Plural politics and transient labour: reflections on the Sunday map

Abstract

How does the temporal passage of transient populations through established immigrant geographies inform our definition of diaspora? What implications do they have for a plural political model? This paper studies the interactions and tensions between citizens and transient workers in contemporary Singapore through the analysis of their primary space of congregation, Serangoon Road, ‘Little India’, during Sundays, their off-day. It studies the anxieties regarding otherness and citizenship provoked by their presence in established ethnic communities and their own education into urban citizenship through the camaraderie of the Sunday map, our record of their temporal gathering in the spaces of the Indian district. This paper examines how Indian diasporic identities in the city-state are complicated by the passage of transient workers.1

Keywords:

• citizenship
• Indian diaspora
• construction labour
• Serangoon
• Singapore

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Athanasios Tsakonas for welcoming my collaboration and to the reviewers and Alison Blunt for comments on this paper.

Notes

This paper develops ideas initially discussed in the conclusion of my book on Singapore's penal history [Pieris (2009)].

The report shows the highest numbers of migrants as being from India and Bangladesh with destinations in the Middle East and Asia.

Social Darwinism is used to refer to the Singapore government's eugenic strategies (since 1983) that encourage educated women to procreate.

Of the 350,000 Indians in Singapore, almost 64% are Tamil. They are followed by Punjabis, 8%; Malayalis, 8%; Sindhis 6%; and Gujaratis 2%.

Fewer than 9% of Indian expats (permanent residents) in 1990 held a college degree. By contrast, in 2000 almost 51% of Indian permanent residents were college educated.

Teh (2009) discusses disparaging remarks about Indians calling them ‘irritating and mercenary’ made on Facebook by Shobna Sukumar, a former beauty queen.

There are 533,200 PRs. They own around 5% of the nearly 900,000 HDB flats island wide.