Walk into Kampung Chitty, the only Chetti Melaka village anywhere
The only village of this people
A gazetted heritage village on Jalan Gajah Berang, about 1.5 km west of Jonker Street, with its own Hindu temple and a small community museum. Twenty or thirty Chitty families still live here.
Why it's unique
The Chitty, or Chetti Melaka, descend from Tamil traders who settled under the Melaka Sultanate in the fifteenth century and married local Malay and Chinese women. They stayed Hindu but stopped speaking Tamil, and the community language is a Malay creole carrying Tamil and Chinese loanwords. Kampung Chitty on Jalan Gajah Berang is the only village of this community in the world, gazetted as a heritage area in June 2000 alongside the Portuguese Settlement and Kampung Morten. Twenty or thirty families remain.
There is a Chetti Melaka diaspora elsewhere, and the Indian Heritage Centre in Singapore has exhibited on it, but the village and the temple are here. That means you can walk lanes where the community still lives, look into a museum of its dress, kitchen, temple practice and trustee system, and stand in Sri Muthu Mariamman temple while a Hindu liturgy runs in a Malay creole, which is the syncretism the anthropologists write about rather than a description of it.
Before you go
The museum is small and easy to walk past. It opened in 2003 and covers dress, the kitchen, temple practice and the community's trustee system, and it keeps government museum hours and charges a small entry fee. The village itself is free and public.
Come during Bhogi or the community's Parchu ancestor rites if you can, when the village is actually doing something rather than being looked at. The village's own Sri Muthu Mariamman temple, not the museum, is where the syncretism is visible. Do not photograph inside houses without asking.