Contested representations of remittances and the transnational family

This paper deals with the changing idea of money and the transnational Indian family across generations and life stages. It draws on a qualitative study of 38 first and second generation Indian migrants to Australia. For first generation migrants, sending money home is one of the important ways of expressing belonging and care for the transnational family. Over time, the remittances become contested in terms of their value and their equivalence to physical care, raising questions of belonging. With multiple migrants, the family centres on Australia, which now becomes the source country when children migrate elsewhere. Money and gifts are sent home to Australia or to other countries. The nuclear family is the main reference point for most of our second generation migrants, but there remain some gift exchanges with extended family and charitable donations. These donations reflect a sense of ancestry rather than the locus of family. Hence accounts of sending money to India need to be supplemented by studies of the diffusion of the transnational family across different nodes of the diaspora. The study of remittances has to reflect this diffusion and change in the transnational family if it is to adequately explain how money is the medium of family relationships