Growing Up Indian, Becoming Immigrants

Chapter 3 focuses on narratives about immigration and reveals performers’ interpretations of the immigration experience and the processes by which they shape their transnational social realities. A close reading of their performances uncovers the ways that dharm (“religion” or “duty”) shapes the Guptas and their social networks’ understandings of immigration, adjustment, and the identities that both precipitate and result from these experiences. Interpreting the Guptas’, their family’s, and their community’s narrative performances of immigration within the context of dharm demonstrates their participation in creating identities, shaping community, and reinterpreting dharm in a transnational context. Two features of the Guptas’ immigration narratives—ambivalence and comparison—work together to help these immigrants and their families enact their imagination in co-constructing their experience as transnational.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the Gupta family through Satya, a member of the extended family. While his story is exceptional as his parents were Indian citizens living in Nigeria at the time of his birth in the United States, his family’s narrative performances of his birth experience demonstrate the ways that narratives help to create and maintain transnational family connections. Satya’s story and the family’s performances of it introduces readers to larger global and transnational processes and serves as an example of the ways that performance analysis can help uncover the methods by which narratives create transnational experiences. Additionally, this chapter describes the content and organization of the book.

Imagining Religious Communities

Based on ethnographic research with a transnational Hindu family and its social networks, this book examines the ways that middle-class Hindu communities are engaged actively in creating and maintaining their communities. Imagination as a social practice has been a crucial component of defining a transnational life in the moments between actual contact across borders, and the narratives community members tell are key components of communicating these social imaginaries. Narrative performances shape participants’ social realities in multiple ways: they define identities, they create connections between community members living on opposite sides of national borders, and they help create new homes amid increasing mobility. The narratives are religious and include both epic narratives, such as excerpts from the Rāmāyaṇ, and personal narratives with dharmic implications. The book argues that this Hindu community’s religious narrative performances significantly contribute to shaping their transnational lives. The analysis combines scholarly understandings of the ways that performances shape the contexts in which they are told, indigenous comprehension of the power that reciting certain narratives can have on those who hear them, and the theory that social imaginaries define new social realities through expressing the aspirations of communities.

“One’s Own Home Is Better Than All Other Places”

This chapter explores various discourses and practices in which a transnational community engages that help to redefine places as home, sacred space, and connected across the oceans. After briefly reviewing relevant theories of space, place, and home, it examines the ways the Guptas and their community define home through people who live and visit there. The chapter demonstrates how immigrants (particularly women) also help redefine their new locations as home through their narrative performances. Constructing home in a transnational context inevitably includes narratives that speak about movement across spaces. Speech about visits to India inevitably focuses on family and transformative moments. Speech about visits abroad from India requires an agility that can negotiate a new understanding of family relationships, home, and connections across the oceans. These discourses imaginatively create connections between spaces that are physically unconnected.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews the kinds of narratives discussed in the book: immigration narratives, narratives about making home, and a recitation of the Sundarkāṇḍ. These narrative performances together demonstrate the means by which members of the Hindu transnational community imagine and enact their experiences: shaping identities, creating homes, and establishing religious communities and practices. Religion here is shaped in this process—changing and shifting as the narratives are performed. Shifting attention to the second generation, it is hard to predict how transnational Hinduism will continue to change, but it is clear that transnationalism will continue to shape Hinduism in India and abroad for the foreseeable future.

On the Importance of Maṇḍalı̄s

This chapter weaves together the themes of imagination, religion, and migration. It argues that although economic globalization and technological advances in communication and transportation have provided a framework within which transnational lives are possible, the heart of developing transnational communities and identities lies in the new social imaginaries made viable by these frameworks but brought to life in religious narrative performances. The argument is supported by several sections that develop ideas about what it means to be transnational, the creativity generated by narrative performances and its connection to social imaginaries, and finally, an argument about what count as religious narratives in a transnational Hindu context.