Neither Here - Nor There : An Anthropological Study of Gujarati Hindu Women in the diaspora

Sammanfattning: During the 1950s, a wave of migrants left India to find work in the West. Many never returned, but instead settled in the West. There were also many Asians who left to live in East African countries. In the beginning of the 1970s, Idi Amin decided to finalise the Africanisation of Uganda. Other East African nations were also part of this trend. At that time, several thousand Asians were expelled. Among these people were many Gujarati Hindus, all with their roots in Gujarat in the north-western part of India. By various routes and in different waves of relocation, some of these people came to find new homes, for example in Britain and Sweden.With respect to Gujarati Hindu diaspora groups in Coventry, Britain, and Mariestad, Sweden, the author aims to answer the questions: Which factors affected what, how, or why they decided to keep or abandon some of their culture and religious traditions? How much of this process happened by choice, and how much was based on necessity due to time and circumstance? How has the size of the group of settlers, in relation to the majority living in those places, affected their choices? How might the size of the local diasporic community itself come to influence their cultural maintenance?In this thesis the author focuses mainly on the aspects of identity that are found in gender discourse (women’s roles) and the diaspora discourse among Gujarati Hindu women. This is done in relation to cosmology addressed to a gender discourse on how gender roles are changing in diaspora when confronted with the modern world. The main contribution is therefore not to ethnicity and identity theory in general, but in demonstrating the different determiners affecting the lives of Gujarati Hindu women in the diaspora.