Hardit Singh Sandhu

His father’s seat

In a letter written in 1961, Hardit said that he had been born in Singapore forty-five years earlier, and that his father had arrived twenty years before that. Sunder Singh, also known as Racha Singh, had been in business in Singapore since 1894. He helped establish the Sikh Moneylenders’ Association and became its first president. Hardit was the elder of Sunder’s two sons; the younger, Bahal Singh, was known in the family as Bhal. ^{1, 2, 11, 12}

In May 1936 Hardit, then about twenty, joined the Sikh Advisory Board in place of his father, who had resigned. Two years later he was elected to the committee of the Indian Association, at a meeting reported under the headline “Indians’ Leader Refutes Malicious Propaganda”. In 1940, Hardit later recalled, his father retired to India. ^{1, 10, 13}

Bangkok, 1942

Four months after Singapore fell, Hardit was in Bangkok, a delegate from Malaya to the conference of the Indian Independence League, the Japanese-backed movement to end British rule in India. More than a hundred delegates had come from across East and Southeast Asia to plan how the movement would be organised throughout the region. Earlier that June, Hardit had been named to the League’s local working committee in Syonan, as the Japanese had renamed Singapore. ^{14, 15, 16, 31}

Within the League, Hardit worked in recruitment and training. In July 1944 the Japanese news agency Domei quoted a Hardit Singh, in charge of the League’s Recruiting and Training Department, on ten part-time centres across Singapore where civilian volunteers trained in their spare hours under graduates of the Azad Hind School. The report gives no surname, but the role fits his. ^{4, 17}

The moneylenders’ president

After the war, Hardit’s public life again reached beyond the Sikh community. In August 1946 he was among the hosts named for a farewell tea-party at Victoria Memorial Hall for B. Govindasamy Chettiar, a philanthropist about to visit India for the first time in twenty-five years. In 1948 he appears, as “Hardith Singh”, on the membership list of the Town Local Congress, the town branch of the Singapore Regional Indian Congress. ^{18, 30}

By August 1949 he was president of the Sikh Moneylenders’ Association, the body his father had helped found, and he was defending it in public: with its secretary, Kartar Singh, he signed a published reply to the association’s critics. Religious life drew him in too. In February 1951 he was listed as honorary treasurer of the Central Sikh Temple. ^{19, 20}

In March 1951 came news that Sunder had died in India, aged eighty. Twice now Hardit had taken up a role his father once held: the seat on the Advisory Board, and the presidency of the moneylenders’ association. ¹¹

Who runs the gurdwaras?

On 6 May 1955 Hardit began a further two-year term on the Sikh Advisory Board, and by his own account he chaired it from 1955 to 1957. ^{1, 21}

By 1961 the question was who should run the Queen Street and Silat Road gurdwaras. A bill to merge their management was before the Legislative Assembly, and in March Hardit urged its Select Committee to go ahead with the merger. Then he went further. Most of the Queen Street management committee, he argued, should be elected at the temple, with places kept for representatives of five Sikh societies. He wanted the congregation, not only the established societies, to have a say. ¹

In May 1962 he was again elected chairman of the Advisory Board. He and his wife, Balbir Kaur, made their home at 116A Tessensohn Road, an address recorded in 1961 and again in his death notice. ^{1, 2, 22}

Navigator

In October 1970, in his mid-fifties, Hardit was due to ride as navigator for a Singapore team called “Friendship”, setting out for the Asian Highway Rally. ^{3, 5}

A year later the war was news again. In October 1971, in its coverage of the Khosla inquiry into the disappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose, The Straits Times described Hardit as a former training and recruitment officer of the Indian Independence League. ⁴

Hardit died on 11 April 1976, aged sixty. His death notice named Balbir, his brother Bahal and the surviving family, and set “Karmuwala” beside his name. Balbir’s own death notice appeared in September 1980. ^{2, 29}

The house with the handpump

What did Karmuwala mean to this family? The memories of relatives and neighbours offer a glimpse. Hardit’s nephew Jaspal, Bhal’s son, remembered riding by tonga with his grandfather Sunder and grandmother Kishan Kaur to neighbouring villages and festivals. Naseeb Chand recalled visiting the family’s large house as a child, bathing at its handpump and seeing its upper rooms. Gurdayal Singh remembered the wells on Sunder’s land, which supplied water for the fields and for drinking. After many years with his maternal grandparents, Jaspal came back to Karmuwala and renovated the ancestral house. ^{12, 23, 24}

In the same decades another Karmuwala Sandhu, Massa Singh, was guarding prisoners and internees in Singapore, and later drove a taxi: read his story.