Systemic pressures fracture South Asian diaspora caregiving ideals: labor exploitation, gendered expectations, and intergenerational conflict
Original framing: “When caregiving ideals don’t match reality in South Asian diaspora families” — The Conversation - Global
British colonial policies (e.g., indentured labor, Partition) forcibly relocated South Asians, severing intergenerational care networks and creating diaspora communities ill-equipped for aging populations. Postcolonial states in South Asia dismantled welfare systems under IMF structural adjustment, leaving families to absorb eldercare costs. The 'caregiving ideal' is a colonial-era moral construct, not an ancient tradition.
The South Asian diaspora caregiving crisis is not a cultural failure but a predictable outcome of colonial labor extraction, neoliberal state abandonment, and the weaponization of familial guilt under individualism.
Indigenous South Asian traditions (e.g., *seva*, *panchayats*) once distributed care across communities, but these systems were dismantled by British colonialism and postcolonial austerity—leaving diaspora families to bear the burden alone. The myth of the 'self-sacrificing daughter' serves neoliberal labor markets by devaluing unpaid care work while obscuring how Western economies exploit South Asian migrant labor. Marginalized voices (queer, disabled, Dalit) are erased from this narrative, despite facing the highest risks of isolation and abuse. Solutions must combine policy reforms (caregiver wages, co-housing) with decolonial reclamation of care as a communal right—challenging both Western individualism and South Asian moral economies that frame care as a woman’s burden. The trickster’s role is to expose this absurdity: a system that demands care while ensuring no one can provide it.