Abstract
This chapter examines how through cross-cultural child adoption, from the late 1920s to 1960s, the Indian community of Malaya (including Singapore) engaged in subtle shifts in what they thought to be ‘Indian’ in a colonial and post-colonial space. Demonstrating that ethnic boundaries are more fluid than once thought, the chapter delves into the process of ‘cultural incorporation’ of Chinese girls into adoptive Indian families: the ways in which the adoptive daughter is received into the Indian family, taking on the ‘Indian’ identity, erasing the ethnic lines between herself and that of the ethnic grouping of her birth family. The success of the incorporation of these daughters into these Indian families occurred because the girls embraced the ‘categorical attributes’ associated with Indian identity and culture; irrespective of their physical appearance and their ‘cumulative disadvantage’ of being females from an ethnic minority group in which son preference was not only upheld but led to these female children being given up for adoption.
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Notes
- 1.
It was also in the towns and rural settings that people developed friendships and fictive kinship relationships (through the institution of godparent-hood) irrespective of ethnic background; which paved the way for adoption across ethnic groups.
- 2.
If boys were given up for adoption, this usually only occurred because a close kin had fallen ill. Giving up the boy child was the decision made at the advice of a medium or astrologer who might have been consulted.
- 3.
‘Self-other’ construction in this case refers to how the ethnic ‘self’, in this case, being raised by Indians is constructed and defined by the ethnic other, that is, the Chinese ethnic group, whom these girls resembled in terms of their physical appearance.
- 4.
It must be noted that son preference tends to be most pronounced in North and Central India compared to South India. Although boys are favoured because a male is needed to conduct the death rituals in the family and the dowry system reinforces the economic liability of a girl child (Arnold, Choe and Roy, 1998; Das Gupta et al., 2003); in the South, bilateral kinship systems operate more strongly when compared to the North. See also Pong (1994).
- 5.
Pereira (1966) also details the cultural and social reasons why adoption was shunned. As such, children would not have been abandoned or given up since it would be difficult to find others who would accept them and take care of them.
- 6.
The case of Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers hired in Brahmin homes serves as a counterpoint (Devasahayam, 2005).
- 7.
Traditionally, the pottu, as it is called in Tamil, is a dot of red colour applied in the centre of the forehead between the eyebrows.
- 8.
These expressions of ‘Indian-ness’ were detailed by nearly every one of my respondents, including those who were Christian; although they did acknowledge that there were variations as to what constituted being ‘Indian’.
- 9.
See also Pereira (1966).
- 10.
An exception was one respondent who represented the younger generation of adopted Chinese girls into Indian families; she was born in 1967 and went in search of her biological relatives on her adoptive mother’s death. As she explained, her search for her biological kin was because she needed a sense of ‘closure’ about who her ‘real’ family was.
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Devasahayam, T.W. (2022). “Indian Mothers, ‘Chinese’ Daughters”: Child Adoption in Pre-Independence Malaysia and Singapore. In: Karupiah, P., Fernandez, J.L. (eds) A Kaleidoscope of Malaysian Indian Women’s Lived Experiences. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-5876-2_3
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