Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad

Notes

Notes Acknowledgments 1. For those familiar with my earlier book, White Saris and Sweet Mangoes, I should note that this Hena (Hena Basu of Basu Research and Documentation Service in Kolkata) is not the same Hena (Hena Mukherjee) who devoted her energies to working with me as a research assistant in the village of Mangaldihi in 1989–1990. Both Henas have been invaluable research assistants and close friends. 1. Introduction 1. I use ‘single quotation marks’ to signify words spoken in English in an otherwise Bengali conversation. As I discuss further below, residences for elders are most frequently referred to by Indians in English as “old age homes,” signifying the perceived Westernoriginating nature of these institutions. 2. As I examine further in chapters 7 and 8, immigrants who become citizens can be eligible to receive the kinds of welfare benefits the United States government offers to any citizen over 65 with limited means, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Medicare. 3. As the book’s following pages reveal, both tea and time—in relation to family , intimacy, and modernity—are in fact recurring tropes in my informants’ narratives. Tea takes time to prepare. Time is essential for true intimacy, among family or friends. Adda—a quintessential Bengali way of forming and enjoying friendships—entails endless , lengthy, time-expending talk, often over tea. Tea is something that Indians commonly drink several times a day—generally at least first thing in the morning, then again with breakfast, and then in the afternoon. Tea is what guests are offered when dropping in to visit. And seniors and superiors (in what many hold up as traditional or proper Indian contexts) rarely prepare their own tea, but rather are offered it by servants, daughters-in-law, or other juniors. The new old age homes in India always specify how often tea is offered, and residents who like their homes readily cite being served tea. Older immigrants to the United States, particularly men, often describe their adjustment to American (busy and individualist) lifestyles by narrating how they have finally learned to make their own tea. 4. Rajan and Kumar (2003:78–79), based on 1992–1993 National Family Household Survey data, report that 88 percent of the elderly in India co-reside with their adult children. Although co-residence is declining, gerontologists concur that the strong majority of Indian elderly still do live with their children. See Jamuna 2003:127–128, Basu 2006. 5. For instance, those who can speak English well comprise only about 5 percent of India’s population; and just about 9 percent of households in India have a refrigerator (Derné 2005:108; see also Fernandes 2006:81, Table 3). I discuss below and in chapter 2 the varying criteria used to define the Indian middle classes, a fast-growing group that includes, scholars estimate, between 100 and 250 million persons, or about 9 to 22 percent of the population. 6. See especially Lamb 2000:90–99. For other important anthropological works on aging in India, see Van Willigen and Chadha 1999, and Vatuk 1975, 1980, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1995. 2-LAMB_pages_133-342.indd 273 5/13/09 3:35:58 PM  Notes to pages 4–9 7. HelpAge India’s (soon-to-be-updated) 2002 guide to old age homes lists eight hundred across India (HelpAge India 2002; see also Sawhney 2003), and since its publication new elder residences have been springing up at a fast pace. From 2004–2006, I was able to locate seventy-one old age homes in Kolkata and its suburbs. 8. As Eric Gable nicely writes, reflecting on his and James Ferguson’s different accounts of their subjects’ experiences of modernity in Africa: “Nowadays in anthropology , when we compare two fieldwork encounters and find them to be divergent, we can account for such divergence in a variety of ways. One way would be to scrutinize the motives, both conscious and unconscious, of the authors of the ethnographic accounts in question. Ethnographers are authors; they write, as Geertz, Clifford, Marcus, and others made us all see in the 1980s, ‘fictions,’ . . . stories that each of us constructs, reflecting our biographies, our preoccupations, our libraries. . . . Ethnography can be a window into the lives of others and it can also be a mirror” (2006:411 n.14). 9. Most residents of old age homes feel compelled to state publicly that their families did not want them to move in (whether or not the assertion is fully true). This saves the family...