Leaping across the ocean: Narrative in a transnational Hindu family

In this dissertation I argue that narrative performances are an important means by which Indian immigrants and the family they left behind constitute a community that builds itself across national borders. I examine the narrative performances of a single extended Hindu family whose members live in both India and the United States as keys for understanding important ways this community builds itself across national borders. While macro-level forces of globalization and international media have facilitated the connections between multiple local sites, those individuals who move across the globe create their own connections to the family and community they leave behind. Hindu families in particular present an interesting case study because Hinduism in practice is centered on family relationships. The importance of an individual's connections to his or her family creates a challenge when family members are separated across the oceans. Narrative performances provide one strategy that allows members of the community to remain connected and shape their experiences as transnational. Although the narrative performances are interconnected, I examine separately three analytical levels of narratives of the transnational process: individual immigration stories, narratives of home and family, and shared community narratives that shape transmigrants' values and experiences. These interrelated levels of narrative performance help create a transnational identity, community, and experience that are shaped by a religious milieu. Ethnographic research methods and narrative, performance, and transnational theories enable me to answer the question: how do narrative performances enable the Hindu community to remain connected despite the oceans that separate its members? In this dissertation I understand that transmigrants and the families and social networks they leave behind are both subjects and agents in transnational processes. They help create transnational experiences by traveling, communicating, and sending items across national borders. In addition to these concrete means of "doing" transnationalism, communities are also engaged in more imaginative processes related to religious expression and narrative performances.