An interesting 1897 Singaporean article by Clement Scott calls for a more brutish treatment of the Indian servant body, utilising ethos: “… they are really slaves … never so happy as when they are beaten … curious creatures, who love you if you are severe and despise you if you are mild, and literally serve you best when you treat them worst” (“Clement Scott on Indian Servants”, 376). Scott’s reduction of the Indian working body from “servant” to “slave”, and reported within The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (Weekly) normalises oppressive attitudes towards the liminal Indian migrant workers’ body which has mutated over the centuries upon principles of exploitation, consistent Othering, and an imagining of one’s own separateness from them.
The transient Indian worker without roots in Singapore often vanishes from imagination, an issue which Leonora Liow takes issue with in her “Rich Man Country”. She traces a dumped Indian migrant worker’s unstable psychological narrative due to excruciating pain from a workplace accident while having flashbacks of his journey to Singapore.
Using Anderson’s perspective of the nation “as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, 7), such separateness and dehumanising of the worker’s body is reified and excluded from such Singaporean “comradeship” through media outlets. I posit therefore that historical attitudes towards Indian migrant working bodies from the late 19th century normalise and reflect their ongoing exclusion from the 21st century imagined community of Singapore due to their perceived and inconsequential liminality.