Beyond Home and into the World: Family in the Short Stories of the South Asian Diaspora in Australia

Abstract

THE FAMILY, AS THE PRIMARY UNIT OF SOCIETY, HAS BEEN OF GREAT INTEREST FOR SOCIOLOgists and anthropologists. They have been interested in structure of family, norms, experiences, anxieties, ideology, values, and rules that govern it along with roles played by different members to achieve its complex equilibrium (see Parsons; Poster). Family, today, is a place for renegotiation and primary socialization, where people can relate to each other not just on ties of blood but also on basis of love-finding solace from hardships and pressures of work (Bloodworth 112). The immigrant nuclear (moving away from traditional extended family, popularly referred to as joint family in South Asia), on other hand, is also site for cultural and generational conflicts particularly when linked with idea of home-both sensory and spatial (see Uberoi; Patel). Although, there is no one monolith familial structural form and practice (because of local cultural and religious diversity) and institution of in modern, global, and transnational South Asian diaspora has also experienced a series of changes (no longer taken for granted), still concept of and home represents for immigrants: inner spiritual self, one's true identity in a strange world (Chatterjee 263). On question of what makes home or so precious in world, J. Macgregor Wise notes that[th]e marker's of home, however, are not simply inanimate objects (a place with stuff), but presence, habits, and effects of spouses, children, parents, and companions. One can be at home simply in presence of a significant other. What makes home-territories different from other territories is on one hand living of territory (a temporalization of space), and on other their connection with identity, or rather a process of identification, of articulation of affect. Flomes, we feel, are ours. (299)Family and home are crucial sites for South Asian immigrants, as it provides them an anchoring-roots for socializing, teaching children inherited cultural values, structuring roles, and domestic divisions. It also gives a space and an outlet for creating micro-histories that challenge the authority of established forms of macrohistory in multicultural settings (Longley 213).To assert that we know what a South Asian is like, in my opinion, is a tall claim to begin with. Assessments of relationships in South Asian diaspora are no easy task, just like adequately defining or specify what is significant about it in Australia. There are no accepted measures of such interactions and negotiations within space of familial location-particularly in literature based studies. A mixing of history, sociology, and psychology is also needed to achieve some sort of theoretical definition. Sharmila Rudrappa notes that the private space/home is one of most crucial anchors for nonwhite immigrant family and to negotiate its way a sea of whiteness is a challenge for scholars of diaspora study (92). It is therefore by doing an analysis of family, with its ethnic, cultural, and social diversity, that we can understand nature of some of conflicts and changes that have occurred in new homes in diaspora. The relationship between stages of migration and life is an important one in diaspora and it can be analyzed only through story of migration from perspective of (i.e., effects on spouses, children, and parents, and, further, their changing identities and roles).Significantly, according to Paul Asbury Seaman, desire to make new connections given sense of alienation from home-or feeling of being at home in several countries, or cultures but not completely at home in any of them often leads to discovery of a new community-a community of strangers (53). For South Asians, is an institution that transcends in importance interests of individual members and their personalities. …