Across seven seas, I followed you here: Caste, marriage migration and multiculturalism in the Indian diaspora

This dissertation explores the experiences of marriage migrant women from India to Canada in relation to migration policies and changing expectations of education, employment, and domestic and care labour. I engage with the narratives of twenty-four Indian marriage migrant women who arrived in Canada as international students, economic immigrants or as spouses of economic immigrants. Using an intersectional and transnational feminist lens, I unpack their complicated agency in decision-making processes around marriage and migration to Canada, inflected by structures and processes of caste, class, race and gender. Neoliberal and Canadian multicultural discourses consider these twenty-four mostly Hindu, Telugu-speaking, middle-class and upper-caste women as the ‘new Indian woman’, ‘model minority’ and ‘designer migrants’. However, I put these discourses in tension with the challenges presented to the women by the Canadian immigration system and the pressures they face in navigating conjugal, familial, community, and caste norms. I further this analysis with multi-sited and mixed methods, using interviews with bridal grooming schools and critical engagement with diasporic pageant competitions for married women, and media and cultural portrayals of marriage migration. This dissertation further examines caste practices in the Indian diaspora in Canada to understand the intersection of race, caste, class and gender across the transnational space of India, Canada and the Indian diaspora, and the replication of caste discourses in the practices of diasporic communities at various levels – domestic, professional, and at the community level. I argue that the horizontal culturalization of racism within Canadian multiculturalism, in conjunction with an understanding of caste as cultural practice rather than a hierarchical structure, enables a particular privileged configuration of Indian economic immigrants to assume the ‘model minority’ mantle within Canadian society.