Leisuring Diaspora: Class, Ethnicity and Leisure in Middle-Class British Indian Families Event

Event details

Research on the global Indian diaspora has proliferated over the last few decades, just as the Indian Government has accelerated its engagement with the diaspora as an instrument of its foreign policy. Till date, scholars studying these diasporic communities in North America and Europe have largely captured the experiences of adults and drawn attention to the ways in which diasporans mobilise material cultural products and media to construct ethnic identities and forge diasporic ties. However, diasporic childhoods – and parenting practices – have remained largely on the margins of this scholarship. Challenging this adult-centrism, in this talk, I use diasporic children’s leisure spaces as a point of entry to interrogate the interior lives and social identities of British Indian families. Drawing on interview narratives of professional middle-class Indian parents and their children, living in and around London, I show how ethnic leisure spaces are constructed by these families as a way of reinforcing ethnic pride, directing place-making and for cross-generational transmission of cultural heritage. I further argue that unpacking this leisure-culture nexus can offer key insights into how ethnic identities are (re)fashioned and cultural practices are (re)produced in the Indian diaspora.