An authentic, diverse exploration of what it means to be an Indian woman today.

The Singaporean Indian identity is deeply multi-faceted. Within the community, there are already diverse languages, skin tones, religions, sexualities, family histories and rootedness to one’s culture, where every Indian person has a unique story to tell. As a minority race within the country, Indians have also faced and continue to face trauma from years of prejudice passed down from generation to generation. And when you’re a Singaporean Indian woman, that minority status is doubled when you layer gender on top of it as well, further complicating one’s place in the social hierarchy, and making it even more difficult to claw your way up the pecking order. How then, does a Singaporean Indian women find happiness when everything seems stacked against her?

That seems to be one of the goals of The Necessary Stage (TNS) Associate Artist Sindhura Kalidas, who embarked on a nearly year-long project to answer that question, resulting in her new play Happy Indian Women. Co-directed by Sindhura and TNS Resident Playwright Haresh Sharma, Happy Indian Women is a verbatim play that uses material collected from 20 interviews with Indian women and non-binary people from various backgrounds, and represent the sheer variety of experiences onstage.

That variety is already seen from the very outset, when Grace Kalaiselvi arrives onstage as a conservative, older woman blessing audience members in the front row while Hindu chants play in the background. It only takes a couple of minutes before Ashie Singh leaps out to join her, performing a more provocative Bollywood dance, much to Grace’s shock. Later on, they are joined by Siobhan Jane Covey and Siti Sara Hamid, playing a matriarch in black who begins to initiate a melodramatic moment straight out of a television serial, and it all seems to encapsulate the stereotypes of loudness, expressiveness and discombobulation associated with Indian drama.

But this is not a show about stereotypes, or at least, not entirely. It is instead, about representation, and to show audience members that Indian women are so much more, each one an individual rather than lumped together as a single homogenous group, as the cast reads random interview extracts from a fishbowl, a cacophony of quotes that hint at how much suppression or silencing Indian women have faced over the years. We see this diversity also reflected in Akbar Syadiq’s set, which comprises of dividers and rows of window-like ‘shelves’ – seemingly homely, domestic pieces, but each piece carrying either a costume or a specific, quintessentially Indian item, from chunky gold jewelry to a container of murukku.

Happy Indian Women then leads us into its structure, as it swaps between cast members performing individual monologues, group segments where all four of them hold a dialogue both in and out of character, and video segments to represent interviewees they felt they would be inappropriate for them to play onstage, including a transgender interviewee, and disabled dancer Jaspreet. Throughout the show, these are supported by the screen, which displays a combination of videos, for interviewees who agreed to it, stop motion videos that show flowers used in garlands and rituals shaped into subjects’ names and ages, and what is now TNS’ signature use of creative surtitling, using colour, arrangement and other elements to make the surtitles pop and integrate them into the work, such as blue speech bubbles to represent Facebook Messenger.

The casting and matching of subjects to each performer has been done well, where all four cast members not only play age-appropriate interviewees, but also interviewees who share similar life experiences as well. Siti Sara Hamid, for example, begins with a piece about an Indian-Muslim woman whose religion is integral to her family, her own parents judging her choice to marry a foreigner, but slowly relent after he converts and they decide to raise their child Muslim. Siobhan plays a brash, queer woman in her 20s who speaks about the differences in dating Indian and non-Indian partners.

As for Grace, she takes on the gargantuan task of playing the heaviest monologue of all, about a thrice-divorced woman who goes through terrifying abusive relationships, something Grace relates to watching her own mother growing up. These individual scenes allow each of the cast members to take the spotlight for a moment, and drive home Sindhura’s other goal – to give these brown actresses a platform to be seen onstage and given meaty roles to showcase their acting chops.

These also come out in the more light-hearted group scenes, where the four of them literally play a group known as ‘the happy Indian women’, with their own theme song as they come together in a sort of group therapy to talk about their experiences and riff off each other. It is these segments that give Sindhura a chance to experiment more with her direction, and to that end, these segments offer up both humour and weight as these characters discuss topics such as dating, how ‘Indian’ they feel, or the trauma of being a minority at work or at school.

It’s a clever way of finding the intersections amidst the differences in the interviews, whether it’s about the shared experience of colleagues lapsing into Chinese to each other to shut non-Chinese out of the conversation, to having names mispronounced in school, to the extent they carry that trauma around with them well into adulthood. For the latter, Ashie Singh has a particularly emotional turn as her character recalls having so much self-hate that she begins to project it onto the only other Indian girl in class, her voice trembling from anxiety. In all, it seems to drive home idea of certain shared experiences and traumas that a majority of Indian women go through, and further adds complexity to the fundamental question of what it means to be an Indian women in Singapore – to be shaped by pain, or to be united by culture.

Choice group scenes also showcase the actors in more stylised work, such as a scene where all four women play Chinese aunties on a train, tsk-ing away simultaneously and wiping invisible dirt off their shoulders as they prattle on with veiled insults about how Singaporean Indian women aren’t ‘like Indian Indian women’, or that somehow, their addressee is one of the ‘good ones’. Elsewhere, an Indian-Muslim girl shares a disturbing recount of being sexually harassed by a family member, and her own mother trying to pretend it never happened. With so many negative stereotypes already existing about minorities, there is even more pressure and stress not to report crimes so as not to ‘shame the community’, putting Indian women in an impossible situation.

Sindhura and her team were clearly very ambitious with so many interviewees and subjects. This doubles as both a blessing and a curse; while it does afford the team to cover as much ground as possible, it also means that there are so many of them going by at breakneck speed, the experience of watching Happy Indian Women ends up blurring a few of them as these whirlwind unique experiences seep into each other over time. Still, Sindhura and her team do a good job to fully realise a large number of them by giving them more time and space to explore their histories and how it’s led to the Indian women they are today.

With so much material to chew on throughout the show, Happy Indian Women also affords us breathing room for reflection. Throughout, Sindhura often proves herself to be a highly intellectual theatremaker, and takes time to not only present these voices onstage, but also give her own cast members a chance to speak. In an act of self-reflexivity, the cast enter more metatheatrical territory, as they break character and comment on their own interpretation of each story, raising questions or expressing their own emotions.

Both Grace and Ashie are even given video interviews projected onscreen, and talk through the process of creating this play, and what it means to them, with Grace having created a play called Angry Indian Women several years back, and Ashie having seen the process through from start to end as a researcher. It’s a rare thing in verbatim theatre to have that opportunity to take a step back and guide the audience, and these moments of reflexivity allow us to temporarily separate from our emotions as we watch the play, and to consider points of discussion for our post-show dialogues with friends in the theatre.

In watching and listening to these stories, one comes to realise the universality of specificity, where no matter one’s background, it is only human to empathise with the person in front of you, and start to realise your own blind spots when interacting with others, regardless of whether you’re an Indian woman or not. Happy Indian Women blows those gaps and reality checks wide open for all to see through these authentic stories, and while it offers no answers, its very existence is testament to the amount of work that still needs to go into educating, promoting greater change in societal attitudes, and to judge others a little less.

Happy Indian Women is a complex work that very much feels like the culmination of a labour of love for Sindhura and her all-brown team, a project that was born out of a pressing need for representation and putting these brown voices on stage. This is a work that makes you laugh but cry on the inside with how familiar all these painful recollections sound, whether you’ve experienced them yourself, or someone you know has, yet kept silent for so long. Sindhura is a theatremaker still finding herself as an artist, evident from how many different styles she tries out in this work alone. But if Happy Indian Women is anything to go by, she’s someone clearly enjoying that process of exploration while making sure she’s doing something important with it, by giving her team a chance to shine both onstage and backstage.

Happiness is not a permanent state of being, often fleeting, momentary, and a feeling you so often wish to come back to again and again. And somehow, just like water in a desert, it becomes all the more sweeter after a struggle, a fact we’re reminded of at the end of Grace’s powerful monologue, where her character finally feels happy after her ordeal. Watching five-year old Maya interacting with her septuagenarian grandmother, we feel the love emanating even from the screen, and immediately wonder what kind of world Maya will grow up in, and whether she’ll experience the same thing as these Indian women we’ve listened to. And by its end, we know that if anything, we want her to be in a happier place than her forebears, and the only way forward, is to keep striving to have these voices heard, listen to what the minorities have to say, and work towards becoming better, for the sake of society.

Photo Credit: Tuckys Photography

Happy Indian Women played from 2nd to 5th November 2023 at the Drama Centre Black Box.

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