Download Keramat 2
Nichele Seibel
Crawfurd was informed that the internee of the keramat was Iskandar Shah, the last King of Singapura who reigned during the late-14th century. After being sacked by Majapahit forces, Shah fled Singapura and established the Melaka Sultanate. Crawfurd and many others have noted that the claim that Shah was buried on Bukit Larangan was inconsistent with most records, which broadly agreed that Iskandar Shah was buried near Melaka, where he likely died.
Nonetheless, the British gave special recognition to the site. This was perhaps due to the romanticization of Stamford Raffles, founder of the British colony of Singapore, who fancied himself the successor to a kingdom more ancient than Melaka.
Ultimately, the identity of the internee remains unverified and archaeological excavations around the keramat have yielded no clues besides confirming the site hosted ancient inhabitants. Since a keramat does not necessarily have to be a tomb, there is speculation that the meaning of the name was conflated over time and that the site is dedicated to Iskandar Shah, but not his final resting place.
In April 2022, a catastrophic fire engulfed the keramat (shrine) on the top of a hill on Kusu Island, off the southern coast of Singapore. Media coverage of the event showed the near-total destruction of the keramat.1
The keramat on Kusu Island is a popular pilgrimage spot with thousands of devotees making their way by boat to seek blessings from the shrine as well as the Chinese Tua Pek Kong Temple (龟屿大伯公宫) on the island. Despite its immense popularity, little is definitively known about the shrine. Delving into the records shows how the origin story of the keramat has changed over time.
Datuk keramat (sometimes spelled as dato) are spirits who dwell within natural objects like trees, rocks, termite mounds and whirlpools. Also known as datuk kong (拿督公), these ancestor spirits of the landscape are often represented by icons that resemble older Malay men. (Datuk is the Malay word for grandfather and is also a generalised honorific for an elder male, while kong is the Hokkien word for grandfather.)
A Straits Times report in 1929 offers one of the oldest descriptions of the origins of the keramat. The reporter spoke to an old man at Joo Chiat (the implication being he was Baba or Straits Chinese), who gave an account that deserves to be retold in detail:
In the 1970s, Kusu, along with the other Southern Islands, came under the management of the Sentosa Development Corporation which had been set up, as the name implies, to develop what was then Pulau Blakang Mati and adjacent islands into the resort destination of Sentosa.
Land reclamation enlarged Kusu from 1.2 hectares (12,000 sq m) to 8.5 hectares (85,000 sq m) at a cost of around $3.9 million. The development work included the construction of a new jetty, water supply system, modern toilet facilities and footpaths. The keramat and temple were preserved as tourist attractions, and major renovation works carried out at both in 1976 included concreting and adding guardrails to the steps up to the keramat.17 The new changes may have altered the original shape of the island, but they proved popular with visitors.18
The pilgrimages to Kusu continued unabated over the decades and a routine had been established. Pilgrims would first visit the Tua Pek Kong Temple to seek blessings, before climbing the steps to the keramat on the top of the hill. There are several waypoints within the keramat, and numbers have been printed and pasted at the different spots so that devotees would know the order in which to visit the different stations.
I returned to the site in November 2022. It had been rebuilt in time for the Ninth Month celebrations, but it was still not complete. A temporary marquee had been erected to provide shade and burned debris still littered the hillside beneath the shrines. The shrines were reconstructed in almost exact replicas with some of the original material, such as the concrete altars, left intact.
Keramat graves in Singapore include those of royalty, community leaders, individuals who suffered violent deaths, and miraculous corpses. The interred are usually Muslim or Malay individuals, yet they receive devotees from varied cultural and religious backgrounds. No religious writings dictate correct approaches, so visitors bring their own religious methods to the practice of keramat grave veneration. Thus, the tradition is not only informed by Islamic and Malay practices, but also Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Indian and Chinese traditions. Notably, some Singapore keramat graves draw devotees from abroad, with Keramat Kusu Island welcoming those from Thailand, Myanmar, and China.
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