Educating Indians, learning ‘Indianness’: navigating pluralistic educational infrastructures in diasporic Singapore

ABSTRACT

This paper advances the idea of ‘educational infrastructures’ to explore the slippages created by national education frameworks and the everyday ways in which citizen-subjects learn to be part of an ethno-cultural community. In doing so, we tease apart the differences between education as a top-down process of citizen-making and learning as a poly-directional assemblage of behaviours and influences that permeate the socio-spatial landscapes of ethnic belonging. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of Singapore’s diasporic Indian community and the collapse of linguistically and culturally complex community backgrounds under the Mother Tongue policy. This leads to a pluralisation of learning and negotiation of identity for young people as they attempt to forge their own identities amidst a homogenising sense of ‘Indianness.’ By tracing the evolution of Singapore’s language policies, this paper demonstrates how educational infrastructures come to fill the gaps created by a state-wide commitment to multiculturalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Indianness
• Singapore
• education
• infrastructure
• Mother Tongue language
• identity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Terence Tan Wei Jian for his assistance with policy research, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education under Grant 22-CIS-SMU-040, ‘Education Infrastructures and Migrant Un/Belonging: Indian Students in Singapore.’

Notes on contributors

Emma Grimley

Emma Grimley is a Research Assistant in the College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University. Her research interests include education, identity, and belonging amongst internationally mobile youth.

Orlando Woods

Orlando Woods is Associate Professor of Geography and Lee Kong Chian Fellow in the College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University. His research interests span religion, infrastructure, and cities in South and Southeast Asia.

Lily Kong

Lily Kong is Lee Kong Chian Chair Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University. Her research interests span religion, the creative and cultural economies, and cities in East and Southeast Asia.