The public life of the Indian community in America plays only a small part in the everyday lives of Indian immigrants and their children. People get up, go to work or school, and return at night to share a common space and perhaps a common meal with virtually the only other Indian people with whom they interact on a daily basis. On weekends, they may expand their contacts to include extended family, or Indian friends, but the most fundamental and consistent context in which people experience their common Indianness is that of the family. Family is preoccupied with spiritual and material growth as human beings; has concerns with maintaining a sense of closeness among family members and focused on working through day-to-day controversies by intensive discussion and fair-minded, though sometimes painful, compromise. (Agarwal, 1991)
The particularity of each Indian family is also evident in the language members shared for discussing themselves and the issues that shape family life. Family members share certain turns of phrase, certain key concepts and contrasts that both connects them to each other and distinguishes them from other ethnic families. The combination of family-specific concerns and family-specific ways of conceptualizing and discussing family life produce unique family idioms. Each family illustrates the overarching family idiom as it relates the events that are of significance to family members, individually and collectively.
In Indian families, the issues that arise (controversies over dating or hairstyles or spending time with peers, controversies about the proper ways to treat one's elders, etc.) and the way these issues are talked about or conceptualized originate in the experiences of parents. It might be expected that family controversies usually arise from the fact that immigrant parents and their children have been raised in vastly different social environments.
In reality, much of what comes up between parents and children is related to issues that arose in parents' own lives. This intergenerational dynamic is responsible for a great deal of continuity between parents and children-not only in terms of what is of concern but also in terms of how those concerns are articulated.
