Sikh Police Contingent (Singapore)

The Sikh Police Contingent (SPC) was a body of Punjabi Sikh policemen recruited for the Straits Settlements police in Singapore. Singapore's National Library Board says the earliest known Sikh in Singapore was Bhai Maharaj Singh, with his disciple Khurruck Singh, on 10 June 1850, but that only the recruitment of the contingent in 1881 produced a permanent Sikh community.

How it began: an 1879 Commission of Enquiry into the state of the police force recommended forming a Sikh contingent. The first batch of 54 recruits arrived from Punjab on 26 March 1881. The numbers differ by source: Wikipedia adds another 65 in August 1881, and Tan Tai Yong writes that 165 Sikhs arrived in 1881 to form the backbone of the new contingent. Recruits were expected to be under 25, at least 5 ft 6 in tall and at least 33 in round the chest, and to pass a medical; many applicants were turned away.

Service and later history

• The British valued the contingent highly and sent it to states in Malaya to help put down uprisings and revolts.
• The Tanjong Pagar Dock Company recruited Sikhs for its own dock police, and by the 1930s Sikh police served at the Sembawang naval base and the Seletar air base.
• Sikhs who could not enter the police worked as watchmen, known as jagas, guarding banks, godowns, stores and school compounds. Chinese businessmen also engaged Sikh bodyguards.
• The policemen and their families lived in barracks at Pearl's Hill, where the first Sikh temple was set up in the 1880s. The dock company built a second at Anson Road, and when the government took that plot around 1912 the dock police were offered a site at Silat Road. The Police Gurdwara at Silat Road was built in 1924 with donations from Sikh policemen in Singapore and Sikh communities in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Thailand and Malaya.
• The contingent was disbanded at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Where it stands: the contingent no longer exists. The Infopedia article counts about 12,952 Sikhs in Singapore in the 2010 census.