ABSTRACT
Diasporic populations present an analytical preoccupation for contemporary academics concerned with cultural identity and its maintenance in the post-modern/colonial global metropolis. This chapter draws on twenty in-depth interviews carried out with professionally employed, married women from Northwest London’s Kutchi Hindu community and twenty interviews conducted with their mothers. The range of initial meetings between the women and their spouses indicates the level of active participation amongst these women. A visible impact of the professional occupation of these women is their increasing ability to obtain a wage sufficient to build up savings that would allow them to move out into a home of their own soon after marriage. But stressing the contradictory nature of Kutchi Hindu Gujarati identities in contemporary Britain requires avoiding the temptation of creating idealized images of South Asian women, and recognizing growing class divisions.
