Paper short abstract:

Second generation Indians grown up in Switzerland are embedded in regimes of assimilation, multiculturalism and Indian modernity. Negotiating various cultural normativities and idioms of "Indianness" in their translocal life-worlds they develop individual ways of "lived cosmopolitanisms".

Paper long abstract:

Second generation Indians, socialized in Switzerland, are inserted in multiple cultural codes, they move in translocal networks and they are connected to global media-scapes. They negotiate and translate plenty - often contradictory - sets of identities and alterities concerning race, ethnicity, class, gender and religion. In Switzerland, on the one hand, they are both disciplined and exoticized within a dominant regime of assimilation and a recent multicultural consumer culture. On the other hand, they face cultural and social norms of their parents and the local diasporic community to maintain idioms and practices of "Indianness" concerning education, career and family values. Furthermore, in global communication networks with relatives and friends in India and other diasporic places, and also during holidays and professional stays in India they negotiate their role as PIO's ("persons of Indian origin") and changing narratives of "Indian modernity".

The paper draws on biographic, multi-sited ethnographic and discourse-analytical methods and shows the strategies of second generation Indians to translate different idioms of "Indianness" and cultural normativities into their own translocal life-worlds. In the course of these processes of construction and de-construction they more and more develop individual ways of "lived cosmopolitanisms". These negotiations take place against the historical backdrop of the increasing and changing representation of "India" in the Swiss public sphere through the cultural semantics of Bollywood, Yoga and IT, a cosmopolitan counterculture against the Swiss assimilation regime, the neoliberal and nationalist assertions of post-liberalization India, a growing global Indian public sphere, and new Indian diaspora policies.