Globalization marks migration as a global phenomenon. There has been a growing trend of migration from developing and underdeveloped nations to developed countries, driven by the pursuit of a better quality of life—marked by better education, healthcare, employment opportunities, and the freedom to live with dignity and self-determination, of late.
Looking at Nepali populace, migration trend looks focused more toward gulf countries like UAE, Malaysia, Qatar and other countries for working whereas the trend of migrant students going abroad for education in Europe and America. When it comes to migration, the concept of home plays a central role in the lives of all migrants whether they are workers or students. Home, a constantly changing concept, has undergone a massive transformation over the years since globalization rose to prominence in the world stage. The present article aims to focus on the dual concept of home. Furthermore, the article will explore the psyche of the Nepali students or workers living as emigrants.
The concept of home carries two meanings: the first one is characterized by integration, love, affection, attachment, care and the other by disintegration, fragmentation, disillusion and fluctuation. Nepali migrants move abroad for better future not only for themselves but also for their family. While searching for a better future, they lose the feelings of home abroad. While staying at the work place, they search home abroad- home with love, care, freedom of choice but they miss their origin, tradition, culture and most importantly their family. They get rootlessness, fragmentation, alienation and disintegration abroad. So, in order to find home abroad, they form diaspora communities to create their homeland abroad. The communities follow their traditions, celebrate rituals, rites and festivals of their homeland trying to accommodate the new way of life in foreign land. While they settle down and find work in the new land, their attachment toward their homeland remains deeply ingrained in their hearts. They miss their origin but continue to search the feelings of homeland while staying abroad. Even they try to synthesize their culture, tradition, and way of life with the newness of foreign land, the ancestral memories- memories of mighty mountains, hills, ever flowing rivers, vibrant festivals, cultural artifacts, closely knit communities- resonate in their lives leaving indelible marks on their way of thinking.
The emigrants remain in limbo, a dual state neither completely able to adhere to their cultural space nor completely forsake the socio-cultural gravity of the foreign land and its people.
Meanwhile, they find themselves uprooted and lost amid a new ambiance of foreign land. Once Nepalis migrate to foreign land they seek their roots, identity, civilization and cultural affinity only to find frustration, rootlessness, identity crisis, existential pangs immersing themselves in a different socio-cultural aspects of a different world. In this context, the first generation migrants staying abroad for a considerable period of time, although politically detached from their home country, hardly detach themselves from their homeland socially, culturally and linguistically. Contrary to this, the offspring of the first generation emigrants have been found detached from the socio-cultural perceptions and practices of their ancestral homeland immersing themselves in new way of life in the foreign land. They learn to live a new way of life of the country of their birth. They hardly know anything about their ancestral homeland and the way of life that their ancestors lived. So, this second generation of migrants are more inclined toward the country of their birth.
The emigrants remain in limbo, a dual state neither completely able to adhere to their cultural space nor completely forsake the socio-cultural gravity of the foreign land and its people. The cross-cultural mix makes the life of the emigrants even more difficult to celebrate as they cannot live their life with a sense of home as well as abroad at the same time and socio-cultural space. For the migrants, the real sense of home is grounded in their homeland but they are deprived of such environment in the new land. Their mindset and lifestyle remain caught in uncertainty—torn between adapting to their new land and clinging to ancestral ways of living.
Thus, migrants live in a constant oscillation—forever yearning for the intangible sense of home, a feeling just out of reach. This elusive quest is shaped by the duality of home itself, a concept torn between culture and ritual, work and perception, memory and reinvention. Every step of their journey—from the land they left behind to the new one they build—is marked by this tension, both a burden and a source of resilience.
Meanwhile, the offspring of the emigrants, living as diaspora, develop a sense of attachment toward their birth place not finding cultural roots as their ancestors do. The emigrants find themselves attached deeply with their homeland back in Nepal while not completely aligning their way of life in new land.
(Ms Punam Joshi is a lecturer at Xavier International College, Kathmandu.)
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