Rightful Shares

The book delivers a rich ethnographic account of present-day Indian communities in northern Italy, considering their journeys of diaspora as well as dynamics of integration, focusing on the shift from first to second migrant generation with an important accent on gender.

Based on three-years of multisite fieldwork between Lombardy and the Punjab in selected households, this study contributes to the emergent debate on South Asian minorities in the national context. Far from being a passive labor force, people of Punjabi descent in Italy confront and resist multiple forms of exclusion: from patriarchy to casteism, from racialization to civic stratification.

As a guest inside these homes, the author registers and and amplifies otherwise unheard struggles: life stories that intersect with collective claims which go beyond the ethnic community in order to interrogate the global politics of mobility as well as local policies for social cohesion.