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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the practices of care in Indian transnational families, highlighting how caregiving responsibilities disproportionately fall on women. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how gendered expectations of maintaining family ties across borders, deepens gendered inequalities.

Paper long abstract:

In India, as in many Asian countries, unlike the West, co-resident family units have traditionally served as the prime source of caregiving for older and younger family members (Mishra & Kaur, 2021; Samanta, 2019). The centrality of family in caregiving arrangements in India is also linked to the non-availability of state-sponsored care arrangements (Mishra, 2021). However, the shifting mobility of adult children because of rapid urbanization and employment-related migration to bigger Indian cities and internationally (Ugargol et al., 2016; Visaria 2001) leads to the rising proportion of aged persons living alone (LASI, 2020). These shifting demographic and residential familial arrangements complicate questions of caregiving and receiving for older persons (Jadhav. et al., 2013) and gender as a structuring factor continues to remain central in these discussions.

In Indian families, women often shoulder the bulk of caregiving responsibilities, whether as daughters-in-law, wives, or daughters (Lamb, 2009). Given the above context, this paper interrogates the gendered practices of care arrangements in Indian transnational families. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 25 such families, this paper illustrates how the burden of maintaining transnational family ties across borders falls onto women only. For female migrants, the challenge is compounded by the expectation to balance caregiving responsibilities for their ageing parents and/or her in-laws back home and their immediate families in the host country. This triple burden can exacerbate gendered inequalities within the family structure. These dynamics often lead to renegotiations of traditional gender roles but also place significant emotional and physical strain on women.