‘Bhadraloks’ on the move: the Bengali diaspora in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Bengalis, a South Asian sub-ethnic group in Singapore, mainly hail from the Hindu majority in West Bengal, India and the Muslim majority in Bangladesh. Although they share similar linguistic, culinary preferences, cultural innuendos, and the collective trauma of the Partition of 1947, the ambiguity of Bengaliness in Southeast Asia permeates their everyday lives, cultural placemaking, and notions of identity and belonging. This research addresses the microhistories and transnational Bengali networks in Singapore beyond the overwhelming scholarship on the South Indian labour migrant communities in Southeast Asia, that is also distinct from the Bengali diaspora in the UK and Europe. It focuses on the less-studied Bengali Bhadralok (the 'gentlemanly' class) that channelled cultural continuities and discontinuities of placemaking through foodways, bridal diasporic networks, occupational affiliation, language integration, cinema and festivals to foreground their distinctiveness within Singapore’s multicultural and multiracial landscape that homogenised the Indian diaspora within migrant labour/ Tamil speaking Indians.

KEYWORDS:

• Bengali
• Bhadralok
• diaspora
• minority
• transnationalism

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and to the editor for guiding us through this process. We also express our gratitude to the Bengalis in Singapore, who welcomed us into the community across numerous festive occasions, and those who shared stories of their lives with us. We are responsible for any inadvertent errors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Advertisements featuring the requirement of Bengali speaking fluency in some government jobs in the Straits Settlements in 1859, Straits Times, 12 November 1859; Requirement of Bangla for teachers at St. Anthony’s Boys’ School, Singapore, Mid-Day Herald and Daily, 23 September 1897; Kuala Lumpur courts asked for interpreters with language skills in English and Bangla, Straits Times 13 March 1894.

2 ‘Bengalis.’ Straits Budget, 16 January 1936, p.6.

3 Authors’ interview, 18th November 2020.

4 Derogatory term for a laborer who migrated from India to Southeast Asia.

5 There was wider recognition of Indians in Southeast Asia, leading to their prominence in leading some workplaces and local institutions.

6 Chander Road in Little India was named in the memory of AC Chander’s contribution towards building a welfare-oriented economy in Singapore.

7 Shantiniketan (transl. abode of peace) was initiated by Tagore to cultivate and disseminate knowledge about Asian Studies in India.

8 Dolly Davenport, National Archives of Singapore, Oral History Recordings, ‘Community-driven Oral History Project’, Accession no. 004323, Reel no. 4.

9 Straits Times, Bleak Future for Bengali, 19 February 1980, pp. 10-11.

10 Authors’ interview, 12th December 2020.

11 Authors’ interview, 13th September 2021.

12 A milk dessert unique to West Bengal and Bangladesh.

13 Dolly Davenport, National Archives Singapore, Oral history Recordings, ‘Community-driven Oral History Project’, Accession no. 004323, Reel no. 1.

14 Authors’ interview, 10th November 2020.

15 Meats not commonly consumed by Hindu Bengalis.

16 Ronendra Karmakar, National Archives of Singapore, Oral history Recordings, ‘Communities of Singapore’, Accession no. 000343, Reel 1.

17 Authors’ interview, 8th October 2020.

18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAGb4ddZE-g&t=2s&ab_channel=IndranilBanerjee, Accessed on 11^th January 2023.

19 Authors’ interview, 8^th October 2020.

20 Authors’ interview, 19^th October 2020.

21 Authors’ interview, 7^th September 2021.

22 Authors’ interview, 19^th October 2021.

23 Authors’ interviewed, 29^th October 2020.

24 Authors’ interview, 12^th September 2021.

25 ABP Ananda is a Bengali news channel based in Kolkata (formerly, Star Ananda) has been covering BAS Durga Puja festivities since 2012.

26 Authors’ interview, 19^th October 2021.

27 Ronendra Karmakar, National Archives of Singapore, Oral history Recordings, ‘Communities of Singapore’, Accession no. 000343, Reel 1.

28 Dolly Davenport, National Archives of Singapore, Oral History Recordings, ‘Community-driven Oral History Project’, Accession no. 004323, Reel no. 4.

29 Authors’ interview, 11^th September 2021.

30 Authors’ interview, 8^th October 2020.

31 Authors’ interview, 31^st October

32 Authors’ interview, 13^th September 2021.

33 Authors’ interview, 12^th December 2020.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jayati Bhattacharya

Jayati Bhattacharya is Senior Research Associate at the South Asian Studies Programme (SASP), National University of Singapore. Earlier, she has worked as Senior Lecturer at SASP, NUS. She has a PhD in Indian business history (Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), and more than fifteen years of teaching and research experiences in Indian trade diaspora, inter-Asian networks, and Indian transnationalism. Some of her publications include Beyond the Myth: Indian Business Communities in Singapore (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011) co-edited volume, Indian and Chinese Communities Comparative Perspectives (London: Anthem, ISEAS, 2015), book chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Indian Transnationalism (2019) and many other articles in peer-reviewed international journals. She has also initiated an informal network of global scholars working on the Bay of Bengal.

Priyam Sinha

Priyam Sinha is a Doctoral Candidate at the South Asian Studies Programme (SASP) at the National University of Singapore. Her doctoral thesis foregrounds the corporeality of disability as ‘content’ in Bollywood and provides an interdisciplinary engagement with creative media industries and production cultures, Disability Studies and Gender Studies. Some of her work is forthcoming in Media, Culture and Society and published in The Economic and Political Weekly and The Routledge Handbook of Exclusion, Inequality and Stigma in India, among others.