Post-Colonial Domesticity amid Diaspora: Home and Family in the Lives of Two English Sisters from India

Through oral history, this essay explores the relationship among home, family and place in the memories and life experiences of two women who are part of the post-colonial British diaspora. Children at the time of Pakistani independence in 1947, Josephine and Judy Beck grew up in an English family in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province, where their father worked as a police official. While still children, decolonization transformed the sisters into "remnants of something." Middle-class femininity and domesticity emerged as their primary identity, inflecting other forms of belonging, including nationality. Each woman adapted familiar aspects of her colonial childhood to an adult life in which personal relationships and geographical mobility have remained central. Josephine settled in a region of the American west that visually resembles Pakistan while Judy has spent much of her life abroad in expatriate western communities that socially resembled those of her youth.