Hindu girlhood in the diaspora

[lovecatcadillac]

I'm writing a novel set at an all-girl Catholic secondary school in Perth, Western Australia in the year 2003. It's based in part on my own young teenage years, and features multiple POV characters, including one girl who is Hindu and the daughter of middle-class Indian migrants. I'm not South Asian or a person of colour, and I grew up with parents who were quite anti-religion, so I'm trying to be very purposeful in writing this girl's experience.

I have a handful of questions about life in the Indian/South Asian diaspora in the early 2000s, specifically regarding teen girl sleepovers, how religiously based vegetarianism might shape social excursions with friends, and recommendations for resources on how religion might factor into a 14-year-old Hindu girl's internal life.

1. In one chapter, a group of 14 year-old girls meet up during the school holidays to see a movie and grab some lunch at a Burger King-like restaurant (i.e., a low-cost fast food joint that serves beef burgers). This is based on an afternoon in my own teenage years. However, it's occurred to me that if one of the girls was an observant Hindu, she would be likely to have been raised vegetarian, and thus might not want to eat in a restaurant where even the vegetarian options might have been cooked in close proximity to beef. With that in mind, if a young Hindu teenager in the diaspora was seeing some friends, how likely is it that she would simply eat a vegetarian option at a restaurant like Burger King? If she wasn't able to eat at a burger place, would a pizza joint or a fish-and-chip shop be more appropriate?*
2. One of the key chapters in the book centres around a sleepover birthday party held at my Indian girl character's home and attended by her friends. In conversations on and offline, women from diaspora communities (particularly South Asian) attest that they were not allowed sleepovers with friends as kids. In my own childhood, I had two different friends who were South Asian (my best friend from ages 9-12 was a migrant from India who emigrated as a baby, my best friend from ages 16 on was from Malaysia and emigrated in her mid-teens). Both girls were allowed to have sleepovers: one could only have sleepovers hosted in her own home, whereas the other was allowed to stay at other people's houses. As I've conceived my character thus far, I figure she emigrated at around age 5. To write my character's parents, are there certain hallmarks of a parent from a South Asian migrant background who would be more likely to allow sleepovers, or host sleepovers in their home?
3. I've begun researching Hinduism to see how it might factor into the worldview of a young Millennial teenager who is kind, creative, a bit eccentric, accepting of others' differences and has some trouble speaking up for herself with her friends (but is learning more about what it means to assert herself). Thus far, I haven't found a lot which is from a young, female, Millennial perspective. If anyone has any insights they would like to share, or recommendations for resources (e.g., memoirs from the South Asian diaspora, YouTube/TikTok accounts, blogs, etc.), I would appreciate it immeasurably (and would, of course, acknowledge your contribution if I ever manage to publish this darned thing).

* I figure that she might be unlikely to eat fish either, but wanted to throw fish and chips there as a possible option for something that young teens in the early 2000s in Perth might eat. Sushi wasn't a common food option in the time and place the story is set, and ice cream doesn't seem right as this chapter takes place during winter.

Comments

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm! This is a bit of a tangent but your comment got me thinking about the culture/class background of vegetarians I know.

Apologies to lovecatcadillac, feel free to ignore this comment it has very little to do with your actual question.

A fully balanced vegan lifestyle is hard on a low budget without specialist stores but from what I saw, asides from special occasions when they had gatherings at Fancy Vegetarian Restaurants (and regularly going to fancy restaurants is for a sure a class marker, but not all the vegetarians actually did that), vegan and vegetarian uni students usually just lived off, like... chips and cheeseless pizza and 2 minute noodles with Woolies tofu etc, with maybe some home made dahl when they could be bothered. As you say, a vegetarian diet can be very cheap. These people lived away from their parents and probably would have been eating weird shitty student food regardless.

And for school students who lived with their parents, I honestly feel like the working class kids I knew from primary school had more freedom about food than the upper middle class ones I knew from highschool. Like, the working class parents I knew were for sure pretty conventional and resistant to Unusual Choices, but they could usually be badgered into acceptance if the kid was determined. Meanwhile the richer parents were by comparison VERY controlling and conventional, they could AFFORD to make separate meals but that doesn't mean they would be WILLING. I knew a kid from primary school who went vegetarian in the 80s, which we all thought was odd but not incomprehensible, and two of my (complicated class wise but not super well off) siblings went vegetarian as children and my parents thought it was annoying but begrudgingly went along with it. I have a friend from uni who was surviving off charity food boxes during her childhood who still went vegetarian the first chance she got. But I don't remember encountering any vegetarians at my fancy private highschool, closest was a few Jews and Muslims who were raised that way. By the 2000s vegetarianism was I think a little more mainstream but in the 90s it was still seen as pretty weird.

Also I feel like I knew some hippie vegetarian families in my parents fine arts student circles in 80s Fremantle, but that's again kind of weird class/culture wise.

Even more of a tangent: There for sure are some major class differences between UWA and the other unis, though unlike private vs state highschools it's not as clearcut a cost difference and there's a lot of variety. I've always felt complicated about the fact I did fit in better at UWA than I think I would have at other unis, versus feeling equally out of place at primary and highschool. Like... I chose UWA because it had more space for the pursuit of abstract theoretical maths/physics with no immediate practical use, and in some ways that sort of thing is for sure associated with the idle rich, but also in practice most actual rich people want themselves and their children to study things which will actually make money, and will often cut kids off financially if they refuse to play along. I guess it's more of that complicated and often precarious class/cultural space for artsy/academic/bohemian types, who aren't making much money at their passion but also need to get money and training from somewhere. I've ended up with some very confused feelings on all this by being raised in a family of neuroatypical artsy-leaning socialists whose actual income varied between "poor-ish" and "comfortable" depending on generation and era, and went on a lot about working class solidarity and the incomprehensible evils of the rich while being equally ill at ease and socially awkward around both. The poor people I knew growing up saw us as snooty self indulgent weirdos but the rich people I met later didn't like us any better, so I guess I have a bit of a knee-jerk sympathy for vegetarians being seen as similarly self indulgent. But you're not wrong about there genuinely being some class related differences involved. Also I didn't really meet many middle middle class people until I got older which affects my perspective. So, hmm! You got me thinking!

EDIT: Context I realise doesn't go without saying is that moonvoice is a professional artist with a humanities degree, we both have different complicated relationships to academia, art, and class (and then there's disability...)