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In India, where around 19,500 dialects are spoken, there is a great abundance of fiction quite rich in varied descriptions of old age and aging. While scholars like Pramod K. Nayar and Ira Raja have recently begun studying Indian literary texts written in English from the perspective of literary gerontology, those literary experiences of aging (which are originally in languages like Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Oriya, etc.) are yet to be analyzed from a gerontological point of view. The present paper aims at studying the experiences of old age in 2 Indian short stories (one from Bengali Literature and another from Tamil Literature)—Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay's "Drabomoyee Goes to Kashi" ("Drabomoyeer Kashibash" in Bengali) and T. Janakiraman's "The Puppet" ("Vilayattu Bommai" in Tamil). Regarding "Drabomoyee Goes to Kashi," the paper interrogates the problems in the emplacement of Hindu older widows to Kashi and explores the possibilities in Drabomoyee from ecofeminist and creatural perspectives. The discussions on "The Puppet" chiefly reflect on the social exclusion of the aging bodies of people living with dementia. Through the story of Venu, the paper shows that what the society or family generally expects from the older persons suffering from dementia may not do any good to them, and may instead lead to their institutionalization and other forms of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an exploratory field study carried out to ascertain the pattern of assimilation among East Indian immigrants in California. It was found that the Hindustani immigrants, because of their small numbers and their pattern of living in individual isolation, are prevented from forming their own ethnic communities. In this paper, the term Hindustani refers to immigrants from India and includes Hindu, Sikh, and Moslem immigrants. They constitute one of the smallest Oriental groups in the U.S.— 2,405 in 1940— and are the least known of all ethnic groups in this country. Of the total Hindustani population in the U.S. in 1940, 61.4 percent resided in California. Many have lived there for over thirty years. The majority of California Hindustanis are emigrants from rural villages in the Punjab, with a handful from Gujarat, Bengal, Oudh, and Madras. This study focused on four aspects of Hindustani life— residential pattern, occupational interactions, community life, family and home life.

In this paper I have tried to suggest some probable extensions and projections into the future of what is at present a dimly visible and restricted condition. As previously reported, the situation at present is stable, in the sense that the attitudes supporting the traditional way of life of both Ladinos and Indians are dominant, and some of the tensions are capable of being drained off by desertion of Indians to other areas. Moreover, the average Indian is so securely orientated and integrated to a pattern of poverty, illness, and hard work that he seems quite capable of taking considerable slack in his psychological belt to adjust to still more of the same. The dynamics of alienation from tradition are at present cumulating their forces. How quickly the power which they contain will be recognized by or forced upon the Indians and Ladinos is a matter of speculation. The evidence would seem to point to considerable resistance to any variation in the way of life to adjust to the new forces at work. It is for this reason that in a previous paper the situation was described as one which has much promise of long life. For, there always remains the alternative that the Indians will grow increasingly small in numbers, but will nevertheless stubbornly keep up their traditions. If this alternative is pursued, it may be some generations yet before they either effectively disappear as a local community, or, through various other mechanisms, become so altered as to be no longer recognizable for what they were in 1940. It seems of significance to note here, finally, that the stratification by age and generation and the vertical division of the sexes in the community have come to have special significance. It makes considerable difference to the observer whether he views the situation through the eyes of a young man or an old man, a father or a son, a mother or a daughter. One does not get the same picture from any randomly selected individual in the community. This in some measure is a decided qualification on the usual assumption of homogeneity of such peasant or primitive communities, an assumption which underlies the use of one or two "trust- worthy informants" as the principal sources of information about such communities. These materials therefore incidentally suggest that a more adequate sampling of peasant populations in transition is called for than has hitherto been practiced in typical ethnographic investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]