The third life story in Finding home in Europe, a HOMInG book edited by L.E. Pérez Murcia and S. Bonfanti (Berghahn, 2022), is about “Priya – Homing in the Global Job Market: the Life Story of an Indian Woman in the Netherlands”. Through this life story, Sara Bonfanti highlights the predicaments faced by high-skilled migrants in making a home on the move. Coming of age with a stronger attachment to her adoptive country and a weaker desire to return to her ‘homeland’ despite her nostalgia, Priya remains in a liminal condition; unable to develop strong bonds with the ‘locals’, she tries to reproduce a sense of home with ‘expat’ peers. The ways in which she arranges her domestic objects and enjoys Indian party culture abroad reveal her mixed attachments to places and people, as well as her understanding of social differences among Dutch people with an Asian background. See the editors’ conceptual Introduction to the book here.
On home and home-making among Indian migrants, see also other HOMInG studies on the prospects of mixed families (Bonfanti, Where do we go from here? Exploring the future of mixed families between Italy and South Asia, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 2021) on the housing conditions and pathways of Indian households in Italy (Bonfanti, From breadwinner to bedridden: Vulnerable tales of a labour migrant household in Italy, Focaal, 2022) and on places of worship as affordances for homemaking (Bertolani, Bonfanti and Boccagni, At home in the gurdwara?, Religion, 2021).