Ashina Singh: three countries, one crown

It is a long way from the fifteen-year-old starting over in Auckland, and Singh is clear about what the distance taught her. "I believe these two decades abroad are what shaped me into becoming the woman I am today — courageous, resilient, and most importantly, adaptable," she says. "My identity carries my South African birth and upbringing, my Indian heritage, and the life I built in New Zealand." It is a sentence that could stand in for a whole generation of the triple-hyphenated diaspora: born in one country, rooted in another's culture, made in a third.

That layered belonging has deep roots. Durban is home to one of the largest populations of Indian origin anywhere outside India — the legacy of indentured and migrant arrivals that began in the 1860s — which makes Singh a daughter of one diaspora who went on to join another. The journey from the Indian Ocean's African shore to the South Pacific is, in that sense, just the latest leg of a much older family map.

A shelf of crowns

By her own account, the Mrs Indian Ocean Globe sash is the latest of several. Singh lists Mrs World New Zealand 2021, Mrs Universe Charity Ambassador 2021 and Mrs Elegance 2021 among her earlier titles, followed in 2024 by Mrs Empowerment International, Mrs Bollywood International and Mrs Photogenic. The newest — and, she says, the most prestigious — is the Indian Ocean Globe crown that sends her to the world stage next year.

For readers who file beauty pageants under spectacle, Singh's pitch is that the spectacle is the least of it. "These crowns we wear so graciously serve a greater purpose," she says. "We can be the voice to those women who are scared and silenced, become role models to young women who lack self-esteem — and most importantly teach that pageantry is not limited to your physical traits. It's about your intellect, your purpose and drive for your community."

That conviction — that a sash is really a megaphone — runs through everything she says about the work. "I believe these platforms are so important for women," she adds. "It is a place where women can make dreams come true, especially if she is one for community initiatives. The right platform gives a voice, and reaches the audience and the organisations." It is a view of pageantry less as competition than as access: a way for a woman with something to say to be handed a stage and an audience already assembled.

The cause behind the crown

The platform she is competing under gives that claim some ballast. The Mrs Globe Organization's official charity is the Women in Need Foundation International — the W.I.N. Foundation — founded in 1996 by Dr Tracy Kemble. Its cornerstone initiative, the "Reclaiming Me" recovery programme, has run weekly workshops for women recovering from abuse and trauma for close to three decades; by the foundation's own account, more than 25,000 women have graduated from it. Singh says her own purpose "aligns a hundred percent" with that mission, and with Kemble's work helping women in vulnerable situations build, in Singh's words, "self-love, the non-negotiables in a relationship, and most importantly their courage."

That is the part of the pageant world that rarely makes the highlight reel: the titleholders who turn a year of appearances into fundraising and advocacy. Singh frames her own crown squarely in those terms — less a prize than a microphone.

"An entire journey behind it"

What she returns to, again and again, is the idea that a sash is the visible tip of an invisible life. "There is so much more to our prestigious crowns — there is an entire journey behind it," she says, "from a daughter, a wife, a mother, to fulfilling life's purpose."

For a diaspora woman who has had to rebuild herself once already, in a new country at fifteen, that framing is more than pageant-speak. It is the argument that the qualities a migrant is forced to develop — resilience, adaptability, the nerve to walk into a room where you know no one — are the same ones a platform like hers is meant to celebrate.

Asked what she wants readers to take from her story, Singh does not reach for her titles. "I want to leave behind a legacy that we women are not limited to the roles given by society or our past," she says. "We are powerful and limitless — with the right platform."

Next June, that platform will be a stage in the United States, at the Mrs Globe world final, and the woman standing on it — born in Durban, raised in Auckland, Indian by heritage — will be carrying all three countries with her.

This profile was built from an interview with Ashina Singh for Diaspora Dreams and has been edited for length and clarity. Her pageant titles are as described by Singh; details of the Mrs Globe Organization, the Women in Need (W.I.N.) Foundation, its founder Dr Tracy Kemble and the "Reclaiming Me" programme were verified against the organisation's own published material (mrsglobe.com).