Exploring the “Myth of Return” in Ageing Pakistani Women of the Diaspora in Great Britain and France

The trope of return has been central to Pakistani Diaspora Studies since the 1970s, but few studies have focused on the return mobilities of first-generation Pakistani women moving and circulating in the transnational arena. The aim here is to look at various forms and modes of ‘return’ practiced by some of these ageing Pakistani women living in Great Britain and in France. In doing so, we question how gender affects the life choices and decisions made by these women, most of whom are grandmothers today, and only few are economically independent. Looking through the lens of gender and ageing, we examine how these women have reinvented and reappropriated the famous myth of return, a dual perspective that enables us to underline the delicate and intricate interplay between gender and ageing but also between agency and constraint in global migrations. Moreover, drawing on recent empirical data, this study casts fresh light on the changing meaning of home and homeland in our day and age. If most ageing women of the Pakistani diaspora regularly evoke Pakistan as the ‘homeland’, our observation is that only few will move back in later life. Relatedly, all transnational return mobilities appear to be affected to some extent by family and kinship considerations, lifestyle and healthcare choices and only to a certain measure by the return politics of the home country. While the wish to return is rather well established, the dynamics of these transnational mobilities are complex, and only few journeys seem to qualify as ‘return’ strictly speaking.