The history of Tamil women in Malaya and Singapore (1870s-1990s): a study of lower-caste Tamil women's representations and gender politics

• Main Author: Al-Mehraaj Binte Mohamed Rahim
• Other Authors: Jessica Bridgette Hinchy
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/173595
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper studies the representations of lower-caste Tamil women in Malaya and Singapore and how they were implicated in gender politics from the late nineteenth century up until the 1990s postwar period. It reveals how the introduction of ‘new patriarchy’ by Indian reformists as an answer to resolve the Women’s Question of the nineteenth century set the path for the ways lower-caste women’s identities were to be constructed for most of the colonial period, implicating them in various kinds of gender politics that predicated sexuality and domesticity as preliminary sites of struggle. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of women’s sexuality, domesticity and gender roles, the thesis argues that the perceived identities of lower-caste Tamil women of Singapore and Malaya – that consisted largely of sexual governance and gender politicisation – were distinctly shaped by transnational politics of caste, class, race and nationalist politics stoking particular systems of patriarchy that emerged over the period of the nineteenth century. This not only led to the production of distorted and definitive constructs of lower-caste Tamil women in colonial, national and cultural consciousness, but also worked to exclude the lower-caste Tamil women from elite and upper-caste models of womanhood over the course of the colonial period. Having been marginalised, these women were conferred the opportunity to attain cultural superiority and ideological strength and thereby regain respectability during instances of embracing domestic femininity following the period of the 1930s. The study attempts to provide a multifarious account of the representations of Tamil women by threading perspectives of colonial officials, European commentators, Indian reformists and nationalists, journalists, mercenaries and novelists and thus digs deep into productions of knowledge that reveal identity constructions that took place through gender politicisation. The thesis makes a timely contribution to the scholarship on the history of Tamil women in British Malaya and Singapore and demonstrates the potential of using gender as a category of analysis in South Asian diaspora studies.