THE CONTESTED IDENTITIES OF SINGAPORE'S INDIAN-MUSLIM 'COMMUNITY'

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explore how the contested identities of Singapore's Indian-Muslim ‘community’ are mediated through spaces. In unraveling this hyphenated identity, I examine the tensions involved in essentialist categorization of racial identities, i.e. the Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others (CMIO) that remains dominant in Singapore. Such essentialist notions assume fixed and rigid boundaries around racial identities. This practice in turn places the Indian-Muslim ‘community’ as a minority within minority. However, the fixed notions of identity are rejected as anti-essential interpretations are instead adopted to explore the multiplicity of subject positions and the constructedness of such identities. To investigate the tensions around essentialism and anti-essentialism, twenty indepth interviews were conducted with young Indian-Muslim women. The women's roles are highlighted through the various racial, religious and patriarchal discourses that place them at the center of the ‘community’. The interviews revealed how spatialised expressions of race can be explored vis-a-vis the interactions between scales through which identities are articulated. The geographical scales discussed are the body, neighbourhood and nation. The paper investigates how the multiple identities of Indian-Muslims are constructed, contested and negotiated in and through these scales. The social constructedness of the scales was reinforced as the fluidity between them was highlighted. It was found that the women's experiences of particular places were constructed by both essentialist and anti-essentialist notions about racial identities and additionally the women also adopted various strategies to negotiate the constraints placed on them. Furthermore, the women creatively used the fluidity of the scales to negotiate their multiple identities.