Heritage & Nationality Through Fashion

Designed by Amira Dossani

To hail from a country is a beautiful thing. To carry a sense of belonging is intangible, yet the most prized possession one can hold.

I am a child of the diaspora, like many others. My ancestors did not write the history of the United States, but they come from India, a country so rich in culture, art and diversity, and a region where colonial encounters grotesquely ripped away its wealth and coexistence.

To fend for themselves, millions of people who hail from South Asia are scattered all over the world. Some have found white picket fences in the United States, England, or Australia. Some sell knick-knacks on street corners on cobblestone streets in Europe. Perhaps you’ll buy a water bottle from one while walking through Parque Guell in Barcelona, or a pair of earrings from one on a roadside stall outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Some are forced to search for livelihoods in countries stained with inequality. They form the lower strata of society, with no clear path upward – such is the case of South Asians in Singapore.

I studied abroad in Singapore this past fall, and my decision to do so stemmed from a desire to live in a country as diverse as my own yet with a large South Asian diaspora. I wanted to be in a place rich with the cultures and traditions my parents grew up with and one that even spoke my mother tongue, Tamil.

I have always been comfortable with my Indian American identity. Nevertheless, curiosity over the experience of an Indian diaspora member in an area where Indians formed a larger subset of the population pushed me to Singapore, where a sense of belonging complicated itself so immensely. Though I am Tamil, I am not Singaporean, though by looking at me one could not discern. My best friends in Singapore were fellow exchange students, heeding from the United States, the Czech Republic, and Australia – none were Indian. We discussed dressing more modestly – clearly, because when in Rome. But no matter how much they adhered to the dressing styles of Singapore, they would always be tourists from a foreign country where I never was.

It is a strange thing to belong. There’s an assumption that one feels the most primal sense of belonging in a homogenous society, yet to me it was so intrinsically unnerving. Never had I felt a necessity to prove or justify my heritage so strongly as I did during my months in Southeast Asia. I was proud to be recognized as Indian or Singaporean, but I longed for someone to look a little deeper – I wanted them to know me, to see the intricacies that exist from my American-ness. Even within my travels, strangely enough, I enjoyed myself in places where I blended in least, like the Philippines or Cambodia, where my accent revealed where I was from, and not so much my face.

Somehow, the same styles that made me feel most comfortable in the United States propelled me into a liminal space of neither here nor there in Singapore. The long, printed skirts with crop tops and jhumkas and dupattas with jeans, that make me confident at home, made me feel lost in the crowd in Singapore.

How does one reconcile heritage and nationality through fashion? The task becomes entirely Sisyphean when the same choices that enhance your identity in one place dull it in another.

The style I’ve developed for myself in a country where South Asians are an extremely small minority is somewhat of an oddity in a place where they make up a considerable size of the population.