Paper short abstract:

In this paper I propose that in the years since Gardner's (1993) research, the nature of British Bangladeshi communities and connections and transnationalism itself has changed. This is due to advances in technology and the emergence of a distinctly British Bangladeshi social field and habitus.

Paper long abstract:

In 'Desh-Bidesh: Sylheti Images of Home and Away', Gardner (1993) explains the way locality is used to discuss and express change over time and people's desires. Desh refers to the home, land or country; while bidesh refers to foreign countries. Connected to these two expressions of geographical locations are related sets of meanings and discourses. In this paper I propose that in the years since Gardner's research, the nature of British Bangladeshi transnationalism changed. This is due to the emergence of a distinctly British Bangladeshi social field and habitus. Rather than two separate places linked to discourses of power, desh and bidesh have become two locations in a transnational social field, which is fuelled by inequalities both between and within these locations and facilitated by increasingly accessible technology. Technology has also linked British Bangladeshis to other transnational sources of symbolic power meaning that the discourses of desh and bidesh have decreased in importance. For British Bangladeshi adults the desh has lost some of its spiritual power, but for their children, the connections between the words, the locations and the discourses are not made.