Gendered Migrations and Literary Narratives: Writing Communities in South Asian Diaspora

Migrations are gendered journeys. During contemporary times when migrations happen due to personal reasons like pursuit of better job opportunities, the spouses, mostly women, face several challenges in finding jobs and sustaining a career. Many of these qualified women often turn to alternate means of finding identity and fulfilment. Writing is one activity that provides them with this sense of purpose and achievement. The personal act of writing a literary text becomes as much a social activity when few of them form writing communities. This socio-literary study begins with an analysis of the social and material conditions that foster gendered migrations, and goes on to analyse writing as an alternate career, the role these gendered writing communities play in the process of writing, publishing and marketing as well as the choice of certain topics, like romance, thus functioning as mini-publishing houses. Through detailed interviews of five women writers of South Asian origin, this paper posits that these popular narratives, the products of these writing communities, are very temporal in nature and a product of interesting intersections between migrations as a condition and the gendered communities.