Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany: Why Move? 3031401468, 9783031401466

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Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany Why Move? Amrita Datta Foreword by Thomas Faist

Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany “In this valuable account, Amrita Datta looks at how narrative accounts construct a world. Migration stories assemble the fluctuations of fortunes and opportunities so that blue card holders in Germany constantly oscillate between hope and despair. An important work for understanding migration, policy matters and survival strategies of Indian migrants.” —Susan Visvanathan, Formerly Professor of Sociology, JNU; Adjunct Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Economic Sciences, IISER Bhopal, India “How can reflexivity be used as an analytical tool in migration research? Amrita Datta’s book offers concrete suggestions on this question, which is of recurring concern for migration scholars. One promising avenue, as Amrita Datta proves, is storification, or what we might call ‘serious storytelling’: By analysing the stories of Indian Blue Card holders and students living in Germany and by adopting a transnational perspective, Amrita Datta points to the role of structural and everyday racism in Germany. She shows that these are fundamental obstacles for Indians to find a home in the new country.” —Janine Dahinden, Professor of Transnational Studies, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland “Against debates that discuss migration without migrants, Amrita Datta’s must-read insider’s view reveals the double-sidedness of transnational labour migration by bringing to light the voices of those involved: Why move? Or, as one interviewee put it, “I chose Berlin, and thankfully Berlin chose me too”.” —Frank Welz, Former President of the European Sociological Association and Professor, University of Innsbruck, Austria “By focusing on the question “Why leave?” Amrita Datta tells touching human stories as part of an important global trend: the reconfiguring mobility amidst rapid political changes and an unprecedented pandemic. Nuanced and powerful, the book shows that migration is never about jobs or status only, it is also about everyday dignity and liveability, for instance the ability of making friends and moving around in a city safely, which are in turn conditioned by large political forces. A very timely and significant contribution to migration studies and global anthropology.” —Biao Xiang, Director, Anthropology of Economic Experimentation, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany

Amrita Datta

Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany Why Move?

Amrita Datta University of Siegen Siegen, Germany

ISBN 978-3-031-40146-6    ISBN 978-3-031-40147-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To the one who asked me, “What’s your point?” We miss you!

Prologue

Abstract  As the opening chapter, the Prologue introduces the subject of this book to the readers and discusses the key concepts, main strands of arguments, methodological approaches and chapter summaries. It offers a glimpse of the theoretical location of this project and salient questions I am raising through this book. Keywords  Indians in Germany • EU Blue Card • Motivation of migration • Pandemic • Emigration from India • Cultural insider • Qualitative research Jostling inside the small room at the clinic with some hundred other Covid patients to get my test done, I promised myself, if I can leave this time, I’m not coming back.

Hema, my participant,1 told this to me when asked about her motivation of emigrating from India. Later as I planned to write a book on “Why Move?” I decided to make this my opening sentence, as it captures the desperation, trauma and vulnerability that often provoke people to migrate. After a year since she stood at that small covid-infested room,

 All data were collected and analyzed following the GDPR in Germany. Participants’ details were anonymized with their informed consent. 1

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Hema migrated to Germany to join a doctoral program at a university near Bonn. White-collar or high-skilled2 emigration from India is not a new topic of discussion. Documented in the World Migration Report 2020, India continues to be the largest country of origin of international migrants with 17.5 million of Indians living abroad followed by Mexico and China. However, what is perhaps new and interesting is, firstly, that the rate of emigration has increased since the pandemic and, secondly, that Indians are now choosing new countries to immigrate, in addition to their classical choices. While top destination country for the Indians is still the USA, Germany as one of the most active member states of the European Union with its Blue Card offing has emerged as a formidable competitor. Interestingly, Germany has so far welcomed the highest number of white-collar immigrants from a third country to live and work there as Blue Card holders and Indian migrants top the chart, with the Chinese as a distant second. Indian immigration in Germany is not a new phenomenon but recent studies show visible increase in their numbers (Faist et al. 2017; Butsch 2020). As such, migration of Indians to Germany can be divided into four phases. The first phase started in the 1950s with arrival of Indian students in Germany; the second phase is marked by the arrival of the nurses from Kerala to work in hospitals in the then West Germany in the 1960s (Goel 2008); the third phase started with massive outflow of Punjabis and Sikhs due to Khalistan Movement in Punjab in the 1970s till the 1980s (Tatla 1999); and the latest phase, i.e., the fourth phase began with the introduction of the Green Card Scheme (year 2000) by the German government that initially brought 20,000 Indian high-­ skilled IT and finance professionals to the host society (Butsch 2016). This was followed by arrival of Indian students for higher education in

 In this book the white-collar immigrants are referred to as highly skilled. While I am fully aware of how conflicted the term “skill” is, in my research “highly skilled” quintessentially refers to a specific profile of immigrants who are able to access a regular migration pathway as opposed to those who are forced to navigate through dangerous tracks with or without documents. From that standpoint, “highly skilled” must be considered here through the lens of a socio-cultural and economic status that white-collar immigrants are able to maintain, even transnationally. 2

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Germany that still continues (Gottschlich 2012) and lastly, the Blue Card holders. Going by the data recently released by Institut fuer Deutschen Wissenschaft, IW-Report 1/2022, between 2010 and 2020, the total number of Indians in Germany (57.6% are white-collar immigrants) has increased from 42,000 to 1,59,000. Also, percentage of Indian students joining German universities has gone up in the last two years from 25,149 to 33,753 (Source: DAAD India, 2022). The average age of the German population being 42 (DeStatis 2021) leading to an acute labour shortage particularly in the IT and other technical sectors, it is not surprising that Germany has received the highest number of Blue Card holders in comparison to the other EU member states. Putting these numbers into perspective, perhaps it is safe to say that the EU Blue Card is increasingly gaining popularity among the Indians considering immigration to Germany. It is also perhaps not ambitious to project that this number will continue to grow given the current employment situation in India and growing labour shortage in Germany. There are several reasons behind the popularity of the Blue Card. It offers work permit not only to the potential employee from a third country but to their spouses too. Also, the immigration pathway is streamlined meaning the migrants are able to move as a family (unlike in other cases they have to apply for family reunion visa which takes months to process). This framework has so far been highly popular among the Indians moving in their mid-thirties, often with small children and partners with careers. Looking at migration in a post-pandemic global order, immigrants are increasingly interested in long-term opportunities than short-term gains, and family matters continue to weigh, as much as employment. In the light of this, Germany has emerged as a popular destination for the Indians; among the highly skilled white-collar immigrants, this is a matter of convenience that they are able to migrate as a unit, not just as individuals. It is also interesting to witness that Indian students are choosing Germany, often over the USA and other classically popular education destinations. This is largely because the tuition fees at German universities are nominal in comparison to the USA, etc. Also, tuition fees at

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German public universities are much cheaper in comparison to the USA; in addition, in the last ten years Germany has been more open to English language programs at university levels. It must also be borne in mind that the Indian students immigrating to Germany for higher education are future Blue Card Holders. From that standpoint, for these students the promise of the Blue Card is not just immediate but futuristic. Within this background, through this book my aim is to locate the motivations of the Indians for emigrating from India and their motivations of immigrating to Germany. At this point, it is important to declare that while through this book I argue that the EU Blue Card holds promise for the Indians to continue choosing Germany as an immigration destination in the years to come, such promise is not without friction and challenges that Germany as a society exhibits, especially with reference to migrants and racism. While the white-collar Indian communities in Germany do not face racism in the form of violence, in this book I argue that there is no relief from structural racism in Germany. Despite such challenges, the motivations for immigration are visible and often linked to the motivations for emigration. While the motivations for immigration are easily identifiable through the various scopes of the Blue Card and educational opportunities, the motivations of leaving the home country are more complicated, often tacit and multiple. In this book I argue that emigration motivations of Indians leaving India with or without documents3 are often similar – based on the political disturbance in the country characterized by an authoritarian government, pandemic trauma combined with poor healthcare infrastructure, economic precarity, anti-minority sentiments and increasing gender-based violence. The motivations of emigration ignite an exit sentiment among the Indians provoking them to choose various pathways of migration, of which the Blue Card framework and higher education at German universities offer safe take offs. This exit sentiment is central to new migration as a theoretical framework and must be located within the context of reflexivity in migration research. New migration as a theoretical approach is reflected in the  https://www.dw.com/en/more-undocumented-indians-attempt-to-enter-the-unitedstates/a-64575956 3

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recent works of Biao Xiang (2020, 2022) and Ayelet Shachar (2020) engaging with emergent migration catalysts and visible and invisible borders. Reflexivity as a methodological tool can effectively be employed in migration research through storification (Aylett 2000). Consequently, in this book I have tried to capture the stories of the Indian immigrants in Germany through the recognition of their migration motivations, immigrant experiences, challenges and prospects that could appear to be unseeming and ordinary unless located in the context. In this regard, my role as a researcher must also be considered. I started working on this topic in 2013. My focus then was on the Indian IT, finance and banking professionals in Germany that the host country invited within the framework of the German Green Card Scheme. The Green Card Scheme of the Social Democrats was unsuccessful since it failed to offer anything concrete to the immigrants unlike the EU Blue Card (Datta 2016). However, while I was submitting my doctoral thesis, I started identifying the gradual yet steady expansion of the Indians in Germany. By 2018, their visibility in German public spaces had increased significantly, prompting me to consider investigating further. This eventually led me to undertake research on the highly skilled Indians arriving in Germany. Witnessing the gradual expansion of the Indian immigrant communities in Germany for the past one decade has been an interesting experience for me as a researcher who is also a cultural insider. Being cultural insider is both a boon and a bane. While it eases the entry into the field, one is always at the danger of unnecessary visibility and attention within the community. This is particularly when the community itself is small. From that standpoint, my political location as a researcher is a significant component in this book. Consequently, at several levels throughout this book, I have tried to instrumentalize my location as a researcher. Therefore, my ontological positioning as a researcher could also be considered as a methodological tool in this book. As an Indian woman immigrant in Germany, it is easier for me to approach and enter the field and build rapport. However, the Indians in Germany being a small community, the visibility within the community is higher than otherwise. Also, interestingly I am the only researcher with an Indian background researching on the Indian immigrants in Germany at the moment, especially the highly skilled immigrants and students.

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Therefore, I am easily identifiable. This could also pose a threat to my research in the wake that some members within the community dislike my political and intellectual stands and start sabotaging and targeting my work. This could be a major challenge that a cultural insider could face.

Chapter Details This book has nine chapters including the Prologue. All the chapters are based on immigrant experiences before, during and after their movements. The chapter “Pandemic and Politics: The Two ‘Ps’ in a Pod” captures the salient motivations of emigration for the Indian Blue Card holders and students arriving in Germany. The next chapter titled “Refuge from the Bovine?” is about the shadow migration trend that I observe among the Indians leaving the country to escape political targeting. Although not all of them seek political refuge in Germany, their motivation is to flee from the authoritarian regime in India. Here, the “Bovine” is a metaphor for the current regime’s preoccupation with the holiness of the cow in India and all anti-minority actions emanating from that preoccupation. Next, in “Gendering the Immigrants” I raise the question that why more women are migrating from India to Germany. Here I conclude that Indian women are immigrating to Germany for mobility, safety and freedom. This discussion includes the plight of the non-male actors as well. “In Pursuit of Freedom: Queer Girl Moves to Berlin” is based on Sukanya’s story, who migrated to Germany to escape from the clutches of patriarchy in India and live life based on free mobility and freedom of expression. The next chapter “Immigrant Homemakers” discusses the homing practices of the Indians in Germany in the light of everyday racism in German society and religious tension within the Indian diaspora over politics and food and the politics of food. In “Uncertain Mobilities: Pandemic, Time and Certitude,” I discuss how uncertainty and risk have emerged as crucial parameters for understanding immigrant experiences especially with reference to new migration trends. The chapter “Immigrants as Biocitizens” is based on autoethnography. Here I argue that vaccination as an expression of biopower conferring biocitizenship to a select few in a state liberates the body as much as

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it captivates. The last chapter “Imagining Tomorrow” offers an assessment of what the future of Indian immigrants could look like in another decade, how to address the structural challenges within German society vis-à-vis migration and what kind of policy shifts could further facilitate white-­collar migration to Germany. The closing remarks include an examination of the Chancenkarte as a potential framework for inviting more Indians to live and work in Germany in the long run.

Foreword

Why Move? And why move from India to Germany? This book’s captivating account provides convincing answers. It also goes far beyond this focus by dissecting the challenges Indian migrants face in their new working and living environments. Given the geopolitical and global economic conditions of the early 2020s, the subject of this book is timely. In this context, the German government and employers are actively wooing Indian “high-skilled” workers. Amrita Datta’s original study is the first monograph in English on Indian migrants in Germany. Her vivid storytelling technique effectively captures the immigrant experiences and locates their emigration and immigration motivations in a comparative manner – taking into consideration social processes in both India and Germany. For India, the study raises crucial questions with reference to the severe challenges to democracy in recent times. For Germany, the author convincingly draws on her experience as an Indian woman immigrant and what she has witnessed in the evolution of the immigrant community in Germany through the last decade. This highly reflexive analysis also critiques the significant subject of racism in Germany and examines how everyday and structural racism affect Indian immigrants despite their white-collar privilege. Very important, this book offers realistic policy recommendations. Amrita Datta provides a multi-perspectival analysis which considers the experiences of migrants alongside the standard views of governments. xv

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This makes it a rare exemplar of reflexive knowledge on cross-border migration, which is something that is badly needed if we want to improve our understanding of migration processes, and if better policies in the Indian–German transnational social spaces are to be devised. Professorship for Transnational Relations Development and Migration Sociology University of Bielefeld Bielefeld, Germany March 2023

Thomas Faist

Acknowledgements

The academic pressure to publish keeps increasing with each passing day. But I do not feel inspired enough to write anything, let alone a whole book, unless I have something new and important to say. Therefore, it took me a decade of examination, participation and observation to finally gather the momentum and try making a point. It is for my readers to decide if the point I make is relevant, but I must take this opportunity to express my love and gratitude for those without whom this book would not have materialized. A book is not written in a day – it is a journey. In my journey, I was immensely lucky to find support from several people and institutions. My heart is full of gratitude towards the Marie Sklowdowska-Curie Grant that allowed my tenure at the Department of Sociology, University of Siegen, and offered the academic and logistical infrastructure for me to write this book. I must make a special mention of Karin Schittenhelm and her relentless motivation towards this book project. My immense gratitude towards the Department of Geography, University of Cologne and Global South Studies Centre (GSSC), Cologne, especially Frauke Kraas, Carsten Butsch, Michael Bollig, Michaela Pelican, Clemens Greiner, Alexander Follmann and Jonathan Ngeh. I am eternally indebted to Boike Rehbein and Humboldt University for hosting me at the

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Institute for Asian and African Studies during the doctoral fieldwork in 2013 – a journey that changed my life in more ways than one, a journey that eventually led me to this book. I must also thank Hanns Seidel Stiftung, Munich, for the doctoral research grant and Volker Bauer for the mentoring. I thank my alma mater Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) – that still remains the best decision of my life. I can never thank my academic parent Anand Kumar enough for his unparalleled contribution in this journey that enabled me to navigate across this tough terrain of academia. I am grateful to Susan Visvanathan and Avijit Pathak for always motivating me to look at the bigger picture. I thank Frank Welz and the Department of Sociology at University of Innsbruck where I made the first presentation of my doctoral thesis. I am grateful to Biao Xiang for inviting me to be a part of his MoLab at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI), Halle, where the workshops, discussions and collaborative reading sessions immensely helped my thought process as a researcher and a writer. I am thankful to Arjun Appadurai, Nina Glick Schiller, Nina Werbner, Sheila Jasanoff and Manuela Boatca for being a part of Corona Conversations and Uncertain Mobilities – the web-talk series and the symposium that hugely informed my understanding of migration. I am thankful to Thomas Faist for the generous foreword and his overall support for my research ideas since 2017. I thank the social scientists who instilled critical thinking in me early in life including Prashanta Roy, Abhijit Mitra and Amitava Ghose. I am thankful to my colleagues at University of Siegen, University of Cologne, University of Bielefeld, Humboldt University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and MPI Halle for the conversations. Huge appreciation for my participants who accepted the invitation to be a part of this book and shared their stories with me without much inhibition. A big thanks to my publishing team Sharla Plant, my editor for taking interest in my work and Liam Inscoe-Jones for signing the book contract. I am thankful to Jessica Katrina John and Christu John for proofreading, formatting and indexing this book. It is impossible to thank my Mum who went against all odds to help me get the education she thought I deserved. It is equally impossible to

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thank Arani, the person who criticizes and appreciates me with equal gusto – without his tough love I would perhaps never have finished writing this book. I also thank my dad, who is always curious about all my academic adventures. I am sincerely thankful for the love and support of my extended family – without whom no accomplishment is meaningful. My friends in JNU, Berlin and Cologne who held my hands in the last decade must be thanked  – Sona Mitra, Arindam Banerjee, Amitabh Kumar, Vineet Thakur, Dev Pathak, Nathalie Strootmann, Elisabeth Jeglitzka, Carolina Kiesel, thank you! This book would not have materialized without you all coming together. Thank you for being you and being a part of my journey!

Contents

1 Pandemic and Politics: The Two “Ps” in a Pod 1 2 Refuge from the Bovine?13 3 G  endering the Immigrants25 4 In Pursuit of Freedom: Queer Girl Moves to Berlin37 5 I mmigrant Homemakers47 6 Uncertain Mobilities: Pandemic, Time and Certitude59 7 I mmigrants as Biocitizens69 8 I magining Tomorrow79 B  ibliography85 I ndex99

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1 Pandemic and Politics: The Two “Ps” in a Pod

The title of the book is “Why Move.” Therefore, it is perhaps obvious that we start by addressing this question. As a matter of fact, the entire book is basically an exercise to respond to the question – why Indians are constantly leaving the country? However, why move, the question, has two parts. The first part is about why Indians are leaving the country and the second part, at least in this context, is why Indians are moving to Germany. This emigration-immigration motivations are the defining premise of this chapter. The World Migration Report 20211 already tells us that India continues to top the list of countries with highest emigration. This has also been presented and deliberated in the Indian Parliament last year.2 The Government of India report and migration-related data at global levels show that emigration from India gathered momentum since 2014 and continues to increase over time. Why so? What are the biggest motivations for Indians to emigrate from India? Secondly, what are their motivations to choose Germany as the country of immigration? To answer these questions, I refer to the primary data gathered through  https://reliefweb.int/report/world/world-migration-report-2020.  https://thefederal.com/news/over-9-lakh-indians-relinquished-citizenship-since-2014-govt-data/.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_1

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fieldwork in different parts of Germany. Most of these data, essentially qualitative in nature, emerge from face-to-face conversations and ethnography; some data are collected through Zoom room interactions during the coronavirus pandemic.

Why Move? Motivations of Emigration It started around the first phase of the pandemic in June 2020. As I was staying at my ancestral home in Calcutta, one of my participants in Germany called me, mostly to enquire after my health and overall situation amidst the pandemic and to share the joy that her “bestest friend from college”3 was moving to Germany too. I could sense Tara’s excitement even over the telephone: “I really don’t believe this! Ever since we moved to Germany, I have been constantly telling Avi to find a job somewhere in Europe so that we can hang out as we did in India. She wanted to but she had no idea how. But now she just got a job offer in Frankfurt. It’s a German company, the pay is good. I am so happy for her, and for us! She was not happy with her job in India. Also, she works in the social sector so there is too much political pressure and corruption.” Although Avi got the job offer in the middle of the pandemic, she had to wait until international flights were resumed. Meanwhile, I contacted her and when she reached Frankfurt, we spoke over telephone, then via Zoom rooms, and finally onsite in January, 2021. I will come to Avi later, but let me first talk about Tara and how our brief telephonic interaction alerted me to the steady rate of emigration from India to Germany. Tara is an IT professional. She and her husband Kshitij moved to Germany together in 2019. When I first spoke with Tara and Kshitij, he was deeply upset by the political climate in India. This was unusual because in my hitherto experience, I rarely found non-Islamic IT professionals in India to be bothered by the everyday political mayhem and  A phrase used by the participants.

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polarization in the country. So, I was compelled to ask him: “Why does the political situation in India bother you?” He, as if almost had his answer ready, described: “It doesn’t bother me directly...as in I am not affected as such. But a country that still fights over which god is greater – Ram or Allah, is not doing well overall, isn’t it? I mean if the government really cares for the Hindus so much, why does the unemployment affect everybody and doesn’t protect the Hindus? So, you realise that this is not a religion thing – it’s about dividing people and pitting them against each other so that the real agenda never comes to light.” Kshitij’s allegations were strong, that encourages me to probe further: “What is the real agenda then, in your opinion?” “Well, the agenda, as a I see it, is to let common people fight over trivial issues because the economic situation of the country is bad. In some sectors, in some regions, there’s hardly any job! If you go to the remote areas, my extended families still live in the villages – I go there sometimes – it is still the same, no education, no job – those who have some lands are doing okay but the rest, only mandir masjid hamla!4 As he indicates that the political situation in India was a motivation for him to move, I now turn to Tara. Tara clarifies what Kshitij said: “It is not just the political drama. The real story is that we are not doing very well economically too. … You look at the way young people are going abroad for studies, for jobs. Why? There aren’t enough jobs in the country. People usually think, my colleagues also think that let them fight, at least they have their job, but very soon they won’t and it will be because of those fights that one didn’t pay attention to.” Tara and Kshitij are not the only people who think like this; several of my participants have confided and clearly stated that the salient reason for their emigration from India is political instability in the country, coupled with acute political polarization, which affects them despite their religion. As Bureau of Immigration, Ministry of External Affairs in India suggests, approximately 1.8 lac people gave up Indian citizenship in 2022, while about 1.6 lac gave up citizenship in 2021, 85,256 in 2020

 Temples, shrines and religious attacks.

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and about 1.4 lac in 2019. Looking at the numbers, there is no denying that the emigration curve for India is steady and upward. It dipped a little in 2020 due to the pandemic; however, it is also noteworthy that even at the height of a pandemic, people did not stop emigrating from the country to pursue higher studies and start a new jobs. Locating this discussion further in the broader context of migration studies, India is the world’s largest origin of international migrants. However, the rate of emigration shot up significantly 2014 onwards and it continues to rise steadily. Going by the data shared by the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, the Indian Parliament records also show that the trend of people giving up their Indian citizenship has been on the ascendant since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. Their estimate is that about 1,31,489 people gave up their Indian citizenship in 2015, 1,41,603 in 2016, 1,33,049 in 2017 and 1,34,561 people renounced Indian passport in 2018 (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1  Indians giving up citizenship (2015–2022) Year

Total number (approximately)

2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

1,31,489 1,41,603 1,33,049 1,34,561 1,44,017 85,256 1,63,370 1,80,000 (until July, 2022)

Sources: Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India and Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

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This graph could be a tell-all insofar as the rising curve of India’s emigration situation is concerned. There has been a steady growth since 2015. Although the number of Indians giving up citizenship ebbed during the peak of the pandemic and global lockdown in 2020, it gathered momentum again in 2021 and has continued to demonstrate an upward curve since then. This is an interesting trend, given that the government of India claims that Indian economy is stable and socio-political structures continue to remain robust. Then why are Indians still leaving the country? The answer perhaps lies in the stories of the Indians emigrating the country. Rahmat, a PhD scholar enrolled at the Aachen University shared: “As Muslims, it is difficult to live and work in India right now. After the riot in 2020, my parents just wanted to leave the country. I wanted to do a PhD in India initially, then our situation became quite bad and unsafe for young people to stay away from home in hostels. If you watch every day in TV that Muslims are killed because somebody just thought they were carrying cow meat, how does that make you feel!” Rahmat’s sentiments are shared at large by several others including a pharmacist working in a German chemical lab, Atif. Unlike Rahmat, Atif was already an established professional in India, living in Mumbai with his doctor wife

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and a daughter. However, as he shares, “the good life was not enough anymore. My daughter was teased at her school for having an Islamic name. Specifically, as the corona pandemic started (sic) and such rubbish news of how the Muslims brought the virus to India emerged in televisions and newspapers, also Twitter … I started feeling the pinch. As if Covid was not horrific enough, we also were outcasted by our own friends, at least whom we thought as our own.” To this, I had to stop and ask, “But you decided to leave the country just like that? Your wife is a doctor, isn’t? Was it not a difficult decision for her?” Rabaya, the doctor and also the wife, chose to respond: “Being a doctor during the pandemic was a different kind of challenge. And being a Muslim doctor was worse. I don’t deny that all doctors and nurses all across the world faced hardships because of the pandemic. But in India, it was more challenging I would say, because there was hardly any infrastructure to support a pandemic like Covid-19. So, my situation was like on a double-edged sword – at one side I was a doctor completely helpless and vulnerable and at the other side, I was a Muslim doctor who apparently was the reason why the pandemic broke in India. The entire scenario was quite hostile so it is not one single reason but multiple reasons like being a Muslim, bad healthcare situation and overall political situation in India that kind of pushed us to make this decision. We do not regret the decision even for a bit. At least yet.” Jayati Ghosh (2020, 2021) has documented how the existing government in India has refused to reveal the data on employment status in the country and prioritized the Hindutva over health. Her work illustrates on the Mahakumbh Mela just before the height of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic that broke one of the worst spells of mortality in India and the death toll will perhaps remain unaccounted forever. Economists like Piketty T. (2019) and Prabhat Patnaik (2020) have clearly indicated that despite the false claim of the Modi-government, the overall economic well-being of the country stands contested. They also insist that all these are linked to the communal overtone as the underlying philosophy of the ruling government in India that paves the way for lopsided budgeting in favour of defence and diplomacy, India-Pakistan border control and anti-minority activities. With reference to the Hindutva agenda, Ghosh (2020) has vehemently critiqued the lack of

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free speech in the country, not just for the Muslims but whoever criticizes the government. In relation to this, most of my participants also maintain that they were uncomfortable with the growing political unrest in India, lack of freedom of expression, communal unrest and an impending breakdown of the country’s economic structure. They also are of the opinion that the pandemic, especially the second wave of the Covid-19 between March and June 2021, was eye-opening for them to learn that the health-­ infrastructure in the country is severely inadequate. They connect this inadequacy to the overall ignorance of the government in building and maintaining a robust public healthcare system in the country. Connecting the claims of my participants with the existing works of Ghosh et al. – it appears that the government is consistently trying to confuse the public through their Hindutva agenda, whereas the real problem for India is employment generation, public education and healthcare facilities. Therefore, it is well-established why an  increasing number of people, especially the young population is emigrating from India. In the light of this, insofar as “why move” is concerned, the simple answer is for better healthcare, education and employment stability. Another interesting survey conducted by Pew Research Centre in 2016 estimates that non-Hindus are more likely to emigrate from India than the Hindus. As per data released by them, about 19% of the Indians living outside the country were Christian, compared with only 3% of the population in India. In a similar fashion, 14% Muslim population in India was compared with about 27% Indian Muslims living abroad. But this ratio reverses for the Hindus – 45% of India’s international migrant population were Hindu, compared with 80% of the population of India. Although this data is based on empiricism, the primary data gathered from the field also indicates that the factors that have long been provoking the Indian citizens (Hindus and non-Hindus at large) to consider emigration were magnified during the pandemic specifically because people across religious affiliations realized that the government has failed to serve them irrespective of who is a Hindu and who is not. As aptly put by a 23-year-old Vikram, currently based in Darmstadt for his M.Sc. Degree: “I have seen people dying like flies just because there was no oxygen

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cylinder available. I come from Uttar Pradesh and there are extreme antiMuslim sentiments in my area. But when the second wave of pandemic was going on (sic), it did not matter who is Hindu and who is Muslim, we all fought together – the fight was then against the virus but also a struggle to find oxygen cylinder – not specific to Hindus or Muslims. My maternal uncles live in the UK; they advised me to pursue studies abroad. My parents were supportive because if I move out, I can bring them too. Or everybody will have to live and die there only!”

Why Move? Motivations of Immigration If poor healthcare infrastructure, lack of jobs and political tensions are the biggest motivations for the Indians to move away from the country, then what are their motivations to immigrate to Germany as compared to other immigration destinations? As a matter of fact, the motivations of Indians to move to Germany directly speaks to the motivations of emigration from India. Let us start with the subject of healthcare. Both Rabaya and Vikram, one a doctor and another a young student, share the sentiment that in a post-pandemic world (if that is where we are headed, after all) healthcare is an important subject to consider. In comparison to the hitherto popular immigration destinations for the Indians, e.g., the UK and the USA, Germany has fared significantly better. “Specifically, during the pandemic, Germany handled the situation very well, almost never letting the hospital load going out of their hands … whereas everybody knows how the situation was in America, also in London … as a doctor and also as a citizen, I felt me and my family are not safe here if another pandemic arrives. Who knows! That’s why we narrowed down on Germany”: said Rabaya on being asked, “Why Germany?” Other participants like Lekha, Vikram, Sathya and Arti had similar things to say. Incidentally, as witnessed in the works of Kapsner et al. (2021), hospitals in Germany recorded reduced number of inpatients even at the peak of the pandemic including the lockdown period. Not only hospitalization, Germany addressed the public health announcements and covid protocol measurements like isolation, quarantine, mask mandate, hotline services much effectively than several other countries (Wilder-Smith and

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Freedman 2020). In the light of this, it is no surprise that public healthcare facilities factored in the motivations of immigration to Germany. Not just those who were planning to immigrate, but Indians who were already in Germany during the pandemic and the lockdown had similar things to say too. In July, 2020, I interviewed Amita, who was then living with her husband in Berlin. When asked about how the isolation situation is in Berlin city, her stand was loud and clear: “Everything is explained clearly in the radio and public announcements. We know that we can go within 5 kilometre radius from our homes, we can go to the supermarket with our masks on … when they change the rules, we know exactly how many people are allowed to meet together … so all details are extremely intricate and planned and executed. I speak little German, but it was never an issue for me to understand and follow the rules. I feel safe that way.” Public communication between the people and the government is a crucial issue. This subject gathered momentum during the pandemic with reference to how effectively governments are able to communicate health risks and safety protocols with its people. More often than not, the more efficient and sophisticated public dissemination of health protocols is during a pandemic, the more efficiently is a government able to control the spread of the virus (Kim and Kreps 2020). In this context, Lekha also adds: “I could have gone to the US too, but for a degree in biodiversity, I wanted to come to Germany, because I want to live a healthier life and in India it became clear that I can’t.” Public health is not a popular issue in India, as far as the political agenda of different political parties are concerned. This is not a recent status, public health in India has historically been bifurcated between the quantity of people at large and the quality of life that governments could offer its people (Amrith 2007). Consequently, public health does not emerge as a prime agenda for political parties; specifically in recent times the main political agenda of the ruling government has been, to put it in a Durkheimian fashion, more “sacred” than “secular”  – as a result public healthcare facilities have taken back seats while the middle-class flock towards private nursing care facilities and are ready to let go of their savings to cover medical bills. Privatization of healthcare did not emerge as an everyday challenge for the Indian middle class until the pandemic broke. Not just during the

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lockdown with reference to social distancing, hospitalization and the spread of the pandemic, the subject of vaccination against Covid-19 also met with severe crises in India due to lack of public health facilities and acute privatization of medical facilities (Saad-Filho 2020). On the other hand, Indian immigrants in Germany, despite most of their lack of fluency in the German language, found it smooth and easy to navigate across the healthcare facilities both during the lockdown and immunization against Covid-19. A typical example here is of Soundarya, who migrated to Germany in November, 2021, to join her sister and brother-­ in-­law in Berlin. Soundarya said, when asked “why Germany”: “My sister kept me posted as to how easy it was for them to access medical facilities in Germany. Of course, we constantly read on the newspaper and the internet about Germany’s efficient way of handling the pandemic situation (sic). But I could easily compare the situations in India with Germany, also with America, England, I wanted to study outside India but by that time my parents were more particular about the covid handling of countries than anything else – if I were to migrate. I too found the experience of my sister and my jiju (brother-in-law) so much better than the nightmare we were going through in India, particularly when the second wave came – all these together, and based on the experiences of my sister – my parents and I felt I must migrate to Germany and not America.” It is interesting to note that the Indians in this case chose Germany over the USA or the UK – two of the most popular destinations for them in general. One cannot help but wonder if this choice would be different without the pandemic. In other words, would the Indians not choose Germany as an immigration destination had the pandemic not happened? Does that mean that the entire discourse of arrival of Indian highly-skilled immigrants in Germany would be starkly different and perhaps not so topical without the pandemic? Such questions are speculative at best and anticipatory at worst. However, what does emerge as a more definitive observation is that poor healthcare facilities, coupled with the politicization of public health in India, has been a major motivation of emigration for the Indians; interestingly enough, public healthcare politics in the UK (Tomkins 2020) and the USA (Yamey and

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Gonsalves 2020) on the other hand have also served as major demotivation to prefer these countries to Germany. Moreover, as opposed to the Indian Muslims in India who were frequently outcasted for bringing the pandemic to India, and often met with social hostilities, the Indian Muslims in Germany did not have to experience such situations. I spoke with one of my long-term participants Anwar, who works and lives in Bonn. His parents and siblings still live in Bihar, India, and he had some harrowing experiences to share: “Forget the pandemic. For the Muslims now in India, especially after Shaheen Bagh5 – it is quite a disaster. How can you feel safe in a country that puts all blame on your religious identity! I fear more for my family now  – because Hindus there think that the Tablighi Jamat6 the Islamic missionary group brought the virus to India. As if they are the only people who crossed borders! This is complete scapegoating. The government should have issued a statement requesting the citizens to stop spreading such rumours, but no! … the government instead validates such unfounded claims! I face no such discrimination here. … I am treated equally. But I told my nephew that it is better he leaves India, if my brother and his wife allows, he can come here and continue studying and he will also get jobs because now Germany needs people too – but no more in India.” Anwar’s experience corroborates with several of my participants and Indians both in India and Germany at large. Indians who migrated to Germany during and after the lockdown, Indians who are migrating now and Indians who are still considering migration to Germany are all equivocally of the opinion that robust public healthcare facilities is one of the biggest attractions that Germany offers. Vanalakhsmi, an IT professional originally from Madurai wraps this up in simple yet profound words: “I am still in Bangalore but I have just got an offer in Dusseldorf. IT has a big scope in Germany right now, but apart from that – I am earnestly looking forward to moving to Germany and starting a life there because of the medical  Mainly consisting of Muslim women, the Shaheen Bagh protest began in response to the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The protest was a peaceful sit-in demonstration of dissent that began on 15 March, 2020 and had to be called off around the 24th of the same month, due to the coronavirus outbreak in India. 6  https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/839980029/blamed-for-coronavirus-outbreak-muslims-inindia-come-under-attack. 5

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facilities. I am young, so today it doesn’t matter but I know how money drains once you are not well – we lost our mother to Covid – despite bleeding money, my father earns a handsome income so we never felt that we are poor or anything! But for my mother’s hospitalization everything … it cost 18 lac and still we could not save her. So, the trauma, the monetary wastage, everything is beyond repair! I do not want to grow old in such situations. Now my father says he will keep all his savings only for medical use and won’t make extra spending. I hear him! I mean what life is this if you earn all your life, you pay medical insurance premium and then you still are not covered for outdoor check-ups, medicines, unless you are admitted to hospitals. In Germany, in contrast, all my medical bills will get covered, including OPD.7 Give me one reason why I should not avail that when there’s a chance!” Public healthcare system as a motivation of migration is yet to find location in the subject of migration as such. However, Covid-19 pandemic has pushed us to find several instances where healthcare in the home country is one of the biggest motivations to emigrate. When coupled with political and religious polarization, such motivations tend to multiply. From that standpoint, locating public healthcare as a migration motivation could open a new line of enquiry in the field of migration research especially insofar as a post-pandemic future is concerned. Covid-19 pandemic has definitely exacerbated migration, redistributed migration patterns and restructured migration motivations. From that standpoint, politicization of the pandemic has worked in India’s disadvantage in controlling emigration of its young population, while the EU member states specifically Germany has both stable public healthcare system and employment opportunities in offer. Politics and pandemic, the two “Ps” in a pod, i.e., India as a country continues to play havoc as increasing number of young people choose to emigrate and move to Germany for education, healthcare, employment, political freedom and gender equality.

 Outpatient department.

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2 Refuge from the Bovine?

We already know that political polarization is one of the reasons why Indians are emigrating from the country. Interestingly, this should mean that Indians are also seeking political refuge in other countries including Germany. Germany is home to refugees from several countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine. Federal Office of Migration and Refugees (BAMF) records that in 2021 nearly 1,90,816 asylum applications were submitted, of which 1,48,233 were first-time applications. There was a 56.2% increase in the number of applications submitted in 2020, when the number of applications was lower due to COVID-19. Asylum applicants predominantly came from Syria: 70,162 applications (protection rate: 62.6%), followed by Afghanistan: 31,721 (protection rate: 42.9%) and Iraq: 16.872 (protection rate: 31.9%). This, however, does not include the Ukrainian refugees entering Germany since February, 2022. According to the German Federal Ministry for the Interior (BMI), 10,24,841 war refugees from Ukraine have been registered (as of 8 November, 2022). Ninety-seven percent of them are Ukrainian nationals. 6,27,706 have received temporary protection. However, despite Germany being home to several other countries that are suffering from acute democratic deficits and authoritarian regimes, India ranks much lower in the list of countries where Germany accepts refugees from. In © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_2

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2020 Destatis recorded 7410 Indians seeking protection in Germany. To consider Indians eligible for refugee status is based on an acknowledgement of the current political situation in India – this is the biggest challenge. India is still considered to be the biggest democracy in the world. Consequently, people seeking refuge from the Indian state are on a perennial wait-list since they are not eligible enough. This is not to undermine the situations in other countries and the people from those countries seeking refugee status in Germany. At the same time, the sole purpose of this chapter is to argue that despite being a democracy, more than 7000 people from India registered for seeking protection in Germany, let alone other countries. Despite being a democracy, emigration from India is the highest in the world and political turbulence does emerge as one of the most significant reasons of emigration; moreover, since young people are aware that their protection and refuge applications from India may never be able to compete with other countries (both because the situations in other countries are worse and Indian state is formally not considered authoritarian), they are choosing other formalized routes to escape hostile situations in the home country. This chapter is based on interviews and conversations with several of my participants who emigrated from India to escape from the political tension and violence. Our conversations took place in different cities both in India and Germany, spread across more than a year and a half. Although some stories are documented across time, what haunts me is the similarity in the experiences of the protagonists  – indicating that, situation in the home country remains static at best and declining at worst. I will begin with Ajatashatru, the film maker.

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Ajatashatru was born and raised in Calcutta, India. He had an average, rather boring, regular childhood. In his own words: “Nothing from childhood really stands out … only that I was a curious child.” Ajatashatru’s childhood may be boring, but his adulthood was far from it. As his friends call him True, he grew up as a creative rebel. His parents were humble yet generous. But they were clueless to his imaginations and motivations. As a humanities and social science graduate, True found himself immersed in the world of creative expression – quite an antithesis to the material world he was surrounded by collective hatred, political manipulation and pogrom. Soon he observed the political totemism around cows and how that alone was playing havoc in the country. After finishing college in Calcutta as he went to Mumbai to pursue higher studies, the dichotomy became clearer – cows were safer in India than the humans. Bharat Mata

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as a metaphor is singularly epitomized, rather captivated in the imagery of cows in order to protect that image and the spirit of Hindutva, people are ready to kill. Soon True met more people with similar schools of thought and they made a short film on this irony of faith, hatred and imposed vegetarianism in India. The film was produced by an internationally acclaimed media agency but it never saw the light of the day in India. “Film banning is not new in this new India but what started was witch hunting. Even this is not new. We already have so many intellectuals in jail. At this rate, all intellectuals living in India will be in jail and the jails can become our new libraries! Anyway, so what happened when we released the film was we started receiving threat calls, not only in Mumbai where I then lived and worked but back home in Calcutta too, where my family still lives.” The situation aggravated for True and his family because random people started following them on the road, appeared at his place at odd hours with no specific agenda but just to “meet and chat” (sic), and he started feeling unsafe in his own neighbourhood, among his own people. “There came a point when I became unsure as to whom to trust, whom to talk to. I was not confident of my friends anymore.” This was a turning point for True, otherwise a popular personality among his friends for his creative mind and cheerful demeanour  – he could not differentiate between a friend and a snitch anymore. This is when he started thinking about leaving India and moving to “somewhere safe” (sic). His first instinct was to seek to asylum in Europe and he chose Germany. “This appeared to be complicated. I applied at Scholars at Risk program1 and waited for about 3–4 months to learn that my application is not convincing enough because it does not document a direct act of violence I have personally experienced. So clearly the threats weren’t enough for them. Mind you, by the time things had become worse – I was then already under the radar of the state, my film was banned from release anywhere in India … so I was invited to reapply if my status changed. That’s exactly what I did. I applied with all documents that  Scholars at Risk protects scholars suffering grave threats to their lives, liberty and well-being by arranging temporary research and teaching positions at institutions in our network as well as by providing advisory and referral services (https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/). 1

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prove the risk I was under. After 3 months, the reply came that there were more scholars who were at a much higher risk than I was, so I still have not made it to SAR’s ‘at risk’ category by that standard. … It sounded ridiculous to me.” Interestingly, while the German university and the professor who agreed to host True strongly recommended in their letters of support that he indeed was at risk and therefore should be categorized as such. However, without the support and clearance from the SAR, one cannot apply for visa and scholarship. The biggest challenge for Indians seeking refugee status in a third country is to demystify that India is a democracy. Economist Intelligence Unit has re-categorized India from Full Democracy to Flawed Democracy, if we are to believe their latest (2021)2 report. Despite that, the general impression continues to remain that India is the biggest democracy in the world. Consequently, migration aspirants whose biggest motivation is to move to a safer location with freedom of speech and expression find themselves left with little choice but to camouflage their motivations and pathways of emigration. Ajatashatru’s story fits perfectly well within this framework where he, despite all his intentions to emigrate from India and move to Germany via the SAR network, was unsuccessful three times in a row. “I had two choices … to continue living in fear in India or leave the country and arrive in Germany as a visiting scholar or with some sort of a fellowship. I chose the second option. By then I had decided that I have to leave India, and I had established some academic contacts in Germany, also some people in the creative field I already knew here. So, what happened is I applied for a fellowship, luckily made it and migrated for good.”

I met True in 2019 when he just arrived in Germany. So, what I have learnt about his story is mostly his narration. However, it appeared to be incredible because his case was already documented in global media, so when we finally connected, I was expecting a story worth capturing. Located in the context of how migration from India is still considered to be motivated only by economic gain “abroad,” clinically detached from  https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2021/.

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the politics of migration and movement, True’s story stands out. His story is perhaps not exceptional if looked from the apparent standpoint that it insists us to see from, but his story is one of the several instances when young people from India are choosing multiple pathways to emigrate from the country and immigrate to the EU (due to the labour shortage) including Germany. These pathways are consequently categorized as “education” and “employment” pathways; however, what is not captured in statistical data and numbers emerge through the stories. Summing up his “case,” True asserts, “I had to literally escape from the cow-dom. I honestly witnessed that … and not just me, the crew that came together to make the short film on how cows are safer in India than people, how cows are respected on the streets and women are raped and murdered … we had a shared sentiment. But since I was the director so to speak, the state came after me.” This statement of Ajatashatru in fact inspired the title of this chapter. This exit sentiment is not rare among the young people migrating from India to Germany for education and employment. Mohit, a journalist from Rajasthan, India is another participant looking for this escape. Mohit is an established reporter in one of the leading national dailies. Despite having an impressive career that led to “a verified Twitter account” (sic), Mohit is now applying for PhD positions in German universities. Echoing Fazila Bhimji’s (2016) recent work on refugees from South Asia to Europe, Mohit’s story narrates a similar experience – that people from democracies are not the top priorities for refugee status elsewhere. Like True, Mohit too spent about a year applying for refugee status in Europe but nothing worked. Consequently, he chose what several others are choosing as the most direct, guaranteed and politically safest pathway of emigration – pursue higher education in the country of immigration. I call this a shadow emigration pathway that young people from India are choosing increasingly, in order to be able to escape the political unrest and polarization in the country. It is a shadow pathway because it camouflages the original motivation of emigration, i.e., an escape from the political tension in India. Young Indians are increasingly leaving the country either on the pretext of education or employment because they are unable to accept the divisive politics and religious fundamentalism in the country that not just undermines more compelling empirical

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challenges of ordinary people but also enables an erosion of free thinking and freedom of opinion. This creates a feeling of alienation among the youth – not just among the religious minorities but at large. Interestingly, neither True nor Mohit fits the imagination of the quintessential other in India  – the Muslims. As numerical minorities when compared to the Indian Hindus, Indian Muslims are the primary victims of political polarization in the country. They are also the salient target of violence and discrimination in the society at large. In addition, whoever, notwithstanding their religious identifications, voices their protest against such politics of violence is a target too. The flaw in the democracy is manifested in the fast-shrinking public spaces of debate, dissent and tolerance for secular worldviews. Therefore, one does not necessarily have to belong to a minority group, any individual criticizing the state and its anti-minority policies is a clear enemy. From that perspective, like True, Mohit is also struggling in his home town Jaipur where he grew up and worked all his life. When I met him in Delhi, he still had unbounded access to the press club. We met at the cafeteria; Mohit introduced me to some of his colleagues, as we started talking about his “future plans” (sic). I knew of Mohit through one of my existing participants, whose help he is still seeking for finding “something” (sic) in Germany. “I was happy with my job until I wasn’t! It became tough to manage things … I had to avoid writing on some politically sensitive topics, I had fall outs with my editor. If I wanted to cover the shortcoming of government policies, my editor did not okay it. As a journalist who has always spoken his mind and been critical of establishments, I am not ready to compromise at this level! I am a Rajput, my cousins think I am stupid to think about leaving Jaipur, where I command a lot of respect … because we are Rajputs. But I don’t have the same life like them because I am a critical thinker. … I went to JNU, now they are after JNU … so you get labelled as a troublemaker. You get targeted because you think and you write and you talk. So, I don’t mind leaving all this and migrating somewhere with more space for dissent and free speech.” As Mohit reflects on why a privileged man from the upper caste, urban educated, well-established with a handsome bank balance wants to emigrate from India in his mid-thirties and pursue a doctoral degree, a career trajectory that visibly appears to be unplanned, my

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next question goes, “And in your opinion you will find that space for free speech in Germany?” “Well, definitely more than we can find in India today! At least nobody is dictating me my PhD topic there, or discouraging me from writing on something!” – Mohit had his reply ready. This seemed to be a strong comment! So, I probe further: “What do you mean – dictating your PhD topic?” Mohit explains, “As a journalist I covered how the government in some states maintain a list of research topics that are … how to put it delicately … politically irrelevant and benign. So that you don’t research on topics that critique the government in any way. This is what in fact irked my editor and the fall out started. I was given an ultimatum and told that if I had an Islamic name, they would have had to ask me to resign immediately.” If Ajatashatru and Mohit’s stories appear as aberration, Saima’s will not. Saima, a 31-year-old Muslim woman from Kashmir, is currently enrolled as a graduate student in Munich. In 2018, she lost her family to, what she calls, “the atrocity of the Indian Army”. “Did you never file a formal complaint to the police?”, I ask her as we meet one balmy afternoon at her university Mensa.3 “You have no idea how things are for Kashmiri Muslims. I do not come from a wealthy family either. My mother was gone when I was a kid, and three years ago, my father and elder brother were killed by the army. Since I had no immediate family left, I wanted to move from Kashmir. I thought what’s the point of living in India as a vulnerable Kashmiri woman! Better to look for scholarships or fellowships and quickly move abroad.” This is exactly what she did – with the motivation of fleeing the country because of her religious identification, she won a doctoral scholarship and migrated to Germany. “Why Germany, Saima?” I ask the obvious question. “Where else can I get a PhD degree from a globally acclaimed university with such low tuition fee! I wanted to go to England … the first choice for many Indians you know … but one, it is way more competitive and secondly, overall cost in Germany is lesser plus I won a scholarship, so I could save up some and still get an education and global exposure to all academic opportunities. I am happy with my decision. Although my parents had no money, they had education – I come from a progressive background,  In Germany, university canteens are called Mensa.

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I do not believe in religious bigotry. That way, I like my university in Germany, I like my friends here, I feel safe now.” – as Saima summarizes her journey, my memories take me back to True’s documentary on how cows in India are safer than the people. Young people like Saima, True and Mohit, people across caste, religion and gender, are following the shadow pathways of immigration – a migration motivation that is not reflected in the path that they are having to choose for the movement. Kirkegaard et al. (2016) document how fleeing home and finding new homes contribute to the global flow of students across borders. While exiting the home country as a route of escaping internal conflict and violence remains one of the most contested motivations of immigration, it is noteworthy that most of the studies so far are based on recent evidences in Africa. While Indians have the largest diaspora in the world, contemporary literatures do not document pan-India scale persecution as a generic motivation of emigration. This is not to acknowledge that Punjabis or Muslims have not escaped the country to save themselves from politically vulnerable situations. Having said that, the exit trend since 2015 is distinct, with emigration across status groups, gender and religion, interestingly blanketed as skilled migrants. There is little doubt that they are skilled – they are skilled and conscious enough to understand the socio-political lacuna in India that does not allow them to exercise their fundamental rights of free speech, critical thinking and dissent. In a functional democracy, exercise of such basic rights should be possible. However, looking at the shadow pathways, one is both humoured and disappointed. The humour emerges from the observation that terms like democracy are reduced to trivialities beyond recognition and the disappointment lies in the realization that for a refuge from the bovine,4 one has to camouflage the immigration motivation. Having said that, the term shadow pathway is applicable only for emigration motivation. Insofar as the motivation of immigration is concerned, first generation young Indian immigrants in Germany are clear about their choice of destination. My participants including whose stories I narrated here unanimously claim that they preferred Germany to  Here bovine is a metaphor for inaction and incompetence of the Indian state in upholding the spirit of democracy and secularism in India. 4

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the USA, the UK and Australia. Several factors were instrumental in this decision – Germany’s comparative distance from India and exceptionally low tuition fee topping the chart. In their pursuit of a refuge from the home state, these young immigrants arrived in Germany with several expectations and personal goals to achieve. Although their original plan was to seek refugee status, now they are in Germany as student migrants. To this, my question to them was: “What do you think about the pathway that you exploited and the pathway that you actually wanted to explore?” Although what I really wanted to ask them is: “Do you regret the pathway, or you are happy about the final outcome?” However, this would have been a leading question, and although I would have received answers that suited my research question, that answer would fall short in its reliability. This is a tricky terrain because as a researcher who is also a cultural insider, one is often provoked to ask questions that could as well be autobiographical. While autoethnography is an established discourse of research methodology and analysis, personally motivated questions are not desirable in this context. However, to my surprise, the answers I still received from the participants are similar at several levels. Quoting Saima, I hear: “I would have to wait forever to register myself as a refugee from Indian Occupied Kashmir. I could even die before that actually happens. So, I had to act quickly. So, I took the fastest option – education. It was also the cheapest, yet one of the best schools I am in today. So, who’s complaining!” I can make two observations from Saima’s statement: firstly, higher education in Germany from a third country like India is cheaper than many others. Secondly, although it is not the easiest option but it is the fastest – because Germany is increasingly welcoming international students to pursue English-language programs. It is noteworthy that most of the immigrants in this context are in their early or mid-thirties and had full time employment in India. Despite that, they were ready to give up their jobs and choose the shadow pathway of higher education in Germany just because they wanted to migrate to a country where they felt more welcome and that was economically reasonable. Moreover, getting a degree in Germany

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enhances their chances of finding an employment in the country because of the EU Blue Card and the recently introduced Chancenkarte.5 Echoing Saima, True asserts: “It is like one has to lose a leg and a limb to be able to catch SAR’s attention! This is ridiculous. They want to wait until my parents are hurt and I am too? Sorry, I am relieved I applied for the fellowship – no looking back.” True’s statement hits me hard! If SAR really wants to help, it is about time they look beyond the apparent – while refugee applications from India may not be their priority, there has to be a mechanism to recognize applications from countries that look peaceful but still may not be. Domestic conflicts in India often make global headlines and international humanitarian bodies like SAR must pay attention to that. Also, it appears to be a dangerous system that until there is a personal attack against an applicant, SAR would not prioritize the case. What is the point of having safety nets if it fails to offer safety while it still counts? However, I would like to end this chapter with Mohit’s response to my question. Mohit was nonchalant as he declared, “It is a misconception that Indians do not seek political refuge any longer … the process of seeking political refuge for Indians is not streamlined enough because of the common perception that India is still the largest democracy in the world but it is not the case! Even with a Rajput name I felt I could no longer live in my country where I grew up with all facilities. I felt as a journalist I have no freedom of speech. So will you usually think that a guy with an upper caste name would think about refugee application … no, but that is what it’s come down to. On the other hand, I see my friends in Germany doing PhD … they are doing well. They are working on topics I wanted to write about as a journalist but I couldn’t. So, I am just waiting for my turn to be able to start my PhD in Cologne … that’s my first preference. I keep my fingers crossed.” The reason why I present Mohit’s remarks here is to drive the salient point of this chapter home  – that however unseeming it may appear, shadow pathways of emigration from India and immigration to Germany  Chancenkarte is an employment opportunity card introduced recently by the German government to invite white collar labour from the third countries. Theoretically, this is a more sophisticated version of the job seekers’ visa in Germany. More details on the Chancenkarte are presented in the chapter “Imagining Tomorrow”.

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emphasize the need to explore the secular democratic republic in the light of the empirical situation in the home country where not just numerical minorities but all dissenting voices are systematically othered and upended. As my participants flee India and arrive in Germany, their choices are motivated by a comparative assessment of the socio-political situations in the home and the host society, free thinking and free speech emerge as big motivators of immigration. As demonstrated in the beginning of this chapter, the number of applications for refugee status from India is witnessing a slow but steady rise in Germany. This number falls far below in comparison to Afghanistan, Syria, Iran or Ukraine. On the other hand, none of these countries claims to be run by a democratic government unlike India. From that standpoint, the fact that Indians are actually applying for refugee status is indicative indeed. Increasing rate of refugee application coupled with a steady rise of the shadow pathway of emigration are crucial factors for assessing the status of democracy in India.

3 Gendering the Immigrants

Among all the highly-skilled Indian immigrants arriving in Germany in the last few years, women and non-male migrants constitute a significant proportion.1 Women comprise about 36% of the total number of Indian immigrants arrived between 2016 and 2022, with the concentration around the age group between 25 and 45. About 67% of them are independent immigrants (as opposed to dependent migrants – a term often used in migration studies), arriving either with a work permit or enrolment in German universities. For those arriving as dependent immigrants, a majority section starts working or studying within several months of arrival, courtesy the framework of the EU Blue Card. Consequently, Germany has emerged as a popular destination for women and non-male migrants from India. However, the EU Blue Card and international students’ friendly university system are not the only criteria for women choosing Germany as their immigration destination. There are several other social, personal and political motivations for all non-male actors including women. This chapter address such concerns, motivations and challenges women and other non-male actors face while making the migration-decision and  It is not possible to get the exact data on the percentage of Indian queer population in Germany because such categorization does not exist in the official documents. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_3

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choosing Germany. They experience Germany through the lens of race and gender, and finally make the decision of staying in Germany or moving elsewhere (to a third country or return to India). Consequently, this chapter revolves around the following questions: What provoked the women and non-male actors to move? What is the experience of the Indian women migrants in Germany? How is it different from being in India? Similar to other chapters, these questions too will be addressed with the help of qualitative data gathered from the field, including data from participant observations. I conducted field work in some of the big cities in Germany so I must submit that I speak from the outlook of the Indian women and non-male actors concentrated in those cities. At the same time, some of the women I interviewed and had long, (in)formal and often unstructured conversations with have already lived in smaller towns and university towns in Germany either for work or education. So, the vision and experience they speak with are not completely disengaged from the life beyond German big cities. The cities I covered includes Berlin, Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Hamburg. Interestingly, majority of the Blue Card holders are concentrated in the German capital Berlin. There are about 13,000 Blue Card holders living in Berlin2 of which about 86% are Indians. Following the framework of the book, this chapter too captures the stories – stories of experiences of the Indian non-male actors in various German cities. I’ve deliberately introduced the term “non-male” because I consider this term to be inclusive in its meaning. I could also use terms like LGBTQ and women, but I intentionally would like to use a term based on a socio-linguistic othering of the heterosexual, heteronormative male and not otherwise. Consequently, in this chapter, I share stories of the non-male actors  – those who participated in my research, to answer the questions raised above, to demonstrate how the pandemic has shaped (im)mobility3 for some of them, and to examine how they experience migration at large.

 DeStatis (2022).  One of my recent publications extensively deals with this subject. In this book, I am offering a snippet. 2 3

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The idea of gendering the immigration of the highly skilled Indians in Germany began with the story of Tanu. Tanu is a PhD scholar at a university in Berlin. She has an Islamic last name although she does not practice any religion. She moved from India in 2021. Tanu worked in Chennai, India for five years. But as “the situation worsened (sic),” she wanted to leave. She applied at several universities for a doctoral scholarship and finally won a full scholarship of three years at German university in Berlin. She chose the university in Berlin over the one in Spain, simply because “this one is way much more prestigious!” Tanu is single, she never married and has no children. Although I would not like to gallop steps, perhaps it is relevant to mention at this stage that after finishing her doctoral degree, Tanu would like to continue living in Berlin or move to another big city in the EU. She does not express any intention of returning to India. When I met Tanu in Berlin, she had just arrived – completely in awe of the city and its offing. To me, Tanu appeared to be full of conviction yet a little dishevelled from the magnanimity of Berlin. In our first meeting, Tanu gushed out: “Honestly, I never had plans to do a PhD. I was happy working. Then I gradually started sensing the political atmosphere in the country and as a Muslim woman, although I come from a very liberal family and my parents, who are both teachers – never stopped me from living my life, I found the society around, is not so progressive. There is a lot of hate against the Muslims in India now. Covid-19 has made it worse because the government claimed that The Islamic sects brought Covid to India.4 So, my parents encouraged me to apply for PhD positions in Germany. Luckily, I got the scholarship too. Since I was always good in academics and both my parents were university teachers, it was easier for me to get PhD position than a full-time job in Germany. Also, I am not from the technical background so corporate jobs are not an option. So, I am just happy I am in Berlin, there is no one to ask me why I am out late, or as a Muslim I do not deserve to live in India but   Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic sect was blamed for importing coronavirus to India. This claim selectively made by the Hindutva-led brigade in India and popularized by the mainstream media exacerbated the covid-induced challenges for the Muslims and made them vulnerable to societal othering (for more context, please look: https://www.newsclick.in/ Covid-Truth-Elite-NRIs-Are-Dearer-to-Modi-than-Domestic-Migrants). 4

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must go back to Pakistan. Berlin is cosmopolitan, there are all sorts of people. I can walk freely here, even at night. Although it’s early for me to decide, but I want to live in such a free space – not in India the way it is becoming.” In these few words, Tanu raised several crucial points central to gender, patriarchy and intersectionality, e.g., freedom of mobility, every day othering of the Muslims in India and the agency of immigration. Consequently, it was time that I started documenting the experiences of my participants within these contexts. Tanu’s story provoked me to start conversing with more women and non-male immigrants. Most of the data subsequently emerged from my conversations with the participants both as they prepared to arrive in Germany and after their arrival. Also, several of the conversations fell at the cusp of the pandemic. I started encouraging my participants to maintain journals and document their experiences under three categories – physical mobility, every day safety and sense of freedom.

 ocumenting Experiences: Mobility, D Safety, Freedom5 This section captures the experiences of the participants. Some emerge from their journal entries while others from our conversations. The journal entries were not very regular, ranging from once a week to “every now and then whenever something happened.” 6 From that standpoint, the entries could be considered as immediate response, reactions and reflexes to specific encounters and experiences. Asha, a PhD Scholar in Cologne shares: “My first response after coming here was that okay – people just walk on the streets like it’s normal … any time of the day, and NIGHT!! I mean women are walking alone,  All participants were approached following the  GDPR protocol. They were handed over Information Sheet with all details of anonymity and informed consent. 6  This does not dismiss the rising concern over Islamophobia in Germany. However, as Muslims not wearing Hijab, these participants had different experiences. The issue of Hijab is addressed at the concluding chapter. As put by one of the participants. 5

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taking trains, even in the middle of the night … nobody bothers you if you are alone! This for me at least … unthinkable back there. When I told my German and other friends here that walking alone and going here and there alone without any issue even at night is so nice and new for me, they couldn’t understand it.” Another participant Reshma, an IT expert documented something similar. “As a Muslim girl in Kanpur, I never felt it was all right to move around just like that. But now I live in Munich. It is quite fine. My mother cannot understand why I must go out with friends at 9 pm and return home after midnight. She thinks I am wrong to do so. But I keep telling her that it is completely okay … people live like this here, it’s normal here. I don’t need to be with a male member … father, brother … to walk on the street late in the night.” Interestingly, both Reshma and Asha chose to document an experience apparently as mundane as walking alone on the street anytime of the day without feeling scared. Although this appears to be a regular activity in several parts of the world, in several others it is not. Their entries also invoke inquisitiveness in terms of everyday safety of non-male actors in the public spaces in India. However, more than anything, what struck me is the sense of freedom that free mobility offered these women. Decision of migration is directly contingent upon access to free mobility without judgement and fear. Also, for Reshma it is dual challenge of gender and religion that renders the very act of physical mobility outside a familiar territory unsafe. “Although I don’t look like one, but people in my locality know that I am Muslim. In Kanpur, it is not safe for Muslim girls … there are daily problems…” is what she said when I asked her how people would know that you are a Muslim. When I met Reshma, she did not cover her head or sport any specific anecdote to underscore her religious affiliation. Consequently, I was curious and went ahead asking her: “But here in Cologne you do not face any issues for being a Muslim?” Her answer was interesting. “No. Because I do not look like a Muslim … no hijab or anything. So, nobody knows that I am a Muslim. At work it is no problem … people know I am from India and a Muslim, it is okay. Outside it is a big city, who knows whom after all! But you know … my flat mate has a friend who wears Hijab. She told me that people stare at

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her … on the road, U-Bahn7 … she said because it’s her hijab.” This piece of information, although not directly relevant for me, stayed with me. Within the context of Islamophobia in the western world (Abdelkader 2017), appearance is still the first parameter of categorization leading to stereotype. Consequently, how Reshma’s experience of free mobility will unfold if she wore a headscarf is unknown. Similar conclusion can be drawn for Tanu. Coming back to the subject of free mobility as a physical activity, Kabir who identifies as a queer person in Berlin shared a unique experience that encouraged me to consider this entire discourse of mobility and immobility through a new light. I met Kabir through one of my existing participants who is a gay-rights activist in Germany and knows Kabir through the solidarity network. Kabir is a graduate student at a university in Berlin and grew up in Kolkata. It was during our first formal interaction, Kabir blurted out even without asking: “I am so glad I could manage to come back to Berlin before the global lockdown!” For a researcher, this unprovoked response was visibly pregnant with several possible interpretations, so, I decided to probe: “Why? What would go wrong if you stayed back with your own family in your hometown during a pandemic?” Apt came the answer: “Well, for starters, I would not even live to tell you my story!” To this, Kabir paused, took a strong and heavy breath and continued, “My family, although they know I am gay, refuses to acknowledge the fact. They are visibly embarrassed by me and are much relieved that I do not live with them, so that they do not have to explain about me and my demeanour in family functions. They detest my clothing, my gait, my voice. While they are not actively abusive – they have never hit me or anything (sic), but they would rather I stay inside the house or take the family car when I go out while in Calcutta, and not walk around the neighbourhood. They don’t want people to gossip about me. So, you can only imagine how it would be if I was forced to live with them, in the same house, indefinitely, and not escape anywhere....as it stands, whenever I visit them, which I have to because they are growing old and my brother is much younger, I hardly socialize with my extended family – I have friends in the city who are like family and I spend time with them.  Subway in Germany.

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So, my parents are my obligations, but my friends are the real source of fresh air whenever I am in Calcutta.......but in Berlin, I can go out, walk around, however I want! That’s liberating! I wear my experimental clothes....so although all these came to a halt because of limited mobility (sic), I could nevertheless breathe in peace at my own room in my WG. Imagine not being able to go out and not being able to stay at home either! I have lived in India during my teenage and already faced strict mobility restrictions. I know how it is to always have embargo.” Another participant Ira has something similar to share. I first started talking to Ira when she was still in India. She had already got admission at a German university and was awaiting an easing of the lockdown. Our initial interactions were limited – she would be available for short conversations and small talks. She informed that she lived with her family and there were many people at home so it was difficult to talk at length. During our digital communications, often she would disappear from the video calls abruptly or become unresponsive and shut her video camera. She explained that because of the lockdown, her extended family members are living in the same house; consequently, she does not have privacy to talk freely. This appeared to be a logical explanation although I remain sceptic of her overall demeanour. Later, after she arrived in Germany, we still continued with our Zoom calls, until it became possible to meet onsite. In our onsite interaction I found her to be extremely interactive and engaging, unlike the way she was in India. When asked, she said: I would mostly be depressed. My parents never wanted me to come to Germany all alone. They are conservative people – they would hardly allow me to stay the night at a friend’s place, forget about moving to another country. But it was my dream to go abroad (sic) and see the world. In fact, my family never wanted me to study so much. So, I applied without their knowledge. I was hoping that I will tell them about my decision and quickly be able to come to Germany right after that but then the pandemic happened. So, I had to stay back indefinitely, with a family who completely disapproved of my decision to move. They would often scold me, shout at me for applying at universities in Germany without consulting them; my mother tried to talk me out of the entire plan too. Because of the pandemic, I could not go to my best friend’s place either – that was my rescue

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zone (sic) – to avoid my parents and their strict nature, I would often just go to her house and spend time – several of our other friends would join us there too. It is, in fact, in her house that I learnt about this university in Germany that offers interesting programs in my subject … but with the pandemic and lockdown, no such thing was possible anymore. I felt suffocated – I did not have any assurance when and if at all I will be able to come to Germany and I had no opportunity howsoever to go out of home, even for some time.

While Tanu, Asha and Reshma share how they enjoy free mobility after migration, Ira and Kabir’s cases offer the contexts to compare the mobility restrictions my participants would usually face in India and how they appreciate free mobility after their immigration to Germany. This is however not to suggest that there are no challenges to free mobility in everyday lives in Germany, but to identify that how basic kinetic movement like freedom to roam, move and walk can be deciding factors for non-male actors to migrate and decide on settling. Also, the way immobility emerged during the pandemic in a way mimics the lack of freedom of mobility that is normalized in several societies – in this context India.

(Im) Mobilizing Migration for Non-male Actors Mobility and immobility also emerged as crucial contexts especially during the pandemic that allows us to move beyond the common knowledge of how pandemic restricts mobility at large and provokes us to think about those for whom mobility restriction was a way of life much before the coronavirus arrived. Looking at shadow pandemic of gender-based mobility restrictions of women and non-male actors in conservative societies India, I argue that social deconstruction of “immobility” is embedded in the process of gendering the pandemic. From that standpoint, covid-induced immobility mimics an already established framework of coerced immobility among non-male actors that acts as a motivation of migration for women and non-male actors at some level. Referring to Ayelet Shachar’s idea of shifting borders, I locate the moral borders at home as a crucial competitor of physical borders of the barbed wire that

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often provokes women and non-male actors to take the leap of faith for survival and better livelihood. In that light, social deconstruction of “immobility” is embedded in the process of gendering the pandemic. Ayona Datta (2020a) has grappled with this in her work on cityscapes and gender mobility with far-reaching consequences. Also, located in the discourse of border and social demarcations as Ayelet Shachar points out in her latest work on shifting borders (2021), immobility through the lens of gender especially during a pandemic can be understood with new insights. Patriarchy (Walby 1989) as a structure of domination is built around the understanding that women’s place is at home, in the so-called private sphere. Although women at large regularly contest this structure at different levels in their everyday lives and practices (Palriwala and Uberoi 2008), the bifurcation between the public and the private is quite strongly embedded in several societies. This divide between the home and the world, as Tagore (1916) called it in his famous novel with the same title (original title in Bangla: Ghore Baire), acts like an invisible border, women and other non-male actors in several cultures are forbidden from crossing that line. Since this already offers the normative structure in several societies including India, the coronavirus pandemic brought forth a double impact as a consequence of this existing demarcation – one for the sake of gender(ed) performance, another for the sake of health safety. Mobility restrictions as traditions passed on through moral policing is not new in countries like India. Women and girls are regularly monitored at home; they are expected to follow night curfews, and the families do not allow them to go out unless in certain specific outfits and rarely alone. The rationale behind such prohibitions is manifold – that it is unsafe for women and girls to be alone outside, especially in the dark, that they might be raped and molested, that it shows poorly on their characters and the family values instilled in them if they are found “loitering.” In this connection, Shilpa Padhke et al. (2011) have carried out an interesting work on the women in Mumbai and their access to transport and public spaces as sites of mobility contestations. They locate the term “loitering” at the centre of discussion and argue that non-purposive strolls are culturally suspicious particularly when it comes to any non-male actor in India; such actions cannot be practiced without resistance from the mainstream

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conservative society because if one loiters, one is either a potential victim (e.g., women) or a perpetrator (e.g., a transgender). In that light, mobility restriction lays down a situation where non-­ male actors are prohibited from free mobility in public spaces because those spaces are unsafe and those public spaces continue to remain unsafe because one hardly finds women there. Public spaces as a male-­dominated site have ensured that non-male actors are not welcome or comfortable in these spaces. This is so normalized in the everyday lives in some societies that unless pointed out, the irregularity never crosses our minds. Reflecting back to Ira, Tanu, Asha, Reshma and Kabir, their experiences demonstrate that for non-male actors in India, mobility and free movements are essentially conditional, bounded by a patriarchal bargain. It is also interesting to observe that some of the participants actually looked forward to the immigration process in the hope that migration would liberate them, while the others unknowingly discovered liberation in a post-immigration phase. From that point, it is perhaps safe to argue that immigration as an experience helped these participants access some of their freedom, because they could now dismiss the household border and its socially imposed demarcations. This observation both challenges and reinforces Shachar’s idea of shifting border and cartographic dilemma. It is also relevant to mention that as non-male actors, my participants are united by the patriarchal domination of male gaze (Manlove 2007), control over bodies of women and non-male actors (Foucault 1975) and consequent imposition of territoriality. From that standpoint, biological male is not a privilege in conservative societies unless coupled with heterosexuality as a mechanism for dominating all other sexual categories. What is particularly interesting in Kabir’s case is not an isolated narrative but his experiences of coerced immobility and sexual vulnerability in public spaces in India are shared by several other participants. For example, another participant Madhusudan (or Mandy as their friends call them) reported that they too were subject to molestation in school and later by a distant relative and they finally escaped “such captivities”8 only by winning scholarships to study abroad. Mandy currently works and lives in Hamburg, and relies on their friends for community support. In  A term they used in the interviews.

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a similar fashion, Rabiya B., a Chennai-based software engineer and also my participant confided that she left her job in India to pursue higher education in Germany after her parents insisted she got married to a boy of their choice against her own will. She further mentioned that her friends already in Germany helped her find a course and an initial accommodation in Cologne so that she could migrate. The term “loitering” is an appropriate expression here to compare the mobility and vulnerability of women and queer people migrating from their home countries that have already denied them free mobility to the host countries – in search of that mobility and freedom. The term “loitering” is in direct opposition to the term “immobility” – while on the one hand, it means hovering around freely, without purpose, an exercise that invites immediate control of moral authorities in some societies, it also epitomizes the uncertainties experienced by individual and communities always subject to external supervision and judgement. “Loitering” perhaps serves as a suitable expression to defend the tripartite framework of physical mobility, everyday safety and sense of freedom that I conclude as the ultimate motivation of immigration for the Indian non-male immigrants in Germany. As Mandy captures in one of their entries: “Migration has helped me understand myself better. As a trans person, I do not have to hesitate while going out, meeting people. I walk across the river alone just for peace and calm. It smells like freedom.” It is fascinating to observe how a simple act of walking can have such lasting effects and organize migrant experiences investigated especially through the lens of gender, patriarchy and power. What is even more interesting is that most of these participants are either enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs in German universities or hold Blue Cards, i.e., they represent the whitecollar population from India. However, their social status has not eased their mobility in their home country, indicating that access to money and other material resources are not proportional to access to freedom and free choice for non-male actors. In the next chapter, we will meet Sukanya, a queer girl in Berlin. Through her story and several others met around the bend, we will explore further on the subject of gender and migration within the context of the highly skilled Indian immigrants in Germany.

4 In Pursuit of Freedom: Queer Girl Moves to Berlin

Sukanya is not her real name, nor is it a pseudo name I have rechristened her with. It is a name she gave herself and insisted that I use it here. She has an interesting take on the name and the story around it: “Sukanya means good girl, something I am not, if you go by societies’ standards. I never was a good girl, as in good in studies … so to speak … or when I was growing up. Unlike many other girls in class and in the neighbourhood, I had cropped hair, loved wandering with friends … my parents tried hard to make me more ladylike … as they taught us in school. But I was always far from it.” Although this was not the beginning of our conversation, what she said about herself reminded me of how the feminine mystique (Friedan 1963, 2001) continues to dominate women’s lives across continents, across time. It is in those moments of conflict with her family, in their pursuit of imposing the heteronormative expectations that Sukanya realised that she was not like everybody else around, she liked women. “The realization was not pleasant. My first feeling was – there now goes another thing about me that my parents will not approve of. So, like many others, I also repressed my feelings for a long time.” Before making further statement, Sukanya turns to me, “So is that why you wanted to meet me? To know my story of being a lesbian woman in India?” My answer, although sounding ambivalent, actually was not. I © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_4

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said, “Yes, and No!” I went on to clarify that although my primary motivation to engage with her is her status as an immigrant, the fact that she is a homosexual woman immigrant from India in Germany is a lucrative bonus. Like most of the encounters with my participants as documented in the previous chapters, meeting Sukanya was eventful too. Sukanya and Kabir (my other participant I spoke about earlier) are members of the same queer book exchange community that also serves as a space of solidarity for non-male actors. It was during the pandemic that Sukanya started frequenting the place and met Kabir and others. In my first encounter with her, Sukanya was accompanied by her partner Lena. That meeting was more of an ice breaking session by the end of which they invited me to their home for dinner one Friday. This was a welcome opportunity because as an ethnographer I prefer not to converse with my participants in set ups disengaged from their stories. So rarely do I prefer meeting them at cafes or malls or parks, unless that space is a part of their stories. The significance of location in ethnography is telling (Hage 2005); Cairns (2013) in her work on feminist ethnography emphasizes the need for understanding the lives of non-male actors through the lens of their immediate surroundings. So, I landed at their kitchen one gloomy winter evening where Sukanya and I started talking. Lena was present through the conversation, this is something Sukanya insisted and I obliged. “To tell you frankly, I came to Germany to explore my freedom. Freedom of expression, sexuality, inner self. As a lesbian I was in a stifled relationship back home. I was a media studies student in Pune, later I moved to Bombay for work. Work was good, I was earning good money. But I was very unhappy with the overall situation around. I wanted to make a short film on the queer people in Indian villages, those who are still in closets. It was a challenging project and I also had a producer. But when we started shooting a portion of the film in a real setting in this village in Maharashtra, it started getting immensely difficult. The locals started gheraoing the film unit. Once the gram Pradhan1 stopped me while I was returning to the guesthouse alone, after getting something from the market … I don’t remember exactly  Village leader in Hindi language.

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what I was buying … anyway, that’s not the point … he just stopped me and said something like Madam ji aap yeh sab yahan nai kar sakte.2 … I asked – kya sab nai kar sakte? ... I knew what he was trying to say though … so he told me then clearly that we cannot shoot on queer politics and queer relationships in the village because this is beyond Indian culture. I was prompted to ask Hindu culture … but I resisted myself.” As Sukanya reveals, she ultimately had to withhold shooting because it became unsafe for her and her team to navigate across the regions. The plot of their short film centred on a Muslim boy who finds a homosexual partner in his neighbouring village. This was clearly not well taken by the local people and they had to leave the set. Sukanya returned to Mumbai and tried to continue shooting in other villages, more adjacent to the big city, hoping that it would be less difficult – only to face similar resentment and harassments from the locals. Finally, she decided to shelf the project and apply for a film-related grant in Europe. Her preference was either Paris or Berlin and she won a scholarship to attend a film school in Berlin. “The funniest thing is, also the saddest part of it though … that I won the scholarship in Berlin with the same short film idea that I could not complete shooting for in India. This just broke my heart. I am not saying that nobody is able to make such politically sensitive films in India but it is now that it is such a problem. On the contrary, Berlin offers several scholarships to film enthusiasts, budding film makers and film critics and there was no embargo on my creative expression.” By now I knew in which direction our conversation was going. So, my next question was: “So what motivated you to migrate to Berlin? Was it only chance or deliberate?” Sukanya clarifies: “No, I would say deliberate – see my first instinct was to leave the situation in India. It is not just that short film, I know several people personally who had to stop their projects because it was politically impossible. This was not the case earlier. The government now … it is creative suicide for many. But not everybody can afford to leave. I could – in the sense that my parents are self-sufficient so I took all my money and decided to come to Berlin. Even if I would have got the scholarship to Paris, I would still have come to Berlin finally because Germany right now has more flexible policies of immigration. Since I  Madam, you cannot continue such activities here.

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want to live and work here … now I also have Lena … this was always my plan. … I mean ever since I planned to leave the country. So, I chose Berlin and thankfully Berlin chose me too.” Such poetic finish to her answer does not deserve an immediate worldly intervention. So, I let the moment pass. Then I resumed: “So what changed after migration to Berlin? How is your experience of being an immigrant in Germany?” Sukanya took some time to think through her answer: “See … what changed is simply the way I live now … quite unapologetically … from a distance it all looks cool that you are surrounded by the glamour of cinema in Bombay, even if you are a lesbian, it is fine! But honestly, it wasn’t for me. Even today my parents do not know about my sexuality. But in Berlin I have the opportunity to exercise my freedom, freedom of sexuality I am saying … I am not saying there is no racism here. There is – it is not like people are out with guns, like in the US … but there is racism. I have faced it. But what is worse then – sexism or racism? Your choice! Also, what I have to consider is the extent of the discrimination. In India I have had to vacate my apartment within 2 hours after my landlady found that I am a homosexual. I was literally out on the road until my friends took me in. Here that is not what I am facing even in the name of racism. You go to the country, there could be racism … like people will stare at you and so on. Maybe you will not have enough friends to hang out in the local bar, as a brown woman. But nobody is giving you a rape threat, a death threat because you are lesbian, because they know you live alone.” I had to stop Sukanya here. I wanted to go back to what she said earlier about choosing the lesser evil between racism and sexism. Borrowing the term “migratisation” (Tudor 2018), i.e., migration as an ascription, my submission is to look at Sukanya’s experiences from the intersection of multiple discrimination at home and the host country leading to a situation where immigrants are compelled to prefer one set of discrimination as against the rest, simply because they consider certain discriminations to be less interfering, less dangerous and more negotiable in everyday lives. I call this a “discrimination bargain.” Discrimination bargain compels the immigrants to operate in a framework of choice-based othering. In choice-based othering, it is a trade between two categories of discrimination where the immigrant themselves choose as to which

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categorization they find less toxic. Sometimes, and more often than not, such considerations are made while making the decision of immigration. Consequently, discrimination bargain epitomises the motivations of migration, motivations of settlement and motivations of return. As a choice-based system of othering, discrimination bargain is a continuous process of balancing among multiple decisions across time and space. Within the larger discourse of feminist intervention in migration studies, discrimination bargain is located in the autonomy-agency structure of decision making. Boyd (2006) maintains that it is not enough to have the access to resources, it is more crucial if one is able to make autonomous decisions regarding migration and mobility. This specifically applies to women because studies suggest that even when women migrate as individuals, their decisions of immigration are often either collective or for the sake of the family. It is rare that women make independent decisions to move. Therefore, even in situations where women have the agency to move, it still remains a question if they have the autonomy to make the decision of movement. Coming back to the discrimination bargain, it is my observation that women are more prone to consider individual specific bargains when moving for themselves. Sukanya, who is also a homosexual woman from India in Germany, her bargain is even more complicated. Sukanya’s situation cannot be bracketed in heteronormative frameworks. Nor can she be considered as a typical representative of the Indian women migrants in Germany. Her story, therefore, has to be located within the multiplicity of intersections including race, sexuality and gender (Walgenbach 2007). Let me take you to where Sukanya continues talking about this discrimination bargain. “When I thought about moving, it was just to feel better. Not to earn more or anything, but to be out there … exploring and investing creatively! For one thing, when my film shelved, I felt like a personal loss (sic). Since the film was on queer relationships, something very personal to me, inspired by my personal experiences, the entire episode made me think hard – about my own life in such a situation where things are so hostile! It is not important if section 3773 is done away  Under Indian Penal Code, practicing homosexuality was criminalized in India. The section was annulled in 2018. 3

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with … it is the prejudice that stays and bothers you. So, when I thought of moving, I thought about places where I can be safe as a homosexual person, where there is little or no prejudice against homosexuals and where there is enough creative freedom. I have been to Germany and France before, as a student. So, I started applying … as I said, Germany’s immigration framework for the Indians appeared to be more attractive, also in the long run.” As she stops to breathe and reflect, I throw my next question. How do you see yourself in a relationship in Berlin as opposed to being in one in Mumbai? “More equal and less vulnerable. More equal in the sense that Lena was married to a man before who did not treat her well. So, she divorced him. In this house we live as equal partners. I think this has also to do with the way general households operate here. I don’t know about earlier but now what I see among my German friends, it’s not just homosexual couples but heterosexual couples too, house work is a shared space. This is the general understanding here – that cooking or cleaning, etc., is not just one person’s job. So, I think that transmits to the homosexual couples too – unlike in India.” I find the last statement specifically interesting. Sukanya’s statement reaffirms that heterosexuality is not decoupled from heteronormativity, and often heteronormativity as the defining social norm continues to dominate our lives even where heterosexuality is not the dominant framework. Traced through the works of Palriwalah and Uberoi (2008), it is not difficult to comprehend how deep-rooted heteronormativity as a structure is. However, it is definitely an insightful observation that the navigation is deep enough to dismiss other more equal frameworks even where gender relations are organized differently. Although scholars like Bastia (2014) has challenged the assumption that heteronormative model could offer absolute theoretical constructs to understand female-specific migration experience, my observation is that it still remains pervasive and emerges as the quintessential reference point for examining all forms of gender relations. Another motivation for Sukanya to migrate to Germany and later decide upon continuing to live in Berlin emerges from her experiences in the creative field in the city. She completed the short film that she could not in Mumbai; she enrolled in a doctoral program and found a freelancing job. “I am enjoying the work here – I can be creatively wild and there

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is support. By support I do not mean that my colleagues back in Bombay did not support me, or that there is a dearth of creativity in India. But what I mean is infrastructural support … in the form of not being scared of putting your wilderness out on the table and having resources supporting your project. Right now, I am writing a screenplay on Muslim women from Morocco and their stories of sexual expression. Imagine doing something similar in today’s India! Impossible!” As already discussed in one of the previous chapters how young people are continuously moving outside India, Sukanya’s story ratifies that. Officially, Sukanya still falls in the category of people moving for higher education but the truth is like several others whose stories I was able to capture and whose I am still searching, Sukanya left India to chase freedom. People do move for freedom but most of the studies are based on tangible experiences of unfreedom. Unlike political activists moving to escape prison time in their home countries, Sukanya is an ordinary person who tried to build a career in the creative field, along with wanting to live the life she is meant for. She decided to choose the shadow migration pathway, like many others, when these unseeming possibilities appeared to be challenging. She does talk about how the larger political situation informed her decision to move and arrive in Berlin. I call this “political unfreedom.” Political unfreedom refers to the absence of socio-political support system that facilitates freedom of expression of individuals and communities. The ambivalence in political unfreedom lies in the significance of an absence rather than a presence, catering to a sense of amiss that extends beyond the immediate purview of formal organizations. For example, political unfreedom not only includes organizations that are unable to exercise their free speech in a structured manner, it also represents the everyday politics of individuals, or the lack of it. In that view, migration to achieve political freedom (Loza 2016) is not a new discourse in migration studies. Especially within the context of international and cross border migration, freedom from political repression of authoritarian governments is aplenty (Bauböck 2003). But Sukanya and others’ stories identify the major shortcoming of migration data with definitive categorization that miss the lacuna of capturing motivations shadowed by official, formalized documentations. Political unfreedom, from that perspective, addresses the lack of freedom that makes individuals lonelier

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amidst a social anomie (Durkheim 2002). In the light of this, I locate political unfreedom within the realm of everyday existence instead of rendering it special as a distinct form of collective action. The fact that people are compelled to escape their home country but are not able to find channels to communicate their desperation and frustration captures the imposition of political unfreedom in India today. Also, the sheer normalization of disdain towards critical thinking and systematic criminalization of dissent informs the absence of political unfreedom. There is another dimension to this discussion on political unfreedom. Lack of opportunities to express one’s politics in the home country in comparison to what is now possible in the host country also indicates that the immigrants are navigating through a solidarity network that facilitates such possibilities. In this regard, Sukanya talks about two forms of solidarities – feminist solidarities and creative solidarities and recognizes that the two often are intertwined. As emerges from our conversations, these solidarity networks respond to the vacuum of political unfreedom and lends political agency to the participants, something that they missed in their home country and something for which they moved. I call these solidarity networks as intimate cohorts. The intimacy stems from the sharing of views and ideas, the assurances that immigrants find in each other through their collective imaginations, the friendships that enable them to break away from the intellectual vulnerability that they experienced due to political unfreedom in the home country. That way, intimate cohort and political unfreedom stand opposed to each other where the former is a direct outcome of the latter. Sukanya’s next statement emphasizes how intimate cohorts in the host country could dismiss and replace political unfreedom experienced in the home country. “Here most of my creative works happen through the queer solidarity network I am a part of … like the one where Kabir is too. I also met Lena in one of those networks. Most of these networks are loosely bound … since my politics is based on my personal experiences, it is difficult for me to separate one from the other. As you would know how the personal is political, right! So that is how my solidarity networks work.” Here I ask a more empirical question. “How exactly do these solidarity networks benefit you?” Sukanya responds; “See, solidarity networks benefit in the sense that my life as a migrant here is based on those

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networks. It’s not like these networks are very organized or something. … It is just that I know there are people who share my politics and my queer existence, who support my politics and who will stand by me. In fact, when I was migrating to Germany, I did reach out to these people or networks whatever you call it … so even before migrating I already knew that I will find my tribe.” What emerges, among other things, is the significance of the feminist networks that Sukanya and her friends exploit for daring migration and sustaining the entire immigration experience in the host country. Scholars like Chandra Mohanty (2013) have written extensively on the transnational feminist solidarities and friendships that often become the most important infrastructure for women and non-male actors, especially as immigrants. Having said that, these feminist networks are not immune to power relations mimicking heteronormative gender roles. As a matter of fact, more the formalization of such networks, more is the concentration of power. Moreover, men as homosexuals often tend to dominate such networks, especially those that are organized. Feminist and gender studies is not unfamiliar with the conflicting relationships existing within queer politics that often bring the politics of gender(ed) power back in the discussion (Herrek 1988). Homosexuality’s unequal treatment towards gays and lesbians does not preclude the normative hierarchy prevalent in societies at large. Consequently, it is not unlikely that gendered power play will replicate in queer solidarity networks too. However, such observations could be conflicting when compared to Sukanya’s earlier assertion that her experiences in personal relationship as an immigrant are less heteronormative than what she faced back in India. Sukanya asserts: “I am not a fan of acquiring positions of power. The solidarity networks are my lifeline because I go there to share, and make friendships that I hope will last a lifetime. But that is not all … in many occasions you will find that these networks are now headed by some white gay men. I am not saying that these networks should be only for brown and blacks but c’mon! a white man as the group leader! Does it still matter if he’s gay?” After hearing her out, I realize that there is no conflict. What Sukanya said about white gay men heading the solidarity networks takes us back to the context of discrimination bargain that as a brown lesbian migrant she has been negotiating already. Consequently, as a queer immigrant

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from India chasing and perhaps finding freedom in Berlin, Sukanya and several others like her are interrogating intersectionality not across multiple spectrum of race and gender, but multiple factions within one category of queer too. Even within the contour of queer politics, location of a brown immigrant lesbian is in subordination to that of a white gay man. I continue meeting Sukanya in several other occasions, sometime in her workstation at her home office sometime in their book exchange community workshop. She told me several details about how her parents still have little clue about her sexuality, how Lena recently accompanied her to her parents’ home in India and she introduced her as her friend from Germany and her parents (apparently) believed her, how she often feels tired of leading a double life still full of lies “because even if I have migrated to Germany that gives me the opportunity to explore freedom, my parents are still the same. So, my baggage remains!” I hear her, although I choose to remain quiet. Through my act of listening to Sukanya about her double life, I realize that a certain portion of the unfreedom is hard to escape for an immigrant even when they have made a satisfactory discrimination bargain. Sukanya’s “double life,” in her own words, is the quintessential contradiction that immigrants usually live with. This brings us to the last formal question I ask her as my participant: “Why do you want to have a future in Germany?” Her answer was clear and apt: “I want a future here because overall, I feel I can use my creative talent, my craft here in Berlin, or may in another German city that offers enough resources, to upscale my profession in future. I like the madness in me that helps me to become better in my creative expression … and with each passing day, all these will not be possible in India at all, at least for me I know that … so if I have got a chance, I feel I must not ruin that. Also, I have Lena now. I like our domestic partnership. What if we want to get married tomorrow and lead a regular life in India? Can we do that – no! So better I live here, find my future here.” This was followed by a scrumptious meal that Sukanya and Lena had put together in my honour. As I devour into the food and rehearse her words in my head, I realize that the key to a successful process of migration ultimately lies in the possibility of a stable future – for most, if not for all. While future is attributed to and measured by several empirical parameters, the promise of a future rests on the abstract imagination of a home.

5 Immigrant Homemakers

Is the title “Immigrant Homemakers” a tell all? While christening this chapter, I deliberately wanted to employ the term homemaker in a gender-­ encompassing manner because as per common knowledge, women are considered to be the primary homemakers. However, the process of “homing” and homemaking (Boccagni and Kusenbach 2020), construction of an invented homeland (Appadurai 1996) and home as the quintessential habitus of migrants (Bourdieu 2018) are different in the context of transnational immigration that extends beyond the immediate purview of gender and performance. Echoing Andrea Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller (2003), I argue that the character and pattern of homing that we witness within the Indian diaspora in Germany today brings the subject of methodological nationalism back on the map for discussing the relevance of nation-state for immigrant identification. Embedded in Wittgenstein, Schatzki (1997) and Bourdieu’s take on practice theory as a methodological tool for examining immigrant experiences and immigrant perseverance towards constructing an invented homeland in the German host society, this chapter examines housing practices, culinary practices, religious practices and political practices, for example as crucial constituents of homing practices. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_5

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In this chapter, my focus is not just the Blue Card holders and students, but other profile of Indians as well, e.g., the Sikh immigrants who migrated to Germany during 1980s and the Kerala nurses. The aim of this chapter is to locate immigrant everyday practices that are mundane and examine them from the critical framework of immigrant-host society interface. This chapter is also indicative of the increasing public visibility of the Indians in German social and political lives – a recent development that is significantly informed by their transcultural practices. Lastly, I find the term “homing” to be appropriate in emphasizing the continuity of the process of place-making.

Homing: Housing Practices The subject of housing as a place making project was easier to address with reference to the Indian green card holders who arrived after the German Green Card was introduced in 2000, inviting Indian techies to come and work in Germany for three to five years and then either return to the home country or move to another. This “onsite” mechanism brought about 20,000 IT specialists from India (Datta 2016b) and they were mostly housed via the company they worked for. During my field work with them about a decade ago, I learnt that majority of them lived in company-set up accommodations. In these apartments, they find other fellow Indians as their neighbours. Therefore, from the beginning of their stay in Germany, Indian green card holders were housed in spaces dominated by Indians. Neither did they have to look for accommodations themselves (which might have exposed them to interact with the Germans as such) nor did they ever share domestic spaces with people from other countries including the Germans. Consequently, their interactions with the Germans were restricted to the work spaces and given their low visibility in the German public spaces, the Indian techies in Germany that worked and temporarily lived in the country almost a decade ago practiced what I term as forced self-­exclusion. The point of narrating their experiences in this chapter, albeit in snippet, is to locate the Indian immigrants in Germany today in comparison the status ten years ago and argue that both visibility and socio-cultural

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engagements of the Indians in German have undergone massive expansion and proliferation since then and we must remember the comparative framework in order to be able to effectively examine their location in Germany today. In comparison to the green card holders, a scheme that did not gain popularity among the Indians due to its tentative framework, the Blue Card offers stability, at least apparently. Because of its family-oriented character that allows immigrants to bring their spouse and children with a work permit for the spouse with immediate effect upon arrival, the Blue Card holders demonstrate practices distinct from the earlier group. Unlike the green card holders, they are not offered housing facilities. In view of the observation that many employers especially in the IT sector offer them permanent contracts, the burden of finding a house does not fall squarely on the former. As a result, Indians have to negotiate the long, arduous and expensive process of finding an apartment in the heart of big cities, in the suburbs across the “Ring” bahn, or in the countryside where rents are cheaper and apartments are bigger. Not just renting, several of my participants confided that they are actually buying apartments or small houses in Germany, given that “the rents are too high” (sic). It is almost common knowledge that housing rents in the big cities in Germany especially Berlin is exceptionally high. In as early as 2006, Wolfgang Kil and Hilary Silver wrote an interesting paper titled “From Kreuzberg to Marzahn: New Migrant Communities in Berlin.” Here, they engaged with how Berlin has gradually been emerging from the ghost of the Cold War and adapting a multicultural and cosmopolitan character. While they focused on the Turkish community being driven out of Kreuzberg and forced to move to the fringe, e.g., Marzahn, their work is significant to establish correlation with migrant housing choices in contemporary German big cities. Coming back to the Indians, unlike the Pakistanis in Berlin Spandau, or the Bangladeshis in Brick Lane London, Sikhs in South Hall, Indians are yet to have a quarter dedicated to them. However, what they have instead is a high visibility in the Neubau area, i.e., the new buildings, clusters and gated communities fast spreading the German cities and towns. While these new housing arrangements address the housing crises that Germany is facing due to high rate of immigration (including the arrival of refugees), this tendency towards privatization of

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the housing sector also speaks to the changing economic policy of the German government. Apart from the neoliberal drive and expansion of the private sector, the emergence of the Neubau also brings the discussion on racism back to the table. There is no dearth of literature on racism in Germany (Kuhl 2002; Fredrickson 2015). We do not find many literature on how everyday racism as a symbolic (Rehbein and Souza 2015) yet structural framework works in Germany today. This is not to understand that racism is only symbolic in Germany but to emphasize that symbolic racism as everyday practices are harder to prove although immediate in experience. One of my participants Geetika and her partner Gautam shares in this regard, “We were searching for an apartment and we preferred the old buildings because they are as we find more beautiful you know. … But although we matched the salary bracket and everything, the old buildings at Mitte1 area … at least the ones we saw and were shortlisted for, went to white couples.” While their experience may appear to be a distinct case, it is far from it. Hearing Geetika and Gautam’s story, I asked my other couple participant Esha and Mukul. They are Geetika’s neighbour in a new building cluster in Moabit. They had a similar experience. “We saw at least 20 Althaus (old building) in Berlin Kreuzberg, Mitte. … We both earn so it was not a money thing. … We had heard from our German friends and colleagues that unless you have enough to show as salary, you may not get the apartment. So basically, as a private enterprise they rent to the unit drawing the highest salary per month or so. … We, I don’t want to flaunt, but we have a handsome pay slip to show and we did. Even then it went to a couple who’s … and no marks for guessing, white. I remember Indians queuing up at several visitation sites and then we would meet the same folks at another visitation. … Then one German friend, when I told her what the situation was and we kind of felt that we are not getting the apartment in the old German buildings because we are brown, she said why don’t you do something. … Let me rent the apartment in my name and then I can sublet you. That way you will get what you want and as friends I have no problem in doing this for you. We appreciated her generosity but the fact that she did not contest us, proved  City-centre in Berlin.

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kind of … that this is an unsaid rule or something. … Not to prefer non-­ Whites in old traditional German housings.” Listening to Esha and Mukul, I felt the urge to document this immediately – what better example I will find of symbolic racism after all! However, I did not want to hurry and make sweeping generalizations. So, I turned to another participant Surbhi. When I approached Surbhi for a conversation I did not know that she lived at the centre of Mitte – in an old German building. As I reached her building and had myself buzzed in, walking through the gorgeous aisle and entering the quiet backyard, I almost felt I have time-travelled. I could not stop wondering – perhaps the stories I heard so far are indeed exceptional. But once I landed in her apartment and started talking to Surbhi and her family, clarity hit me. The obvious opening question (apart from greetings) from my mouth went like this: “How did you find this beautiful apartment in an Altbau!” “Oh, we didn’t find it … it’s through the company that my husband works for. They found it for us. Initially we were staying at an Airbnb and then after a month or so, the company found this place and we moved. Deepka’s (Surbhi’s husband as she refers to) office is nearby so we didn’t want to stay far. Isn’t it beautiful, the building? I just love this old-world charm you know.” It was now clear as to why and how Surbhi and her family could live in an Altbau and the other Indians among my participants could not. Unless it is a company that leases the apartment out, it remains inaccessible to many. Therefore, it is no surprise that the Indians, here representing the non-white communities, that independently searched for apartments, had to comprise with the Neubau because Altbau are out of bounds. As pointed out by Esha and Mukul, it is perhaps reasonable to refer to this shared experience of house hunting as a common denominator for understanding everyday racism in Germany. Located in the broader context of homing practices, it is also perhaps then fair to say that everyday racism in Germany affects the housing experiences of the Indian white-­ collar immigrants. Can this also be argued that everyday racism in Germany rests on a deep-seated structure of othering non-white immigrants across social status? As a migration scholar, I would refrain from claiming this yet because the fieldwork in this context was restricted only

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to Berlin. Therefore, we do not have enough information if this trend is present in other German cities as well. Having said that, Berlin as a cosmopolitan global city and the capital of Germany could stand as a typical example of what to expect in other cities across the country. Experiences of house hunting for the Indian Blue Card holders in Berlin could thereby emerge as a popular parameter for examining their experiences elsewhere, including cities and smaller German towns. It was, however, challenging to compare their status with the students as the students mostly live in shared apartments, and “wg,” as they are popularly known, are rented through a different mechanism altogether. To offer an example, Sadiya Bano, a final year MBA student at a management school in Manheim tells, “There is a website, also an App called wg-gesucht. That means search for shared apartments. So, we all look there for rooms in shared flats. Also, Indian groups on Facebook also is another place where Indians put ad (sic) if there is a room available … so this is how we mostly find.” On the other hand, Indians who arrived in Germany during the second and the third wave, i.e., the Kerala nurses, their second generation and the Sikh migrants and their second generations live in a rather scattered manner. The housing situation and its characters in a pre-1989 Germany, i.e., before the Berlin Wall came down was starkly different from what is experienced now. Majority of the Kerala nurses arrived in West Germany and continued to live in the North Rhine Westphalia region while the Sikhs have a concentration in the Hesse region. Consequently, Frankfurt has the biggest Gurudwara2 in Germany. In addition, several of the earlier generation Indians live in houses in the peripheral regions and German villages, unlike the Indians arriving now who are mostly concentrated in the cities. Given all this, it is neither feasible nor appropriate to compare their experiences. However, coming back to the subject of homemaking as a transgender project, one of my earliest participants said something that in my understanding encapsulates the spirit, the conflict and the perpetual contradiction of making home as immigrants. Premjit Kaur, a government employee in Germany, now retired is one of the first  Temple for worshipping and community-based activities for the Sikhs.

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Indians I met in Berlin and I have known her and her family for almost a decade now. Her husband Dr. Prabhjyot came to Germany during the 1970s to pursue his doctoral studies and never went back. Premjit joined him later and they started their life in Berlin. The first time I met them at their two storied house in the outskirt of Berlin, tucked in a corner, they were warm and invited me for tea. The second time it was for lunch. By the time I went for the dinner on a weekend, I considered bringing a bottle of wine. Although I was conflicted if I must offer them any gifts, a bottle of red wine did not seem an inappropriate gesture in exchange of their hospitality. As I sat on the sofa and we started sipping tea, I ask Premjit, “When was the last time you were in India?” Prabhjyot, who too was sitting with us, says, “Long back actually. I don’t like going there anymore, I have friends and colleagues and everything here now. Germany is home, after all these years you see.” To this, Premjit adds “Oh it’s been three years actually … you see there’s nobody there now … earlier we used to go often at least every year, but now whom do we visit when we go? We like India but now we are in Germany for almost 45 years … like he said – now this is our home.” Premjit’s closing sentence seemed to be a reasonable epiphany, and I as a researcher apparently had found my “data” for the day. That said, I suddenly realized that I forgot to offer them the wine. So, I unzip my handbag and take the red out and extend it to her with a smile. Premjit says, “Oh why have you brought us wine! You didn’t have to do that! We are not Germans you see!” I do not know if Premjit had another epiphany but I most definitely did. Our conversation of the past five minutes epitomized the entire dichotomy of immigrant homemaking. Homing although a process that goes beyond the binary of two nations – the home and the host, thus reinforcing Glick Schiller’s critique of methodological nationalism  – is one that never ends (Garcia-Sanchez 2014). I call such conflicts as social constants; despite the changes in the profile of migration, circumstances, motivations, mobility patterns and status of immigrants, certain trepidations never cease to exist for the people who move.

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Homing: Food, Politics and Religion Culinary practice as a way of sustenance, fulfilment, ritual and politics constitutes the immigrant homing process. Echoing Schatzki, here I have tried to identify the ritual and unsaid rules behind the food practices that Indians in Germany follow today. Unlike a decade ago, the size of the Indian diaspora in Germany is expanding now. Consequently, there are regional variations in food culture within the diaspora. In comparison to other ethnic diaspora, Indians anywhere within and outside the home country display cultural differences with reference to food, language, clothes, etc. This multiplicity is visible in this diaspora as well. Methodological nationalism as a rejoinder to transnationalism does not apply for examining a diaspora that has exceptional regional variations. Therefore, the focus must shift from the transnational to the translocal and transcultural. From that standpoint, habitus as a precondition for homing derives from the multiple imaginations around home and othering. Among the Indians as an immigrant community, the idea of home is based on the intolerance of the Other, mostly the Muslims. In continuation to the political polarization back in India – a subject that arguably is one of the primary reasons for the Indians to move out of the country – it continues to remain a point of contestation as they enter the diaspora. As a result, people who eat vegetarian food share a conflicted relationship with the meat eaters, while the beef eating Indians are soon identified as Muslims, anti-nationals or at best the quintessential others. Ashraf, an Engineer in Munich tells me, “I am a Muslim, most of the Indians that you see around, are Hindus. That’s okay, in India it is the same. But my Hindu neighbours initially thought I am Turkish, later they thought I am from Pakistan. They saw the name on my door, or the post box downstairs may be, and just made something in their mind. So, when I had a house party and invited my neighbours, the Hindu family refused to eat anything at the party. They said they are strict vegetarians, Tamil Brahmins, so they cannot eat anything because everything is mixed … meat and French fries are all mixed. … They were not comfortable. They stayed for a bit and soon left.”

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In another context, my participant Chandra informs, “The Germans have a huge thing with smells. I don’t believe this – they like what I cook but when I cook, my neighbours go crazy! They want me to shut all windows when I cook, I do; then they want me to open all doors and windows so that the smell can be out, I do that too – but nothing makes them forget about the smell of garlic! This is funny also, isn’t it?” To answer is not my role to play so I probe more. “So, what happens when you offer Indian cuisine to the same neighbours?” “They eat it! Not just do they eat it, they eat them all with their fingers because thanks to YouTube, we all know that Indians eat with fingers. So, they want to impress me and convince that they like the food but by then I’m mad already – with their intolerance for smell.” I remember a similar experience was narrated by a student in Giessen who rented a room in a German house owned and lived by an elderly couple. Giessen being a university town, it is common for old people to rent out one room to young people in exchange of a modest rent. Reshma, this participant was almost in tears, “I don’t know what to do – whatever small I cook, the landlady comes up to my kitchen and requests me to finish fast because apparently the entire house is getting affected (sic) by that smell.” Although the two incidents took place almost ten years in between, the experiences remain curiously similar. Taking Ashraf ’s experience of vegetarian and meat-eating practices together, it is interesting to note how othering within the diaspora shapes the perception of the unfamiliar. Food as a political practice of homing and othering is thus embedded more in a sentiment of rejection than belonging. Unlike what is followed among the Bengalis from West Bengal, India during Durga Pujo, food during such festivities within the diaspora is strictly vegetarian. When asked one of the pujo committee members, they inform that unlike in India, here Indians from different regions will arrive to offer their respect to Durga3; therefore, they must follow the rules of food practices followed in the rest of India during this festival time, i.e., a no meat diet. While this forced vegetarianism is not a popular choice, it is a feasible choice, as the organizers maintain. Arindam, one of the organizers says, “All we want is to keep the tradition alive so that our next  A Hindu upper caste goddess.

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generation does not feel rootless, they must know their festivals. So, we do it in a way that does not hurt others’ sentiments.” While Durga pujo is a Bengali festival, the Bengalis from Bangladesh are not invited there. Although Bengali, majority of the Bangladeshi migrants are Muslims. Therefore, their entry at a Hindu festival is often restricted. This othering is also witnessed in the social media practices of the Hindu Bengalis from India. They are not conflicted when choosing the best quality Hilsa from the Bangladeshi supermarket, but they find it unacceptable to include the Bangladeshi Bengalis in the conversation in Facebook and WhatsApp groups titled as Bengalis in Germany – groups where the Bengalis from India continuously share information regarding the best spices, best restaurants, best recipes, etc. In the light of this, it is perhaps justifiable to claim that homing through food as a process rests on the politics of intolerance, stereotype and othering. Another interesting observation is that while Hindu festivals are celebrated within the diaspora, Islamic festivals like Eid for example is hardly celebrated as an Indian festival. Therefore, most of the Indian Muslims either celebrate privately or they visit the nearby Mosques built and run by the Turkish and Kurdish communities. One of the significant reasons for underwriting transnationalism as a framework for examining the Indian diaspora emerges from this observation that Indian diaspora excludes the Indian Muslims. Indian Christians meet with similar experiences – during Christmas, Easter or Sunday Church visits, they usually frequent the local Churches. This way the Indian Hindus can protect the food culture from meat and the celebration around them. This also ensures a misguided optic for their children to grow up witnessing only Hindu festivals as Indian festivals, vegetarian food as Indian food and Hindus as the only Indians they socialize with. Religious disparities within the diaspora especially with regard to food are not surprising. Most of what we witness within any diaspora is an extension of the tension and conflicts already present in the home country. While documenting and analysing the politics around homing through the practice of culinary othering and exclusion, as a researcher I wonder where caste is hiding among all this. Caste, unlike the Indians in the US, is yet to factor in the Indians in Germany since the size of the diaspora is relatively smaller although growing. Having said that, an

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investigation on homing practices among the Indian immigrants in Germany remains incomplete without the caste context. Another effective parameter for measuring the homing process is to follow the money, i.e., where and how the immigrants are investing their savings. The Indian diaspora in Germany being a new diaspora dominated by young people, majority of my participants are conflicted in their decision of investment. While several of them would like to buy apartments or houses in Germany, as a clear process of creating a home, the rest of the participants are undecided if they would like to continue living in Germany when they age. This is not uncommon among the migrants at large (Gmelch 1980). Piracha and Vadean (2010) have extensively discussed the subject of circular and return migration among migrants that were able to generate enough wealth to return to their home countries and live their last few years comfortably. While wealth is definitely one indicator that makes or unmakes the possibility of a comfortable return, the health infrastructure in the home country as compared to the host country is another assessment point, as my participant Surbhi shares, “It is true that we also think about it. Should we make some investments here, buy a house and all or make some arrangements in India, for old age. But then I think we pay health insurance here and then can avail almost everything without any further payment which is not so in India … surgeries, hospitals are really expensive and Mediclaim does not always cover it … it’s a big hassle. Also, these days all old people live alone, children … they will have their own lives, so if I am in India and I need help, it is not always that I will find somebody helping me … who knows how it all becomes in the next thirty years when we get old … so I think we should first buy something here and then later think about India. Also, you look at the air quality in India. Even healthy people are falling sick. Forget Corona, the air you breathe will give you lung infection … so all these factors we must think about too.” Through my conversation with Surbhi I understand that homing although a process that never ends, the feeling of uncertainties around it never ends either. Immigrants as homemakers are constantly living with and negotiating such uncertainties and trying to make comparative choices – through homing and beyond.

6 Uncertain Mobilities: Pandemic, Time and Certitude

Immigrants and Uncertainties In migration discourse we are obsessed with the question of what motivates people to immigrate. While this is a valid question, we are eternally amazed by the shifting and myriad of reasons that motivate, force or condition people to immigrate, mostly from the “rest” to the rich “west.” Here what also emerges as a crucial negotiator is the question of what enables people to stay in the country of immigration, create homes or return to their countries of emigration. The scopes and indicators of migration-decision making that revolve around people’s choices with reference to staying back in the immigrant country or going back to their home country are informed by calculated risk and uncertainty. This coming and leaving or arriving and going are captured in a rather fleeting manner since the diaspora is new and the immigrants are still arriving in significant number thereby consistently raising the curve. Therefore, any assessment of uncertain mobilities in this context is a work in progress. In this context, it is relevant to learn about Suresh and Nilima, a heterosexual family (both Blue Card Holders) with children. I first met Nilima and Suresh in December 2018 at a café in Munich. They had just migrated to Germany with their two children, a baby boy named Pratyush © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_6

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and a six-year-old girl Anamika. I had come across Suresh through snowball sampling – his colleagues at work were already my participants. As we ordered Americano on a chilly winter afternoon, the first thing I noticed about him was he spoke German fluently. Not only did he place our entire order in confident German, he also appeared to be at ease at a regular German café – things that I do not observe among all my participants. While it might appear mundane, this was important for me as a researcher who already has interviewed the Indian Green holders in Germany in 2013 – where many of them demonstrated a rather disdain for learning German language and adapting to the local culture in the public spaces in Germany. With my first question: “How long have you lived here?”, I learnt that they migrated from Chennai in 2018 and arrived in Germany. They are both software engineers, although Nilima had quit her job after she gave birth to their two children. “It was a dream come true when Suresh was offered the employment contract within the EU Blue Card Scheme; we were excited to move to Munich,” Nilima exclaims. Although they moved as a typical heteronormative family with husband as the breadwinner and wife and children as dependent migrants, Nilima too started working after a year and received her Blue Card consequently. When I first met them at their two bed-room apartments in Munich, they proudly announced that their children go to German public schools in the city – unlike a few of their friends who prefer the international schools. “We believe that German education system is very strong (sic). So, we always wanted to choose the government schools in the city. Both my children enjoy learning German, and they are learning English too. Many of our friends are sending their children to international schools, they are more expensive – although we can afford the fees, we want the children to learn German as a language and go to the local schools here.” Here I stopped them and asked the obvious question – why would they insist on sending their children to German schools while their own friends and colleagues have chosen international schools? Nilima was clear in her answer, “Look, we want to live here at least for now. We have also bought a house in Gilching. In Munich city, you cannot afford. So, we bought the house in the village. We talked to a lot of people if it is okay for us to live in the village … although it is one hour train ride from

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Marienplatz … but as an Indian family, is it okay to live in Bavarian villages? We were concerned. But then when we went to see the house and everything, we found two more Indian families living in the nearby area, in the same village and we also found one family in Passing, which is close to Gilching … on the same train line. So we are planning to move there after some internal work. Why I am telling you all this because if we have to live here, we have to speak local language. So why not send our children to government schools. We bought the house because we plan to live in Germany and not move to another country. At least that is our plan … now if our luck takes us somewhere that would be not in our control (sic).” As mentioned in the previous chapter, investment in the host country is a general indicator of settlement decision, especially for the Indian middle-class people who are aspiring yet cautious with their money. So, I was interested to learn more about the journey that enabled them to arrive at this decision of settlement in Germany. This is where Suresh intervened, “Employment situation in India was not good (sic). I was working in Bangalore for ten years. My wife was working for nine years. Both in Bangalore. But then two of my friends took the Blue Card offer and migrated to Germany in 2017. We decided then to come and work here too. Initially, we were not ready to settle down here. But later, after we sent our son to Kita here, my wife also got the job, we decided to settle down in Germany. We had our second child – a daughter. Although we miss family but our parents and in-laws visit us often because it’s just one flight. So, our children are not cut off from their families. We want to give the best of both India and Germany to our children. So, we bought this house. Although the countryside is white dominated, gradually Indians are buying property in these areas – Herrsching too. So, we can build a community and live here. It is important to have an Indian community because Germans are although nice to us, but cannot be our friends. We are still outsiders for them. But I don’t want to go back to India, especially now with the pandemic. So, we thought about all this and made a decision. Hope we are proved right in the future! Hope our children will agree with us when they grow up!” Suresh and Nilima remind us how the pandemic even after almost four years since the outbreak continues to inform and dominate mobility decisions of immigrants. Zinn (2009) maintains that any decision around

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the subject of health almost always involves risk assessment. While I do not consider health as the defining premise of risk analysis but in this context, it definitely emerges as a significant category. Considering how the pandemic left many dead in India not due to the severity of the virus but due to lack of availability of oxygen cylinders in hospitals, immigrants like Suresh and Nilima would like to build a future for their children with better healthcare, among other things. Based on this conviction, they have invested their money in buying a house in a German village. This calls for separate set of uncertainty insofar as everyday racism and perception of people of colour in a white-dominated German village is concerned. In their pursuit they have also found Indians as neighbours and are hopeful that they will be able to build a community based on that. Their uncertainty is epitomized in the conflict of desire that engulfs most immigrant stories – the fear and uncertainty of having their children forget their roots and the dream of offering the children and themselves a healthy life. As we will witness through the other cases too, as a young diaspora still at the stage of formation, the Indian immigrants in Germany are negotiating through multiple levels of uncertainties and concomitant risks informing their decisions and indecisions. Some of those uncertainties are temporary but some are more lasting. For example, the pandemic has changed the way work is organized. While several consequences of the pandemic have been short lived, e.g., mobility restriction and the likes, work within the scope of formal employment has been revolutionized through the introduction of Zoom and similar online real time communication systems. Without the pandemic, work from home will not be a popular concept among both the employers and the employees. Resultantly, many employees continue to work from home and many employers continue to support and encourage this even after mobility has been regularized at large. Work from home is not just a part of the gig economy but it is now a popular way of functioning for those with full employments too. There are several challenges and benefits to work from home but we are not interested in them. What I am interested in is to demonstrate how the possibility of work from home could make immigrants’ future uncertain. In this context, it is one of my participants Sukhwinder who shared his anxieties and fears. Sukhwinder migrated to Germany in 2019 with a job seeker’s visa. His

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hometown is Chandigarh, Punjab. The reference of Punjab is relevant here because although as an Indian migrant in Germany Sukhwinder is likely to be categorized under immigrants with job seekers visa; he in fact arrived through chain migration. As he shares, “After getting the MBA degree I got a job in Chandigarh, my home town but the job was not well paid. I wanted to go to Delhi for a better job but was not getting anything suitable. In the meantime, my cousin and his friend told me about Germany is giving temporary visa to search jobs within six months. I already knew some people in Frankfurt who migrated to Germany from our neighbourhood in 1980s, I did not know them personally but my parents did so we contacted them and when I came here, I stayed with them for three months, learnt German language and got a job in a startup – my uncle in Frankfurt helped me meet a guy who was looking for an HR executive for his startup company. Since I had learnt German already, it was possible to get the job. But now sometimes I worry that because of the pandemic, it is all work from home. So, will Germany need me to live here anymore? Will my job be relevant after this pandemic?” Sukhwinder’s fear initiates an interesting discussion – will work from home make migrants redundant? If an employer in Germany is able to outsource the service of an employee remotely from across the continent through the “work from home” system, will they still invite them to migrate (i.e., within the framework of job seekers visa, Blue Card, etc.) to the host country to live and work? Several studies since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic have dealt with the subject of how the pandemic changes the economic structures and financial policies across the world (Kramer and Kramer 2020). Notwithstanding the rise of remote work as an alternative to onsite employment, labour migration including highly skilled migration is unlikely to go down. While the salient motivation of the host country to invite immigrants for highly skilled labour is to fill in labour market shortages, it is short-sighted to look at migration through the lens of a demand-supply framework. Countries like Germany have a demographic deficit with an average age of the German population being 42 (DeStatis 2020). Consequently, immigrants are not invited and accepted not just from a purely economic but societal perspective. An aging population needs to outsource the youth for the sake of social

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functioning of states. From that context, such instrumental outlook for the immigrants would only intensify societal crisis. If anything, the pandemic has been a catalyst in facilitating new migration (Datta 2020b). Nevertheless, the uncertainty that Sukhwinder and alike experienced during the pandemic and even later is based on the general perception of disposability and perpetual vulnerability of the migrants. Also, what worked for them as risk triggers (Schutz 1962; Luhmann 1995), i.e., migration motivation (in this case the pandemic) often translates into uncertainty holding them back from making futuristic decisions. As explained earlier, uncertainties also have multiple characters and some uncertainties last longer than others. Also, within broader sociological discourses, risk and uncertainty as construction of social realities (Beck 1999) are based on rationality and anxiety as binaries. Short and long-term decisions being the endgame of any risk-uncertainty discussion, for my participants navigating through structured and regularized migration system, rational choices also involved future imaginations. In several cases, these imaginations are acutely dependent on the larger migration policies of both the home and the host countries, thereby pushing the immigrants to consider familiar outcomes based on unfamiliar variables.

Immigrants and Time Fast expansion of the Indian immigrant communities in Germany can be called lifestyle migration, a conscious choice for availing better access to resources, or risk migration. The tendency to evade the authoritarian government in India is failing to deliver economic benefits for the citizens. Notwithstanding that, what is interesting to note is that while many of these immigrants would like to live in Germany in the long term, for several of them, this decision is conditioned by the possibility of bringing of their aging parents in the immigrant society. This is particularly relevant in view of the pandemic where several Indians are migrating because of the poor healthcare system in the country and choosing Germany specifically in that context (Datta 2020a, b). Consequently, these migrants are concerned about the aging parents back in India and their health

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situation. Therefore, several of them are interested in bringing their parents to Germany, if not immediately but later. From that standpoint, their decision of staying back in Germany and creating a home is partially based on the potential of organizing multigenerational households in Germany – a trend we can compare with the multigenerational Indian and Pakistani households in the United Kingdom (Werbner 2008; Bhimji 2016). Within this context, several of my participants have shared on their emotional journey and the inner conflicts of being caught between age and time, and age as time. Resultantly, time and space emerge as two key parameters for measuring uncertainty. My participant Sherry, a Malayali Christian data analyst in Frankfurt says, “During the pandemic I had to literally stay up all night to take care of my parents via WhatsApp call. Since there was no house help and they live on their own in Kerala, and nobody could go out or anything … so it was quite a scary situation. I could not go either … there is a global lockdown now what do you do! My parents were worried for me too … but they were more scared that maybe we would never meet each other … it was really stressful. So, I used to stay up all night with them, because it would be morning in India already when it was still late at night and my parents will be worried and depressed. People were dying, although I must say Kerala had done (sic) much better than other states in India, but the fear was real! I made all grocery delivery; medicine delivery calls on my parents’ behalf because they were too confused what to do how to do. … During those days I started wondering … how long would I do so, what would happen if the pandemic and lockdown last for years. … I have to sleep and get some rest too … my parents cannot live like this.” Very few situations in recent times have captured the spatio-temporal contradictions of immigrant lives like the coronavirus pandemic. While the physical distance between an immigrant and their extended families and friends back home is a popular subject of examination, rarely do we consider the complications and anxieties emerging from the real time differences in experiences between them and their people in the home country. I call this the “gap-lapse framework” in immigrant experiences. The gap-lapse framework maintains that it is not just physical distance but also temporal distance between the immigrants and those they leave

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behind that inform their decisions about their present and their future. From that standpoint, risk-uncertainty duality cannot be located within migration studies without recognizing the relevance of “time” manifested through the gap-lapse framework. Also, it is challenging to examine the transnational caregiving practices unless embedded in this gap-lapse framework. Baldassar et al. (2006) have extensively studied the caregiving practices that immigrants offer their elderly parents from across the continents. However, most of the experiences they share through their work are based on caregiving in the form of physical visits, co-living with the older generation, regular phone calls, etc. What the covid-19 pandemic brought is the compulsion to offer real-time caregiving fighting through the gap-lapse framework. This calls for an analysis distinct from the ones we are familiar with. In relation to this, Yusuf, a communication manager in Munich shares, “My mother is bedridden and there is a house help at home who takes care of her. I usually monitor everything from here. So, during the pandemic I did not face any difficulty … I mean it is already complicated with her given her health issues so the pandemic was just another episode. But what happened once the lockdown was eased in India made my life really difficult. The house help wanted to go to her home and we had to arrange a replacement. … It was fine until the new person came … now who will tell her which medicine to take … my mother cannot do all that because she is sick already. … So I actually had to give her all instructions from here no matter what I am doing whether I am at work or in a meeting or running or to the grocery. … I literally had to watch my mother from here as the new lady learnt her way through the house. Lastly what I did is I installed CCTV1 in my home … even the bedroom where my mother stays so that I can see what is happening there. In India as you would know it is not just a question of medical health for the old people, it is also about their safety … what if this new person steals something or somebody breaks in from outside. … I was quite afraid so ultimately, I got the cameras fixed.” It is noteworthy how immigrants attempt at negotiating the gap-lapse framework through the intervention of technology. Yusuf ’s case and his experiences of arriving at the decision of installing cameras to watch his  Closed-circuit television.

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mother and ensure her safety from more than five thousand kilometres across the continent are unsettling but commonplace. Caregiving, in absence of onsite and physical presence, is often outsourced by immigrants especially from the Global South to care for their parents in a transnational framework. In their work titled “Virtualizing intimacy,” Bacigalupe and Lambe (2011) grapple with the social media platforms and how they enable the migrants to offer love and affection to the elderlies. However, in this context, what we witness is a process of virtualizing exposure that violates the mother’s privacy for the sake of offering her safety. This may not be as trepid as it sounds, given that Yusuf has to depend on a stranger for caring for his bedridden mother who is basically on assisted living. Therefore, in his pursuit of choosing between the familiar and the unfamiliar notwithstanding that the familiar is a technology as against the unfamiliar who is a real person with intentions, Yusuf as an immigrant chooses technology over the caregiver. “Risk in any particular social setting is not determined objectively: in real life situations, the boundary between certitude and uncertainty is of course seldom razor-sharp, and vagueness and ambiguity tend to be the rule rather than the exception” (Boholm 2003: 168). Moreover, an assessment of risk and uncertainty is based as much on intuition as on rationality. Echoing Boholm, my submission is that risk and uncertainty provokes us to meander through three levels – the known known, the known unknown and the unknown and unknown.2 Straddling between the realm of the familiar and the unfamiliar as I raised the questions at the beginning of this chapter, it is crucial that immigrant decisions are categorized based on their level of knowledge and familiarity with the context. While there are plenty of illustrations one could draw on the known unknown and the unknown unknown, examples of the known known within immigrant uncertainties is not so common. Experiencing the pandemic at large, offering transnational caregiving services, negotiating through the gap-lapse framework and anticipating the larger policy issues of the German government regarding labour migration – all of them  In a typical Sartre-ian fashion, this theoretical framework emerged from a discussion at the workshop I organized at the University of Siegen titled “Uncertain Mobilities”. Our discussant Dr. Samuel Williams, Max Planck Society for Social Anthropology, Halle offered us this framework and I am only employing his concept (also an adaption of Sartre) in my work. 2

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could be categorized within the familiar-­unfamiliar binary. Examples of experiences emerging from familiar risk-­uncertainty could perhaps be about visiting the elderly parents in real time onsite. For example, Sherry tells me in this context, “I have to change transport three times to reach my village in Kerala, from Frankfurt, it’s three times changes, two times in plane then bus. Several times I have thought about asking my parents to visit me in Germany but I feel unsure if they will be able to travel through so many transports (sic) so I usually do the travelling and visit them. I do not want to put them to unnecessary risk.” While for Sherry, familiar risk of her traveling to meet her parents (also a part of transnational caregiving as Bacigalupe and Lambe 2011 maintain) is to cut down on unfamiliar uncertainties that her parents may have to experience in the wake they travel transnationally to meet her in Germany, lack of certitude as a thrust for understanding calculated risk also involves other components. A relevant subject here is trust (Williams and Baláž 2012). Through their work they ask how trust is located in the framework of risk assessment. Along with imagination, rationality and intuition, trust emerges as a defining premise for examining how risk and uncertainties are consumed by the immigrants. For example, Yusuf could not trust the stranger lady house help alone with his mother so he installed the CCTV at his home in India. While the CCTV will ensure that Yusuf witnesses in real time what his mother is doing or how she is being treated by the house help, at the same time, he is watching the house help with and without her knowledge. Apart from trust, the subject of privacy looms large in this context because one has to consider the trust issue of the house help now that there is a CCTV in the house. When asked, Yusuf confirmed that he had already informed the Help about installing the CCTV and she gave her consent, it still remains a contested terrain as to how must we analyse the consequences of immigration risk taking and uncertainty negotiations that impact those back home.

7 Immigrants as Biocitizens

This is an autoethnographic chapter based on my field work as an Indian immigrant in Germany, researching on the Indian immigrants in Germany. Through the primary data collected during the first and second phase of vaccination against coronavirus in Germany, I conclude that although vaccine is envisaged to be a health or medical necessity, for immigrants from the Global South arriving in the Northern richer countries, e.g., Germany, it is a civic necessity, even at the cost of potential health hazards. This not only contradicts the public health policy of the German government, it also indicates that migrant bodies, across their status in the German host society, are disposable.

The Process Ellis et al. (2011) emphasizes on the process of autoethnography as much as the results. Autoethnography as a method (Chang 2016) is a contested terrain. However, the latest preoccupation of migration studies with reflexivity lends the much-needed support to self as a method (Biao and Qi Wu 2022). Reflexivity in migration studies (Nowicka and Ryan 2015) upholds the significance of interpretive narration and description of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_7

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events locating the researcher as the witness. Consequently, to avoid eurocentrism and decolonize migration studies, reflexivity has emerged as an appropriate research method. There are several ways to present the narratives resulting from autoethnography. In this book, I have made the use of two – my personal journal entries and the interviews and conversations I had with my participants. As a process driven method, I will start my narration with the first experience I had as an Indian immigrant trying to access information regarding vaccination after returning to Germany as the global lockdown eased. While being stuck in India as the global lockdown made flying impossible, I was inoculated with an “Indian vaccine”  – as the doctors in Germany would come to call it – Covaxin. I completed the full course meaning I was vaccinated twice to ensure comparative immunity from the virus and compliance with international travel rules. While there could be a whole separate debate on how the vaccine may or may not be an appropriate solution to a pandemic, sitting at the so-called third world with sketchy healthcare infrastructure at best and the fear of dying without oxygen masks at worst, there was little scope for my critical thinking self to outperform my ordinary citizen self – scared, vulnerable and helpless. It is significant to talk about “feelings” (Bagley 2008) in this context because while some of my participants back in Germany were actually contemplating if the vaccine is necessary for their bodies at all, my preoccupation and inoculation decisions were completely based on a motivation of survival. Consequently, when I returned to Germany, the readjustment with reference to the virus, the pandemic protocols and the vaccine obligations were more complicated than I anticipated. The re-­ entry was smooth, since I was traveling with a covid-negative certificate but the complication started soon after. By this time, I was back on the field – albeit digitally. As I was conversing with Nandita, my participant from Cologne-Bonn area, a non-IT engineer living in a small town with her husband, I realized the biggest vaccine-related challenge for me as a migrant was then to confirm my status, or more precisely the status of my body with regard to inoculation rules of the German government. Nandita asked me, “Are you vaccinated with a vaccine recognized here?” I was not. “You must find out what happens then. I think you are required to take another round of vaccines…”

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Soon came the order from the German government that one cannot board any public transport within the country without being fully vaccinated. That included me because I was not vaccinated with one that was recognized within Germany. Therefore, although my body knew that it was vaccinated, the government did not – this dichotomy between the status of a human body and civic expectations and obligations rendered my mobility problematic (Jasanoff 2005). The irony also was that while my unvaccinated body (as per the rules in Germany) was allowed to migrate from India to Germany, it was now no longer allowed to remain mobile. Located within the context of the immobility of the mobile, I found myself in an interesting spot. My first instinct was to find more information on the vaccine related protocols people in my situation must follow. I started the process at three levels: first, I started reading materials on the official site of the Robert Koch Stiftung (RKI) – the institute officially responsible for pandemic related guidelines in Germany including sharing information about vaccines, international travel rules and protocols for entering and living in Germany, especially for the migrants; second, I started posting my questions to the Facebook groups of migrants in Germany at large and Indian migrants in Germany in particular, in the hope that I will find more people in similar situations and perhaps be able to pull in all information sources; and third, in absence of a Hausartz,1 I started reaching out to my doctor friends in Germany; simultaneously, I called my family doctor back in India whom I have known for many years and trust. My first source disappointed me as there was little information at RKI website for people like me. The second source was far more useful – the Facebook groups of migrants, Indians and otherwise. It is there that I learnt that Janssen (the single vaccine counted as a full shot) from Johnson and Johnson was recognized in Germany and several people in my situation are actually opting for it. Incidentally, one of my existing participants Pratyush was also one of them. By this time, I was already aware that this entire experience was too significant from the standpoint  Hausartz in Germany is close to what commonly is known as a family doctor – your go-to doctor, the first medical practitioner you report to and who recommends you to specialists. Until then, I did not have a Hausartz and the pandemic was not the best time to find one. 1

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of pandemic-mobility interface to let go off. So, I reached out to Pratyush for a conversation  – both as a researcher and a participant (Eide and Kahn 2008; Probst 2016). Since Pratyush was already a participant and this time I was meeting him with a personal concern along with a research question, our conversation was more structured and focused than usual. On a rainy December afternoon as we met at the university lobby (since neither of us would be allowed to enter the university cafeteria without a proof of vaccination), I ask Pratyush, “So you came walking?” Pratyush lives about two and a half kilometres from the meeting spot. “What to do! I started about an hour ago so that there’s time. It’s raining too na. … I didn’t want to be late for the meeting. … I am just waiting to get this vaccination then I can again board the tram, it’s a nightmare!” Pratyush, like me, was also inoculated with Covaxin and now categorized by the German government as the unvaccinated. As I proceed to learn his plan of action, Pratyush shares, “I will get Janssen. Then I am vaccinated according to the rule here and it’s only one vaccine. So, it’s one vaccine less than if I take Pfizer.” He went to add that this is what several others are doing too, although he did not have the option to ask a doctor as such, but “I hear that at the vaccination centre there will be doctors who can guide you,” Pratyush reassures. Although it appeared to be a reasonable solution to the logjam, I nevertheless preferred talking to a doctor. This brings me to the third source, i.e., my doctor friends in Germany. Contrary to my expectations, I did not learn much from them because they had no information regarding Covaxin, since it was not administered within the European Union. On the other hand, my family doctor in India had already recommended me against Pfizer – he knew that I had taken two shots of Covaxin already. Consequently, the Facebook groups and my participants being the only source of information, I desperately reached out to the doctor in my neighbourhood. I shared my health history, existing inoculation document (Covaxin) with Dr. Rainsieck and explained my concerns over hyper-vaccination, my main concern being: is it safe for me to take another set of vaccines since I just got fully vaccinated less than six months ago; and which vaccine will be compatible with Covaxin, as different vaccine combinations go inside my body? After giving me a patient hearing, to my utter disbelief,

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he said, “I don’t know … your vaccine is a black box!” The imagery was so befitting and well-timed, that for a moment I had no reaction. But soon enough I realized that this conversation will go nowhere and thanked him for his time and left his cabin. Till date I do not know if it was the abrupt end to our meeting or an expression of disappointment my face could not hide, Dr. Rainsieck felt the need to explain himself further. “See the problem is I have vaccines. I have Pfizer and I can give you a shot right now … but if you ask me about the vaccine you already have and what happens if the Indian vaccine and Moderna are inside a human body … all these research works are not done yet (sic) so we do not know the results of all such experiments. That’s why I said it’s a black box because nobody knows what happens when these vaccines are combined.” By this time, I sincerely hoped he would not repeat the word “black box” given the graphic impression it already had on me. But I still had a question, “Do you think Janssen could be a wise alternative to Pfizer? Since it’s only one shot?” His reply changed my mind about the black box metaphor because now I wished he repeated that word instead of saying what he did, “The German government does not recommend Jannsen. Research reports say that it could cause blood clot in the brain.” “But the German government is still recognizing Janssen as a vaccine, isn’t it?” I could sense I was sounding nervous. “Yes, but it’s not recommended.” I gathered Dr. Rainsieck had nothing more to add so I thanked him and left. During this period, a few Indian migrant’s groups also started posting comments on how they were successful in digitizing their covid certificates in Germany, including those with Covaxin. They confidently claimed that several drug stores in Cologne are digitizing Covaxin certificates and before any further attempts at another round of inoculation, one must try this option. Partly for the sake of research and party due to personal desperation, I tried my luck at about seven to ten drug stores in different parts of Cologne and returned home with no success. Realizing that I could not continue like that without availing any public transport, frequenting eateries and most importantly meeting and conversing with my participants to continue my research, I landed at the vaccination centre, filled in the paperwork, went inside the vaccination cabin as my turn came and told the doctor that I wanted to get

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vaccinated with Jannsen. Like Dr. Rainsieck, this doctor too declared that Janssen could cause blood clot in the head, although, he added, chances were fairly low. I considered the possibility of leaving the vaccination centre for a moment but immediately realized that I will have to come back here as my choices were limited. Consequently, with a partly cathartic and partly apprehensive mind, I hopped on to the elevated bench and rolled my sleeves up  – prepared for the shot and the consequences. I remember the next few days were full of anticipation although I experienced nothing apart from the usual fever and heaviness on the left arm. I also remember I phoned Pratyush to learn what happened to him and the others. As I regained my mobility eligibility back after two weeks since the inoculation and started meeting my participants, Sharad, an  electronics graduate in Cologne, informed, “I spoke with my local doctor in Delhi. He was also confused but you know … you trust your own people in such situations … isn’t it? But it was difficult for him to help me here … so what to do … I also took (sic) Jannsen. Thank God it’s available here … how many vaccines can we take! They keep changing rules every few months. The virus keeps spreading and the governments keep changing their rules. In the middle of all this, ordinary people like us are struggling.”

The Problem The moot point of presenting the subject of vaccine dichotomy of migrants as autoethnography is to rest the larger discussion within the framework of reflexivity. As a researcher in an immigrant body, my political location allows, in fact insists that such examinations happen in the light of public health sovereignty, transnational health practices and immigrant bodies as sites of civic duties. The pandemic, while on the one hand, upscaled borders through a global lockdown, the vaccine regime initiated a new and invisible border, territorializing bodies and categorizing them between the safe bodies and the unsafe bodies (Maguire et al. 2018). As a result, migrants, including those who could cross international borders, find themselves immobile in the wake of shifting rules of

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the state as the virus spreads. Also, different countries set different rules and protocols for combatting the virus. In absence of any universal rule, migrants find them caught at the cusp of mobility uncertainties. Moreover, vaccine recognition as a process and a policy rest on the political economy of the pandemic, meaning which vaccine is recognized by which country is not decided upon a scientific merit alone, but depends on the domination of the big pharma (Okereke 2021). Consequently, while Pfizer for example has a wider reach than others, for a migrant in need of an obligatory vaccination on the one hand and information deficit on inoculation consequences on the other, it remains unclear if Pfizer’s popularity is due to scientific efficiency or marketing efficiency. Here, Foucault’s biopower submits that under such circumstances as individuals, immigrants have little agency in denying vaccination although on principle, there is no vaccine obligation imposed by the state. Instead of a policy imposition, the state chooses structural imposition, making it almost impossible for human bodies to exercise free and unhindered mobility. At such occasions, human bodies as the site of contagious diseases emerge as a public threat and the state uses its sovereignty in the name of restoration of public health. It is during these moments that the vaccine as an antidote to the virus transforms from health-­ necessity to a civic-necessity. Already fully vaccinated with Covaxin in India, structurally I was compelled to get inoculated all over again because in the eyes of the German government I was unvaccinated. The situation unfolded almost like a dark comedy of possible error where migrant bodies are the sites of experiments to know more about, what we discussed in the previous chapter, the unknown unknown. So, while the body knows that it is vaccinated, the state that has allowed the body to cross international border and enter its territory dismisses that information and structurally imposes a vaccine mandate on that immigrant body. The location and experience of an immigrant is relevant here as this dilemma specifically arises due to a differential level of vaccine recognition across the world. Also, there is a sense of disposability attached to this entire experience insofar as migrant bodies are concerned. Having said that, the situation during the coronavirus pandemic is not comparable with that of the Spanish flu or any other recent pandemics

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since never in the history of human civilization were the migrants so highly mobile nor was a vaccine so quickly available (Franchini et  al. 2020). As a result, the knowledge and memory gathered through the coronavirus pandemic cannot be referred back to the knowledge we acquired during the past pandemic specifically with reference to these two aspects. Echoing Foucault and through the invocation of reflexivity, my submission is that the coronavirus pandemic turned immigrants as biocitizens enforcing a governmentality that renders the migrant bodies problematic, unless they fulfil all obligations related to vaccination, despite little clarity. Lack of clarity as an outcome of inoculation experience is not in sync with the otherwise meticulously planned German system. From that standpoint, immigrants as biocitizens emerge as a by-­ product of the biopower exercised by the state. Resultantly, vaccination for immigrants remain as much a civic necessity as it is a health obligation. Also, lack of communication between the countries of emigration and immigration poses a threat to immigrant bodies and the potential health hazards. Lack of communication is emphasized through the metaphor of the “black box” that came in the form of a formal response from a doctor when asked about the potential health implications of coupling Covaxin with another vaccine. This “black boxing” paves the way for absence of information available both at the RKI website and with doctors regarding vaccines and their implications administered outside the EU.  Perhaps such information sharing is more efficient today, given the expansion of the internet. Moreover, it is also the obligation of the countries that send and receive immigrants to recognize or at least be aware of the vaccines they are administering on the people. The element of disposability lies in this casual approach of the home and the host countries – as if the consequences of unplanned and ill-panned inoculation must rest squarely on the immigrants alone. As a matter of fact, effective communication of pandemic protocols lies  at the centre of efficient tackling of the pandemic. While, as shared by my participants, the German government has been explicit and meticulous about the dissemination of pandemic related information at large, the data gathered through autoethnography deflects from that position. However, communication during the pandemic continues to remain a key factor in risk management (Ratzan et al. 2020).

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This lack of communication and information sharing between the home and host countries, and between the host country and the immigrants impacts the transnational healthcare practices of the Indian immigrants in Germany today. Specifically, those who migrated in the recent years and still have strong family ties (parents, siblings, friends) back in India, trust their family doctors there, more than their Hausartz in Germany. This is more relevant and pronounced in the wake of medical uncertainties where they need a second opinion and clarity. In fact, trust emerges as a crucial parameter for vaccine decisions, including several other health-related decisions. While the experiences narrated in this chapter do not offer enough information so that a phenomenon can be made out of this, the location of trust in transnational healthcare practice could be an interesting subject for future.

8 Imagining Tomorrow

Prospects and Challenges The Indian immigrant communities in Germany dominated by the young Indians is an emerging diaspora. Consequently, the immigrant experiences, challenges, achievements, motivations and failures are in a state of perpetual evolution. Several aspects of these communities including their interactions within the diaspora in Germany are still in formative stages. For example, caste-based discrimination within the Indian diaspora in the US is a big challenge but caste is yet to be institutionalized among the Indians in Germany. There are primarily two reasons behind that: Indians in Germany are relatively smaller in number in comparison to the US, for example, and they are yet to be in the positions of decision making within companies or be the key employer in the German labour market like in the US. However, in the wake that the immigrant communities expand in the next decade or so, it is likely that the German government will have to make policies to combat caste-based discrimination within German companies. While the Blue Card offers a popular framework for family migration, the German government is also inviting more students from India to pursue higher education from German universities. There are several © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3_8

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challenges to this, apparently smooth framework of highly skilled migration from India to Germany is encouraged by the German government for filling in the labour shortage in certain sectors. Some of these challenges can be resolved through policy shifts while some require structural changes. One of the most compelling challenges is to retain those who arrive. As highly skilled immigrants, mostly IT and non-IT engineers are in demand in the EU and other countries including Canada, USA, Japan, Australia and Singapore; these immigrants have high mobility potential. For some, Germany is a second migration destination, meaning that they already migrated to another country from India a few years ago and now are arriving in Germany from the third country. Therefore, the possibility of them emigrating from Germany to another country is immediate, especially because the immigrants are relatively young – the average age group being below 45. The major policy shift that Germany needs to make in order to attract more Indian white-collar migrants not just to arrive but stay in the home country is by offering a stable future. As much polemical as this could sound, such stability could be ensured by the German government by fast-tracking permanent residency and citizenship for these immigrants. The Indians immigrating to Germany through the Blue Card are arriving within the framework of family migration, along with their spouses and small children. Also, immigrants who are arriving alone are eager to avail the scopes of this family friendly visa and imagine a possible future in Germany (e.g., immediate employment eligibility of the spouse, financial assistance for childcare, free public education, etc.). In view of the trends of immigration, Germany could continue to remain a popular point of entry for the Indians. However, it is too early to confirm if it remains only a popular point for entering the European Union or emerges as a popular destination for homing. For example, white collar migrants with a global demand are likely to find it demotivating to learn the German language. From that context, English speaking countries could pose threat to Germany as an immigrant society. To emerge as an immigrant society, Germany has to reconsider linguistic nationalism. As a matter of fact, debates have started already at the governmental and policy level if Germany must introduce English as the second official language. In view of Germany’s conflicting relationship with the English since the Second

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World War, such policy shifts would witness major resistance from the German society. There are several concerns that Germany must still address if it intends to continue remaining an attractive choice for the Indians leaving the home country. Nina Glick Schiller once told me, during her residency at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, that migrants always say that they will return to their home countries and, eventually, they stay back in the country of immigration often citing that now their children will not leave so they will not either (Fouron and Glick Schiller 2001). Gmelch (1980) in similar fashion believes that return migration as a choice of mobility eternally looms large on white collar migrants, mostly because the home country is not a point of no return for the majority of the highly skilled immigrants. On the contrary, refugees are unlikely to return at will, unless deported. What about those who are not officially counted as refugees but have emigrated from India to escape political hostility, shrinking space for free speech, gender-based violence and an irresponsible government running the country? What are they counted as? These questions are rhetorical and posed only to demonstrate that hairline categorization of people into migrants and refugees, into regular migrants and irregular migrants, into legal and illegal immigrants are often banal and useless. This is, however, not to trivialize, underwrite or dilute the precarity of the refugees and other migrants forced to move without papers. This is but to argue that migration pathways that apparently appear regular, stable and risk-free are often not as smooth. Migration motivations are complicated, multiple and intricate, so are migrant categories – often overlapping and more mutually inclusive than official documents would like us to believe. The next policy shift that the German government could consider is to offer a reliable, stable and futuristic visa rule for the parents of the Indian immigrants. While the EU Blue Card is a family visa, the definition of family for most of the Indians is different from what the Blue Card offers. The Blue Card allows the spouse and children of the Blue Card holder to enter, work and live in Germany. It does not allow the immigrants’ parents unconditional entry to Germany. However, because most of these immigrants have aging parents back in India for whom they are the primary care givers, as witnessed previously in this book, the possibility of

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bringing their parents to Germany under a long-term multiple entry visa remains a key factor for them to make a decision about staying in Germany in future or moving to a country that offers this opportunity. Recently, some of my participants even started a petition signing campaign at change.org to push the German government for policy changes in this regard. Therefore, transnational caregiving is a crucial factor for the Indians to make a decision about their future in Germany or return to India. To further facilitate the immigration of Indians to Germany, the German labour ministry proposed to introduce an opportunity card to invite Indians to migrate to Germany even without an employment contract. This opportunity card or “Chancenkarte” is targeted primarily towards the IT professionals and others with technical skills. In December 2022, German-Indian Migration and Mobility Agreement was signed between the two countries to facilitate the entry of more Indians to Germany. Although the Chancenkarte is claimed to hold promise, the migration policy makers in Germany do not consider the provisions to be useful. In view of the success of the EU Blue Card among the Indians, it continues to be the primary target population for Germany although the labour minister Hubertus Heil is interested in roping in a few African countries too. The Chancenkarte is based on four criteria: “a foreign degree, professional experience of at least three years, language skills or a previous stay in Germany and, fourthly, an age of less than 35 years.”1 Anyone meeting three out of these four criteria is eligible to receive the Chancenkarte. At the face of it, the Chancenkarte has several loopholes and policy makers and migration scholars are already critical of its success. Their main argument is that Germany needs to simplify its bureaucracy for this opportunity card to be useful for the potential immigrants. Also, the Chancenkarte excludes those who cannot demonstrate enough financial resources for self-sustenance in Germany until they get an employment. Unlike the Blue Card that offers an actual employment contract, the Chancenkarte offers an opportunity to find employment in Germany.  https://www.dw.com/de/deutschland-soll-eine-green-card-bekommen/a-63013437.

1

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There are mainly two questions related to this new opportunity card. Firstly, despite the success of the EU Blue Card that continues to bring an increasing number of Indians to Germany, why does Germany need a separate opportunity card to attract the same target immigrant population? Is it because despite being a popular port of entry to the European Union, Germany is not a popular “homing” destination within the EU and outside? Secondly, why must a potential immigrant prefer a Chancenkarte over a job seeker’s visa? Can the Chancenkarte actually simplify German bureaucracy? It is highly premature to answer these questions but crucial to raise them. As an emerging diaspora, the Indian immigrant communities in Germany still needs time to evolve in character. This process also goes hand-in-hand with the way the German government and the German society interact with them. This brings us to a more structural concern. Racism in Germany is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to address. For example, the Muslim women immigrants from India shared that they do not feel threatened in Germany because of their religion unlike in India. That is one of their biggest motivations of immigration and decisions to stay in the host country. However, for a Muslim woman immigrant wearing Hijab in public, the experience is different. Abdelkader (2017) has written about European Islamophobia where Hijab is a site of conflict, identity, community affiliation, exclusion and racism. Consequently, the experiences of my participants and the women wearing Hijab in public spaces are different. Having said that, structural racism in German everyday lives goes deeper than the country with a Nazi past would like us to believe. Therefore, as the number and visibility of non-white white-collar immigrants, mostly Indians till date, increases, the AFD (Alternative for Germany) popularly known as the neo-Nazis will continue receiving more votes in elections. From that standpoint, another crucial question one must ask is: can Germany resolve its inherent crisis of racism? Given its need for highly skilled labour from outside the European Union, can the German government introduce more effective awareness starting from school education to address everyday racism in Germany? In this regard, another interesting observation comes from the way the Federal Statistical Office (DeStatis) records “migration background” (Will 2020) in micro-census.

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Under such categorization, a German citizen with a non-German background is categorized separately from a German citizen with no migration background. While both are third generation Germans, born and raised in Germany and hold German passports, they are officially counted as different. There has been several critique to this approach and respond to that, the DeStatis has recently introduced the term “immigrants and their descendants.”2 However, it still does not indicate substantial reform in the approach of the DeStatis towards immigrants as such, as it refuses to drop migration background as a category for recording the demography in Germany.3 From the context of the political economy of migration, I consider this to be a racist approach and the fundamental problem to the way the German government looks at its people and bifurcates them into citizens with migration background and those with no migration background. This not only makes the micro-census a racist discourse and practice, it also complicates policy reforms at several levels. In addition, this sentiment of othering that starts with numbers translate into symbolic, subtle and often overt racism against the people of colour. Under such circumstances, it will be interesting to observe and examine how the Indian immigrants continue to grow in number and in the wake the second generation of highly skilled Indians grow up to a voting age, how they are officially counted and categorized in German census data in the long run.

 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-­ Integration/Methoden/Erlauterungen/einwanderungsgeschichte-hintergrundpapier.html. 3  https://mediendienst-integration.de/artikel/kein-abschied-vom-migrationshintergrund.html. 2

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Index1

A

Abdelkader, E., 30, 83 Altbau, 51 Alternative for Germany (AFD), 83 Anti-minority activities, 6 policies, 19 sentiments, x, 8 Anxieties, 62–65 Authoritarian regimes, x, 13, 43, 64 political targeting of, xii Autoethnography, xii, 22, 69, 70, 74 B

Bacigalupe, G., 67 Baldassar, L., 66 Bangladeshi(s)

Bengalis, 56 (see also Bengalis) in Brick Lane London, 49 migrants, 56 Bastia, 42 Bengalis, 55 Durga pujo, 55–56 Hindu, 56 Berlin, 9, 10, 26–28, 30–31, 35, 39–40, 42–44, 46, 49–53 Berlin Wall, 52 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 4 Bharat Mata, 15 Bhimji, Fazila, 18 Biopower, 76 Blue Card Holders, vii–xi, 23, 25–26, 35, 48–49, 52, 59–61, 63, 79–82 in Berlin, 26

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Datta, Stories of the Indian Immigrant Communities in Germany, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40147-3

99

100 Index

Boholm, Åsa, 67 Bourdieu, P., 47 “Bovine” as metaphor, 21 Boyd, M., 41 C

Cairns, K., 38 Calculated risk, 59, 68 Caregiving, 66–68 Caste, 21, 56, 57 based discrimination, 79 in Indian diaspora, 79 CCTV, 68 Chancenkarte, xiii, 23, 82–83 Change.org, 82 Citizenship, 3–5 fast-tracking of, 80 for immigrants, 80 Indians giving up, 5 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 11n5 Collective hatred, 15 imaginations, 44 Communal unrest, 7 Conflicted relationship, 54 Covid-19/ coronavirus pandemic, 2, 6, 9–10, 12, 13, 33, 63, 66, 69, 75, 76 and government claims, 27 immunization against (see Vaccines) and migrants as biocitizens, 76 oxygen cylinders crisis, 8, 62 second wave, 6–8, 10 Cow-dom, 18 Cows, xii, 15–16, 18, 21

killing Muslims carrying meat, 5 safer than humans, 15, 18, 21 Creative expression, 15, 39, 46 freedom, 42 suicide, 39 Critical thinking, 21, 44, 70 Culinary othering, 56 practice, 47, 54 See also Food Cultural insider, xi–xii, 22 D

Datta, Ayona, 33 Death threat, 40 Democracy, 14, 17–19, 21, 24 flawed, 17 Destination country, viii Diaspora, 21, 47, 54–57, 59, 79, 83 Indian, xii, 47, 54, 56–57, 79 religious disparities, 56 Dichotomy, 15, 53, 71 of immigrant homemaking, 53 Discrimination, 11, 19, 40–41 “Discrimination bargain,” 40–42, 45, 46 Dissents, 11n5, 19, 21 criminalization of, 44 Divisive politics, 18 Domestic conflicts, 23 Double life, 46 E

Economic precarity, x Economist Intelligence Unit, 17 Education, 3, 7, 12, 18, 20, 22, 26

 Index 

higher, viii–x, 18, 22, 35, 43, 79 public, 7 Ellis, C., 69 Emigration, vii–viii, x, xii, 1–4, 7–8, 10, 12–14, 17, 18, 21, 23–24, 76, 80 motivations for, x, xii, 1–2, 8, 18, 21 reasons for, 3 Employment, ix, 12, 18, 22, 23, 23n5, 62, 82 generation, 7 pathways, 18 stability, 7 status, 6 English language programs, x Ethnography, 2, 38 European Union, viii, 23, 72, 80, 83 Blue Card, ix–x, 25–26, 61, 81–83 Exclusion, 56, 83 Exit sentiment, x, 18 F

Facebook, Bengalis in Germany, 56 Indian groups on, 52 Federal Office of Migration and Refugees (BAMF), 13 Fellowship, 17, 20, 23 Feminine mystique, 37 Feminist ethnography, 38 networks, 45 solidarities, 44–45 Film banning, 16–17, 39, 41 Food culture, 54, 56 homing through, 56

101

meat-eating practices, 55 as political practice, 55 politics, xii Foucault, M., 34, 75–76 Frankfurt, 2, 26, 52, 63, 65, 68 Freedom, xii, 7, 19, 28, 29, 32, 35, 38, 40, 43, 46 movements, 34 Freedom of expression, 7, 38, 43 Free speech, lack of, 19–21, 24, 43, 81 G

Gap-lapse framework, 65–68 Gay, 30, 45 white, 45–46 Gender, 21, 26, 28, 29, 33, 35, 41, 46, 47 politics of, 45 relations, 42 Gender-based mobility restrictions of women, 32 violence, x, 81 Gendering, 25, 27, 32, 33 German-Indian Migration and Mobility Agreement, 82 Germany arriving in, xi–xii, 25, 80 as home to refugees, 13 Indian Muslims in, 7, 11, 19, 56 Indians in, vii–ix, xi–xii, 27, 47, 54, 56, 57, 79–80 public spaces, xi, 48 Ghosh, Jayati, 6–7 Girls, 33, 37 Global South, 67, 69 Green card holders, 48–49 Green Card Scheme, German, viii, xi, 48

102 Index H

Hausartz, 71, 71n1, 77 Healthcare facilities, 6–7, 10 infrastructure, x, 7, 8, 70 privatization of, 9, 10 public, 9–12, 75 system, 7, 64 Health insurance, 57 Heil, Hubertus, 82 Heteronormative, 26, 45 family, 60 framework, 41 gender roles, 45 model, Bastia and, 42 Heteronormativity, 42 Heterosexuality, 34, 42, 59 Higher education, see Education Highly skilled labour, viii, 25, 63, 83 Hindus, 3, 7, 8, 11, 19, 54, 56 festivals, 56 Hindutva, 6–7, 16 Home country, 12, 14, 21, 23–24, 35, 43–44, 48, 56, 57, 59, 65, 80–81 Homing practices, xii, 47, 51, 53–54, 56–57, 80, 83 Homosexuality, 39–42, 45 See also Gay: LGBTQ; Queer; Transgender project Hospitalization, 8–10, 12 Host countries, xi, 35, 40, 44–45, 57, 61, 63–64, 76, 77, 83 Hostile, 6, 14, 41 House help, 65, 68 Housing experiences, 51 hunting, 51, 52 practices, 47–57

situation, 52 Housing sector, privatization of, 50 I

Immigrants biocitizenship of, 7, 76 experiences, xi–xii, 47, 65, 79 highly-skilled Indian, 25 homosexual woman, 38, 39 Indian, xi–xiii, 21, 48, 57, 62, 64, 69–70, 77, 79, 81–83 Indian white-collar, 51 making home (see Housing) non-male, 28, 35 Immigration, ix–x, 1, 3, 8, 9, 18, 21, 23–24, 32, 34–35, 39–41, 80, 83 female-specific experience, 42 Germany as destination, 8, 10, 25 of highly skilled, 27 of Indians, viii, 82 motivations for, x, 1, 8–12, 21, 59 pathway, ix Immobility, 30, 32–33, 35, 71 (Im)mobilizing migration for non-male actors, 32–35 Indian Christians, 56 citizenship, giving up off, 3 culture, 39 festivals, 56 green card holders, 48, 60 and Pakistan border control, 6 seeking refugee, 17 techies, 48 Infrastructural support, 43 Intellectuals, 16 in jail, 16

 Index 

vulnerability of, 44 Intolerance, 54–55 politics of, 56 for smell, 55 Investments, 57, 61 Invisible borders, xi, 33, 74 Islamic festivals, 56 name, 6, 20 Islamophobia, 30, 83 J

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), 19 K

Kapsner, L., 8 Kashmir “atrocity of Indian Army,” 20 Muslims, 20 Kerala, nurses from, viii, 48, 52 Khalistan Movement, viii Kil, Wolfgang, 49 Kirkegaard, 21 Kurdish communities, 56 L

Labour shortage, ix, 18, 63, 80 Lambe, S., 67 Lesbians, 37, 38, 40, 45 brown migrant, 45 women as, 37 See also Gay LGBTQ, 26 Lockdown, 8–12, 31, 32, 65, 66, 70, 74

103

global, 5, 30, 65 Loitering, 33, 35 M

Mahakumbh Mela, 6 Mandir masjid hamla, 3 Migrants, vii–x, 21, 25–26, 28, 56–57, 60, 63–67, 70–71, 74–76, 80–81 housing choices, 49 non-male actors as, xii, 25–26, 29, 32–35, 38, 45 Migration, 79–80 as calculated risk, 59, 68 cross border, 43 decision, 25, 59 family, 79–80 from India, viii, 17, 18, 71, 80 lifestyle, 64 motivation for, xi, 12, 17, 21, 25, 32, 41, 42, 59, 64 studies, 4, 25, 41, 43, 66, 69 “Migration background,” 83, 84 Migratisation, 40 Minorities, numerical, 19, 24 See also Religious Mitte, Althaus in, 50 Mobility/mobilities, xii, 28–30, 32–35, 41, 62, 71, 81 eligibility, 74 freedom of, xii, 28, 29, 32, 34–35 physical, 28, 29, 35 restrictions, 32–34, 62 uncertainties, xii, 59, 67, 75 Mohanty, Chandra, 45 Moral policing, 33 See also Mandir masjid hamla

104 Index

Muslims, 5–8, 11, 19, 21, 27–30, 54, 56 doctor, 5–6 girls, 29–30 as outcaste in India, 11 woman immigrants wearing Hijab, 83 women, 20, 28 N

Nationalism linguistic, 80 methodological, 47, 53–54 Nation-state, 47 Neo-Nazis, see Alternative for Germany (AFD) Networks, 16n1, 44–45 See also Feminist; Solidarity networks Neubau, 49–51 Non-white(s) communities, 51 immigrants, 51 white-collar immigrants, 83 North Rhine Westphalia, 52 O

Opportunity card, see Chancenkarte Othering, 51, 54–56, 84 choice-based system of, 41 of Muslims, every day, 28 within diaspora, 55 P

Padhke, Shilpa, 33 Pakistanis in Berlin Spandau, 49

Palriwalah, 42 Pandemic, vii–viii, 1–12, 28, 30–33, 38, 61–66, 70, 71n1, 72, 74–76 mobility interface, 72 trauma, x uncertainties, xii, 35, 59–68, 75, 77 Pathways, x, 17–18, 22 employment, 18 shadow, 18, 21–24, 43 Patnaik, Prabhat, 6 Patriarchal bargain, 34 domination of male gaze, 34 Patriarchy, xii, 28, 33, 35 Permanent residency, 80 See also Housing Piketty, Thomas, 6 Piracha, M., 57 Pogrom, 15 See also Riot in 2020 Polarization, 2–4, 18, 19 Political agenda, 9 disturbance, x freedom, 43 manipulation, 15 polarization, 3, 13, 19, 54 refuge, xii, 13, 23 totemism, 15 unfreedom, 43–44 Population, 7, 83 Public spaces, 29, 33–34, 60, 83 fast-shrinking, 19 male-dominated, 34 Punjabis, viii, 21 See also Sikhs

 Index  Q

Queer, 30, 35, 39 book exchange community, 38 existence, 45 girl, xii, 35 immigrant, 45 of India in Germany, 41 migration, 35, 45, 46 mobility restrictions on, 31 people migrating, 35 R

Racism, x, 26, 40–41, 46, 50, 83 everyday, xii, 50, 51, 62 structural racism, x, 83 symbolic, 50–51 Refugee(s), 13–14, 18, 22, 49, 81 applications, 23–24 Religious bigotry, 21 fundamentalism, 18 minorities, 19 tension, xii Residency, fast-tracking permanent, 80 See also Citizenship Return migration, 27, 57, 81 motivations for, 41 Riot in 2020, 5 Risk assessment, 62, 68 Risk-uncertainty duality, 66 Robert Koch Stiftung (RKI), 71, 76 S

Safety everyday, 29, 35

105

protocols, 9 Schatzki, T., 54 Schiller, Nina Glick, 47, 53, 81 Scholars at Risk (SAR), 16–17, 23 See also Intellectuals Scholarship, 17, 20, 27–28, 39–40 Section 377, 41 Self-exclusion, forced, 48 Settlement decision, 61 motivations of, 41 Sexism, 40 Sexuality, 38, 40, 41, 46 freedom of, 40 Shachar, Ayelet, xi, 32–34 Shaheen Bagh, 11 Shared apartments, see Housing; Wg-gesucht Sikhs, viii, 48, 49, 52, 52n2 in Hesse region, 52 immigrants, 48 migrants, 52 in South Hall, 49 Silver, Hilary, 49 Skilled immigrants, xi, 80, 81 migrants, 21 white-collar immigrants, ix Socio-political support system, absence of, see Political, unfreedom Solidarity networks, 44–45 Stereotype, 30, 56 Students, x–xii, 21, 42, 48, 52, 79 in Giessen, 55 Indian, viii–x

106 Index T

Tablighi Jamaat, 11, 27n4 Threat calls, 16 See also Violence, target of Transcultural practices, 48 Transgendered project, 52 See also LGBTQ Translocal, 54 Transnational, caregiving practices, 66, 68, 82 immigration, 47 Transnationalism, 54 underwriting, 56 Turkish, 56 U

Uberoi, P., 33, 42 Ukrainian refugees, 13 Uncertainties, xii, 35, 57, 59, 62, 64, 67–68 Unfreedom, 43–44, 46

Vadean, F., 57 Vegetarianism, 16, 55 forced, 55 Violence, target of, 19 Virtualizing intimacy, 67 Vulnerability, vii, 35 W

Wg-gesucht, 31, 52 White-collar immigrants, viii migrants, 80–82 Wimmer, Andrea, 47 Wittgenstein, 47 Women, 18, 25–29, 32–35, 37–38, 41, 45, 47, 83 Indian, xi as migrants, 25, 41 migrants Indian, xi, 26, 41 and walking alone, 28 Work from home system, 62–64 World Migration Report, viii, 1

V

Vaccination, xii, 10, 69–70, 72, 75–76 Vaccines, 69–77 Covaxin, 70, 72–73, 75 inoculation consequences, 75 Janssen, 71–74 Moderna, 73 Pfizer, 72–73, 75

X

Xiang, Biao, xi Z

Zinn, J. O., 61 Zoom rooms, 2