‘I am the over-educated maid who must also earn a good living’: Exploring migration and sense of freedom among professional Indian women in Toronto

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, several Indian women novelists have enriched mainstream English literature with stories of educated, middle-class, Indian women migrating to and settling in North America. The novels assert that by migrating to North America, the protagonists were able to find ‘freedom’. In this paper, I question whether international migration necessarily leads to ‘freedom’ for this cohort of Indian women and argue that it their histories and experiences of subjugation and emancipation are not necessarily in binary opposition, and that there may be a space for multiplicity. Based on their changing power positions, the respondents were placed simultaneously at the centre and at the margins in their own homes, at work and at the places of socialisation.

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