UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Imagined mobility : migration and transnationalism among Indian students in Australia Baas, M. Publication date 2009 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Baas, M. (2009). Imagined mobility : migration and transnationalism among Indian students in Australia. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:01 Oct 2021 141 06: Fourth Semester: Graduating as a Migrant ∂ Into the Great Wide Ocean It is a cold, windy day in September; the wind joyfully plays with the women’s saris while it causes the thin fabric of kurta pyjamas to flap nervously around shivering male legs. We are all watching the spectacle from the pier: two men in snow-white kurtas are making their way into the ice-cold ocean water, carefully balancing a beautifully decorated clay idol of Lord Ganesh over their heads. When they are barely able to keep their heads above the water they submerge the idol in the water. There is applause, pictures are taken, but most of all relief is in the air as we can all go back inside now. Spring may be on its way but on this cold Saturday afternoon, it still seems far away. When I make my way back into the community center of Seaford, a distant suburb about an hour by train from the CBD, I notice that the place is already packed with Maharashtrians. Waiting in line for the traditional sweets that are being handed out I chat a bit with Rajesh, one of my regular informants. Although he came to Australia as an overseas student, once arrived he discovered that he could have already applied for PR back home (‘offshore’), as he already met the necessary requirements (having the right skills and a required number of years of work experience). Rajesh was planning to go back to his studies at some point, but now that he was working full- time, he wondered whether it would ever be the right time to do so. I noticed that the neck problem he had developed as a result of heavy manual work at a car parts factory, working mostly night shifts, was still there. Rajesh dismissed it somewhat halfheartedly. It was annoying, he agreed, but on such a happy day as this one there was no reason to complain. Having a job, making money, living a relatively secure life was providing enough satisfaction for now. In the future, he was sure, he would get an opportunity to do more with his IT-skills. He firmly wanted to believe in this, but there was also doubt in his eyes. We have ended up in the fourth semester which means that a long journey is about to come to an end. Some students will simply finish and return home, others will confidently fill out the forms for permanent residency, and then there will be those who want to apply for PR but are not able to just yet. The fact is that for many ‘the time of PR’ is very near and more than ever before it will be a stress factor in their lives. This chapter will deal with that ‘last’ semester that leads up to the final application for PR and asks the question how students deal with the insecurities that 142 6: Graduating as a Migrant come with this phase, taking into account, in particular, that they once imagined this stage to be a moment nearing arrival. Investigating this question also means taking into account that migration processes are gendered and that narratives produced by different students might be colored by this. By the same token the dimensions of class will be further examined. Although the vast majority of Indian students hail from middle class backgrounds, the Indian middle class is a broad concept and internal differences of caste/class backgrounds are expected to influence the way students deal with, for instance, issues relating to success and failure. Recently the concept of class has been introduced to studies that focus both on gender and migration. A good example here is a study conducted by Batnitzky et al (2008) on young Indian hotel employees who hail from middle class families. They convincingly show that class and gender take up a central place in analyzing the dynamics at play when migrating to, and building a new life in, a new country. In this chapter I will elaborate on this argument by bringing in the narratives of a number of different Indian students from middle class families. I will show that being middle class in the Indian context does not always mean the same thing. Students might describe themselves as coming from middle class families but often use subcategories such as new or old middle class, lower/middle or even upper middle class. The category should, therefore, be treated with the necessary caution. Caste differences, educational backgrounds, income and even transnational linkages further complicate matters. Expectations and obligations from family members back home, as well as personal ideas on ‘arrival’ will almost certainly be influential. Yet we should not forget that these are all equally gendered and that together they make up the sum that could be understood as the basis for how students imagine their own future. In the first section ‘the process’ of applying for PR will be dealt with. We will meet students who are either about to or already have applied for PR. We will also meet immigration agents who guide students in making the ‘right’ decision, thus making a profit out of providing such advice. The focus will initially be on those who have run into trouble with their applications and who are now going through all the different options available to them. These ‘options’ are also central to the next section of this chapter, which will closely examine how these different options translate into different (‘individual’) strategies. Although for many obtaining a PR is what they have been aiming for for so long, it doesn’t always bring with it the kind of change in (quality of) lives and lifestyles that one perhaps expects. This then serves as an interesting bridge to the final part of this chapter (‘the return’) in which the camera will zoom in on those who have PR now. How they narrate future expectations, as well as experience their own failure and/or success, will lead to a conclusion on how to understand such early ‘mobile’ lives. Flexibility will be a key term; not only for practical reasons but also in understanding how their experiences of being ‘abroad’ relate to the dreams they once embarked on this plan with. Have plans and imaginations been rewritten as a way to 6: Graduating as a Migrant 143 cope with everyday ‘migrant’ reality? The answer may seem obvious (‘yes, of course’) but this would then cloud the many layers that can be dissected in the way this has happened. It is the small details, in particular, that are the focus of this chapter. THE PROCESS Wanting But Not Being Able To I had learned of the Ganesh Chaturthi74 celebrations the day before when Geetha had casually inquired, in her usual precise way of speaking English75, if I was planning on going or not. She was unsure about going and as it turned out, in the end she didn’t attend. In the train, en route to Seaford, she had messaged me that the weather (imminent threat of heavy rainfall and a brooding storm) was convincing enough to keep a Pune girl like herself safely inside, with a good book and mug of hot cocoa. The previous day it had already been quite rainy. We had planned to have pizza at an Italian restaurant but first met up at the house she stayed at with two other girls in Glen Huntly. When she opened the door she was dressed in an over-sized sweater and thin girly-like jeans, which somehow made her look skinnier than she really was. Fixing up a quick snack in the kitchen, she complained that she was not able to gain weight from anything really. Once she had tried it but it did not work out very well. “I just ate and ate but all the food made me just feel really sick.” She was longing for some well-prepared home-cooked Indian food. The thoughts of home were appealing in that sense. Now in the final semester of her masters in health administration, her time in Australia was almost up, as she phrased it herself. She would miss the regular trips to the small city campus Latrobe University operates just behind Victoria Market; she was sure of that. Back in India she had completed a ‘bachelor of homeopathy, medicine and surgery’. In Australia, however, she had initially done a graduate diploma in business administration at Victoria University.