‘Bhadraloks’ on the move: the Bengali diaspora in Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bengalis, a South Asian sub-ethnic group in Singapore, mainly hail from the Hindu majority in West Bengal, India and the Muslim majority in Bangladesh. Although they share similar linguistic, culinary preferences, cultural innuendos, and the collective trauma of the Partition of 1947, the ambiguity of Bengaliness in Southeast Asia permeates their everyday lives, cultural placemaking, and notions of identity and belonging. This research addresses the microhistories and transnational Bengali networks in Singapore beyond the overwhelming scholarship on the South Indian labour migrant communities in Southeast Asia, that is also distinct from the Bengali diaspora in the UK and Europe. It focuses on the less-studied Bengali Bhadralok (the 'gentlemanly' class) that channelled cultural continuities and discontinuities of placemaking through foodways, bridal diasporic networks, occupational affiliation, language integration, cinema and festivals to foreground their distinctiveness within Singapore’s multicultural and multiracial landscape that homogenised the Indian diaspora within migrant labour/ Tamil speaking Indians.