Sunday, July 19, 2009

Kapitan Keling Mosque, revisited

Here some more pictures of the 'Kapitan Keling Mosque' I visited last Friday. The name "kapitan keling" is used to denote the headman or leader of the South Indian Muslim community.
And yes, although I am in a mosque now, in fact t
he term 'keling' is derived from the ancient Hindu kingdom on the Coromandel coast of South India, and the local Hokkien community corrupts the word to derive 'keling-na' for Indians in general, particularly those from South India (The North Indians are pooled together with another term, 'banggali', though they are not necessarily from Bengal).

Yep, the Indian atmosphere is all around here ... and yes, I love it!