SPECIAL ARTICLE

Imagined and Social Landscapes Potential Immigrants and the Experience of Migration in Northern Italy
Meenakshi Thapan

Aspirations and the desire for upward mobility compel migrants to view Europe through an imagined perspective of hope and anticipation. Lived experience, on the other hand, foregrounds the experience of racism, exclusion and difference. This paper seeks to understand the typical immigrants desire to migrate out of India and the experience of migration in a region of northern Italy. It attempts to do so by understanding the aspirations of potential immigrants in terms of what Europe signifies and the lived experience of immigrants of Indian origin in northern Italy. The analysis is based on interviews with potential migrants in New Delhi and in the region of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, more specifically in Fidenza and Parma.

Meenakshi Thapan (citizencivic.09@gmail.com) teaches sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.
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n drawing our attention to its difference from memory, Paul Ricoeur tells us, imagination has as its paradigm the unreal, the ctional, the possible, and other nonpositional features, whereas memory is our one and only resource for signifying the past-character of what we declare we remember (2004: 21). Memory is of that repertoire of images, emotions, representations which we have left behind or seek to be rid of whereas imagination provides hope for the future, through the contexts in which the migrant seeks to build her future potential and possibilities for upward mobility and transformation. No doubt, imagination is coloured by memory, of the presence and extravagant lifestyles of transnational migrants in villages and small towns in India, of things learnt in high school or university and remembered as Europes rich cultural heritage, and of images seen in the media that celebrate it as a continent that appears to have a material life that far surpasses their present circumstances. The desire of potential immigrants to move out of their present living conditions is based on the experience of the lack of educational and/or employment opportunities, the lack of access to nancial resources and a luxurious lifestyle, and is no doubt founded on the search for upward mobility. It is however simultaneously grounded in an imagination that denes for itself the promise that life on another continent possibly holds. Such an imagined perception of life is based perhaps on an unreal and ctional view of the world out there, that appears, from a distance, to be rich in nancial, cultural and educational resources, apart from the material and social benets that would apparently accrue as a consequence. It is also based on the culture of migration that exists in Punjab, the state in north-west India from where most of the Indians immigrate to Italy. Migration out from the Punjab to the developed western countries, Australia and east Africa has been a tradition among the Sikh and Hindu communities in the Punjab. Singh and Tatla refer to this tendency to move as the propensity of Sikhs, for example, to return to their most permanent tradition that of roaming (2006: 33). In addition, the showing off of their newly-acquired wealth by returnee migrants creates aspirations among local residents who imagine that they will be able to access the same once they are able to attain their coveted goal international migration.1 This paper seeks to understand the immigrants desire to migrate out of India and the experience of migration in a region of northern Italy through two registers: one that seeks
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to understand the aspirations of potential immigrants in terms of what Europe signies; the second, to understand the lived experience of immigrants of Indian origin in northern Italy. The analysis is based on interviews with potential migrants in New Delhi and in the region of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, more specically in Fidenza and Parma.2 Although the two sets of interviewees are not related in any way, to the extent that Italy is not necessarily the preferred destination for all potential immigrants, the responses of both sets frame the basis for understanding the two aspects of imagined landscapes and lived experience in the lives of those who both seek and experience migration. I examine the idea of imagined landscapes as those mental perceptions and images that shape an Indian immigrants idea of Europe. In seeking to understand imagined landscapes, I aim to go behind the obvious aspirations of individuals for better livelihood options and the underlying socio-economic factors that propel them towards such opportunities through migration. It is something in the imagination that constructs a mental image about a place and its surroundings that inuences the already prevalent desire for upward mobility. Imagining a landscape is therefore an essential component of the process of migration: it is the mental construct that undoubtedly inuences the physical act of migration. In this process, it is imperative to consider the location of the subject. The potential migrants location in the homeland is one register through which we may understand the impetus to the ways in which a migrant formulates a mental imagery of a foreign land. The imagined world, or a fragment thereof, is a unique subjective space, an imagined landscape, that exists in an abstract realm but is none the less grounded in the world of the everyday through the available imagery in different social and cultural contexts. In the case of potential migrants to Europe, mental constructs not only play a signicant role in providing an impetus for migration; in fact, they serve as a catalyst for changing the life course of individuals who through their imagination construct the possibility of an alternate lived reality. In other words, the possibility of realising an unseen, imagined landscape is opened up through purpose, determination and hard work. On another register, the location of migrants in the physical territory of Italy provides a very different understanding of how they perceive Italy and indeed Europe. This is the social landscape in which they are now embedded as a consequence of their act of migration and location in another society with all its social, political and economic realities. The experience of being a migrant is also constituted through the domain of affect. The role of emotions in establishing the relationship between migrants and their others is critical to the life worlds of migrants. If we condense the discourse of the migrant merely in the backdrop of structural categories like nation state, citizen and immigrant, we would miss out the complex web within which migrants exist and which may work parallel to the macro discourse and not submit to it. It becomes imperative to understand how these parallel worlds are constituted and framed through affect, to understand the nuances of the web of relationships between
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strangers and others.3 This is done in the paper through an understanding of the experience of belonging and difference articulated by both youth and adult migrants. Such an experience constructs identities in complex ways that are ambivalent both in their experience of being a migrant as well as part of an ethnic community experienced as problematic in many ways. The focus on youth is deliberate. In the literature on migration in and from the south Asian region, there has been an increasing emphasis on the categories of gender and age and the ways in which they affect the processes and outcomes of migration.4 In addition, the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982), Brah (1996), Baumann (1996), Maira (2009), Fangen et al (2011) stand out as signicant markers of youth studies in understanding the relationship between race, racism and youth, unemployment, resisting cultures, dissenting forms of citizenship, and the like. However, work on the aspirations of Indian youth migrating to Italy and their experience as immigrants in this context is somewhat limited.5 Youth are the most signicant category among the migrant community as they represent a movement towards the future, both among members of this community as well as in the host community of which they are members. In the Indian immigrant community, who are the focus of my study, they are also perhaps rst-generation learners as opposed to their parents who belong largely to the less educated and largely low-skilled category of dairy farm and factory workers, and petty daily wagers. In addition, gender emerges as a crucial differentiating factor in the ways in which the youth experience Italy and relationships within the ethnic community. The aspirations, dilemmas and anxieties of this category of the immigrant population is, therefore, of particular interest.
Methodological Considerations

This paper is based on the premise that a disparate group of 27 potential migrants constitute a category based on their initial impetus to seek to emigrate out from India for educational and for livelihood opportunities in the same way as more than 50 immigrants of Indian origin in northern Italy constitute a category for analysis. The category of potential migrants is hugely diverse, from different parts of India, rural/urban, welleducated/less educated, men/women, university students/ low skilled labour, skilled and educated job hunters, and dependent women seeking migration with partners. What is common to the potential migrants under study is the fact that they have shared aspirations: to seek a transformation in their lives. The category of immigrants of Indian origin in northern Italy is a heterogeneous group of men and women, in terms of their background and their experience. The two categories appear disparate in terms of their positions in both the country of origin as well as in host societies because of their markedly differing characteristics: potential migrants are those who are yet only aspirants to the status of the immigrant, awaiting their visa and other travel documents, or part of an educational system that will open up opportunities for them to seek out travel to Europe. Their legal status is ensured as they are still in the country of origin and they are not outsiders in alien
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contexts. Immigrants of Indian origin in Italy, on the other hand, are often uncertain about their legal status, about forms of available employment, and have a particular lived experience of being the other in an alien context. Immigrants of Indian origin were selected according to location, gender, social class, age and educational background.6 Those with very little formal education and minimal skills are employed in the agriculture sector, primarily dairy farms, and small factories in the largely rural and small towns of northern Italy.7 They have lived in Europe for 15-25 years, depending on the trajectories for migration undertaken by them.8 I met and interviewed men between the ages of 35 and 60. Interviews and focus group discussions were also conducted with 50 schoolgoing young adults (15-18 years) and other youth (18-21 years). I met several women as well, some of whom were engaged in factories, laundries or working in small shops. Most were homemakers and unemployed. Selections were made on the basis of introductions to different categories of workers through local immigrant associations, employers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the church, and other workers. The idea was to get a good cross section of employed workers and irregular, unemployed persons of Indian origin through different sources. Interviewees in high schools and vocational/training schools were selected on the basis of the school to which I was able to gain entry in different towns. Fidenza is a municipality and district in the province of Parma in the Emilia-Romagna region. There are 13 municipalities in the district of Fidenza, among which also lies the municipality of Fidenza. Almost all interviews were conducted in the district of Fidenza and in a high school in Cremona in Lombardy. In 2011, the Indian population constituted the largest segment of the stranieri (foreign) population in Fidenza district: that is, 1,725 Indians out of a total of 13,058 foreign persons in the province of Parma (Statistica. Parma 2011). In 2004, there were only 589 people of Indian origin in the district, increasing to 1,082 in 2008 and to 1,725 in 2012 (ibid). The dairy farming sector in the region has come to be increasingly dominated by men of Indian origin, who are perceived to be good and reliable workers. The variety of sites in Delhi for meeting and interviewing the potential immigrants, such as embassies, visa centres, language schools, university cafes, and other spaces in Delhi University, were selected in order to identify two clear subcategories among those youth (between the ages of 17 and 25) who seek to emigrate: those seeking better life chances and those seeking higher education. Those seeking better life chances belonged to small towns and rural regions in Rajasthan and Punjab, while those in search of higher education in Europe are from different parts of urban India and are currently enrolled in language schools in the university and in New Delhi.
Potential Migrants

Potential migrants in India seek to move into Europe as students, petty workers, skilled and low-skilled labour, riding on the back of family and sponsors, with the help of agents, dalals and kabutarwallahs (literally, man of pigeons) and
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negotiate a space for themselves in what at this point they consider the promised land.9 It is in the different understandings of Europe as an alien land that the differences in the location of the migrant in the homeland become apparent.10 Imagination is opened up with vastly different ways depending on the level of education migrants have received, and whether they attended only secondary school or some form of higher education in a metropolis like Delhi or in a small town in the Punjab region. These differences are apparent in the migrants articulation of their aspirations and dreams. For those migrants from rural regions, and thereby with limited economic, social and cultural capital, Europe appears as the land of opportunities where it is imagined that hard work enables them to earn money and improve the nancial situation at home. As is well known, kin networks and community relationships in rural Punjab and elsewhere in India play a signicant role in developing the motivation to emigrate. This perception of Europe as the land of opportunity is fuelled by neighbours and family, who are immigrants in Europe and who provide them with rich descriptions of the lavish lifestyle and opportunities that await them. The dream to immigrate is thus born. Economic need is the prime dening characteristic of this desire so that even though the potential migrant understands that employment is scarce, hope lies in his perception that eventually, as one potential migrant said, he will earn seventy times more than that in India (Manjeet, male, 22 years). There is in this construct an exaggerated understanding of what Europe means that is based not only on the unreal picture created for them by others but also on their own desire to emigrate and radically transform their lives. The following narrative about Rajeev (male, 26 years), from a small village in Rajasthan, draws out the role of the family and community in international migration for the fullment of this dream. In addition, we learn how, in spite of an awareness of the difculties that may be encountered abroad, the potential migrant still views it as an opportunity, not only in economic terms but also for the well-being and security it will bring him and his family. Rajeev tells us that his village is a close-knit one and there is a lot of interaction between the villages in the same area. There is a sense of community and there are several events where people from different villages offer advice and help. The migration process is a good example. At home, Rajeev has parents and his father always had the urge to go abroad. Since his childhood he wanted to stay outside the village. His father caught hold of an agent from a neighbouring village and his uncle provided him with the money for the journey. His father went to Italy in 1992 and worked there for few years. Over there he was duped by an Indian middleman (an agent of some kind), whom he had met in Italy, who did not provide him with legitimate papers. It was very difcult for his father to get a job without a passport. Rajeev adds, with some sadness, that his father had to sleep on the roadside on newspapers for a while and could not even bathe for two weeks. He nally found a job in a beer bar and the owner looked after him. However, after the owners death, his children behaved differently. His father has now returned to
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the village although he still has a long-term visa for ve years; he might go back again but he is not that strong anymore. Presently, Rajeevs younger brother is working in Rome in a supermarket where he has to carry goods in trolleys from the shop to the parking lot. It is not an easy job, Rajeev tells us, and he sends money home to India every few months. Rajeev recently got married and so feels his responsibilities have increased. He says, It is better to even sweep oors in Italy as you earn more than in India. He has therefore come to the visa centre to apply for a tourist visa. His brother is a taxpaying resident in Italy and could call one member from his family to Italy. Rajeev is using this opportunity to gain entry into Italy. He is hoping that he will nd a job there and if his employer likes him, he would work towards extending Rajeevs visa. He wants to eventually take his family to Italy but for that he has to earn a huge salary per month. To be able to earn that much is still a far-fetched dream. Rajeev adds, The sad truth however is no matter how much you work you do not get paid more than a thousand euros. In spite of knowing that life is hard and income moderate, the dream for immigration is not over. Rajeev has observed that every month 10 people from his village and neighbouring villages, and around 20 from Pakistan and 30 from Bangladesh, get on a bus to head towards a foreign land. He says,
Villagers are gullible. Whenever someone comes back from abroad they bluff a lot that life is very good outside. These people believe them blindly and plan to go abroad. They end up paying around Rs eight to ten lakh (approx 11,000 to 13,000) per head to the local agent who xes their journey.

Movement to Europe for these migrants, who have much higher levels of education than those from rural backgrounds, is a way to expand their consciousness through knowledge and to nd avenues to upgrade their skills as well as explore new cultures. Rahul (male, 28 years), a young professional, is well educated and was working in India before he made a decision to work in Europe. He is not interested in earning money or moving up the professional ladder. In India, he had been a student of English literature and he wanted to explore the life worlds opened to him through literary texts. Europe has shaped his imagination as a spectrum of rich history, daunting architecture, enduring literature and evolving art. The books and poetry that he has read, from Camus to Kafka to Wordsworth, the lms of Bergman, have all built up a visual and ideational collage in his mind. He said,
Bergman has this beautiful way using dark characters that shows the contrasting side of individuals, his characters would display different roles, you would get to see glimpses of European life and somewhere the banality of existence. If all the characters are put together it is like a collage of Europe, there is a difference you see when you are actually there though, the visual spectacle is not as dynamic as the real Europe is so dynamic and diverse.

The villagers who end up going out pay huge sums of money and have to work really hard for at least two years to return the debt incurred while making payments to the agent. This is the story of the rural potential immigrant, who seeks a better life, at any cost, in the hope that there will be a great transformation in his life in the future. Potential migrants from rural India emphasise the extent to which they strive to realise their hopes by selling their land and property, paying huge amounts of money to agents to help them obtain the necessary documents, with often the entire family involved in helping the migrant achieve his dream. Even though there is an understanding that there is hard physical labour and uncertainty about nding employment, the strength of their hopes lies in the imagined landscape that is so rmly entrenched as a real possibility in terms of its outcome as compared to the hardship and lack of opportunity in India.
Perceptions of Europe

For potential migrants from urban India, many of whom are youth in search of employment opportunities or seeking higher educational and work opportunities, perceptions of Europe are quite different. Their mental constructs are based on literary, aesthetic and media sources that shape imagination in complex ways.11 This is an imagery that is detached from the harshness of lived realities and a fascination for another culture which is viewed as a land of great cultural history.
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He always wanted to experience and soak in this visual spectacle. Rahuls story conveys to us the deep inuence of European texts and lms on his imagination and emphasises how mental images about a particular place determine future choices. Young women in Delhi University (18-22 years) also maintain an image of Europe that is based on literary sources and their view emphasises Europe as a land of cultural resources rather than merely a place to earn wealth. Such students have an informed understanding of Europe based on their education. They specically point to, for example, the political situation and harsh immigration policies in France, and are well aware of the difculties of living in Europe. For them, Europe is a place for higher education to obtain the required skills and experience and they would always seek to return to work in India. This bestows on them the status of youth in circulation who are uncommitted to migration as such. Young peoples voices, whether from rural or urban India, point to the promise that Europe holds out to them in one way or another. It is either the land of wealth and opportunity, or of physical beauty, and an ancient culture and civilisation. It is also a refuge from family pressures and constrained social life in conservative middle-class families in India. A recent study points to the need among Gujarati youth from middle-class families to move to London to earn money and gain new experiences, at the same time, however, seeking to escape social pressure from the family by living independently (Rutten and Verstappen 2012: 4). Such type of migration is referred to as middling migration in an effort to understand the contradictory class experiences and ambivalence of the Gujarati youth as they traverse their life worlds between Gujarat and London. All these images are intermingled in the different categories of youth and their mental construct of Europe thus frames their initial encounter with Europe. We now proceed to understanding the changing contours of
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mental constructs as lived experience edges out the positive images that impelled migration.
Indian Immigration to Italy

Italy has not always been on the destination map for immigrants from India but there has been a signicant upward ow in recent years. The rst migrants in the 1970s, according to Bertolani,
were above all pioneers, who separately tried the luck with the hope to be able sooner or later to enter UK, Canada or USA... In this period Italy had open frontiers and had no adequate immigration laws; it became above all a transit path, while migratory ows tended to be oriented elsewhere (forthcoming).

However, once they arrived in Italy, they tended to settle down quickly with the help of familial and kin networks and gained employment in one form or another, often working for low wages to start with. Many of them now view Italy as their nal destination.12 Indian immigrants in Italy are a very diverse group from Punjab and Kerala. Those from the Punjab are located in the agricultural sector in regions such as Emilia-Romagna where the economy is in better shape and employment is possible. The immigrants from Kerala remain in the nursing and elderly care sectors in and around Rome. Gallo (2006) has pointed out how the Punjabi migrants, due to their rugged masculinity, nd employment in hazardous and tough jobs in comparison to men from Kerala.13 There could be an interrelationship between the racial attributes associated with the Punjabis and the farming and the manual work in which they engage. In Italy, employers in the agricultural and services sector describe their Punjabi employees as extremely hard-working, dedicated, polite, quiet and committed to their work. This leads to the conclusion that the productive eld of dairy farming has resulted in the Indians carving out an ethnic niche for themselves, access to which takes place almost exclusively as members of kin-networks (Bertolani et al 2011: 144).14 Against this background, mental constructs of Europe are ambivalent and varied. One of the most signicant inuencing factors in the views among Indian immigrants is the comparison that is made with India where everything is seen to depend on personal contacts and networks. This is the major difference with Italy where migrants feel they are treated with respect and dignity by the state (police, hospitals, schools) whether you are a milkman or a factory worker. Hard work is paid for. However, there is a slide in employment due to recession and, as a result, the men feel they have to be very circumspect at work, and cannot answer back as they may lose their jobs. They say that they experience exploitation at work from the Italian employers and, as one man put it, We are not integrated and we will never be integrated because we are different. He continued: We are different and will always remain different (Rajinder, male, 35 years). He recognises the reality and works hard to maximise his gains within a difcult situation: There is no other solution as there is no possibility of return to India where we will have to struggle for everything all over again. Women migrants come to Italy primarily through
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marriage and experience a double burden of exclusion: prevented by their partners from working or going out into Italian society, most women remain indoors out of what they consider their own choice. At the same time, their lack of familiarity with the Italian language restricts their mobility and interaction with the host community. This develops in them a view of their life in Italy as restricted and guarded and they often regret the community life they have left behind.15 At the same time, there is heterogeneity among Indian women migrants based on their educational levels, their socioeconomic backgrounds, their partners restrictions on their movement and interaction, and their own position within the family and the community. Nayanjyot (female, 36 years) lives in a large house owned by her husband and her brother. Her husband prevents her from going outside the home or engaging in any form of activity outside the home. In her words:
I have great love for the language here but cannot do much. I dont have time to learn the language. My daughters teacher gave me a telephone number to call for learning the language but I have not done it yet. I have a licence to drive but cant really do it. I am afraid of driving. I cant help the children with the Italian homework, so I would have loved to drive (and learn the language). But my husband does not encourage me to learn it; he asks me, tumne kaunsa professor banna hai? (Are you planning to become a professor?) So it is very difcult.

Nayanjyot is reconciled to being at home as the home atmosphere, she says, is good and her husband is nice and this enables her to stay at home as that is what she has to do: Andar hi rehna hai (I have to stay inside). She also nds succour in religious experience that she now insists is fundamental to her identity as a good Sikh. Although this ensures her a good position within the community, it further marks her ethnic identity as she now continuously wears a black headscarf which places her in a unique cultural slot vis--vis the host community who see her within an essentialised trope of belonging to a religiously marked ethnic community.16 Other more educated women nd opportunities to engage with members of the Italian community through forms of civic engagement, for example, with the teachers in the public schools where their children study.17 Such women are seeking greater acceptance among the host community and are asserting their individualities in the hope that Italians see the differences among Indians and do not view them all through the same lens: as different and other.18 The construction of us versus them is strongly constituted in Italy through different markers of identity that are well established. Maritano (2002) argues, for example, that there is a way of expressing difference present in the Italian language in the way in which the term stranieri is used to address all foreigners. This points to a system of internal differentiation in which the inside is distinguished from the outside, in which the nation is distinguished from the others (ibid: 64).19 Cultural differences are other signicant causes for exclusion, and interviews with Italian service providers, employers and others point to this in many different ways (Thapan 2011). The older generation of workers no doubt experience humiliation in their interaction with their employers. Their experience is contained, however, by their mute acceptance of such
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humiliation as part of the life of a migrant. There is an acceptance of the inevitability of the situation and the context in which they are located. Ironically, this silence may be perceived by Italians as a form of integration as several Italian employers told me how happy they are with their Indian employees who silently do their work without raising their voices, or ghting with other employees. Employment is critical to the legal status of the immigrant and there is therefore great pressure to remain in employment. As one NGO that works for the rights of refugees in Parma put it, immigrants therefore work like slaves as they cannot lose their jobs. If they do so, they lose their right to stay in Italy.20 Negative labelling by service providers who tend to view Indians as living in a closed community unwilling to learn the language, or freely interact with Italians, or insisting on maintaining their own cultural and social links, results in disadvantaging immigrants in many different ways. They tend to remain excluded from the Italian community, homogenised and essentialised as a very different cultural and ethnic group. Clearly, for migrants, in their experience in Italy, the imagined landscape is overtaken by the lived social landscape that permeates all aspects of their emotional and embodied existence. The emotional turmoil they now experience prevents them from retaining a positive perspective about Europe. In fact, they now pin their hopes for success and fullment onto the next generation who is being educated and will perhaps do better than them, they hope.
Belonging and Exclusion among Indian Youth

Youth of Indian origin in Italy are in a category that is set apart: from other migrant youth with whom they rarely interact and from the Italian youth population who are their ambivalent other. There are huge cultural differences although language is not a problem as it is learnt early in school and is part of their repertoire of languages. They speak it with ease and condence and, at one level, it is a strong binding force with the Italian community. At the same time, it is important to look into the school experience of children of Indian immigrants as the school is a signicant space for socialisation into the host community as well as for developing relations with other immigrant and Italian youth. Indian youth in school are rather articulate about their experience of racism and bullying. As a result, some youth who were born in Italy and some who travelled with their parents as infants or very young children are very clear they will never be fully integrated into Italian society. These young men provide the example of servants in India who aspire to be like their masters in terms of their desires and aspirations but can never realise them. One of them asserts, We want to have a lifestyle like the Italians/Europeans, but this will never happen. The job market will always prefer the Italian over the Indian even if both have the same qualications (Jeet, male, 18 years). The uncertainty over their employment is the main factor inuencing their decision to use Italy as a stepping stone for secondary migration. This is fuelled by their experience of difference and distance that cannot be overcome. One boy concluded the discussion: In India, you
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are free. It is your own country. I can never feel the same way here however much I integrate into Italian society (Nitin, male, 18 years). The experience of the inability to integrate by Indian youth no doubt underlies their interaction with Italian youth as well as their decision to move out of Italy, a decision that does not always bear fruit. At the same time, employment opportunities are limited in India and the students do not nd returning to India a viable option. Due to their education in Italy, they appreciate the quality of life and the services that are available for ordinary people which they feel is not possible in India where corruption is rampant. There is a certain ambivalence towards Italy which they identify as their home and, at the same time, experience the inability to completely integrate. Among these youth, the image of Europe is no doubt constructed through the lens of difference but the prism through which they view Indians and India is also one of difference. They are in a sense isolated and alone in a bubble that is formed by their experience which locks them into a lived world where they remain troubled, uncertain and anxious about their future and also their present. The experience of belonging depends on relationships and interaction, emotional ties and an attachment borne of interaction and togetherness. Being different emphasises the feeling of marginalisation. As Colombo et al put it: The place that is experienced as ones own and as the basis of the fundamental experience of feeling at home is construed ... within relational and imaginative dimensions, rather than within a spatial one (2009: 40). The bodily and sensory experience of difference is a very critical part of the experience of who you are as an immigrant. Young women students of Indian origin in high school say that their bodies are experienced as smelly by other students. They are often told that their food smells, or their hair smells, or their bodies smell: that in any case they give off a smell that is experienced as distasteful and abhorrent by the host community. This for the Indian students is the most humiliating experience of difference that they have encountered in their everyday life. As Wise puts it, there is an acute feeling of temporal and bodily disjuncture that occurs when other bodies do not respond as anticipated (2010: 923). They cannot change their bodies and therefore the sense of being different and other is in some sense permanently xed through their embodied existence. The experience of being different is particularly painful in the middle school years when Italian students are most harsh in their criticism of Indian students, who are often told to return to India, to stop wearing turbans and to stop coming to school. Indian youth tolerate their taunts by ignoring them because it is what they call their majboori (helplessness). It is, however, the experience of being isolated and alone that stands out sharply in their memory of their middle school years and affects their experience of high school as well. Fangen et al examine such feelings of isolation and rejection within the context of social exclusion and distinguish between feelings of being excluded and physically not being allowed access (2011: 4). While migrant students have access
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to schools and good relationships with their Italian teachers, they experience social exclusion at a very emotional level from their peers. However, social exclusion in the context of migration is very complex and it is important to examine it as a process that cannot be neatly slotted into either/or situations (ibid). It then becomes apparent that exclusion is not necessarily an emotional experience vis--vis others in alien contexts but takes place within the ethnic community as well. Girls in high school view the Italian people largely in terms of their experience of other Indians in Italy. The latter suspect them of having boyfriends and gossip about this endlessly amongst themselves. Italian adults, on the other hand, are on the whole more loving and gentle and treat them with respect. None the less, even these migrants did not hesitate to point out that they are different from the Italians who think that Indians do not interact with them. This is accentuated by their experience of the Indian community as quarrelsome and difcult, which is not appreciated by the Italians, and this, the girls say, makes them feel bad. This sense of feeling bad is linked to the emotional experience of shame vis--vis their own community in relation to the host community so that difference is being experienced on two planes: within and outside the community. Similarly, the girls do not have any relationship with the Indian boys in school with whom they are afraid to speak. They do, however, freely interact with Italian boys in school. There is in this articulation of sameness and difference a complexity based on relationships, norms and values in the Indian community itself that prevents them from being independent in their relationships with Indian youth in the same way as they are with their male Italian classmates. The difculties this engenders amongst themselves and in their experience of being different in Italy is based on the communitys lack of trust and willingness to accept another lifestyle or relationships that are different from their own established ones. At the same time, relationships across the sexes are not tolerated. The youth thus feel isolated within the Indian community as much as they do in the Italian community. This places an undue strain on the young migrant who is simultaneously struggling to keep herself aoat in the school as a marked person as well as a good, virtuous and respectful girl in her own community. As we can see, gender is critical to how Indian youth view the other: girls value relationships with Italian youth and teachers and seem to desire such relationships in order to successfully achieve their goals of integration. This is, however, not the case with Indian boys who emphasise the difference and accept the fraught situation, seeking to avoid conict with members of the Italian community. Increasingly, however, there are instances of youth breaking out of the constraints of the home and becoming independent of Indian parents as their conservative ideas and lifestyles begin to conict with what the youth experience as a more liberated and independent European culture. Their socialisation in particular social landscapes as a consequence of their familiarity with the Italian language and culture learnt in school and with peers steers them in this direction. We can see, therefore, how
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the experience of living in Italy shapes their imagination in diverse ways, not based on economic criteria alone, but carrying within it now the experience of individuals in a different and perhaps more enabling social and cultural space.
Freedom and Familial Loss

Guddi, born in India, is a young woman in her early 20s. Her father is a Punjabi Sikh from Jammu in northern India. Guddi has two brothers and one sister, who had an arranged marriage and lives in Italy. Her father had left home for Europe when she was an infant and she saw him for the rst time when she was eight years old. Until then, she lived with her grandparents in India. Her father settled in Italy, where they have been for the last 20 years. He earlier worked on farms and now sells clothes, with the help of his wife, in different markets held in small towns. Guddis father appears to be a domineering, violent personality who regularly beats up his wife and children. Her experience of being a migrant is thus painfully linked to her experience of being abused at home. She says, He did not turn out to be a nice papa. Very quickly, Guddi started working in bars as a waitress. He used to beat her and she left home, helped by her mother and her brothers, just two months before her high school examination. She went to her mothers friend who worked in a hotel and started working with her. Guddi says that after some time, her mother wanted her to return home but Guddi continued to live separately. She forgave them and started visiting them after seven months but did not move back into the home. She then developed a relationship with an Italian boy with whom she now lives and, once again, her family was unable to accept this relationship. Her siblings, grandparents and other family members have accepted the situation but not her parents. This time, she did not communicate with them for a year. Although Guddi took the decision to separate from them, she is very distressed and suffers because of the lack of acceptance from her parents. She says she has wept a lot but they have not changed their stance. The parents rejection of her relationship with her Italian partner has resulted in Guddi feeling completely alone and vulnerable. In spite of her estranged relationship with her own family, Guddi judges European culture and lifestyles in terms of familial values and norms. She asserts that in Europe people do not even know their neighbours; there is no love or closeness in the family; it is a very cold family life with almost no feelings and everyone only thinks about themselves. There is no closeness between siblings as there is in India: Those kinds of relationships do not exist here. Guddi laments, with a breaking voice, I feel very alone here. I came here when I was fteen years old. My parents were not so much in my life before that. They were not there then and nor are they here now. At the same time, she realises that the independence she has attained in Europe would never have been hers in India. A lot of people have helped her here and she is sure no one would have come to her rescue in India. She says:
Mujhe azadi se bahut pyar hai (I love my freedom), independence in my work. No one tells you that you have studied this but now you are doing that. In India, if you do a waiters job, it would not be appreciated.

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Here it is OK. Working in a boutique is also OK. I can stand on my own feet although I have to work hard. I could do something with my life. When I left home, my parents taunted me, You will come back one day but I am totally independent and have worked as a receptionist in a hotel, waitress, now in a boutique, and I keep getting work.

Guddis sense of independence, which she realises she was able to attain in Europe, has not only resulted in her living alone in a town other than where her parents live but, more importantly, it has also given her a different mental framework with which she conducts her life. She is not in a hurry to get married and will wait for a year or two before she takes the plunge. She also does not visualise her current employment in a boutique as her future. She would like to have a professional degree and plans to start a course in accounting and to continue learning French which she has studied for ve years in school. She is very clear that she does want to take a risk at all as getting a job in Europe is becoming increasingly difcult with factories closing down and employment becoming scarce. Guddi has therefore realised that long-term independence depends on her ability to have a job and keep it by attaining good professional and linguistic skills. It is possible to conclude, therefore, that in matters pertaining to her professional life, Guddi has internalised a non-familial perspective, different from other Indian families in her region, one that is oriented towards her individual goals and personal ambitions. However, in her personal life Guddi remains committed to a family life as she experiences a sense of deep personal loss: I long for a relationship with the family. I like my sister and used to see my mom in her but now she is very busy. Guddis mom-inlaw (boyfriends mother) is very different. She doesnt understand me. So I am not close to her. She is very busy in her work as is the father. I cry easily and they dont understand. I feel I am unhappy but I cant nd that happiness with [his] parents. Although Guddi seeks a congenial familial life, as the idea of the family remains central to her imagination, she is unable to nd it with her new Italian family who remain marked by cultural difference. Guddi has valued independence and freedom throughout her young life, in terms of the choices she made, the clothes she wore, what she wanted to do, where and when she wanted to go out of the house, and so she says, it was easy for me to leave home. And she never wants to become like her parents who have only given her sorrow. Above all, Guddi aspires for a career: My dreams for a career are not fullled. I dont want to get married and have children only. In a nal assessment of her life and her cherished values, Guddi concludes, I love my independence. I do not want to ask anyone for anything. In her journey as a young woman of Indian origin, Guddis experience stands out for her courage and erce commitment to keeping her independence. There is no way she envisages a departure from this commitment although she simultaneously experiences a severe sense of loss of familial affection and support. When she was living with her grandparents in India, Guddi was waiting to go to Europe to her parents and the new life that awaited her. When she got there, the imagined landscape of family reunion in a happy, socially developed and
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upwardly mobile society did not materialise. It was, in fact, a shock and destruction of everything that Guddi had experienced as familial until then. Europe, therefore, has given her more than anything she could have ever imagined: it has allowed her to nurture her love for freedom and realise it in different contexts. The imagined landscape has been reconstituted by her desire for independence and her realisation that this is indeed possible. At the same time, it has deprived her of an emotional anchor in familial life that appears to be out of her reach for the present.
Conclusions

Imagination and experience offer vastly differing versions of what it means to be an immigrant in contemporary Europe. This paper has emphasised the perspective of difference that underpins the experience of migration, much as the potential migrants imagination propels a positive and laudatory landscape of Europe. On the one hand, aspirations and the desire for upward mobility compel migrants to view Europe through an imagined perspective of hope and anticipation. Lived experience, on the other hand, foregrounds the experience of racism, exclusion and difference. Migrant adults have, by and large, come to terms with their situation and make an effort to ride out their troubled lives. Women, depending on their socioeconomic backgrounds, however, seek out different ways of engaging with the Italians through forms of civic engagement that transcend the political. Men and women also view their lives as a form of sacrice for their children whom they hope will benet from the advantages of a better education than the one they would have received in India. Among young people, there is an ambivalence in their experience of Europe that is borne out of their experience of being and belonging in another culture. Youth of Indian origin in the region under study in Italy are caught in a dilemma between an Indian life through family and friends that shapes one kind of view of Italy through their lived experience. At the same time, they belong to Italian society through the very potential that it holds out: of freedom and change, as Guddis remarkable story shows us. The gaze through which they view Italy is therefore a troubled gaze, marked simultaneously by doubt and belonging. Following Levitt and Schillers argument (2007) about how individuals in transnational elds use ways of being and ways of belonging differently in particular social contexts, we may argue that Indian youth experience ways of being in certain contexts where their lives are enriched by being in another cultural and social context. However, in other situations, their ways of belonging that are so closely tied to their experience of identity as members of another community and are marked by hostility, separation and difference set them apart. The imagined landscapes so evocatively conjured up among potential migrants are lost to the social landscapes that now prevail in young migrants lives in Italy. New forms of imagination, impelled by the desire for growth, are born. The aspirations of the youth are driven by the desire to nd employment outside their parents current jobs as dairy farm workers, to have ofce jobs or jobs in the technical sector, to gain respect
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by the host community and to be Italian citizens in their own right. The youth, however, do recognise that they may never succeed in gaining either this employment or the respect and there is, therefore, a perception of the failures that await them in the future. Identity is a vexed concept in this discussion. In all this, what emerges is that there is no xed identity for a young or adult migrant and there is no stable idea of Italy and indeed Europe; images change as situations and contexts change, resulting in often uctuating and shifting perceptions that
Notes
[I am indebted to Philippe Fargues of the Migration Policy Centre, and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Firenze for a fellowship that has enabled me to complete this paper. The collected material is part of Work Package 3 on Migrants and Borders in the EU FP7 EuroBroadMap project 2009-12 funded by the European Union and I acknowledge the support of Claude Grasland and Catherine Quiminal. I would like to express my gratitude to the European Studies Programme (2010-11), University of Delhi, funded by the European Union, that enabled me to engage in eldwork in Europe in 2011. I remain indebted to Stefano Gandol and Chiara Scavia of Intercultura, Fidenza, who provided invaluable help in organising meetings with a vast cross section of respondents, and to Maitrayee Deka for assistance in eldwork in New Delhi and in Italy in 2010. I also thank participants for their comments at workshops in University of Rouen, France; Martin Chautari, Nepal; Department of Sociology, University of Delhi; Rajiv Gandhi Institute of National Development, Sreeperumbudur; and National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, where earlier versions of this paper have been presented.]
1 See Thandi (2012: 13ff) for a recent and concise presentation of the history of migration from Punjab to Europe. 2 Sites such as embassies, visa centres and language schools in New Delhi were selected for the interviews with potential immigrants as it was assumed that a large number of potential immigrants frequent these venues. Fidenza was selected as the site of study in Italy as a large number of immigrants of Indian origin work in dairy farms in the region and the number is steadily rising (see Thapan 2013a for more details). My own position as an Indian woman professor no doubt enabled me to access different worlds with relative ease: I was able to interview Indian men and women in Punjabi and Hindi as well as interview Italians with the help of an interpreter. The Indians spoke to me with no restraint once they understood that I did not represent any ocial category of personnel and I was able to attain a similar comfort level with the Italians I met. 3 Sara Ahmed argues that it is important to understand that attachments based on emotions are complex phenomena and primarily depend on the ways in which subjects respond to others within everyday spaces of inhabitance, where bodies both move and dwell (2001). I nd this statement of particular value and purpose while trying to understand the everyday world of immigrants in difcult contexts and worlds.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

dene Europe alternatively as the land of independence, opportunity and possible wealth, but also as the land of exploitation and racism. It is the lived reality that disadvantages young migrants, excludes them while simultaneously providing them with a livelihood and the possibility of growth and success. It is a constant struggle between the experience of marginalisation, difference and despair and the elusive possibilities for success. This is the young migrants dilemma that denes and shapes his or her understanding of Europe both as an imagined landscape and as a social landscape of lived experience.
13 Ballard (1990), Brah and Coombes (2000) and others note that the Punjabis were the earliest migrants to Britain who were absorbed in industrial menial jobs due to their propensity for these jobs. 14 There is a myth circulating among Italian employers that as Indians worship cows, they are gentle with cows and good dairy farm workers. Indian immigrants from the Punjab, who may not be cow-worshippers, have none the less encouraged the circulation of this myth as it is to their benet! 15 For a larger discussion on the isolation and uncertainty that women face in this context, see Thapan (2013a). For an excellent and landmark study on the theme of the suffering of the immigrant, see Sayad (2004). 16 Subsequent to the interview, Nayanjyot is now driving her car and visiting the childrens school to interact with the teachers. The process of integration into the Italian community is slow and arduous and women in particular have to work hard to convince their partners about the necessity for their interaction with members of the host society. For an understanding of the strategies for integration under taken in Italy by both immigrant Indians and the local Italian population, see Thapan (2013b). 17 I use the term civic engagement as used by Brettell who refers to such forms of engagement as how immigrants become civically engaged and hence construct, with their own agency, a sense of belonging in their new home that may or may not have to do with political indicators (Brettell 2012: 133). See also Brettell and Reed-Danahay (2011). 18 There is in their articulation a consideration of caste and class issues that remain unspoken but present. In other words, they point to themselves as being different from those other Indians who are poor, illiterate or belong to low castes. 19 See Pratt (2002) for a rich analysis of the problems of inclusion and exclusion as a result of historical and cultural divides within Italy. 20 Ambrosini (2010) refers to this form of integration of migrant workers into the labour force in Italy as a form of subordinate integration. See also Calavita (2005: 48ff).

4 See, for example, Gardner (2002), Gopinath (2003), Osella and Gardner (2004), and Puwar and Raghuram (2003). 5 In the context of immigrant youth in Italy, see, among others, Colombo et al (2009), Colombo and Santagati (2010), Milone (2011), Ravecca (2010), and Riccio (2011). 6 The region of Emilia-Romagna was selected as it has the largest number of Indians (17, 260 of whom 7,143 were women in 2012) after Lombardy. Fidenza was especially focused on as it is well known for its large number of dairy farms where Indians are employed in large numbers. 7 Immigrants of Indian origin who are entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers and other highly skilled professionals were interviewed but do not constitute the category of immigrants that substantiate the analysis in this paper. 8 These trajectories often include routes through eastern Europe, Germany or other sites in Europe, and they eventually arrive in Italy through kin and familial networks. 9 The terms are signicant: while dalal is a more common term used in northern India referring to an agent in general parlance, the term kabutarwallah was used by potential migrants from rural Rajasthan who explained it thus. A kabutarwallah who, like an agent, captures several pigeons and cages them before selling them in order for them to be set free. The identication of the migrant with the encaged pigeon indicates the migrants acknowledgement of the situation, that in order to be truly free one must rst pay the price for such freedom, not only in monetary terms but also allow oneself to be completely in the clutches of the agent who will supposedly organise everything (such as visa and travel documents, employment, etc) to enable the free and unencumbered ight. That this does not always happen is wellknown as migrants endure difcult forms of transit to Europe, often through inhuman conditions, arriving abroad to nd themselves without any money or work. It is however viewed as the rst step in the process of migration that is linked to the struggle and vicissitudes that a migrant endures in order to attain his or her imagined goal. See, for example, Jain (2007) who captures the harsh realities of such forms of migration. 10 All interviewed potential migrants referred to Europe as either Europe or by the names of particular countries such as Italy and German (for Germany), and referred to UK or England as a separate country which they did not associate with Europe. 11 Media sources such as lm festivals, photography and art exhibitions on European cultural and social life and lectures by visitors from Europe are organised exclusively in large cities and are obviously accessible only to the educated middle classes in urban India. 12 For a comprehensive review of immigration to Italy in its political and sociocultural contexts, see Grillo and Pratt (2002).
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