Dr Supriya Singh’s fear of not living fully led her to learn six languages, revisit her memories in the backdrop of her garden and seek to preserve her saris as art in the NGV.
In all the stories I have shared so far, many have had the power of human benevolence, but never have I written stories about migrants. Not that I’ve never spoken about it – after all, we’re all the products of migration.
But all that’s ever been spoken about migrants was just the outer layer – never have I fully indulged the subject to its core, perhaps because I am one too. But now more than ever it has become important to talk about it, giving the next generation a full view of the gaps that have been witnessed.
A handful of people have shaped the path before us. With such stories, often we paint a picture in our head about the heavy-laden luggage packed with treasures of our lives, or simply the cross-border transitional displacement.
So, this edition will look at four women, from their thirties to their seventies, who have broken stereotypes. These women are unstoppable, bringing not only themselves but the whole discussion of migrancy to the forefront.
In this first series, we speak to one such woman who has taken an extraordinary leap into the future. She calls herself ‘not quite a migrant tragic,’ though she has migrated twice, first from India to Malaysia in 1967 and then to Australia in 1986. Her story started before the Partition in Rawalpindi.
But every person has a story, and every story has a reason.
Meet Dr Supriya Singh, who has done everything in life out of fear of not living fully – from being an anthropologist, learning six languages, becoming a financial journalist in Malaysia and Australia, doing her PhD at La Trobe University, and writing nine books.
Doing her PhD led to her part-time job at the Centre for International Research on Information and Communication Technologies set up by the Victorian Government.
This centre was taken over by RMIT in 1998.
I first met Dr Singh at an International Women’s Day conference. I was transported to her world, which involved the art of writing letters as a medium of communication, where newspapers would come on a lazy afternoon and things were much simpler.
She fell in love with Malaysia and its tea ceremonies, and later went to Borneo as her husband was transferred.
Away from Delhi and with her Master’s degrees from India and the United States – and now living in a land where forty-five thousand people were mainly Chinese – Dr Singh soon adapted by learning Mandarin and Simunul, a language of the Bajau people.
Sabah, in Borneo in 1971 was still very much a Somerset Maugham type of place. In those days, to call long distance was terrifying because it was expensive, and those calls were made only if someone passed away.
A letter took two weeks to reach India, and by the time someone read that letter, life had somewhat moved on – and that’s the effect of migration. It has its own charm; the long distances and that piercing silence that would drive anyone to loneliness and make them great writers.
Dr Supriya was already a sociologist. Migration made her a writer. She started getting published at the New Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur – but it didn’t matter, as only six people read the paper from Kuala Lumpur in Sabah during those days.
“And then as a sociologist, I was a writer. So, you will know once you're a writer, you are always.”
Born into a family where her mother had become a scholar of Punjabi literature, living amidst a museum of languages in Delhi was a sense of pride for Dr Supriya.
During our conversation she mentioned that when she was a new bride in Penang, an older woman speaking Punjabi as it was spoken in villages 100 years ago, called her beautiful tanchoi sarees ‘rags’ – an old Punjabi word for ‘clothes’, it upset her so much that she ran to her room and cried.
Also, during those days milk in Malaysia was not easily available, as the Malay and Chinese seldom drank milk.
Coming from India, where milk flowed in abundance, was a difficult migration change for the bride; later drinking strawberry milk from a carton filled with preservatives had its own story.
But the best part of her journey was that in Australia, she realised she would always be an Indian in Australia. She delighted in wearing saris and later the salwar kameez. She just was being herself.
She recalls this would play to her advantage as a journalist; bankers often saw her as a housewife from India in a sari and talked openly of themselves. By this time, she had already written about the history of the central bank in Malaysia.
She was part of the consumer finance movement in Australia and even wrote her thesis on marriage and money. She was far away from the world of Malaysia now and this second migration came easy, surrounded by universities and saris.
Before this interview, I met Dr Supriya for a coffee, and she asked me about my mother adjusting here. I was honest: I really didn’t know how to answer. Then Dr Supriya addressed the elephant in the room. The most unsettling behaviour that human beings take time processing: loneliness.
Her book The House over Diamond Creek in 2021 stemmed out of that loneliness and fear. Even in her speeches she mentioned that she writes for herself to make sense of her life and the loneliness that sparked her writings.
Her sister had passed away in Delhi just before COVID. Grief is lonely. That whole process transports one to the past which shapes the history and identity of a person.
In her case it was her mother and siblings. When her mother passed away, she couldn’t talk to her siblings because the mother they knew, a housewife of pre-Partition Rawalpindi, was different to the mother she grew up with, a mother and scholar in independent India.
Her memories of picnics in the grounds of Delhi gave her the capacity to stretch her eyes as far as the trees would go.
Somewhere in lockdown, sitting in her own garden in Melbourne, she was able to deal with the grief as well as the joys of the past.
Along with her memories of writing a book came the delicate, intricate saris. These beautiful pieces of art always worried her – who would wear them? Her daughters-in-law don’t wear saris and it was hard to think of these garments being laid aside after she died.
That fear made her approach the National Gallery of Victoria to preserve two of the beautiful pieces as pieces of art, and part of her history and that of Victoria. She hopes these saris will forever be a great way of understanding the writer and the uniqueness of Indian textiles.
Dr Supriya these days is learning Gurbani, which she didn’t get a chance to study in all these years gone by, and reading about the poet Kabir is also a way of making sense of the times. “Everything is temporary and now this too shall pass.”
This is the life of a woman who has walked seven decades, plunging herself into a new and exciting Malaysia, learning languages, then becoming a professor in another continent that had yet to discover a love of saris.
After the interview, I called her on FaceTime and she took me to her favourite garden, where she wrote her book, as if transporting me to her world of memories.
As far as I could see were trees that shared her secrets of joy and loneliness. I felt melancholy and as I tried digressing from this odd feeling it pulled me back to the fear that the professor was talking about.
Being a migrant is not as simple as it sounds; the process of becoming the person in the journey is what makes an incredible story.
Even today it’s not easy, as it was difficult for the professor and every decade will have a lingering effect on the next.
By Nandita Chakraborty