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Community, Worship, and Voluntarism in Singapore Hindu Temples Lee Wei

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Community, Worship, and Voluntarism in Singapore Hindu Temples Lee Wei EXCLUSIVELY SACRED: COMMUNITY, WORSHIP, AND VOLUNTARISM IN SINGAPORE HINDU TEMPLES LEE WEI FEN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2013 EXCLUSIVELY SACRED: COMMUNITY, WORSHIP, AND VOLUNTARISM IN SINGAPORE HINDU TEMPLES LEE WEI FEN (B.A., National University of Singapore) A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES PROGRAMME NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was borne out of a fascination with stories and the experiences of migrant and minority communities, fertilised and developed with ideas and conversations with acquaintances, friends, and educators, and delivered—not without occasional pain—to the sound of temple bells ringing. It’s been quite the journey, and deep thanks are due. My longtime supervisor and mentor, Dr. Rajesh Rai, who has inspired, accompanied, and laboured along with me across these years, always with dependable good cheer. I have benefitted from his deep knowledge, understanding, and connection to the Singapore Indian diaspora; that it has been accompanied by the delightful skill of making hard work light is an additional boon I have had the fortune to watch and learn from. The personal studies I have undertaken with Dr. Vineeta Sinha and Dr. A. R. Venkatachalapathy have added immense value to the foundations of my research, and their time and dedication to my studies are greatly appreciated. Dr. Venkatachalapathy must be credited with whatever understanding and interest I have in Tamil culture and literature, which has been supplemented by the tireless attempts by Dr. John G. Samuel and his wife, along with Dr. S.P. Thinnapan and Mrs. K. Sabapathy, to educate me in the Tamil language. Likewise, Dr. Peter Friedlander, Dr. Sunil Bhatt, and Mrs. Sandhya Singh are thanked for their dedication and enthusiasm in their impartation of Hindi. The seeds of this study were planted years ago as a student of the South Asian Studies Programme in the National University of Singapore, and the knowledge and mentorship received from Dr. Andrea Pinkney, Dr. Rahul Mukherji, Dr. Gyanesh Kudaisya and Dr. Indivar Kamtekar through various classes and conversations have been invaluable, as have been the suggestions and support from Dr. Annu Jalais and Dr. Jayati Bhattacharya. Unsurprisingly, all this could not have been achieved without the efficiency and support of Nur Jannah Mohamed and Hamidah Bte Hamdan. The kindness and generosity of Dr. McComas Taylor and his South Asian Program at the Australian National University in including me in their Crookwell postgraduate thesis workshop in the winter of 2012 must also be acknowledged; it has given me the pleasure of continued friendships and exchanges with likeminded researchers with an incorrigible connection to South Asia. Likewise, my fellow researchers and students at NUS, Ritu Jain, Ngawang Drakpa, Himanshu Jha, Sojin Shin, Vithya Subramaniam, Praveen Vijayakumar, Priscilla Vincent, Lavanya Ramesh, George Jose, and Amritarupa Sen—my thanks for the continuous i encouragement and the comfort of presence, as well as the robust conversations and perspectives. This thesis would be invalid without the support, curiosity, and encouragement of members and devotees of the Sri Siva Durga Temple and the Shree Lakshminarayan temple. The generosity of time, ideas, and opinions that I have received is well appreciated, and the openness in including me in their functions and activities have given me the finest year of understanding more worlds within the world I live in. It is my hope that this thesis will help others do the same. The friendships have been an unexpected and lovely bonus, and for the colours, the camaraderie, and the trust—thank you. Finally, the expenses of this study have been borne by the good people at the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the help and support I have received from Cherielyn Leong, Zhuang Wenya, and Debbie Loh are gratefully acknowledged. No large project would be complete without some surprising twists and turns. To Philip, who joined me mid-way through this journey, and who has since been a pertinacious pillar of support, a ferocious editor, and an unwavering partner and friend—my appreciation and love are small returns for the large and dusty roads you’ve travelled to me. To my parents, Christina and Pang Wee, and my sisters Claire and Wei Zhen, who have unwaveringly supported, accommodated, and encouraged me despite their bemusement at my strangest of paths: the quietest of thanks, the loudest of love. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments i Table of Contents iii Abstract v Chapter 1 Introduction 2 On Migration and Religion 8 The Hindu Diaspora in Singapore a) Querying Cultural Processes 13 b) The Singapore Context: Plurality and Diversity 15 Outlining Agendas 20 Chapter 2 Field Sites and Field Work 23 The Hindu Temple: An Institution of Hinduism ‘North’ and ‘South’ Indian Temple Worship 26 A Note on the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Indian Diaspora 30 Field Sites a) Sri Siva Durga Temple 33 b) Shree Lakshminarayan Temple 38 Field Work a) On Positionality 43 b) On Methodology 48 Chapter 3 Community Identities 51 Politics of Identity a) Language: a Background 53 b) The SSDT: Tamil at the Top 55 c) The SLNT: ‘North’ Indian and Hindustani 59 An Uneven Caste Consciousness 62 Challenges to Leadership Renewal 69 Potential Outcome for Devotees 71 Chapter 4 Worship in Moments 76 Everyday Worship 79 Group Worship: the Redistribution of Honours 82 Tuesdays: Dupattas on Fire at the SSDT 85 Extending the Finite 93 Moments of Lingering, Loitering, and Idleness 95 Temple Tours: of Pilgrimage and Leisure 100 iii Chapter 5 Seva: Dialogic Voluntarism 113 Seva in Singapore: a Background 116 Temple Seva: SSD and SLNT 119 Opening a Third Space: a) Seva in the SSD: Privileged Pathway to Leadership 123 b) Seva in the SLNT: Recognition as Belonging 130 Chapter 6 Conclusion: (Dis)Integration? 140 Identities and Belonging 141 State-Society Relations: Hindu temples as ‘Civic Society’ 145 Glossary 153 Bibliography 156 iv ABSTRACT The traditional Hindu temples of Singapore are devotional and community spaces, where diverse groups of Indians with varied regional, linguistic, caste, and citizenship identities meet and mingle. Increasingly, there has been a growing sense by “local” Hindus of being crowded out of their temples by new professional Indian migrants, whose immigration into Singapore has increased significantly in the last decade. This thesis, as an ethnographic study of the Sri Siva Durga temple and the Shree Lakshminarayan temple, investigates the social interactions between two groups, and examines how the different ways of belonging are negotiated within the temple. This thesis examines what it means to be “local” and “foreigner” as both a ‘North’ or ‘South’ Indian in Singapore, and how this affects devotee interactions in moments of worship and voluntarism. As two main activities that the temple is structured around, worship and voluntarism are understood as spaces of intercultural interaction that are both the lenses to understand Indian identities by, as well as to examine the effects of these identities on existing temple activities. Worship, a central function of the temple, is argued as peripherally conjoined to moments of lingering, loitering, and idleness, which can facilitate reparative knowledge within divided communities. Temple tours, a hybrid form of holy pilgrimage and secular tourism, contains many of these moments, exemplifies how these overlooked phenomena may contribute towards the development of communitas. This thesis also proposes that seva, as a form of voluntarism, is a dialogical process between temple authorities and new devotees, and a powerful method of negotiating the latter’s position within the temple. Ultimately, this thesis argues that greater inclusion through temple activities is possible, but cannot translate immediately into positions of power and full belonging. However, the forms of hybrid identities and positions that emerge through worship and seva are indicative that the diasporic Hindu temple in Singapore will evolve spatially and functionally in response to the changing landscape of Indian communities in Singapore—retaining its original community and protecting their positions, whilst accommodating the ‘new’ minorities. v CHAPTER 1 1 1. INTRODUCTION 'What kind of Indian are you?' 'Apa macam punya mama?' he said. I had stammering Tamil, two words of Urdu, It seemed hard to get round his head. 'Apa macam punya mama?' he said In Malay, our one common tongue. It seemed hard to get round his head. And I shamefully left my head - hung. In Malay, our one common tongue, I was tempted to ask, 'What of you? I may shamefully leave my head hung, But at least I'm not one of the few Who've abandoned the sarabat-prata tradition With my stammering Tamil, two words of Urdu. I'm not the only 'revised Mama edition'. Just what kind of Indian are you?' - ‘pantun for a drink seller at newton circus’, by Aaron Maniam The place of the Indian individual within the palimpsest of Singapore society is firmly ensconced within the letter ‘I’. This ‘I’ sits snug within the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) framework of multiculturalism, a colonial inheritance that demarcates residents and citizens of Singapore racially as Chinese, Malay, Indian, or ‘Others’. Of the problems associated with the CMIO categories,1 which have rigidly defined the organisation of Singaporean society since its independence in 1965, most troubling has been the easy conflation that it encourages between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’, and increasingly, other forms 1 Of which there are many, including the conflation of South Asian identities with ‘Indian’, as well as the strong associations made between racial categories and dominant religions. For a more comprehensive discussion of the ‘CMIO’ system of categorisation in relation to the Indian community, see Mani 1998. 2 of identity by which individuals choose to define themselves by. Representing both the questioned and the questioner, Aaron Maniam’s poem above, about the in-between-ness of being Indian Muslim hints at the plurality of the Singaporean Indian identity, and linked both to language, heritage, and regionality.
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