Freud Along the Ganges by Salman Akhtar

Author:Salman Akhtar [Akhtar, Salman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hybridization of culture expressed in areas of sexuality and autonomy often systemically provokes concern or conflict. As a result, families make efforts at containment, exclusion from the group, or silencing of woman, as strategic gestures to resolve, deflect, or avoid confrontation with more powerful group members. Hybridization might be on a spectrum ranging from threatening (equated with killing a traditional paradigm and assaulting a homeostatic system) to creative. As an assimilation process, we see this reflected in diaspora community work, theater, dance, media, film, writing, and art. As immigrant women create hybrid identities and rework ego ideals or archetypes, they may be seen as evolving or redefining Indian feminine ideals. Transgressive acts of girls dating without parental consent might propel the family into uncharted territory of increased flexibility, new identities, and intermarriage of their children, but on occasion has resulted in severe reprimands or even the murder of girls for violation of izzat.

There are no valid generalizations on hybrid identity. Diaspora Indians, for example, constitute 45 percent of Trinidad’s population, and their women absorbed African cultural influences in a biracial postcolonial context to become assertively modern and sexually liberated, in a unique idiom, diverging from historical connections with Gandhi, Indian nationalism, and the issues of indentured labor (Niranjana 2001). Diaspora Indians from the Caribbean have their own familial paradigm of proper traditional ways and chutey-soca culture, a creolization of Indian and calypso influences. Immigration to North America is another horizontal path in a line of evolving cultural identity for women of Indian origin.

In an ethnographic study using a Pittsburgh Hindu temple as the site of transitional experience for a “deterritorialized” conservative and highly successful community, Rayaprol (1997), looking at renegotiation of gender roles with immigrant agendas, does not see these women as oppressed but rather as resilient and strong. They have created a validating women-centered life in the temple focusing on youth, education, and ritual. These American career women were assimilated high achievers, but their cultural life was closer to values of elite or privileged Indian women. Their main concerns anticipated the separation and individuation of their children, addressing that gap between themselves and their second-generation children by holding a cultural space for their community. In addition to religious networks, American and British South Asian women’s groups in many urban communities are often secular and united around broader social concerns, taking on supportive roles with refugee and less established immigrant woman from mixed ethnicities, who are dealing with initial immigration or refugee realties, legal issues, single parenting, language fluency, racism, domestic violence, or sexual abuse issues.

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