The Gender of Migrant Money

Abstract

Indian migrant money in Australia has been and is predominantly male. This reproduces the male ownership of money in traditional Indian patrilineal families. Women in patrilineal India do not always inherit property, even though legally women have equal rights of inheritance in ancestral property. Women among the early Indian migrants to Australia reproduced the gendered norms relating to money and property in India, rather than challenged them. We do not know enough about the management of money in the households of recent Indian migrants. But the incidence of financial abuse among recent migrants shows that money remains male. I deal with this in greater detail later in the chapter.

Parts of this section are based on Singh, S. (2015). Transnational community and money in the Indian diaspora in Melbourne. In S. Singh, Y. Nadarajah, M. Mulligan and C. Chamberlain (Eds.), Searching for Community: Melbourne to Delhi. (59–76). Delhi: Manohar Publishers. Used with permission.