Abandoned daughters: Child adoption by Indian Families in pre-independence Malaya and Singapore
Abstract
From the late 1920s into 1960s, child adoptions within the diasporic Indian community in Malaya and Singapore revealed a revisioning of what it meant to be “Indian”. Cultural constraints that limited adoption in India lost their impact, and diasporic Indians received girl children, mostly from the Chinese community, into their families, shifting away from a preference for sons. In welcoming these adopted girls into their lives and treating them as family members, they contributed to a reformulation of ethnic group identity.
Summary
This article examines the practice of cross-ethnic child adoption in colonial Malaya and Singapore, in which Indian families—predominantly Tamil—received girl children, almost always of Chinese birth, into their households from the late 1920s through the 1960s. Devasahayam argues that this practice reveals a fundamental revisioning of what it meant to be “Indian” in the diaspora: cultural constraints that made adoption rare and stigmatized in South Asia—public admission of infertility, son preference, caste endogamy—lost their force in the plural ethnic environment of the Straits Settlements and the Federation. By welcoming Chinese girls as daughters, diasporic Indian families simultaneously challenged the son-preference norm and sidestepped the caste system, which had no purchase over a child outside the Indian social order.
The article explores the intersecting pressures that produced these adoptions. On the supply side, Chinese families abandoned daughters due to poverty, Confucian son preference, beliefs linked to the Chinese horoscope (particularly girls born in the Year of the Tiger), widowhood during the Japanese Occupation, and the sheer burden of large families. On the demand side, Indian couples—often childless or seeking gender balance—found in Chinese girls a viable option that Indian children, rarely given up for adoption, could not provide. The Catholic Church, particularly convents in Singapore and Selangor, functioned as an informal adoption broker, receiving children from families who could not afford to raise them and placing them with interested couples. Most adoptions were de facto arrangements between biological and adoptive parents, often neighbours, with the courts rarely involved until legislation in the late 1940s and 1950s introduced formal regulation.
The narrative is grounded in oral history interviews conducted over a seven-year period (2004–11, with additional fieldwork in 2020) with eleven women who had been adopted by Indian families, seven of their siblings or peers, a Catholic nun who worked in the Cheras Convent orphanage from the 1940s to the 1960s, and a Chinese geomancer. These testimonies are supplemented by materials from the National Archives of Singapore, student theses from the University of Malaya and the National University of Singapore, and published social work research from the 1950s. The author is herself the daughter of such an adoption, a personal connection that both motivated the study and is disclosed through a family photograph reproduced in the article (p. 143).
Key Findings
- Singapore’s Adoption of Children Ordinance was passed in 1939 but its implementation was delayed by the Pacific War; the Children and Young Persons Ordinance of 1948 added government regulation, and the Federation of Malaya passed its own adoption legislation in 1952 (applicable to boys and girls but excluding Muslims, unless registered under the ordinance). (pp. 142–143)
- In 1956, 3,772 women sought family planning assistance from the Singapore Family Planning Association; 301 of these reported having given up one or more children for adoption. Of the 301, only six were Malay and two were Indian; the remainder were Chinese. (p. 145)
- The Indian population in Malaya grew by nearly 80 per cent between 1947 and 1957, driven by internal growth rather than migration, with the largest increases in Singapore; two pieces of legislation passed in 1953 subsequently plateaued Indian immigration. (p. 141)
- Lower-income families in the period lived on an average income of less than $150 per month, a threshold below which each additional child represented a significant financial strain. (p. 145)
- The Infant Jesus Sisters established a convent and orphanage at Victoria Street, Singapore, in 1854; the wrought-iron gate at which unwanted babies were deposited became known locally as the “Gate of Hope.” (p. 144)
- In 1933, more Chinese women entered Malaya than departed the colony, a reversal that reflected the administration’s deliberate policy of encouraging female immigration to create a permanently domiciled Chinese workforce. (p. 141)
Conclusion
Devasahayam concludes that cross-ethnic adoption in the Indian diaspora demonstrates that diasporic Indians were not passive carriers of homeland culture but “interpretative subjects” who actively transmutated inherited practices in response to the conditions of their new environment. The opportunity to adopt across ethnic lines—something structurally impossible in caste-rigged South Asia—allowed these families to reconfigure norms around gender preference, family continuity, and the stigma of childlessness, fitting borrowed practices into traditional family structures in ways that were culturally intelligible within the plural society of Malaya and Singapore.
Context
- Primary archival collections: National Archives of Singapore (taped oral history interviews, including Sister Damien Murphy 1983, Daisy Vaithilingam 1993, and Ann Wee 2008); unpublished research papers from the University of Malaya and National University of Singapore (Heng Hong Ngoh 1957; Daphne Pereira 1966; Annie Hoe 1959).
- Historiographical contribution: The study extends the literature on ethnic boundary permeability in colonial Malaya (Hirschman 1986, 1987) by documenting a specific domestic practice—cross-ethnic adoption—that reveals how diasporic communities negotiated and redefined cultural identity from below, complementing existing scholarship on migration policy, labour, and public health with evidence from the private sphere of family formation.