Cosmopolitan Maternalisms : Migration, Kinship, and Coorg Mothering in Modernity

This women-centred study examines social reconstructions of immigrant mothering among a middle-class minority community of first-generation Coorg women – Kodavathees – in urban Karnataka, Singapore, and Sydney through conceptual lenses of new cosmopolitanisms and new maternalisms.

Cosmopolitan Maternalisms explores how Kodavathee immigrant mothering is practised with a pragmatic awareness of adapting the ways of the ancestors to the promises and pitfalls associated with living in modernity. As a member of this community, which possesses martial and agricultural traditions, and as an immigrant mother herself, Bittiandra Chand Somaiah engages in maternal conversations and in-depth qualitative interviews with forty-three mothers. The book emphasizes the socio-cultural processes associated with cosmopolitanization that accomplish mothering in general and that affect these Kodavathee mothers specifically. Cosmopolitan Maternalisms makes sense of the gendered and globalized convictions, contradictions, and aspirations shared by these mothers who are poised to slowly challenge the heteronormative maternal pedestals and patriarchal structures of middle-class transnational India.