ABSTRACT
Divorce has a peculiar status in Singaporean public discourse. Divorce is simultaneously believed to lead to further social deprivation, as it produces single-mother households with low income and concomitantly low educational opportunities for children born in such households. Divorce is usually the outcome of a variety of factors, and applicants for divorce are likely to emphasise those reasons that they deem most effective in convincing the state to grant divorce. The operative logic was that while Indian men were already more lecherous than others, something biologically revealed through their "big eyes", the 'revealing' sari was the similarly immoral response provided by Indian women to masculine Indian lechery. Talaq is a Tamil drama that combines the stories of twelve Tamil Muslim women, who were subjected to abuse and rape by their husbands, into the narrative of a single woman. In contrast, the teacher in the Tamil version is dressed in an orange sari and a red blouse.
