Asia's burgeoning museums, special exhibitions, and accompanying publications witnessed the launch of Singapore Indian Heritage, an inaugural volume by the Indian Heritage Centre, a diaspora museum which opened in 2015 in Singapore. Edited by Rajesh Rai and A. Mani, this book opens the concepts of ‘diaspora’ and ‘heritage’ to an array of disciplines: museum/curatorial/heritage studies, archaeology, art history, and sociology collaborate with their respective methodologies and sources to produce a wide and lucid arc of enquiry around Indian migrant communities in Singapore. What is largely rendered as a story of migration, settlement and formation of transnational communities in precolonial, colonial and post-national Singapore also weaves in and out of the history of material cultures, technologies, memories and ideas, to present a rhizomatic picture of tangible and intangible heritage.
The peerless archaeologist of Singapore, John Miksic, utilises texts, folklore, and epic traditions alongside architectural, numismatic, and epigraphic remains to survey the early interactions between Indic peoples and Southeast Asia. The scientific and stylistic analyses of these materials evidence the constant reappropriation of ideas and objects to suit local preferences on both sides. This cross-cultural appropriation is furthered in Gauri Krishnan's investigation of precolonial trade networks between South and Southeast Asia. Krishnan pays keen attention to textiles produced in Gujarat, Bengal and Coromandel for Southeast Asian markets. Numerous textile typologies based on specific materials, motifs, trademarks, and contexts of consumption are surveyed.
Nalina Gopal mobilises archival and oral history sources to chronicle voluntary and assisted migrations of South Asian people to colonial Singapore. Individual stories and collective memories of communities such as the Sikhs and Kadayanallur Muslims are presented. The religious, cultural and linguistic diversity of these groups is highlighted through markers of identity such as textiles, headgear, and a wide selection of jewellery and objects which mark rites of passage.
Following Gopal's careful delineation of mobility patterns, Rajesh Rai charts the waxing and waning presence of transient and settled Indians across the island due to occupational imperatives. The religious-cultural and socioeconomic contours of these earlier settlements provide rare insights into contemporary residential, commercial and cultural areas which continue to bear a strong South Asian affiliation. Reproductions of occupational paraphernalia and tools of trade such as company logos, textile chops and porcelain cups illustrate Indians’ engagement in money-lending, the textile trade and rubber tapping, among others.
The next two chapters utilise illustrations of a treadle printing machine, typesetting moulds, and posters to underline the crucial role of print culture and its attendant propaganda material in the imagination of national and transnational communities. Rajesh Rai and A. Mani trace specific influences from the homeland on the political and cultural consciousness of Indians in Singapore. Rai profiles the fascinating search for an Indian identity in Singapore's vortex of the rising Indian Independence Movement, the Japanese Occupation, and a weakening British Empire. A. Mani's nuanced discussions centre on the formulation of a sub-ethnic nationalism in the Madras Presidency and its centrifugal force which shaped concerns about Tamil identity in Singapore. It is argued that the latter's reformist slant was informed by ideas of modernism, literacy, and social betterment.
Malavika Agarwal shifts attention from colonial rule to the post-Second World War phase and subsequent ideas of self-rule. As the Indian contribution to Singapore's national narrative is noted, this chapter also sheds light on the grooming of a Singaporean-Indian identity in a multiracial and multiethnic landscape.
Despite the constant shape-shifting of Indian identity, i.e., the Indian national, anti-British, unified Tamil, followed by Singaporean-Indian, our understandings of the Indian diaspora rely on a presumed ethnic homogeneity based on the same place of origin (p. 511). In an erudite conclusion, Vineeta Sinha fissures this assumption of ethnic sameness and its guaranteed cohesion by enumerating tensions between older settled Indian communities and new migrant professional classes. Instead of seeking solutions within state-led paradigms, Sinha rests the onus on migrant communities to advance heritage as a space and tool for creative negotiations. A sociological, and more specifically, ethnographic lens, gestures towards modes of heritage, namely, places of worship, festivals, and popular culture as inclusive spaces which not only subsume prevalent differences, but also absorb new practices, objects and meanings seamlessly. Just as the tangible and intangible are rendered as mutually constitutive throughout this book, Sinha's chapter too argues for the very different, yet mutually constitutive, nature of the old and new diasporas. This argument links back to one put forth by Miksic: the arrival of Theravada Buddhism, Islam and Western colonisation in Southeast Asia did not obliterate the former Sanskrit cosmopolis; instead, it meant the latter's continuity in a new set of relationships. These revisionist views advance the contingent, hybrid, and contemporary nature of heritage and diaspora, while rescuing them from simplistic notions of timelessness, purity, and homogeneity. In turn, they make a valuable case for the IHC and its projects, including this publication. The Centre's community-driven curatorial process demonstrates how heritage is not necessarily defined by institutional networks and state establishments. On the contrary, it is reconstituted and mediated by the people, just as diasporic cohesion is not always led by state apparatuses.
The re-imaginings of heritage and diaspora continue to evolve across the pages of this book. Painstaking picture research connects objects from disparate local and overseas collections and archives with new themes. Overall, the broad range of material, confidently deployed as empirical data, and thematic and conceptual categories, produces a deft counter to elite, colonial historiographies. As an example, stories of skilled convicts, women and non-caste Hindus make for a balanced view of the diaspora. Likewise, in the realm of the visual, the delightful Krishnanagar clay figurines depicting Indian tradespeople (pp. 226–7) are relocated from their long-held provenance as Oriental exotica/objects of curiosity/ethnographic illustrations at European exhibitions to an Asian community-led museum. The latter's inclusive storyline activates the agency of craftsmen such as Rakhal Das and contributions of tradespeople to the diaspora to not only return the Orientalist gaze, but also unsettle certainties of the diaspora's own self-image by opening it up to internal differentiations.
