Habib Noh came, his family came from, Hadji Muhammed. And he was... descended from the prophet. 

Which is an important factor when you understand why he came to be worshipped. Early history is hard to come by because there’s nothing really written about him till he dies in 1866 in Singapore. And he’s buried on this hill in what is now Shenton Way. And that site is still there. So, you look at him as a historical figure. 

Very important in understanding Arabic migration patterns into Singapore. Understand the way Islam functioned at that time in Singapore since the functioning, maybe not the functioning, but the understanding of it and the sensibilities of Islam have shifted since that time. Looking at it is mythologising because he was a real person, but stories have accrued around him of magical powers. He could teleport, for example. 

Jimmy
This is while he was alive? 

William Gibson
Yes, but when these stories were coming out, did it come out while he was alive or did they come out after he died? These are the questions we’re trying to tease up. So, you know, these tales of the incredible associated with him. He’s associated as a kind of sea saint because his shrines are located on the harbourfront, or were, because of landfill and land reclamation now no longer are. But it used to be right on the water. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

William Gibson
And so, it became a kind of patron saint of the sailors who came through Singapore. These are all important stories. But what you’re doing is essentially mythologising an actual historical figure. You can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Those stories are important to his legacy and power. And so we have to contextualise those things. 

As far as preservation, if you see the shrine today, it runs right near where there’s a ramp to the ECP. 

Jimmy
Yes, that’s right. I keep passing it. 

William Gibson
And there’s always been discussions in the community of how close that came to being destroyed because of that construction. So another fact that we have spent an incredible amount of time looking at is the details of that time frame, the building of the ECP, planning, responses to preserving the keramat etc.. And then there are folktales associated with it. Bulldozers couldn’t destroy it. 

Jimmy
Right. Yeah. 

William Gibson
Any bulldozer broke down and the people in the village that had been around the keramat all testified to this. So, we put all that in there. 

Jimmy
It’s a great story. 

William Gibson
It’s fantastic. You know, and it has to be included because it shows you the power of the site. So, whether it was a bureaucratic decision, you know, where somebody shuffled some papers and said, “Well, we’ll preserve it. I don’t want to rile up the locals”, or if it was divine intervention or maybe both. 

I mean, to me, you shouldn’t try to elevate one at the expense of the other. And I think when you're studying keramat it is very important to understand that you don’t want to come at it as.... We’re western-trained and so we’re always very sceptical about religious things and everything has to be categorised as under the box. 

I think you have to accept the fact of multiple truths at these sites if you really want to gain insight into them. 

Jimmy
Is this going to be a book or an article? 

William Gibson
Yeah, it’s going to be a nice big coffee table book. Lots of illustrations. 

Jimmy
When will we be able to see this book? 

William Gibson
Let's hope for the beginning of next year? 202.. is that 6 now? 

Jimmy
Yeah, it’ll be. So, you’re saying like sometime in 2026. 

I am very excited because I think a lot of people know the keramat Habib Noh, but they don’t know all these stories. 

William Gibson
I mean, I lived in Singapore before I lived in Indonesia. I lived here for eight years and, you know, drove by it. 

Jimmy
Yeah, you see it all the time. It’s a very prominent place… 

William Gibson
But I assumed it was some old fancy mosque. and then you realise, oh, this is a very important historical monument. It certainly should be preserved or conserved in some way and the story of it should be better known. He still draws people from all over the world to come to that shrine. 

Jimmy
Wait, all over the world? 

William Gibson
All over the world, people come from the Middle East... 

Jimmy
Really? 

William Gibson
People come from Indonesia, you know, and the mosque has to keep track of all of these. 

Jimmy
Really? I did not know that. 

William Gibson
He is still considered a major saint. He’s considered the grand saint of Singapore. He’s considered the pole of Islam in Malaysia. And he still draws people here. 

Jimmy
Wow. 

William Gibson
But if you don’t follow that, if you’re not in that kind of culture, then of course this is all a mystery to you. It’s just this old building by the side of the highway, right? I think that needs to change. 

Jimmy
No, that’s amazing. I did not know that keramat Habib Noh is such an important institution. Based on what you’ve just talked about, you know, in terms of keramat Habib Noh, what sort of allows keramats to persist in Singapore? Fame? 

William Gibson
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean, because of the state power in Singapore, many of the keramat are on state land and they exist at the leisure of the state. Many of them have what are known as temporary occupation licenses, T.O.Ls, which is the same for Chinese temples and Hindu temples and shrines that the state basically says you have a license to stay here. That license is renewable. It’s also revocable. 

Jimmy
Right. 

William Gibson
So, it puts a lot of pressure on shrine keepers, you know, to make sure that they follow all the rules and make sure people aren’t doing bad things at these places. Otherwise the license can be revoked and the shrines destroyed. And this is different in each of the three countries in the region, each approaches that problem very differently but within Singapore, it becomes, maybe not surprisingly, a bureaucratic issue and there are religious issues, like I said, for many Muslims, these things are considered just haram. I mean, they are not permitted. 

And I had a cab driver, a fella who was in his 60s whom I was chatting with, who told me he grew up in Geylang Serai. And I always ask guys like this, do you ever visit Habib Noh and he said, you know, my parents did, my grandparents did. I will never visit one of these shrines. 

And he said to me, his exact words were, “You know, eventually God will forgive any sin except that one, if you commit that sin, you go straight to hell. You never get out.” So that was his perspective. You know, and he wasn’t some kind of uptight religious figure, he was a kind of chilled out cabby. But this was very serious for him. So, in the face of, “we need to save these things for heritage purposes”, you run up against this and that can’t be dismissed either. You can’t just tell these people, oh well, you’re wrong. You’ve got to take account of those sensibilities and find a way to accommodate all of those different needs at these sites. 

It’s not easy for a bureaucracy to do that. Bureaucracy likes black-and-white. And that’s one of the issues with preserving the keramat that still exists. 

Jimmy
Okay, but out of curiosity, how does it get handled in Malaysia and Indonesia? 

William Gibson
Indonesia is very much open to it and they’re still very, as I was saying before, there’s these kinds of tours that go around and usually go to these sites. So, there is a conservative element in Indonesia that doesn’t like this, but so far they don’t have the power to really effect that kind of change and destroy the sites. 

Malaysia, exactly the opposite. Especially in the 70s and 80s into the 90s, it was called the Dakwah movement, which was a bringing of Islamic understanding in an effort to remove what were seen as un-Islamic elements of traditional Malay Islam. 

Jimmy
Or pre-Islam? 

William Gibson
No, not even pre-Islamic, the early forms of Islam that came in from India and had a lot of Sufi elements, had a lot of Shiite elements in them, wound up coming from India and again sitting with other Malay traditions, pre-Islamic traditions, and they blended and created a kind of localised version of Islam. As the Dakwah movement came in, they said this is not really the proper Islam. 

And a lot of other people agree. It was like, you know, I’m glad you’re here to tell us this. You people from Damascus, people from Baghdad, I mean, people considered Islamic scholars who say these things need to be changed. What you’re doing is not permitted and this is in Malaysia. This becomes a kind of default policy position, and a lot of keramat are destroyed. 

In Singapore, we call it MUIS, in Malaysia, each state has its own and is a federal level kind of, bureaucratic institution to monitor and control Islam and it’s under the egis of that organisation or those organisations that a lot of these keramat are literally destroyed. As being, you know, the best solution to the problem is just to... 

Jimmy
Get rid of it. 

William Gibson
Yeah, just get rid of them. In Singapore, they’re destroyed and put up in shopping malls. In Malaysia, they’re destroyed very specifically for those religious purposes. 

Jimmy
Right. 

William Gibson
Strangely enough, people are so interested in them and want to rebuild them. 

Jimmy
They rebuild them? 

William Gibson
They rebuild them or they move them, surreptitiously. Oh, and you also find in Malaysia, there’s a really rich heritage, culture, pop heritage culture in Malaysia, where people are investigating and researching these things and posting videos about them. 

Jimmy
Oh, that’s great. Tell me, why do you think it’s important to study keramat? 

William Gibson
One, they hadn’t been studied. I mean, they were really kind of not considered appropriate for academic study because they’re a part of folk culture. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

William Gibson
And that attitude has shifted and folk culture is becoming important and accepted, along with pop culture. More generally, as a field of academic study. And so they’ve been picked up and including myself, there’s maybe another half dozen people around the world who work on this. You know, we all know each other, and love each other. 

It’s a real kumbaya moment, I got to say, and we all kind of know each other. And so as a small group, I think we are pushing the boundaries of this a bit to try to get more acknowledgment both from an academic perspective and for me, importantly, in Singapore, a government perspective to push for the preservation of these sites and to do it in a way that comes from a very secular perspective of preserving heritage. As opposed to saying this is a religious or ethnic issue. It’s something that all of us can then use. If it’s heritage, we can all learn something from it. 

Jimmy
So now that your keramat book is out, then you’re, you know, earning the big bucks from the royalties. When you’re not holidaying in the Seychelles, what are you working on? 

William Gibson
I’m doing this research into the shrines in North Jakarta. And that’s taking up a lot of my research bandwidth. I don’t have any support from an institution. I don’t work at a university. I don’t work at a major heritage institution of any kind, local or global. I do this completely on my own and that has pros and cons to it. Pros is that I can do whatever I want. I’m not restricted. I don’t have to teach classes etc.. Cons, the biggest is simply cash. I have to pay myself to go to Jakarta and go to these sites. It’s all completely self-funded. 

Jimmy
Right? Okay. 

William Gibson
And it creates an atmosphere, I think, where academics, even though I have a PhD, even though I’ve published a number of peer reviewed books and articles and things, there’s still a sense of, well, he’s an outsider. 

Jimmy
Yeah. Oh, I wanted to ask you about your brush with fame. You were recently featured in the ChannelNewsAsia documentary on... What’s the name of the show? 

William Gibson
Karikal Mahal, which is.. That documentary was... How should I say this... Influence, maybe I’m an influencer now. 

Jimmy
Oh, yeah, yeah you are... 

William Gibson
IMHO, that documentary was influenced by my first article published in BiblioAsia. 

Jimmy
Yeah. Okay. 

William Gibson
Because I lived next to that. 

Jimmy
So, yeah. One of the photos clearly from your kitchen window. 

William Gibson
Yeah, that’s right. So, a local production company found it an interesting piece. And I think the building itself is interesting to the people that live in the East and people are curious about it and they created a really well done, three-part documentary, docu-drama, I should say. And they asked me to come in to be a talking head, which I can do. And my head’s talking, my head spoke. 

Jimmy
Yes. Well, it was an interesting speech by your head, but no, it was very good because, it’s very nice that work that started from BiblioAsia. You know, eventually some gain momentum and we have the docu-drama and I think that, you know, Karikal Mahal is an interesting sort of building, right? 

William Gibson
Absolutely. I mean, the story behind that is fascinating and detailed very well in my article, which you can find on the BiblioAsia website. 

Jimmy
Okay. Complete this sentence. Mythology is.... 

William Gibson
Yes, mythology is. So, I think when you say this, people think of it as something ancient and old and Zeus. 

Jimmy
Yeah, that’s what I think, actually. 

William Gibson
It’s not, you’re completely wrong. 

Jimmy
Not for the first time. 

William Gibson
It’s a process that I think is absolutely essential to humanity itself. I think you’re going to struggle to find any grouping of people, whether you’re talking a civilization level, nation state level, polity, ethnic groups, religious groups, tribal groups who do not mythologise and mythologise constantly because what mythology gives you is two very important things. It creates identity and it creates legitimacy for a ruling elite and both of those things are essential for organised human activity. Again, whether it’s civilisation level, you think of Greek mythology, which is a huge, broad topic, you know, or you can put it down to. We talked about Habib Noh, this becomes a kind of localised mythology. 

And I don’t, that word is not pejorative to say that’s a mythological figure. Academics have turned their back on it because academics are snooty this way. But it’s not a pejorative word. It’s something that humanity does in order to understand itself. So, the stories we tell ourselves inevitably lead to kind of heroics, good guys, bad guys. 

And that leads to this kind of mythologising. Ideas of superhumans, in some way. If you look at gods, across the board, they are people who have some kind of immense power. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

William Gibson
Whether it’s time travel or super strength or what have you. And that winds up getting distilled down to us, as a kind of superheroes. I think you can even argue that, you know, in a modern consumer society, you say, well, we don’t mythologise anymore, to me, like Marvel. 

Jimmy
Yeah, yeah. 

William Gibson
Or comic book figures like this. Those are mythological figures. They are gods. Superman is a god, you know, in that kind of abstract sense. So, this is something that we continually do. And I think, again, to think of it as a pejorative or something that just used to happen. And we've now grown out of it because we’re so modern these days, to really misunderstand the social purpose of mythology and then misunderstand how you can study it and how it can inform your own research. 

Jimmy
Okay. Fantastic. William, thank you very much for joining us on BiblioAsia+. You know, we urge you very strongly to buy William’s book, which is what’s the title again? 

William Gibson
Keramat, Sacred Relics and Forbidden Idols in Singapore. 

Jimmy
I cannot imagine how I can’t remember that, but yes, it is such an exciting book. It is available in bookstores but you can always borrow it from the library and the chapter that he wrote on Badang that is in BiblioAsia is actually a chapter from his book. 

William Gibson
It’s an excerpt. Yes. 

Jimmy
And you can find all of this at biblioasia .nlb.gov.sg. William, thank you very much for coming here today. 

William Gibson
Thank you for having me, Jimmy. Thank you. 

Jimmy
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