Illustration: Paperlily Studio

Journeys on Old Lines, Remembered

Review by Vithya Subramaniam

Together, Partitions (2021) and Between Pudukkottai and Singapore (2017) have me realising that to be a South Asian person in Singapore is to have journeyed. Apart, the two films reveal how these journeys haunt us, unsettle us, and inspire us.

Made by Vishal Daryanomel, Partitions and Between Pudukkottai and Singapore introduce us to protagonists who have made a life in Singapore – lives marked by migration, where permanence was never guaranteed. Both come to the island nation in different decades; one in its waning years as a colony, another in the bustling years leveraged off rapid postcolonial development. Yet, both these journeys about making life and place in Singapore present the interplay of personal agency and historical structures, of self and family, of identity and creation. In noticing these intersections, though, I do not want to overgeneralise these unique journeys. After all, to enter Singapore in the early 1960s as a dependant of a citizen with better accessibility to citizenship is not at all the same as entering Singapore in 2012 on a work permit with no chance for permanent residency. But all journeys begin with a departure.

Film still from Between Pudukkottai and Singapore

Partitions begins with an invocation of the Partition of 1947 – the departure of the Crown from Colony, of Pakistan from British India, of Hindus and Sikhs from the new dominion of Pakistan, of Muslims from the new dominion of India. Sindh, a region with its unique tradition of shared sacred spaces and syncretic practices between the devotional Hindu and Islamic traditions, also sees its Hindu population departing the newly raised borders of Pakistan. Long and far journeys are not new to the Sindhi population. With its riverine landscape and bustling port, Sindhis have long established commercial and familial networks around the world. In Asia, Sindhi families extend across Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Kinship, marriage, and business dealings thus animate most of the trade and migration between these countries and the homeland. With the partition of the subcontinent, these old lines see many new departures from Sindh, but few returns.

The route to Singapore is one such line, well-forged over the years of empire-enabled mobility of goods and people between the two ports. Yet it does not stand alone. Migration is never about a singular journey. As Gunwanti recounts in Partitions, her journey from Sindh brought her first to Madurai, then Madras, before her eventual move to Singapore. Importantly, as it is characteristic of diasporic migration, it was extant familial contacts that sanctioned the journey. She first goes to Madurai to meet with her two elder sisters who have married there. She then travels to Singapore because contacts 'in Changi' vouched for her prospective groom.

It is this established community of Sindhis in Singapore that sets in motion the nexus of opportunity, aid, and trust that enables further migrations. We see this also in the fact that the then Sindhi Merchants Association (now renamed Singapore Sindhi Association) established premises at Enggor Street in 1938 with the expressed intent to 'provide Sindhi travellers in transit with comfortable boarding facilities'.[1] These facilities were expanded to Katong particularly to accommodate the large influx of Sindhis displaced by Partition,[2] a move that would account for the concentration of Sindhi families in that neighbourhood. As we see with the commingling of images of Hindu deities and Guru Nanak (the first Guru of Sikhism) in Partitions, the Katong neighbourhood too witnesses the syncretic nature of Sindhi religious practice particularly with the attendance of many Sindhi Hindus at Gurdwara Sri Guru Nanak Sat Sang Sabha.

Partitions conjures the unreturned departure with its opening sequence of citizenship documents and passports spliced with family photographs. Documents – a certificate of registration for Singapore citizenship, a spousal entry permit, a cancelled Indian passport issued in Madras and a certificate of Singaporean citizenship – trace the act of migrations on paper. Papers attest to and make visible the individual’s journey to a distant authority like the state. Family photographs trace migrations of flesh and blood, attesting to the journey of generations and people beyond those pictured.

Following Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes insists on the photograph’s connection to life:

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being … will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze … [3]

Family photographs then evoke the literal umbilical cords, marking not just the corporal relations of the photographed and viewing body, but also how the life narrative of one relates to another. Photographs disrupt the 'having-been-there' of the subject and its death, allowing it to 'haunt', and enabling the life of the photographed to 'haunt' the life of the viewer.

Film still from partitions

Studying Holocaust memory, Marianne Hirsch suggests that family photographs are documents of both memory (the survivor’s) and of what she calls 'post-memory' (that of the child of the survivor whose life is dominated by memories of what preceded their birth).[4] Even in the absence of unspeakable violence and overt trauma, the life of the child of migration is dominated by that journey that preceded their birth. The family photographs in Partitions thus record not just stories of migration and settlement, but their 'haunting' of descendants who will always be asked to recall a homeland and departure preceding their birth.

The task of recollection though, is unsettling. As Hirsch writes, post-memory 'is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.'[5] Yet, it does not take its use beyond memory. Instead, post-memory 'should reflect back on memory, revealing it as equally constructed, equally mediated by the processes of narration and imagination.'[6] Partitions demonstrates this mediated nature of memory. We never see the older subject on film and see only the younger subject’s hands, yet the entire piece is presented in their voices – one through archival recordings, and the other recorded while filming. We hear the 'haunting' of memory, and see how post-memory reflects back onto memory, a narrative that is constructed out of and weaved through the fragmentary recollections and enduring family ornaments, documents, and photographs.

In a subtle sense, when viewed together, Partitions and Between Pudukkottai and Singapore also reflect back on the construction, narration and imagination of the 'Indian' in Singapore. With roots in colonial era political realities and bureaucratic practices, we now use the term 'Indian' synecdochically to mean all persons of South Asian descent. Yet, because of demographics, popular historiography, and the particularities of Singapore’s race politics, the prevailing image of the 'Indian' person is one who is Tamil and whose forebears migrated to Malaya under British colonialism, about two or three generations before. Both films, then, unsettle this incomplete image by centring figures who are just as much 'Indian' in Singapore.

To be an 'Indian', or South Asian person, in Singapore is therefore also to be unsettled about our history. Generations of revised histories leave us questioning our lineage; from convict labour, to our alliance with Japanese forces during Occupation, to our overwhelming presence in labour unions, and involvement in the rise of key political figures. Now, calls to decolonise Singapore’s history threaten to decentre a major mechanism in the fact of our presence, ironically contributes to the marginalisation of the 'Indian' experience. Ours is an arrival borne of colonialism, with precedence, networks, schemes, and travel set up out of the business of empire. To decolonise too simply is to erase our lines. To refuse the structures of empire that brought Tamil indentured labour to Malaya, and how it was policy to recruit labourers exclusively from the Madras Presidency for work in the Straits Settlements, is to sever the long laid lines that continue to tie this island to southern India from which the subjects in both films have journeyed. 

Like Gunwanti, migration 'haunts' N. Rengarajan’s time and life in Singapore but unlike the previous subject, Rengarajan narrates his journey as one 'haunted' by money. It is the need to provide for his family immediately after college that drove his decision to work overseas. In his poem ‘Pluses and Minuses of Life Overseas’, the migrant labourer’s journey 'is a pilgrimage that reeks of money', and yet the idea of money is never far from thoughts of family – 'My lineage was only used to paying interest / But for the first time, we have started to save up.' While parts of Rengarajan’s story of migration and diasporic settlement bears similarities with that of Gunwanti (such as how a familial contact already in Singapore encouraged the journey), there is a stark absence of familial or even personal artefacts in Between Pudukkottai and Singapore. The two exceptions, however, work as they do in Partitions. As Rengarajan recounts his brother’s death, we see a photo of the late brother, a reminder of the way his memory 'haunts' Rengarajan’s life in Singapore. We are also shown handwritten samples of Rengarajan’s poems, recalling the hands at work throughout Partitions creating food.

Film still from partitions

Film still from Between Pudukkottai and Singapore

Rengarajan’s poems in Between Pudukkottai and Singapore spell out those threads that haunt Partitions. The yearning for family – for love in all its harshness – in his account of the pluses and minuses of life in Singapore point to a way of relating to land and country that is passionate but not unquestioningly idealistic; that is about lived presence but not authorising permits. The films remind us that the idea of citizenship and its prerequisite, the modern nation-state, are not the only ways of relating to lands and nations. Rengarajan envisions his future back in India, winning the National Award for songwriting, but his poems demonstrate that both pieces of land, both these experiences of space and society, inspire his work. Likewise, Rengarajan seeks community for personal growth, be it amongst fellow migrant poets or amongst Singapore’s significant resident Tamil population. It is his laments, about the divided and seemingly unbridgeable gulf between himself and a larger community of potential readers and supporters, that is the film’s moment of returning the gaze onto the viewer, onto the 'Indian' in Singapore, onto those who have also journeyed on those same long laid out lines.

Film still from Between Pudukkottai and Singapore

It is the unabashed reality of life that inspires the candour, poetry, and food in the two films. Beyond the obvious handiwork or the subjects, Partitions and Between Pudukkottai and Singapore also show us the ways in which Gunwanti and Rengarajan negotiate the nation’s landscape in the making of their own place in Singapore. We see one film set entirely indoors within one familial home, while the other is set outdoors across several informal but de facto community spaces. We see the open spaces of community and friends in Little India, but also a bus shelter that resembles a cage. We see carefree treks along communally laid 'desire paths' along the concretised stream. We see all the walks in a household and the outside noises that barge in. We see images of divinity set in the home in a recollection of sacred spaces across the seas. We see the ways these subjects testify to their lives and bear witness to journeys made before their time.

In turn, these films invite us to bear witness to these witnesses and their testimonies. I venture that these films also invite us to bear witness to our own lives, to consider what haunts, unsettles, and inspires our own journeys. As with any testimony, these films speak for themselves. I follow the thesis put forward in Between Witness and Testimony (2001), that films 'present a limit to universal constructions … pointing instead to the necessarily impossible nature of a universal language.'[7] Instead of seeking to present a universal position that can be understood by every subject but from which something will be lost, both these films by Vishal Daryanomel, in standing as witnesses onto themselves, work to communicate without loss of meaning. In testifying to the unique journeys of Gunwanti and Rengarajan, Partitions and Between Pudukkottai and Singapore invite us to see that, in part, to be 'Indian' in Singapore is to have history and memory, even if they haunt, unsettle, and inspire us.

Vithya Subramaniam is a DPhil Anthropology student working on the materiality of ‘Indian-ness’ in Singapore. She is interested in the lives, mobility, and agency of everyday objects in the making of identities. Vithya previously worked on mnemonic spaces and cartography, particularly in the Sikh tradition. She is also a sometime playwright; she sometimes plays and sometimes writes. For a list of Vithya’s works see her website, or scroll through her ‘gram @straitssettled

Vishal Daryanomel is a Singaporean filmmaker whose works have explored themes of migration, labour, identity and belonging. His first documentary short Between Pudukkottai & Singapore (2017) premiered at the Singapore Writers Festival, and was an award winner at the inaugural Citizen Cinema programme organised by Freedom Film Festival, Singapore. It went on to screen at various other festivals in Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. His second short film, partitions (2021), tells a story of Sindhi migration to Singapore following the Partition of India in 1947, juxtaposing fragmented recollections of the past with enduring practices of the present. He curated the short film programme as part of Global Migrant Festival in 2018.

Watch partitions (2021)

Synopsis: partitions is a short film about a Sindhi woman’s migration to Singapore following the Partition of India in 1947. The film takes an observational approach, juxtaposing fragmented recollections of the past – drawing on photographs, state documents, oral histories – with enduring practices of the present.

Watch Between Pudukkottai & Singapore – Poems by N Rengarajan (2017)

Synopsis: This short documentary features poet N Rengarajan, a migrant worker from Pudukkottai, India who sustains a practice of poetry as a way of life while working in the construction sector in Singapore. The film, structured around three of his poems, seeks to visually mirror the rhythm and tone of his writing. Together, verse and visuals strive to draw attention to the poet's acute illuminations of the realities of migrant life.