THE HINDU DESTITUTES BURIAL FUND: A COMMUNITY’S ATTEMPT TO SALVAGE A DYING REPUTATION

Abstract

The Hindu Destitutes Burial Fund (HDBF) was set up by the Singapore’s Hindu Advisory Board (HAB) in October 1952 in response to a pressing need to provide proper burials for unclaimed dead destitute Hindus regularly found by the Singapore Coroner in the General Hospital Mortuary. I want to tell the forgotten story of the HDBF and its failure as an example of how the conflation between assumptions of community with religious communal labels such as Hinduism can be so detrimental to the success of providing community care to people who fall through cracks of society. I hope to show how communal labels simultaneously oversimplify the diverse identities they attempt to contain, as well as exclude all those who do not relate to what the unitary label represents. For example, in the case of Singapore, Hinduism was (and is) associated with being Indian and speaking Tamil – a nexus not all fit neatly into. I thus provide the historical context behind Hinduism as a colonial category, and of the intertwined relationship between developments in Singapore's Hindu community and social welfare for dead, destitute Hindus leading up to the HDBF's creation. I then, describe the HDBF itself, with special emphasis on how the HAB emphasised the need for Singapore's Hindus to operate as a united community, despite the many divisions within the group. Lastly, I analyse the operations of the HDBF, revealing why the HAB's assumption of community under the label of “Hindu” contributed to the failure of the HDBF, resulting in its ultimate closure in 1961.