Across seven seas, I followed you here: Caste, marriage migration and multiculturalism in the Indian diaspora

This dissertation explores the experiences of marriage migrant women from India to Canada in relation to migration policies and changing expectations of education, employment, and domestic and care labour. I engage with the narratives of twenty-four Indian marriage migrant women who arrived in Canada as international students, economic immigrants or as spouses of economic immigrants. Using an intersectional and transnational feminist lens, I unpack their complicated agency in decision-making processes around marriage and migration to Canada, inflected by structures and processes of caste, class, race and gender. Neoliberal and Canadian multicultural discourses consider these twenty-four mostly Hindu, Telugu-speaking, middle-class and upper-caste women as the ‘new Indian woman’, ‘model minority’ and ‘designer migrants’. However, I put these discourses in tension with the challenges presented to the women by the Canadian immigration system and the pressures they face in navigating conjugal, familial, community, and caste norms. I further this analysis with multi-sited and mixed methods, using interviews with bridal grooming schools and critical engagement with diasporic pageant competitions for married women, and media and cultural portrayals of marriage migration. This dissertation further examines caste practices in the Indian diaspora in Canada to understand the intersection of race, caste, class and gender across the transnational space of India, Canada and the Indian diaspora, and the replication of caste discourses in the practices of diasporic communities at various levels – domestic, professional, and at the community level. I argue that the horizontal culturalization of racism within Canadian multiculturalism, in conjunction with an understanding of caste as cultural practice rather than a hierarchical structure, enables a particular privileged configuration of Indian economic immigrants to assume the ‘model minority’ mantle within Canadian society

Abuse, violence and abandonment in transnational marriages: issues for policy and practice in the UK

Abandonment of wives in their home countries by their husbands who are UK residents has become a growing phenomenon that practitioners may encounter in their work. This article explores the nature and consequences of transnational marriage abandonment for its victims and survivors, and argues that this practice should be considered as a form of domestic violence because it involves coercive and controlling behaviour intended to deprive a woman of her financial and residence rights and rights relating to her children. In the context of the recent recognition of transnational abandonment as a form of domestic abuse by the family justice system through Practice Direction 12j, It outlines some issues for policy-making on domestic violence as well as for frontline practitioners in the UK

Across seven seas, I followed you here: Caste, marriage migration and multiculturalism in the Indian diaspora

This dissertation explores the experiences of marriage migrant women from India to Canada in relation to migration policies and changing expectations of education, employment, and domestic and care labour. I engage with the narratives of twenty-four Indian marriage migrant women who arrived in Canada as international students, economic immigrants or as spouses of economic immigrants. Using an intersectional and transnational feminist lens, I unpack their complicated agency in decision-making processes around marriage and migration to Canada, inflected by structures and processes of caste, class, race and gender. Neoliberal and Canadian multicultural discourses consider these twenty-four mostly Hindu, Telugu-speaking, middle-class and upper-caste women as the new Indian woman, model minority and designer migrants. However, I put these discourses in tension with the challenges presented to the women by the Canadian immigration system and the pressures they face in navigating conjugal, familial, community, and caste norms. I further this analysis with multi-sited and mixed methods, using interviews with bridal grooming schools and critical engagement with diasporic pageant competitions for married women, and media and cultural portrayals of marriage migration. This dissertation further examines caste practices in the Indian diaspora in Canada to understand the intersection of race, caste, class and gender across the transnational space of India, Canada and the Indian diaspora, and the replication of caste discourses in the practices of diasporic communities at various levels domestic, professional, and at the community level. I argue that the horizontal culturalization of racism within Canadian multiculturalism, in conjunction with an understanding of caste as cultural practice rather than a hierarchical structure, enables a particular privileged configuration of Indian economic immigrants to assume the model minority mantle within Canadian society

‘Abandoned women’: Transnational marriages and gendered legal citizens

Abandonment of women in transnational marriages can be understood in the context of specific social milieus of community and kinship relations and legal jurisdictions associated with specific cultures of law. As a sociological-legal category that dismantles the myth of ‘flexible citizenship’ in transnational migration, abandonment must be seen in an experiential matrix constituted by the graded/differentiated diaspora, legal frameworks, and institutional structures, which frame the gendered citizen. This article reads stories of abandonment in legal documents where testimonies are mediated by legal practitioners for ameliorative justice through the court, in tandem with personal narratives of abandonment as reported to the authors. Through this reading, the article explores the way particular narratives of personal hurt and ‘personal/private’ identity – drawing from membership in the family and community – relate with the public identity of the legal citizen, the public governance of marriage by the protective/paternal state, and the ‘promise of happiness’ in marriage

Changing nature and emerging patterns of domestic violence in global contexts: dowry abuse and the transnational abandonment of wives in India

This paper argues for the need to understand dowry-related abuse through a lens that focuses not only on micro-and meso-level gendered socio-cultural milieus and economic norms but also on macro-level formal-legal structures and global power asymmetries. Based on life-history narratives of 57 women in India and 21 practitioner interviews, this paper documents a growing phenomenon whereby men who are resident in another country abuse their Indian-origin wives, appropriate their dowry and abandon them. While dowry-related abuse in such marriages is part of a continuum of domestic violence prevalent in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, we explore how gender and migration intersect to exacerbate existing forms of violence against women and foster new forms of violence such as transnational abandonment. Gender-blind transnational formal-legal frameworks and gendered and transnational structural inequalities come together to construct transnational brides as ‘disposable women’ who can be abused, exploited and cast aside with impunity

Gender, migration and exclusionary citizenship regimes: conceptualizing transnational abandonment of wives as a form of violence against women

Based on life-history narratives of 57 women in India who married Indian-origin men settled (primarily) in the West and interviews with 21 practitioners, we document the neglect, abuse and instrumental deprivation of the women’s rights in the process of transnational abandonment. Gendered local socio-cultural milieus and economic norms contribute to these harms in a context where women’s identity and social status are closely connected to marriage. However, these harms are enabled and sustained by transnational formal-legal frameworks which make women subordinate citizens. Widening the explanatory lens for understanding domestic violence beyond the family and community, we argue that in a globalised world, (inter)state policies serve to construct categories of ‘disposable women’ who can be abused and abandoned with impunity

Lessons from "No Ban on Stolen Land" (Dispatch)

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