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THINKING ALOUD! WALK WITH ME ON THE PATH WITH THE MOST QUESTIONS 12 Khwaish | February 2018 Ms Vithya Subramaniam My journey of working with Sikh memory and space, and Sikh heritage in Singapore, began with a few rather serendipitous steps. With openness to new, less-trodden paths, these last eight years have paved an exciting career in academia and public heritage projects. The story starts with me standing bare feet on the freezing marble parikrama in December 2009. I remember that moment well. It was a winter’s morning and I stood looking across the sarovar at a radiant Harmandir Sahib. I felt numb in my fingers, too awake for four o’clock in the morning, uncertain about what I was supposed to do or how to keep the scarf on my head, cautiously excited about the few things I knew then about this space, and eager for some hot cha. This was the originary moment of my academic research and career, several public projects, and numerous evolving questions. That heady daze, thankfully, still lingers. That was the morning of a day of rest from refurbishing a village school library in Gurdaspur. I was there with Khwaish IX, a project I had initially joined for the chance to see another part of India. Walking through the Golden Temple complex and neighbouring Jallianwala Bagh that afternoon, I was struck by the seemingly serene coexistence between spiritual sanctity and a difficult history. How does one feel whole and hopeful standing next to visible bullet holes? I experimented with this question the very next semester at the National University Singapore, and have since continued asking across two degree dissertations and several research papers. It is this same fascination with the role and spaces of the Sikh community memory that has shaped my projects in Singapore. The first of these projects is the Sikh Heritage Trail mobile app that Ishvinder Singh and I conceptualised and produced. The spark was lit by images we saw on social media of ‘Sikh Guards’ in the Bukit Brown Cemetery. This venture into the spaces of local memory and technology was supported by the National Heritage Board, and has since been warmly embraced by the Sikh community here and abroad. It also led to other fruitful partnerships, including a theatrical play and a film. Co-written with Saleem Hadi, and produced by Blacspice, ‘Sikhs of Serangoon’, was staged in August 2016 to some 250 members of the public. Set and staged in the Little India neighbourhood, this piece of historical fiction was also a means for me to explore interactions
Khwaish | February 2018 13 and bonds between early Sikh migrants and other settlers in 1930s Singapore. The film, ‘Singh in the Lion City’, by Upneet Kaur of Uptake Media also offered the opportunity to Ishvinder and me to share the journey behind the development of our mobile app. At the launch of the film, I also had the honour of sharing the panel with author Balli Kaur Jaswal as we discussed impressions and representations of Sikhs in various local mediums. Crucially, these projects have also been important avenues to introduce a wider audience to the myriad of histories and stories that animate the Singapore Sikh community today. The time is ripe in Singapore for such ventures. Having marked 50 years of national independence, many segments of the local community are looking back onto their own pasts. As each group does so, we find moments of interactions and exchange across ethnic, religious, class, and geographical lines. It is in these crossings that, I suggest, the heritage of Singapore is made and preserved. It is also at such crossings that I come closer to an answer for the question most frequently asked of me. Many are often curious why one of the Straits Tamil descends would choose to study an ‘unrelated’ community and region. This is certainly a fair question, and one that anthropologists ought to ask themselves. This seeming paradox was even the subject of an episode of Channel NewsAsia’s ‘On the Red Dot’ that featured my work and story. I do not know if I will ever have a satisfying answer. (But no, it does not involve a nice Sikh boy.) What I can say for now is this – where there were many available paths, I took the one with the most questions. For anyone else who might be interested in taking up heritage work in Singapore, or any other passion project for that matter, I would say this – you do not have to have the answers yet, but be prepared for the questions. The time is now, the funding is there, with some comes more, there is support and more will find you, there are multiple ways to go about it and it all starts with starting. These starts that I have had with great collaborators have also led me here. In early 2017, I was invited to join the YSA’s Executive Committee by the current vice-president Sarabjeet Singh. Since Sarab was also the one who suggested I join Khwaish, I knew he would not steer me wrong. With YSA, I am currently working on ways to commemorate Sikh presence in Singapore as part of the 2019 Singapore Bicentennial. As with my other projects, I look forward to celebrating and creating more moments of interactions and exchanges with other communities. This too is where Singapore’s future lies – at the crossings, not in the categories. These are new shoes to fill, and I am honoured to walk in them. Since that cold morning on the parikrama of Harmandir Sahib, these feet have worn through multiple pairs of shoes that have been handed over to many a gentle sevadar at gurdwaras, whose soles have weathered the stony alleys and tarred highways of many Punjab summers, and whose laces have been embraced too fondly by love grass in Bukit Brown. As I step forward with YSA and continue working on celebrating Singapore’s heritage of exchange, I look forward to crossing paths with more of you. Come walk with me! Ms Vithya Subramaniam is a historian and anthropologist in training interested in questions of memory and space. Her primary research has focused on sites and objects across Punjab. Vithya holds degrees from Columbia University and the National University of Singapore (NUS). She currently seeks to inspire her students to ask better questions as a teaching assistant with the South Asian Studies Programme at NUS. The views presented in this article are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of YSA.
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