Belonging

 August 10, 2020

 

Over the last week I have grappled with a sense of not knowing where I belong. It did get set off by the Ram Temple ceremony and the messaging around it — about how it was a celebration for all 130 crore Indians and how Ram belonged to the whole world. I was struck by how quickly one feels estranged by this sort of messaging when one cannot include oneself in the narrative. Another friend remarked on how this had made her feel like an alien in her own country. I read a news short about a South Indian woman being asked at the airport if she was Indian just because she didn’t speak Hindi, and I wondered what I would be asked, to prove my Indianness. What do I need to feel and think to belong there?

 

Belongingness has not been so hard for me as an adult. When I was a child I often felt excluded from things – starting with my large joint family where I rarely fit in – but later, probably only in my early 40’s, I found a strong inner core which allowed me to not be swept away by external marginalisations. Often forces around me have created strong storms but like a well rooted tree I have swayed in the winds, lost a lot of leaves and branches, but remained solid through them all. 

 

But now events in the country leave me feeling extremely displaced, like a part of my identity is thinning and breaking away. So loud are the voices about what it means to be Hindu or Indian that those of us who can’t relate to them are left untethered. A lot of these voices have got stronger with the establishment of the Ram Temple and though I want to leave the issue behind I feel chased around by it. 

 

I have lived in Singapore for 12 years now and have managed always to feel a sense of belonging here. It was easy to integrate as though it is a different country it still has an Asian feeling with its emphasis on a collective community culture. Also, right from year one I found close local friends who though Chinese Singaporean spoke an inner language that resonated. I have experienced racist or xenophobic situations, but they have been rare. 

 

Saturday was the first time I felt an exclusion here that left me rawer than I expected. I wrote that story about the Ramayana and the way in which it had been used to legitimise violence against women, create an evil ‘other’, manipulate identity, and to grab political power. I sent it off. It was not the whole story I wanted to write since there was a word limit, but it captured my strong feelings around this epic and its misuse. The editors extended the deadline for submission and wrote back asking if I might want to rework my story as it didn't reflect the Singaporean South Asian experience. I don’t yet know why this left me feeling ungrounded; like a floating vapour unable to find a place to settle, to solidify. I questioned whether I didn’t belong here either. 

 

It was only the next morning when I was sweating at Hong Lim Park with four other karatekas that I felt myself in my body again. It was National day -- we were two Singaporeans, two Japanese and one Indian training together, laughing and exchanging stories about ourselves – we were a community. 

 

I think one reason I felt the sense of non-belonging that I felt on Saturday is because the story I sent to them is about an issue I feel so passionately about – not just today, but from 1992 when the mosque was destroyed, even earlier perhaps when I was a teenager and questioned the way Sita was treated in the Ramayana. While I understand the editors stance -- that my perspective of the story, with its slant around the politics of India, is not something local South Asians would identity with, I think that each one of us, wherever we come from, will have a different experience of a myth and I need to not feel excluded by this experience? Though it does have a residual something left to it that I continue to ponder. 

I think I need to spend some time with others who think and feel like I do to reconnect -- to belonging to my own core.