Introduction

Abstract

Sociological research on Indian families has largely focused on questions of household form and structure, to the exclusion of not only the more nebulous dimensions of family life and relationships but also the discursive and imagined aspects of the familial worlds people inhabit. The ideology of the joint family continues to influence resource distribution within a family even when most of its members spend some or the greater part of their lives in nuclear households. Not only does migration overturn conventional understandings of the family in the diaspora, it also changes the mode of relating to the family that is left behind. In their essay 'Contested Representations of Remittances and ..