Punjabi Youth in Northern Italy

This chapter examines the fraught experience of being migrant, young and belonging to several cultures at the same time. ¹ It is about the quest for freedom and independence that underlies the aspirations of Indian (largely Sikh and Punjabi) youth in northern Italy who simultaneously seek belonging and integration both into the family and into the Italian social landscape. Their quest for freedom is always balanced by the deep and unshakeable place of the family in their lives. The family provides emotional sustenance, security and well-being in an alien space. At the same time, it is also the source of difference and inequality. ² In that sense, the family is as constraining as much as it is an enabling agency. This often results in an anxiety-ridden and complex situation. Youth, especially young women, seek to rebel, and desire and pursue autonomy and independence, and yet assert their need for immersion in familial life. The situation is also complicated by the fact that absence of family, especially a missing spouse, evokes a kind of existential dilemma where the experience of being “alone” is heightened into a psychological condition that requires medical intervention. The co-presence of family members is therefore as much a necessity in some contexts as it is a bane in others.