By Miranda Jeyaretnam

Review of What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian (Edited by Shailey Hingorani and Varsha Sivaram; Singapore: Association of Women for Action and Research, 2022)

Race in Singapore is complicated. We boast of our racial harmony — celebrated in the form of a day once a year where schoolchildren don their ethnic traditional clothing and attend an assembly about the importance of loving your neighbours — to the point that the word ‘racism’ itself is a kind of taboo, as though, if we avoid uttering it, it can’t exist. Conversations about race, intersectionality, and the ‘Western-imported’ notion of Chinese privilege have recently come to the fore, but beneath them are the life stories of racial minorities in Singapore — stories of community, celebration, and marginalisation that have gone untold. In What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian, those stories come to life.

This collection of personal essays and poems amasses 38 South Asian writers, most of whom are women and many of whom are queer, an impressive and historic entry in Singaporean literature. Published by the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE), Singapore’s leading women’s rights and gender equality group, the publication builds on AWARE’s legacy of foregrounding minority voices. In the book’s introduction, Shailey Hingorani and Varsha Sivaram write that the impetus for chronicling these stories was to portray members of the Indian community in their own words and in “all their fullness,” something they could not accomplish simply by restating mainstream media coverage of discrimination in Singapore. Hingorani and Sivaram emphasise the intersectional nature of what it means to be an Indian woman in Singapore. In one sense, the collection demonstrates a long-avoided truth: that racism in Singapore is a real, everyday thing. Yet, the book is not a “request to be understood — by men, by majority races, and so on.” Instead, in the hands of individual writers, these stories fill a gap in the Singaporean literary consciousness.

Reading the collection, I was struck by its sense of perseverance, joy, and community. These stories, each one so different from the next, certainly contained experiences of discrimination, but they were also rife with celebration of what it means to be Indian in Singapore.

The collection is broken up into five sections: What We Inherit, What We Endure, How We Speak, How We Identify, and How We Find Joy. The first section explores the cultural, familial, and political norms the writers inherited.

Rakhi Peswani - Fruits of Labour (A Monument to Exhaustion) (2013), Handmade quilted canopy, dyed, organically treated, torn muslin fabric, hand built quilted cotton fabric and fiber, machine embroidered taffeta fabric, found and discarded clothes, used labor tools, buckwheat hull, found and edited sound, 5 channel surround sound, 15 min loop, 800 cm x 800 cm x 500 cm
Image description: An expansive, cloth installation spans the ceiling of an indoor space, forming a quilted canopy. The quilt is orange and decorated with floral patterns. From the underside of the canopy, silhouettes of various clothes and tools are visible. Heavy cloth sacks of various sizes hang down from the quilt, some almost touching the ground. The cloth sacks resemble large, falling droplets.

Sofia Begum’s “Dadhi from a Distance” opens with a memory of her paternal grandmother’s death and an admission that “after this phone call about my dadhi, no tears came.” The “truth” was, she continued, that “nobody liked her.” Begum’s voice initially reminds me of the thoughts we sometimes have and immediately swallow, feeling guilty and indulgent, but that later pour out in irrepressible resentment. As her story goes on, however, she reveals a remarkable objectivity about the situation, probably born out of the distance between her adult self and her late dadhi.

Recalling episodes of her dadhi’s cruelty towards Begum and her mother and sisters, she lays bare the complex nature of familial lovelessness. Begum and her sisters were “abominations, haraamis, girls” to her dadhi and therefore were not treated as children to be cared for but disgraces to be covered up. In these moments, it seems her dadhi is reluctant even to touch them. Through these stories, however, Begum displays the tenderness between her and her mother, who reaches for them when their dadhi rejects them. Begum’s story is also that of her mother, who is chastised and rebuked by her mother-in-law: in one incident, Begum’s dadhi even attempted to curse her with black magic.

The boundaries they try to draw with her dadhi are complicated by a persisting filial love and respect.

At the time of her death, my father was still visiting his mother at the nursing home, although this had become more challenging since the Covid-19 pandemic began. He would sit beside her entertaining all her furies and complaints, then come home a bit quieter and more hurt. But he still went, again and again, a dutiful man driven by religion and obligation. I listened to my father’s accounts of these visits with patience, knowing that my own mother was constantly rewounded, re-traumatised every time we spoke about my grandmother in the house.

Begum tells us about damaging and difficult-to-break bonds of intergenerational trauma, “spread down [her dadhi’s] lineage, through her blood, through her milk and womb.” Raziqah, her dadhi, was only fourteen years old when she was married to a 35-year-old man, an act that effectively brought her childhood to an end. “Men would worship you for your gifts, and for your bearing of boys, but they would also destroy you in other ways,” Begum writes.

In careful words, Begum finds the inner child in her portrayal of every family member. She sees how her father “carries the wound of abandonment” from his father, how he “struggles to speak about his mother” even now, after she has passed. About her dadhi, she wonders: “Would she have known, at 14, that she would one day die from a virus that would shake the world to its foundations? Or that she would die completely alone?” In her dadhi’s death, Begum forgives her.

This story, among others in the collection, brought me to tears.

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The second section, What We Endure, looks more explicitly at the discrimination the writers have faced. Importantly, it gives them the space to be angry, to tell of their experiences without pushback or fear of being trivialised. In keeping with the emphasis on diversity of identity and experience, this section is not simply a response to the wave of pandemic-related hate crimes against the Indian community in 2020 and 2021. What We Endure grapples with institutionalised racism, microaggressions from close friends and coworkers, and patriarchal expectations imposed by community, family, and even the writers themselves.

In “The Freedom Walk,” Shobha Avadhani recounts how her childhood and adolescence were marked by desire and rejection. In school, her long braid became a marker of her difference. She was trapped between two worlds: classmates and teachers saw her hair as a nest for lice, while her parents rejected her pleas to cut it short.

Yet, Avadhani could not make a sanctuary of her home. She recalls how her mother and relatives would compare her to her grandmother, and her “heart would ache, knowing everyone thought she was ugly.” Through humour and touch, Avadhani would attempt to distract people from what they saw her as. She would massage her mother’s feet and legs with the “strength in [her] large hands.”

Her journey through adolescence portrays her in search of acceptance and love. As a baby, she would “tug at the pleats of [her mother’s] sari, roll myself up in the soft cotton material that pooled around her feet, and soothe myself while waiting for her.” She was “Always at her feet, from taking comfort as a baby to giving it as a teenager who wanted to be seen as something other than a monstrous replica of the grandmother no one liked.”

At 18, Avadhani discovered that men desired her. The discovery left her confused: “Who is this man who finds a monster attractive?” Although the man in question was nine years older than her, she married him three years later, at 21, a decision she attributes to shame and fear rather than love.

Shame becomes a weapon used against her throughout her marriage and adult life. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry” is a refrain she utters again and again. Shame keeps her in her marriage, telling her what other “Good Women” would do, that “His temper is bad but his heart is good,” and to “Pray to the Goddess Varalakshmi for his long life.”

But, unlike the shame she associates with her desirability, Avadhani’s desire — for another person, “someone who makes you hear the music and want to laugh and dance again,” and another life — pushes her to leave: “At first, it feels like you must die. It is the Bad Women who catch you, walk slowly with you and teach you how to laugh again, your chopped-off braid discarded on the ground.”

One of the most painful stories in the collection, Jaryl George Solomon’s “Regardless of this Body,” explores what it means to be a bigger Brown man in the LGBTQ+ community. Like Begum, Solomon begins with an admission: “At the age of 30, I had sex for the first time.”

Solomon navigates his transition from desirer to desired through an online forum where queer men traded nude photos. He shares his first sexual experience with HGBoy101, chosen because he was “a fellow big Brown boy” and would therefore “understand.” This belief in mutual understanding and solidarity stemmed from rejections and comments made by thin Chinese women and men. Solomon writes: “It was clear to me that my yearnings for companionship, for love, for visibility, could only be tethered to a similarly Brown body.”

Later, Solomon’s relationships with thin and/or Chinese men were often tarnished by them fetishising him for his appearance: “the more I explored my queerness with other people, the more discomfort and shame clung onto my body, slowly but surely hooking into my fragile skin.”

This story contains episodes of sexual violence that are hard to read but equally hard to look away from. Solomon’s longing to be seen as whole, to be loved in his entirety, is deeply betrayed, not only because of the trauma he is left with but “because those men were supposed to understand how it feels to be a bigger, Brown, queer body. They were supposed to know how I felt when people recoiled at seeing my naked body. They were supposed to know how I felt being late to the game. They were just supposed to know, because their bodies were just like mine.”

Solomon’s story is not one of the many in the collection that end with pithy statements and words of advice, noble attempts to wrap everything the writer has learned into something the reader can take home and work with. Instead, he ends with a question: “Is it silly that I want to be loved, not solely because of my bigger Brown body, but regardless of it?”

***

Language and speech are inextricably linked with our sense of identity. And, in Singapore, they are also linked with educational policy. The third section, How We Speak, delves into the unspoken but near-universal demand for the writers to codeswitch to accents and languages more palatable to Chinese Singaporeans.

Prasanthi Ram’s “Huā by Any Other Name” articulates the imbalance of knowing so much about the Chinese and Catholic world around her but not being known. At her Catholic kindergarten, she learnt Catholic prayers “not because I was forced to, but because I heard them so often.” She herself came from a Hindu family. It was there, too, that she learnt she was “Not Chinese. I was Indian, and it made me different.”

The idea of ‘Not Chineseness’ arises in part from being categorically different: “From our passports to housing applications to pesky property agents, race is everywhere, and we are meant to accept this the moment we are inducted into the education system.” Mother Tongue language classes are an extension of this: in addition to English, everyone learns a second language beginning in kindergarten or primary school. That language is typically their mother tongue. If you are Chinese, you learn Mandarin, if you are Malay, you learn Bahasa Melayu, and if you are Indian, you learn Tamil or Hindi. If you fall into multiple categories or the ‘Other’ category, or your parents want you to learn one of the other languages, you can submit an appeal to do so.

In spite of this, however, many Indian students pick up some Mandarin here and there. Ram recalls that “in most local kindergartens of the ’90s, Mother Tongue classes meant only Mandarin.” She therefore sat in on the Mandarin classes and would occasionally be ‘tested’ on her vocabulary — “a little social experiment of theirs to see if an Indian child could pick up their language.”

Ram developed a love for wuxia productions and Channel 8 Singaporean dramas, as well as for a knack for certain Mandarin phrases, but she could not escape her classmates’ narrow perception of her as “not one of us.” In the end, Ram’s solace lies in imagining a different response to the kindergarten Mandarin teachers:

This time I decide to tell my sweet laoshis more than they seek to know. That flower in English is to huā in Mandarin is to pū (பூ) or malar (மலர்) in Tamil. Before they even reward me with a cookie, I ask them to repeat after me, my tongue lingering on the last r. I even sing them a line from the melodic “Malargalae Malargalae” (O Flowers, O Flowers) — a famous A R Rahman song from the 1996 film Love Birds — in my own childish mimicry of Tamil. Maybe this way they will remember the word by heart, the same way Tamil music gently moulded my tongue around my mother’s language. […] I wait for them to ask more questions, even though they are not used to doing so. I wait a long while, with my mouth half open, longing to share.

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The fourth section, How We Identify, calls for “a deeper interrogation of the ‘I’ in the state’s CMIO framework.” Many of the writers in this section have mixed ethnicities and diverse cultural heritages that do not fit easily into the category of ‘Indian.’ When pointedly asked what their race is, many are told that they don’t fit certain stereotypes or traits associated with being Indian.

Jeyda Simren Sekhon Ataç addresses these issues point-blank in “Conversations I Want to Have as a (Mixed-Race) Indian.” Recalling how she is all too often asked her race, Sekhon Ataç, who is of mixed Turkish and Indian heritage but simplifies her answer to just “Indian”, rhetorically asks: “What is an Indian person supposed to look like? What is the purpose of asking someone their race if your only reaction is to then question it?”

The perception of how an Indian person should look is assigned a value in Singapore: the darker your skintone, the more you are looked down on; the lighter your skintone, the more you are seen as an exception. As a mixed-race person, Sekhon Ataç describes how her fair skin would be praised and her beauty attributed to her Turkish side, even if those features were in fact typical amongst many Indians.

Sekhon Ataç does not deny the privilege she holds as a fairer mixed-race woman in Singapore. Instead, she points out that these comments compound Chinese privilege by making Indian women who meet Chinese-based beauty standards exceptions to, rather than examples of, the Indian community. They make it seem as though an Indian woman must be considered beautiful not because of her Indian features but in spite of them.

A similar phenomenon persists with language. Sekhon Ataç describes how she is made to feel that speaking Mandarin as an Indian person is a “superpower.” Although she is still dismissed or scoffed at on occasion, speaking Mandarin is a privilege that has allowed her access to Mandarin-speakers-only jobs and conversations held in Mandarin. Again, the structures that uphold Chinese privilege force Indian women to not only be exceptional but to be ‘more Chinese’ to break through the glass ceiling.

“It seems that the uniqueness of Singapore’s multiculturalism contains within it a need to categorise race,” Sekhon Ataç writes. The construct of racial harmony in Singapore ironically undermines the multitude of identities and experiences that its people hold — “an attempt to make the complicated embodiment of race understandable in some form.” The question then is: Whom does this simplified understanding serve?

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How We Find Joy, the fifth and final section, celebrates what it means to be Indian and an Indian woman. Often in these stories, joy sprouts up from narrow and unexpected spaces. Balli Kaur Jaswal’s “Prito and Me” finds home in culturally specific Punjabi TikToks that feel like an inside joke. Kelly Kaur’s “The Music of Laughter” celebrates her mother’s ability to bring laughter to any situation as she picks up a new instrument, screeching as she practices, and keeps at it against her strict husband’s denigrations. Pooja Nansi’s “Kitty Party” venerates the sacred space created by friendship between Brown women.

Female friendship abounds in “Kitty Party” and feels like finding “a kind of home in each other.” The Kitty Party offered this home to Nansi’s mother. Each month, her mother and eight of her friends, often with their children in tow, would meet at one of their homes to “share food and gossip and laughter.”

Nansi connects the slips of paper used to draw lots for the next host of the Kitty Party, with the “kind of notes anyone who has been to an all-girls school (prior to the use of mobile phones) has passed around with gleeful trepidation.” She thinks of the “sanctuaries of beauty salons, kitchens, covens” and women’s bathrooms. She remembers the Kitty Party when she and her friend, giggling as they talk, try to think up what their girl band name would be.

She offers a reason for why such secrecy is valued by women: “You see, we learn early as women that there are certain things we are not allowed to say out loud.” But the focus of her story is not on what drives women to these spaces. Instead, she wants readers to see the value in these spaces in themselves — spaces that are often trivialised as places of gossip and superficiality rather than of confession and community. “When I tell you that my Gujarati mother knew nobody when she moved to Singapore in 1982,” she writes, “I will not give you the story that you want — the one about loneliness, alienation, confusion. I want to tell you instead about how she found laughter, gossip and community — the things that make up a village.”

The Kitty Party connected women across their “place of origin within Gujarat, religion, caste and class as well as different levels of education” and gave them a space to speak and laugh freely. It became a place of warmth, love and good humour as well as a place where women could share their grief or marital issues.

Curled up in bed reading this collection, I imagined that I was attending a Kitty Party and that each of these writers were speaking in a circle with each other, sharing laughter and pain and commiseration.

Miranda Jeyaretnam is a third-year undergraduate student at Yale University, where she studies English and writes for the Yale Daily News. Born in Singapore, she is interested in ecocritical readings of postcolonial literature and is an aspiring journalist. In her free time, she enjoys baking, weightlifting, crossword puzzles, and hunting for community cats to pet.

Rakhi’s art practice explores various discursive and material aspects of crafts and the nuanced associations of crafts as languages, especially with an emphasis on the hand-made. She is interested in the affective possibilities of materiality and labour as well as the contexts these create in contemporary image making. She has been examining the experiences of modern migrations, environmental issues and pedagogical structures associated with crafts and dedicated artistic practices.

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Rakhi’s work has been shown in various institutional and curated exhibitions in India, China, Japan, Australia, Brazil, UK, US and Europe. Her solo exhibitions have been hosted in Bangalore (2020), Hamburg (2021, 2019), Mumbai (2018, 2013, 2007, 2006), Delhi (2015, 2009) and Hong Kong (2011). Currently, she has been working as Associate Professor at the Visual Arts Department, Ashoka University, Sonipat, India.

Kitty Party

By Miranda Jeyaretnam

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