Bittiandra Chand Somaiah
Drawing links between (im)migrant maternal emotions and temporalities within intra-Asian migration contexts, this paper considers new Indian (im)migrant Kodavathee mothering across three cultural domains. Firstly: feminised, emotive exigencies of mothering; secondly rationalised temporalities of mothering in modernity; and thirdly emotive temporalities viz-a-viz the relational. Just as the detraditionalisation thesis has been critiqued for its a-temporal and binary aspects, studies of mothering in migration too must consider the unique emotions and temporalities embodied within contemporary immigrant mothering in superdiverse Asian contexts beyond here-there, and now-then. Drawing on broader qualitative interviews with 33 (im)migrant Kodavathees in urban India and Singapore, but centring the voices of 14 interlocutors, (im)migrant ‘emotive maternal temporalities’ across affective rural-urban space–time continuums is proposed. Extending Smitha Radhakrishnan’s ‘cultural streamlining’ ([2011]. Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), i.e. the gendered cultivation of appropriate cultural distinction within the family by global Indians, this paper secondarily argues that ‘cultural splicing’ occurs at the interstices of temporal-emotional and ethnicised, (im)migrant mothering to be ‘appropriately Coorg’. Kodavathee (Coorg women’s) reproductive domestic scapes (Nava [2006]. “Domestic Cosmopolitanism and Structures of Feeling: The Specificity of London.” In The Situated Politics of Belonging, edited by N. Yuval-Davis, K. Kannabiran, and U. Vieten, 42–53. London: Sage) are maintained away from the land of the ancestors via strategic and sensitive balancing of contingent (im)migrant timelines and mothering-for-ethnicity practices.