Inheritance

Inheritance, published in 2013, is the first published novel by Balli Kaur Jaswal, a Singaporean novelist of Punjabi Sikh descent. Set in Singapore between the 1970s and the 1990s, it follows a Punjabi Sikh family across twenty years of the city-state's transformation, tracing how the family's carefully guarded reputation frays as each of its members refuses, in a different way, to fit the mould.

About the book

Inheritance was published in 2013 by Sleepers Publishing in Australia, a 294-page paperback, with a Singapore edition from Epigram Books. Jaswal developed the novel during the David TK Wong Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, which she won in 2007. Its working title was When Amrit Returns, but as the manuscript was revised Jaswal realised the book was not about one woman. It was about a whole family, and what each of them inherits: duty, shame, expectation and the past.

It was not the first novel Jaswal began. She had started Sugarbread while she was at college, but felt she did not yet know enough about writing novels, so she set it aside. Inheritance was the first to see publication. Sugarbread followed in 2014, after Epigram Books set up a prize for unpublished manuscripts and Jaswal revised the book for it.

ਕਹਾਣੀ

Harbeer Singh, a policeman, was posted to Singapore before its independence. He stays because he hopes for greater opportunities, even though his wife Dalveer hates it. Dalveer dies giving birth to their daughter Amrit, and Harbeer is left to raise three children, and a nephew, Karam, on his own. The novel is told in four time frames, 1970 to 71, 1977, 1984 to 85 and 1990, each from the point of view of a different member of the family.

In 1971 the teenage Amrit briefly disappears from the house in the middle of the night, and returns a different person. The fissures that open in the family never close. Gurdev, the eldest son, does everything duty asks of him: he marries, has children, holds down a job. His father still holds him in contempt for underachieving. Narain, the middle son, is expelled from national service and sent to study in the United States, to protect the family's reputation and to make a man of him. He returns empowered to refuse marriage, but his relationships must stay covert. Amrit, whose mental illness goes undiagnosed for years, is left unprotected once Narain is gone. Her drinking and public behaviour become known across the Sikh community, and her father's idea that marriage will solve the problem turns out to be a fantasy. Karam, the orphaned nephew, thrives in Singapore's fiercely competitive education system and becomes the son Harbeer wishes he had.

As the decades pass, Singapore's medical services improve, and Amrit's condition is finally recognised as a mental disorder. She is diagnosed and given a treatment plan, finds work, and gains the confidence to realise her potential. The family survives, but the cost of its respectability has been counted in full.

What is Inheritance about?

The novel's subject is inheritance in every sense: what a family passes down, and what a country passes to its people. Harbeer's ambitions for his children mirror the ambitions of Singapore's leadership: education, hard work, order and conformity as the route to success. Those who do not fit suffer accordingly. The book follows the family as Singapore itself changes, from an outpost of the British Empire to a well-ordered, if socially constrictive, island state, and it asks what that order costs the people who live inside it.

Around that central question Jaswal weaves the pressures her characters live under: caste, youth culture, sex and gender roles, identity and belonging, and the shame that polices them all. Mental illness is treated as a moral failing before it is treated as an illness. A son's sexuality is a threat to the family name before it is his own life. And in a society where welfare is the family's job, not the state's, Narain is left to carry his sister's care alone while his father denies her condition.

ਲੇਖਕ

Balli Kaur Jaswal was born in Singapore into a Punjabi Sikh family, and grew up in Singapore, Japan, Russia and the Philippines, following her father's career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She studied English at Hollins University in the United States, graduating in 2004, and won the David TK Wong Fellowship in 2007. She taught high school English in Australia for several years, and at an international school in Istanbul, before taking up writing full time after the success of her third novel, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, in 2017.

Identity, Jaswal has said, is a major theme in all her work, and she has not strayed far from Punjabi female characters, because there is still so much work to do in telling their stories. She is seen both as a voice of the Punjabi diaspora and as a critic of Punjabi communities, and she has said the diaspora is not inherently more progressive than Punjab itself.

Reception and legacy

Inheritance won the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist Award in 2014. Reviewing it in The Australian, Ed Wright called the prose 'pellucid and evocative', and praised the way the novel builds its world with 'anthropological awareness and intimacy'. Peter Pierce, writing in The Monthly, found a debut of 'imaginative boldness and assurance not yet matched by the quality of its prose', and was tantalised by what Jaswal would do next.

The novel was adapted into a film, Lizard on the Wall, directed by K. Rajagopal and presented at the 2017 Singapore International Festival of the Arts. Its cover, designed by Miriam Rosenbloom, was a nominee for Best Book Cover Design at the Singapore Book Awards in 2017. A decade on, the book is still the starting point for readers discovering Jaswal, and for readers discovering the Punjabi Sikh community of Singapore in fiction.

Where it sits in her work

Inheritance was the first of Jaswal's novels to be published, and it set the pattern for the rest: a Punjabi family, a place the family has made home, and the arguments between its generations. Sugarbread (2014) returned to Singapore through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017), set among the Punjabi widows of Southall in London, became an international bestseller and a Reese Witherspoon book club pick. The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters (2019) took three British-born sisters on pilgrimage in Punjab, and Now You See Us (2023) turned to Filipino domestic workers in Singapore. Inheritance is where that body of work begins.