“Happiness is a mood, not a destination,” says Sindhura Kalidas. “That’s a quote from One Tree Hill, and I think about that a lot, and how it’s really just this fleeting emotion that comes and goes, not a constant state of mind.”

That’s an important distinction for Sindhura to make, especially considering she’s directing a show called Happy Indian Women this November. Presented by The Necessary Stage (TNS), where Sindhura is an Associate Artist, Happy Indian Women is a verbatim theatre show crafted from interviews held with twenty female-identifying South Asians and non-binary individuals that explores the commonalities and diversity of their experiences living in Singapore.

Work on Happy Indian Women began in late 2022, when TNS conducted a lab entitled An Exploration of “Growing Up Indian”, where artist-collaborators explored interdisciplinary performance styles by using excerpts from “What We Inherit: Growing Up Indian” published by AWARE.

“Along with Haresh Sharma (TNS Resident Playwright) and Deonn Yang (TNS’ other Associate Artist), we worked on the lab and found it such a powerful, enlightening and enriching experience, and were struck by how these stories resonated with all of us,” says Sindhura. “Especially with how our artist-collaborators, which included a movement artist, a naturalist, and a Carnatic singer, all had different entry points and their own rich experiences of growing up Indian.”

“As part of the Associate Artist scheme, I was to pursue my own project, and when Haresh asked if I would be interested in exploring this further, I just went ‘yes!’,” she adds. “I realised that there were so many stories by South Asian women to be shared and that they needed some kind of platform for it. It’s never been done before for a verbatim work, and with Haresh who’s so experienced with that form of theatre, it made sense to work together with him on such a project.”

Since then, Sindhura, along with research assistant Ashie Singh and her other collaborators, have been busy developing the play, from the beginning stages of conceptualising the work, to conducting and transcribing the interviews, to coalescing it into a single, coherent whole for the theatre. “To me, putting real words spoken by real people is such a powerful thing , and there really isn’t a more authentic way to capture people’s thoughts and feelings, especially for a group that’s been so often underrepresented, misrepresented and wrongly portrayed,” says Sindhura.

“So in deciding who we wanted to interview, we considered how we wanted to explore the idea of ‘Indian-ness’ and the diaspora as a whole, including people from Bangladesh or Pakistan, and not necessarily hailing from India itself,” she adds. “Part of the reason for that is to showcase that there is such a diversity of Indians, and so we deliberately chose interviewees to represent a range of ages, socioeconomic background, occupation, sexual orientation, nationalities and more. Most of these people were also complete strangers we’ve never spoken to before, and were at most related by being friends of friends or family, so the interview was also our first time really getting to know them and hear from them.”

Despite being warned that sometimes ‘less is more’, Sindhura and her team insisted on doing all 20 interviews, and at an hour each, resulted in plenty of time spent transcribing them and an overwhelming amount of material to fit into a 90 minute play. “When we did the interviews, we kept in mind that we wanted to include multiple aspects of their lives, from romance to growing up, and we started to realise there were some similar threads, like how almost everyone had a bullying incident while in school,” says Ashie Singh, who is also part of the cast and a final year Theatre Studies major at the National University of Singapore (NUS). “It’s an unfortunate incident for sure, but it’s also something that binds us, and we realised that we were not alone in this. It’s this idea that someone out there understands us, and while 90 minutes isn’t enough to cover all of it, I think it’s the start of a conversation that can begin dismantling some. of these misrepresentations and build more solidarity within the community.”

“When you are in a group that is purportedly similar, you do notice the commonalities, but also become more aware of your own privileges as well, like how being a Tamil woman means that you have certain advantages. With Tamil being an official language, we become the ‘chosen’ community in Singapore to represent the entire Indian population,” says Sindhura. “So Tamil ends up getting prioritised in literary festivals for example, or it becomes easier to get funding if you’re doing something related to the language. Or even if say, you studied Mandarin as a child, the kinds of circles you end up in are fundamentally different, and all these only surface when you finally have conversations with other people about your experiences.”

Besides Ashie, Happy Indian Women will also star theatremaker Grace Kalaiselvi, and recent Lasalle graduates Siobhan Jane Covey and Siti Sara Hamid. But even more than that, almost the entire production team comprises brown men and women, from sound artist Bani Haykal to multimedia artist Nina Chabra. “I did ask TNS if it could be an all-brown production team, and props to them for helping make it happen. It feels a little bit like my Avengers,” says Sindhura. “The cast helped a lot with the writing process, and even included their own experiences, thoughts and comments into creating their characters, which are composites of several interviewees. It’s nice to come together like that, and there are times we find everyone from our stage manager to sound designer helping out with translation, and I cannot count myself as the sole playwright because of such a process.”

“In terms of casting, I really wanted to subvert expectations and didn’t want to just match the skin tone of the interviewee to the closest cast member. Under Haresh’s mentorship, I was encouraged to challenge myself and approach the text in more creative ways, because no one really wants to hear 20 monologues in a row, which is why we combined these interviews and decided on who to match each person to based on the final composites,” she adds. “We also interviewed someone with a disability and a transwoman, and there were ethical considerations in how our cis and able actors could not best portray these roles unless they had the lived experiences, so we ended up representing them in multimedia form, which you’ll see in the show.”

The cast formally came together in July 2023 during the earlier phases of production, and finally, have reached the last leg of the preparation process, as they enter intensive blocking and rehearsals as they get ready for the run taking place in a little over two weeks. “Coming into this entire project from the initial lab, I never thought there would be a group that understands my experience and helped me locate my identity and also question the way I exist in the community, in Singapore society,” says Ashie. “On a personal level, sometimes I do struggle with not fitting perfectly into the prescribed brackets, like how even though I’ve grown up here, I’ve never had chilli crab and can’t tell you what all the different kinds of kopi are. I still have a very strong connection with my Indian roots, travelling every six months to see my grandparents, and it feels like a part of me belongs there, but not neatly. It’s been nice to know other people feel that way, and that we’re all still figuring it out together.”

“When I came in to audition, the first thing I realised was how ‘brown’ the entire room was, and it literally was the first time I’d felt that way, even though I do have brown friends,” says Siobhan. “Reading through the transcripts, I felt like I’ve learnt more about my culture here than all my own experiences outside, and it’s been so fun learning and understanding and bridging that gap of knowledge to me of what it means to be Indian.”

For Siti Sara, who identifies as Singaporean Indian-Javanese, the fact that her Indian-ness doesn’t explicitly present itself in her skin tone and features hits especially hard. “When Sindhura invited me to audition, I told her ‘but I don’t look South Asian’. But she reassured me that it was more about the fact that I was partially Indian that mattered, and so far it’s all been a really eye-opening experience,” she says. “All my life I’ve been surrounded by brown folk, and there’s been a disconnect between myself and the Indian girls, because I tended to do more ‘Malay’ things, while also being Indonesian. I started to have a bit of an identity crisis where I wondered whether it was correct for me to like or dislike certain things, or when I sit with my best friend, a Tamil person, I somehow feel ‘less’ Indian. This play has really helped me understand and find my footing in this world, and humbled and educated me about keeping in touch with our cultural and ancestral roots.”

“For me, I do resonate a lot with the bullying, and that kind of discrimination is still very much out there, whether at school or the workplace, or even abuse that a woman goes through,” says Grace. “And for me, representing all these Indian groups beyond the Tamils, including the Punjabis, the Sinhalese, the Gujaratis, the Sikhs, the Bangladeshis and the Pakistanis, there really is so much diversity and different stories all worth sharing.”

To become an actor and artist is a deliberate choice, and even knowing how difficult the road ahead is, it’s impressive that all four actors and Sindhura have chosen to continue pursuing the arts. What then, keeps them going? “One of the big reasons I became an independent artist is because the year I graduated, there were almost zero auditions available for Indian women,” says Grace. “As a result, I decided to stage my own show, Mother I (which itself was a verbatim play where she interviewed 20 mothers). It was a very encouraging project, so I ended up going down that path and never looking back. It’s challenging creating your own work of course, but it’s also given me the freedom to decide my own projects and make a name for myself. Eventually, that opened up new opportunities where people would start asking me to perform in shows and for the last six years, it’s been commissioned work, while I still teach, so I’ve managed to make it all work out.”

“I’m in my final year of university now, and Happy Indian Women is my first show outside of school. My mother likes to say that you need to be a little crazy to do the arts, and she’s not wrong,” says Ashie. “But there’s this fundamental need for me to do it, just being in the space and finding myself at my happiest being able to talk about all these different things, to feel present and at peace, along with the fact that I just love being onstage.”

“I’ve always been very adamant about not having ‘white saviours’, and yes, as brown women it’s very easy to go ‘oh my god it’s going to be hell for us’. That’s the truth – it is hard, but sometimes you just have to take it like an adult. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating that Singapore society would still rather cast me as a maid,” says Sara. “I was reading Gayatri Spivak’s essay ‘When The Subaltern Speaks’ and it really resonated with me about how much prejudice was still present in Singapore and the world. I think about how there are double standards for example, for when a brown woman wears a revealing outfit compared to a white woman, or even how on TikTok, you see people slamming a brown sex worker for doing exactly what a white sex worker is, except on that video they’re cheering her on and going ‘yas queen’. There are parallels to that even in Singapore, in small but clear ways, and it makes me angry.”

“I’m a year into the industry now, and one thing about me is that I recall how in school, my professor would say ‘oh you’ll play the mother, or the witch’, and the bias, the pigeonholing kept happening because I am a brown woman, even in a supposedly safe space like school,” says Siobhan. “I had to do a lot of fighting just to get a ‘good’ role, like say younger or more complex characters. It’s an uphill climb, but I don’t see myself doing anything else but acting, so it’s important for me to do this. What’s more, I believe that it could become a beacon of hope for the younger generations down the road, where they no longer feel that they’re out of place or the token minority.”

“I freelanced a while after graduating, working a couple of different jobs before becoming an English teacher for eight years for stability. I didn’t mind it, but a part of me did feel undernourished, even if I did shows like Off Centre (2019),” says Sindhura. “Having one foot in the industry and the other foot out just wasn’t fulfilling for me, and I finally realised that I was happiest in the rehearsal room. When I was doing Off Centre, I was also juggling it with my previous job, and there would be days I’d have both rehearsals and a long day at work, and I’d just end up collapsing into bed when I got home. My mom would be concerned, but I told her – this is the most exhausted I’ve ever been, but I’m happy.”

“Brown women do have it tougher, and often don’t have all the projects lined up for them, and I decided that I had to hone my skills by leaving first. That’s why I did my MA in Dramaturgy and Writing at Goldsmiths,” she adds. “These days, I have a niece and nephew who mean the world to me, and I think, what do I want them to watch onscreen or onstage? And I know that I want them to be able to see shows where they feel they recognise people who look like them onstage, or stories that they know and have experienced, and that’s the goal that I’m working towards with my artistic practice.”

The work minorities have to do in educating the majority is never over, and oftentimes becomes incredibly exhausting. Yet perhaps, things are indeed getting better. “It can be hard to break out of those stereotypes, knowing that people still look for racially ambiguous, ‘pan Asian’ actors to put onstage. Whose job it is to educate them, well it’s a complicated question,” says Ashie. “We can punch at their throats in the hopes they learn, but in my head the onus still falls on both sides. Priyanka Chopra once said, in relation to favouritism in Bollywood, that we need to extend the table for more people to sit at it and take part in it, and for the people at the table to make space for them, and perhaps that’s what we must do.”

“On the other hand, I don’t think the responsibility falls on us to extend the table all the time, especially when the majority race does have to use their own initiative and take things into their own hands – it’s a lot of baggage to expect from the minorities,” says Sara. “And it is hard. I’ve met people who were initially apprehensive but eventually really open to learning, but also people who literally get hurt and say ‘do you hate me because I’m Chinese?’ I don’t have to be the person holding your hand and guiding you all the time -I still have my own life to lead.”

“Society and cultures and people will always hold inherent biases and notions, which get passed down from generation to generation. Even for us, I’m sure that if we talk about our own lives, we will have discriminated against others knowingly or subconsciously, and we’re all guilty to an extent, where even within one person you can be wildly contradictory, say like you claim to be a feminist but still say problematic things about women,” says Sindhura. “As a theatremaker, it’s all I can do to put all these complexities I’ve identified and put them onstage in the hopes that people will watch, listen, and no longer categorise people into easy, superficial stereotypes. And it’s hard to find such work in mainstream theatre still.”

Most importantly of all, at this moment, at this time, the cast does think that they’re as happy as can be, and that is enough before moving on with life and presenting their show. “Happiness is momentary, but if you watch the show, yes there are sad moments, but the resolution of each story is indeed happiness,” says Grace.

“I think we’re all happy Indian women in our own right, and much like Grace says, even though the things that happen to us may not necessarily be happy, but there are so many different shades and layers to this idea of happiness, where the good things also bring us community and solidarity besides the traumatic experiences, and it’s so important to talk about those things that bring us joy,” says Ashie.

“Hope is the only thing you can cling to, and when you speak of brown folk and brown stories, it is so important to remind people of brown joy, which can be something as simple as appreciating Indian food,” says Siobhan. “And because I believe in hope, even if you’re not happy now, I think you eventually will be.”

“It’s a sensitive society, and sometimes it’s not easy to say the things you want, perhaps out of fear that you might offend someone or important stakeholders, and having the backing of TNS to use their platform to speak about this is such a privilege we all appreciate,” concludes Sindhura. “I think it’s important to have programmes that both weave brown people into mainstream narratives, as well as work like Happy Indian Women that is so specifically for your own people and put their voices out there. Either way, I believe that this is a show that will spark conversations both within and without the community, and that is what we need if we wish to see shifts in mindset and change in society.”

Photo Credit: Natasha Fathin

Happy Indian Women plays from 2nd to 5th November 2023 at the Drama Centre Black Box. Tickets available from BookMyShow

Production Credits:

Writer: Sindhura Kalidas Directors: Sindhura Kalidas and Haresh Sharma Cast: Ashie Singh, Grace Kalaiselvi, Siobhan Jane Covey, Siti Sara Hamid Sound Artist: Bani Haykal Multimedia Artist: Nina Chabra Set Designer: Syadiq Akbar Lighting Designer: Emanorwatty Saleh