Caring for Old Age

Front matter

CARING FOR OLD AGE

Perspectives from South Asia

Christiane Brosius and Roberta Mandoki Editors

Table of Contents

Christiane Brosius and Roberta Mandoki Caring for Old Age. Perspectives from South Asia: An Introduction ou... seeseeeeeeseseseeseseeessssesesessesecaeseseees 1 Annika Mayer

Gateways of Ageing: Middle-class Senior Citizens

in the National Capital Region of Delhi oo... ee eeesseseeseeeeteeceteeseeeesecseeeees 35 Roberta Mandoki

Part III: Narratives Of Care woccccccccccsscsscsssesesecssscesssesesesessesestseeeees 253

The “Holy Joint Family” in South Asian Ageing Theories „sesse 285 Ira Raja

No Time to Die: Illness, Ageing,

and Death in Three Short Stories from India uu... ccessscesecesseeeeseeseeseees 305 Sarah Lamb

“Successful Ageing” across India and North America „sesser 321 ABOUT THE Authors dicssisssdisveadecsvocdevesties eia Sues suas a eenias 339 vi

Preface

Active ageing

The contemporary understanding of active ageing developed from a shift in research focus from questions of old age to questions of ageing. Thereby, human development is conceptualized as a life-long process, a dynamic and continuous interplay of age-connected and age-independent developmental factors, which people explicitly conceived of as agents of their own development. Taking a primarily individual perspective, active ageing can be understood as a preventive concept. With continuous engagement in personally meaningful relationships and contexts, and the systematic use of chances and opportunities, physical, psychological, and social losses and deficits can be prevented, or at least substantially delayed. Referring to more recent definitions of productivity—i.e. intellectual, emotional, and motivational expressions of productivity in higher age groups—it is further argued that even when suffering severe physical losses and loss of independence, people still have the option to use their capabilities to be productive for others or for society as a whole.

Potentials and vulnerability

A comprehensive understanding of old age must consider potentials and vulnerabilities, aspirations, possibilities, and the limits of self-design and world-design, i.e. how ageing persons participate in society and take responsibility for themselves and others, not only in the so-called third, but also in the fourth age. This book elucidates how, even in very old age, shared responsibility, particularly in the form of intergenerational engagement, is both a potential for society and an important individual motivation, and how important it is to do so from a local, regional, and transcultural perspective—in this case, with respect to South Asia. Even if in old age, physical (and in part also cognitive) vulnerability is increasingly obvious, this must not lead to the assumption that older people can no longer contribute to the development of human capital and to our cultural heritage. The passing on of collective and personal knowledge, an instrumental and emotional commitment to subsequent—primarily to young—generations, a readiness to speak with subsequent generations about topics of central significance for life in old age, including about very concrete hopes and fears with a view to one’s personal future as well as with a view to the future of mankind, are contributions to the development of human capital and cultural heritage. A readiness to allow younger people to participate

Published in: Brosius, Christiane and Roberta Mandoki, eds. 2020. Caring for Old Age. vii Perspectives from South Asia. Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality 8. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.597

PREFACE in the personal management and handling of chronic illnesses, pain, and a need for help and support can be perceived as a contribution of this kind.

Caring

Accompanying and caring for older people should always include the perspective of psychological growth and not only be viewed from a perspective of psychological burden. Therefore, we should not commit the error of understanding the care provided to men and women exclusively as a burden. Because the care provided does not rarely go hand in hand with processes of emotional and intellectual growth—even if there are times in which carers very clearly sense the limits of their capacity and of their actions. However, it should also be considered that these kinds of growth processes are linked to internal as well as external conditions. The dimensions of emotional well-being identified by the US-psychologist Carol Ryff (self-acceptance, personal growth, purpose in life, positive relationships with others, effectively managing demands and opportunities posed or offered by the environment, autonomy) provide insights regarding in which direction the search for these internal conditions should go. At the same time, some of these dimensions can be understood as pointing towards external conditions which must exist in order that potential growth becomes actual growth: carers rely on emotionally fulfilling social relationships in which they also experience practical support; they rely on environmental conditions supportive of integration and participation under which there is a greater possibility of the experience of being able to “master” the situation establishing itself; in the end, they depend on the person for whom they are caring being able and prepared not to overtax the carer either emotionally or physically. And yet we should not overlook the fact that accompanying and caring for frail people can go hand in hand with a large number of burdens. It is not only or primarily about talking about different varieties of burden, rather the objective is also to highlight possible ways in which these burdens can be eased, how to be able to deal with and better manage these.

Caring communities

The commitment by wider society is considered alongside the commitment by care professionals, doctors, and social workers. Intense discussions are already taking place concerning to what extent we can succeed in understanding care not only as a task of the family—supported by professional care—but also (and perhaps even primarily) as a task of the neighbourhood, acquaintances, active members of society—equally supported by professional care. The term “caring community” can illustrate that the family feels supported, valued, and recognized by people from outside of the family.

viii

PREFACE

At the same time, it is not possible to look at the caring community, which is an amalgam of family, neighbours, acquaintances, and active members of society, without including providers of professional care (itself often supported by the family doctor). Rather, professional care brings in the required professional expertise in the provision of care and support. Against this background, caring communities must be seen as an element of a “new care policy”, which also and not least recognizes the risks posed by the economisation of care and raises awareness of individual and collective responsibilities and possible ways of delivering the care required.

In order that a caring community of this kind can actually constitute itself in sufficient numbers, there is a need to create a platform for civic engagement, i.e. a virtual or even actual citizens’ centre that organizes and delivers civic engagement. Here it is important that voluntary engagement by members of society for families with a member in need of care is integrated into an existing care structure generally stemming from cooperation between a family member and an outpatient service (this would be a part of the care management). Furthermore, support by a family doctor is also important. It must be ensured that this caring community is tailored as far as possible to the needs of the family member requiring care and of the relatives providing care (this would be part of the case management).

This book comes at precisely the right time—seen from a social and political perspective, because caring for seriously ill people is one of the pre-eminent issues on both the national and the international agenda. Demographic change is linked with a change in family structures, significantly increased mobility of the middle generation (which overwhelmingly takes on the main responsibility for care), an increasing discussion on how to combine family and professional career and, not least, also with a significant increase in the number of people aged seventy-five, eighty, and older. These developments are playing a significant role in current (and surely also in future) international political discourse on securing care provision. The care of seriously ill people, in particular those with dementia, is no longer a “minor” or “middling” political issue, rather it is a “major” political issue—and will remain so over the coming decades.This book contributes to a dynamic concept of cultural flow with respect to ageing and old age. It is a highly successful attempt to understand the demands placed on older people, but also to substantially extend the creative mental, emotional, and cultural handling of these challenges from a South Asian perspective.

Heidelberg, February 15, 2020, Andreas Kruse

Christiane Brosius and Roberta Mandoki Caring for Old Age. Perspectives from South Asia: An Introduction

The ageing of many societies’ populations and growing longevity around the world have resulted in a multitude of narratives and strategies as to how individuals, groups, and societies can respond to such fundamental shifts to “age well.” In the past decade, these narratives have been reflected in a diversifying body of qualitative research literature which offers sociocultural and historical as well as economic contextualization, and allows for a deeper understanding of how such discourses unfold and transculturally influence each other in different localities. However, the perspective of countries outside the group of nations leading the global list of ageing pyramids has not been widely addressed in this corpus, such as the present case of South Asian countries whose populations are currently relatively “young” compared to other greying Asian countries, but whose share of older persons is expanding at an accelerating speed.

For this reason, this volume presents perspectives on old age and related vernacular discourses on place and space, as well as mobilities and narratives from South Asia. Our book rests on the motivation to think about notions as well as experiences of ageing from multiple angles, and South Asian understandings of care have proven to be key vantage points for our considerations. However, in using the term “South Asian” we also want to highlight that we do not wish to suggest a sedentarist approach that confines itself to a cultural relativist or regionalist identification and a conflation of the “cultural” with the “regional” (or the “national”). Instead, we hope to gesture towards the relational and transgressive as well as circulatory nature of concepts, people and institutions across geophysical boundaries. We argue that such a transcultural approach has not yet found entrance into scholarly research on ageing. Predominantly, concepts and methods used to study ageing processes and imaginaries have been based on restricting “container” models of “West” versus “Asian” or “Global North” versus “Global South,” “modern” versus “traditional,” whereby theorizing would be done in the first and anecdotal examples of deviance would be delivered from the second part of the binary opposition. We propose that theorizing of ageing must be done from and in the Global South, the so-called “periphery” that is too often only considered as reacting rather than acting. But we also suggest that an “Asianist” perspective cannot be the answer either. We rather hope to shed light on relational connectivities—or disconnectivities—on “entanglements” and transculturation rather than “influences” or “hybridities.”

Published in: Brosius, Christiane and Roberta Mandoki, eds. 2020. Caring for Old Age. 1 Perspectives from South Asia. Heidelberg Studies on Transculturality 8. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.597

We consider care and caring as substantially humanistic and heterogeneous modes of both life-course and ageing that require scholarly attention towards the relevance of place and culture as dynamic and relational. To our understanding, “caring for old age” incorporates several meanings: the implications of demographic shifts across the world have taken many by surprise, be it in countries of the so-called Global North or the Global South. While societies speed up in terms of economic growth and individual flexibility of the majority of social groups, ageing populations are often perceived as a “burden,” “slowing us down”—implying that this “us” is an imagined community of middle-aged productive citizens—and as interrupting the access to progress and wealth or putting economic achievements at risk. There is also a quantifiable need for new institutions for and by older persons since neither states nor cities nor families and the market seem to be able to sufficiently care for those who demand, serve, and define what such care could be. Much of the discourses and narratives around ageing societies have been dominated by the Global North, and while it is not our intention to fall back on the repetitious rhetoric of ageing statistics, they do form an influential backdrop for such discourse. When we look at South Asia in this volume, we propose that it is high time to incorporate vernacular perspectives through “thick descriptions” to disclose the multilinearity and transculturality of narrative flows and, ultimately, to more adequately and self-critically reflect notions and experiences of ageing in all their diversity and fields of tensions.

The need for critical perspectives to contextualize statistics

Despite a growing awareness in South Asian countries of shifting demographies and altering modes of care, the overall interest of qualitative disciplines such as critical and environmental gerontology and anthropology, to name a few, in ageing and related themes in South Asia has remained remarkably small in comparison to large-scale surveys and quantitative data from disciplines like nursing, gerontology, or sociology, which mainly define the field and relate to developmentalist or modernist discourses (see Smith and Majumdar 2011). Seminal ethnographic works have beyond doubt introduced major arguments around understandings of personhood and the life-course, old age as a social construction, and influential discourses of ageing well. Seminal works on ageing in South Asia include Cohen's writings (1992; 1998), Lamb's monographies and edited volumes (2000; 2009; 2017), Brijnath (2014), De Jong (2005; 2012) and Vera-Sanso (2004; 2012) for India; Goldstein and Beall (1981; 1983; 1986) and Parker et al. (2014a; 2014b) for Nepal; as well as Risseeuw (2012a; 2012b) for Sri Lanka. Works from other disciplines have mainly focused on well-established categories of health and nutrition, but sociocultural aspects and religious differences remain largely neglected. As anthropologists, we care deeply about vernacular narratives and performances of old age which allow us to support and thicken statistical data with our ethnographic material. Possible reasons for this lacuna are that it is still the family, and not the state, or civil society, which is considered as the pillar institution for solving questions related to the challenges posed by care and old age; a formulation of care and life-course, or intergenerational relations, which builds the backbone, the “glue” of South Asian societies and is often framed as morally superior to narratives of Euro-American individualism and societal fragmentation. Furthermore, current demographic dynamics are not yet as dramatic as they might be in some European countries or Japan, the Asian leader of the international ranking of ageing pyramids. However, statistical prognoses foresee these to change at unprecedented speeds and in view of high social and economic mobilities as well as transnational migration.

The present volume invites the reader to explore themes around ageing and care through the lens of other urgent social themes in South Asia, namely through life experiences in rapidly urbanizing environments, changing mobilities and discourses revolving around care. In this context, what we mean by caring about old age is that we aim to contribute to a more refined understanding of the multi-layered “caring communities” in South Asia as well as our “caring” perspective as researchers from humanities and social sciences to carefully scrutinize and appropriately depict vernacular negotiations and discourses of seemingly global approaches to ageing societies. Therefore, we propose that caring about old age in South Asia includes our rethinking of categories with respect to concepts such as “ageing well,” or “active ageing” and to explore—also collaboratively—methods that help us go beyond “centre-periphery,” “East-West,” or “global-local” binaries. By relating thick, vernacular descriptions to transcultural flows of concepts, even paradigms, of old age and the ageing process, we cannot only highlight counter-narratives to globalizing, but also challenge “internationalist” or “developmentalist” responses to population ageing. Moreover, we may come closer to developing more holistic—or comprehensive—understandings of fundamental humanistic concepts like reciprocity, filial piety and care in view of contemporary shifting mobilities, institutions and technologies.

The transculturality of care in South Asia

The authors in this volume, from South Asia themselves or with thorough regional expertise, explore and denominate particular discourses and narratives of the South Asian region by contrasting detailed, small-scale ethnographic perspectives with large-scale ageing discourses and data. For us, Care represents a comprehensive key term with which to grasp the multilinearity and vocality of interpersonal and social processes which form relationalities between different generations in families, and more generally, in communities (see also Baldassar and Merla 2014; Brijnath 2014). One significant, multi-layered South Asian moral notion of care is seva: its meaning of respect towards older persons in the context of moral debts of children towards their parents (gerontocracy, see Lamb 2000; 2009), but also its meaning as social service characterizes the moral and normative roots of a “caring society” or community. Moralities and normative notions of care determine intergenerational relations and offer important guidance in the formulation of new, non-kin “care scripts” (Coe 2017), but also create immense tensions for all sides when clashes between contemporary South Asian life realities and long-performed ways of care make it impossible for the latter to be continued. Renegotiations of care cause highly emotional moral debates because they seem to shake vernacular understandings of family and filial piety to their very foundations, and many South Asians find themselves torn between “traditional” moral systems and neoliberal shifts taking place in their societies and economies which promise progress and more recognition in global hierarchies.

Transculturality is a phenomenon which also serves as an important heuristic lens. If we look at “care” and “caring” as a transcultural phenomenon, both terms reveal a universally valid category that underlines both the increased need to pay more attention to qualitative factors of care and affective relations towards the growing population of people above sixty years. Yet, “care circulation” (Baldassar and Merla 2014) or “global care chains” also point towards a very cultural and socio-specific notion of relations, values and norms that find reflection in gift exchange and depend on body concepts, gender, and class/caste (Hochschild and Ehrenreich 2002). In Asia, they may divert from a service-delivering notion that is increasingly central for the professionalization of caregiving in Euro-American contexts. Transculturality as a concept that is sensitive to often invisible traces of entanglements and multiple, historically rooted aspects of subjectivity and identity formation serves to underline these various forms of encounters and transfer processes, even if they are asymmetrical. Circulation and translocality are constructive tools to address theoretical and methodological implications to care for old age in—and beyond—the Global South.

CIRCULATION OF AGEING PARADIGMS

Another transcultural phenomenon can be found in globally circulating ageing paradigms, namely the two most dominant concepts of “successful ageing” and “active ageing” (see Foster and Walker 2015; Katz and Calasanti 2015; Lamb et al. 2017; Lassen and Moreira 2014). Initially formulated and propagated in the USA and Europe, both ageing paradigms inhere some Eurocentric aspects through their primary focus on remaining an independent, healthy, and in some way productive individual in later life—"optimizing” one’s ageing self along these imperatives turns into a veritable project. As the latest body of literature aptly demonstrates, such paradigms strongly influence public imaginaries of later life and are quickly contextualized with “statistical panic” (Woodward 1999) of inverting population pyramids which represent the symbol of shifting demographies per se. In this context, frailties—earlier perceived as natural companions of ageing—become negative side effects, and on a national scale old age mutates into an object of medicalization and politicization that needs to be regulated. But how are such paradigms interpreted and (re-)negotiated in contexts like South Asian societies which are based upon different notions of personhood, dependence, and intergenerativity? As the chapters of this volume highlight, more focus is needed on the perceptions and aspirations of ageing persons themselves, but transculturality helps us to detect and detangle flows of concepts, paradigms and notions which are used to coin social issues—such as “the problem of aging” (Cohen 1992)—and, in that process, concurrently contribute to shape them.

We underline that a seamless distribution of such paradigms cannot be assumed and, even if so, would not be productive to a South Asian context. We likewise argue that not all “new” or “recalibrating” approaches come from “the West” to be further disseminated or appropriated. For this, a transcultural perspective can be deemed useful. The transcultural approach stresses the fact that we have to be cautious of cultural and national sedentary reifications: neither should we assume clear-cut categories such as an “Indian” way of ageing, nor a “Western” way, though this is often suggested by the terminology used. By no means does this mean that we privilege a universalist or seamlessly homogeneous approach that flattens differences and ignores boundaries. Instead, we propose a relational approach, one that considers a need for multiperspectivity, connectivities and entanglements. With it comes the concept of “translation” that further illuminates how ideas, practices, and knowledge circulate and are altered at different speeds, alongside which different and even new forms of meaning are created (see Abu-Er-Rub et al. 2019).

How can we develop counter-narratives?

It is difficult to develop counter-narratives to dominant iconic terms like “active ageing” that have been taken over by the World Health Organization (Active Ageing 2002) and the European Union (European Year of Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations 2012) to phrase uniform responses to population ageing, another step to brave demographic shifts from a productivist viewpoint (see Denninger et al. 2014). Such iconic terms quickly became paradigms to guide nations in developing policy frameworks and public health measures, but also in promulgating imaginaries of appropriate lifestyles which ultimately created new markets, following consumerist logic. Cohen’s seminal dissection (1992; 1998) of such ‘internationalist’ strategies and action plans has shown us the importance of conducting such discourse analysis. To look at ageing in a transcultural context allows us to explore a host of globally circulating concepts, social networks, and institutions in particular contexts of appropriation and translation, and challenges relational perceptions of being old in demography-wise drastically changing social and trans/regional contexts. Discussions on perspectives on and from South Asia consider debates related to critical gerontology as well as critical area studies and propose productive approaches using transculturality as a heuristic lens. Through transculturality, we can take notice of the international increase of socio-economic changes for and national policies regarding older persons while considering particular cultural contexts, albeit refraining from essentializing these as “container cultures.”

As all contributions in this volume illustrate, intensifying, accelerated global entanglements of neoliberal economies and communication, flows of media imaginaries, people, care, and medical options have profoundly impacted vernacular perceptions of old age. Through increasing age segregation (i.e. shrinking intergenerational co-presence) and institutionalization of later life (e.g. medical and care arrangements, policy), imaginaries of old age developed static images of set life stages, for instance dividing older persons into groups of “young-old” and “old-old,” or employment vs. retirement (see Fry 2010)—imaginaries which attempt to grasp growing longevity. Another result of such changed life realities are isolated and somewhat patronizing representations of older persons as being detached from their social, urban, or kin environment. As shown above, demographic statistics proved to be a double-edged sword: while national ageing and health policies require certain databases, the same data have been employed by media to create “statistical panic” (Woodward 1999), promoting a “discourse of burden [German Belastungsdiskurs]” (Kruse 2013) of older persons on contemporary societies and their neoliberal economies.

The eleven chapters of this edited volume explore different issues of ageing and care through the lens of transcultural phenomena of spatiality, mobility, and narrativity. Their common point of departure is South Asia in its transgressing connectivities and entanglements with other locations, concepts, people, and institutions. By taking such a transcultural perspective on the lived everyday contexts of older persons, the individual chapters present nuanced ethnographic insights into current South Asian understandings and negotiations of care (see Abu-Er-Rub et al. 2019). In one chapter, a South Asian scholar’s look into changing European approaches towards institutional care carries forward the transcultural perspective. In addition to its transcultural approach, which has not yet received much attention in ageing studies, this volume assembles much-needed close-up ethnographic research focusing on social dynamics such as ageing in North India’s and Nepal’s rapidly expanding metropolitan areas and megacities which profoundly change its urban fabrics and socialities, and how the mobilities of people from North and South India and Sri Lanka, in many cases across continents, affect and transform forms of “doing family”. This also affects the making, altering, and unmaking of other social relations, often marginalized because of an overemphasis on family relations, but increasingly important also for transnational labour contexts, friendship, cohabitation, and care practices. These dynamics also reflect in the manifold ways how lived experiences of care and ageing are narrated and framed.

The chapters of the first book section focus on lived experiences of ageing in particular localities. These localities comprise particular places, such as care homes as particular institutions for older persons, and spaces, in this case existing and emerging elderscapes that are enmeshed in urban transformations in South Asia. The first three chapters combine approaches from anthropology, environmental gerontology, and urban studies and look at the specific dynamics of ageing in two heavily urbanizing areas in North India and Nepal. In her chapter on the interrelations of space and power in the National Capital Region of Delhi, Annika Mayer investigates how middle-class senior citizens respond to and engage in neoliberal processes of urban reorganization, juxtaposing diverse settings such as in an older middle-class neighbourhood, a condominium, and a senior living project. Chapters two and three are based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, one of South Asia’s most rapidly expanding urban regions whose more or less non-colonial past led to a different state institutional and administrative environment for spatial restructuring, also with regard to ageing. Along the notion of elderscapes, Roberta Mandoki’s chapter explores how contemporary social trajectories related to ageing and care translate into Kathmandu’s suburban space. Using this concept, she highlights the active and creative role of older persons from the middle classes in such urban place-making processes. In conversation with the first two chapters, Christiane Brosius looks at the intersectionality of “ageing in place” and urban transformation in the historical city of Patan where the locality’s spiritual landscape and its distinct private and public spaces constitute important resources for older people to dwell in, shape and care for their and other groups’ urban habitat. In her chapter on institutional care in Goa, India, Deborah Menezes continues to underline the agency of older persons to partake in place-making practices by carefully examining the complex, sometimes subtle articulations of power, agency and resistance between residents and staff in a controversially debated locality.

Expanding the scope of the book, the chapters of the second section explore how caring mobilities translate into the everyday of South Asian transnational families. By following people, objects, and financial flows across borders, but also tracing the effects of national regulations and policies on individual migration decisions and agency, the three authors explore transnational mobility and care on a variety of scales. In chapter five, Michele Gamburd scrutinizes the impacts of Sri Lanka's “Family Background Report” policy and its moralized family discourse on different generations of women from rural working families, taking a differentiated view on the intersections of female mobilities, intergenerational support and cultural construction of class identities. Following migrated nurses from Kerala, India, and their parents at home, Tanja Ahlin’s chapter illuminates the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a crucial part of the care collective of geographically dispersed families beyond being mere tools, allowing for a nuanced understanding of mobility and care over distance. In the last chapter of this section, Bianca Brijnath employs the concepts of kinship, capital, and technologies as a lens to reflect upon ethnographic approaches to transculturally conceptualize care in transnational Indian families.

The third book section introduces the narrativity of care and caring relations from a variety of viewpoints. These narratives highlight how transcultural flows of images, concepts, and people inform and alter local understandings of care. Four authors explore in the local contexts of India, Nepal, and North America how their interlocutors and texts frame and contextualize lived experiences and narratives of ageing, care and illness against social transformation. In chapter eight, Roma Chatterji offers a rare South Asian long-term perspective onto altering care narratives in the Netherlands and their direct impact onto a care institution which reflect a neoliberal commodification of care, clashing with the institution's original orientation as a liberal, innovative space. Axel Michaels traces the textual roots of a powerful South Asian narrative idealizing the institution of the joint family, demonstrating that this narrative ultimately serves as an epitomization of South Asian identity and a subaltern moral standpoint against transcultural notions from “elsewhere”. In her chapter on three Indian short stories which follows the narrative turn in gerontology, Ira Raja explores literary articulations of being an older person in the light of dementia, illness, and end of life and highlights the potential of literature as a space for negotiating cultural understandings of and approaches towards the fragility of health in later life. The final chapter of this volume by Sarah Lamb carefully dissects transcultural flows of narratives and imaginaries of ageing, care, and personhood in India and North America and offers a differentiated view of the complexities and cultural notions of care and ageing well in a neoliberal world.

Which alternative approaches towards old age informed our aim to express much-needed counter-narratives for the South Asian context in particular and which perspectives allowed us to incorporate ageing persons’ concerns and viewpoints? In recent years, researchers from different disciplines suggested alternative approaches which look at old age through the lens of the person's life-course (Poser and Poser 2014; Danely and Lynch 2013) which highlight their individual life histories and their interests and experiences, but also crucial aspects of “ageing in place.” Given the extent of global urbanization, one crucial lacuna which has been largely addressed by sociologist Phillipson (2010; Buffel, Handler, and Phillipson 2018) is to adequately look into the specific conditions of ageing in urban environments, but the focus on Asia, and in particular, South Asia, is still dominated by public health-driven studies (see the first book section, “Caring Spaces and Places”). Other authors (see e.g. Coe 2017; Vanderbeck and Worth 2015; Baldassar and Merla 2014) direct our focus towards the continuous meaningfulness and importance of affective and caring intergenerational relations, both within and beyond the biological family, for developing novel living and care arrangements as an age-inclusive response to demographic change (see the second book section, “Caring Mobilities”). To change the above-mentioned “discourse of burden” into a more adequate representation of older persons, gerontologist Kruse (2013) advocates for a balanced perspective of old age which carefully weighs “potentials” and “vulnerabilities” of older persons (see the third book section, “Narratives of Care”).