The Twice Migrated Gujarati women of west London: financialization and pensions

This research focuses on a group of older Gujarati women aged 60-70+, whom we describe using as Twice Migrated. As Kenyan Asians, they have roots in three continents (India, Kenya and the UK) so that it is against this background that we explore their lived experience (Appadurai, 1990) with regard to later life personal finance issues, given ongoing financialization in the UK in particular. Moreover, due to Kenyan independence and other political developments over the last 70+ years, our research also raises issues of postcolonialism as well as the financialization of daily life, where with respect to the latter, Martin (2002, p. 43) comments:

“… financialization…insinuates an orientation toward accounting and risk management into all domains of life.”

Regarding pension planning in the most general sense, Gough and Hick (2009) observe that relatively little research has been done on the later life financial planning of ethnic minorities in the UK. Indeed, even their own research only refers to Asians as a generic group, rather than differentiating between the many sub-groups with their very different histories and traditions.

Our own research aims to contribute to this literature by focusing on women from the Oshwal community which numbers around 25,000 in the UK. As one of the authors is a full member of this community, issues of autoethnography (Anderson, 2006; Davie, 2008) arise in the focus groups and interviews, which whilst adopting a sociological life course methodology (Bujaki et al, 2017), focus on later life issues.