Second Generation Voices: Growing Up Between Two Worlds

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The migrant generation makes a decision. The generation after it inherits the consequences of a decision it did not make, in a country it did not choose, with a relationship to an ancestral homeland that is real but second hand. Sociologists call these people the second generation, meaning the children of immigrants born or largely raised in the receiving country. The category covers an enormous range of experience, but it produces a set of recurring patterns that are visible in Britain, Canada, the United States, Australia, the Gulf, East Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Trinidad and everywhere else Indians have settled in numbers.

The most measurable pattern concerns language. The American linguist Joshua Fishman described a three generation model of language shift that has been confirmed repeatedly in immigrant communities: the first generation speaks the heritage language and acquires the host language imperfectly, the second is bilingual with the host language dominant, and the third is effectively monolingual in the host language with at most a passive comprehension of the ancestral one. Indian families have fought this pattern harder than most, through weekend language schools attached to temples, gurdwaras and community associations, and through formal provision in school systems. Australia's state run community language schools and the availability of Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil and other languages in senior secondary examinations, and Punjabi instruction in parts of British Columbia and Ontario, all exist because parents demanded them. The effect is real but partial. Most second generation children end up able to understand a parent and grandparent and to reply in a mixture, which is enough for the household and not enough for literature.

Educational outcomes are the other measurable pattern, and here the picture is unusually strong. Where the parent generation entered through skilled migration streams, as most Indian migration to Australia, Canada and the United States since the 1970s has, the children typically outperform national averages in school completion and university entry by a wide margin. This is not mysterious. Selection systems screen for education, so the parents are drawn from a population already far above the Indian average, and educational advantage transmits. Research on the children of immigrants in New York, published as Inheriting the City in 2008, found in several groups a second generation advantage: the ability to draw selectively on two cultural repertoires, using immigrant work discipline and family networks alongside native fluency and local credentials, produced outcomes better than either group of comparison peers.

The pressures nobody puts in the brochure

The costs are less often counted. Career expectation is the most commonly reported. Families who migrated at professional cost, often accepting a period of downgraded work while credentials were reassessed, tend to attach enormous weight to their children entering secure, high status, credentialled professions, with medicine, engineering, law, accountancy and pharmacy recurring as the acceptable list. The corresponding cost falls on those who want to do something else, and the friction is not really about the career; it is about whether the migration was worth it, a question the child is being asked to answer.

Marriage is the second recurring pressure point, and it is where the two frameworks collide most directly. Parental expectations formed around arranged introduction, community endogamy, caste and religion meet children who have grown up with the assumption that partner choice is personal. Most families negotiate this into something workable, often described as an assisted or introduced marriage in which the parents suggest and the child decides, and rates of marriage outside the community rise steadily with each generation and with time since arrival. But the negotiation is not always successful, and estrangement over relationships is a genuine and under discussed feature of diaspora family life.

Then there is the experience of being racialised. Second generation children generally speak with a local accent, hold local citizenship and know no other home, which means that when they encounter hostility it lands differently than it does on their parents. A migrant can rationalise prejudice as the price of arrival. Someone born in Melbourne or Manchester has no such buffer. Correspondence studies in several countries have shown that identical job applications with South Asian names receive fewer callbacks than those with Anglo names, so the experience is not confined to schoolyard insult. This is a large part of why terms like British Asian, Indian American and Indian Australian became widespread: they are attempts to name a position that neither of the available single labels describes.

Making culture out of the gap

The most visible consequence of the second generation is cultural production. The gap between two frames of reference is uncomfortable to live in and extremely productive to write from, and diaspora writing, film, comedy and music has been dominated by second generation voices for thirty years. In Britain, the BBC sketch series Goodness Gracious Me, which moved from radio to television in 1998, made the mismatch itself the joke and reached a mainstream national audience. Bend It Like Beckham in 2002 built a globally successful film out of a daughter's negotiation between a Punjabi Sikh family in Hounslow and a football career. In music, the fusion of Punjabi folk forms with British club production created bhangra as a distinct diaspora genre in the West Midlands and west London from the 1980s, a form that did not exist in Punjab and was later exported back to it.

Return visits complete the picture, and they are frequently the point at which the second generation discovers that it is not Indian in the way it assumed. Relatives identify the visitor immediately by clothing, walk and accent. Anthropologists studying return travel have consistently found that these trips clarify identity rather than resolving it: the visitor comes back understanding that they belong to a diaspora community rather than to India, which is a different and more specific thing.

What emerges is not a person torn between two worlds, which is the cliche, but a person operating a third position with its own conventions, its own vocabulary, its own food, its own religious practice adapted to a country where the festival calendar does not match the public holidays, and its own institutions. That third position is now old enough in Britain, Canada, Fiji, Malaysia, South Africa and the Caribbean to have produced third and fourth generations who relate to it as their tradition. The interesting question for the coming decades is not whether the second generation assimilates. It is what happens to the community institutions, the temples and language schools and newspapers, that were built by people who assumed their grandchildren would need them.

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