I was in Singapore recently to give a few talks and do some book readings at the India Se-India Club Literary Salon, the first literary platform in the South-East Asian region for South Asian writers, sponsored by a new magazine that aims at NRIs. When I first lived in Singapore as a young U.N. official 27 years ago, the country would not have seemed very likely to offer a plausible platform for an Indian writer. There was no literary forum in Singapore of any kind in those days, let alone one devoted to subcontinental writing — even though Singapore was far ahead of other South-East Asian countries in this respect (at least one could read about such writers in the Straits Times’ cultural section!). The existence of an NRI-focused magazine is equally remarkable. I doubt that the Indians in Singapore those days would have particularly wanted to advertise their Indianness. We were still seen as a country mired in despair and disrepair, the whole concept of NRIs was yet to be born, and Indians in Singapore largely turned their backs on their homeland. A magazine like India Se reflects a new pride in India that was largely absent in those days.

Changing equations

A decade ago, in my book India: from Midnight to the Millennium, I had asked whether “NRI” should stand for “Not Really Indian” or “Never Relinquished India” — because there’s a little bit of both in all of us Indians who live abroad. But today they have also become the “Now Required Indians”, actively sought after by the mother country for their expertise, resources and initiative. And because India itself is advancing and winning a great deal of attention from so many countries — including Singapore and other lands in the region — these “global Indians” are basking in some of their homeland’s reflected glory as well. This phenomenon is changing a great deal about the way in which Indians abroad relate to each other and to their new countries.

This leads to some intriguing challenges. For instance, unlike in Singapore, the majority of Indians in the U.S. (though by no means all) are educated, well-off and professionally successful. Today, the ethnic group in the U.S. with the highest median income is not white Americans, but Indian Americans. In Singapore the story is a little different, since there is a large Indian population that has been settled there for several decades, a majority of whom came from more humble backgrounds, mainly from the Tamil working class. Of course there are many first-rate professionals from that community as well, but they are by no means the majority. By contrast, the NRIs — many prefer to call themselves “global Indians” — who have moved to Singapore from India in more recent years are all educated professionals (they are the only ones who would get long-term visas). They have been slow to identify themselves with the local Indians, especially if they do not relate to Tamil language and customs — but people of other ethnic groups in Singapore all see them lumped together, as one undifferentiated group of “Indians”. This results in some confusion about what “Indians” are like, a confusion compounded by simple matters of cultural preference. For instance, “fish head curry” is considered the pre-eminent Indian dish in Singapore, which astonishes those Indians who routinely discard the fish heads at the market. And many non-Tamil NRIs look blankly astonished when felicitated on the occasion of Thaipusam, the biggest Singaporean Tamil festival.

The divide

I was struck, during my one-week visit to Singapore, by the frequent references my friends made to the existence of an expatriate Indian-local Indian divide. There seems to be little mixing between the two groups — Indians from India still see themselves essentially as expatriates and have few friendships with local Singaporean Indians, other than the affluent elite amongst the latter. This is a particularly Singaporean problem with few parallels elsewhere, because other countries with long-established Indian populations, like Fiji, Mauritius or Guyana, do not also have a significant “new” Indian expatriate community. Because the expatriate community is large enough to be socially self-sustaining, there seems to be little social contact with the “locals”. The key to a solution may lie in the expatriates ceasing to be expatriate and making Singapore their permanent home, at which point certain common elements may well come to the fore. But I wouldn’t necessarily bet on it.

What is particularly striking about this is that Singapore is perhaps the country with the greatest affinity for, and interest in, contemporary India. I had the pr

Source: The Hindu