“There is solidarity in recognizing our alienation from happiness, even if we do not inhabit the same place (and we do not). There can be joy in killing joy. And kill joy we must, and we do. In sharing our alienation from happiness, we might also claim the freedom to be unhappy.”
—Sara Ahmed [1]
Sometime in 2021, our team at AWARE (the Association of Women for Action and Research), Singapore’s leading gender equality non-profit, began thinking about how best to document the narratives of Indian women. While a rise in hate crimes against Indians—exacerbated by Covid-19—had been documented in the news and on social media, simply repeating that such discrimination existed felt insufficient to us.
After all, mainstream coverage of these incidents so often depict them as one-off, rather than placing them within the larger context of Indian women’s lives, and how comprehensively these lives are diminished. How could Indian women’s stories be told in all their fullness, if they are only taken seriously in select moments of pain?
Thus, What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian came to be: a collection of personal essays by Indian women (and a few men) in Singapore. This project has been a deeply affecting experience for us as editors: from our first call for entries, to our Kickstarter campaign, the writing workshop we held with author Balli Kaur Jaswal and the process of editing the wealth of submissions that came in.
The book is a follow-up to AWARE’s publications Perempuan (2016) and Growing Up Perempuan (2018), anthologies that sought to show the richly complex and diverse experiences of women in Singapore’s Malay and Muslim communities. Like those previous collections, What We Inherit is the product of an explicitly intersectional feminist approach. Rather than thinking of Indianness and womanhood as identities that are distinct from one another, we consider how these experiences are woven into each other, resulting in experiences of discrimination that are specific to Indian women.
A non-negotiable priority for us was that the stories had to be told on the writers’ own terms. As in the Perempuan series, therefore, we chose to privilege (for the most part) the form of the personal essay—which allows writers to claim ownership and control over their lives, to tell their stories without being interrupted, judged or dismissed. The vulnerability, honesty and liberation enabled by the form has led to a collection that puts what Indian women writers want to say first: an idea that feels obvious, but has been relatively absent in Singapore nonetheless.
In an essay titled “On Opacity”, published in the 1997 book Poetics of Relation, Martinican writer Édouard Glissant wrote, “As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence; I shall also pay attention to not mixing it into any amalgam.” In this same spirit, our writers are taking care of their identities themselves. They write their own distinct stories, not allowing their narratives to blend in with one another for the sake of others’ conveniences or comfort. (These narratives have always existed, but have been silenced: by dominant narratives around Singapore’s multiculturalism, societal norms that reward conformity while punishing deviation, and the public–private dichotomies that make it so hard for women to talk about abuse.) The result is not a request to be understood—by men, by majority races, and so on. Instead, by their very existence, these stories argue that Indian women’s everyday lives—their torturous paths to self-realisation—deserve to be witnessed in their own right, and that they cannot be subsumed into one monolithic category.
At the same time, it is in the collective that solidarity is found. Private self-exploration is inextricably linked to advocacy, a principle that has long animated AWARE’s work. So this anthology of voices is also a means of advocating for the rights and freedoms to feel safe and valued as Indian women. By placing these stories and poems next to each other, one by one, we hope to take back control from the feelings of isolation that characterise the experiences of so many of us. To reframe our trauma not as a blemish to be held close to the chest, but an experience that, when shared, carries the power of identification and community.
What We Inherit is a title that comes with a significant amount of baggage, especially for those sitting at the intersection of Indianness and gender in Singapore. We associate the word ‘inheritance’ with passing down traditions, family names and other cultural touchstones to the next generation. Yet more and more conversations are taking place about the uglier sides of inheritance: intergenerational trauma, the pressures of caregiving and the fact that for many Indian women, family is a source of pain and distress. Inheritance can also reach further into the political: the narratives that Indian women inherit from Singapore’s colonial past, from paths of migration, and from the state in the present day, through forms like race-based policies. Accordingly, the title What We Inherit exists to us as a sort of open question.
What do we mean when we say “Indian”, anyway? Or, for that matter, “woman”? These terms are themselves ripe for interrogation. In the making of this anthology, we sought a breadth of stories that illuminated the varied experiences within Indian women’s communities. This way we attempt to cultivate empathy for the vastly diverse lives that the term “Indian women” encompasses, even when those who identify with it look completely different from one another. To this end, we chose not to use italics for non-English terms, and instead use footnotes to translate any terms whose meanings may not be intuitive to readers. We wished not to separate so-called ‘exotic’ words from those that purportedly ‘belong’ in the text, thus catering to an imagined reader for whom those words are foreign. This editorial decision, we hope, will encourage curiosity and empathy.
It goes without saying that one anthology is simply not enough. So many more Indian women’s experiences need to be recorded. The perspectives of low-income women, LBTQ women, sex workers and migrant workers are unfortunately lacking in the print anthology—a limitation, perhaps, of AWARE’s call-for-entry mechanisms—but we hope to see them in future publications on Indian women.
Whether you identify closely with Indianness and/or womanhood, or have little understanding of how these identities are navigated in Singapore, we believe that What We Inherit will resonate with you. Reading each of these stories has spurred us to think further, and deeper, on how we bear what has been passed on to us. Beyond superficial dichotomies of acceptance or rejection, these personal essays express the glorious nuances of being an Indian woman in Singapore: the “freedom to be unhappy”, the freedom to find joy, and perhaps the freedom to do both in the same breath.
Previously published in and adapted from What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian.
Shailey Hingorani is AWARE’s Head of Advocacy, Research and Communications. She has spent the last 13 years working on human rights issues in the United States, South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Varsha Sivaram is a Senior Projects Executive in AWARE’s Advocacy, Research and Communications department. They are passionate about literature and advocacy.
[1] Sara Ahmed, “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness,” Signs 35, 3 (2010), pp. 571–94.
