THE INDIAN DIASPORA IN SINGAPORE : THE POLITICS OF SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE

Abstract

The Singapore government routinely states that the inflow of talented foreign nationals is crucial to the economic progress of the nation. This inflow, the government argues, is even more crucial as intellectual capital becomes the key to success in a knowledge-based economy. Since the 1990s, the government has thus put in place several incentives to encourage the influx of talented foreign nationals. This inflow is a highly selective process, however, and is highly regulated by the state. What is particularly significant to this thesis is how these new waves of migration have also generated new forms of racial politics. Deputy Prime Minister BG Lee recently stressed that the recruitment of Toreign talent’ has been a success, with the recruitment from India being especially successful. This thesis focuses on the experiences of both Indian migrant professionals and the local Indian community to show how their engagements with each other and the broader Singaporean community are shaped by stereotypes and racial ideology in multicultural Singapore. Rather than portraying them as passive receptors of these forces however, I explore how they contest and resist them. To do so requires an elaboration of new 'paradoxical' spaces that better capture the complexity and diversity of Indian communities in Singapore. Rather than accepting social categories as given, this thesis draws on post-structural theories to examine how race is socially constructed in and through the migration experience. I do so to contribute to recent calls for a re-theorisation of population geography, problematising categories that are often taken for granted in migration research. In this thesis the category of Indian', often understood as stable and natural is problematised by documenting contests over its very meaning. Finally, a family-based research strategy is explored as a response to calls for more intensive and appropriate research methods in population geography and beyond. Keywords: Singapore, migration, Indians, racial ideology, paradoxical spaces.