Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain

Dreams, Questions, Struggles South Asian Women in Britain Amrit Wilson Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI Wilson...

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Dreams, Questions, Struggles South Asian Women in Britain Amrit Wilson

Pluto

P

Press

LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

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First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Amrit Wilson 2006 The right of Amrit Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN

0 7453 1848 7 hardback 0 7453 1847 9 paperback

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

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In memory of my sister Aparna Rao (1950–2005), of the principles she stood for, and all the years we shared.

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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1 The New ‘Good Woman’: Reconstructing Patriarchal Control Where ‘belonging to …’ comes from Encounters with colonial and global capital Controlling women’s sexuality The hijab – ‘brimming with politics’ Reconstructing femininity Women working for patriarchy Mothers and violence Sexual abuse and patriarchy 2 A Thing of Beauty and a Boy Forever – Changing Masculinities From workers to worshippers – Sikhs and male identity The Warrior Guru Azad Kashmiris and transnational biradaris New Islamic groups and approaches Luton’s club scene Gujaratis and the creation of a ‘civilised’ Hindu culture Masculinity, femininity and right-wing Hindu groups in Britain Discourses of Hindutva and the diaspora The Gujarat massacres: responses from Britain 3 ‘Mercy and Wisdom of a Government’? Race, Culture and Immigration Control Multiculturalism – reshaping culture in the interests of control Immigration, gender and ‘credible witnesses’ The Two-Year Rule ‘No recourse to public funds’ The Forced Marriage Initiative – confronting South Asian patriarchy? Colonial counterparts of the Forced Marriage Initiative

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7 8 13 15 22 25 27 32 35 41 42 48 50 54 57 59 66 68 69 72 73 76 78 83 86 88

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Dreams, Questions, Struggles

Do only ‘British’ women need human rights? Giving women ‘choice’? Honour crimes and multicultural constructions

89 91 93

4 Making a Spectacle of Oneself – South Asian Weddings in Britain Bollywood and Europe mingle in the market The bride as spectacle or bahu as icon The bride’s ‘Big Day’ The rise and rise of the cost of weddings The escalation of dowries – factors specific to Punjab The escalation of dowries – factors specific to Gujarat Demands from the groom’s family Life after the wedding

96 98 99 101 103 104 105 106 108

5 Psychiatry, Violence and Mental Distress When psychiatry colludes with patriarchy Rehab, respite, race and gender Self-harm and suicide An ‘up and coming health authority’ What is ‘normal’ for a man?

111 112 118 119 121 125

6 Contesting (mis)Representations Racism – a thing of the past? East is East A few messages from Bollywood Charismatic fathers

128 129 131 134 137

7 Still Fighting for Justice – Low-paid Workers in a Global Market Global workers Care homes – legitimising exploitation Sweatshops and Asian women’s struggles: continuities and changes The restructuring of British industry: Smethwick as a microcosm Strikes in the service sector A comparison of two strikes Key strategies of the two strikes Attitudes of the trade union leadership The new ‘era of partnership’

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139 139 145 147 147 148 149 150 154 155

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Contents

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8 Dreams, Questions and Struggles – Reflections on a Movement Some early experiences of organising as Asian women Asian women’s refuges, funding and the state ‘Supporting People’ policies Racism and the fragmentation of services Feminism is needed more than ever

159 161 163 165 167 170

Notes References Index

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Acknowledgements Many of the women whose experiences, ideas and insights I have recorded in the pages which follow cannot be named, but without their courageous testimonies and their generous giving of precious time, this book would never have been written. I must also acknowledge the support of the many women who have helped me with specific aspects of this book. They include Anita Bharadwaj, Anjona Roy, Dipali Chandra, Kiran Patel, Leena Dhingra, Mohini Howard, Ravinder Barn, Sarbjit Johal, Savita Bhanot, Talat Jabin, Urmi Rahman, Valerie Bryson, Zubaida Motala, and my friends and colleagues in some of the organisations I have been involved with – Imkaan, Asian Women Unite, Londec and particularly South Asia Solidarity Group. I would like to thank Kumkum Sangari whose encouragement was crucial when I first started work on this book, Avtar Johal for always being willing to share his knowledge of the history of South Asian workers in Britain and Aisha Gill for her helpful interventions and her willingness to engage in discussions of gender and race. I acknowledge a Small Grant from the Barrow Cadbury Trust at the outset of the research for this book. Thanks are also due to my editor at Pluto Press, the ever-patient Anne Beech, and her colleague Debjani Roy, for their painstaking reading of the manuscript. Most of all I would like to acknowledge the unstinting support of my daughter Kalpana who gave me her critical comments at every stage and helped me develop many of the ideas in this book. Finally I would like to thank Brishti whose stories and jokes kept me on an even keel – almost – over the last few years.

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Introduction I wanted them to have a sense of who I was. That there were certain values and principles which were central to me … I told them that core values are not necessarily shared through faith but through life experience and through political experience, through growing up as a British Asian and what impact that has on who you are. I wanted them to know me – know about the things I would struggle for, and the things other people of my generation see as struggle. I wanted them to know how I feel. ‘Manpreet’1 This book is about the lives and hopes of South Asian women in Britain and about their complex and overlapping identities. Through the prism of their experiences, I have tried to examine how gender relations have been reshaped over the last 30 years. I have located these processes of change in the context of local and global discourses, and I have examined the role of the British state, the relentless pressures of the market and the politics of South Asia in reconfiguring patriarchal power. In these three decades, patriarchal relations have been reshaped in Britain, and inevitably they have been reshaped in different ways in different communities and classes. At the same time racism has been reconfigured, and the policies of the British state have served to deepen the religious and ‘ethnic’ divisions between communities. If these changes have continually fragmented the South Asian experience in Britain, women’s struggles against gender oppression, individual and collective, have reversed this process and shown the striking similarities across religions, class and caste in the structures which oppress women. These experiences display myriad complexities and differences, but also validate the notion of a common struggle which has inspired me throughout the long project of writing this book. When I have doubted these notions of commonality, South Asian women’s opinions and experiences have continually revived them, demonstrating that differences within a framework of unity can only be strengthening. For example, in December 2004 I go to facilitate a small group discussion about women and the media, in an Asian women’s refuge in London. We talk about the way Asian women are represented on TV. In Coronation Street, a British soap that all the 1

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participants watch regularly, two Asian women have been fighting violently over an Asian man. No one likes it. One woman, ‘Seema’, says she cannot bear to see this scale of violence between our women. ‘That is for white people’, says ‘Kulwant’, ‘maybe that is how they like to see us, either that or they show us as victims – just suffering.’ They question why the media never shows anything about women like them, about their lives. ‘When I came here to this refuge’, says ‘Asma’, ‘I was caught between life and death, frozen like a seed. I was nurtured and warmed and now I can see the green leaves of hope … our lives could never be shown on television.’ Suddenly, unstoppably, she pours out her story, with passion and a sort of amazement at herself. It is the first time she has told it. It is a story of false promises, psychological abuse, depression – but more than anything it is a story of survival. There is a silence, then Seema says: ‘When you tell your story I can hear mine in it.’ ‘Sarlaben’ has been silent so far. She is in her fifties, older than the others, but now, cautiously, almost fearfully, she asks Seema and Asma and ‘Kalwant’ in turn, ‘Did he used to hit you?’ When they reply she is quiet again. ‘And you?’ I ask. ‘That used to happen to me too’ she says. It is the first time she has spoken openly about the abuse she has suffered. The talk about the media is forgotten, suddenly we have come closer, no need now for formal discussion. Speaking eagerly, in a common language – Hindi shading into Urdu and back again, with Punjabi words thrown in – we exchange ideas and contexts. Yes, issues of izzat (honour) and badnami (bad reputation) stretch across the South Asian countries and communities we come from. They are common in Lahore, Jullunder, Sylhet and Ahmedabad, and also in the communities in Britain which link to these places. Dowries are common across regional boundaries. And yes, racism is ever present in Britain, colouring the way we and our culture are seen, not only by white people but on occasion by other South Asians. From different countries, different religions, of different ages and class backgrounds, the five of us are bound in a common identity of being Asian women – something, Seema tells me later, she was always aware of, but never experienced in this way before. We discuss our lives and attitudes further, differences are identified and argued over – the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in our countries of origin, and in our own attitudes to each other; the tensions in this country between British Asians and those directly from the sub-continent: the racism of British society and of the

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agents of the state, which we have experienced in different ways to differing extents. Because of what has gone before, prejudices can be confronted, differences can be examined and serve to highlight the contradictions, but also the richness, of Asian women’s lives and struggles in Britain. The media, as Kulwant said, has portrayed Asian women as victims. But the answer is not to deny the existence of negative experiences or posit the existence of ‘choices’ where few exist. Rather the experience of this small group of Asian women and many others suggests that this mask of victimhood can only be torn away by revealing the structures of oppression that women are resisting. In terms of perspective, what I present here is an unapologetically feminist approach. But of course feminism – even while it is under attack in this supposedly ‘post-feminist’ era – means different things to different people. As Alison Jaggar puts it: ‘For some, it is a pejorative term, for others it is honorific. Consequently, some people deny the title “feminist” to those who would claim it, and seek to bestow it on others who reject it’ (1988: 5). I use feminist here in Jaggar’s ‘inclusive’ definition to mean those who regard women as systematically subordinated and who seek ‘no matter on what grounds, to end women’s subordination’. While I do not see patriarchy as an autonomous system, I regard patriarchal relations – relations between men and women that subordinate women – as a core attribute of the vast majority of historical and existing social formations. As for the experiences of gender of South Asian women in Britain, as Brah (1996) and Anthias and Yuval Davis (1992) among others have noted, these are inextricably bound up with race, class, region of origin, religion and other differentiations, shaping and reshaping each other – producing, for example, gendered experiences of racism and racialised experiences of gender. In societies in many parts of South Asia, where capitalism has incorporated rather than swept away pre-capitalist forms of power, patriarchal relations are very different from those in advanced capitalist societies such as Britain. In Chapter 1 of this book, I explore how, in periods of social transformation, earlier patriarchal relations are often retained and incorporated alongside and in interaction with new structures for subordination. A theme that I discuss in different contexts in various chapters is the British state’s pragmatic interactions with South Asian patriarchal power. For example, on the one hand, it consolidates gendered

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hierarchies within communities through multiculturalism and the creation of patriarchal community leaders; it enhances patriarchal power in the family through the iniquitous Two-Year Immigration Rule and through its practices in the welfare services; and at the same time it appears to condemn women’s oppression though initiatives against forced marriage and honour killings, in the process sometimes intensifying racism. At the same time, behind the façade of the ‘war on terror’, state racism, particularly anti-Muslim racism, has escalated and the repressive power of the state has been increased to unprecedented levels.2 This book is also about the political changes and the activism Asian women have been involved with over the last three decades. And if some chapters seem not to be ‘distanced’ or ‘neutral’ it is because I was there too – part of those collective experiences. These sections are also the ones where it is possible to look at changes over a comparatively long period of time. In Chapter 7 for example, I compare South Asian women’s strikes in the late 1970s and mid-1990s, while also looking at their struggles at work today and the contemporary experiences of women who are insecure migrant global workers. In each case I seek to examine the gendered relations of power in the workplace, the family and the community. South Asians in Britain belong to a wide variety of linguistic groups and many of the sub-continent’s religions. In this book I have focused on the experiences of women from some of the largest South Asian communities in this country. The first members of these communities arrived in Britain between the 1950s and 1970s from the states of Punjab and Gujarat in India; from Azad Kashmir, Punjab and the North West Frontier Province in Pakistan; from Sylhet in Bangladesh; and as refugees from the countries of East Africa. However, as Avtar Brah points out, ‘if the circumstances of leaving are important, so, too, are those of arrival and settlement’ (1996: 182), and it is the latter that I discuss in this book. In addition to collective struggles, throughout this book I have also tried to convey the experiences of those who have fought alone as individuals – like ‘Ranu’ who challenged her mother’s psychiatrist over why he was shoring up her parents’ violent marriage, of ‘Mona’ who took on her attackers in the school playground when they taunted her about her hijab, of ‘Bhupinder’, who fought to stop the men in her family taking control of the land that is rightfully hers, of the young women who confronted patriarchal rules and stepped

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across boundaries, and many others. These struggles too bring crucial messages of change. All the chapters that follow draw upon interviews and conversations with Asian women. Some of them are women I have met over the last 30 years as an activist – women who participated in workers’ strikes in the 1980s and 1990s, women who were fighting deportation, women who faced and survived domestic violence, and women who confronted structures of oppression in a variety of other ways. In addition I have drawn on specific groups of interviews. These include the 22 young women aged between 14 and 18 from Southall and Harrow in Middlesex, Luton in Bedfordshire and East London, who spoke to me about their lives, hopes and personal relationships for the booklet We are Making Changes produced by Asian Women Unite! in 2003; the twelve women I interviewed in Northamptonshire in connection with a report on domestic violence service provision in 1998; the eleven women facing the Two-Year Immigration Rule whom I interviewed when I worked on a report, A Place to Stay, Experiences of Asian Women and Children Affected by Domestic Violence and Insecure Immigration Status, for Imkaan in 2003; and the 18 women, mainly from Oldham, whom I got to know after I had written so-called expert reports on their immigration cases between 2001 and 2005. Most of these were semi-structured one-to-one interviews where we focused on the specific area of concern – immigration or service provision, for example – but also discussed other aspects of everyday life. I also carried out 42 in-depth semi-structured one-to-one interviews specifically for this book. These were with women of different ages, classes, religions and regions of origin in South Asia. They include women who had migrated to this country, as well as those born here whose parents or grandparents had migrated. Among them are, for example, women I have referred to in the pages that follow as Shireen, Manpreet, Ranu, Kamalaben, Anita, Anjali, Fatima and Narinder. A few of these interviews took place over two sessions separated by several weeks. I also recorded a much smaller number of group discussions in Luton, Southall and Harrow. These interviews and discussions were in English, Hindi and Bengali. My emphasis has always been on creating conditions where the women I interviewed could talk freely about themselves and about the world in general. Implicit in this, however, is my interaction with them. My feelings echo those of Beth Roy, a psychotherapist

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who reflected on her experiences in trying to research a communal riot in Bengal: The stories I heard were not about … ‘what happened’ (itself a questionable concept). What I heard was how people saw what happened, or, rather, how people remembered what they saw, or, rather, how they talked about what they remembered – or, rather, how they talked to me about what they remembered, or, rather what I heard people say to me about what they remembered. I was well aware that what I heard from my informants engaged my own history and was transformed in that interaction … After a lifetime’s engagement with other people’s stories … I have come to suspect that all human understanding takes the form of conversation. (1994: 5–6)

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1 The New ‘Good Woman’: Reconstructing Patriarchal Control Even if my eyes become the soles of your feet This fear will not leave you … And while I can think Where will your fear lead you? And while I am free Where will your fear lead you? (From ‘Anticlockwise’ by Kishwar Naheed)1 The oppression faced by Asian women in Britain is often portrayed as something incomprehensibly foreign that the communities brought with them when they migrated. Remarkably, this view has persisted for nearly half a century. It allows the open condemnation of Asian cultures and at the same time suggests that ‘understanding these communities’ requires ‘cultural expertise’. In the meantime, gender relations in the South Asian diaspora have undergone some major transformations. They have been affected by indigenous British gender relations, which are inscribed in the policies of the state, in the discourses of the media and in the constant, insistent pressure of the market. These ideologies are sometimes strikingly similar in theme to those originating in South Asia. For example, the story of the ‘infidelity gene’ shows how female (but not male) sexual liberty is clearly categorised as deviant – a disease that could be carried and transmitted genetically: A quarter of British women may carry ‘infidelity genes’, which sharply increase the chances of them being unfaithful … Professor Spector came up with his theory of the ‘infidelity gene’ after studying the faithfulness of 5,000 female twins compared with that of 5,000 unrelated women … He admitted other factors, such as happiness in a relationship, influence infidelity. But his claim of a strong genetic influence will be controversial in seemingly removing women’s accountability. (Daily Mail 6 February 2005)

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Such messages from the media highlight, too, the tenacity of traditional British patriarchal ideology which, like its South Asian counterpart, originated in peasant societies, but is still going strong many generations after the Industrial Revolution. However, as I discuss later in this chapter, there are also more implicitly controlling elements of modern British culture. For example, individual women are now expected actively to project images which conform to marketled definitions of sexual attractiveness, and are blamed if they fail. Gender relations among South Asians in Britain have, however, also been reshaped by developments in their regions of origin in contemporary South Asia. Over the last two or three decades, these countries have witnessed both the rise of right-wing religious and quasi-religious movements, and battles against women’s oppression waged by strong women’s movements. Last but by no means least, patriarchal power in the South Asian communities in Britain has been affected by Asian women’s struggles against it – struggles which have occurred in an organised collective form for around 30 years and in individual confrontations for far longer. Gender relations also vary, of course, from diasporic community to community, differing with region of origin in South Asia, religion, caste and linguistic group, and also, crucially, with class status in Britain and the particular history of migration. However, there are also enormous similarities in the framework of South Asian women’s oppression. In this chapter, I explore this framework, and within it, the control of women’s sexuality and labour.

WHERE ‘BELONGING TO …’ COMES FROM Feminist historians have argued that the origins of male dominance were connected to the struggle over women’s productive as well as reproductive labour (see Kelkar and Nathan 1991, for a discussion of various perspectives). Male control over this was intensified and institutionalised as societies based on class and private property emerged in which accumulated property was transferred from father to son. The possibility of breaks in patrilineal transfer of property, in the form of ‘illegitimate’ children, was seen as a threat to social structure. Female sexuality was therefore strictly controlled and regarded as unruly and inherently dangerous. This occurred in all societies where land and property passed from father to son, including

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Reconstructing Patriarchal Control

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those in the regions of South Asia from where substantial migration to the west has occurred. These societies are highly varied in terms of language and religion but they share many aspects of patriarchal control. While this control may be imposed in different ways and with varying degrees of severity, there are some remarkable similarities. In patriarchal peasant communities from regions as varied as Azad Kashmir and North West Frontier Province (NWFP) in Pakistan, Gujarat and Punjab in India and Sylhet in Bangladesh, for example, women were and often still are seen essentially as the property of the family and the community. As a result – irrespective of their own desires and wishes – women’s bodies are made available to certain men and at the same time are unavailable to others. A woman is regarded as belonging first to the men in her family, then to the men in her husband’s family but never to herself. A Punjabi Hindu wedding song, sung while the bride and groom walk seven times around the wedding fire, expresses this quite clearly: Here she takes the first round, Her grandfather’s granddaughter. Here she takes the second round, Her maternal uncle’s maternal niece. Here she takes the third round, Her father’s elder brother’s daughter.2 Here she takes the fourth round, Her father’s own daughter. Here she takes the fifth round, Her father’s younger brother’s niece. Here she takes the sixth round, Her brother’s sister. Here she takes the seventh round And lo! the darling becomes alien. (Lewis 1958, cited in Wilson 1978: 6) ‘Belonging to’ in these societies means ‘having the protection of’. As ‘Farah’, a woman from NWFP, who feared divorce by her husband, explained: When you are young, your father and brothers protect you. You belong to them. Then when I got married it was my husband’s family who looked after

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me. But if a woman is thrown out by her in-laws then she has no one to shelter her, no haven for protection. Anybody can use her because she does not belong to anybody. ‘Belonging to’ almost inevitably shades into ‘being a possession of’ the extended family. ‘Shireen’, a woman from a small village in Sylhet, made this quite explicit: What is a woman’s life worth? If she produces sons, if she does the housework without complaint, if she is lucky in her husband, then maybe she’ll have no trouble. But if she does not, what then? She is regarded as useless, like a broken sieve or saucepan which is defective and should be thrown away. Young women – daughters, sisters, nieces – were, and still are, characterised by their sexuality. Their behaviour is controlled by a variety of rules which are regarded as essential for survival – which in these societies is seen as identical with the propagation of the paternal line. They must not have any contact, not even eye-contact, with unrelated men. Their clothing and manner must always be ‘modest’ – although what constitutes modesty in this respect may vary from community to community. In the villages of South Asia, across religious and linguistic differences, marriage is still seen as an economic and social bond between families. There are clearly many differences in marriage arrangements: among Sikhs and Hindus in Punjab, for example, a woman would traditionally be married into a family living in a different village from her parents. (The last line of the song quoted above refers to a woman’s transfer from her parental family to that of her marital family – from then on she is ‘alien’ to the former.) Among Muslims, in contrast, marriages are often arranged between cousins, or at least within the broader extended family (Rao 2000: 112). But in either case, when a woman is married, the control over her sexuality passes to her husband and his family. She now belongs to them – in many communities across the sub-continent she is even given a new name to confirm her new identity. As ‘Lakshmiben’, a Gujarati woman in her fifties, told me: ‘My parents-in-law gave me my name Lakshmi, because it was auspicious. I was just a young girl then and I used to forget and not reply to Lakshmi, because before that I used to be called Nisha.’ However, a woman is also a possession of the community – who can act in certain situations as guardians of her ‘purity’ (Menon and

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Bhasin 1996). The delineation of who she can and cannot marry serves as a marker of the boundaries between communities and castes. As ‘Farhat’ from Azad Kashmir explained: ‘People have to marry within the quom [community/caste], otherwise the quom itself and its way of life will disappear.’ Or in the words of Lakshmiben: ‘It is a question of Khaandaan [a group of families bearing a common name within a caste and status group]. If you don’t respect that and marry someone of a different type, then you lose what your parents and their parents before them have given you.’ After a girl is married, the marital family also control her labour. Her work consists of all aspects of domestic labour, servicing the entire extended family and in addition giving birth to sons. In fact she is now characterised more than anything by her ability or otherwise to produce sons, because sons will continue the patriarchal line and be the lifelong workers for the family. Daughters, on the other hand, would be married off, as she herself has been, and once married they are useless to the parental family. If she is unable to produce sons, as Shireen explained, she will be regarded as a failure and in some cases (in all these varied groups) she may well be replaced by another wife. Implicit in these structures and rules are not only the objectification of a woman’s body but the sexualisation of her identity as a woman. This is expressed in a variety of ways – for example, unlike a ‘bad man’ who is seen generally as a wrongdoer, a ‘bad woman’ implies more specifically ‘loose’ or sexually available. (This is so in all the South Asian languages spoken in the diaspora and of course also in English, displaying the patriarchal roots of English societies and language.) A ‘good woman’ is by and large someone whose sexual behaviour conforms to established patriarchal rules. In most pre-capitalist societies, the control of women and concepts linked to it were institutionalised as essential aspects of education, of aesthetics, health and much else. Since religion structured all institutions, customary as well as religious laws not only condoned violence against women but left no recourse to justice for women facing violence. Despite an ever-present undercurrent of resistance from women,3 a plethora of superstitions, fears and taboos served to stigmatise female sexuality as dangerous and ‘unclean’. For example, in all the regions from where substantial migration has occurred, among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike, a woman’s hair is regarded as symbolic of her sexuality and newly married women are as a result forbidden from being seen in public with their hair uncovered. As

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‘Balwinder’ from Ludhiana put it: ‘If a new daughter-in-law does not cover her hair and lower her eyes, it would not be right. Yes, it would be dirty behaviour.’ In fact a woman’s sexuality is ‘unclean’ by its very existence, not as a result of her actions. This is why women were and sometimes still are excluded from many religious rituals, or, on another level, may be prohibited from preparing food during their menstrual period. Images and discourses of female weakness, inferiority, fickleness and untrustworthiness further confirm that female sexuality has to be kept in check, and is acceptable only as a response to male desire within the formal framework of marriage (Chakravarti 1995). These images and discourses were part of people’s everyday life. Even where some of the pre-capitalist patriarchal rules have been muted or removed, they remain rooted in people’s consciousness and both men and women believe in them. Women in South Asian patriarchal societies are also encouraged to internalise the perception of women’s sexuality as dangerous through the notion of sharam which means shame, shyness and modesty. The effects of sharam were to discourage women from crossing patriarchal boundaries and breaking out of prescribed moulds of femininity, and it still serves this purpose. But it operates on other levels too. It was and is a means of acknowledging female sexuality and making it ‘safe’ by placing it within patriarchal limits. Within these limits it is reconstructed as acceptable femininity. Sharam therefore could be an aspect of acceptable flirtatiousness – the surreptitious glances and smiles which are the language of romantic relationships so common in the earlier generation of Hindi films. Acceptable femininity was also constructed around concepts such as ‘purity’. These concepts are still with us, as shown by this comment by a Pakistani woman (Wilson 1978: 99) about sunbathing in public: You can say our religion forbids it. You can say we are not used to it because our parents never sunbathed. But deeper than all this are the values of our society. You see we think for women, Sharam itself is honour. It can be a woman’s pride because it reflects her purity and sensitivity. Sharam requires a woman to be watchful of all her actions – how she walks, how she responds to others – because patriarchy demands that sharam is always present under the surface. She has to feel sharam about all aspects of her body and about her sexuality.

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If female sexuality is closely connected to the consolidation of patriarchal property – both a danger to it and at the same time essential to preserve and propagate it through reproduction – a third concept binds these two, making them inseparable. This is honour, which is closely linked to prestige, reputation and male ego. This concept is regarded as symbolic of the survival, and propagation of the paternal line. In the northern belt of South Asia covering Pakistan, India and Bangladesh this is known as izzat, while almost identical concepts of reputation, prestige and ‘good name’ are current all over the sub-continent, as are notions of the loss of honour and reputation such as badnami (loss of reputation), bezti (loss of honour) and so on. Izzat and its synonyms also play a role in maintaining the stratification of society. They demand strict maintenance of caste barriers because South Asian societies (regardless of religion) are stratified according to caste. A relationship between a man and woman across caste barriers is therefore a blow to izzat or reputation. And because a woman is the property of her community as well as her family, women who have been raped and abducted by enemy forces are often not taken back by their families and communities – they are regarded as both damaged themselves and instrumental in damaging the izzat of their families and communities (Menon and Bhasin 1996). Any hint that a woman has broken patriarchal rules or crossed patriarchal boundaries, even unknowingly or by implication, is usually seen as damaging izzat. In addition, anything that is done to her which breaks these rules is also a blow to her family’s honour. These actions could range from rape to exchanging a few words and, in extreme cases, even a glance from an unrelated male. Even when a woman has rejected or resisted these actions, she may still be seen as damaged. Family reputation and honour may then be affected.

ENCOUNTERS WITH COLONIAL AND GLOBAL CAPITAL Patriarchal relations in South Asia may come from a pre-capitalist era but they have been repeatedly shaped and reshaped by their encounters with capitalism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the interests of siphoning off profits to Britain, the colonial politico-economic system restructured the Indian economy. Existing manufacturing industry was demolished and India (then comprising what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) was transformed into

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an agricultural country which produced and exported raw materials to Britain and provided a market for the manufactured goods which Britain now exported. Changes in the economy were accompanied by the strengthening of an indigenous elite through whom the British could rule. These economic and political developments profoundly affected rural and urban social structure. Inequalities of class, caste and gender intensified. The positions of upper-class and upper-caste women, for example, as possessions and producers of sons, and of lower-class and lower-caste women as exploited labourers at the mercy of upper-class men, were consolidated. Patriarchal relations were affected in a variety of other ways too. For example, in Punjab in the colonial period, the preference for sons increased – and with it the incidence of female infanticide: … the jobs in the army with their salaries and pensions, the promise of land grants for loyal service, the hope for wealth in the enormous migration of peasants to build the canals and railways … the colonial call for manpower translated into an implicit imperative for Punjabi women … a gender-targeted family was achieved, in those medically primitive days, by female infanticide. (Oldenburg 2002: 171) It was colonialism, too, that led to substantial migration from Gujarat and Punjab in India to East Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of those who went formed a middle administrative strata between the colonising whites and the Africans, others were involved in small businesses and trade that were crucial for the colonial economy, and yet others were indentured labourers (Tinker 1974). Those who were ‘sandwiched’ between the Europeans and Africans developed a sense of superiority characteristic of intermediate classes, and this became an aspect of East African Asian culture. This notion of their own group’s superiority affected the patriarchal relations they had carried with them from the sub-continent, emphasising both the prescriptions for acceptable femininity like ‘purity’ and the rigidity of caste stratifications. In the South Asian sub-continent, pre-capitalist relations have been incorporated into capitalist frameworks. Highly developed urban areas in India draw labour from impoverished rural communities, which themselves may be highly stratified along caste lines. In large farms equipped with modern machinery in Pakistan, the workers are bonded labourers. The violence faced by women is now no less extreme but is infused with the ethos of the market.

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Global capital has brought a hunger for consumer goods to the rural areas of South Asia from where Asian communities migrated in the 1960s and 1970s. In some regions, remittance economies – where money is sent back to families from workers in Britain, North America, the Middle East and elsewhere – have further intensified consumerism. In many of these villages, jobs are scarce. Local economies are in crisis, but the consumption and acquisition of luxury goods symbolising affluence matters enormously. The proliferation of semi-pornographic images on films, TV screens and billboards across these countries brings the clear message that women, all women, are potential sexual commodities. At the same time, global networks trafficking women continue to grow. In the context of patriarchal relations which rule that women’s sexuality is dangerous and must be kept under control, these developments set up a powerful interaction between the notions of feudal possession and capitalist commodity – reinforcing both. Young women, who may be seen as a matter of course as possessions of their families, would now be regarded in the outside world also as potential sexual commodities. Attacks by upper-class and middle-class urban men on women who are complete strangers are increasingly common because all women are now seen as available. At the same time, from the 1990s on, women, especially young women, have been increasingly drawn into the urban workforce. This has increased their visibility as workers, as well as their confidence and status in the family (Kabeer 2000). Through these conflicting developments, global capital has reshaped patriarchal power in many parts of South Asia, making it less secure perhaps, but also more aggressive and acquisitive. Pre-capitalist practices such as the giving and receiving of dowries have not only increased, but are now often deliberately used to acquire money and consumer goods (Karat 2003). And concepts like izzat are known to be used as excuses for intimidation and extortion. As Nafisa Shah writes, ‘honour killings’ are not restricted to dealing with adulterous couples alone but ‘used as a mask for getting rid of unwanted women and for settling tribal and familial scores or – more simply – as a means of making money’ (1997: 242).

CONTROLLING WOMEN’S SEXUALITY Between 1999 and 2005 I had been looking at Asian women’s experiences in Britain, through one-to-one interviews and group

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discussions, but in the summer of 2002, as a result of a project set up by Asian Women Unite!, I was able to focus specifically on the experiences of young working-class and middle-class Asian women aged between 14 and 18. My brief at that time was to identify the issues they thought were important in their lives and use their comments for a booklet which could be used to encourage debate. I recorded their words in a variety of circumstances: 22 one-to-one confidential interviews; three large-group discussions in schools; and two discussions with groups of three. All these took place in the neighbourhoods where the participants lived – Southall, Harrow, Luton and East London. In these discussions, across divisions of class, caste, religion and community, a recurring central theme was control, control of women’s bodies and particularly control of their sexuality by their families. Often this generates intense pressure; as a 16-year-old from Southall put it, describing her older sister’s life and her own: ‘There is no space to do what you want, first it is your parents and then later when you are married it is your husband or your parents-in-law.’ However, the way these controls are imposed and maintained varies enormously. The last 30 years have brought major changes to Asian communities in Britain. Class inequalities have increased hugely and religion-based identities have been strengthened. In some areas, there are significant numbers of Asian families who have found a niche for themselves within British capitalism, and this engenders a particular form of masculinity. In others there are whole communities who continue to face long-term unemployment – a result of racism, the decline of manufacturing industry and the lack of any viable economic alternatives. These differences inevitably mean that South Asian male identity is being reconstructed in different ways leading to different forms of control of women (see Chapter 2). And yet, despite these important differences, there are overall similarities in patriarchal patterns of control. In one such pattern, for example, communities coerce families into maintaining control; families try to control their daughters; and daughters defy these controls or seek to defy them – by slipping through the patriarchal net, by directly confronting their parents, or by suppressing their anger (often for their mother’s sake) with devastating consequences to themselves (see Chapter 5). And mothers, whose role it has been to socialise their children into an acceptance of patriarchal boundaries, are held on a knife edge since they know that if anything ‘goes wrong’ they will be blamed.

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A large proportion of young women I spoke to had slipped through the net, not because, as the media has it, they want to be like English girls, nor because they are ‘caught between two cultures’, but because they longed for the freedom to do as they wished. In middle-class Harrow, for example, 14-year-old ‘Sonia’ commented: Quite a lot of girls do have boyfriends. I think generally Asian girls are a bit more discreet, but I’d say about half the Asian girls we know have boyfriends. Asian girls tend to be a bit more careful. Because if anyhow, somehow, our parents find out. Then – Oh my God! In Luton, in a working-class and deeply conservative community relating back to rural Kashmir, ‘Tasmeen’ (18) said: ‘Yes, I do have a boyfriend, many of the Pakistani girls in my class do or have done at sometime. We’ve got to be very careful.’ There is often a real fear of violence. Girls from the George Mitchell secondary school in Walthamstow, most of whose families have migrated from Azad Kashmir, depicted this in a play performed at a conference organised by the London Development Education Centre (Londec) in December 2001. In the play, conceived and improvised by these 14-year-olds, with the help of Londec, the father threatens the daughter when she asks to go out to a party with her friend: Asha: Could I, could I go to a party tonight … just this once. I promise I will get back really early. Rabia’s dad said he would pick us up and drop me back here before 10 p.m. Riaz: What, what the hell are you thinking? Which world do you live in? Do you have any idea what it is like out there … you don’t know what goes on in people’s minds. I am a man and I know how those boys think. And you are not going anywhere. Asha: Please dad, please, just this once, I promise I will never ask for anything ever. Riaz: No Asha, I told you no the first time. Go on, go get out of here. I don’t want to see your face. Asha: Dad, please dad, I promise I will never go anywhere for the rest of the year. Riaz: Do you want to feel my hand on your face, because that is what you are asking for. Just get out, go, go, go to your room, you are giving me a headache with your screeching.

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In the play Asha leaves home and goes to live with Rabia, an unrealistic scenario perhaps, but one reflecting both the anger felt by these young women and their determination to change the situation. Some parents, particularly those who relate back to urbanised areas of India and Pakistan, or those who have migrated from East Africa and are now middle class, say they must ‘compromise’, at least partially, if they are to retain overall control of their daughters. They try a variety of strategies. Some mothers who spoke to me said, for example, that they had accepted reluctantly that their daughters would choose their own partners but felt at least that parents must be satisfied with ‘the type of boy’ both in terms of regional and religious background and ‘respectability’. ‘Balwinder’, a middle-class Sikh woman in her fifties who has lived in Britain since the 1970s, explained this point of view: Since we have come here, our thinking has changed. Parents have compromised, otherwise they would be excluded altogether. So now we just accept it happily or unhappily. All we ask is that our girls please us by choosing a boy we like, he has to be from a good family, be of the right caste and all that. Class (‘from a good family’) and caste remain centrally important. How this ‘compromise’ works in practice was expressed by a 14-yearold girl in Harrow: I can have blokes ring me but they have to be Gujarati! If they are not a Hindu – then I am dead! And they expect a Patel … My dad told me no BMWs [Blacks, Muslims and Whites]. My mum has the same views. I think it is the same for all three of them, but maybe Muslims a bit more than the other two. But really if he is not a Hindu – that’s it! Or as a 15-year-old Sikh girl put it: ‘They worry about what people will say if we go out with someone who is not the right caste. Don’t even think of a Muslim.’ These ‘compromises’, therefore, are a means to an end for parents. They maintain not only a girl’s ‘purity’ – she should have nothing to do with ‘outsider’ men – but also observe the hierarchies of caste that are considered crucially important in these middle-class communities. And to this end there has been an incorporation of western elements within a framework of parental control. In the 1980s, for example, Gujarati parents would arrange parties with Gujarati traditional

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dancing but to a disco beat. At these so-called disco dandias, the young people would meet and get to know each other in a parentally supervised space. But even where these ‘modern’ or western social arenas have been incorporated into South Asian essentially pre-capitalist systems of control, everything a family does is watched and judged by community networks both male and female. In Southall, you know the community, you know everyone … If they see someone’s daughter just talking to a bloke, they think she is doing something wrong (especially if they are old-fashioned), then they might bring it up even if it is not true and she might end up not even getting married. They think she’s doing things behind her parents’ back – so that’s not a good family. (‘Jasbir’, 15) Once away from the prying eyes of the community, however, young women feel the pressure to adopt a different kind of femininity. Journalist Yasmin Hai (2003), who joined a group of teenage Asian girls and boys out for a night’s clubbing, noted that none of the girls had told their parents where they were going, each using the subterfuge of spending the night at a female friend’s house. Hai found that drinking and smoking seemed almost essential if you were to be part of the group. The girls felt they had to ‘move with the times. Sex is part of our culture now. Plus, there’s a lot of pressure from the boys.’ They were aware that these young Asian men were unwilling to use contraception and therefore that they could well get pregnant. They told Hai that when girls do get pregnant ‘they just have abortions and get on with their lives, no one knows about it’. Summed up here are not only a number of pressures and tensions, but also clear prescriptions from British mainstream patriarchal culture. A young girl must, for example, be willing to consume large amounts of alcohol and cigarettes – no matter how this affects her health, no matter that she may not really enjoy this. And because she is by definition ‘having fun’, the issue of vulnerability must not arise. These assumptions also allow men to have sex with no obligations of any kind – not even to use contraception. Male attitudes obviously vary, but as an 18-year-old woman from Luton put it: ‘They think, “These girls are willing to have sex, they go to clubs, they have obviously done it before so it’s up to them to protect themselves”, or they’ll think “I am not the type of man who uses contraception – I just don’t do that”.’

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In addition a young woman must be able to wear clothes whose main purpose is to reveal her body and she must be sexually available otherwise she is not fun and not ‘moving with the times’. Observer columnist and psychologist Oliver James epitomises this approach in his weekly articles, which combine the condescension of an agony uncle with a good helping of ‘commonsense’ misogyny. As he declares in an article subtitled ‘Girls are losing their virginity younger than ever. But that’s a good thing’ (2003b), apart from those ‘who are shy, fat or ugly’, girls are having a great time because: … sex for the average teenage girl is as effortlessly obtained as a billionaire calling for more champagne … she has untold freedoms compared with those of her ancestors, not the least being to actually have sex, as well as being an object of desire … Overall, the sexual liberation of the teenage girl … is a huge step in the right direction. The notion that sexual liberation simply means being sexually available and being happy to be a perpetual ‘object of desire’ has been challenged by feminists since the 1960s but is evidently still with us in the twenty-first century. And so, as young women evade family controls and go out in defiance of parental wishes, they are often confronted with a whole new set of patriarchal pressures to conform to a new model of acceptable femininity. In many Asian communities in Britain, young Asian men, irrespective of class or religion, want to have sex with a girlfriend but still want to marry a virgin. In other words, the notion that a ‘good woman equals virgin and bad woman equals slag’ (group discussion in Harrow 2001) is very much alive. At the same time, sexual harassment on the streets by young men is a huge problem, in working-class and middle-class areas alike. The discussion group from Harrow emphasised this. A 14-year-old from Harrow described what it was like walking home from school: Harrow is the worst – loads and loads of gangs of boys hanging around. Just stand there every day looking at girls. I mean you think, get a life! Sometimes you can’t walk round Harrow without some guy looking at you. They start rating you – and they don’t know you. They think they do it as a joke but it’s …! The other day there was a gang and they said, ‘We know your dad, we know your brother!’ I was so freaked out. I was like, OK, Bye, I don’t know them. I have never talked to them. They hang around Harrow. They are Sri

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Lankan and a few are Indian. It is quite intimidating because there is a lot of them, especially if you are by yourself. If they are always behind you if you are walking. I just put my head down. Ignore them. Here harassment and control are two sides of a coin, harassment being justified by men in the community because they define a girl as ‘out of control’ even if she is simply walking home from school, and control being justified as a way of ‘protecting’ a woman from harassment. Control over a woman’s sexuality continues right through her life and if she openly defies it – by leaving home with a partner of her own choice – she may face extreme violence. In some communities, for example, there have been instances where families have tried to force women to return using bounty hunters (WLUML 1998). What is more common, however, is the sexual harassment faced by women who divorce their husbands. They are regarded – in all classes and across communities – as sexually available and may have to fight off sexual advances. In addition, because divorce is often regarded as a blow to izzat or reputation for the husband’s family, a woman who divorces her husband is often considered ‘immoral’ and deserving of punishment and frequently accused of adultery (see Chapter 3 for a discussion of the effects of this on women’s lives). In most patriarchal societies, homosexuality is, in general, powerfully taboo. In Britain’s South Asian communities it is unmentionable. Asked if lesbianism had ever been discussed in the community she came from, a gay Gujarati Muslim woman recollected that when she left home to live with her partner: It was the one thing that was never ever mentioned. They thought I left home to live with a man! But they never thought it was because I wanted to be independent and of course the issue of my wanting to have a relationship with a woman was unthinkable, although I told them I was living with a woman! There is also the belief that lesbianism is something western and unknown in South Asia. Leila’s story illustrates both these myths about lesbianism and the dangers of ‘coming out’. Coming out [to my mother] was very painful to me … She still thinks it is a white woman’s disease and if I had been in Pakistan this would never have happened; that it’s this country that has corrupted me. What she doesn’t

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know is that, in the long holidays back in Pakistan, I had a girlfriend who was the first person to kiss me! After I came out to mum, she told my uncles, who became very strict with me and said I must stop being gay. They said that if it had been anything else that had been wrong with me, like if I was going out with an African man or I was pregnant, they would help me by saying the right prayers for forgiveness. But being gay was the worst thing … They began to talk about getting me married to a Pakistani man to ‘cure’ me. I got scared and left home. I am still in hiding from my family. They have tried to find me and make me go back with them, so I have to be careful though I really love and miss my mum. (Kassam 1997: 57)

THE HIJAB – ‘BRIMMING WITH POLITICS’ Such are the contradictions and catch-22s of mainstream British patriarchal ideologies that while a woman with an extra-marital relationship can be pathologised as a carrier of the ‘infidelity gene’, she is also under pressure to constantly be desirable. At the same time she may be vulnerable to male sexual violence. In a situation where women’s bodies are endlessly and relentlessly sexualised, many Muslim women choose to wear the hijab to establish their own boundaries and their own space. The hijab, however, is fraught with contradictions – ‘brimming with politics’, as one Muslim woman put it in an interview in 2003. In South Asia it was the burkha (which covers the whole body) rather than the hijab which was worn by some Muslim women. In that context, the burkha clearly is symbolic of the control of female sexuality. However, in the diaspora, as the vast majority of my interviews with Muslim women – both those who wore the hijab and those who did not – showed, the significance of wearing the hijab can be different. Here, the hijab can represent not only the assertion of a Muslim identity but also the claiming of a non-sexualised identity; carving out a space, and in this way not so much accepting patriarchal boundaries as establishing one’s own in the face of the male gaze of British society. There are inevitably (in Britain as elsewhere) families who force women to wear the hijab, or the burkha, as part of the patriarchal project, sometimes using intimidation but more often deploying far subtler methods. A Gujarati woman in her early forties, from a conservative family, described the way control was exercised in her family.

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The older women in my family wear hijabs, the young and middle-aged women wear the veil [burkha] which covers everything. We were never asked to cover, never asked to do that specifically, but it was expected. There is a notion that your parents sit you down and tell you what you can and can’t do. Of course that never happens. I have never said to mum, ‘Mum, can I do this, can I go out …’ It wasn’t allowed. There was no point in asking. She would have been totally baffled if I had asked her. She had no authority … At the same time there is sometimes fairly intense community pressure on women to cover themselves, as this discussion with a group of young Bangladeshi women aged between 14 and 16 shows: K: You see ladies with burkhas, they are so calm. White people shout ‘Ninja’, but they don’t care because in the community everyone respects them. They are pure. R: I wouldn’t want to wear it. I don’t see the reason. A: I might because everyone [in the community] respects you if you do. And if you don’t then … they don’t respect you. In addition, there are prescriptions from the more recently established Muslim organisations like the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). At the MAB’s Protection of Hijab conference organised on 12 July 2004 (in response to the French government’s ban on the hijab in schools), a prominent Islamic intellectual, Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, commented that ‘although it [the hijab] is not a pillar of the religion, it is a requirement, it is a duty and it is required of every Muslim woman’. The MAB is also supporting the call for ‘theatre hijabs’ to be worn during surgical operations. However, in general, the younger Muslim women who spoke to me wore the hijab out of choice – not to please anyone or obey anyone. In fact, in a few cases their mothers did not cover themselves and were not particularly pro-hijab. Some, like this 17-year-old woman from East London, showed a remarkable clarity about the role of the hijab, echoing points made by feminist historians like Leila Ahmed (1992). The hijab protects you from the male gaze now, and then there is the history. At the time of the Holy Prophet, there were women who wore it … they were entrepreneurs in the textile and spice trade. They wore the hijab and carried on their daily lives without being objectified by men. They were just business women.

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She explained how young women like her, unlike the older women in their families, were able to demolish one of the myths created by the interaction of race and gender – that the woman in a hijab is an easy target. It is nice to wear a hijab and challenge people’s assumptions. My auntie wears a hijab, and sometimes horrible white men would follow when I went out with her. They’d call her ‘Paki’, or call her ‘Ninja’, and my auntie would just say, ‘Fine, fine’. Me, wearing the hijab, and I got the same comments, I could retaliate. Once in the [school] playground, someone called me a ‘Ninja’ and I hit him with my hijab on! They thought I was docile and submissive, I was not going to hit back! I hit him! Wearing the hijab in such cases is about self-assertion above all else. In the wake of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11, the hijab was worn much more than ever before. In this case it was a political statement against anti-Muslim racism or against US attacks on Muslims. An 18-year-old Muslim woman from Luton told me: ‘Afghanistan was attacked, Iraq is being bombed, Muslims are dying – that’s why I am wearing the hijab these days. I want people to know I am a Muslim. I am proud of my culture.’ In Europe and the US, in the context of anti-Muslim racism, the hijab clearly has a political meaning that is very different from its meaning in Muslim majority countries. This is the reason why ‘in certain parts of Brussels there are more women in veils than in the streets of Algiers’ (Anne-Marie Lizin, cited in Henley 2004) and not, as many European commentators have seen it, because women are suddenly being forced into wearing the veil by their fundamentalist fathers. To ignore the impact on women of anti-Muslim racism in this way is to continue the orientalist discourse which sees Muslim women as isolated from the world and perpetual victims of their brutal men. In the wake of 9/11, attacks on Muslim women in particular escalated hugely. Simply the sight of a woman wearing a hijab and ‘looking Muslim’ has provoked violence. According to Arzu Merali, Director of Research at the British-based Islamic Human Rights Commission, who has collated reports of these attacks while herself receiving obscene phone calls at her office, there were about 300 attacks on Muslims in Britain in the first month after the bombing of the Twin Towers, most of them on women. ‘Muslim women have been spat at, punched, kicked, called names, hit with umbrellas

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at bus stops, and pelted with eggs and fruit. They have received dog excrement and fireworks through their letter boxes and bricks through their windows’ (Chrisafis 2001). Since the bombing of London’s transport system on 7 July 2005, attacks on anyone who might ‘look like a Muslim’ and particularly Muslim women in headscarves and hijabs have further intensified. There is, also, however, the religious and spiritual symbolism of the hijab. Many deeply religious Muslim women who spoke to me about this emphasised that wearing the hijab was not necessarily an indication of whether or not a woman was religious. ‘Zainab’, a Pakistani woman from Lahore in her early thirties, told me, for example: ‘I am not ready for the hijab yet. It is not just another garment, it is sacred and needs a level of spiritual commitment which I have not yet achieved, though I hope to.’ While ‘Arifa’, a Gujarati Muslim in her late twenties, explained that the way people practised their religion was dependent on their particular life experiences and was up to the individual: I went to Qu’ran school and yes, I am religious, but for me it is something more spiritual. I don’t drink alcohol, don’t go to pubs. I don’t pray always but I do my namaz before setting off for a journey. It is something spiritual. That’s what we did when we were young and it has become a part of my life. When we were young – there was no discussion, you had to do certain things because of Islam. I now have a choice. Many people are religious out of choice. I choose to wear a head-scarf, but some girls choose to wear the hijab.

RECONSTRUCTING FEMININITY In Britain, the mainstream patriarchal male gaze, in a striking similarity with sharam, discussed earlier, schools a woman to ‘continually watch herself … [so that] from earliest childhood she … surveys herself continually … her own sense of being in herself supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another’ (Berger 1992: 190). It facilitates the process whereby women objectify their bodies, and hunger for more and more treatments and commodities, which promise to lead them along the path to ‘perfect beauty’. The market, of course, has a ruthless male gaze of its own which, through a constant flow of advertising, ‘reveals’ the weaknesses and failings of a woman’s appearance. Whereas, before the era of globalisation, in South Asian societies with peasant roots, plumpness was considered beautiful, possibly

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because it was associated with economic well-being, now slim, even thin, is beautiful, fitting in with the globalised notions of beauty and the interests of a variety of multinational industries, from fitness to garments to dieting products. And the pressure to be slim brings with it an enormous increase in levels of anxiety. A study of stress levels among 15-year olds in 1987, and again in 1999, carried out by Patrick West and Helen Sweeting of Glasgow University, showed that among middle-class girls, stress levels increased enormously, as did the pressure to compete with each other to be slim (James 2003a). Middle-class Asian girls could be described as a special sub-set within this trend. They face the same pressures as other girls, expressed by an 18-year-old Gujarati woman, ‘If you are modern, I mean for any British Asian who wants to look good, you have to be slim. To wear the clothes, the shoes, have the look.’ But in addition, and perhaps even more crucially, their parents urge them to be slim – fearing that otherwise they will get nowhere in the arranged marriage stakes. A Punjabi woman in her early twenties told me, ‘My mum wants me to have just one meal a day, she says that is the only way I can lose weight and be beautiful’, while another was pressurised by her father: ‘He is afraid of my belly, he keeps mentioning it – he says “Who’s going to marry you if you don’t lose weight?”’ These experiences show the extent to which South Asian fears about the difficulties of getting daughters married have locked into the very western capitalist anxieties which are created by the market in the interests of profit. It is not surprising, perhaps, that young Asian women have a high risk of suffering from eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia (Dolan, Lacey and Evans 1990). While, for many decades, western women have been under pressure to conform to the images of sexual attractiveness dictated by the market, now these pressures are beginning to be transformed into obligations, even duties, so that if a woman does not strive to conform, she is not only considered unattractive but disapproved of and blamed. In the case of young South Asian women, these obligations are often mediated by issues of race. To be approved of, or even be acceptable, they are now expected to look well-groomed in an essentially deracinated way. An example of this was the offensive description of a young Muslim woman Shahara Islam – a victim of the bombing of London’s Underground train network on 7 July 2005 – by a restaurant owner, also a Muslim, in the neighbourhood where she worked – a description which the Guardian newspaper thought fit to print. ‘She was a pleasant modern girl … a very confident

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upright sort of girl. She had a nice manicure and her hair was always straightened. She didn’t look like some stereotyped ethnic minority’ (Gillian 2005). Modern western patriarchal ideology has long decreed that young women must be judged by their appearance first and foremost. Now, increasingly, this applies to older women as well. For example, the mother of the bride or groom, at an English wedding, is now under pressure to look young and ‘attractive’. This was reflected by television programmes such as This Morning (ITV 25 March 2004) which featured mothers of couples, ‘before and after’ make-overs. Here English women in their fifties and sixties were expected to go on a catwalk, watched by their families, while the make-up artist commented on their thin hair, their wrinkles and their sagging features and tried to make them look ‘more youthful’. The anxiety created left these older women more or less speechless. These humiliating assessments of older white/European women contrast with the position of older Asian women – particularly those who have succeeded in having sons – who may well be expected to display their jewellery and expensive clothes, but would rest assured that they were not being judged for their ‘attractiveness’; no one would think of saying that they looked ‘old’ or fat. But with current trends, this is something which appears likely to change with the next generation of mothers-in-law. Gradually, like their English counterparts, all Asian women will be judged on the basis of the male gaze of the market.

WOMEN WORKING FOR PATRIARCHY In most patriarchal societies, domestic labour consists of three main elements. These are: first, reproducing the family from one day to the next (otherwise known as housework) which includes, of course, cooking, cleaning and the care of the young, the elderly and the sick; second, giving birth to sons; and, third, socialising their children to obey patriarchal rules. This is also the case in most South Asian families in Britain. In almost all social classes, daughters from the age of 12 onwards, and sometimes much earlier, are expected to do, and learn how to do, housework. And it is here that some of the early contradictions between mothers and daughters emerge. Of 20 female students at Luton University who spoke to me, 12 spent most of their evenings helping with the cooking, cleaning and care of younger siblings. One of them described her feelings: ‘I never

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have time even to do my college work. I have to look after the little ones. My mum – it’s just too much for her, so in the end, I have no time which is my own.’ Housework, of course, varies enormously with class. Among the wealthy, or in some instances where the woman has a well-paid professional job, a small but significant proportion of women hand all housework over to live-in domestic workers. In my sample of eight such families, these domestic workers were themselves Asian women who had migrated from the family’s region of origin, specifically to this job. In Britain, most middle-class and working-class Asian women also do paid work outside the home, or take paid work in, as outworkers or home-workers, but in the vast majority of cases the responsibility for running the household appeared to remain theirs alone. This is particularly so where married couples live with the husband’s parents. Many daughters-in-law in working-class and also middle-class families are still expected to do a major part of the most labour-intensive aspects of housework – cleaning the house, cooking meals and caring for the sick, elderly and children. This, for example, was the experience of a young Gujarati Hindu woman who had a full-time job as a teacher, as described by a female friend from the same community: My friend, she had an arranged marriage, and is not getting on with her in-laws who live with them. She’s got a full-time job but she has to do a majority of the housework – and there is quite a bit – and she’s not from India, she’s born here and not used to it. Like she’ll get up at 6.00, she’ll run him a bath. She’ll get his coffee. She’ll do that every morning. Her mum says, ‘I know she’s not getting on with the in-laws but as long as she keeps Kirit happy, it’s OK. They have got a lovely house and we can help them with the mortgage if they need it.’ It’s all about keeping him happy and keeping the marriage intact. Here performing domestic labour – which includes ‘keeping Kirit happy’ – and maintaining a middle-class lifestyle are a crucial part of the woman’s duties, expected of her by both her in-laws and her mother. In addition she has a full-time job. Among the most oppressed and exploited daughters-in-law, however, are women from the sub-continent who marry into families settled in Britain. They may also face racism within the family itself, as this can sometimes be internalised by British Asians (of all

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backgrounds) to the extent that they regard themselves as superior to recent migrants from South Asia. For example, a young Pakistani woman married into a middle-class family in Bradford told me: ‘My sister-in-law would slap me. She would swear at me and call me a “lazy bitch”. I did all the housework. They would never ever wash even a plate. They said I was backward, I didn’t know anything.’ As Parita Mukta writes, these acts of violence ‘must be situated within the structure of power between women of the household, in the social dynamic between an older sister-in-law, a mother-in-law and a much younger (and more recently arrived) daughter-in-law’ (2000: 165). However the authority that some women in the family have over others is, most often, used only to further the patriarchal project. Some feminist writers have argued that women within patriarchal households strike a ‘patriarchal bargain’ (Kandiyoti 1988), making deliberate compromises in order to protect their own future material interests. For example, a woman accepts oppression as a daughterin-law because one day she may become a relatively powerful mother-in-law. But, as Kandiyoti has subsequently argued (1998), this focus on ‘rational decisions to conform rather than rebel’ clearly neglects the impact of patriarchal ideology internalised by women. In families where a major class transition has taken place in the space of a couple of decades, the arrangements about housework can be different. Ramji’s study of high-caste and middle-class Gujarati Hindus (originating from Kutch) reveals a marked shift in power relations between husbands and wives. Women whose mothers were manual workers are now accountants and lawyers. As one of them puts it: My parents have a very traditional division of labour. My mum is in charge of running the household … Her income was always the secondary one … for me it is different because I have a job on the same level as my husband and we get paid very similar amounts so both of our incomes are depended upon to pay the mortgage! So I have a more equal relationship. (Ramji 2003: 231) In addition, they are often not expected to attend traditional or wider family events. There is, according to Ramji, ‘a growing acceptance within the contemporary British Kutchi community that women with full-time professions may indeed be too busy to attend some functions. Excuses of “long hours” and “hard work” were previously the exclusive preserve of men’ (Ramji 2003: 236).

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In Britain, the nature of the work expected from a woman because she is a wife is different from what it was, and sometimes still is, in South Asia. Piped gas, gadgets and processed food items have brought some relief from the back-breaking aspects of domestic labour in South Asia, but, in many communities, new and exhausting tasks are added to a married woman’s duties. ‘Shahida’s experience illustrates one such task. When she came to Oldham, in the north of England, in 2002, as a newly married bride, her husband forced her with threats of violence to redecorate his property, laying floor boards and stripping wallpaper. In the village in Punjab in Pakistan where both her family and her husband’s extended family live, such jobs are never done by women and in fact are only done by workmen of a specific caste. Shahida’s forced labour was an example of the exploitation faced by many married women, particularly those who come from a rural background in South Asia. In peasant societies, women routinely perform heavy non-domestic labour as part of their duties as wives. In Britain too, through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, a woman’s duties as a wife (and often as a daughter) included long hours working in the family business. In the poorer areas of Britain, where unemployment is high, these non-domestic duties can be harsher. In Oldham, in the north of England, for example, out of twelve women I interviewed, eight were forced with varying degrees of pressure by their in-laws and husbands to work in warehouses, or perform heavy unpaid labour in shops and market stalls, even when the rest of the family did very little of this work. Inevitably these women would be those whose parents were poor and powerless compared to the husband’s parents – even where the bride and groom were part of the same extended family. Not all of the women in this situation who spoke to me lived with their in-laws, in fact most of them lived in a separate house with their husband while the husband’s parents lived in the same neighbourhood, but these labouring jobs were included within the remit of their domestic work. The most difficult and perilous of a woman’s tasks in Britain is however the socialisation of her daughters to accept the variety of restrictions and boundaries which perpetuate patriarchal relations. As a 50-year-old Gujarati Hindu woman explained: ‘The woman is in charge of upholding our culture – keeping it pure and she has to teach this to her daughter and in this country it is not easy.’

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Mothers are answerable to the family and community for their daughter’s actions. In Kashmir, in diverse communities, as Rao (2000: 119) comments, ‘it is the mother who gets blamed for progeny who do not fulfil cultural expectations’. She cites a saying from the Gujjar community (which is also represented in the diaspora): ‘An immoral mother will always give birth to an immoral daughter’ (2000: 118). If the daughter steps beyond patriarchal boundaries, both mother and daughter may face violence and humiliation. Daughters growing up in Britain described the pressures their mothers were under in this respect. A working-class Gujarati Hindu woman recalled her experiences of trying to leave a suffocating home environment, and the way she and her mother were treated by the community as a result. At 17, I decided to leave home … I was only gone a couple of days … before I was persuaded to make contact with my family, so I telephoned them. Although I knew how shocked and upset they would be, I still could not bear to listen to my father in that state … I felt so guilty that I returned home the same day … The women with whom I would normally chat at ease were quiet. They felt this whole business was out of their league. It was up to the men of the family to sort out my problems. Some of the men thought that the best thing would be for my family to disown me completely. My mother was accused of lack of control over me, all because she went out to work. She was told her child had ruined the family name. I still feel hurt when I think of what was said and what was threatened. (‘Meena’ 1995) A middle-class Sikh woman of 18 who had to make a three-hour train journey to attend classes in Luton, and had trouble studying at home because of family tensions, told me simply: ‘I can’t leave home. I can’t even talk to my dad about leaving home. I know if I do, it’s my mum who will get it!’ While the mother’s role was seen by many of the girls who spoke to me as mainly educative, some emphasised that mothers were also often involved in actively controlling their daughters. Were they forced into this role, or did they do it of their own accord, wholeheartedly supporting patriarchal stipulations and participating actively in violence? This question was discussed at length by the young women who spoke to me in every community, though these discussions were never conclusive. Clearly psychological violence and emotional blackmail by mothers is and has always been very common. I had noted this in 1977 and

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illustrated it with an interview with ‘Manjula’, a 19-year-old Gujarati Hindu woman who fell in love with a man of a different caste. [My mother’s] reaction was really frightening. She began to cry. She said I had disgraced the family, that I must promise never to see him again or she’d kill herself. I tried and tried to explain how I felt but she didn’t want to know. She kept saying ‘You have disgraced us and degraded yourself! He is of a lower caste! You must stop seeing him.’ She made me promise never to see him again. (Wilson 1978: 108) Eventually Manjula escaped from her parents’ home and married her boyfriend. Her family cut her off. She told me: My brother says, ‘For me my sister is dead. I don’t want to see her until the day I die.’ My mum gets sick quite a lot now. She’s got high blood pressure. But if anything happens to my mum or my father, my brother says – ‘That’s because Manju left home.’ He blames it all on me … sometimes I feel so guilty because I did love my parents. There were so many good times before all that happened. (Wilson 1978: 109) Some Gujarati Hindu women felt that such experiences happen less often now in the context of differences of caste, but they said that emotional blackmail was still common where a woman got involved with a black man or a Muslim man. The bonds within the Asian family are still extremely strong, making emotional blackmail a powerful method of control. The words of a young Sikh woman from Birmingham in an interview in 1977 are still relevant today: ‘My family is like a part of myself, of my body; if I cut it off I could die. But it is a part that gives me so much pain that sometimes I can’t bear it – can’t bear it at all’ (Wilson 1978: 30). And because of this the family can still deal devastating blows without breaking any laws or contravening anyone’s ‘rights’.

Mothers and violence Mothers have been implicated in killings and instances of extreme physical violence. The best known of these is the tragic case of Rukshana Naz, a 19-year-old woman who was murdered by her brother while her mother held her down by her feet. She was regarded by them as ‘shaming’ her family by refusing to stay in a marriage they had arranged for her and returning to the man she loved and by whom she was pregnant.

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According to figures currently available,4 in the UK, two women are killed by their partners every week. Of these, in 2003, 13 were so-called honour killings like that of Rukshana Naz – although not all of these were murders of South Asian women. The police are however re-examining another 117 cases of murder that occurred since 1994 to find out whether they involved issues of honour. When such murders occur, the fear and intimidation associated with them reverberate through the South Asian community concerned. In Luton, two working-class Kashmiri women in their late teens described in January 2000 how the women in their families had reacted to a murder, a so-called ‘honour killing’ in which a brother shot his sister for having an extra-marital affair. ‘Shabina’: A man has his izzat in the community and it’s his daughters who can damage it, not his sons. A girl was killed over izzat last month … She was married and then she was seeing someone else. Not many people will speak out about it openly. ‘Farah’: Yes, but when her brother shot her, some people thought the right thing had been done. Though he ended up in prison and his sister is dead. Shabina: Yes, this woman was saying ‘poor girl’ and my auntie and my mum just stopped her. ‘Be quiet!’ they said – whatever has happened had to be done, now everything is OK! Farah: To be honest, I don’t even like to think about their attitude. So why do women play this role on behalf of patriarchal power? Fear may be one reason. The fear that causes a silence to descend on the community, as in Luton, also ensures that to be safe you have to show you are on the side of the killers. But is it fear alone that drives women to support killers or even participate in killing their own daughters? Clearly, power relations between mothers and daughters can engender violence, but this alone cannot explain these murders. I asked a group of Pakistani women in their fifties, living in Luton, how they could explain a mother’s violence. ‘Azra’: We all have high hopes for our children, we want to be proud of them and we want to be proud as a family. We don’t want to be humiliated by the community pointing a finger at us. When the girl does something shameful, very shameful, people find no way out of it. It is unbearable for the parents. They feel anger but pain more than anything. Murder is a crime and no one should do it,

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but I am telling you because you are asking. People do it because that is a way of taking the pain away. And sometimes sons do it because they see their parents suffering and they are very angry that they have been hurt like that. Q: But can’t people try to change their attitude, not feel humiliated? Azra: How? When everywhere you turn, there are people from the community who know what has happened. ‘Shamim’: But even otherwise, this is part of us, part of our thinking. From the beginning, our mothers taught us this and we try to teach our daughters. We want our girls to be pure and to be submissive to their elders. ‘Shenaz’: Also there is the question of what our husbands think. As wives we have to be obey them. The ideologies and concepts that proclaim the inferiority of women and demand their submissiveness and obedience to men have here been deeply internalised. Daughters therefore are worth very little – few mothers would participate, for example, in violence against their sons, let alone kill them. And if daughters are worth so little, what does it say about women as a whole – including the mother herself? With this comes the erosion of all identity other than that of a wife. The mother who is able to attack her daughter may be unable to leave her husband, however violent he may be. Leaving a violent home is a complex and difficult process for all women. As a worker in Newham Asian Women’s Project explained: It’s not just walking out of the house. A woman facing domestic violence is held like a prisoner within the family. Even if she has no children, there are a number of steps she has to go through. There is the decision to leave, the preparation for the departure from the home, the departure itself, and then sticking to it, rejecting all the many kinds of pressure to return. After that she has to go back with a refuge worker or someone from another agency to pick up her belongings. Then the decision to try and prosecute or not. And then of course the whole process of rebuilding her life. (interview with author) For a woman living in an extended family, it can be harder still, since she may also have to challenge oppressive and powerful in-laws, and if she has children, her husband and in-laws may well try to prevent her taking them with her.

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Clearly, every step involved in leaving a violent home requires enormous courage, resourcefulness and often careful planning and there can be no doubt that at every point in the process women exercise agency. In rebuilding their lives, one of the hardest things for many South Asian women is to free themselves of the guilt and shame caused by sharam. This is one of the reasons why many South Asian women’s refuges regard discussions and ‘educational’ work as crucially important. At the same time, it is in this period – when a woman leaves a violent relationship – that she is most likely to be attacked by her husband and his family, because the very worst sin a woman can commit, in the eyes of patriarchy, is to attempt to free herself or to question the sources of her oppression as a woman.

SEXUAL ABUSE AND PATRIARCHY Sexual abuse by family members occurs in all communities, all over the world. There is no evidence to suggest that it is more common among South Asians than in the indigenous British population. In every case, the experience of, and reaction to, sexual abuse are shaped by the power relations within which it occurs – relations, for example, between a young woman and a well regarded male family friend or relative, or between a child and an adult man. These power relations also affect the way sexual abuse is dealt with and its impact on the person abused. In the many interviews I conducted with Asian women, I never directly asked about sexual abuse within the family, but four young women told me of their own accord about the abuse they had suffered. In every case this was after we had got to know each other well and had discussed many other experiences and ideas. Every one of them told me they would want me to discuss it in my book in the hope that it might benefit other Asian women who had been abused. Of these women, ‘Fauzia’ was the only one who was abused as an adult. She was in her late teens when she arrived from Pakistan to live with her husband, who was a British citizen. Within a few months her marriage broke down and she was thrown out of her in-laws’ house in the north of England. She had no choice but to live with her husband’s dominant and wealthy uncle and his wife. The uncle forced her into a highly abusive sexual relationship. Humiliated and angry she exposed him within the family. But instead of protecting her, they responded with a torrent of blame. She was accused of

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being an adulteress who had led a ‘respectable’ man astray and in the process destroyed her own and her parents’ reputation. Eventually, facing violence from her husband as well as members of the extended family, Fauzia approached the police. She was then blamed for telling ‘outsiders’ and told she deserved to die. Fauzia fled her uncle’s home and she is now in the process of trying to regularise her immigration status and rebuild her life. Fauzia’s experience of being blamed for the abuse she had suffered and accused of being a seductress is extremely common. Because South Asian patriarchal ideology rules that female sexuality is dangerous, sexual abuse experienced by a woman is seen, by definition as it were, as her fault. The man is regarded, in general, as blameless and merely acting in response to messages from the woman. John Berger’s comments in the context of the European male gaze are relevant here too, highlighting the underlying similarities in patriarchal relations: ‘Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated … Every one of her actions – whatever its direct purpose or motivation – is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated’ (Berger 1994: 190). However, Fauzia was blamed also, and explicitly, for speaking out. The implication was that if she had suffered in silence, izzat would not have been damaged and that, conversely, izzat was endangered not so much by the abuse itself as by the exposure of the abuser. Because honour and reputation depend very much on what outsiders think, it follows that if a child or woman is sexually abused by an outsider, the family’s honour will be damaged and can only be salvaged by killing the man and often killing the victim as well; but if she is abused by a family member, damage to honour can be prevented simply by keeping it quiet. Fauzia’s experiences were clearly shaped by the power relationship between her (a poor and vulnerable young woman recently arrived from Pakistan) and her abuser, a wealthy and respectable man who was well established in Britain. However, in the cases of the women who were abused as children, the power relations were more complex. While here too their sexuality was regarded as a potential threat because they were females, as children they were particularly powerless in abusive relationships with adults. At the same time, as female children, their status within the nuclear and extended families could be extremely low. All three women who had been abused as children emphasised that when a child suffers sexual abuse, she takes a long time to

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understand the meaning of what is happening. ‘Kajal’ was a child of 7 when she was first abused by an uncle. The abuse continued intermittently for about two years. Eventually she told her mother about it. Her mother told her never to speak about it to anyone because what had happened was shameful. The abuse was stopped and her uncle’s visits became less frequent, but Kajal became very withdrawn. ‘I felt that there was something wrong with me, that I was not like other girls. And I think because there was no discussion of what had happened I felt very isolated. Sometimes I felt my life was worthless.’ By the age of 12 Kajal was harming herself. Eventually, because she was acutely depressed, she was referred for counselling. It was only then, after several sessions, that she was able to speak about the abuse she had suffered. ‘Munira’ was only 6 years old when she was abused by a teenage cousin. She was physically traumatised and this made her extended family aware of what had happened. My cousin disappeared so I guess they must have told him to go to some other relative’s house. But the incidents of abuse were never mentioned. It was as though nothing very much had happened. I felt confused and isolated and later I remember thinking that what happened to me didn’t seem to matter to anyone. Munira has suffered from bouts of acute depression and rage. Finally, there was Manpreet, who was abused between the ages of 8 and 13 by an uncle and a cousin twelve years older than her. She was able to stop the abuse herself, after many years of suffering. As an adult she told her parents about it, which led to a confrontation with the abusers.5 Manpreet was the younger daughter of a family where the sons and daughters were, by and large, treated equally and grew up in a mainly white and racist suburb of Leeds where she did not feel she fitted in at all. ‘I was completely different from the others. My language, my food, my culture, I even thought my uniform wasn’t quite the same. I have often thought that at that time, home should have been a sanctuary.’ Her father had helped his sister and her family to come over to Britain and they lived in his house for those years. It was the sister’s husband and son who abused Manpreet. She told me: That period of abuse, which started when I was 8, really affected me. I lost my confidence … I remember wanting to say it to someone but not having

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anyone to say it to. My mother used to work long hours in a factory. My sister was a lot older than me, I used to look up to her and I remember thinking I would say it to her. I think by the time I was able to understand what was going on and able to process it, she had got married and left home and she was in her own life. I lived with it till I was about 13. Then one day, I said, No more! I actually physically stopped my uncle. How I stopped my cousin, I have blocked out that memory, but I am sure it was me saying that does not happen to me any more. The abuse stopped, but she had to continue to live in close proximity to the men who had abused her. I would see them every weekend and they were constant reminders of what had happened. A dirty little secret you had where you felt you were the one who was sexual. It was all down to you. You had something about you that made you available for that kind of behaviour. Years passed, eventually her father’s sister and her family moved out of the house and Manpreet’s cousin became an affluent professional man with all the trappings of a wealthy consumerist lifestyle. He had an arranged marriage to the daughter of another man whose family Manpreet’s father had also helped in their early days in Britain. Meanwhile Manpreet became active in political struggles around race and feminism. She was also involved in a long-term relationship with an African-Caribbean man. When she was about 27, she felt she had to tell her parents about him, partly to stop them looking for a prospective husband for her, but more because, as she said, she wanted there to be no barriers between her and them. Their reaction was one of shock and extreme concern for her future. Her father told her he sympathised with her, and could see how much the relationship meant to her, but ‘You’ll have to leave the community, they will not let you live here.’ Some weeks later she decided to also tell them about the abuse. She described their response: My father went completely quiet – found it very hard to have a conversation with me. I think he felt he had failed to protect me from his family. It was his sister’s family, whom he had brought over to this country and looked after – he couldn’t quite cope with it. Also I think he felt he hadn’t looked after me the way I had needed him to. Probably he had been too busy with his business and raising his family the best he knew then but possibly he questioned quite

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a lot about how much he had been there for me in my childhood. My mother completely broke down for about two weeks. She felt she had failed me as a mother … Even now she feels if I have male company and she is not there to protect me, what is going to happen? It’s fear of what they would do if they had me on their own. I try to explain to her that whatever’s happened, couldn’t happen anymore. It happened to me when I was a child and was not able to control what was going on in my space and that wouldn’t happen anymore. I am now a woman who can look after my own space. Eventually her father decided to confront his sister with what her husband and son had done. She responded by saying that it could not be abuse, that Manpreet was ‘loose’, and she must have been having an affair with her son. ‘It was about protecting her son but also that for her, sex is sex. It is the woman’s fault because she is enticing him. She even said we could have got them married.’6 After this, the story that Manpreet and her cousin – by now a married man – were having an affair spread in the community. People began to gossip about it, and different versions of it were retold to younger members of the family. Around the same time, her cousin’s wife was discovered having an affair. Anxious to avoid damage to her own and her parents’ izzat, and eager also to get a good settlement from her husband, she announced that she was going to sue her husband for divorce on the grounds that he was having an affair with Manpreet. Manpreet told me: At that time my father was trying to comprehend how people whom he had helped come into the country – they had lived in his home, he had got them jobs, he’d supported them, defended them, everything – now the very same people were crippling him with pain by resorting to notions of honour. But despite that pain, despite all that he was going through he was able to say, ‘No! This is where the blame lies! And honour is about telling the truth.’ In the end the extended family backed off, perhaps because they were aware that, even in the eyes of the community, Manpreet’s father would be seen as occupying the moral high ground. However, if this had not happened, Manpreet says, she would not have hesitated in taking the people involved to court for defamation of character. Manpreet’s struggle highlights many of the themes I have discussed in this chapter and elsewhere in this book and locates them in the specific context of a Sikh community which had once been working

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class, though many of its members are now middle class. In this community, as her experiences show, men and also women can invoke the notion of honour cynically for personal gain, gossip can be used as a weapon against women, and the female body is seen as dangerous, even where this body is that of an 8-year-old child. However, we are also made aware of the spaces within this community which make women’s struggle possible – however hard these struggles may be. Manpreet’s story also shows us the importance of women’s individual battles against patriarchal oppression – which are so often fought alone.

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2 A Thing of Beauty and a Boy Forever – Changing Masculinities In West London, a group of middle-class, 15-year-old Sikh girls are talking about their families: ‘Ravinder’: In Bollywood you will always see the father as someone very handsome, disciplined, loving towards his children, for example in Kabhi Khushie, Kabhi Gham [a Bollywood film, see Chapter 6]. They would dance with their kids, show affection to their wives in public. If you see an Indian couple, if the husband wanted to console his wife, he would not hug her, he would tap her on her arm, saying everything is going to be OK. That’s in real life! ‘Preeta’: My mum, she is always aware of what is going on and saying don’t do this – don’t do that. At the end she’s been there and she knows what she has been through. Fathers don’t really talk to you, they’ve got to show they are not soft. They say you should talk to your mum about this. ‘Jasbir’: That happens in private. The father will say go to your mum for support. But if other relatives and friends are there then the father will show himself to be the greater parent in caring for the child. It’s like a show. Say all the family has come round for Diwali, the father is there. He will drink in front of the children as an example – to show he is socialising. Then if the child is talking to the mother, the father will say – that’s my son or that’s my daughter. We love him or her. He brings himself to the centre of attention. This perceptive discussion of the behaviour of men as fathers and husbands provides a glimpse of the complex and contradictory nature of male identity as it moves between public and private, between image and reality. Masculinity, as these girls tell us, is about being ‘in control’, clamping down on emotions in public – ‘He would not hug her …’; or ‘They’ve got to show they are not soft’ – and also about being the dominant partner, ‘the greater parent’, ‘the centre of attention’. And this control and dominance is underpinned by 41

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the threat of violence which is so clearly understood that it does not even always need to be stated as such: ‘My mum … she knows what she has been through.’ These girls, however, are not discussing masculinity in isolation or for its own sake. They are more concerned with the way power (patriarchal power, though they do not use these words) operates within the family and the gendered positions and roles it allocates to their parents. And it is within the context of patriarchal relations that I too explore aspects of male identity in this chapter. Within this framework , masculinity plays a crucial role, because, although like femininity it is a social construct, it is also a driving force for patriarchal power in a way femininity cannot be. (Although, as we have seen in Chapter 1, femininity plays an important part in facilitating and propagating patriarchal relations.) Men’s subjective experiences therefore both shape, and are shaped by, relations of male dominance. I will look at three different communities – Sikhs, mainly in West London and Southall and Birmingham, Azad Kashmiri Muslims in the working-class communities of Luton, and Gujarati Hindus mainly in Harrow and Luton, but also in other cities in the UK – and examine the impact of the processes of migration, racism and the market. I will look also at the role of religious and quasi-religious ideologies in shaping both male and complementary female identities.

FROM WORKERS TO WORSHIPPERS – SIKHS AND MALE IDENTITY In families such as those of the 15-year-old girls quoted above, men’s lives, particularly older men’s lives, have changed enormously. Their grandfathers were some of the earliest immigrants to Britain in the post-war phase. They were Jats, a powerful farming caste, and back home they were middle-level peasants aspiring to be rich peasants.1 The state of Punjab in India, where they had come from, had seen some crucial transformations just before migration took place in the 1960s. New systems of rural credit had altered the balance of power in the villages. A system of government loans had been made available – in theory to all farmers, but in practice to those like the Jats who had medium to large landholdings. With these loans they could purchase the inputs required for farming. This system, together with the introduction of a new type of wheat which gave three times

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the former yield, began to change both farming methods and the social structure in the villages. As a result of this so-called Green Revolution, a number of traditional jobs done by ‘low-caste’ people became obsolete, many became impoverished and were forced to become agricultural labourers (Mamdani 1972). For those with access to the new technology, the workload soared, because production even on the smallest holdings trebled. More than ever before, sons were needed to work on the land, because without them farm workers would have to be paid and production costs would rise. However, new technology, and the essential inputs that the new seeds required – fertilisers, insecticides and tube wells – also meant economies of scale. In other words, larger and larger amounts of land were needed to make farming viable. This too led to the hunger for more and more sons – who would migrate and earn money (or bring in money as dowry), which could then be used to buy land. While colonialism had already increased the preference for sons in Punjab (see Chapter 1), among Jats, the Green Revolution increased it further. In this already deeply patriarchal society, this led to a further deterioration in the position of women. While in the 1960s, Jat Sikh women had worked long hours on back-breaking tasks both inside and outside the home, their main role now came to be the production of sons (Wilson 1978). Those who did not produce sons were considered worthless. By the late 1960s, with the growing status and wealth of Jat families, women came to be seen more than ever as possessions. Marriages of daughters began to mean paying out vast dowries (see Chapter 4). Women were increasingly withdrawn from work in the fields and secluded indoors, and this legitimised male violence by defining women as unproductive and a burden, as well as concealing this violence behind closed doors. The ideologies of masculinity tied up with the pre-capitalist social structure had pressurised men to be tough and to compete ruthlessly for resources. The Green Revolution intensified these ideologies by increasing competition between landowning households. Loyalty to their families and insecurity in the wider world meant that men were expected to play things close to their chests, and not to display their emotions. However, unlike those constructions of masculinity that discourage men from expressing their emotions, here men were permitted to do so, but mainly in the context of non-sexual relationships. Deep emotional bonds with other men, brothers, cousins and family friends, for example, as well as with parents or children, were encouraged. These were the relationships,

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of course, which cemented the economic unit of peasant society – the extended family. The internalisation of the ideology of masculinity, the development of a consciousness which reflects its values, its desire to dominate, its competitiveness and its insecurity, can mean also that a man defines his masculinity against the masculinity of others. For the Jat communities in rural Punjab these ‘others’ could be ‘low-caste’ men and they could also be Muslims. There were, in these communities, real or imagined memories of the partition of India, and Sikh–Muslim hostility was present in varying forms under the surface – ready to emerge in periods of communal tension such as the India–Pakistan war of 1965. But the seeds of this hostility had been sown much earlier, not only by the colonial divide-and-rule policies, but by the stereotypes in opposition to which white male identities were defined in colonial discourse (Bhatt 1997). The men who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s had been mainly Jat farmers from Punjab in India and they established the dominant Indian Punjabi culture in Britain. There were also, however, a smaller number of immigrants from the so-called ‘lower castes’ particularly Ramgariahs and Chamars; people from these groups faced and still face discrimination within the community in Britain. The immigrants came first and foremost to work, not to settle. Racism ensured that they were channelled into the hardest, dirtiest and lowest-paid jobs in factories and foundries and the transport sector of post-war Britain. In the early years, and particularly between 1960 and 1980, they set up (almost exclusively male) workers’ organisations to fight the injustices they faced.2 Racism at work and on the streets led them to create new collective identities as Asians and as black people. However, and contradictorily, the constant attacks on their culture by a white population who appeared to them to lack both humanity and sensitivity led them also to cling on to the values which for them symbolised their particular past. Among these values were the patriarchal rules of family life. As their families arrived in the late 1960s and 1970s, their attitude to the women in their families, young and old, was that they must be protected from what they saw as a hostile, corrupt and immoral society. Patriarchal rules and boundaries very similar to those that had existed in Punjab were laid down. However, the women who arrived often went out to work, went to school or coped with the British welfare state on their own. The changes in their lives raised new

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expectations, making the old patriarchal boundaries more suffocating than ever before (Wilson 1978). ‘Ranjit’, who arrived in Britain as a child of 7 from Punjab, recollected the period of intense struggles against racist violence in Southall in 1979. I was 17 at the time. I knew about the way kids were bussed out of Southall so they could keep the schools white, I knew about the attacks and murders and my brothers were involved – they were there as ‘the youth’ – but it was like we girls were not youth. My father and his friends had their own meetings but me and my sisters were stopped from going out at all – once I ran away from home. My father used to lock me up after that. My brothers also agreed with that, they never thought we should have any freedom. But if it was a time when conservative attitudes and rules were being established, it was also a time when there was still a potential for change, as many relationships and roles became more flexible in this new framework. For many families of all backgrounds the rules were not yet consolidated, the community with its hierarchical structures was not yet fully established. So, for example, with women working on production lines – often for the first time –– some men found themselves doing unacknowledged amounts of housework and doing it willingly. ‘Rupinder’ recollected her experience of growing up in West London in that period: My grandfather took on the role of carer within the family. My mum was working in a factory, she was out of the house at 5.30 a.m. My sister was 13 or 14 years older than me, so she would braid my hair in the mornings and my grandfather would make me breakfast. When my sister got married [my grandfather] took on that role of braiding my hair and making me breakfast. He would make me a paratha and give me Aloo da Chaat with it and make me a cup of tea. Before, I remember he loved cooking meat, but later he took on that whole role. My dad would go to work, my mum worked for the airlines, she was on the production line … He [my grandfather] loved my brother and me equally. However, while some men were able to respond pragmatically to the new situation in which families found themselves – for example, by doing the housework – this coexisted with a consolidation of the core

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values of patriarchy, including the control of women’s sexuality and labour, often with violence. Many of those who were young men in the 1960s still own land and property in India, and family tensions about ownership of land occur fairly frequently. They are also still highly conscious of their caste as Jat Sikhs. According to many women, young and old, landownership and caste still shape the masculinity of these men in a variety of ways. The control of women for example, could still be linked in some cases to the desire to keep control of land, although this was fiercely contested, as Bhupinder a recently widowed woman of 42 said: I need to go to India to sort out the land, my father-in-law has made a will for his grandson … I shall have to go and sort it out, it may well resort to physical violence … It’s hopeless a woman’s life is rubbish! What they [her brothers-in-law] want really is for me to be in their control, under their foot. (Kaur 1999: 43) Some women also felt that it was a characteristically Jat masculinity, shaped by landownership and caste, which led to a specific way of being impervious to women’s arguments. As feminist activist Sarbjit Johal told me: One shouldn’t say it really, but there’s something – a different kind of ego, a sense of self, in some ways it can be good because they are confident and just get on with it. But on another level it can mean that they don’t want to reflect or go deeper. They are never self-critical and that makes them act very crudely sometimes. You can argue with them, but you never know how much has gone in. And it is across class. I used to think it was just my uncles, but there are lots of men like that of that age group – not younger ones that much, they are more British. Maybe with the older lot, it is an ego created out of being upper caste and having land. Many younger men who are ‘more British’ have of course been influenced by British masculinity and patriarchy. For example, they have enthusiastically adopted the crude and mindless behaviour associated with the British phenomenon of ‘being a lad’. And whereas in South Asia, and also among older South Asian men in Britain, friendships are often intense and emotional, among younger men the camaraderie of laddishness appears to stop just short of friendship

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since, in many forms of white British masculinity, emotions are taboo. ‘Laddishness’ has also transformed the atmosphere of Sikh festivals. Sukhwant Dhaliwal (2003: 192) describes a celebration of Vaisakhi, the spring festival where, for example, young men carried the ‘Nishan Sahib, the Khalsa Flag in one hand and a bottle of beer or a cigarette in the other as they revelled in the streets in the evening’ harassing women. Vaisakhi and other Sikh festivals have become occasions for conspicuous consumption which showcase British Sikh masculinity. Santokh Singh Gill (2001: n.p.) describes one such occasion, the ‘Vaisakhi tricentenary celebrations of Sikh identity’ in Birmingham: Multiple numbers of young Sikh males adorned (sic) such clothing [i.e. that worn by baptised Sikhs] while driving up and down Soho Road in their fast cars. In this context it was the bandanna, a post-modern twist on the turban … the mouth piece (a ‘gangsta’ interpretation of that used by Sikh priests when serving holy food) and also the Khanda (the universal symbol of Sikhism). This resulted in a particular Sikh masculinity being played out … If aspects of Jat male and identity and ego have metamorphosed into laddishness within a generation, the Punjabi relationship with alcohol has travelled a similar path. Sikhism forbids intoxicants, but alcoholism among Sikh men in Britain is causing concern. Higher than average alcohol-related morbidity rates (McKeigue and Karmi 1993) and high alcohol-related psychiatric admissions (Alcohol Concern 2004) have been noted, as has been the link between heavy drinking and domestic violence (Shaikh and Naz 2000). On a positive note, alcoholism is now increasingly discussed in the community. On the discussion page of Sikhnet.com, a popular website among Canadian and British Sikhs, it is one of the most frequently raised issues, with young men and the occasional woman discussing both the impact of heavy drinking at weddings and social occasions, and trying to work out why Sikhs are heavy drinkers in the first place. These discussions reveal both clear generational differences as well as strong pressures to drink in each generation. Inderjit Singh Dhillon (Sikhnet.com, 2 April 2005) comments for example that for ‘the old Jat men from India, [there is] the macho competition of being able to drink one another under the table and this dictates supremacy in a group of friends, you get a pat on the back if you can drink from the bottle etc.’

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Sikhnet contributors trace the origins of the heavy drinking habits to a variety of historical factors: that ‘party culture’ has always been a part of Punjabi culture; the fact that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a large number of Sikhs were recruited into the British Army, where heavy social drinking was the order of the day; and that making your own liquor has become something farmers are proud of in Punjab. If the older generation of men have established heavy social drinking, particularly of spirits like whisky and rum, it has also been enthusiastically taken up by younger men and women as a part of ‘Bhangra culture’ which, as Sikhnet comments, has in the UK ‘turned into club culture, so boys and girls drink themselves silly whilst doing the Bhangra on the dance floor’.

The Warrior Guru If the Green Revolution profoundly affected Sikh patriarchy and masculinity so too did political developments in Punjab between the late 1970s and early 1990s. This latter period also had a particularly powerful and lasting effect on the Sikh diaspora. In Punjab, by the early 1970s, Jat Sikhs had risen to dominance as an agricultural bourgeoisie. But their further development, and particularly the industrialisation of the region, had been blocked by the central government in India, which saw their potential political power as a threat. By the late 1970s, a militant Sikh movement began to emerge demanding Khalistan, a separate nation for the Sikhs. The Indian state responded by unleashing a reign of terror on Sikhs, with mass killings, rapes and ‘disappearances’. Those responsible for these atrocities, some still in high positions, have yet to be brought to justice (Kumar 2003). Although the Khalistani movement is no longer strong, its impact on the diaspora has been lasting. Khalistani ideology privileges Guru Gobind (1666–1708), the ‘Warrior Guru’ and patron of the Jat Sikhs, over the other nine Sikh Gurus. Guru Gobind introduced the notion of the ‘ideal man’ and also the idea of an army for the defence of Sikhs (the Akaal Purkh Ki Fauj), and both of these have had an impact on the identity of Sikh men in the diaspora. In Britain, in the 1990s the state’s policy of multiculturalism was modified to categorise communities primarily according to faith. Religious identity was officially recognised and institutionalised. Since then, Sikhism, like other religions, has impacted on the education system and it has done so largely in its more militaristic form, with

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Guru Gobind’s teachings often being a key component in the version of Sikhism being taught in state schools (Johal 2000). At the same time, a British-based Sikh organisation named after Guru Gobind’s Akaal Purkh Ki Fauj worked with the British Army to jointly organise summer camps for young men over 16 in the late 1990s and, more recently, it set up the only single-faith scout group in London within the framework of the British Scout Association. The militaristic ideologies of the new Sikhism are now absorbed by young Sikh men of all castes – influencing a whole generation growing up in Britain. They validate the notion that violence is an essential characteristic of masculinity to be acted out in relationships with women and in gang fights. However, men who may have absorbed these aspects of Jat masculinity – which serve to emphasise notions of izzat and justifications for violence against women – have also been influenced by constructs of British masculinity which have their own relationships with violence and misogyny. Like large numbers of other British men, they too play popular computer games, which allow men to obsessively stoke their aggression while at the same time dismissing these activities as merely light entertainment and retaining a calm and rational image. They too consume pornography, which frequently validates violence against women as an essential part of masculinity. At the same time, the hostility towards Muslims which had lain dormant has now been revived in a virulent form through the direct impact of British anti-Muslim racism. It is played out in gang fights, as Dhaliwal puts it: The macho gang culture in Southall did not fade away in the 1990s but reconstituted along religious lines, the Tooti Nung and the Holy Smokes (youth gangs of the 1970s and 80s) were replaced by Muslim and Sikh gangs. Press reports refer to clashes between hundreds of Sikh and Muslim youth during the years 1995 and 1996. Out of revenge, both sets of youth attacked Sikh and Muslim property. However it is interesting that the attacks were orchestrated to coincide with religious festivals and were vicious expressions of hatred towards each others community. One young Muslim man was attacked by sword-wielding Sikh youths, who sliced his arm; in 1996, a Sikh man was killed during a fight between Sikhs and Muslims. (2003: 192) The hostility comes to the fore most often in the context of ‘protecting’ Sikh or Hindu women: ‘I strongly believe that a Sikh woman or

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girl should never get involved with a Muslim … brought up with three sisters, I know they’re never to go out with a Black person or a Muslim. Both are just as bad as each other’ (Gill 2001: n.p.). The violence between Sikh and Muslim gangs is also a popular subject on the Sikhnet discussion site, with comments about ‘Muslim boys out there to harass and convert Sikhs/Hindus’ and, predictably, about the need to control Sikh women: ‘Sikh girls are easy targets since many smoke and drink at clubs’ (31 March 2005). This control of women operates at various levels, from the gangs on the street to religious and community leaders. Progressive voices, female and male, are ignored, partly because multiculturalism has ensured that they are defined as ‘in conflict with the community’, and partly because the wealth and status of many Gurdwaras or Sikh temples mean that they are very hard to confront.

AZAD KASHMIRIS AND TRANSNATIONAL BIRADARIS Whatever is written about Muslim male identity is inevitably read in the context of the demonisation of Muslim men as barbaric fundamentalists and terrorists. The roots of this racism can be traced back to the eleventh century, when armed groups from an underdeveloped Christian Europe plundered the highly developed Muslim societies of the Middle East. Racist discourses about the passive Muslim woman, the perpetual victim, being rescued by the white man from the brutality of the Muslim man, or of the rapacious Muslim man in whose presence no white woman is safe, for example, originated in this period and were later consolidated by colonialism (Said 2003). They surfaced again with the rise in anti-Muslim racism over the last two decades and are common currency today. Violence was, and still is, central to these discourses, which is why every case of male violence against women in diverse communities in Britain today – Pakistani, Kashmiri, Turkish, Kurdish or Bangladeshi – is identified as characteristically Muslim. However, as the experiences of the mainly working-class Kashmiri communities in Britain show, South Asian Muslim male identity in Britain is constantly being reshaped both by racism and the responses to it, and by political and military events played out on a global level in the interests of the US and Britain. Kashmiris in Britain are mainly from Azad Kashmir, the part of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, with a smaller number from the Kashmir valley, which is occupied by India. Migration from Azad

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Kashmir first occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this period, men came to Britain, often for comparatively short periods at a time, worked in factories and mills, and sent money back to their families in the small (and largely caste-based) villages in the Mirpur and Kotli areas. Many of these villages consisted of the members of one or two extended families who are also part of a biradari (literally ‘brotherhood’). Large-scale migration from these regions occurred when it was clear that the 1971 Immigration Act was about to restrict entry to Britain. This is when Kashmiri women first came to Britain. The migration of families from the villages of Azad Kashmir has also meant the formation of ‘transnational biradaris’ (Ali 1999) where, although members live thousands of miles apart, they remain in close contact. This means also that not only village customs and obligations but also long running feuds are reproduced and kept alive not only in Azad Kashmir but also in Britain and the US and elsewhere where migration has occurred. These feuds are essentially an expression of the conflict between men over power and honour in the village communities. Women are treated as possessions and often have to bear the consequences. Newly married women just arrived in Britain, for example, have been suddenly divorced on the telephone, for no apparent reason, and faced deportation under the Two-Year Immigration Rule (see Chapter 3). As for their relations with the indigenous population, Azad Kashmiris, like other working-class Asian communities in Britain had long faced racism – at work, at school and on the streets. In Luton, as elsewhere, this racism escalated in the 1980s as the recession and de-industrialisation hit manufacturing industry. Against this background came the publication of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses and the demonstrations against it by Muslims from Bradford. The Rushdie affair led to a largely media-generated public preoccupation with fundamentalist Islam. Young Muslim men were increasingly constructed as intrinsically fanatical ‘ultimate Others’ (Phoenix 1997: 5–24). There was a heightening of anti-Muslim racism right through the 1990s. These extracts from interviews with young working-class Muslim men in Luton, carried out by a young male researcher of the same background, describe how they felt two years before the peak of anti-Muslim racism post-11 September 2001 (Ghaus 1999: 30):

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White people … they sometimes talk to us like we’re aliens, like we’re fundamentalists that are plotting to take over this town. It’s like you’re some sort of scum. The police, there are times they will drive by you, laugh at you or smirk at you. It is very shameful – it disrespects your honour. If the police are like this, just imagine what the rest of white people are thinking. Since then this anger and sense of humiliation has been exacerbated by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the racist contempt which underlies the reporting of the devastation of these countries, the inhuman and degrading torture of prisoners by US and British soldiers, and the deaths of thousands of men, women and children. The years since the attacks on the Twin Towers have seen intensifying racism for Muslims in Britain. Between 11 September and the first week of December in 2001, there were around 300 assaults on Muslims in this country – a large proportion of them on women (see Chapter 1). And after the bomb blasts on London’s transport network on 7 July 2005, this figure was much larger. There have also, of course, been arbitrary arrests, searches and harassment for everyone who is regarded by the police as ‘looking Muslim’ and for those with Muslim names who travel abroad. Louise Archer’s work with male Pakistani and Bangladeshi school students in the north-west of England suggests that, in addition to rejecting British identity, there is a sense of ‘local unity’ through identification with a ‘strong religion that unifies Muslims from different … backgrounds’, and that there is also the perceived potential for ‘global brotherhood’ (Archer 2001: 87). My interviews and discussions confirm this, but suggest that this local unity and the notion of a potential global brotherhood of Muslim men are also shaped by events related to the history of their communities (which affect both gender and generational relations), and by political processes in South Asia which have been nurtured and sometimes even initiated by British and American governments long before the ‘war on terror’. For Kashmiris, the most important of these political processes occurred in the Kashmir valley in India, and in Afghanistan. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Islamic movements and clerics in Afghanistan and Pakistan were drawn into the conflict.

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Manipulated by the CIA, these groups joined Reagan’s alliance of ‘God-fearing peoples’ to fight the Soviets. Their members were hailed as freedom fighters and as ‘democratic heroes’ by British politicians such as Geoffrey Howe. Kashmiri youth in the diaspora were increasingly drawn to them. The British and Americans were doing this for clear strategic reasons. As the former US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski declared, when asked whether he had any regrets about having supported Islamic fundamentalism and given arms and advice to future terrorists: ‘What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? A few crazed Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?’ (Le Nouvel Observateur 15–21 January 1998). As Ghyasuddin Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament told me: ‘Muslims were used as cannon fodder in Afghanistan. We know that some of these Holy Warriors were trained in Scotland by the British government during the Thatcher epoch. They were allowed to come and go freely and recruit among Pakistanis in Britain.’ Militarism in the name of religion, therefore, was continually nurtured by the British and American governments not only in Afghanistan and Pakistan but in the Kashmiri and Pakistani communities in Britain. At the same time, right through the 1990s, the Kashmir valley was witnessing the ruthless suppression of a nationalist movement by the Indian Army. Kashmiri women were specifically and systematically targeted in rapes and abductions. There was a heightening of nationalist feeling among Kashmiris in this period. There were protests and pickets of the Indian High Commission in London attended by Muslim men of all ages. When the war against the Soviet Union was over, Siddiqui says, some of the Pakistani and Afghan fighters, ‘revelling in their victory but eager for more battles, stationed themselves in Azad Kashmir or crossed into the Kashmir valley. They took the weapons which were used in Afghanistan with them and they also took a culture of violence.’ The fighters brought with them too a Talibanesque patriarchal ideology which they enforced on local populations in the Kashmir valley, Azad Kashmir and other parts of Pakistan. It led to a change in patriarchal relations which both reshaped male identity and heightened women’s oppression, not only in these parts of South Asia but also in the Kashmiri and Pakistani communities in Britain.

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NEW ISLAMIC GROUPS AND APPROACHES In Azad Kashmir, Muslims are mainly Barelwis who practise a form of Islam infused with Sufism. Barelwis believe in spiritual mediation through Pirs (holy men), who are regarded as having supernatural powers. This form of Islam, the most common in South Asia, comes from a rich tradition of tolerance which has allowed people from different religious communities to live together in peace and create a syncretic culture. Hindus, for example, have attended and felt welcome in Sufi shrines. However, during the last 50 years or so, there have been some major changes. Remittances sent back to Azad Kashmir and the consumerism engendered by global capital have affected Pirs too. Many of them have metamorphosed from ascetics who travelled from village to village to celebrity figures who travel across continents (and in some cases even live permanently in Britain). As before, they provide solace and advice, but also collect large sums of money to establish themselves and their mosques in Pakistan. Increasingly such ‘spiritual healers’, as they are increasingly called in Britain, are using conventional marketing methods and advertising in newspapers and magazines. For example, Mr M.A. Hashmi, advertising in Eastern Eye (12 November 2004), offers ‘the most powerful Taveej [amulets]’ for ‘domestic problems, love, black magic … disobedient children etc.’. ‘Spiritual healers’ mediate in feuds and in lesser quarrels between men from the same biradaris. As such they provide a safety net for male violence as well as strengthening the notions of male honour. However, as the advertisement I have quoted shows, they are also involved in ‘domestic’ issues. They are called in to bring women or ‘disobedient’ children, usually daughters, into line by exorcising evil spirits with sometimes extreme physical violence. More often than not, these evil spirits are identified as the cause for women’s resistance to patriarchal control and violence. Like other holy men linked to Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity, Pirs have also been involved in sexual abuse of those who go to them for solace.3 While the dominant form of Sikhism has changed into a hierarchical and militaristic form with only limited internal conflict, Barelwism is being challenged increasingly and publicly (on the Internet, for example) by the new forms of Islam. The conflict here is often between two generations. While respect for, and obedience to, parents is a central tenet of most South Asian cultures, and Kashmiris are no different in this respect, many young Kashmiris feel that the

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extremely rural background of their parents has affected their outlook on religion. This is reflected in the comment of a 19-year-old man in Luton: ‘My parents are from a village, they are unpar [uneducated or illiterate] – you know what I mean. They don’t know that all this with Pirs and things is not religion, it is just culture. These Pirs are just out to get money from us. And people are sending money.’ Many young men and women are drawn to non-Barelwi Muslim organisations which preach a less mystical, more scriptural form of Islam and are also, unlike the Barelwi preachers, active in universities. A variety of these exist in Luton, among them the Tabligh I Jamaat, which is currently the largest missionary organisation in the world. The Tabligh established itself in Britain in the 1980s, setting up its main base in Dewsbury. According to some members of the organisation, its main aim is not proselytising but strengthening the faith of those who are already Muslims. As a young Bangladeshi man told me, Tabligh is about ‘learning the real Islam, with proper rules and meanings. Our parents tried to teach us about Islam but they didn’t themselves know much. They were village people.’ The way the Tabligh I Jamaat operated was described in a discussion I had with an 18-year-old woman, Mona, and her mother, Fatima: Fatima: Tabligh I Jamaat, yes we do that – go to another city. The men spend time in the local mosque and the women spend time in a local home who host your visit. The women pray and talk and read from the Holy Book. Basically you do good things. It was political and it was organised, but I never experienced it as political. That system was led by men. I couldn’t have gone into Tabligh without Mona’s dad and without my brothers. It is called invitation, where you are invited to share your faith. Mona: It was a massive part of our growing up. Say one weekend every month, boys of 14 onwards, they’d go, take their sleeping bags. They’d go to Dewsbury, Batley or Leicester. They would go to the mosque, set it up there. Then in the summer holidays, they’d go for 40 days, do the same Tabligh but in Russia or America, they’d go abroad and do it. You would meet your brothers and sisters in Russia – they’d invite you there. They are Russians but they are Muslims, same as Asians. In America they’d go to Long Island – lots of places. It’s amazing. Fatima: It generates the sense of community throughout the world and men get to know so many people. They meet them at Tabligh.

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Mona: For men it was quite political because they got to talk about what was going on in the world and how they saw it. Fatima: For women it was very respectable. They would not lecture you. It is called taleem when you meet like that. Taleem means ‘knowledge’. The Tabligh, despite its differences with Barelwi traditions, appears to be reproducing the latter’s public/private, male/female dichotomy. From the 1990s onwards, in response to US and British attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and the heightening of anti-Muslim racism in Britain, new groups have emerged. At the same time, the British state has increased its attempts to categorise Muslims as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. ‘Good Muslims’ are those who in the state’s discourses project the acceptable face of Islam, and are willing to play the role that multicultural ‘community leaders’ played in the past, trying to keep order on behalf of the state and to act as the ‘Muslim community’s’ representatives. ‘Bad Muslims’ are those who are critical of the government’s foreign policy and against whom the state tries to justify surveillance and repression. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) is interesting in this context. Set up in 1997, it has had a close relationship with the government although some of its founding members have had links with the religious right in South Asia. In contrast the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) has taken a consistently critical and anti-war stance. Unlike the Tabligh, the MAB has drawn women into its mainstream political activities. While this is undoubtedly in direct response to younger women’s demands, it is also an effort to retain control over them. So, while MAB has mobilised young Muslim women in considerable numbers, MAB’s ‘Sisters’ Section’ was set up, according to its website, to create ‘a national network between female Muslims in Britain as well as protect the Islamic identity amongst Muslim women of all ages and backgrounds’ (my italics). With its prescriptions on the wearing of the hijab (see Chapter 1), MAB and other similar organisations are clearly highly patriarchal – despite the fact that women are present at various levels of the organisation. However, young Muslim women are a vibrant presence at anti-war demonstrations. The fact that organisations such as MAB emphasise the need for women to have an analysis of the current phase of attacks by the US and UK on Muslim countries gives them an obvious appeal.

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Many of these ‘modern’ Muslim organisations acknowledge that women are oppressed but either ascribe this to cultural influences of Hinduism in South Asia or describe the causes as neither religious nor cultural but, as Abdulrahman Jafar of the (MCB) puts it, because ‘men do discriminate, and men do control society. Muslim men seek to justify that oppression under the guise of Islam’ (Jafar, 2004). In other words, by simply acknowledging that women are oppressed, groups like the MCB absolve themselves from the need to do anything about it – because ‘it is not about Islam’. However, the fact that they are at pains to argue that Islam condemns the oppression of women makes these organisations attractive to many Muslim women, no matter that their definitions of oppression are quite limited. Some groups, for example, provide arguments in favour of women’s participation in politics – often against parents’ wishes; some also argue that marriages arranged by parents may sometimes be problematic. These Islamist groups’ ideological frames provide only a circumscribed space in which women can choose their own partners and lifestyles but, in the face of day-to-day experiences of racism and misogyny, many British Muslim women find such theoretical positions inspiring.

LUTON’S CLUB SCENE Class differentials among Muslims, like everyone else in Britain, are marked. While middle-class Muslims might think, like Sarah Joseph, the editor of emel, ‘the lifestyle magazine for Muslims’, that ‘you can have an Islam that draws on British culture and heritage. It is about creating an Islam that is authentically British’ (Joseph 2004), few in working-class areas of Luton would agree. Many young Kashmiri men in Luton may be British-born, but racism has meant that, like young white men in their localities, they equate being British to being white. However, despite this, many working-class Kashmiri men – often from the same families as those who join Muslim organisations – embrace what are clearly western male identities. For example, the flourishing night club scene in Luton is dominated by young Kashmiri men. Many of them emulate the fashions and aspire to the consumption patterns of Mafia gangsters – some even calling themselves the Gambinos. In an interview in 2003, Anita, a Gujarati Hindu woman of 22, described a typical nightclub scene:

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The Gambinos … they’ll go to the bar, they’ll come back with their Moët and the champagne glass. They’ll have their Armani, they’ll have their Gucci, and Patrick Cocker shoes, all 20-year-olds have that, diamonds in their teeth and gold on their wrists. And they look good with it. In these clubs, Kashmiri and Pakistani women are few and far between. The reasons are not hard to find. Muslim women in Luton who have openly had relationships with men are known to be categorised as ‘whores’, often by the very men who they thought were their lovers. As a result they have faced sexual violence from other men.4 And yet women are essential for an evening out. They are possessions, but not in the way they are in rural South Asia; they are more overtly dispensable commodities: as Anita puts it, ‘You have your drink, you have your coke, you have your extra woman.’ They are chosen as fashion accessories for each occasion: the ‘extra woman’ could be ‘Indian’ (meaning Hindu or Sikh) because ‘Indian girls are said to be easy’, and ‘if they are going to a garage night out of Luton with black people, the women they have for the evening could be mixed race because that’s supposed to be an asset with black people’. What is clear, too, is the scale of intimidation, often by older men, and of violence, including sexual violence. Women who leave men from one gang for men from a different gang have been beaten up. The clubs are scenes of fantasy. As a young Kashmiri woman whose brother was a club-goer put it: The Armani and stuff is just fashion. The mafia thing is – well it is fashion too. They have no mafia networks or organisations, and most of them have no real criminal connections, though some link up to older drug dealers, some of whom have close connections with people in local government. The Kashmiris are going down a path trodden by many others before in small towns in Britain. Their lifestyle is underpinned by the presence of older drug dealers and what holds the framework of power in place is the relationship between criminal elements who have the backing of local caste networks and powerful elements within local government – which in small English towns has been for decades, almost traditionally, nepotistic. Money is often scarce but once a man adopts the mafia image, there are relentless pressures to consume, and a need for expensive cars and clothes to keep up with other

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similar men. Consumer items now extend to male beauty products and treatments such as back waxing.5 Outside the clubs, life goes on as usual. Among people of Kashmiri and Pakistani origin in Luton, a substantial proportion of men still get married to women directly from South Asia, though exact figures are hard to come by, often to fulfil promises made by their fathers. As Anita puts it: In the clubs, many of the guys are married. They’ll tell you a sad story about cultural difference and how they don’t get on with their wives, so they carry on with their girlfriends as well, lots of people do that, so after their night out they go home to their wives, their families, to the community. And back in their families and communities izzat still rules.

GUJARATIS AND THE CREATION OF A ‘CIVILISED’ HINDU CULTURE The Gujarati Hindu communities in Britain are differentiated not only by class and caste but also by their history of migration. Some who migrated in the early 1960s were directly from peasant families in Gujarat, others came from urban backgrounds in East Africa, migrating as refugees between 1968 and 1975. This latter group were themselves differentiated by class before they came to Britain. A few had set up thriving businesses in East Africa and had become extremely wealthy. When they migrated, a small number of these well-off business families were able to bring their assets with them to Britain. Another much larger group of refugees were those who had been used by the British to form a middle strata between Africans and whites and had absorbed notions of racial superiority characteristic of middle-status groups in racist societies. In general, they arrived in Britain with no money and few possessions. Other Gujaratis who fled East Africa, however, were from a very different background. Taken there as indentured labourers, they were part of East Africa’s emerging working class. They were neither welloff, nor when they arrived, did they have middle-class aspirations. Yet others, also living on the edge of poverty, were traders in small towns in East Africa. By and large, all these groups except the very rich, worked in factories and foundries when they first arrived in Britain.

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However within a decade their class differentials in Africa reemerged in Britain. Many of those who had been labourers or impoverished traders in East Africa, like those who came directly from the peasant communities in India, did less well – some have remained poverty-stricken over several generations in Britain. The contrast between different parts of Leicester reveal these stark inequalities among Gujarati Hindus. Those who had been middle class in East Africa, have, in general, done much better. A significant proportion among them saved money with steely determination, invested judiciously and went all out for their sons’ (and increasingly for their daughters’) education. Now, many of their sons and a few of their daughters are accountants or lawyers, occupations which are secure even in the midst of widespread unemployment. As Jayaben Desai, the leader of the legendary Grunwick strike, recounts today, she ‘took no risks’ – even in the days when she was a low-paid worker at Grunwick’s and her husband worked night shifts in the Rank Corporation, they saved up enough to send their sons to the US for their education. Now these sons are ‘doing extremely well, with salaries in six figures’. This upwardly mobile group provide the model round which the Gujarati Hindu community’s dominant culture is shaped. Many of the middle-class and fairly well-off Gujarati women who spoke to me, particularly women over 40, mentioned a need for material security and ‘respectability’, which they said constantly ‘lurks in our minds – men feel it more than women’. Behind this need lies a deep insecurity. ‘Kamalaben’, a woman in her sixties, hints at the way in which respectability and also its opposite – the loss of reputation – involve both money and morality: ‘Even respectable people are insecure. One day you may have money, next day you have none. One day you may have your morality, tomorrow you may lose it.’ In other words, if you lose your money, you lose also your status and your respectability – people in the community think ‘there is something wrong with you’. These anxieties, which possibly originate in the East African experience of being financially insecure refugees, mean that ‘normality’ is considered crucially important and often identified with an unstoppable drive to accumulate more and more money. ‘If you are out with a Gujarati boy’, As ‘Geeta’, a Gujarati Hindu woman of 25, who sees herself as unconventional, says:

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conversation has to be very ‘normal’ and if you don’t fit into that normal, then they don’t understand it. It’s like if you drive a Nova why aren’t you driving a Mercedes? If you are working for the Borough Council why don’t you move to an IT company? And in the end they want to know point blank how much money you make. As if to acknowledge the burden of insecurity borne by men in the world outside home, the Gujarati man is provided with a total sense of security within the home, a security which is theirs by right. Of course, this is by no means specific to Gujaratis, but Gujarati women I spoke to, both working class and middle class, mentioned it more frequently than any other group. This perception of the nurturing of a precious masculinity from the moment of birth on, and the very different approach to girls and their future is portrayed in a poster designed by the artist Kiran Patel for Asian Women Unite! In it, under the painting of the palms of a woman’s hands is a caption which reads: The palms of the woman who held fate in her hands As the first-born son imprints his baby feet with a red sindhur (vermilion) stamp of presence … The girl goes unseen, her fate, her destiny pre-written in the lines of her hands … Her hands which hold the power for change, belong to the one body whose feet walk without a print. At Luton University, a group of young women discuss the attitudes of young Gujarati and Pakistani men. Gujarati men, they agree, are less outgoing and seem not to try that hard when it comes to competing for girls. It is a small group and these are just their impressions, but if it is true it is likely to change. In universities in the south of Britain and across the Midlands where there are South Asian populations, the National Hindu Students Forum (NHSF) act as ‘brothers’ and ‘protectors’ of female South Asian Hindu students – ‘protecting’ them mainly from Muslim men. Savita Bhanot, in her study of the NHSF, describes how the organisation – which is linked to right-wing Hindu groups – operates in universities. NHSF men, she says, approach women in a ‘brotherly’ fashion. She notes that where this ‘bhai-behn’ (brother–sister) relationship evolved, ‘new couples emerged … [But] there was a more strategic element to this relationship market which was not simply

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a question of finding a suitable boy but also making sure that girls were introduced to male students as potential suitors.’ A young Hindu woman student is quoted describing the pressure: They claim that we are all brothers and sisters in the Hindu society, but if you are a single attractive Hindu girl, they try to set you up with one of them … What about Rakesh? What about Chetan? What about Prakash? They keep asking me. Can’t they just accept that I am not interested … (Bhanot 2003: 35) Bhanot points out that, despite the more traditional focus on asexual virtue, here ‘sexuality is grossly valued in certain environments’. She relates how, while one young woman was prevented from wearing a dress to the Diwali Ball because it was found to be ‘too revealing’ by NHSF men who were her self-appointed ‘brothers and protectors’, the same men commented approvingly about ‘how “sexy” the girls looked in their ghagra cholis’. In other words, as Bhanot puts it, ‘sexuality in this case is within a male gaze, dressed in the garb of cultural authenticity’ (Bhanot 2003: 35). My interviews suggest that middle-class Gujarati Hindus are the Asian group most likely to marry partners who also live in Britain. These partners are most likely to be from the same caste and class and are usually identified by parents, but increasingly it is acceptable for women as well as men to find their own marriage partners or to be introduced by friends, as long as differences of caste are strictly observed. Marriage is seen as something that helps men and sometimes (though far less often) women get the material things they value. In Bury Park, in the heart of Luton’s Asian community, Gujarati families – often young married couples – make it their goal to move out. Some do this as a result of the money received as dowry. Women in these families are often motivated by the need for a ‘home’ of their own, away from the extended family. But frequently, when couples move, the parents of the husband move with them, particularly if they are elderly and unwell. Apart from a house in a ‘good area’, I was told by Geeta that the young Gujarati man chooses ‘prestige, respectability, keeping up with the Joneses – in a specifically Gujarati way, and with young Gujarati men even more than with their fathers, it is about materialism. It’s about the house, the car, the phone.’

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There is nothing specifically Gujarati or Hindu or even specifically South Asian about these aspirations. The flight to the suburbs, for example, is typical of upwardly mobile communities living in a capitalist society. However, these symbols of middle-class status and spending power in western societies, are often linked in South Asian communities to characteristically South Asian notions of prestige, honour and reputation. In the patriarchal peasant societies of origin all over South Asia, whether in Gujarat, Punjab or Kashmir, land was the source of livelihood and passed from father to son. In these societies, prestige or izzat (or reputation and ‘good name’ in the case of Gujaratis) was a reflection of the family’s continued role in production – more land bringing greater honour and ‘good name’ to a family. The consumption of costly commodities was extremely important but it was for display, a symbol of honourable behaviour – in many parts of South Asia accompanied by charitable acts such as feeding poor people. When people migrated to East Africa they took these notions with them. Although they no longer had land, charitable acts, for example, were still very important in maintaining prestige. With migration to an advanced capitalistic society this has changed. The consumption of costly commodities is now a goal in itself – a self-perpetuating and forever shifting goal. And whereas prestige and izzat in a peasant society was a reflection of the capacity to produce, in Britain it is measured by the capacity to consume commodities whose production has no link to people’s lives. Through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in many Gujarati families, the men had white-collar jobs while the women were manual workers who were also responsible for ‘the home’. In the twenty-first century, women’s jobs – where they bring a substantial income – can enhance the prestige of their families. This has led (as discussed in Chapter 1) to modifications in configurations of masculinity and femininity, which, however, remain strongly dependent on class. In middle-class (or aspiring middle-class) communities, the way control over women’s bodies is exerted has in any case been reshaped, because pre-capitalist patriarchal relations have been accommodated in a slightly modified form into a capitalist framework. As Mohini Howard, a cultural studies researcher, and herself Gujarati, told me in an interview in 2003: ‘despite their love of conservative middleclass Britishness, Gujaratis also project what they see as a Gujarati Hindu culture – “traditional” but also “modern”’. Clearly this fits into Britain’s advanced capitalist society, but it also has a global dimension.

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Gujaratis in the diaspora, particularly (and perhaps ironically) those whose families have migrated from East Africa, see themselves as representatives and shapers of authentic but modern Indian culture. Multicultural, multi-faith and diversity policies provide space and resources for the development of this culture. What does this version of ‘modern Indian/Gujarati Hindu culture’ mean for gender relations? As Mohini puts it, ‘Gujarati Hindu patriarchy still has its bite. I don’t think it ever went away, it just changed its colours. It has become subtler but it is just as effective.’ She told me of these changes in the Gujarati community in Birmingham: … the Gujarati communities have become more established and with it a lot more conservative than before. They see this as integration and part of integration in this so-called multicultural society is to have a cultural identity which is acceptable to white society. Religious identity links into the moral values of mainstream society which in turn provides a very conservative way of looking at religion. Being Hindu is not what it was when my mother was young. Now Gujarati middle-class men are proud that the women in their families ‘are liberated’ and they see this in contrast to Muslim women. But this liberation means the freedom to do certain western things but in particular ways. Like they will have separate Hindu sports groups, something they never had before. These groups are based on being Hindu but the actual activities they are doing are very westernised – a gym, a very modern, middleclass concept, yet they are using it. These women don’t have the freedom to go out and meet for other purposes or for no purpose. The community uses religion to rubber stamp what is a very western activity and they use religion to keep control while giving the impression of freedom. They see western culture as civilised and they want to be seen as civilised. This reshaping of patriarchal relations, and with it the strengthening of male and female caste identities, is also apparent in Ramji’s (2003) study of a middle-class Kutchi community. Ramji writes that the women in her study, whose parents had migrated to Britain, were … aware of their high-caste position and of their ‘heritage’ and differentiated themselves from ‘Others’ outside the community … Caste remained an important variable influencing how women organised their lives, the temples they went to, the women’s groups they attended, the organisations and charities they ran or supported. (2003: 237)

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They are less open to the notion of ‘marrying out’ than their mothers were. Ramji interprets this as not an ‘abandonment of cultural traditions but a redefinition of these traditions’. In fact, the most conservative elements of pre-capitalist practice have been strengthened and placed within a modern framework. At work, the women interviewed by Ramji adopted what she calls an ‘ethnically neutral identity’, erasing all signs of difference from their speech and apparently from their interests. When Ramji rang them up at work and deliberately spoke in Gujarati, they invariably replied in English. One woman told of her ‘reluctance to tell her boss that she wanted to take a day off to celebrate Diwali and Indian New Year because she did not want to stand out among her colleagues’ (2003: 234). These women, according to Ramji, leave their ‘cultural differences’ (2003: 234) at home and have a different persona for public arenas. Ramji comments that ‘although the workplace was a site of both racist and sexist discrimination, it also presented a site for challenging these assumptions in non-confrontational ways’, although she concedes that ‘one could argue that it is these women who are changing to fit into the occupational structures, not the structures changing to accommodate them’ (2003: 234). But the young working-class Gujarati women who spoke to me had a different analysis for similar behaviour they had observed in their better-off relatives. As Anita put it: Just think about it, people spend a lot longer at work than at home. So if you are whiter than white at work, if you don’t want to acknowledge anything about your culture, you are going to bring it back home. That’s why you get parents giving their children names like Emma or Brian. Yeah, you’ll find quite a few Brian Patels in our community. The argument being presented here is clear – that racism and the urge to be as British as possible are both factors that contribute to the new ‘civilised’ middle-class Gujarati masculinity and femininity. (This urge to be acceptably British is not present in the same way in workingclass Gujarati communities.) Also present are a strong belief in the divisions and hierarchy of the caste system and a general conformism and a Thatcherite contempt for ‘low achievers’ who have done less well materially. As Ramji puts it there is ‘an inability to appreciate why they [low achievers] would settle for no career’ (2003: 236). In other words this is a new and right-wing culture where dissidence,

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or even the freedom to be different from the majority, is stamped upon or simply excluded. Hindu Gujarati masculinity, like Sikh masculinity has long defined itself in counterpoint to Muslim masculinity. This is now much more the case. Gujarati Hindu women who spoke to me regarded Hindu men as ‘soft’ and ‘gentle’, unlike Muslim men who were seen as a threat. ‘Kamlaben’, who is in her late fifties, described this very explicitly: ‘Our men are innocent, they don’t do these types of things, but look at the Muslims. They want to get a Hindu girl, convert her, marry her then take her to Saudi Arabia.’ Another woman of the same generation, describing a Hindu woman’s marriage to a Muslim man said, ‘She was carried off by a Muslim.’ Gujarati Hindu men too appear to have internalised this deeply. When asked about the issues discussed in conversations between a man and woman who have been introduced in the new ‘modern’ framework for arranged marriage (see Chapter 4), Geeta said: Some of them will ask you intrusive questions – ‘Are you a virgin’ is one of the questions which comes up or ‘Have you been out with men?’ They will say things like ‘You love black men don’t you?’ Or ‘You like Pakistani men don’t you?’ This suggests, again, that Hindu masculinity is being defined in contrast to what it sees as a more virile and powerful black/Muslim masculinity.

MASCULINITY, FEMININITY AND RIGHT-WING HINDU GROUPS IN BRITAIN In the 1970s and early 1980s, although East African Asians often retained their notions of racial superiority over people of African origin, anti-Muslim feelings were certainly less intense.6 From the 1990s onwards a section of the Gujarati Hindu community has become more established in Britain whether in big business, as professionals, or in positions in local government. At the same time another factor has had a powerful impact on Gujarati Hindu culture and male identity in Britain. This is the increasing influence of Hindu right-wing groups, the Sangh Parivar (or family of organisations), which have shot to prominence in India over the same period.7 These groups are now extremely well established in Britain. At the core of their practice is the Hindu supremacist ideology of Hindutva.

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Because of their influence on the diaspora, I will briefly outline the nature of their politics. They originated in the 1920s with the establishment of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Samaj (RSS), a militaristic, cadre-based organisation which openly espoused fascism. They now include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an international cultural organisation, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the female counterpart of the RSS, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) a political party which gathered mass support through the 1990s, ruled India between 1998 and 2004 and still controls several Indian states, including Gujarat. Their goal is the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra or Hindu state in India. By the mid 1970s the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the international wing of the RSS, the VHP-UK and the Hindu Sevika Samiti (which I will refer to as the Samiti) – the women’s wing of the HSS – had established themselves in Britain. By the early 1990s their activities were in full swing. They used caste networks, regional contacts and a variety of other ‘community links’ to expand their influence. Councils where Hindus (Gujarati and non-Gujarati) had important positions supported them in the name of multiculturalism. Many Gujarati women in Britain have been drawn into the fold of the Hindutva groups for no reason other than that these groups have identified their lack of day-to-day support. As ‘Ramaben’ who is in her late forties and active in the Hindu Sevika Samiti, explained: We moved to Harrow because we could be near to Indians, mainly because of our culture. I was lonely at first, my daughter was only 4, then a lady told me about this organisation. Now we meet every week; children can also play there. Now we have branches everywhere – in South Harrow, Kenton, Alperton, Slough, Hounslow and also Leicester, Luton, many places. The aim of the organisation is to bring our Hindu ladies together and to be proud of our culture and heritage. To be Hindus, Indians. At the same time the networks of these groups also serve to reinforce patriarchal relations and male violence. There have been instances where women trying to leave violent husbands, in itself a hugely difficult task, have been pressurised by these groups not to do so. Where women have succeeded in leaving, members of Hindutva organisations have intervened to make their lives more difficult – exacerbating situations where they already often face malicious gossip and sexual harassment from men in the extended family and community. In one case, for example, in Northamptonshire, a woman

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who divorced her violent husband was pressurised by VHP committee members to withdraw the papers. When she refused, they hounded her for years, spreading stories about her. Increasingly, Hindutva organisations cater for families: children are drawn in through school shakhas (branches) – the HSS has persuaded local schools to accommodate them in their after school activities in the name of multicultural education; college students are attracted by the NHSF and summer camps which act in coordination with shakhas, and older men and women through local temples and Hindu associations.

Discourses of Hindutva and the diaspora The discourses of Hindutva have had a direct impact in reshaping Gujarati Hindu male and female identities, both in India and in the diaspora. Here I will touch upon only those which have a direct relevance to Gujaratis in Britain. First, there is the discourse of exclusion; this comes from the definition of India as a Hindu state from which non-Hindus, and particularly Muslims, will be excluded with violence. Here racist constructions of Muslim men as ‘beast-like’ and ‘oversexed’, very similar to those of black men in white supremacist discourse, are used for specific ends. Muslims, in this context, are seen as threatening the purity of Hindu women. Second, and inextricable from the first, is the discourse which urges the re-masculinisation of Hindu men through acts of violence. The rape and defilement of Muslim women are seen as the way for the Hindu man to reclaim his manhood and are to be performed as his sacred duty. A pamphlet distributed by one of the Hindutva organisations explicitly stated: ‘Don’t feel guilty to rape women of the other community’ (International Initiative for Justice 2003). Finally, there is the discourse of Hindu unity, which requires the establishment of a strong and monolithic Hinduism, and demands the destruction of the syncretic forms of religion and culture so characteristic of South Asia. These discourses have strong resonances with Hindu Gujarati male identity and culture in Britain. As we have seen, the constant male insecurity, the fear of Muslim masculinity, the perceived need to nurture Hindu masculinity, are elements that already exist and can be drawn upon. Also, Gujarati middle-class Hindus often regard much of the syncretic, contradictory, highly complex nature of Indian dayto-day cultural practice as irreconcilable with the modern image they

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seek. In a clear parallel with the new generation of Islamists, they categorise these practices and beliefs as ‘backward’. They prefer a Hinduism that can fit in with ‘modern life’, a ‘civilised’ Hinduism as Mohini Howard puts it, and a religion that can be reduced to sets of rules of which they will not be ashamed in white society. They see themselves as standard-bearers who both preserve Indian culture (by which they mean Gujarati Hindu culture) in an ‘appropriate’ form, with clear caste differentials and clear boundaries, and also lead India forward in a globalised world. This too is in line with the thinking of the far-right Hindu groups in India. Ironically, these standard-bearers are often those who grew up in Britain or East Africa, not India. They are however encouraged in their role by the Hindutva organisations, particularly the BJP which has, and wishes to maintain, excellent relations with international finance and western governments. Middle-class professionals and businessmen in the Gujarati diaspora are an essential link in cementing these relations. In addition, the middle-class supporters of Hindutva in Britain play a role as fundraisers. In 2000 a massive earthquake caused large-scale devastation in Gujarat. Sewa International (UK), the largest Indian Charity in Britain, was one of the main organisations in Britain which raised funds for earthquake relief. It was supported by many Labour politicians, among them Barry Gardiner MP (of Labour Friends of India) who, in January 2002, handed over a cheque for £1 million from Sewa International to the BJP Chief Minister of Gujarat. How did Sewa International (UK) and its Indian partner Sewa Bharati (which is closely linked to the RSS) use these funds? Audited accounts have not been made available to investigators from Britain’s Charity Commission. (Awaaz – South Asia Watch Ltd 2004, 2005)

THE GUJARAT MASSACRES: RESPONSES FROM BRITAIN At the end of February 2002, there were massacres of Muslims in Gujarat which left more than 2,000 people dead and 200,000 dispossessed. A feminist investigating team for the International Initiative for Justice in Gujarat described the process which ignited the violence: … the Gujarati press invented the rape of three Hindu women by Muslim men in Godhra in Gujarat … which served not only to justify the mass rapes of Muslim women in the following riots but to conjure up a sense of outrage

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at the supposed long history of wrongdoings of the Muslim community. (International Initiative for Justice 2003) The sadism of the Gujarat riots of 2002 was unprecedented. Children were brutally murdered in front of their mothers, who were then raped and murdered; foetuses were torn out of pregnant women’s bodies. All this occurred with the collusion of the state. The police stood by or even participated in the violence themselves (Human Rights Watch 2002).8 Women participated not only by urging men on but also by leading mob attacks on Muslim homes and localities. This was in line with Hindutva ideology, which constructs the ideal Hindu woman as dependent on the authority of her husband, a subordinate, dutiful and sacrificing producer of children, but also as a protector and defender of Hindu culture, rising in this context to the nationalist call to arms against Muslims (International Initiative for Justice 2003). If fascism hides behind the mask of Hindutva’s modernity, so does extreme violence against women: Nagalia points out that in Gujarat, ‘one of the most developed states in India, [violent] deaths of women rank highest’; in 1995 alone, 5,583 women aged between 14 and 30 were burnt to death (2002: n.p.). A study of violence against women in Gujarat shows a high level of psychological violence against women among upper-caste groups (Visaria 2000). Ila Pathak, Secretary of AWAG (Ahmedabad Women’s Action Group) links the ‘unspeakable violence against Muslim women’ with ‘the record of atrocities against women as a whole’ in the state (Nagalia 2002: n.p.). Such is the influence of the Sangh Parivar and its ideology that when I raised the issue of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 with the Gujarati Hindu women (belonging to two generations) who spoke to me in 2004, few were willing to condemn the massacres or even show any pity for the Muslim women who were raped or the children who were brutally murdered. Their opinions varied from quiet justification to open approval. The usually mild-mannered Kamalaben commented: ‘Whatever has happened is right. We should drive them out of our areas here too. There are two Muslim shops on the high street, if our people had any sense they would boycott them.’ Others were less explicit but clearly shared these feelings, saying, for example, that it was not a matter of politics, rather that ‘Hindus are under attack from Muslims’ or, mentioning the ‘war on terror’, ‘You can see they

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[Muslims] are terrorists.’ They also told me that the men in their families shared their opinions. However, no community is monolithic, and there were also women from the same background among the activists who challenged the Sangh Parivar in Britain. Women from secular South Asian organisations in Britain like South Asia Solidarity Group and Southall Black Sisters joined hands with British-based Indian Muslim organisations to protest on a number of occasions, demanding the dismissal of the Gujarat government, the indictment of those responsible for the attacks and an end to fundraising in Britain by Hindutva groups. I have looked in this chapter at male identities (and sometimes complementary female identities) in three quite different South Asian communities. The contrasts are considerable and to be expected, but the similarities are remarkable too. Masculinity (and often femininity too) has been considerably reshaped by multiculturalism and by the forces of politicised religion, and in each case the syncretism of South Asian religions with their potential for pluralism is being swept away by more rigid and authoritarian forms of religious belief.

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3 ‘Mercy and Wisdom of a Government’? Race, Culture and Immigration Control … rejoice in the mercy and wisdom of a government which blends humanity with justice, and consults at once the interests and prejudices of its subjects, by recalling them from practices revolting. (Parliamentary Papers on Hindoo widows 1830) ‘I want to ask Tony Blair, would you like to be in my position? Is this right – what you are doing to me?’ ‘Varsha’ is 19 and she has come with about 100 other Asian women to protest in front of the Home Office on International Women’s Day 2004. A cold March wind blows down Queen Anne’s Gate as the Oldham contingent get off their minibus. Some, like Varsha, are carrying babies, others are leading young children, sleepy and cranky after the long journey. Pushchairs and bags are unloaded, and then placards: ‘End this torture! Stop forcing women to stay in violent relationships!’ They are protesting against the Two-Year Rule, the British government’s policy of sending women from South Asia who are foreign nationals back ‘home’ when their marriages to men settled in Britain break down within two years of arrival in Britain. In this, the first demonstration any of them has been on, a demonstration about their own lives and their very real fear of death, their strength of spirit is obvious. But behind it lies what passers-by do not see, the day-to-day reality of their anguish and fear and their yearning for some vestige of normality for themselves and their children. Overwhelmingly their marriages have broken down because of domestic violence; now they face deportation back to their countries of origin where the most extreme violence may await them. Their experiences are stark examples of the double standards of a Labour government that proclaims in its document, Living without Fear – An Integrated Approach to Tackling Violence against Women (1999), that ‘Women have a right to live their lives without fear of violence and mothers have the right to raise their children in safety. Without this, we will never achieve a fair and equal society in modern Britain.’ But the same government, at the same time, excludes women who 72

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do not have British citizenship – almost all of them South Asian and African – from what it defines as a basic right. And despite the British state’s traditional concern with upholding the line between ‘private’ and ‘public’, in the context of immigration it had no hesitation in intervening in the ‘private’ arena through its ‘investigations’, its procedures and its rulings – suggesting that, as in the colonial era, Asian, African and African-Caribbean families are seen as not deserving the respect accorded to white families. In this chapter I discuss the interventions of the British state in the lives of South Asian women in two broad areas: first, its direct interventions in the context of culture – which I return to elsewhere in this book; and, second, its interventions in the arena of immigration, many of which are justified by its own conceptualisation of South Asian culture.

MULTICULTURALISM – RESHAPING CULTURE IN THE INTERESTS OF CONTROL As Heaven Crawley puts it: the state has no necessary relationship with gender but is dynamic, evolving and dialectical. Gender (and other) inequalities are buried within the state but, through part of the same dynamic process, gender relations are also partly constituted through the state. The state therefore partly reflects and partly helps to create particular forms of gender relations and gender inequalities … (2000: 91) Buried within the British state, however, are not only gender inequalities but also a variety of often contradictory patriarchal ideologies and discourses. Asian and African women’s experiences reveal this throughout the history of British colonialism. For example, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when British state policies were aimed at creating a workforce for colonial capital, families could be split apart, as in the slave trade or through the system of indentured labour. But in situations of so-called benevolent colonialism, the British state tried to impose the Victorian patriarchal family structure on its subjects in India and parts of Africa, because these institutions were central to its notion of ‘civilisation’ (Banerjee 1989) and could fit into its wider structures of control. In Britain, the state has attempted to categorise and reshape the culture of settled South Asian communities over the last four

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decades. In the first phase, from the 1960s to the late 1970s, the state tried to assimilate the ‘immigrants’. The policies in this phase were explicitly racist, involving ‘diluting’ the populations of South Asian (and African-Caribbean) people and ‘assimilating’ them into British ways by erasing their culture and languages. There were schemes for dispersing immigrants and refugees from East Africa to prevent areas being dominated by them. Policies were implemented to bus even very young Asian children to schools miles away from home so that schools could remain predominantly white. South Asian children were not allowed to speak in their mother tongues in school and were often taunted by white teachers as well as pupils about Asian food or clothes (Wilson 1978: 4). In response, the largely working-class South Asian and African-Caribbean communities – at that time sharing a united political identity as black people – fought back, demanding basic justice in the face of racism, and cultural recognition. The state’s answer was multiculturalism. Multicultural policies used ‘ethnicity’ as a guiding principle. The relationship between the newly labelled ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘majority society’ was portrayed by the state and its spokespersons in exclusively cultural terms. Racism and the power relationships which perpetuated it were therefore defined away, while the notion of ethnicity was used as ‘a tool to blunt the edge of black struggle, to return “Black” to its constituent parts’ (Sivanandan 1990: 67). Multicultural policies claimed to recognise ‘ethnic’ cultures but what was projected as culture was not the dynamic ever-changing reality of our lives but something static and unchanging – or ‘timeless’. Multiculturalism also denied internal differentiations of gender, class and caste. Oppressive gender relations were therefore implicitly accepted and women’s struggles against them were defined as not ‘part of’ South Asian culture. This was the origin of the notion that all struggles within the family were a result of ‘western influence’ or because Asian girls wanted to be ‘like English girls’. In this way, existing power relationships were reinforced, while at the same time women could be portrayed as victims without agency who needed to be ‘saved’. Multiculturalism grew in the next two decades into a vast industry with its own experts in every field from education to health to social work. At the same time it established a structure of funded community leaders, almost invariably male and conservative, through whom the state could control the communities.

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Multicultural ‘commonsense’ ideology also became pervasive. For example: ‘multiculturally sensitive’ social workers often urged women seeking to leave violent marriages to think about the extended family and family honour, or ask themselves, ‘Who will marry my daughters if I do this?’ (Wilson 1989).1 Whether in the institutions of the welfare state or in academia – ‘culture’ and ‘community’ became inseparable. In the 1990s, the demonisation of Islam in America’s global strategy began to feed into the British media and into constructions of ethnic minority communities, generating a specifically anti-Muslim racism. The construction of the ‘Muslim’ man (and also more recently woman) as fanatical, fundamentalist, violent and owing allegiance to forces external – and hostile – to Europe came to be foregrounded in racist imagery (Wilson and Wilson 2002). Simultaneously, culture and religion came to be conflated, and ‘Muslim’ became the new ‘ethnicity’. As Claire Alexander (1998) notes, in Britain the term ‘Muslim culture’ increasingly started appearing in welfare state documents and in academia, regardless of the diversity of groups adhering to variants of the Muslim faith, making the concept meaningless in practical terms as well as flawed on a theoretical level. Asian communities, which had first been categorised according to country of origin, and then according to linguistic group, were now categorised by their religion above all else. Increasingly, fighting women’s oppression was regarded therefore as being against religion. As a result, in towns where anti-Muslim racism was acute, women fighting for basic rights as women faced increased hostility, not just from ‘community leaders’, but from a wide range of voluntary and state agencies. In Bradford, for example, according to Shamshad Hussain – who has worked on domestic violence issues there for nearly a decade – an alliance of local government organisations and voluntary sector workers has acted to suppress even the most basic organisation by women. She tells me, in an interview in January 2005, of an incident from 1996 which she says is still relevant. I could see that racism in Bradford was very acute and I wanted to find out about anti-racist groups out of personal interest. I thought the Keighley Youth Services might be a good place to start. Also I was an outreach worker with Asian women with the Bradford Domestic Violence Forum, so I decided to

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go and talk to a group of school-age women about various issues which they brought up. Soon after, she had threatening notes put on her car and was summoned by four people from the Youth Services – a white woman who was a senior employee and three young Asian men. They insisted that I go and meet them with my manager from work. I was told, ‘We know you’ve been taking the mickey out of the Qu’ran! Telling young women not to drink holy water! You can’t get these girls to go out with white guys like you do!’ I told them ‘I deny everything you have said and my personal belief has nothing to do with you. Any complaint, put it in writing.’ Later, she learnt of another Asian woman who had similar experiences to her own. As we saw in Chapter 2, as well as direct interventions in culture, the state has also indirectly heightened patriarchal ideologies and control by nurturing religion-based identities and deepening divisions in the South Asian communities. Multicultural policies are now gradually being phased out in the name of ‘community cohesion’ and the funding associated with multiculturalism is being withdrawn. However, the power structures within communities that were set up by multicultural policies are deeply entrenched, and the attitudes and ideologies required for control are now both widespread and institutionalised.

IMMIGRATION, GENDER AND ‘CREDIBLE WITNESSES’ While the state has consistently reinforced South Asian patriarchal relations through multicultural policies, in the arena of immigration it is far more pragmatic. It will at times condone patriarchal power, as in the Two-Year Rule, and at others come into conflict with it, as in the Forced Marriage Initiative, which I discuss later. Its pragmatism must be seen, however, in the context of its policies of exclusion of Third World immigrants – particularly when these immigrants would be entitled to basic rights in Britain. These policies came into effect by the early 1970s, when Britain was beginning to face an economic recession and no longer needed workers. The racism and sexism of the Two-Year Rule can, in fact, be traced back to the 1971 Immigration Act, which systematically intervened in Asian and African-Caribbean families. Mothers living in Britain,

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hoping to have their children join them, were questioned about the extent of their love for their children and often told that their relationships were not close enough. Elderly parents were held in detention and deported because immigration officers did not think that they had ‘sufficient reason’ to join their children settled in Britain. Husbands and wives were kept apart because immigration officers were ‘not satisfied’ that they were in fact married to each other (Bhabha and Shutter 1994; Wilson 1978). British immigration policy from the 1970s on assumed that South Asian marriages were a sham, contracted solely to gain entry to Britain, unless proved otherwise. Those seeking to enter, and their partners seeking to sponsor them, were categorised therefore as potential liars. This was legitimised by the racist ideology of the state, expressed by Margaret Thatcher, then opposition leader, who described Britain as ‘being swamped by people of a different culture’ (Fryer 1987). White people entering the country with, say, Australian citizenship were not in general interrogated in this way. Women in particular were largely regarded as not ‘credible witnesses’. It was assumed that they were not really the individuals they claimed to be, and were trying to enter Britain to live with men who were not their husbands. They and their relatives were questioned separately, about their in-laws’ living arrangements, the number of guests who attended their weddings, the colour of the family’s goats and so on. Any discrepancies, however trivial, were picked on as proof that they were liars (Bhabha and Shutter 1994). Clearly the interrogation of women and the types of questions they were asked were a form of psychological torture. It was torture, moreover, that was gender specific, because as women they found this invasion of the most intimate aspects of their private lives particularly humiliating and painful. The horrific ‘virginity tests’ inflicted on Asian women seeking to enter Britain as fiancées and wives in the 1970s carried this humiliation further. And yet, the sheer brutality of the treatment meted out to women who were seeking to enter as fiancées and wives is often lost in the almost inevitable sensationalisation of the ‘virginity tests’ themselves. In 1976, for example, a pregnant 18-year-old woman, Zahira Galiara, was interrogated for twelve hours without food and water and detained overnight, to be deported the next morning. When she started having severe labour pains, she was ridiculed and denied

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medical help till the baby’s head began to emerge. She was then taken to hospital where her baby died (Wilson 1978).2 My visits to detention centres in March 1977 showed that ‘virginity tests’ were routine. A patriarchal and racist logic asserted that if these women were virgins they were not wives, and if they were not virgins, they were not marriageable and therefore they could not be fiancées. That ‘virginity tests’ were officially sanctioned was clear from my interview with Alex Lyon, the then Labour Home Secretary (Wilson 1978). In fact, from the late 1970s on, immigration officials have had to reach targets for numbers of people rejected, to satisfy the chain of command. In the 1970s and 1980s, the people sent back were spouses, elderly relatives and siblings, along with a comparatively small number of would-be workers seeking to enter Britain. By the early 1990s, all the racist practices and procedures of the past had been incorporated into a far more repressive immigration regime whose aim was primarily to exclude refugees and asylum seekers. As for the violence of immigration practices, there have been no discontinuities: it has steadily escalated through the 1980s and 1990s. For example, in 1993, Joy Gardner, a Jamaican woman being served with a deportation order in her home, died after being ‘restrained’ with a body belt and gagged with 13 feet of surgical tape in front of her 5-year-old son. The police officers involved were charged with manslaughter but later acquitted.

THE TWO-YEAR RULE Within the framework of the 1971 Immigration Act, the Primary Purpose Rule is the most direct precursor of the current Two-Year Rule. Under this, fiancées and spouses migrating to live with partners settled in Britain had to prove that the motivating factor in their marriage was not to obtain settlement in the UK. In addition, women who migrated to marry or live with spouses settled in the UK were expected to remain in the relationship for a probationary period of one year. If the relationship ended (for whatever reason) before the year was over, they had no right to remain in Britain. Women in violent relationships therefore had a stark choice between two potentially life-threatening alternatives. If they were forced to return to their country of origin, they would, in many communities, be blamed for bringing dishonour to their own or their husbands’ families, and as a result face abuse or even murder.

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The Labour Party in opposition had promised to repeal the Primary Purpose Rule. When they came to power in 1997, the Rule was in fact repealed, but the so-called ‘One-Year Rule’ or the probationary period for marriages was retained, as was the culture of suspicion which used the notion of ‘lack of credibility’. After much lobbying by Asian women’s groups led by Southall Black Sisters (SBS), the Rule was modified in 1999, providing a ‘domestic violence concession’ which gave women in this position an opportunity to apply for ‘indefinite leave to remain’ if they could provide evidence of domestic violence. The evidence required was a relevant criminal conviction or a police caution, or an injunction or other protective order issued against the sponsor (except for ex parte injunctions). For most South Asian women in this situation, however, many of whom had been thrown out of their homes with no money or passport, these changes were of little relevance. What made their position more difficult, and in many cases effectively untenable, was an additional rule, ‘no recourse to public funds’, which barred them – in the long period during which their applications were made and considered – from receiving any support from the state.3 This meant that most Asian women and their children who tried to leave violent marriages in the probationary period faced destitution and homelessness. Although they were allowed to work in this period, this was rarely a realistic option, as many of them had child care responsibilities or language problems, or educational qualifications that were not recognised in Britain. After three and a half more years of pressure from Asian women’s groups, the government changed the Rule again in 2002. The evidence of domestic violence required could now be provided by the police, a GP, social services, a women’s refuge, a hospital doctor in the form of a medical report, or an undertaking given to court by the abuser. These were clearly easier to obtain, suggesting the government’s concern for ‘cultural problems’, but this ‘concern’ was accompanied by an extremely harsh measure – the lengthening of the probationary period from one year to two, and the retention of the ‘no recourse to public funds’ rule.4 More pressure wrung a new ‘concession’ from the Home Office. The paltry sum of £40,000, in total, was sanctioned as a ‘last resort fund’ to help women in this situation. This was clearly disingenuous on the part of the Home Office given the scale of the problem and also the fact that appeals often take years to be settled, while the estimated cost for a woman living in a refuge is £1,000 a month.

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Eventually, in the run-up to the 2005 general election there was another ‘concession’. Under the Supporting People policy – which separates rent from support services – the government will now pay for a woman’s support services even if her immigration status is insecure. Under the Two-Year Rule, however, women still have no help with the most crucial aspect of their expenditure – their rent – or with food and living expenses. In addition, because Supporting People provisions are public funds – and are already being cut – this is a concession that could be taken away at any time (see Chapter 8 for a further discussion of the Supporting People programme).5 As for the immigration laws, they remain unchanged despite years of campaigning. There is, of course, as apologists for the state never fail to remind us, the right of appeal. But it is an appeals procedure where the immigration establishment itself acts as judge and jury on its own actions. In theory, if the Home Office refuses a case there are two further stages of appeal – an Immigration Adjudication and the Immigration Appeals Tribunal. But at every stage the appellant faces obstacles. As Talat Jabin, a solicitor at Oldham Law Centre, told me in February 2005: When the Home Office refuses a case, we have to appeal for further funds from the Legal Services Commission to take it to the adjudicator. Funds are often refused, and women under the Two-Year Rule can’t usually afford private solicitors, so it means they simply can’t appeal. If we do get the funds we could be turned down by the adjudicator: we then need permission from the Immigration Appeals Tribunal to appeal to them. This is often refused. Hardly any cases are getting permission lately. The adjudicator’s determinations and Secretary of State’s rulings reveal the nature of British racism, and say a lot about the British state’s flexible relationship with South Asian patriarchal oppression. In what Crawley describes as the state’s ‘evolving and dialectical’ relationship with gender, these rulings often blatantly ignore the government’s own declarations about violence against women. For example, in the wake of the bombing of Afghanistan, while British politicians frequently asserted that the British and American forces were rescuing Afghan women from the ‘barbaric’ Taliban, the Home Office was routinely trying to send Pakistani women back to villages in those very parts of Pakistan (like the North West Frontier Province [NWFP]) which had provided the support base of the Taliban and were still largely under its control. One of these women was

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‘Sadia’, whose mother, an impoverished widow, lived in a small village in the NWFP of Pakistan. Her experiences are similar to those of many others. Sadia was married to a man based in the UK, whose family were powerful in her village. Soon after she arrived in Britain, she discovered that her husband had a number of girlfriends. When she challenged him, he became extremely violent. Her father-in-law took his son’s side and blamed Sadia for causing ‘problems’ in the marriage. When she eventually managed to escape from the house, he accused her of being unfaithful and publicly threatened to track her down, take her back to Pakistan, and have her killed. Sadia found temporary refuge in a hostel for Asian women and appealed to the Home Office to be allowed to stay in the UK, but she was turned down. The Secretary of State did not think she would be in any danger if she were returned to her village in NWFP. In a long legal struggle with the immigration authorities, her solicitor pointed out the extremely high number of honour killings in the region and the threats made by her father-in-law, who was a powerful figure in the village. She highlighted the prevalence of accusations of adultery and the feudal punishments inflicted on women who were so accused, as a result of the heightening of fundamentalist ideology; and the existence of the Hudood Ordinance in Pakistani law, which rules that adultery is a crime punishable with death by stoning. She pointed out that all of these issues have been discussed and documented extensively by Beena Sarwar (2004), Asma Jehangir (2003) and others. Sadia eventually won her right to stay in the UK. But many others in her situation were not so fortunate. The laws and their interpretation by the Home Office have forced such women either to continue to live in violent relationships or be deported back to Pakistan to be persecuted and possibly killed. More recently (in late 2004 and 2005) rulings have been far harsher. With increasing frequency, women are being told that they must go back to Pakistan, and that their human rights will not be violated because they can simply ‘relocate’ to other parts of the country. This trivialises women’s oppression by regarding it as the result of ‘isolated incidents’ or ‘individual deviancy’ rather than entrenched and systemic (Pettman 1996). In fact, the idea of relocation to another part of Pakistan is absurd. As Shahnaz Bukhari – who founded one of the very few refuges in Pakistan which safeguards women’s human rights – told me in an interview in February 2005:

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The idea of relocation to another part of Pakistan is entirely unrealistic. A single woman is not likely to have the resources. Even if she did, travelling alone would be impossible. She is likely to be attacked. If she wants to rent or buy a place, she would be unable to do so because she would be assumed to be a prostitute. And then, there is the question of living alone: a woman living alone would not be safe. In fact, a woman on her own without male relatives would not be safe. She would be targeted by rapists and abusers. In addition, members of her caste or clan would track her down and kill her wherever she tried to flee. While this situation would be untenable for a woman from a village, on the issue of being tracked down, it would be just as bad for a woman from a city. In fact in some ways it would be easier for a family seeking vengeance to find an urban woman. Decisions to deport women facing the Two-Year Rule have been continually and sometimes successfully challenged in the courts of law, and some precedents have been established. For example, a ruling in 1999 (in the Shah-Islam case) established that women from Pakistan were a ‘particular persecuted social group’ because they were identified by gender, were discriminated against and the Pakistani state did not protect them. However, even those legal victories that have become precedents are increasingly being ignored. Women are simply being told to return to Pakistan and ‘relocate’ within the country if they fear violence, or go to a woman’s refuge there. Case after case of women being deported to Pakistan show a shameless disregard for human rights on the part of the Home Office and their readiness to use any excuse to deport women. ‘Salima’, a Pakistani woman, faced the most horrendous physical and psychological violence from her husband and his family settled in Britain, being told for example to abort her baby because its birth might upset her husband’s English girlfriend, and also being accused falsely of adultery by her mother-in-law. The Home Office rejected her application with the following comments (Letter no.: S 1249775, July 2004): … there is no reason to suspect that anyone in Pakistan is aware of the problems you have had with your husband in the UK. Furthermore, as noted by Amnesty International in a 2002 report, six Women’s Crisis Centres were set up by the Pakistani government in late 1999 … it is therefore not accepted that you would be unable to seek support from the state if your family refused to help you on your return to Pakistan.

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In fact, the Amnesty report cited finds that: the state in Pakistan still by and large fails to provide adequate protection for women against abuses … in the family and the community … the number of victims of violence appears to rise … a woman was raped every two hours somewhere in the country, while hundreds became victims of ‘honour killings’. (Amnesty International 2002: 1) It notes that the public sector in Pakistan has only 13 women’s refuges across the country which are like ‘sub-jails’. Shahnaz Bukhari explained what this means in an interview in February 2005: Government shelters or Dar ul Amaans are mini-prisons. Women are kept like criminals who might run away and corrupt society. They are locked up until relatives come to take them, so a woman who has run away because her husband is going to kill her will be forced to return to the same husband. Can the Home Office really be ignorant of all this? Can they really be unable to make sense of simply written Amnesty reports? What these cases reveal is the cynical use of every possible excuse to deport women to situations of extreme danger in clear violation of their human rights.

‘NO RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS’ Sadia and Salima’s experiences confirm that for women facing the Two-Year Rule, the shadow of deportation hangs over every marital conflict right from the start. ‘If we had a disagreement, even about something small’, says Sadia, ‘he would say “We’ll send you back to Pakistan, then see what happens to you!”’ Their immigration status becomes therefore a source of intimidation. What heightens their insecurity is the lack of appropriate welfare agencies and outreach services, which can mean that women have no contact with anyone outside the family. They have little access to services that would help them leave a violent home and, of course, once they leave home, often through their own efforts, they are punished by the state by the denial of these services under the ‘no recourse to public funds’ stipulation.6 Because women in this situation are denied housing benefit, many women’s refuges (which require this benefit as rent) have been reluctant to take them in. As for social services departments,

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they have no clear policy where women with ‘no recourse to public funds’ are concerned. In theory, where there were children involved, the women were, till the 2004 Immigration Act came into force, eligible for funds under section 17 of the Children Act 1989. But social services had discretion in the matter. Often in deficit and short of funds themselves, and sometimes unaware of the rules, they turned away vulnerable women and children. Asian women’s refuges up and down the country have their stories to tell about inconsistent and arbitrary decisions from social services departments in their area. This potent mixture of inefficiency, callousness and racism created the type of situation described by a worker from an Asian women’s refuge:7 Fatima was so badly bruised she had to go to hospital with her 8-monthold child. At 3 p.m. she arrived at the police station because they wanted a statement from her. I contacted the duty officer at social services and explained that we needed to sort out the housing benefit, so that we could house her. He said ‘OK, but I have to go back to my manager.’ Then he asked, ‘How much is the housing benefit?’ When I told him it was £312 he said, ‘Oh I can’t afford that from my budget.’ Anyway, about midnight they said ‘OK we’ll pay for her.’ I said to them I need it in writing. When the police finally brought her it was 4.30 a.m.! She had no shoes … she had a broken nose, broken fingers. Her baby had a nappy and a vest … no clothes at all. It took them that long to bring her to the refuge! You know, they always say, you pick her up, but they know that we have no staff to do that especially in the middle of the night. (Imkaan 2003: 10) As for the obligation under the Children Act to house a mother and child, in practice social services frequently ignored this, leading to experiences such as this, related by a worker at another refuge in 2003: The woman has a 2-year-old daughter. She went to social services. They said, ‘We are not going to give you any money, and we won’t give you any support in terms of recognising your immigration status. However we will accommodate your child in care for £300 a week. We will take your child off your hands.’ It doesn’t make any sense! You are taking the child away from any support she knows! Social services has the discretion, and the problem is discretion and how the law is interpreted, and how children’s and women’s welfare is interpreted. (Imkaan 2003: 11)

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The new Immigration and Asylum Act (July 2004) legitimises this nightmare scenario. Social services’ duty to children now applies to children alone, which means that children are more likely to be separated from mothers. Police attitudes in this context vary, but racism and concern with catching ‘illegal immigrants’, to the exclusion of helping a seriously injured victim of violence, is fairly widespread and well documented, as is the police’s reluctance (on a local level) to prosecute perpetrators of domestic violence (Patel 2003). At police stations, the lack of appropriate interpreters compounds the confusion and institutionalises the attitude that these women are less than human. When the police are called out in such cases, there have been instances where the arriving police officer has asked family members or even the perpetrators of violence to act as interpreters (Imkaan 2004). If a woman finds herself destitute, a minority approach friends or relatives who are willing to support them while they apply to stay in Britain under the domestic violence concession or under the asylum laws. Cases could take a few months to several years before they are decided. Women, often very young women, are being forced to live in situations of humiliating helplessness, open to every kind of abuse, not only oppressed but fearing more violence at every step. In its treatment of women under the Two-Year Rule, Britain is in contravention of the UN Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to which it is a signatory. CEDAW contains guarantees of equality between men and women and freedom from discrimination, and places an immediate obligation on signatory states to pursue a policy of the elimination of discrimination (Gill 2005; Sen 2004). Even the US, not normally known for its a respect for human rights, has after pressure from women’s groups passed laws which protect the rights of ‘abused immigrant spouses and children’ (Abraham 2002). Perhaps it is Britain’s colonial past that prevents it from following in America’s footsteps on this issue, as it so enthusiastically does in so much else. One of the few truly inspiring developments in the arena of the Two-Year Rule and immigration generally is the founding in 2004 of Roshni, a self-help group in Oldham set up by women like Salima with the help of the Oldham Law Centre. Although still not solidly established in terms of resources, this group is sustaining women’s hope and strength in the daily struggles they face to survive.

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THE FORCED MARRIAGE INITIATIVE – CONFRONTING SOUTH ASIAN PATRIARCHY? In striking contrast to the policies discussed above, where the state appears to condone violence against women, in the year 2000 it announced what appeared to be a remarkable new approach by intervening in apparent opposition to South Asian patriarchy to prevent the ‘forced marriages’ of British Asian women. Forced marriages were defined as marriages ‘without the valid consent of both parties, where duress is a factor’ (Home Office 2000). The initiative was welcomed across the country by Asian women’s groups but the focus of the initiative was not as broad as many had hoped. The Home Office (and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office [FCO] which was also involved) was mainly concerned with the marriages of British Asian women with men from the South Asian sub-continent who by virtue of the marriage then entered the UK. In their own words, they were tackling ‘the overseas dimension of forced marriage’. In this sense the initiative was clearly a mirror image of the TwoYear Rule. While under the Two-Year Rule the state shows a total lack of concern for Asian women from the sub-continent facing violence from their British Asian husbands, in the Forced Marriage Initiative it acts to protect ‘civilised’ British Asian women from violence and prevent their exploitation by men from South Asia. This latter group of women ‘belong’ to Britain – they are seen by the state in this context as ‘our women’ as opposed to the former group who are those ‘others’ from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. But if citizenship confers this ‘belonging’, it is increasingly citizenship moulded to fit in with a racist conceptualisation of nation and culture, where David Blunkett (Home Secretary (2002–05) could exhort Asian parents not to speak anything other than English to their children, where he proclaimed the wrongness of marrying ‘foreigners’ and where he could say – speaking of people who were born here and have grown up in Britain, ‘those who come into our home – for that is what it is – should accept those norms just as we would have to do if we went elsewhere’ (Younge 2002). Under David Blunkett, racism reached new peaks, or perhaps revisited old peaks from the 1970s when Asian people were seen as a problem. Under a new Home Secretary, nothing has changed, perhaps because Blunkett, in his outspoken way, was merely expressing New Labour views on race. Meanwhile the Home Office’s pathologisation of the South Asian family and South Asian marriage has continued

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apace. While the 1999 Immigration Act made it a duty for marriage registrars in the UK to report ‘suspicious marriages’ of foreign nationals to the Home Secretary, under the Immigration and Asylum Act 2004, which came into force in February 2005, all those subject to immigration control have first to apply to the Home Secretary for ‘permission’ to marry. The marriage itself can only be carried out in designated registry offices, where it is most likely that they will be interviewed by an immigration officer who will ascertain whether or not it is a sham marriage. Significantly, those who want to get married in an Anglican church do not need Home Office ‘permission’! The Forced Marriage Initiative was launched by a debate in the House of Commons led by Ann Cryer, the MP for Bradford. In a speech laden with colonial overtones she appealed to ‘the leaders of the Asian Muslim community’ to ‘encourage their people to put their daughters’ happiness, welfare and human rights first. If they do, their communities will progress and prosper, in line with the Sikh and Hindu communities’ (Hansard 1999), suggesting, therefore, not only that ‘forced marriages’ were the preserve of Muslims, but that they were poor and working-class as a result. In reality, of course, coercion of one sort or another can be a feature of family-arranged marriages across religious divisions. Soon after the debate, the Home Office appointed a Working Group which, with the exception of representatives of two Asian women’s groups, consisted of influential ‘community leaders’. Within a few months, one of the Asian women’s groups, SBS, left the group over disagreements about mediation. SBS’s view was that mediation between those being forced into marriage and those involved in forcing them would necessarily mean that women would be pushed back into situations where they would again be coerced. SBS called instead for the mainstreaming of the issue of ‘forced marriage in the national strategy on violence against women and children. This included challenging policies and practices that ignored the problem in order to respect cultural difference’ (interview with Hannana Siddiqui, joint coordinator SBS). The SBS position reflected their view of the systemic nature of women’s oppression where decisions have to be made within a structure of patriarchal relations. The rest of the Working Group thought otherwise. In June 2000, the report of the working group, A Choice by Right (Home Office 2000) was launched by the Home Office with great fanfare. The state’s approach to the handpicked members of the

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Working Group can be gauged by the patronising comments of the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office in a joint action plan in August 2000 in which they were congratulated on ‘a difficult job well done. They have bravely broken the taboo on discussing this difficult subject openly and objectively’ (Home Office and FCO 2000). In fact, coercion in the context of marriage is, and always has been, widely discussed in the Asian community, particularly among women. A Choice by Right led to a deluge of racist articles in the British press, about brutal Asian parents of girls who were far less mature than their white counterparts, and about horrendous experiences from which they must be rescued. Frequently, these articles were specifically antiMuslim. The notion of women’s agency was completely missing in these accounts. The report called for a debate around the issue and the debate was conducted by the media. Every tabloid now had the power to choose key spokespersons and bring selected victims as evidence into the public gaze, whetting the appetite of their readers with more and more salacious accounts of young women suffering and brutal South Asian parents destroying their lives.

COLONIAL COUNTERPARTS OF THE FORCED MARRIAGE INITIATIVE This way of using a ‘debate’ to initiate an intervention around gender and culture is, however, not entirely new to the British state. It was done once before in the colonial era, in the British state’s interventions around widow immolation or sati – although then the debate was initiated by the colonial officers and the indigenous elite. At the time, India’s economy and society were being reshaped in the interests of colonial profit. Feminist historians have examined this process and have analysed and demystified the interventions which passed for ‘social reform’ but led to the reconstruction of patriarchal relations (Sangari and Vaid 1989). Sati, was, of course, a very different phenomenon from forced marriage. However, the British state’s interventions and strategies in the two contexts reveal continuities. While today’s consultants are ‘community leaders’ who are approved of by the state, in the nineteenth century they were conservative religious leaders and priests over whom the state had influence. Just as women’s agency never explicitly arises today, nor did it in the nineteenth century:

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now as then, women were mainly seen as helpless victims to be rescued by the state. The most significant similarity between the sati and forced marriage interventions however, is around the issue of coercion. In both instances this is presented as the pivotal issue. In the years between 1813 and 1829, the British ruled that sati was legal if it met certain criteria, chief amongst which was that it was a voluntary act (official witnesses were urged to pay close attention to the widow’s demeanour as she approached her husband’s pyre) (Mani 1989: 94). Today, arranged marriage is acceptable provided there is no force involved, but the question of what constitutes force is not discussed. As Asian Women Unite! commented in a press release (20 September 2000), forced marriages are … not a clearly defined category. In a large number of family arranged marriages, family members ‘persuade’ women to enter marriages by using emotional pressure, or by creating feelings of guilt or inadequacy … there is no clear dividing line between them and those now being regarded as ‘forced marriages’, nor can they ever be eradicated until women have more control over their own lives. Clearly, therefore, while many arranged marriages were not forced marriages, coercion becomes a factor in those instances where women’s lives are determined by relations of oppression. The meaning of consent in a patriarchal society, Lata Mani writes in the context of sati, ‘is hard to assess. Still, it is fair to assume that the mental states [of the women] were complex and inconsistent. Some … were undoubtedly coerced; the decisions of others would be difficult to reduce to “force”’ (Mani 1989: 97). She might just as well have been writing about ‘forced marriages’. Sati was finally banned unconditionally only after a powerful campaign by progressive Indians themselves, although it is still performed, albeit infrequently, in certain parts of India (Sangari and Vaid 1996).

DO ONLY ‘BRITISH’ WOMEN NEED HUMAN RIGHTS? From a feminist viewpoint, a family-arranged marriage is often an arena of struggle which may be psychological, emotional or physical and is affected by a complex of interacting issues – from emotional blackmail and low self-esteem to isolation and exclusion as a result of racism. Rather than recognise and strengthen women’s own

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resistance to oppression and coercion in general, the state has tried to draw an artificial and static line between arranged marriage and forced marriage. Since it started in 2000, the Forced Marriage Initiative has expanded into a widespread network, spanning the UK and the countries of South Asia. Through this the Home Office, working with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, aims to ‘know the scale, nature and distribution of the problem … the reasons behind it, the forms it takes, the variety of tactics that families may use’ (Home Office and FCO 2001: 18) – frames of reference reminiscent of colonial studies of the ‘natives’. In 2001 they reported in their Collated Joint Action Plan and Update that they were testing women’s refuges in South Asian countries for ‘their ability to look after victims of forced marriage’ during the comparatively short periods before they are able to return to the UK. In these periods the FCO and Home Office wish to ‘find ways of avoiding victims being placed in jail-like safe custody’ (Home Office and FCO 2001: 19). This initiative has coincided, as we have seen, with the Home Office frequently ruling that there are plenty of refuges in South Asian countries to which women being deported under the Two-Year Rule and fearing death in ‘honour killings’ could go for protection. The contrast here is striking: for British Asian women fleeing forced marriages, the refuges are places where they may have to stay for two weeks at the most; for women deported under the Two-Year Rule they are a dead end from which there is no rehabilitation. The Home Office/FCO 2002 update also mentions a truly Kafkaesque development. In a project costing £350,000, South Asian policemen (whose record of sexual abuse and rape is well documented) are to train and be trained by their British counterparts whose racism and sexism are also well-established. There are also lengthy guidelines for the police on how to deal with forced marriage cases. How will rank and file police officers implement these guidelines? With senior officers admitting the weaknesses of the lower ranks, and with the sort of sexism and racism encountered by women facing the Two-Year Rule, it is hard to be optimistic about the new police sensitivity. In terms of actual cases, the FCO’s work got off to a shaky start. According to Hannana Siddiqui, the joint coordinator of Southall Black Sisters, after a botched attempt at ‘rescuing’ a woman who had

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been forced to marry, the FCO ‘decided to stage no more rescues’ in Pakistan (Siddiqui 2003). However, more recently there have been a number of ‘rescues’ carried out by the FCO. According to Fauzia Samad, the case worker for the Forced Marriage Initiative, between July 2004 and July 2005 the FCO carried out about 100 ‘rescues’ in South Asia, mainly in Pakistan. In these cases they visited the village concerned with the support of the local police. When asked what she thought of the state’s approach in rescuing some women while deporting others to their possible deaths under the Two-Year Rule, Fauzia told me, in a telephone interview in December 2004, ‘It is a strange situation. It is human rights abuse, whether it is happening to a British national or a non-British national!’

GIVING WOMEN ‘CHOICE’? Despite the state’s pragmatism, cases of the most extreme violence have placed it under pressure to respond to the demands of Asian women’s groups and take action. Two such cases, according to Hannana Siddiqui (2003), are the murder of Rukhsana Naz for bringing ‘dishonour’ to her family, and the case of Jack and Zena Briggs, a white Englishman and an Asian woman, who remained in hiding for many years because Zena’s family hired bounty hunters to track them down and kill them. However, the focal point of the state’s interventions has not been women’s attempts to resist oppression. Instead, the state, in line with neoliberal ideology, is concerned with the lack of individual ‘choice’ – or in the case of ‘forced marriages’, with the fact that young Asian women are unable to exercise their right to choose. This ignores the point that power relations within the family and community undermine the very notion of choice and make it meaningless. What this means in the context of ‘forced marriage’ is obvious from an analysis of the large number of what Fauzia Samad calls ‘reluctant sponsors’. These are young women who have reluctantly married partners chosen by their families and, on returning to Britain, have informed the Home Office or the FCO confidentially that they do not wish their partners to come to Britain, or if they are already here, that they want them deported. As Fauzia Samad comments, ‘We cannot help them if they are not willing to go public but they do not want to do this because of family pressure.’

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Of the eight young married women in Luton who discussed forced marriages with me, two said they would like to inform the Home Office about being forced, but would not be willing to say anything publicly, and two others said this would be the best course of action if they had to go through with marriages which their families wished to impose upon them. Their attitude showed not only an ignorance of the law, but that they believed (on the basis of their experiences of the racism of the state in general) that anyone could be ‘shopped’ under the immigration laws and would then simply be removed regardless of the circumstances. More than anything, their approach to their marriages revealed the strong and complex relationships which bind these girls to their families. These relationships, and the fear of separation and rupture from the parental family, can prevent women from acting until they are desperate. They may know, in addition, that these fears are fully justified because there are examples in the community or family where women have been cut off in this way. ‘Sukhvinder’, an 18-year-old Sikh woman, told me: I thought my auntie, my mum’s sister, was dead. But then one day my mum told me that it was because she had refused to marry the man they chose, she married someone from a different caste I think. But I don’t know the details because no one ever talks about her. My mum told me that it is like she is dead, finished. It is within this context that we must locate the latest moves by the state which might lead to a law that makes forced marriages a specific crime. Asian women’s groups up and down the country have opposed this. As many activists argue, the laws required to punish those responsible for forcing someone into a marriage are already there. What is needed is a change in power relations within the family and community that will make these laws more easily enforceable. Without this shift in power, a specific law on forced marriages is likely to be ineffective and will serve only to whip up racism. These arguments are confirmed by the long history of anti-dowry legislation in India: impressive on paper but largely ineffective in practice. Patriarchal relations within the family and community can only be weakened by long-term support for women’s struggles against oppression, but this is something that is not on offer from the state. In fact, many Asian women’s projects constantly face closure or run on shoestring budgets. It appears, therefore, that the state aims to

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manage, rather than challenge, patriarchal violence, keeping it within what it sees as ‘acceptable’ levels.

HONOUR CRIMES AND MULTICULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS The Forced Marriage Initiative has been followed, in June 2004, by Home Office initiatives around ‘honour killings’ which link into a wider European initiative against ‘honour crimes’. This is the special name given to murders of women who have crossed patriarchal boundaries and who are then punished for ‘damaging honour’ or to ‘regain honour’. They are, however, still murders – just as the many killings of white British women who have challenged patriarchal rules are still just murders. According to figures available in 2004, on average two women are killed each week by their partners in the UK. Of these murders there were 13 that were established as ‘honour killings’ in 2003. Currently 117 cases of murder over a tenyear period are being re-examined to establish whether ‘honour’ was a contributory factor and to devise strategies of intervention to prevent such crimes.8 However, as Hannana Siddiqui told me in an interview in 2003, while discussing ‘honour crimes’: They [the police] are talking about it from a different perspective … They are looking for the exotic, the oriental, saying ‘This is what makes the community backward’, not ‘How does honour affect our job – our job must be to make sure that it is not seen as another obstruction.’ And now there is a slight diversion – they don’t call it domestic violence anymore, they call it honour crimes or honour killings. In fact, the notion of ‘honour’ used by the police and the Home Office is derived from the well-worn multicultural conceptualisation of ‘honour’ as an essential characteristic of Asian culture, and of Asian women as creatures without agency. Here patriarchal power is seen as monolithic and uncontested, and is simply equated to culture – which is seen as an unchanging attribute of minority groups. Parts of the media go further: ‘honour’, ‘reputation’ and the dire consequences for women who damage them, or the closely related question of a woman bringing ‘good luck’ or ‘bad luck’ are often represented as an essential aspect of British Asian culture. And, despite evidence that crimes motivated by notions of honour are extremely common in India among all religious groups (Modi 2003), they are,

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particularly in the tabloids, specifically associated with Islam and portrayed as integral to Muslim culture. In fact, when honour-based violence is reported as part of Hindu or Sikh culture it has sometimes been presented as less problematic, or even acceptable. For example, a programme in the television series Inside Out (BBC1 2004) told the story of a Hindu couple, Lata and Aakash. Lata was unable to conceive and, in desperation, asked her mother to act as a surrogate. Lata, we are told, moved to London four years before from Gujarat following her marriage to Aakash. Because she could not conceive, the programme informs us, ‘Aakash was even ready to divorce his wife unless a miracle happened.’ Aakash’s father Natu then explains, ‘When a woman cannot give birth, she is considered bad luck for the family as the family on the boy’s side wants an heir to carry on the family name.’ The commentator/interviewer asks no further questions about this but moves rapidly on to the question of the happy birth of twins. The message to the viewers, as an aside as it were, is that it is all very quaint but acceptable that an Asian man should divorce/punish his wife for not producing an heir, because by her failure to produce a son the woman would bring ‘bad luck’. Conceptualising Asian culture and the Asian communities in this way allows state agencies to intervene to protect women, or not intervene – as they wish. They can refuse to intervene, claiming that this would be interfering in Asian culture and as such be racist; at the same time, the multicultural stereotype allows the state to manipulate racism by castigating Asian culture as backward and even immoral. Home Office minister Mike O’Brien could therefore say with total impunity in August 2000 that ‘multicultural sensitivity is no excuse for moral blindness’, conveniently forgetting that multiculturalism and its stereotypes and ‘excuses for moral blindness’ were themselves shaped by the British state. Because even today, as in colonial times, in its conceptualisation of Asian culture, the government seeks the advice of the most reactionary male ‘community leaders’ whom it has nurtured with funds. If the state’s interventions on forced marriage have been part and parcel of its policies of immigration control, the new concerns about ‘honour crimes’ also have a dual role. At a time when the ‘war on terror’ has led to a huge escalation in the policing of the Asian majority areas of Britain, and in stop-and-searches of Muslim men, when large numbers of Asian Muslims are arrested every year and criminalised for little reason other than that they are Muslims, the police’s new programme of ‘preventing honour killings’ helps

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establish policing networks that could be used to further criminalise these communities. Ironically, therefore, while women are being sent back to ‘honour killings’ as a result of the Two-Year Rule (in the interests of immigration control) the state can use the notion of ‘honour killings’ to criminalise Asian communities in Britain in pursuit of the so-called ‘war on terror’. I have argued that the state’s interventions in South Asian women’s lives through the policies and ideologies of multiculturalism and through immigration laws and regulations have in general strengthened South Asian patriarchal relations. In the Forced Marriage Initiative and in the recent moves around ‘honour killings’, however, the state appears to be in conflict with patriarchal violence. These contradictory positions can only be understood in the context of the other economic and political imperatives discussed here. At the same time, increasingly under pressure from women’s groups to provide protection from violence, the state has responded by trying to manage and control, rather than weaken, South Asian patriarchy.

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4 Making a Spectacle of Oneself – South Asian Weddings in Britain ‘It is an emotional roller coaster. Sometimes I feel really positive, see it as a challenge, something I am quite ready for. But some days I think I’ll never be ready and I am very anxious.’ Anjali is not talking about a high-pressured job, or a turbulent relationship, or even a marriage, but about her wedding, which will take place in a month’s time. While in many patriarchal societies marriage is seen as the turning point in a woman’s life, weddings are usually public statements about how the main actors involved wish to be seen. As such, they reflect the actual gender relations in the bride’s and groom’s families, and their class status, as well as the relations and status they seek to project. British Asian weddings are also a barometer of a process that I have touched on throughout this book, and will explore further here – the reshaping and incorporation of South Asian practices around gender inherited from earlier periods into ways of life that are essentially capitalist. Anjali’s parents are not well off: her father was a factory worker, her mother a primary school teacher, so she is concerned about how much her wedding will cost. She says the wedding is going to be ‘something small and intimate, only 350 people are being invited’ – and this is small and intimate by the standards of a ceremony to which around 600 people are often invited. She started planning eight months in advance, looking through Asian Bride, a glossy magazine which, since it started in 2000, has built up a circulation of 40,000 in Britain, and visiting exhibitions the magazine organises. She examined hundreds of wedding outfits, most of them lenghas, which, with their long skirts, short tight-fitting tops and fine gauzy dupattas or long scarves, have established themselves as ‘traditional’ wedding wear – although this tradition goes back less than 20 years.1 Influenced by Bollywood (wedding sequences dominate many Bollywood films) the lengha is not only ‘traditional’ but the most popular garment for South Asian brides. This is the case for the middle classes and aspiring middle classes in much of the sub-continent, and for the majority of South Asian communities in the UK and US, even 96

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those where it was never worn by earlier generations. Sylheti brides in London, for example, as journalist and writer Urmi Rahman told me, ‘increasingly wear lenghas, though their mothers were married in saris and often still regard saris as not only quintessentially Bengali but the only Bengali garment for women’. Anjali’s efforts to find a suitable lengha through Asian Bride were, however, unsuccessful – there was nothing she could afford, although the fantastic outfits she saw were useful for ‘inspiration and ideas’. She decided to visit India with her parents and her three siblings, hoping to get wedding clothes based on British designs made up there. But this was not to be. Her father insisted that they should buy the wedding clothes in Ludhiana, a provincial industrial town in Punjab where his family still live. ‘I did not enjoy the shopping experience in Ludhiana’, Anjali said ‘they cater for different kinds of looks and colours there.’ In fact, what happened next revealed also the very different gender and generational relationships in her extended family in Punjab. My dad’s sister had a boutique in Ludhiana and she bought me an outfit without consulting me. I really didn’t like it. I plucked up the courage to tell my mum. She said I could take it back to the shop and exchange it for another one. I had 15 minutes to choose it and eleven outfits to choose from. I still have that lengha and I really don’t like it. It is awful! But that’s probably what I’ll wear because I don’t want to waste money. It is not very tailored. It’s not me. It has big kaddai (golden embroidery) on it … To be honest, I’d have even preferred a simple sari but the family say that’s not heavy enough. ‘Heavy’ here is not just about weight, it is about the amount of gold embroidery in a garment. The importance accorded to the display of gold originates in pre-capitalist conspicuous consumption, which demands not only that you must spend large sums of money but that you must be seen to be doing so. It reflects the prestige and worth of the family, which, as I have noted in earlier chapters, are essentially male qualities, although expressed here through women’s clothes and jewellery. In the fertile ground of advanced capitalism, conspicuous consumption has not only survived but metamorphosed into a monster. In Britain, a considerable amount of gold jewellery and embroidery is considered important in all communities. ‘Farida’ who was a saheli (roughly the equivalent of a bridesmaid) at a wedding in Peterborough, described how the bride’s body was

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objectified and literally immobilised to display the expensive gold jewellery she had been given: ‘Humera’ was doing this to please her family, they are from Jhelum in Pakistan. At the wedding … she did not look herself at all. I don’t think she was happy. She was wearing a sort of shawl or dupatta over her lengha, and it was so heavy with gold embroidery that four of us had to carry it when she walked. She wore it all day, and she was also weighed down with lots and lots of gold bracelets and a very heavy gold necklace. I think if she had known it was going to be like this she would have just refused to go through with it. Clearly, the tensions in weddings of this sort are caused not only by the physical discomfort of the bride but also by the fact that her gender roles in everyday life, whether at work, or in the context of her immediate family, are very different from the entirely passive and objectified image to which she has to conform during the long drawn-out wedding ceremonies. This image comes from a rural past where, in earlier generations, a bride would have been a young girl in her early teens, who had no choice but to do what she was told. Increasingly, however, brides are asserting themselves, and many in Humera’s position are refusing to wear vast amounts of heavy gold jewellery. The compromise, as ‘Sobia’, a young woman whose family are from Azad Kashmir, told me, is simply to record the giving of prestigious jewellery so it can be witnessed by the community both here and in the sub-continent: ‘You don’t need to wear everything these days. Everything is videoed or photographed so people know it is there, even if you don’t wear it.’

BOLLYWOOD AND EUROPE MINGLE IN THE MARKET While Bollywood has introduced the lengha in its present form to a large audience, it is the market that has delivered it to South Asian weddings far and wide, and it has delivered other Bollywood-inspired commodities too. For example, because heroines of Bollywood films are usually Hindu and representative of what are clearly seen as ‘Hindu values’, no Bollywood heroine marries without a Mangal Sutra, the traditional necklace of gold and black beads worn by many Hindu married women that is said to ensure their husband’s longevity. Increasingly, British Asian women of all communities are wearing Mangal Sutras, whether or not they are Hindus. For example, Sikh women are wearing them at their weddings, although, as ‘Balbir’,

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a religious Sikh woman explained, such necklaces are forbidden by Sikhism. However, British Asian weddings are not shaped by Bollywood alone they are also being continuously Europeanised. Wedding cakes, unknown in South Asian ceremonies a decade back, are now practically indispensable, and many, like Humera’s, have a miniature model bride and groom atop the icing – the woman, a blonde in a white wedding dress, and her man in a black dinner suit. In fact, cakes are so important, that a letter to Asian Bride’s agony uncle Sanjay Anand inquires if it is OK to have a fake cake, because a fake ‘fairytale cake’ is so much more affordable than ones you can eat! Sanjay replies, reassuringly, that this would be absolutely acceptable and suggests that perhaps guests could ‘tuck into a cheaper unseen one’ (Asian Bride no. 5, summer 2001). Often Bollywood and the European market work together in producing ‘acceptable’ images. The advertisements in Asian Bride, for example, despite their lenghas, can have a decidedly European look. The majority of models are light-complexioned and apparently tall. Only a few look anything other than European. White outfits are common, which is remarkable since white is widow’s garb among Hindus and Sikhs. For British Asian brides who want a more consciously European image, there is, in addition, the registry office ceremony and the reception that follows it. These are seen as opportunities for western wedding dresses – often the full white wedding gown. As for bridegrooms, their image is clearly in flux. Urmi Rehman’s rather down to earth briefing on this subject is: ‘Grooms used to wear sherwanis [a high-necked coat] and a turban and would look awful – like a khansama [chef]. Now some of them are beginning to adopt a look which is well … better than the khansama.’ In fact, the market is reaching out to them too, and in the pages of Asian Bride they have blossomed into Bollywood-influenced gold embroidered kurtas (long shirts) and tight trousers. However, despite their new image, they, like their white British counterparts, are only supporting actors in the drama of the wedding.

THE BRIDE AS SPECTACLE OR BAHU AS ICON Increasingly in British Asian weddings the bride is the central figure and in the discourse of these weddings, this centrality is presented as ‘traditional’. In fact, this is a tradition peculiar to the west. In

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Western Europe and America over the last few centuries, patriarchal relations and ideology have ruled that a woman’s wedding is both her pinnacle of glory and her raison d’être. It is the climax of every fairy story, after which the excitement is over and ‘living happily ever after’ – or domestic labour as a wife – begins. In these cultures, the bride is given an iconic status: she is a spectacle to be viewed and the wedding has the character of a dramatic event which takes place in a limited space of time; when it is over the woman can return to her everyday clothes and be a wife for the rest of her life. It is this ‘spectacle’ that the bridal wear and accessory industry has fed into and commodified. In South Asia, this has never been the case. The wedding is not a ‘dramatic event’ but takes place over a long period – usually several days. Patriarchal notions of purity demand that the bride is not the centre of attention. In fact, in all the regions of South Asia from where substantial migration has occurred, and particularly in northern India and Pakistan, the bride’s ‘modesty’, a concept tied up with her virginity, is so important that, in many parts of South Asia, she is supposed to be ‘shielded’ from the gaze of male wedding guests who are not close relatives. This is one reason why, in the past, in many parts of South Asia brides were carried in a doli (palanquin). Other reasons were her extreme youth – she was often a girl of 12 or 13 – and the fact that she was often distressed and unwilling to leave her mother (Tanika Sarkar 1999).2 However, after she is married and taken to her in-laws, bedecked in all her expensive clothing and jewellery, the traditional South Asian bride is ceremonially viewed by the women of her marital family and their friends and relatives. It is in this period that she is both objectified and also given iconic status as a bahu (daughter-in-law or recently married woman). In many communities she is expected to continue wearing colourful and expensive clothes and jewellery as she goes about her day-to-day tasks. If the British Asian bridegroom often plays a comparatively lowkey role, in contrast, in most of South Asia, certain parts of the wedding are definitely a time for male showing off. For example, in a ceremonial journey to the wedding, the groom often rides through the streets on a horse with his followers dancing beside him. There is a well-known story of an NRI (non-resident Indian) groom who rode on an elephant and was unable to dismount when he arrived at the reception. Styles may vary, but patriarchal images and messages permeate every aspect of the bridegroom’s journey to his wedding. In

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2005, many bridegrooms in Delhi are adorned to look like Hindu gods as they sit in chariots pulled by horses wearing bejewelled crowns and surrounded by lights. However, first and foremost, most weddings in South Asia symbolise a bond between two families. In some communities, this bond and its patriarchal nature is made explicit. Among Sikhs, at the Milni or official meeting of the bride’s and groom’s side, I was told by Balbir, it is older men from the two families who are centre stage: ‘The men from the bride’s family formally welcome the men from the groom’s family watched by a large number of family members from both sides. They garland each other and photographs are taken.’

THE BRIDE’S ‘BIG DAY’ For British Asians the notion of marriage as a bond between two families is still strong, but increasingly, the bride-to-be is responsible for organising the wedding, even where she has not chosen the bridegroom. At the same time, her ‘Big Day’, as Asian Bride calls it, often appears to be less about her enjoyment than about what needs to be bought and consumed. Conventions, instantly repackaged as ‘traditions’, have been established based on the relationship between the market and the female body. This demands that every part of a woman’s body must be scrutinised, found wanting and then improved with a beauty product or treatment. The objectification and fragmentation of a woman’s body, and the quest for ‘perfection’, becomes a journey into alienation and unbearable anxiety. The commercialisation and objectification of the body has been accompanied by changes in the way women in the community relate to and see each other. ‘Pushpa’ is a Gujarati Hindu woman in her fifties, two of whose daughters have been married in the last twelve years. She explains: Even ten years ago, in Birmingham, the women would gather a few days before, they would sing songs and do the mehendi (application of henna) and the day before the wedding they would do the flowers. Now you just order the flowers and pick them up. The beautician comes in the morning and she does the bride up. Somebody else that you pay does the mehendi. It means that the pleasure of celebrating together and doing things together for that celebration has gone. Everyone is just a guest admiring things that have been bought, and then also girls are wanting to buy the best – better than their friends. So there is competition.

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Today, as Anjali explains: There are three types of services you can buy. There are community ladies who don’t seem to have qualifications but can charge quite a lot, there are Asian professionals advertised in Asian Bride who are even more expensive, and there are mainstream make-up companies you find in department stores who charge something in between. My friend had a traditional look by a lady from the community who did not consider what she would wear at the wedding. They just put a lot of make-up on her face. It was terrible. The foundation did not match her skin colour. Her lipstick was red although she was wearing a pink outfit. Her hair had sort of frills all round, her eye make-up was …! Anjali’s focus on qualifications is interesting because it illustrates the transformation of these services from community, or even familial affairs, into something commercial. It is qualifications, rather than experience, which validates a service in a capitalist market and reassures the consumer. In the weddings where the bride-to-be is the main planner and organiser, she seeks perfection, and for that thousands of expensive little details must be right. She has been persuaded that she can have it all, from the European clothes for the registry office, to the bridesmaids’ bouquets, to the napkins and crockery for the table, to the wedding cake, the manicure and pedicure, the face masks and make-up, the mehendi on her hands and feet, the Bollywood hairstyles – the list is endless. In the end it is her Big Day, her production in which she will be the star. In remarkable contrast, on the Big Day, the British Asian bridegroom appears to be little more than an accessory. Letters from recently married women in Asian Bride illustrate this. Fameeda Yousaf, for example, who got married in Yorkshire, wrote: I have always dreamed of getting married in the summer and, on a beautiful summer day, my dream finally came true. Because I am a very hands-on person I did most of the organising, but my family and friends really helped me out too. I had expected to get very stressed out by the whole process but I was quite surprised at how I managed to stay calm and stress-free throughout it all. My few remaining pre-marital nerves seemed to disappear on the morning of the actual wedding, and I was so happy that after months and months of meticulous preparing and organising, everything finally seemed to fall into

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place. The make-up artist arrived early in the morning and made me look great and then the relatives started to gather and, all of a sudden, everyone was fussing over me! It was all a bit daunting to tell you the truth but it was my Big Day so it was to be expected. When we got to the hall it was decorated beautifully with red roses. I had chosen them to coordinate with my outfit. I even made sure that my three-tier wedding cake matched the surroundings, but it didn’t last for long because it was gone in seconds after the wedding. It was a beautiful day and one that I will never forget. (Asian Bride no. 9, 2003) There is no mention here (I have quoted the letter in full) of the bridegroom. Even in the accompanying photograph, in which Fameeda is cutting the three-tier wedding cake with his help, he looks like a self-effacing helper rather than a central figure. Thanks to the market, the notion of bride as spectacle appears to have been absorbed seamlessly into very different South Asian patriarchal frameworks.

THE RISE AND RISE OF THE COST OF WEDDINGS Across divisions of religion and community, the expenses associated with British Asian weddings have escalated enormously. Whereas on average, weddings in the UK cost £17,739 in 2004,3 the British Asian weddings I was told about in 2003 and 2004 cost an average of £28,000. Much of this is associated with venues, food, the bride’s outfits and the adoption of western conventions. However, there are also South Asian rituals and customs that have been retained and reshaped by their encounters with capitalism, so that where once they were mainly symbolic, now they too involve spending huge sums of money. One of these is the Milni ceremony as celebrated by Punjabis. Veena Talwar Oldenburg has described the path travelled by it in the colonial period. In 1853, Milni gifts in Punjab were ‘rather small cash tokens for the male relatives of the groom who actually attended the wedding, ranging from five to twenty rupees’ (Oldenburg 2002: 88). In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as travel became easier, women – who were eager to attend – began to be included in the Baraat or bridegroom’s party. As the number of guests increased, so did the cost of entertaining them, and a very large number of them were now given presents. From around the beginning of the twentieth century, a set of clothes and jewellery for the groom’s mother and sisters began to be added to the Milni, along with clothes or cash for

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other women relatives. Milni ceremonies in Britain and Canada today can mean an outlay of thousands of pounds, with expensive outfits and jewellery, gold watches and cash presents for a large number of male and female relatives of the groom. Another custom which has been retained in Britain is that of cash gifts at the wedding ceremony itself, although here too it has survived in an inflated form. Called Chandlo by Gujarati Hindus and Neondra by Sikhs, it is also known among Punjabi Muslims from Jhelum in Pakistan and involves a system for noting the amounts received. Farida described the arrangements at her friend’s wedding in Peterborough: As a Saheli, I had to sit next to Humera a lot of the time. People would come and give her money, £30 or £40, and sometimes much more. I was given a book to note down the names of the guests and amounts given. The log is later used, in all communities, to give the right amount of money when the bride’s parents are invited to weddings by these guests. South Asian wedding expenses, also, of course, include the dowry, which is known in all British South Asian communities across regional and religious divisions.4 It consists of gifts to the bride, the groom and the groom’s family, from the bride’s parents. Almost all the recently married, or about to be married, British Asian women who spoke to me about weddings felt that, in principle, the dowry was a positive element of the traditional wedding, symbolic of their worth as women and of their parents’ love for them. However, the dowry, like Milni gifts, is a ‘tradition’ that has been markedly reshaped, both qualitatively and quantitatively, from the colonial period on.

The escalation of dowries – factors specific to Punjab Until around the mid-nineteenth century in Punjab, Oldenburg notes, dowries were not given by the bride’s father to the bridegroom, rather they were gifts to the bride herself from family and friends. ‘Dowries were … gradually accumulated and recycled, and forced fiscal discipline on the family’ (Oldenburg 2002: 96). However, by 1916, the dowry had changed from ‘the private volitional giving of a traditionally defined set of gifts packed in a chest and sent off with the daughter as her property to one that is publicly displayed and formally given over to the son-in-law’ (2002: 97). This shift of control of the dowry from the woman to her husband and his parents echoed

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another change brought by colonialism – the decline or complete erasure of women’s customary rights over their own property. The public display of dowry, which is still common today, has led to a competitive approach which has contributed to the huge escalation of expenditure by the bride’s family. This in turn has led to a fall in the status of women. In Punjab, the 1950s and 1960s brought a further steep rise in the amounts spent on dowries. The policies of the Green Revolution had increased the preference for sons, and with it the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction (see Chapter 2). Since cash was needed more than ever to buy more and more agricultural inputs to increase productivity, all avenues were exploited to raise money, including dowries. Not surprisingly, within this new economic framework, dowries soared, and while marriage remained essentially a bond between families, it was more than ever a bond between unequal parties.

The escalation of dowries – factors specific to Gujarat Among Gujarati Hindus there were also specific factors linked to the history of the Patel community, the dominant group among Gujarati Hindus, which led to the redefining and escalation of dowries in the colonial period. Historically, the Patel community is said to have been founded around 1700, when six brothers from Persia settled in the Charottar region of Gujarat. Each brother brought with him a full retinue of staff – artisans, labourers, shoemakers and so on – in fact all the elements of the Hindu caste system. While they were all Patels, marriages were only permitted within their own caste groups. However, in Gujarat, as elsewhere in India, colonialism had demolished the self-sufficient economies of the villages. By the 1920s and 1930s, men were migrating to towns in search of work. In the Patel villages, those who migrated were mainly those from lowerstatus groups because they were least likely to have land. As a result, there was a shortage of marriageable men among the lower-status Patels. This problem was solved by the marriages of lower-caste Patel women to upper-caste Patel men. These marriages between different castes would normally be forbidden, but in this situation, they were allowed on condition that the parents of the woman paid huge dowries, to acknowledge her rise in status. These weddings of lower-caste Patel women to higher-caste Patel men became vast affairs, with the bride’s family being forced to spend enormous sums on sweets as well as give huge amounts of gold to the groom’s family.

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Among lower-caste Patel families, as among the Jat peasants during the Green Revolution, the birth of a girl began to be regarded as a disaster and the status of women in the family deteriorated (Wilson 1978). When the Patels migrated to East Africa dowries rose again. Gold was more easily available in Africa and the Patels became more and more gold-orientated as a community. East African Patels went home to marry and the weddings of lower-caste Patel women to upper-caste Patel men became legendary in terms of costs. In the 1950s and 1960s, in many parts of India (though not Punjab) dowries fell slightly because gold was controlled, but not so in East Africa where they continued to rise. When the East African Asians were expelled from Africa and came to Britain, after an initial period of settlement, dowries rose again. As the dominant group among Gujaratis, and perhaps in many contexts the dominant group among the Asian middle classes, Patels have in this respect set standards to which others aspire. Patels settled in Britain, the US and Australia frequently travel back to their villages of origin. (In these villages, according to Nagalia [2002], 35 per cent of those who migrate are Patels.) As a result the rising Patel dowries have set standards not only for the middle classes in the diaspora, but also for the middle classes and aspiring middle classes in Gujarat.

DEMANDS FROM THE GROOM’S FAMILY The inequality between the bride and groom’s families has persisted through migration and the birth of a new generation in Britain, and the anxiety about getting daughters married still affects the vast majority of negotiations that take place in Britain and North America (Bhopal 1997). Underlying this, as Kiran Patel writes, describing the situation in the Gujarati community in Britain, ‘is the belief that a women’s sexuality is a prime cause for concern and an impetus to safely getting daughters married before anything bad happens’ (Patel 1999: 51). The prospective bride’s family, therefore, is often still vulnerable to demands by the groom’s family for disproportionate amounts of money and commodities. In many cases, as Pushpa told me, even when these demands are not actually articulated, the bride’s family provides a huge dowry anyway, because ‘it may be expected’, or to ‘show respect’ for their daughter’s future in-laws, or sometimes even in the hope of ensuring that their daughter is treated well after marriage.

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The pre-wedding timetable is roughly the same for most South Asian groups. First, there is the search for a suitable candidate. This may be done on Internet sites such as Shaadi.com or through matchmakers, but, most frequently, suitors are found through contacts. There are then two possibilities. In the first, as Pushpa, who was looking for a match for her son, explained: ‘If I hear of a girl through a friend I get her mobile number. They talk on the telephone or arrange it on email. When he comes home I ask, what happened? He says she is too free, or too dark or fat, one girl he said – her family are mean, they won’t give much.’ In the second scenario, the woman, identified through contacts, is subjected to the humiliation of being viewed by the prospective groom and his family. She is expected to look her best, make polite conversation and often to serve them tea. After this – except in the most conservative of families – they get to know each other better through telephone conversations. These conversations represent a crucial phase in British Asian marriages. It is a chance for the groom to raise questions about dowry, but the bride is also able to find out what is expected of her and whether she can live with it. This was the period that helped Sobia to decide that she did not wish to go ahead with her marriage. It was lucky that his dad took my mobile number and we spoke a few times on the phone. It does not usually happen in Pakistani weddings, not in Luton anyway. We really clicked, but he wasn’t what I was looking for. He wanted someone practising, who covers. I have been getting into Islam but I am not ready at the moment to cover … Her rejection of this prospective groom created tension all round. But the fact that she did reject him, and that too in the conservative Azad Kashmiri society of Luton, shows the extent to which the balance of patriarchal power has altered. Among less conservative middle-class South Asians in Britain, in most communities, after the engagement, the couple meet more frequently, though usually in the presence of others. In this period, through jokes and hints, and sometimes more openly, the prospective bridegroom and his family make specific demands (Jhutti 1998). The bride’s family are now in a more vulnerable position since, as Jutti writes, the termination of an engagement will stigmatise them. Even after the wedding, women may well face demands for further dowry gifts.

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I had trouble with my feelings for my husband because he and his family had started demanding things from my parents after my engagement … Although I was angry I married him because mum and dad said it was the right thing to do, and because they believed the demands would stop once we were married. They were wrong. Although I married him I still had some bad feelings towards him. These feelings flared up when he told me to ask my parents for money. Even though I refused he kept pestering me about it … He never got violent with me when I refused, but his constant nagging was probably as bad … I left him after being married to him for a year. (Jhutti 1998: 188) Clearly, at every stage of the process of arranging a British Asian marriage, there are opportunities for the groom and his parents to assess the bride’s family, and openly, or implicitly, demand money and goods. At the same time, because the earning power of British-born Asian women has increased, women now accumulate much of their dowry from their own earnings. Where this happens, they can both choose the items they themselves want and also retain control of them more easily. Dowries reflect class very clearly, as Bhachu (1993: 107–8), writing about Sikhs, puts it: they may be ‘sloanerangerish in their interpretation – reflecting the exclusive … Knightsbridge/Sloane Square locale consumption patterns of some of the high earning and professional brides’ or they could reflect other more middle-class and working-class consumption patterns.

LIFE AFTER THE WEDDING There were, of course, women I met who did not want to marry at all – or not within this conventional framework. But not Anjali. She is ‘in love’ she says, and she wants to marry. Yet she too is deeply worried about her life after the wedding. Central to these anxieties is the knowledge that she will have to live with her in-laws. Four of her close friends who got married in the last year, two Punjabi and two Gujarati middle-class women, are living with their in-laws. Their experiences, she says, are disturbing. These days, she says, women feel they should not have to make all the compromises:

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A girl would have been to university, had her own circle of friends, been financially quite independent and then she is expected to sacrifice everything for something she does not even believe in. For example, that you shouldn’t have any time of your own, that you shouldn’t have phone calls from your friends. Cooking for the whole family, never, ever, being able to cook just for yourself. Its not housework – it’s having to do housework – it becomes a chore. We feel homeless. We come from university, our parents’ homes aren’t ours any more. The in-laws’ house isn’t ours. So when are we going to have our own space …? To expect you to take up this completely different role of being totally subservient. Not being able to say what you think. I just hope I survive through it. These British-born Asian women’s anger reflects a powerful tremor in the structure of the patriarchal extended family. Here the daughter-in-law is no longer someone in her teens who has come straight from her parents’ home, schooled in subservience. She is in her mid-twenties. She has been to university and has often lived away from home. She has experienced a few years of a financially independent life during which she enjoys her own space and takes her own decisions regarding her time and any domestic labour she may perform. After marriage, she remains financially independent, and in fact is urged to work, and though a few in-laws still take away wage packets, this now happens infrequently. She knows she can cope with the outside world. How, then, are the patriarchal requirements of domestic labour due from a daughter-in-law to be met? The extended family is now more than ever before a site of struggle. In the past the extended family (with the husband and wife and their children living with the husband’s parents and siblings, and sometimes his brothers’ families as well) has often been an economic unit, in a farm or a family business. In Britain, however, with other forms of employment available, this is usually not the case, and slowly but surely the extended family is falling apart. Even in conservative families, mothers-in-law are increasingly telling of the way ‘young people like to move away and live their own lives’. As younger couples move away, the woman is freed from the labour of caring for her inlaws and issues of care for the elderly have surfaced openly. Weddings in all South Asian communities in Britain, I have argued, have been reshaped and profoundly Europeanised, while expenses have risen astronomically. The wedding itself is increasingly being organised by the bride although the arrangements for marriage still reflect the patriarchal relations of power between the bride’s and

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groom’s families. However the fact that brides are now older, better educated and far more independent has increased their strength and confidence in the face of the patriarchal control they may experience as wives and daughters-in-law.

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5 Psychiatry, Violence and Mental Distress Our states of mind, and whether or not we are categorised as mentally ill, often depend not only on our psychiatric condition but on our position in a variety of power relations. How then are we to interpret the following facts: first, that a disproportionate number of people of Asian origin are receiving treatment, having been categorised as mentally disturbed; and, second, that a disproportionate number of Asian women are experiencing extreme mental and emotional distress. Does it mean that the mental health services have accurately identified those who need help and are providing appropriate treatment? Asian women women’s experiences in different parts of the country and over a period of nearly 30 years suggest otherwise. In this chapter I will look, through these experiences, at two interacting arenas, the family and community, where patriarchal oppression may cause or sometimes aggravate mental distress, and the mental health services and institutions and the treatment they provide. Everyday psychiatric assessments today often implicitly classify Asian women in a category of their own – as suffering from ‘cultural problems’ or, if they are young women, as ‘caught between two cultures’. As Chandra Ghosh, a leading psychiatrist puts it, Asian women are seen … as more submissive, less expressive of their emotions than others, but at the same time more devious. In fact if an Asian woman said ‘I am not depressed any more’, the doctor would think she is trying to hide these symptoms because ‘you can’t trust these women’ while at the same time he may think ‘Well of course I am going to support this patient because she has been subjected to an arranged marriage – she hasn’t even had what my British patients have – she hasn’t had choice! And secondly she is a Muslim’ and other religions are interpreted as far less democratic than Christianity. (Ghosh 2003: n.p.) The term ‘culture’ itself is now used, she says ‘as a pejorative term, if you come from a different culture you are more likely to be stupid, 111

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more violent, you may be even mentally disordered’. In fact, notions of psychological ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’ are central to racist ideology which permeates the whole subject of mental disturbance (Bulhan 1981). There has been a considerable body of research, for example, which examines the incidence of mental disturbance among Asians and black people generally. Some of these studies use ethnicity and culture as explanations for what is regarded as black people’s ‘propensity to madness’. (For a critique of earlier literature see Black Health Workers and Patients Group 1983.) Many of the more recent studies of South Asians in Britain are also deeply problematic, suggesting, for example, that the experience of migration itself leads to mental illness, but they are still often quoted as credible texts. This is perhaps because, as Shashidharan and Francis point out: … the idea of race and racial differences still maintains a salience and significance in contemporary culture, no doubt strengthened by an increasingly visible non-European presence within Europe. Such a presence and the experience of black people in their relationships with Europe and European people continue to be understood and articulated in largely negative terms and the messages and perceptions of immigrants and black people that are reinforced in contemporary culture are essentially a reworking of the earlier notions of racial difference, re-designated as ethnic differences. (1993: 97) In this situation, qualitative studies like that of Jasbir Kaur (1999), the Newham Asian Women’s Project (NAWP) study of young Asian women and self-harm (1998), or Fenton and Sadiq’s study of depression (1993), often throw more light on the reality of Asian women’s lives. In Fenton and Sadiq’s study, the factors that women thought caused or intensified their depression were identified as: being immigrants in a country where they did not feel accepted or wanted; the loneliness of having no immediate family or friends of their own; the problems of not speaking the language; the unremitting racial hostility of neighbours and white people generally; and the official indifference to their complaints and problems.

WHEN PSYCHIATRY COLLUDES WITH PATRIARCHY Ranu is one of my guides in the world of mental disturbance, with its anger, pain and confusion, and its bewildering and apparently


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irrational world of treatment and ‘care’. Her family are from Bangladesh but she has lived all her life in East London, in an area known for its unemployment, high crime rates and intense racism. Ranu has been on medication for more than seven years. What is her experience of family, community and the mental health system? To explain what she has been through, she says she will take me to visit her mother, who has been categorised as mentally disturbed and has been on medication for 30 years. She arranges it all well in advance, since permission to visit with a friend must be negotiated carefully with her brother. And one hot summer day we arrive at a large terraced house where Shireen lives with her son. She smiles quietly as she lets us in and takes us through to a room at the back of the house. There is a large television, a bed, a wardrobe, a few chairs – no ornaments or anything personal. She says she is glad we have come. Days can be so bleak and uneventful. She cleans the house, she cooks the evening meal and she watches television – whatever is on. In the evening, when her son comes home, he eats his dinner and goes to his room. He says very little and makes it clear that he does not wish to speak to her. Her daughters, apart from Ranu, are married and they don’t and can’t visit often. Sometimes weeks pass without anyone to talk to. She laughs, ‘even the nurse who comes with my monthly injection speaks no Bengali and in any case she never wants to waste a minute, has never even drunk a cup of tea with me … That is how my life has passed.’ Eventually, she tells me about her life. She is from a small village in Sylhet. She married when she was 12; her husband left for England a few years later. In the early years of the marriage she had two babies, a son and a daughter, both of whom died before they were 3 months old. After that, she says, ‘I didn’t ever breast feed again. I was told, and I understood, that my milk was bad. It was me and my milk that had damaged them.’ In 1970 when she was 17, she left her family and her life back in the village and came over to Britain to join her husband. She knew nobody in England. She came to the same house she lives in now. She had four more children in quick succession. After each birth, she says, she had to manage almost entirely on her own. ‘Nobody ever even made me a cup of tea. And I had to care for my babies on my own – I was always afraid that they would die.’ Her suppressed grief and her loneliness remind me of the women whose words I had recorded in 1978. Women like Rezia Begum, who


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had come to Britain from Bangladesh four years earlier and who told me how she felt on arrival: You ask me how I felt, sister, bad, I felt bad, to leave them all back in the village. I used to be sad, I used to cry not knowing anyone or anything – missing my home. To live in one room after living in a country where houses are so open. (Wilson 1978: 16) Or women like Manisha, only 16 in 1977, who was suffering from post-natal depression and told me of her headaches and burning fever and her anger: ‘anger with my babies, with my husband and with the whole of my life. Then suddenly I am panic-stricken. My head feels as though it is on fire’ (Wilson 1978: 22). How many of those women are in the same position as Shireen now? Perhaps Shireen had felt these things too, when she was younger. Now she is calm as she looks back with a bitter humour across this long span of years through which she has survived without support. Did she have no kind of comfort of any sort – religion? ‘Religion?’ She laughs out loud, ‘I only made children – how could I take Allah’s name! I had no time.’ Now her laughter is uncontrollable. ‘There was no one there for me’, she says eventually. She picks out incidents, feelings: ‘after my babies were born, when I came from the hospital, no one even asked me how I felt. He did nothing … I got ill or rather they said I was ill. But it was not illness. I had been wounded – in my mind.’ She says: There are men who understand women’s minds and respect them – a few. Others torture women. My husband used to beat me if I spoke up. This was right from the start. As for me, I never hit anyone or anything. I just spoke. When I went mad I continued to laugh, just to laugh … I was so lonely. Even then he used to hit me. One day he almost strangled me. Here Ranu intervenes: ‘She wanted him to stay home, spend time with her. He did not want to.’ ‘There were so many things’, Shireen says: I wanted to be sterilised but he said it was against the religion. In the end I had the hysterectomy done. After that he said he would marry again and send me back. I lost faith in him. He would say, ‘What is the point in your living, what’s the use?’ I wanted to die. I wrote a letter saying, ‘I can’t live anymore, forgive me.’ He didn’t believe me. After that – what more? One night I took caustic soda … In the hospital … they asked my husband, ‘What


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is the problem?’ No one spoke to me. No, I don’t think it was just the language – no one felt they had to talk to me. Ranu says, ‘She said nothing, and he spoke to the consultant.’ That was in 1974. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She was only 23. There can be no doubt that Shireen is isolated but isolation is a word full of implications. It suggests that women are passive victims of circumstances which are beyond anyone’s control. It serves to mask patriarchal violence and racist exclusion and the reality of women’s struggles against them. When we meet again later, Ranu recalls painfully those years when her mother was ill and she and her brother and sisters were growing up. Mum got ill when I was 1 year old. There were always lots of arguments. She wanted him to stay with her, give her support … She is bright, brighter than my father. He beat her up because he couldn’t win arguments. Then she would have psychotic episodes – crying, tantrums, being in bed all day – those were results of the arguments. She pauses and then continues thoughtfully ‘In many ways my dad was a good man, he used to do community work, filling in forms and things for people who couldn’t write and he never charged for these things.’ But this kind and considerate man was also violent. He was not willing, or able, to satisfy Shireen’s basic emotional needs for human company. His own needs were apparently met through outside relationships and affairs, but he did not like her to go out. And when she demanded emotional sustenance and adult company, he used violence to try to silence her: ‘My father was violent sometimes, even after mother got ill, he occasionally hit her.’ This behaviour too appears to be fairly common, because although innumerable cases show that mental distress is often linked to domestic violence, violence often continues, even after the woman has been diagnosed as unwell. Despite this, thanks to the strength of patriarchal ideology, it was Shireen who was seen by the family and the medical establishment as unreasonable. She was condemned by two very different ideologies – the South Asian patriarchal notion of a good woman – someone who is all-enduring and ever tolerant; and the mainstream British patriarchal contempt and derision for ‘naggers’ and ‘moaners’.


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These two ideologies interact to create a new model, which a good or even ‘normal’ woman – a daughter, a young bride or a mother – must live up to. This model demands that a woman must endure, must not complain and must not make too many emotional demands because this is tantamount to rocking the boat. In the stormy seas of a racist Britain, the Asian family is seen as a shelter and a source of strength against the world outside. It is all important for survival: studies have shown some families to be a source of support even in the context of mental illness (NAWP 1998: 31). Its pivotal emotional role, however, leads to a fear of admitting any weakness in its structure, lest this admission weaken it further. And because it is patriarchal, its problems – particularly where they affect women rather than men – are frequently defined away as non-existent. However, mental distress can rarely be simply forgotten, even with medication. In Shireen’s case, even after her attempted suicide and despite the tranquillisers, her demands for emotional contact continued, spilling over eventually into her relationship with her children. Ranu tried to support her mother through those difficult years: She would knock on the bathroom door, and ask what I was doing. She would come to my bedroom at six in the morning when I was sleeping. But if she knows you are there for her it’s OK. She was desperately unhappy. Once she tried to kill me with a hammer. She was about to hit me and I took the hammer and was going to hit her, then I saw that she wanted me to kill her. Now I know it was insecurity, if she knew you were there for her, it was OK. I suppose she was very lonely as well. If, as appears most likely, Shireen’s words and acts were the symptoms of mental illness, at what point could she have become ill? Was it as a result of the medication she was prescribed? As Ranu sees it now, her mother’s post-natal depression, intensified by the deaths of her children and the total lack of emotional and physical support, could have shaded into schizophrenia. In fact, she had had no support in a number of critical periods of her life – the anguish of her children’s deaths, the very natural fear of her other children dying, the lack of anyone to speak to in the emotionally fragile periods which precede and follow childbirth, and the lack of support, let alone any counselling, after her hysterectomy, and of course the continuing psychological and physical violence of her husband. In


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her case it seems that her attempt at suicide was both a cry for help as well as an expression of despair. What was the state’s response? She was categorised as mentally ill and treated solely with medication. Even today she is given Depixol injections, whose known side effects can include fits and convulsions, blood disorders and serious hormonal changes. In the year after she was diagnosed as schizophrenic, the family received little support or information. But ‘saving the marriage’ was regarded as of primary importance. Years later, Ranu challenged the consultant psychiatrist who had been in charge of her mother’s case, asking him if he knew about the violence she had faced from her husband, and if he had, why he had chosen to ignore it. His answer was: ‘We knew your father was dominant – but we did not want the marriage to break down.’ Patriarchal violence was thus shored up as a matter of policy. They were occasions when, after a row, Shireen’s husband would simply call the hospital and get them to take her away. And in this her experience is similar to that of many other Asian women in a continuum from the 1970s till today. Women from different backgrounds provide the same evidence, relating it to the varying circumstances of their lives. For example, ‘Sushila’ an 18-year-old woman living in the London Borough of Brent and about to start a university course in 1991, told me of how she felt when her father called the hospital after a row with her mother and got them to take her away. ‘I would feel terrible fear and guilt, but their rows were so violent, I would be shaking when I left the house for school. At least after she was gone there was silence.’ Fatima, a woman of 25, related these childhood memories in an interview in the late 1990s: I don’t know what they did in private, because I was young at the time. I knew that she would go away for two or three weeks at the time. My dad didn’t treat her right. He treated her cruelly. He wanted things his way all the time. If she did not agree, he would phone the doctor or the ambulance, when they came he would say she is mentally ill – making out that she is mentally ill when there was nothing wrong with her. He used to hit her and once he hit her and she had a black eye. I didn’t want to see things like that. She used to cry and I would say ‘Mum what is wrong?’ I could not do anything for her – I don’t know why she put up with it. He abused her mentally, physically, emotionally.


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All these daughters have been affected by their mother’s experiences. They are prone to depression and panic attacks. They too, therefore, have been affected by the domestic violence that their mothers suffered, and from which they tried to protect them.

REHAB, RESPITE, RACE AND GENDER If women like Shireen spend short periods of time in hospital, what about those who spend years in medical institutions – hospitals, rehab units and respite centres? How do they assess their experiences? ‘Shama’, a young woman who spent seven years in rehab, discussed her experiences with me. Still being monitored by the local mental health services, she is eager to talk but asks me not to mention the hospital by name, or even the town in the Midlands where it is located, as there might be repercussions: After I was sectioned and taken to the hospital, I was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and forced to take medication. After a month I was transferred to a rehab unit where I spent seven years. I don’t think the atmosphere there was conducive to my recovery. You had your own very small room but you were not encouraged to remain in it except when you were sleeping. There was group time, two hours every day, and group cooking and cleaning. Many of the people were seriously damaged and also it was a mixed [male and female] environment. There was a lot of racism and sexism. One woman there was a terrible bully, and we were really scared of her. Another woman made it clear that she did not want to be in the same room as me. She didn’t want to be touched, talked to or sitting next to a black person. There were grown women who behaved like little girls. It was a response to power. Men would dominate the conversation and women often did not want to be with them because of domestic violence or sexual violence [which they had experienced]. But they had to, because it was about breaking down barriers. Often the only person I could talk to was my key worker who would listen to me for an hour and then leave. The psychiatrist was treated like God. We were all told to behave ourselves for Dr P’s visit … I have found, and still find, the mental health system very disempowering. Now I live in my own flat in sheltered accommodation, but I still find the monitoring meetings quite disempowering. Whatever problem I mention, their answer seems to be, ‘Take some more medicines, some more drugs.’


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Shama’s account suggests that sexual intimidation was routine. Mixed-sex mental health units are still the order of the day although an NHS circular (NHS 1998) ruled that no new mixed-sex wards are to be approved.

SELF-HARM AND SUICIDE It has been shown that young Asian women, as a whole, suffer from a disproportionate amount of mental distress. They have, for example, a 20–40 per cent higher suicide rate than the indigenous community (Soni-Raleigh 1996). Clearly, issues of women’s oppression are important here. While, in most countries, men are about three times more likely to commit suicide than women, in the countries of South Asia, women take their own lives far more often than men (Gill 2004b). As Gill writes, suicide is viewed in many communities in the South Asian sub-continent as ‘an appropriate means for protecting the family from shame, exposure and embarrassment’ (Gill 2004c). The links between domestic violence generally and suicide have also been clearly established (Hoff 1990). Psychological violence, particularly, can lead to a lowering of self-esteem, which in turn can lead women to take their own lives. Shireen, as we have seen, tried to commit suicide primarily as a result of psychological violence: her enforced loneliness and her husband’s comments, ‘What is the point in your living?’ The extent of mental distress faced specifically by young South Asian women is also expressed by the fact that they are up to three times more likely to deliberately harm themselves (self-harm) than their non-Asian peers (Tanner 2000). Self-harm includes a wide range of behaviour in which a person deliberately inflicts pain or injury on themselves. Estimates vary, but up to one and a half million people are thought to inflict some sort of self-harm on themselves every year in the UK, of whom, according to Favazza and Conterio (1988), an estimated 97 per cent are women. Self-harm has also been explained as ‘a symbolic way of expressing deep distress’, the body being used to externalise and articulate feelings in a non-verbal manner so that they can be dealt with in a more visible way (Harrison 1996). Its clinical definitions include attempted suicide, self-poisoning, para-suicide and self-mutilation, but these definitions can be problematic because they take no account of the meaning given to their behaviour by those who harm themselves.


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A ground-breaking study by Newham Asian Women’s Project explains that ‘these definitions and diagnoses unnecessarily medicalise and pathologise … a non-pathological coping strategy to otherwise unbearable emotional pain’ (1998: 8). The NAWP study, which analyses the results of interviews and focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with women aged 14–30, revealed a startling lack of support experienced by this generation of women. Like their mothers, they had little information about mental health support services and they did not see their GPs as a means of finding support. In fact, they feared that GPs would not keep the details of their distress confidential. They frequently mentioned their inability to speak to their parents about how they felt. And, across classes and communities, ‘seeking help was seen as a sign of weakness’ (NAWP 1998: 36). The NAWP interviews left … an underlying impression that if [these young women] had not cut themselves, overdosed or denied themselves food, their distress would have been unbearable to manage and they would not have been able to contain it … In this sense, self-harm acted as a coping strategy. It helped them survive from one day to the next with their feelings of distress, selfloathing and particularly their feelings of anger towards others, which they felt they were unable to articulate and therefore felt they needed to direct towards themselves. (NAWP 1998: 52) Women’s subordination helps them to internalise their anger towards others in this way. This in turn serves to perpetuate their powerless position in the family and the world outside. In other cases, self-harm serves as a self-punishment for the difficulties endured: I hate myself with venom. I hate myself so much; I don’t want anyone else to tell me I can’t feel like that because they are not in my shoes. I know my family don’t want me, they told me I should be dead and I am a burden. Blah, blah, blah. When my dad died, when they carried out the coffin, when they were wailing, they were saying it should be my body not his. For me, it is not the seeing, it is the feeling what I have done. I basically warm up the iron as hot as I can, then I get it, leave it on me as long as I can possibly tolerate the pain and that just lets go of a lot of stuff … I actually need to pick my wounds and keep picking them because I don’t want it to heal. I don’t want it to get better because what’s inside never gets better. (Virdee 2001: 12)


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Following the publication of their study on self-harm, NAWP set up the Zindaagi Project to work specifically on mental health issues, focusing in particular on suicide and self-harm. Currently it works in three expanding areas: first, a counselling service, which includes outreach counselling; second, a youth project which works with young girls aged between 11 and 19, in and outside schools, and is in contact with about 140 young women; and, third, it develops services across East London to support women aged between 11 and 35 specifically in the context of self-harm. The research done by NAWP, as well as their work at Zindaagi, shows that women who harm themselves have also often, though not always, suffered sexual abuse. After a few sessions of counselling, a woman may begin to talk more openly. It is then that underlying issues of violence and sexual abuse come to the surface, demonstrating the central importance of ‘talking therapies’. Poppy Banerjee, a counsellor in Tower Hamlets college, who also works with Zindaagi, confirms this. Of Asian women referred to her from all over London, about half have been sexually abused by family members. But they hardly ever come because they have been abused; rather, the abuse leads to self-harm and this, she says, is the ‘presenting problem’.1

AN ‘UP AND COMING HEALTH AUTHORITY’ If NAWP have gone some way towards developing appropriate services in East London, so have SBS in Southall and West London. There are, in addition, smaller initiatives in various parts of Britain. But in many areas things are only marginally better than they were in the 1980s. In Luton, two small organisations are involved in trying to provide support to Asian women facing mental distress. Roshni (Light) has been set up by social services and has a team of three full-time and one part-time community support workers. At Ghar se Ghar (Home from Home), nine women, three of them volunteers, speaking different Asian languages, provide seven drop-in sessions a week at different venues. The organisation runs on a shoestring budget – just £4,000 from the Primary Care Trust. Pari Rashid, the coordinator, tells me: ‘It is a drop in the ocean. I have been to meetings with the health authority, police and others, they say we have link services, big units, funding and other things. I say it’s all on paper! At the end of the day there is nothing!’


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There is no doubt that Ghar se Ghar caters for a need. The day I visit, in February 2002, there are around 15 women sitting at a long table. Some are waiting to be seen by workers, others have come just to avoid being alone. One can see the suffering inscribed on their faces. Poverty is ever-present, sapping their energy. They are unemployed; the men in their families – where they are still in touch – are unemployed too. This is what has become of the Asian working class who came to Luton in the 1960s and 1970s, when their labour was desperately needed. An older woman smiles at me and we get talking, but when I ask her about her life she just shakes her head, tears stream down her face. Her husband died two years ago and she has literally no one to speak to all day – and no money either. Two other women have ongoing problems of treatment for mental distress and medication. Another is facing serious domestic violence. But her efforts to call the police have been fruitless. Her calls to 999, when she was being threatened, received the reply ‘He isn’t beating you up right now is he?’ There is also a social worker, who has come to get some ideas on how to set up a carers’ group. She tells me, to my surprise, that Luton is an ‘up and coming authority looking at best value and specialising in the Asian community’ and now using carers’ groups which is a new government initiative. These groups, she explains, are meant to bring carers together to support each other and pass on information about special benefits, holiday breaks and so on. So far, she says, she has not come across a single group that works. What kind of groups would work? She asks Pari. They have a desultory discussion. In the end Pari says: Well, take an Asian woman looking after her mother-in-law, she just wouldn’t be able to go out for an evening, let alone a holiday, it is not that easy. I think we should see what is possible, carers’ groups may be a good thing but I don’t think holidays for carers’ groups will be that useful to us. Finally, I ask Pari about mental health cases dealt with by Ghar se Ghar. I don’t know what you’d call mental health problems? A couple I was talking to just now have serious disability problems, they have a young child, they are British Overseas Citizens and have come from East Africa with nothing. For six months they got no benefits at all. He used to come here and cry.


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She couldn’t cope. Now they get child benefit of £15 a week and that is all. Can anyone survive on that? I ask her how many mental health-related cases there are. We go through her records, picking a month at random – 18 September to 18 October 2001. There were 70 ongoing mental health-related cases and six new ones. Pari arranges for me to meet the women involved in three of the ongoing cases. I outline their experiences very briefly below. ‘Rashida’ is in her thirties. She was married and had two sons. She used to long for a daughter. She got a job as a classroom assistant and had a small salary. This provoked the displeasure of her parentsin-law. They became increasingly violent. After some years, Rashida had a daughter. When the baby was 3 months old, the in-laws took the baby from her, saying they were going to Sainsbury’s and would be back. In fact, they left for Pakistan. She has not seen her daughter since. She was shocked and eventually sank into depression, to which her husband reacted with violence. One day he threw her out of the house. As she stood there angry, shouting and swearing, he called the police. He told them, ‘She is a witch, she is mad, and she is scaring the children.’ The police took her away and she was locked up under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act (1983) which allows for people to be held against their wishes for six months at a time. When she was released, her husband would not take her back and she lived on the streets. No one was willing to take any responsibility for her. By now her mental condition and her physical health had deteriorated. With help from the police, Ghar se Ghar eventually had her readmitted to the mental health unit at the Luton and Dunstable hospital. Her physical and mental health gradually improved, although, she says, she lived in a state of intimidation throughout her stay in the unit. She was unable to stand up for her rights in any way because she felt if she disagreed with those in authority she would again be categorised as ‘mad’. For example, she had made it clear that she ate only halal meat, but was served pork in the unit’s canteen. She felt unable to refuse – later complaints by Pari were answered with protestations from the unit that halal meat and in fact a variety of other foods were available, it was just that these dishes were kept in the freezer. Rashida has put on a huge amount of weight and was only recently told that this is a side effect of the medication. She has lost hope of


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ever seeing her daughter again. But with help from Ghar se Ghar she has got a flat and is now working as a shop assistant. The second woman, ‘Safina’, is also in her thirties. She had a difficult relationship with her husband and eventually, when she was pregnant, he threw her out of the house. She found accommodation nearby, gave birth to her baby and managed to get by until the child – a son – was 5 years old. Then one day the husband saw the child playing outside and took him into his house. When Safina tried to follow, her husband locked the door. Appalled by what had happened, she started screaming and eventually threw a brick through the window of her husband’s house. He called the police, who came and arrested her. She was sectioned at her husband’s insistence. While she was in the mental health unit, her husband got custody of the child. He argued that because she did not speak much English or get about much and socialise with the community, she was not a good mother. This was accepted by social workers and court welfare officers. Pari got her enrolled in English classes and introduced her to various community groups. When she came out of hospital, Ghar se Ghar arranged for her to stay with another Asian woman, who monitored her progress and also generally looked after her. Eventually, after advocacy by Pari, she regained custody of her child and she moved out to her own place. She then started coming regularly to Ghar se Ghar, who continued to monitor her. She is still on medication and she drops in at the centre, although they do not now have the funds to continue with the supervision. A third woman, ‘Kulvinder’, is in her early forties. She faced conflict with her in-laws and violence from her husband, who every so often arranged for her to be taken into the mental health unit. Eventually he got a court order to keep her away from the children. However, she could not keep away. She was arrested and imprisoned. ‘This is everyday life’, says Pari. ‘You can see what it means – sometimes I feel I have to protect these women from the institutions which are supposed to care for them.’ Are the women who come to Ghar se Ghar ever referred for counselling? ‘No’, says Pari, ‘there are simply no appropriate counsellors in Luton.’ This is the reality behind the government’s rhetoric which promised, in a Department of Health paper, back in 1998, that ‘root causes of ill health [will be] tackled, which will ensure excellence everywhere, and which will make services safer, faster, more accessible and more convenient’.


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In 2005, I get in touch with Pari again. She tells me Ghar se Ghar dealt with 1,300 cases in the previous year and that they have applied for a council grant. Has anything else changed? ‘Nothing,’ she says, ‘nothing has changed for the better.’ At Roshni, where they have 60 ongoing cases, Prafulla Sangharajka, the coordinator, tells me their main aim is ‘to prevent hospital admissions’. They have various activities, cooking classes, sewing lessons and so on. She too is concerned about the lack of appropriate counsellors. ‘There are issues of confidentiality’, she says ‘and then there is also the question of their approach. A counsellor might know all the theories but she may still impose her views and her value system.’ The general non-availability of counsellors is disturbing in the context of the Department of Health’s strategy on women’s mental health (2002), which acknowledges the need for services sensitive to gender, race and culture, and for more access to ‘talking therapies’. And if we bear in mind Prafulla’s concerns about the nature of counselling, additional questions must be asked, not only about access to these services but also about how counsellors will be trained and how it will be ascertained that the counselling they provide is appropriate?

WHAT IS ‘NORMAL’ FOR A MAN? Many of the experiences in this chapter show how South Asian patriarchal ideology’s conception of ‘good’ in a woman has been identified as ‘normal’, and ‘bad’ as ‘mad’, and how the state has facilitated this conflation. While this may well be a result of ‘multicultural sensitivity’ or mere callousness, it could also have other rationales. As Chandra Ghosh comments, much of British psychiatry and medicine is based on a model that sees people as work units, who need to be got back to work as quickly as possible (in Inqilab, 1992). This may well be the reason for the questions almost routinely asked by health visitors: ‘Is she coping with the housework and is she happy?’ They reveal the obvious patriarchal assumptions of the welfare state – that a ‘normal, healthy’ woman must be able to perform domestic labour – do her ‘job’ as a wife – and do it happily. Increasingly, however this model is being modified by the needs of advanced capitalism. Now, the woman must continue to serve capitalism with her labour – be it the domestic labour of servicing and reproducing the labour force or working outside the home – but


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she also has a crucial role as a consumer. While in the 1960s the ‘depressed housewife’ could simply be kept quiet with prescriptions of Valium, it can be argued that new drugs like Prozac facilitate the new levels of participation required from women by advanced capitalism, as workers outside the home and, in particular, as consumers. If the state implicitly and explicitly upholds certain patriarchal models and roles that are supposed to be ‘normal’ for women, what are the models of normality for men? In other words, what is considered normal for a man and as such requires no follow up of any sort by state agencies? A wide variety of cases can of course be used to illustrate possible answers to these questions. Here I will examine only one: an immigration case under the Probationary Period Rule which, though it involves serious violence, is not untypical. It concerns Mr A and Ms P, who married in February 1999 in a South Asian country. P arrived in Britain in June 2000. Her lawyer described the relationship in a statement to the Home Office: My client’s husband was very controlling. He controlled whether she stood, walked or sat. He said ‘I want you to live your life according to the way I say, the way I want you to.’ … My client’s husband would not allow her to use the telephone, she was not even allowed to pick up the receiver if it rang … my client’s husband was very violent towards her. On one occasion he sat on her and put pressure on her legs. He held her wrists and the gold bangles she was wearing cut into her wrists. He sat on her for approximately one hour and tried to strangle her. She had cut marks on her wrists where the bangles had cut her and marks on her neck where her husband had wrapped his fingers round her throat … During my client’s pregnancy, her husband’s violence and aggression increased … On one occasion my client’s husband hit her with her own shoes. This was because she had wanted to lie down in the bedroom, and was feeling cold and went to put the duvet over her body to keep herself warm. Her husband told her that she was not allowed to have the duvet and that she would just have to lie there. Was A’s behaviour ‘normal’? The employees of the state appeared to think so. P eventually won indefinite leave to stay in Britain. But no follow-up was thought necessary on A, who continued in his job (as a care officer). After P left him, he married again. While she was referred for counselling, he was not considered in any way unwell. Clearly, while violence against women in your own family may be disapproved of, it is seen as entirely ‘normal’ not only by South Asian patriarchal ideology but also by the agencies of the British state. But if


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A (see Chapter 5) was ‘normal’ could he perhaps have been considered criminal? Once again the state answers – no. He is neither ill nor a criminal. Despite P’s injuries, the police were unwilling to press charges because she had not reported the ‘incident’ straight away. In autumn 2005, a new Mental Health Bill is to be presented to Parliament. The Draft Mental Health Bill (2004) does not suggest that issues of human rights or ethics or even service provision are high on the agenda. On the contrary, as Mike Shooter the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, commented, ‘This proposed legislation would further distance the practice of psychiatry from the rest of medicine and ensure that people with mental health problems have less rights than people with physical illnesses.’ The college has ‘grave anxieties in terms of civil liberties, ethics, practicality and effectiveness’ of the proposed law (Royal College of Psychiatrists 2004). Asian women’s experiences show that often their distress is a response to the violence they face. The government has declared that it is committed to eliminating violence but the way its agencies operate, particularly those involved with mental health, does not reflect this commitment. On the contrary, they collude with South Asian patriarchal violence. Too often the treatment given to women diagnosed as mentally disturbed is deeply disempowering, and the racism and patriarchal relations which are part and parcel of life in mental institutions add a new dimension to their suffering.


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6 Contesting (mis)Representations One day, when I was halfway through writing my book Finding a Voice (Wilson 1978), my young daughter fell ill and we had to call a doctor. The Indian GP who came saw the typed manuscript lying on the table and asked what it was. I remember his astonishment and bewilderment when I told him. ‘Asian women,’ he said, ‘what is there to say about them? Who will read a book about them?’ Now 25 years later, things are very different. Young Asians have been proclaimed ‘cool’ and Asian women are frequently a focus of media attention. But just how far have we moved beyond the patriarchal views encapsulated in the GP’s remark? Examine this view closely and it divides into its constituent parts: the middle-class man’s view of working-class ‘immigrant’ women; the urban man’s view of women he regarded as rural or from a rural background; and the view of the westernised South Asian man who over-compensates in an effort to express what he thinks is the mainstream British view of Asian women – saying, in other words, ‘what white people think’. Looking back, I can see that in this last context at least, the doctor was right. This was what many sections of white British society thought in the 1970s and today, more than 25 years later, although new images have been constructed, the same perceptions are still influential. Working-class ‘traditional’ Asian women are still seen as of no interest, passive, having no agency whatsoever – waiting to be liberated. And that liberation still means only one thing: ‘westernisation’. The lack of agency meant that Asian women in the 1970s were seen as grateful and humble recipients of help from health workers, social workers, and other service providers. At the same time, particularly if they were young, they were seen as tragic repressed girls who needed to be rescued by white society. Beneath these perceptions lurked the very similar colonial images of Indian women which could be accessed by film-makers and journalists for use in historical feature films and TV series like The Far Pavilions (1984), in which ‘native’ princesses are saved from their patriarchal men by ‘civilised’ white 128


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colonial officers. These productions, which sometimes mixed up the eighteenth century with the nineteenth, and confused South India with Afghanistan, allowed British viewers to relax and feel superior. Asian women are still widely portrayed as repressed but smouldering, and increasingly as ‘liberated’ because they are eager to have sexual relationships with white men, through characters like Heere, for example, in Second Generation (Channel 4, 2003) or Anji in No Angels (Channel 4 series, 2004 and 2005).1 In the 1970s and early 1980s however, Asian women interacted with white people most frequently at work and as workers they often faced implicit and explicit racist abuse (Wilson 1978). These experiences were shaped by very different discourses from the colonial era, which presented Asians in general as deceitful and dirty, and Asian women as unskilled and incapable of change, and therefore suited only to the lowest-paid and most unpleasant jobs. However, the images of Asian women as workers in Britain have, by and large, been erased. In fact, even at the time of the remarkably militant strikes of Asian women right through the 1970s – at Imperial Typewriters, Grunwick’s, Futter’s and other workplaces – the dominant images of Asian women in the media were rarely courageous, determined or even working-class women. They were portrayed either as suffering or quietly accepting their lot in the context of the family and their ‘traditional’ culture. If they were young, these images focused on their sexuality; if they were old, they remained semi-visible figures in the background. How far are today’s images different? And with three generations of Asian women now living in Britain, how do we, Asian women, see and read them? The answers require a separate analysis which is beyond the scope of this book. However, as a very modest beginning, in this chapter I examine several television programmes screened between October 2003 and October 2004, and a limited number of mainstream films. I chose them because all of them reflected, in one way or another, the themes I have addressed in earlier chapters, and also because some of the women whom I had spoken to during the writing this book had commented upon them in the course of wider discussions.

RACISM – A THING OF THE PAST? In October 2003, Asians were flavour of the month in Britain. Among several similar programmes featuring Asians in Britain was


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the Big Dreams series (BBC2, August 2003) which featured ‘the rags to riches fairy tales of first generation immigrants [and] the efforts their children are making to take their legacies forward’. Two main messages emerged from this series: first, that Asians have done well, they are very rich; and, second, that for Asians, racism is a thing of the past. In reality, of course, as ‘Fahmeeda’, a Gujarati Muslim woman in her mid-forties, commented, racism has become more virulent than ever before. While in an earlier phase the police were simply abusive to all black people, now in addition they were specifically targeting Muslims. Fahmeeda herself wears a hijab and has had her share of being pushed and shoved and abused, particularly in the wake of 9/11. At her suggestion, a week later, we watched Secret Policemen (BBC1, 21 October 2003). In this programme an undercover reporter exposed the vicious racism in the Greater Manchester Police force and the lack of any realistic policy to change it. We listened to police officers boasting about how they harass Asians for no reason other than race. ‘He’s a Paki, I am searching him, that’s proactive policing! He’s a Paki I am stopping him because I am fucking English! At the end of the day, mate, we look after our own.’ Despite such reminders of the reality and intensity of contemporary racism, dominant media portrayals of Asian life routinely banish racism to the arena of distant memory. This process was reflected in another programme which was shown around the same time – an interview with an Asian arts celebrity who reminisces about the period when he and his family first came to Britain as refugees from East Africa in the 1970s. His speech is slow and impassioned: My mother had to work. Didn’t want to get state security and she along with many other women at that time took the first job she could find – in a factory. Had to take off her sari – that was a requirement. So basically she had to strip. I remember seeing her for the first time in her slacks and blouse and it was a violation. Because the entire image of my mother had disappeared in one fell swoop. I saw her shape, something I had never seen before. For me that was a huge violation. That was another instance of the world really being shattered. Here the experience of racism is mediated by explicitly patriarchal perceptions: that a woman’s body is owned so completely by her son that only he can correctly interpret the impact of what she does, or what is done to her – no need to speak to her, or even remember what


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she said or felt. In addition, we are being told that women and their bodies are symbols of their culture and, because their culture requires them to be dressed in a particular way, their change of clothing is ‘a violation’ not only of their culture but of their bodies – which is why changing into ‘slacks and blouse’ is seen as having to ‘strip’. ‘Daksha’ a Gujarati Hindu woman in her sixties, who also came to Britain from East Africa in the 1970s, has watched the programme. She tells me it has downplayed the harshness of those years. She remembers the atmosphere of those times. Only the worst-paid, most unpleasant work was available to the refugees. Men who had been clerical workers or teachers in East Africa ended up working in the noise and heat of foundries, for example. The death rate escalated. Women went to work mainly in sweatshops with other Asian women. ‘It was a very hard experience for us too, but it was also exciting to be working outside the home, earning your own wage for the first time.’

EAST IS EAST Of the British films about the lives of Asians in Britain, the only one made before 2000 which the women I spoke to mentioned was East is East (Director: Damien O’Donnell, screenplay by Ayub Khan Din, 1999). Many of them found it offensive. However, some of them felt that it had been influential in shaping the images of Asians, particularly Pakistanis in Britain. Set in the 1970s, in a town in the north of England, East is East has a Pakistani man, Genghis Khan (or George Khan as the other characters call him) as the central character. George is married to an English woman, Ella, and tries to enforce ‘Pakistani culture’ on their five children. The film, which is the story of his brutality and violence as observed by his children, projects everything George does as characteristically Pakistani. East is East has been acclaimed as a comic film, but the comedy consists almost entirely of lavatory humour or crude sexual jokes. In a scene in the toilets of the mosque, some children notice that the Khan’s youngest son, 10-year old Sajid, has not been circumcised. The Imam is called, he checks and confirms that this is the case. Later Sajid’s penis is examined again by his mother Ella’s English friend Auntie Annie, and eventually he is taken to be circumcised. George tries to force arranged marriages on his sons. His first son, who is gay – though his father does not know it – runs off in the middle of such a wedding and is disowned by his father. The Imam


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at the mosque suggests that his second and third sons, Abdul and Tariq, are married to the daughters of a Mr Shah. George agrees without consulting anyone, and without finding out anything more about the girls or their family. The jokes about sex intensify as the film progresses, and in the second half develop into fullblown misogyny. Abdul and Tariq are not told about the weddings being planned for them. Meanwhile the Khan’s fourth son, Salim, who is at art college though his father thinks he is studying engineering, has been asking his mother for money for his sculpture. Unknown to his parents, this sculpture turns out to be a life-sized replica of a vagina. Salim has got his English girlfriend to pose as a model for this, persuading her with promises to marry her, although he clearly despises her for being overweight and vulnerable. Eventually Tariq finds out about George’s plans for him, he wrecks the gifts George has bought for the wedding, and says he will never marry a Paki. His younger brother Maneer is cleaning up the mess when George walks in. When he refuses to tell George who has destroyed the gifts, George beats him up. When Ella intervenes, she too is assaulted. The last scene of East is East has been described as the comic climax. The Shah and Khan families meet, and the two sons are introduced to their prospective and very unattractive brides, who are both wearing glittery clothes, heavy jewellery and thick make-up. Their mother, Mrs Shah, is portrayed as a snooty middle-class Asian woman. There is an argument and Salim’s sculpture of the vagina lands on Mrs Shah’s lap. After a family row, George leaves the house. ‘Shazia’ and ‘Leila’, two Kashmiri women from Luton in their twenties, discussed East is East with me. Shazia said, ‘the film is telling us that George is a monster because he is Pakistani. And the children are mixed race, but they are like white people. They see George like racist white people.’ Shazia’s insights helped me to see the film afresh – not only is it anti-Muslim, but the children are in many ways surrogate whites, and because this is never acknowledged, an essentially racist antiMuslim perspective is given the status of simple and neutral truths, based on childhood experience, while anti-Muslim jokes are passed off as harmless family humour. In addition, many people are likely to see the children as ordinary British Asians, and the film as a story of inter-generational conflict, nothing more, making its racism far more insidious.


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Leila found the treatment of the women characters disturbing. She pointed out that every woman is treated brutally by the film-maker – the fat English girl, the mother who is just a doormat, the Pakistani girls and their mother. Each one is humiliated in a different way. The Pakistani mother in East is East was played by Leena Dhingra, whom I have known for many years – I remember that many people appreciated her performance when the film first appeared. I asked her how she felt about the film. She tells me that she would never do a part like that again. People tell me how much they enjoyed my performance, casting people, directors, everybody … They found it very funny, when they tell me about the success of East is East and how well it has done, I just don’t want to know. There was humour at the expense of the two young girls who were made ugly, they were both Pakistani. There was also an ugly fat English woman, and there was a sort of general misogyny – because she is ugly and fat she can be abused. It is there, this misogyny, it is there in reality, it appealed to people, but for me, I found it painful. Leena found the last scene particularly distressing, as it brought back traumatising memories of childhood humiliations: This rubber thing – this life-sized replica of a vagina – was expected to land on my lap and become part of me. This was the high point of the film, which was supposed to be hysterically funny, and now I meet all these people who tell me how hysterically funny that was. For me I sat there for about three hours with this pornographic thing in my lap being filmed, and the director saying through the loudspeaker – could you part your legs so it falls better. She told me about the power of directors and mentioned the accent which Om Puri had to assume as George: ‘There are different ways of portraying an Asian accent, it could be done with affection or it could be mockery. This was mockery.’ Leena also pointed out that the trend of using accents to mock Asian characters has been taken up by the new generation of British Asian writers. In this sense at least TV comedy shows like Goodness Gracious Me (BBC1 1998) and The Kumars at No. 42 (BBC2, now BBC1, 2001) follow in the footsteps of East is East, although of course their mockery is gentler. ‘All these writers’, says Leena, ‘have, to different degrees, absorbed looking at their cultures through a European gaze.’


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I realised, however, that I was still haunted by one aspect of the film – Om Puri’s powerful portrayal of George’s violence against his children, which lies at its heart. East is East may well be racist, but it is also a story of domestic violence, particularly child abuse, which therefore needs to be told. Must such a story inevitably be racist if the father is Asian and the mother white? How is this to be resolved? Clearly the portrayal of the women through most of the film as passive, spineless and unable to stand up to George, draws him even more to the centre, demonising him and the Pakistani men he is made to represent. He is therefore the ultimate orientalist stereotype, who uses and brutalises women, especially white women, and is a threat to all white people given the chance. It would have been different if the female characters had been allowed some spirit or agency. The long-suffering mother could have been less so. The ugly sisters could have refused to marry and revealed that they were in love with other people – male or female. George’s first wife who lives in Pakistan could have arrived and told him to behave like a human being. Such things do happen, after all, in the real world. But then again, for this to happen, the female characters would have had to be developed, not left as mere cardboard cut-outs.

A FEW MESSAGES FROM BOLLYWOOD As we have seen in the context of weddings, Bollywood is increasingly influencing the lives of the South Asian diaspora. Two Bollywood films which have been particularly influential in this respect over the last ten years and are mega-hits in both India and Britain are Hum Aapke Hain Koun (HAHK) (1995) and Kabhi Khushie, Kabhi Gham (K3G) (2002). The two films have very different storylines but they also have striking similarities. Both present a sanitised picture of India, with none of the poverty which might embarrass Asians living in the West and none of the ‘strangeness’ which might make them or their children feel uncomfortable in white society; and both focus on the consumption of commodities (often with brand labels clearly visible) while at the same time presenting a new Hindu identity – upper caste, ‘modern’, market-led and conservative – which fits in with the rightwing Hindu nationalist ideology of the BJP (see Chapter 3). K3G is about a millionaire family, the Raichands, where the son marries against his father’s wishes. Cut off without a paisa, he leaves for England where, surprisingly, he and his wife have an equally opulent


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lifestyle. But he is not happy and his wife longs to be a properly subservient daughter-in-law. Eventually, thanks to the intervention of his brother, they return to the bosom of the family and all is well. K3G had such an impact on the Asian diaspora in Britain that its song and dance routines, which are catchy, but far from classical, or even particularly Indian in tune or rhythm, are now being taught in primary schools as examples of Indian ‘traditional’ culture. Other films have tried to follow in the footsteps of HAHK and K3G but few have been so successful. However, in 2003, ‘Sudha’, a Punjabi Hindu woman in her late fifties, suggested I see a new film which she thought was ‘one of the best films made recently’. I accompanied her and her family to see Baghban at their local cinema in Harrow. It was a film which touched on a number of themes I have discussed in this book and was particularly prescriptive about the roles of women, so I will outline it below. Baghban (2003) is the story of an elderly (though still very glamorous) couple, Raj Malhotra, played by mega-star Amitabh Bachchan, and his wife Pooja (Hema Malini), who, although they are apparently not well off (Raj is a bank employee), live in a palatial house and are deeply romantic about each other. (Every morning when Raj returns from his morning walk, Pooja greets him with a cup of Tata’s instant tea, made with her own fair hands!) They have five sons, one of whom is adopted. When Raj retires, he and his wife suddenly find themselves bankrupt because they have sacrificed everything for their sons. They are shocked to discover that there is no room in their sons’ lives, or in their houses, for them. The old couple are split up (Raj goes to live with one son in Mumbai, and Pooja with another who lives in a different city) and suffer greatly as a result. The sons, their wives and children have busy lives in rather cramped flats. Most crucially, the wives have fulltime jobs which leave them exhausted and the sons, who also work long hours, occasionally show them some consideration, though this does not extend to their doing any housework. These relationships cause bafflement, displeasure and distress to Raj and Pooja. Pooja is particularly unhappy about the amount of freedom given to her teenage granddaughter whom she continually spies upon. On Valentine’s Day, Pooja secretly follows her granddaughter on a date and, revealing herself like a true avenging Hindu heroine, rescues her when her boyfriend tries to rape her. The girl, who has disliked Pooja, now turns to her, preferring her to her parents.


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Eventually the old couple decide to escape from the sons. After spending the night in a hotel where they dance the night away, they try to return to their old home. But they do not have enough money. Disaster is averted by the chance appearance of their adopted son Alok, who has married a girl brought up in Britain, returned to India and become a hugely wealthy car dealer. Alok’s wife is the perfect daughter-in-law, willing to be a slave and insisting on literally worshipping her in-laws. But unlike western films about grandparents, which may make one feel sorry for the elderly characters, here the older generation are the stars and this is taken to an extreme in the resolution of the plot. Raj Malhotra has been writing the story of his love and longing for his wife and it has been snapped up by an English publisher, and yes, he wins the Booker Prize! After the prize-giving ceremony, the sons urge their mother to forgive them, but she makes it clear that though she loves them as a mother, she will repudiate them as her duty to her husband comes first. Raj and Pooja hug their grandchildren, who we can see love them dearly, proclaiming the message loud and clear, in case anyone had missed it, that these values are coming back! Sudha points out the many ‘beautiful’ aspects of the film. How we can be modern but must keep our values, how the older generation must be respected because they have wisdom, how for a woman her husband must be her God but she must also dedicate herself to her in-laws. ‘Some of our young people are forgetting these things’, she says. ‘We need to remind them. And really it is easy, because to keep your Hindu culture, you don’t have to be old-fashioned. You can do westernised things as long as you keep your Hindu roots.’ I realise that despite Baghban’s powerful evocation of the modern Hindu identity (also glorified in HAHK and K3G), it does not in any way appear anti-Muslim. It will not lose audiences in Muslim countries or among the Muslim South Asian diaspora. Instead – like similar films – it concentrates on a more immediate goal – the constant redefining and strengthening of a modern investor-friendly Hindu identity which appeals especially to the diaspora. There is the projection of wealth and material success – opulent houses and large-scale ownership – as something akin to dignity, honour, even godliness: in K3G it’s made explicit that when the father has amassed a huge fortune, it is the son’s duty to acquire even more; and in Baghban, the bad sons were sweating it out as the employees of multinationals but the good adopted son had his own business as a successful car dealer. These contemporary Bollywood blockbusters also


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project a very conservative patriarchy, which glorifies the extended family and insists on the wife’s total dedication and subservience to her husband, and the daughter-in-law’s self-abasement before her inlaws. This reflects the desperate efforts of the Indian, and in Britain the middle-class Asian extended family, to survive as an institution in the face of a variety of threats, most centrally the fact that women are increasingly economically independent. Baghban shares the ‘family values’ of HAHK and K3G, but it is a few steps ahead in terms of the Hindutva agenda – the appearance of the battling grandmother who dispatches the potentially rapist boyfriend, for example, brings back images of right-wing Hindu women activists. Baghban is not a mega-hit on the scale of HAHK or K3G but it is undoubtedly a trailblazer. It is also particularly important because it is the first film financed by the Hinduja brothers, recently listed as the richest Asians in Britain, who are making inroads into Bollywood. I ask Fahmeeda how she thought films like HAHK, K3G or their more recent counterparts compare with earlier Hindi films. ‘Even in the 1980s let alone in our parents’ days, Hindi films were about values, good and evil, charity, sacrifice, they always raised questions which we could discuss. Now there are not really many questions’, says Fahmeeda. Bollywood, I realise, has changed since the economic liberalisation which began in the early 1990s. In addition, globalisation has brought a major role for the diaspora within Bollywood. Now few successful Bollywood movies are without NRI (non-resident Indian) heroes or heroines. Even if the portrayals of the lifestyles of Asians living in Britain, the US, New Zealand or Australia are over the top and surreally affluent, there can be no doubt that Hindi movies are now of more interest to Asians growing up in the west than ever before.

CHARISMATIC FATHERS In the Bollywood films mentioned here, the patriarchal family almost inevitably provides the framework within which the plot unfolds. What is more striking is that it is the father who is both central to the plot and the strongest character. Played by charismatic actors like Amitabh Bachchan, these fathers had carried the day. The ‘father question’ is also central to the highly successful Bend it Like Beckham (2002). And yet this is a film which takes a progressive stand on gender. Gurinder Chadha, the director of Bend it Like Beckham, had directed the explicitly feminist but less commercially


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successful Bhaji on the Beach (1994); and Bend it Like Beckham is on the face of it a film about girl power. It is the story of Jess Bhamra, a West London teenager who is mad about football. Her family doesn’t want her to play because they think it will bring her in contact with boys, and playing football is not what a ‘good’ Asian girl does. But Jess manages to join a girls’ football team without their knowledge, goes and plays in a match in Hamburg, falls in love with her male coach, and eventually, because she is such a brilliant player, gets a sports scholarship to a prestigious university in America. Jess is loved by everyone: her English friend (played by Keira Knightley), her coach, her male Asian friend Tony – who is gay – and more than anyone by her father, played by Anupam Kher. Significantly she never really goes too far in her rebelliousness, never has a boyfriend, for example, and is even willing to give up on her chance of the scholarship but is saved at the last moment because her father not only gives his permission, but encourages her to go. Bend it Like Beckham is a feel-good film which is genuinely funny in parts but is also curiously bland – and carefully moderate. The character with the greatest emotional depth and complexity is the father, Mr Bhamra. However, the power wielded by him is never explicitly, or even implicitly, questioned. Meanwhile, the older women in these films are largely an undistinguishable mass. Whereas the earlier images of older Asian women made them invisible – shadowy characters in the background – in these modern productions they are colourfully dressed creatures, well-meaning but impossible to empathise with. Their only and unambiguous aim in life appears to be the propagation of patriarchy. In Bend it Like Beckham they also represent ‘the ethnic community’, where ethnicity is more than anything a sort of bland seasoning which can be sprinkled on as needed without detracting from the apparently wholesome and even nostalgic Britishness of it all. We are still waiting for a film about diasporic South Asians which will go further than merely acknowledging the existence of older Asian women to create characters who are ambiguous, complex and riven with contradictions. Such a film would inevitably question a multiplicity of power relations and, in doing so, would overturn the assumptions of the film and TV industry, from the BBC to Bollywood.


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7 Still Fighting for Justice – Low-paid Workers in a Global Market ‘The contractor’s bus arrives just before six in the morning. It is usually dark and the air is still damp and cold. Someone told me that shivering makes you feel colder so I try not to shiver but it’s hard not to …’ ‘Kamaljit’ travels on one of many buses transporting farm workers west and south out of Birmingham, past where spaghetti junction gives way to an urban sprawl and on to the countryside across the Cotswolds to Gloucestershire. ‘There are about ten of us at the pick-up point’, she says, ‘ladies and some men, mostly 40- or 50-year-old people. Sometimes he can’t take us all. That’s what each of us dreads, being left behind with no earnings that day. But mostly he does takes us and we head out of the city.’ Occasionally, say once every month or so, the bus is stopped and made to pull over to the side. The driver of Kamaljit’s bus explains what happens: There is always one man from the Ministry of Transport checking numbers allowed, have we exceeded them. Then there is one with a laptop from the immigration department. He asks four questions: name, address, date of birth and when you came here. If you answer quickly you are OK. They won’t check you on the computer … Say one man is slow in answering, he starts to hesitate, they check on him and take him away. But by mid-day he is usually back on the farm. In this chapter I will examine the changes in the experiences of low-paid Asian women workers fighting for justice over the last 30 years. Their experiences tell the story of the transformation of the trade union movement in this period and, inseparable from this, the story of changes in labour markets in Britain and globally.

GLOBAL WORKERS Kamaljit and the others travelling like her in the early morning are global workers who have come all the way from India to earn money


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for a few years and return home, only to come again ‘when things get bad again back home’. As temporary, insecure, casual, agricultural workers, some of them doing seasonal work, these women and men from India, along with other migrant workers, have changed the nature of this lowest rung of the British working class. With India increasingly being regarded as a source of middle-class, highly skilled professionals for western establishments, a veil has been drawn over the existence of workers like these.1 Low-paid global workers are in any case, by and large, disregarded. Only a serious accident like the one in February 2004, which caused the deaths of 21 Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay could bring their existence briefly to the attention of the press and MPs. A new law, the Gangmasters Licensing Act, came into force in April 2005. But according to Avtar Jouhl, General Secretary of the Indian Workers’ Association GB (IWA-GB), in the context of farm workers, it is likely to bring only recommendations, not changes. The agencies of the state seem to be fully aware of workers like Kamaljit, but their treatment of them is fairly arbitrary. A minibus driver who takes workers to a farm most days of the week tells me (in February 2005): They [the police and immigration officers] do what they like, sometimes they take people away, detain them, then deport them. But often they don’t bother. They say, ‘You are not supposed to do illegal work’ and let them go, so people return to their work on the farms. It costs a lot to detain a man, that’s what an immigration officer told me. Also detention centres are often full. And really I think they don’t have any objection … they know these farms run on this type of labour. By the time Kamaljit reaches the farm there is a hint of light in the sky, the sun is rising somewhere far away behind the cold grey clouds. ‘It is so hard’, she says, ‘working with a heavy coat on, bending constantly to pull onions out of the wet soil.’ The work is split up into segments: first pulling out the onions and loading them onto trays, then loading trays onto baskets, then placing them onto a trolley which is pulled by a tractor to a shed where they are washed on a conveyer belt. In Kamaljit’s farm, as in many others in Gloucestershire, it is the exhausting backbreaking labour of the first segment that is done mainly by Asian women and men in more or less equal numbers, and by a few Iraqi and Kurdish men. They are paid at piece-work rates – which could be £3 a tray or


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at some farms £3.50 a box. This adds up generally to about £25 a day, with people scrambling to work as hard as they can. Only heavy rain stops them, and then there is nowhere to shelter except the minibus they came in. They sit there cramped, waiting for the downpour to stop. The other steps, which require fewer workers, are managed and controlled according to Kamaljit by ‘gore’ (white, apparently English) men, although this varies from farm to farm. The health risks are enormous. As Narinder, a woman in her fifties who worked on a farm near Walsall and then in Oxfordshire, put it: ‘The head hurts when you do that kind of work for long. I would take painkillers at times. I used to be very tired.’ There are no basic amenities at many farms. There are no shelters or toilets, nor is there sick pay or allowances of any kind. The day has no structure – no breaks for lunch or tea. And there are no clear rules either as to who is paid what. ‘We think’, says Kamaljit, ‘that the contractor gets double of what we get and then the supermarket sells them at an even higher price.’ Here in twenty-first-century Britain, arbitrary and unquestioned exploitation rules supreme. Everything won through the struggles of British workers in the last century has been swept away. In the 1950s, when workers first came to Britain from India, they were mainly young men. On arrival, they were channelled to the hardest and worst-paid jobs in factories and foundries, but as Avtar Jouhl, who also came to Britain in that period, explains: ‘The work was hard, but there were at least some basic regulations. Now, there’s nothing.’ This time round the new workers appear to be mainly married women like Narinder, who have migrated leaving their husbands in Punjab; or women like Kamaljit, who came here with her husband but stayed on when he returned. Almost all of them have relatives in Britain who migrated decades earlier and are now settled in this country. Currently Punjab is in the throes of an agricultural crisis. The globalisation of Indian agriculture dictated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) left farmers at the mercy of fluctuating world prices, while cutting subsidies and rural development expenditure and ending low-cost credit. Large-scale rural unemployment and escalating indebtedness have been some of the results. Families across a wide spectrum of agricultural classes have been affected. There are those like Kamaljit’s family, who are ‘not poor, but afraid we’ll become poor because of unemployment, and because we are running into debt’; or those like Narinder’s, who are poor peasants with only


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a few acres of land, who have fallen deeply into debt – prey to the unscrupulous moneylenders. ‘Right from the start’, says Narinder, ‘we were poor. My husband had very little land because when his father died his fields were divided among six brothers. I worked very hard in my in-laws’ house. I did what seva [respectful care] I could for my father and motherin-law. I have four children and we had two khets [a khet is a field of 1 acre]’. She first came to Britain 14 years ago. Her nephew who was settled in this country sponsored her. She stayed in Walsall with relatives, and worked as a machinist in a factory. But after 8 or 9 months, they asked her to return to India. When she didn’t leave, they told the immigration authorities that she was working illegally. Detained briefly and terribly upset, Narinder was deported to India. She went back, as she says, ‘empty-handed, with nothing even for the children’. When she got back to Punjab, things were bad, ‘the wheat had got soaked and spoilt with so much rain. There was nothing to eat in the house. We were forced to sell one of our plots of land. I used to pray to God a lot, cry out “God why have you taken so much from us?” Then my friends from Birmingham wrote to me that they were missing me, they sent me a sponsorship letter.’ Her husband and son urged her to go. During this second visit to Britain, Narinder worked on a farm near Walsall. I would wake up at four in the morning, make the food to take with me for my lunch and go to the pick-up point. The van would come and take us to the field. We would arrive there at six. We would finish at six or seven in the evening, go to bed at ten or eleven and then wake up again at four in the morning. It was seven days a week, some did five days but I did seven. I worked there nine years. This second time too, Narinder lived with relatives. But ‘relatives’, she says, ‘are not what they used to be’. They charged her £20 a week for her room and she also paid for her own food. The rest of her earnings, she sent back to pay the debts in India. ‘Because they [the moneylender’s men] would come to our house in India, knocking on the door, asking for the money.’ Narinder’s co-workers on the farm, like those of Kamaljit, were mainly over 40. She describes them as, ‘50 or 55, some may have


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been 40 years old. But mainly older people. Like me they also had a lot of worries at home, they were mainly people with worries.’ The money earned by these women under these harsh conditions has been used to pay off debts, build houses in Punjab, pay for the weddings of their daughters and much else. The way this has affected their status within the patriarchal family and community, here and in Punjab, appears to vary with class. In Punjab, almost all agricultural tasks, from tilling to harvesting, have been mechanised for some 40 years. What little is left to be performed manually is done – except in the poorest families – by hired migrant labour from poorer states of India. Women, particularly among landowning Jat communities, do not work on the land. In these groups, the prosperity of the 1960s meant that women had been, as far as possible, secluded within the home: their major role had been the production of sons. Although they performed labourintensive work within the household, manual work out in the open is something they would not have done before. And yet on farms in Gloucestershire and Kent the majority of workers were Jat Sikh women with a small but not negligible minority of so-called lowercaste women. Some women told me that what they did in Britain did not count in this respect. Others did not agree. Many felt that they were really doing this only out of sheer necessity. The question of prestige came up implicitly in discussions with drivers and contractors. It was clear that farm labour is seen as dirty, undignified work. One contractor who drove his wife daily from Southall to the farms in Oxfordshire insisted that she did not work there but had a catering job in Heathrow. Another claimed that ‘Our women [Jat Sikhs] do not work on the farms – only Pakistanis from Slough send their women to work there.’ In fact the majority of South Asian women who worked in the fields in Britain appeared to be mainly Sikhs and a few Hindus from Punjab in India. The ‘ownership’ of women from India by the community in Britain, even when they have left their husbands and immediate family behind, is possible because of the close-knit network of extended families from specific villages who migrated to Britain in the late 1950s and in the 1960s. On the farms this ‘ownership’ means that the policing of women by men – contractors and drivers, and also co-workers – continues as it does in the community itself. These women doing farm work – like Bangladeshi garment workers in East London interviewed by Naila Kabeer – are ‘literally under the gaze


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of the community, and as an overwhelmingly male gaze, their social discomfort would be compounded by sexual unease’ (Kabeer 2000: 242). However, in the case of the farms, this male gaze includes an unconcealed contempt, usually associated with power relations between upper-caste/class men and lower-caste/class women in India. On these British farms too, caste and class shape patriarchal relations and perceptions. How a woman is treated is defined by her class and caste and her position in the labour market, as these extracts from interviews carried out in Birmingham show: The men decide if a woman is a khunjri [a whore]. Then they go on harassing her and making comments about her. They do this specially to women who might be alone in this country. In my first week in England, my sister-in-law took me to work with her. I was 27 at the time, a bit younger than most of the others. The man in charge looked me up and down and then said, ‘Why have you brought her? She should be at home making babies, not here!’ The worst is how they treat low-caste women, Chamar women, for example. They’ll just leer at them and ask ‘How was the night?’ My husband’s cousin told him: ‘Don’t send Deepa to the farms, she is educated. That’s for a different type of woman. And there is a lot of harassment of girls and women on the farms.’ Several women commented on the old-fashioned attitude to women that they found in the communities in Britain. Back in Punjab, they said, in the context of work outside the home, patriarchal restrictions are considerably weaker than they used to be. If, as a result of a woman’s earnings in Britain, her family achieved middle-class status in Punjab, then her status in the family increased.2 I was told, for example, by Avtar Jouhl, of a middle-class couple who came to Britain together from Punjab. He went back to India after five months but she stayed on for three years. Out of her earnings they built a three-bedroomed house and funded the postgraduate education of their children. Having lived here, she changed, she doesn’t take any bullshit from her husband. She tells him to shut up. The tables are turned. She says – ‘All this is the result of my labour!’


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Here ‘she has changed, she doesn’t take any bullshit from her husband’ speaks volumes about her position before she became a migrant worker. However, in cases where a woman’s earnings have served to avert total financial disaster, but the family has remained poor, there appears to be no such improvement in a woman’s status. Narinder, for example, is the only wage-earner in the family and as such has supported her husband and grown-up children. When one of her sons was arrested in Punjab over a fight with a more powerful man in the village, it was her money that provided the bribe required to release him. It was her money, again, that secured her daughter’s dowry when she got married to an older man settled in Britain. Yet she has not felt welcome back in her village. She has lived with relatives, doing piece-work machining at home. At the age of 57 she is still looking for work on farms.

CARE HOMES – LEGITIMISING EXPLOITATION Indian nurses are among the highly skilled workers who have been actively recruited for jobs in Britain. Unlike farm labourers in the countryside, who are harshly exploited because they are undocumented workers, in British care homes – catering for the elderly or mentally disabled – qualified nurses who have entered the country quite legally are being exploited because the state chooses not to recognise their qualifications. Many of them have heard, before they emigrated, that ‘British hospital culture will involve more teamwork and more professional development’ (Prasad 2004). But the reality of care home work is very different. And since it is far easier to get a work permit to work as a ‘nurse’ in a care home than in a hospital, because of the continual staff crisis in these homes, it is here that these qualified nurses are most likely to find themselves. In any case, whether in hospitals or care homes, registration is necessary. Under the NHS Code of Practice, this requires an adaptation period that can last from four weeks to six months. In care homes, however, the adaptation period can be as long as two years and during this time, according to Champa Chudasama of the Highfields Minimum Wage Project, nurses are paid the minimum wage and often less. As ‘Sita’, a qualified nurse working in a care home in the Midlands, told me: ‘They use all kinds of delaying tactics to prolong the adaptation period and continue making us do the work


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of personal carers not nurses. During this time we are paid at C grade as non-nursing staff.’ In care homes, except during inspections, employers have enormous freedom to exploit their workers, both legally through the adaptation process and illegally by demanding ‘training fees’, which are deducted from their wages. Officially, there are ‘care standards’ but staff shortages are frequent. In this situation, in care homes I was told about in Southampton, Birmingham and Leicester, ‘the nurse who is still on adaptation has to do floors and laundry’. ‘Swapna’ is a highly qualified nurse with years of diverse types of nursing experience in India. She was unable to find a job other than in a care home in Britain. She says, ‘the problem is that they don’t really want nurses in these care homes, they want labourers here, that’s where the shortage is. They have managers aplenty.’ Swapna came to Britain in 1995, completed her registration as a nurse, and then returned to India to sort things out for a longer stay in the UK. When she was ready to return to Britain, she applied for a job through an agent. This is normal procedure, she says, since employers do not usually advertise directly. She was interviewed on the telephone and then offered a job at Bristol at the D grade. ‘My work experiences would have merited a higher grade but work permits are always only for D grade because that is where there are staff shortages.’ In Bristol, she faced racism. She was, she says, given an extra big work load, singled out for heavy work, teased about her manner and clothes and blamed for others’ mistakes. She challenged this but found no means of redress. In the end she decided to change her job. Her agent from India got her transferred to a care home in Southampton, where the situation was very similar, although there the owner was an Asian. Looking back at that experience, Swapna relates it to the way health care is now largely market driven. The written policies are excellent, but in reality health care here is purely a business. There is a culture of complaining with everyone complaining about everyone else. The aim of the hospital or home is not to provide care – rather to avoid complaints. Patients or their relatives often complain about trivial things if they want to target a particular nurse. At the same time it makes those patients who have no relatives extremely vulnerable, even where they are comparatively well off. They have no one to complain on their behalf.


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She describes daily incidents where elderly patients are mistreated and ignored. There are those who can only eat their food slowly, often you find that the nurses take the trays away and then eat the best bits of the untouched food … the overseas nurses thrown to the bottom of the heap feel there is no point in making a fuss. Their attitude is ‘We haven’t come here to change things. Their patients – whether they live or die, eat or do not, are cared for or ignored – these are not our issues. We are here temporarily, to earn money and then leave.’

SWEATSHOPS AND ASIAN WOMEN’S STRUGGLES: CONTINUITIES AND CHANGES In contrast to the ‘global workers’ who migrate in order to work, many Asian women settled and educated in Britain now hold professional jobs. In the year 2000, according to the Labour Force Survey figures, quoted by the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit (2003), 16 per cent of Indian women and 9 per cent of Pakistani women held professional/managerial jobs. Today these figures are likely to be considerably higher. Even so, the majority of Asian women are still likely to be low-paid workers – in the service sector, as cleaners, for example, and in small highly exploitative factories, or sweatshops, which in some industries have proliferated, and as ‘home-workers’ working at piece rates.

The restructuring of British industry: Smethwick as a microcosm If Asian women are still mainly involved in low-paid work, their experiences over the last three decades have often been a reflection of the restructuring of British industry. In Smethwick, Birmingham, the Asian community has witnessed this restructuring in the motor industry. Asian male migrants came to work here in massive foundries and factories in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the next ten years or so they fought and won sustained struggles for union recognition and other rights. In this period, women in the same communities worked mainly at home, doing sewing at piece-work rates. In the mid-1970s, more women moved into the service sector and sweatshop work. Faced for the first time with daily racist insults and humiliations and often with lower wages than white workers, Asian women organised and fought back collectively. This period saw a series of remarkable


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and inspiring strikes by Asian women workers not only in the West Midlands but also across Britain, wherever Asian communities had settled. These included, for example, Imperial Typewriters in Leicester in 1974, Grunwick’s in north London in 1976–78, Futter’s also in north London in 1979, Chix in west London in 1980, and P.S. Randy in Birmingham in 1982. In the 1980s many of the car factories across the Midlands closed down, the overwhelmingly male workforce was largely made redundant, and work was subcontracted out to sweatshops where there were no unions, no concern for health and safety, and no security of employment. These sweatshops employed mainly women at the lowest possible wages. It was here that the wives and daughters of the Asian workers who had been made redundant fought for basic rights in the 1980s and 1990s, in continuation, as it were, of the earlier phase of strikes and stoppages and workplace struggles. Today the gigantic factories of the motor industry are being turned into luxury apartments for the well-to-do. Of the sweatshops, many of those linked to the motor industry have closed down too, with multinational companies relocating to Third World countries where labour is cheaper. Those that remain exploit their workers more than ever in order to be competitive. In the last ten years or so, the strikes and protests in small workplaces have dwindled in number. According to Avtar Jouhl, there are no records of any stoppages in the West Midlands area between the Burnsall’s strike of 1993 and today. Paul Gates, General Secretary of the trade union Community (a merger of the Knitwear, Footwear and Apparel Trade Union and the Steel Workers Union) says this is true for the East Midlands too.

Strikes in the service sector In the service sector, the situation is slightly different. Asian women have worked in this sector from the mid-1970s on. Conditions of work are poor and wages are low, but many of these workplaces are unionised and here strikes and disputes have continued. The 1990s have seen both the increasing privatisation of public services and the handing of contracts to multinational companies which have sought to impose more exploitative rates of pay and conditions of work. As a result, a number of strikes have taken place. These include the strike of ancillary workers at Hillingdon hospital from October 1995 to January 1997; the dispute at Skychef, the catering company for the Lufthansa airline, which lasted 17 months from November 1998; and


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the Gate Gourmet dispute, which started on 10 August and is still in progress as this book goes to press in mid-September. Gate Gourmet, an American company, is the world’s largest supplier of in-flight meals. Its UK branch supplies British Airways. On 10 August 2005, the company brought in 130 ununionised agency employees without any consultation with the workers’ union, the TGWU, and sacked 670 workers, the majority of whom were Asian women. Despite the existence of the union they were treated with a callous disregard for their basic rights. When they questioned the management about why the agency workers had been brought in, they were told to either go back to their work or leave the premises. When they continued to demand answers, the management announced on a megaphone that they were all now sacked. They were locked in the canteen without any food and water or access to toilets for almost six hours and then dragged out of the building by private security guards while police with dogs looked on. The dispute revealed the brutality of a company with operations in some 29 countries and assets of £15 billion. But, as I discuss briefly later in this chapter, it also touches on some key issues of trade union rights which have the potential to change British labour relations.

A comparison of two strikes The history of sustained and collective struggles by Asian women workers has many continuities today. It reveals, for example, both the way race, gender and low pay continue to shape the approach of British trade union leaders, and the attitudes of Asian families and communities to women’s militancy at work. The strikes at Burnsall’s, in Smethwick, and Grunwick’s, in north London, separated by 14 years, are particularly revealing in these respects. Both took place in highly exploitative sweatshops; in both Asian women were the majority workforce; in both race and gender were issues; and both companies are still functioning. Yet the strikers’ strategies and their relationships with their families were quite different. Burnsall in 1992 was a fairly typical factory in Britain’s motor industry. It supplied components to car plants such as Jaguar (in Coventry) and Rover (in Solihull and Longbridge), competing with factories in Export Processing Zones in Third World countries. The workers had to process pieces of metal by immersing them in baths of chemicals. There were no health and safety provisions – no gloves, no ventilation fans, no clean area where they could eat their


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lunch. Their employer urged them constantly and with little irony to care for the pipes which were being produced because ‘they are my babies’, although these same pipes were so hot that, according to Darshan Kaur, the strikers’ shop steward, ‘When you tried to take the lids off your nails broke and you’d get blisters and when the blisters broke the blood poured out.’ Work-related illnesses, including miscarriages, were frequent (miscarriages are common among women working with pollutants, a result of chemicals accumulating in the foetus). At Burnsall there was no way of avoiding this. When one young woman had a miscarriage, the employer’s attitude did not change. His position was that the workers in his factory were treated well. The Channel 4 documentary about the Burnsall strike – The Women of 10 Downing Street (Sweeney 1993), showed him sitting in his office, with a racist drawing on the wall, explaining: ‘They are given tablets at a whim, when they’ve got a headache, when they’ve got “fever” as they call a cold.’ Unlike Burnsall, Grunwick, which now functions under the name Bonus Print, was not a small factory but a photo-processing laboratory. Conditions here, too, were harsh. As Jayaben Desai, the strike leader, put it in 1977: There are glass cabins for the management so they can watch you from both sides … You have to put your hand up even to go to the toilet. If someone is sick, say a woman has a period or something, they wouldn’t allow her home without a doctor’s certificate … Everyone would be paid a different wage so no one knew what anyone else was being paid.

Key strategies of the two strikes The Grunwick strike used mass support and solidarity boycotts by other trade unionists as strategies. As the strike developed, trade union branches up and down the country, workers’ organisations and individuals across a wide spectrum, feminists, anti-racist activists, office workers, students, just about anyone who believed in justice, flocked to the picket line. They were drawn to it, eager to show their support not only because they were outraged by the conditions at the factory but also because these exploited workers had directly sent out a call for support through their strike leader and members of their independent strike committee.3


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As the mass pickets increased in size, the police grew increasingly violent. They attacked the pickets mercilessly as they cleared paths for the strike-breakers going in and out of the factory in vans. In addition to support on the picket line, and most crucially for the strike, the local postal workers at Cricklewood started a boycott of Grunwick mail. Because Grunwick was a mail-order photo-processing plant it was totally dependent on postal services. At that stage victory for the strikers seemed a matter of weeks if not days. But this situation – one where the workers themselves could take control of their struggle, organise and make demands on their own behalf – was not acceptable either to the government and employers, or to the trade union leadership and bureaucracy. The leadership of APEX, the union that the strikers had joined, and the TUC, stepped in to try and rein in the strike and destroy the people’s movement that had grown up around it. APEX called for a limit to the number of pickets permissible, while the TUC ruled that the trade union bureaucrats at the APEX head office in southwest London, not the strike committee, would control and direct the strike. This was followed by action against the postal sorters. The leadership of the Union of Post Office Workers, threatened to withdraw their strike pay, forcing them to go back to handling Grunwick mail. Without the boycott, and without the mass pickets, the strike began to lose its momentum and eventually collapsed. In the years following the Grunwick strike a series of repressive industrial relations laws were passed. Mass pickets were banned and all secondary actions and solidarity strikes made illegal. At every strike which followed, strikers were faced with the need to go beyond the law if they were to win or even carry on with their strike. The only major strike where trade unions decided to do so was the miners’ strike of 1984–85. It led to the sequestration of the union’s funds and eventually the crushing of the strike in a long-drawn-out and bitter conflict with the government. In the Burnsall dispute, the strikers used a new strategy – while remaining committed to the union, they set up support groups, one locally in Birmingham and the other in London. These groups, unlike trade unions, would have no funds to lose. If they broke the law on picketing they would face only the comparatively minor problem of group members being arrested. The Birmingham group was organised by the IWA-GB, community projects, local trade unionists and anti-racist activists, and the London group by South Asia Solidarity Group, an organisation involved in


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supporting democratic and revolutionary movements in South Asia as well as fighting racism and communalism in Britain. There were also supporters who travelled from Manchester. Ten or twelve of us, mainly Asian women, came down to the picket line from London, once and sometimes twice a week. It was in this period that I got to know the strikers and their families. They were almost all from the same background as Kamaljit and Narinder and others who work on the farms today. Most of them were aged between 45 and 55, although some were much younger. Like the farm workers, most of them had been middle peasants in Punjab. They had, however, migrated some 20 years earlier, and the men in their families had for decades been part and parcel of the British working class. While their caste and region of origin were still relevant, as we could see from many of their conversations and questions, at this point of their lives these women clearly saw themselves as belonging to the working class in Britain. They were obviously deeply affected by their experiences as workers and occasionally spoke of work experiences in other factories – whether conditions were better or worse, how racist or sexist the bosses were, and whether they should have organised collectively elsewhere. Throughout the strike, the families of most of the women, particularly their children, supported and encouraged them, frequently visiting the picket line. Six months into the strike, Surinder Bassi spoke of the strength this gave her: ‘Our children say … “Win your rights before you go back. Don’t lose heart, have courage”’ (Sweeney 1993). They were also clearly affected by their interaction with members of the support group and the other supporters who increasingly gathered round them – among them the Women Against Pit Closures, women from mining communities who had helped sustain the miners’ strike of 1984–85 and had continued to campaign against the closure of coal mines. Autumn 1992 was the period when draconian new asylum legislation was going through Parliament, and many of us from the London support group were actively involved in organising against it. Refugees at the time were already working in the harshest and lowest-paid sector of Britain’s service industries – loading supermarket shelves at night, working in petrol stations, doing the lowest-paid cleaning work and home-working for the garment industry. The Burnsall strikers gradually began to get involved in all these different struggles. Darshan Kaur, the strike leader, and Surinder Bassi, a woman of enormous foresight and generosity who was very much its


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heart, were both affected by this wider activism which was suddenly all around them. When they heard of the national demonstration against the Asylum Bill in November 1992, it was they who urged the other strikers to travel to London and join the march. Their message to that demonstration was not just a rhetorical statement but one of deeply felt solidarity based on their own experiences: All of us are black and most of us are Asian women. We would like to express our solidarity with refugees who like us are low-paid workers in this country, doing the hardest jobs in exploitative sweatshop conditions. We also ask you to support us in our national demonstration in Smethwick next Saturday. Justice for refugees! Justice for workers! (Sweeney 1993) In the Grunwick strike, in contrast, the women involved were mainly those who had come to Britain as refugees from East Africa where many of them had been middle-class housewives – their husbands doing clerical work or running small businesses. In Britain they had suddenly faced poverty and the humiliation of racist employers. Their families’ attitudes to the strike were, by and large, very different from those at Burnsall. The two women central to the struggle, Jayaben Desai and Kalaben Patel, had to visit homes of the others, talk to the husbands, fathers and fathers-in-law of the strikers, who often did not want women in their families to take part in the strike, and urge the women themselves to assert themselves. As Jayaben Desai told me at the time: Our Gujarati women are often weak, weakened by the acceptance that their lives must revolve round dressing up, housework, wearing jewellery and things like that … Their husbands do not want them to do anything that is not passive and in the end women end up believing the same. In my case my husband gives me every help. All too often in the Grunwick strike, husbands actually prevented their wives from coming to the picket line and there were cases where parents-in-law forced women to go on working. In other words, patriarchal norms of this specific class abhorred women’s militancy and, under these material conditions, actively sought to crush it. This was partly because militancy per se was not acceptable, but also because their actions would highlight the fact


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that they were manual workers, which many families did not want to dwell on. However, this may not have been only because patriarchal relations in the two communities were different, there was also the fact that the Burnsall strikers were mainly older than those at Grunwick’s. They were not yet, in general, mothers-in-law, but as older women were in a more powerful position in their families and in a better position to take decisions about domestic issues. For example, while many of them continued to perform domestic labour, in some cases, particularly if they were over about 45, cooking and cleaning were reduced to a basic minimum – they were neither willing to nor expected to do more. ‘I just have some dal and roti and go to bed’ (Sweeney 1993). In contrast, many of the Grunwick strikers, including Jayaben Desai, told me even without specific questioning that they always put their duties as wives and mothers first. Whether this was something they had to say to protect their image in the community, or whether it was based on the reality of their everyday lives, or whether this was their preferred image of themselves, was not clear but it still suggested patriarchal rules which they did not wish to, or could not challenge.

Attitudes of the trade union leadership If the Grunwick strike ended with a betrayal of the workers by their union APEX and the TUC, the Burnsall strike revealed the extent to which this approach to workers’ militancy and community solidarity had developed in 25 years. Right from the start, we as members of the support groups could sense that the GMB officials were extremely uneasy about our presence. When we arrived on the scene, we found that hardly any publicity materials had been produced and few people had heard of the strike. We were keen, as were the strikers, to publicise the strike, get more supporters, make the strike grow in strength, and to a limited extent we were successful. On a local level, the street outside the factory was buzzing with supporters several times a week – though we determinedly avoided calling these gatherings mass pickets since these were now illegal. We felt that our enthusiasm to make the strike better known increased the tension between the trade union officials and the strikers. The officials wanted to be in control, keep things low key


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and small so that when they wanted to end the strike and withdraw strike pay, they could do it without any major protests. The documentary Women of 10 Downing Street exposed the paternalism with which these officials actually interacted with the strikers, the way they constantly urged them, for example, to ‘be responsible’ (Sweeney 1993). When the support groups called for a mass picket at the request of the strikers, Joe Quigley, the GMB National Organiser, demanded that the strikers sign a statement repudiating the call. His words, captured on film, are revealing: … people have received substantial benefits from the union. The union is not a charity, along with benefits also go obligations … Anyone who cannot sign this statement is clearly not a member of the GMB … I want genuine people committed to the GMB. Committed to this strike being won under the leadership of the GMB. Soon after, the GMB ended the strike by withdrawing support. After nine months of standing on the picket line the strikers were not even allowed to vote on the decision.

THE NEW ‘ERA OF PARTNERSHIP’ What has changed in low-paid work in the ten years or so since the Burnsall strike? On the one hand, as though to show the government’s sympathy for sweatshop owners, a new law now rules that, in firms employing 21 or fewer workers, there is no statutory right to belong to a union; on the other, a legal minimum wage has been introduced (in April 1999) finally bringing Britain in line with the rest of Europe.4 How have these and other changes affected the attitude of the trade union leadership to low-paid workers’ struggles? According to the TUC, we are now in an era of ‘partnership’ between unions and employers. In theory, this means that employers will consult trade unions on all decisions that will affect union members. In practice, according to Paul Gates, General Secretary of Community and also a member of the government’s Low Pay Commission, ‘We often end up being consulted after the decision … The partnership idea was introduced when New Labour came to power in 1997 but was picked up by the trade union movement to help with recruitment.’ The role of unions has changed in that they now concern themselves almost exclusively with taking cases to employment tribunals. In the


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textile industry, with the closure and relocation of big firms from the UK to Third World countries, sweatshops have become the main form of employer. Here, according to Paul Gates, there are a far greater number of tribunal cases than before. But he cannot remember any tribunal cases which have led to workers being reinstated, although ‘in the early days, 15 years ago or so, there were some cases of “reengagement” where the same employer would take a worker back but in a different job’. He says: Over the last 15 or 20 years tribunals have become more legalistic. It is not so much about fairness. What happens to a small employer who is taken to a tribunal by a worker is that the Chair of the Tribunal is made aware of questions of judicial bias – in other words, allowances are made for the fact that this is a small employer who may not have the facilities larger employers have. Such ‘allowances’, mentioned by case workers up and down the country, amount to a major bias in favour of employers. In one case, a tribunal chairman who had persuaded a worker to come to a settlement gave the following explanation for his actions: ‘if she had insisted on the hearing she would have won, but I was aware that this would have meant that the business would have had to close down. I had to make a moral decision’. At the Highfields Minimum Wage Project in Leicester, set up in partnership with Leicester City Council and Community, Champa Chudasama deals with cases of workers who are not being paid the minimum wage in the five main industries categorised as low paying in Leicester – hosiery, retail, care of children and the elderly, restaurants and catering, and hairdressing. In all of these, except hairdressing, Asian women form a large proportion of workers. If a worker is being paid less than the minimum wage, the Inland Revenue can not only investigate without the worker being identified but also enforce payment. However, according to Champa Chudasama, this does not happen often. In practice the Inland Revenue do not use their powers under the legislation. For example, they could take out criminal prosecutions for falsifying records, which is very common in the low-paid sector but there has not been a single case of such prosecution so far.


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If a worker is not being paid the minimum wage and has, in addition, other problems such as non-payment of holiday pay for example, then the Project takes the case to the Employment Tribunal. The bulk of employers do pay up if the tribunal finds against them but some won’t. Then money has to be found to take the case to County Court. This could cost a total of several hundred pounds with no guarantee of success. Champa confirms what other case workers have told me, that the level of stress for workers taking such cases to tribunal is enormous. There is a feeling, she says, of a losing battle against the rising tide of unscrupulous employers whose sweatshops have mushroomed in the Belgrave and Highfield areas of Leicester. Even the old Imperial Typewriters building is now home to a number of such workplaces. These employers, says Champa, can simply close down their factories when threatened and reopen registered under another name. And yet workers do come to the Highfield Project. Between September 2002 and January 2004, 43 cases were dealt with, and … a significant number of these are of Asian women – from all groups, Hindu, Muslim, Gujarati and Punjabi … On the whole I’d say that those who come are the strong ones, because even coming here is a big step – in a lot of cases the family does not want it. The attitude is don’t rock the boat, don’t make trouble. She outlines one case where a woman in her fifties had worked as a cook in an Indian sweet shop. Her pay slip showed £4.50 per hour from back in 1998, but she got much less, sometimes as little as £2. On occasions when the shop was catering for a wedding, for example, she had to work continuously all night and then do a full day’s work the next day. She fell over and injured her head. The case, taken to tribunal, was not heard, but led to a settlement in which she was paid £4,000. However the woman’s brother is still not speaking to her. He felt she had been disloyal to the employer. Such cases are not infrequent. They demonstrate a complex mixture of patriarchal priorities – that a woman must be prevented from fighting back and that she must show proper respect to her Asian employer – who could well have been of the same caste. The feelings of class solidarity so tangible at Burnsall are not present here and the lack of any collective action only highlights this. However,


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poverty is evident and acute, with people ready to work for very low wages in order to survive. In this situation (in tribunal cases) there is always the fear that the firm may close down, other workers’ jobs may be lost, and then those who had made demands for justice would be blamed in the community. For Asian women this is particularly the case, since they are expected to be selfless and self-sacrificing. This again is different from the approach that was there in strikes at Grunwick, and to a lesser extent at Burnsall, that the struggle was important since it would send a message to employers across the region that their workers too would no longer accept exploitation. There is also the question of agency – in strikes like Burnsall’s the women were in control, fighting for their own rights, whereas Employment Tribunals, with their legalistic language and approach alienate and disempower the appellant. However, despite all this, as Champa says, ‘Some women do filter through, they do take risks and hope to get justice.’ As Jayaben Desai put it, expressing her despair about the trade union leadership, ‘The TUC people are saying that without an army we can’t fight because we are generals. I don’t agree. The army is still there. One shout will bring thousands of people but the generals are sleeping.’ As this book goes to press, leaders of some trade unions are, in the context of the Gate Gourmet strike, finally showing signs of questioning the era of ‘partnership’. The strike itself has two remarkable features. First, although sympathy strikes are illegal since the anti-worker laws brought in after the Grunwick dispute are still in place, a thousand British Airways baggage handlers, check-in workers and bus drivers walked out for one day in solidarity. Second, the strike has led Tony Woodley, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union which represents the strikers, to demand that such legislation be repealed. He has been supported in this demand by the TUC. Will these words be followed by action? Will these demands be pushed forward by a workers’ movement or simply by feeble and ultimately pointless attempts at change through negotiation with the Labour government? This remains to be seen. What is without doubt is that low-paid Asian women workers will, in a variety of ways, continue their struggles for basic rights at work.


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8 Dreams, Questions and Struggles – Reflections on a Movement ‘Dreams, Questions and Struggles – Sapne, Sawal aur Larai’, the first national conference of South Asian women in Britain for many years was held in London in March 2003. Planned by a wide range of groups and individuals, its aim was to bring politics back from the margins to the centre, and to launch Asian Women Unite! (AWU), a new umbrella group which would continue this work.1 More than 200 women from all over the country attended the conference. Some, though by no means the majority, were women who had been feminists for two decades; others had been drawn into political activism by recent personal experiences or by the anti-war movement; and yet others were very young women, born after the Thatcher era, who were interested but also surprised: ‘Dreams, yes! Questions, maybe, but struggles – why? Asian women are not losers’, one said. There were workers from Asian women’s refuges and resource centres, and representatives from more than 25 Asian women’s organisations ranging from high-profile groups like Southall Black Sisters (SBS), Newham Asian Women’s Project (NAWP) and Imkaan, to equally important if less well-publicised organisations like Dostiyo in Northamptonshire. For two days, this enthusiastic and diverse group of women discussed their own, or their organisations’, experiences of issues which are central to Asian women’s politics: domestic violence, the ‘no recourse to public funds’ immigration rules, mental health, singlefaith schools, the way forward in workplace struggles and so on. They looked at some remarkable visual art by Asian women, they danced, sang and performed short plays. This was a unique gathering, affirming the presence of a movement with its own dynamic of tension and solidarity. Looking back now at the discussions and presentations at that conference, it seems that two key questions surfaced over and over again: how have our collective strategies shaped our relationship with the state? And are they the most appropriate for strengthening a broad movement? 159


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These questions were touched upon in the first plenary – when Hannana Siddiqui of SBS traced the history of her organisation. They were discussed again in workshops and informal conversations, and raised once more at the closing session. Hannana recounted Southall Black Sisters’ campaigns and changing strategies. She told us how, for example, in 1984, after Krishna Sharma was driven to her death by her husband’s abuse, SBS had called a demonstration and women had poured onto the streets of Southall, naming and shaming him, and protesting outside the courts at the verdict of suicide. She spoke also of the legal challenges mounted by SBS in the 1990s2 and of SBS’s more recent campaigns against the Two-Year Rule which had involved careful negotiations with ministers. ‘These days’, she said, near the end of her speech, ‘we are focusing on policy.’ Her speech reminded me of what she had said to me in an interview a few months earlier, which spelt out the issue of changing strategies even more clearly: It’s the right time to be in policy because policy is where it’s at – legal challenges are also important but there are not enough of them going on at this time. You have to go with the trend, everybody is looking at policy: the police, social services, different professions. We’ve been around for 25 years – how do we pass on our expertise? For example, how to deal with cases, what is good guidance. If we don’t do that now, it would be a total loss of experience. If SBS does not exist tomorrow, at least the experience would be passed on … I don’t want the government to fund our political work but they can fund core services. That would provide stability and if you have not got that stability, there is no guarantee that any agencies, including ourselves, will continue. She had identified in that interview both the difficulties faced by SBS and the change in its focus – reflected also in Asian women’s collective politics. It was about a transition from political mobilisation, and a broader politics of movements, to advocacy work done inevitably within the framework of the state. Perhaps this was also why, out of SBS’s rich store of experience, what Hannana chose to identify as expertise to be passed on was ‘how to deal with cases’; and why she spoke of SBS in the context of different agencies, ‘the police, social services and the professions’. This approach suggested a strategic shift to a more conventionally liberal feminist position where struggles are essentially about negotiating rights from the state.


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There is, as Pettman has noted, a ‘very complex politics’ in how we deal with the state: ‘women’s organisations and feminists direct demands at the state … while many are profoundly suspicious of the state and its implication in the reproduction of unequal gender reproductions’ (1996: 9). These dilemmas and concerns about the state were raised at various points during the AWU conference. Some women felt that the pursuit of liberal feminist strategies, with their focus on working with, and sometimes within, the state, which were at the heart of much that was being done in the context of domestic violence, ran the risk of neglecting more transformational socialist feminist strategies. Others disagreed, arguing that working within the state was the only realistic option. At the last plenary these questions were raised again but this time in a different way. While acknowledging the importance of working within state-funded or even statutory organisations on many issues, we agreed unanimously that South Asian feminism needed to be a more visible presence on the streets and in the lives of the majority of women, and that we needed to involve women (and not only those in women’s groups) in collectively confronting the state and the establishment – over immigration, for example, or by taking on the patriarchal racism of much of the mainstream media.

SOME EARLY EXPERIENCES OF ORGANISING AS ASIAN WOMEN The AWU conference had put me in touch again with old friends, some of whom I had not seen for decades – women who, like me, had been active in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) and in Awaz, the first Asian women’s group in Britain. Meeting them again brought back memories of that exciting but in many ways harsh period. Many of us had earlier belonged to the predominantly male black movement or the predominantly white women’s movement. By forming Awaz, in 1977, we had taken a stand against the sexism of the former and the racism of the latter. But these were not the reasons why we, a handful of mainly young Asian women, had set up the group. It was rather that we desperately needed a way of addressing our needs and those of other Asian women. It was a time when Asians in Britain, with few exceptions, were working class, doing some of the hardest and lowest-paid jobs. The communities were beginning to establish themselves. Patriarchal relationships in these newly established communities were acutely


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oppressive. The threat of racist violence lurked in the streets in many areas and the paternalistic and colonial attitudes of the educated English middle classes were palpable. At the same time British mainstream politics was in the process of turning a corner with the emergence of some of the apparatus of an authoritarian state. Asian women were drawn to Awaz and, although there were only about 10–15 of us who worked consistently, hundreds participated in our meetings and protests. What we did in that short period between 1977 and 1982 was remarkable. We set up the earliest campaigns against deportation and held the first demonstration at Heathrow Airport against the ‘virginity tests’. We supported Asian women strikers at Grunwick’s and Futter’s in North London and at other workplaces. In some instances, as in the Futter’s strike, we looked in depth at health and safety issues and campaigned to change conditions at work. We demonstrated in alliance with other black groups against police racism. And we did the political groundwork to set up one of the first Asian women’s refuges in the UK. Awaz was not funded by any organisation or authority and we saw ourselves as a political group. We regarded our agitational work – pickets, demonstrations and so on – as inseparable from our efforts to understand and analyse the world. However, we were not always able to reject all the negative legacies of some of the movements we had earlier belonged to. Like them, we demanded ‘total commitment’ and in general did not acknowledge that women had multiple identities quite apart from their identities as activists – as mothers or daughters or partners, for example. This meant that some women found it hard to participate and others did so at great cost to themselves. Throughout those years, our most consistent long-term project was our campaign to set up refuges run by Asian women for Asian women facing domestic violence. Eventually, in the early 1980s, we worked in collaboration with the Asian Women Community Workers Group to set up a refuge in south London which was to be the precursor of the Asha Project. That year, 1981, also saw the first major street battles in which young black men took on the police. They were followed immediately by a major change in the strategy of the state. Police powers and repression increased, with methods imported from Northern Ireland; at the same time black activists were deliberately bought off and installed in well-paid jobs within the newly established and divisive framework of multiculturalism.


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Many black groups folded in this period. We were proud that Awaz survived that first round as it were. But our days as an organisation were numbered. The refuge we had just set up was soon taken over by Asian social workers whose politics were very different from our own. Both feminism and anti-racism were anathema to these women. But they were the preferred ‘representatives’ of Asian women within the emerging multiculturalist framework of the state. Awaz was not prepared for this blow and the organisation collapsed, though, of course, many of its members remained politically active. In hindsight it is clear that Awaz was a victim of its changing relationship with the state. Initially our strategy had been twopronged – we exposed and confronted the state’s racism and violence against women (in the context of immigration for example) and at the same time demanded that the state provide services to Asian women in the context of domestic violence. However, when our demands were partially met – to the extent that we were able to establish a refuge for Asian women – we had no clear strategy on how to handle this new situation since we were working now, inevitably, within the framework of the state. The AWU conference, almost exactly 20 years later, showed quite clearly that the same uncertainties remained. Because we have succeeded in pressurising the state to meet some of our demands, our work in the context of domestic violence is now largely within the remit of state-funded voluntary organisations and projects and statutory services. But as many of us are painfully aware, this does not erase the state’s patriarchal ideology, nor does it make it any less repressive or racist.

ASIAN WOMEN’S REFUGES, FUNDING AND THE STATE While Awaz folded, a large number of other Asian women’s organisations established themselves all over Britain and grew in strength through the 1980s. Southall Black Sisters emerged in this period as a leading feminist organisation based in London, helping women facing domestic violence through its advice centre, playing a campaigning role nationally and mounting legal challenges over specific cases (Gupta 2003). The Asian women’s groups set up in the 1980s, with few exceptions, did not have the charity ethos of many voluntary sector organisations. As Anjona Roy, Chair of Dostiyo, in Northampton explains, ‘these refuges and resource centres were set up by women who had identified


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problems and then come together to solve them. They had ownership of the issues, and looked at them in depth and holistically. It was because of their own experiences that they integrated educational work (about women’s oppression or about how to manage in a racist society) into service provision.’ However, most of these organisations were kept perpetually financially insecure. The Thatcher era, with its public service cuts and attacks on voluntary organisations, saw them constantly in fear of closure. They eventually survived by making political compromises. Many of the early Asian women’s refuges had been set up by women who had themselves experienced domestic violence. Most of them were run as collectives, where in principle at least, power and decision-making were shared by management committees, workers and residents. By the mid-1980s many refuges had to abandon these egalitarian methods. While earlier they had considered themselves accountable to the women who came to them for help, now they found themselves accountable only to funders who demanded hierarchical structures in the name of this ‘accountability’. Increasingly, funding organisations also made it clear, in grant application forms, for example, that they required targets based on a market-oriented philosophy and language. The right outputs and ‘performance indicators’ were now deemed essential. As Muneeza Inam of SBS put it: Helping a woman and her children escape violence, supporting them through a traumatic time … enabling them to have greater control in shaping their own lives … the value of this help to women cannot be measured in terms of hours spent with them and seen in the framework of value for money. (Inam 2003: 57) And yet this is exactly what was imposed on refuges. Their organisational structures too were expected to mirror those of business organisations – with project officers answering to line managers and line managers answering to directors. Starved of funds and seeking desperately to raise them, many Asian women’s refuges became registered charities, since, increasingly, this was the only way to raise the sort of money required to run a refuge. However, this brought them under charity law, which required them to keep clear of anything that could be considered political. By this time, open feminist debate had diminished and collective discussions among residents of refuges were not always prioritised.


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Although ‘educational recovery’ had been incorporated into service provision, in many refuges this work was done in one-to-one discussions with case workers. Given the restrictions of charity law, only in a minority of refuges were residents actively encouraged to inform themselves about current affairs or involve themselves in any political activity outside the organisation. The state and funders had given a clear message that refuges were a business and refuge workers were professionals. But the low wages of refuge workers showed the absurdity of this notion. While in the past committed feminists had accepted these salaries because they felt they were at the heart of a movement, as years passed and many of these women left, those who replaced them often found it hard to cope. As Anjona Roy put it: The pay is so low you could get more doing admin. And it is a complex job. You would have to be able to get doors fixed, change locks, deal with traumatised women with compassion, know the laws, fill in complicated forms on the computer. It really is asking for the impossible.

‘SUPPORTING PEOPLE’ POLICIES In the 1990s there were major changes in the government’s policies relating to so-called ‘social housing’ – or housing for homeless and vulnerable people. The buildings of many Asian women’s refuges were now taken over by Housing Associations, huge organisations managed by the state and funded mainly by charities and state agencies.3 This obviously affected the independence of these refuges. But worse was to come. In April 2003, the government started implementing new policies aimed at restructuring a number of welfare services. Called the Supporting People programme (SP), these policies affected refuges by separating the cost of support services for residents from rent, and funding the former from an SP budget administered through local authorities. By December 2004, cuts of up to 7.5 per cent were already being made to the SP budget (Weaver 2004). The government claims that SP policies offer ‘vulnerable people the opportunity to improve their quality of life by providing a stable environment which enables greater independence’ (see http://www. spkweb.org.uk). In fact, SP has thrown the Asian women’s refuge sector into the worst crisis it has faced. Ila Patel, director of the Asha refuge in London, explained in an interview in February 2005 that since SP was introduced, almost all her time was


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… taken up with working out hour by hour what you do, split services into units and then justify what you are doing. Show that you are ‘strategically relevant’ otherwise you may be ‘decommissioned’. Not surprisingly, you have to see your sister projects as competitors. Ila, like other refuge managers, has to measure the work done in the refuge according to performance indicators which have been set by the government using mainstream generic refuges as a standard. However, written policies say one thing, and the implementers, the local authorities and the plethora of SP consultants say something quite different. For example, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister document (2002), proclaims that the needs and concerns of black and minority ethnic (BME) communities must be reflected in Supporting People policies. But, on an operational level, there is little recognition of the needs of Asian women, and the services and ways of working that have been fought for and established over three decades are being brushed aside as irrelevant. As Shamshad Hussain, who is researching the impact of SP on behalf of Imkaan, explains: ‘Supporting People have used white projects as a bench mark, a standard against which all projects should be assessed. The measuring tools have been endorsed by WAFE (Women’s Aid Federation of England) – basically a white women’s organisation.’ Ila explains a central point of concern. How long can a woman stay in a refuge? We are being told that the average period of stay in our refuge is just too much, but if you have come from South Asia, have then been staying at home, acutely oppressed, it can be overwhelming coming to a refuge. Often you are not able to engage with support services, it takes time. It is at that point – when often mind and body are still disconnected because of the trauma of domestic violence – that we are being asked to give an exact time when a woman would move on – a ‘planned move’. Kate Richardson, the resettlement worker in Asha, confirms this. She has worked at non-BME refuges as well and points out that preparing an Asian woman to live independently may require far more support, and take far longer, particularly in the case of women who have come from South Asian countries and have never lived in Britain on their own. In addition, there are issues of izzat and sharam which make taking a stand against domestic violence, approaching services and making public the details of your life an enormously


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difficult step. The support a woman receives at this point makes all the difference, and without it she may well return to a violent, even life-threatening situation. A similar point was also made to me in 2001 by Anjum Mouj, then director of NAWP: NAWP’s statistics had shown that when a woman leaves a violent relationship the chances of her returning are considerably reduced by appropriate training courses and counselling which help her rebuild her life. At a time when the state appears to be so concerned about Asian women’s human rights in the context of forced marriages and honour crimes, the entirely market-driven SP policies have serious implications for human rights. In one refuge, according to Imkaan’s research, SP consultants insisted that ‘all domestic violence services are required to reduce their outreach work and children’s services by the end of 2005’. Refuge staff reported that they had been told this ‘in an extremely underhand manner, within a cloak of secrecy’ which made them feel ‘really threatened and extremely worried about lack of provision for Asian women’ in the region (Imkaan 2005). Outreach services in the community, are a lifeline for women isolated in their homes. If they are removed or reduced, lives will be lost, because many women and children facing violence will have no means of escape. The cuts in funding for work around children speak of a similar callousness and lack of concern with human rights.

Racism and the fragmentation of services On a local level, many refuge managers are being told by Supporting People consultants, as Ila Patel was, ‘Why in this day and age, do you need Asian women’s refuges, why don’t you merge with generic refuges?’ In other words, Asian women’s refuges are being faced with closure. As Imkaan’s report emphasises, ‘environmental factors are crucial’ and it is important not to underestimate ‘the value of having the same cultural groups sharing refuge space [because] it fosters an enabling process breaking the isolation that Black and Minority Ethnic women often experience’ (2005: n.p.) In generic refuges, with which many Asian women’s refuges are now being asked to merge, these ‘environmental factors’ include racism, implicit and explicit. Ila Patel relates the experiences of a young women who had to be evicted from the Asha refuge:


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This young woman had been abused from an early age. She had no concept of danger either to herself or others, so we were forced to evict her. When I was making arrangements for her, she told me: ‘Please don’t send me to a white refuge.’ She was unable to stop talking about what she had been through. She said when she talked to the other women here, they took it on board but in a mainstream refuge, the women used to be racist and stereotype her and her culture. She found that unbearable. I was involved in documenting similar experiences in Northamptonshire in 1999 in a report commissioned by the Northamptonshire Domestic Violence Black Perspective Task Group (Cooke et al. 1999). Women interviewed at that time described how they had felt in a generic refuge. A woman who had grown up in Britain and had no language problems said: ‘I felt so alone. All the white women were together; they didn’t speak to me. I wished that there was another Asian girl like me there. I would have had someone to talk to.’ Another woman described her experiences of sharing kitchen facilities: Everyone cooked in the same kitchen. There was no possibility of keeping halal things separate. The English women made it worse if I complained. They would use lard even more and spread it around. Those women were racist inside, outside they were nice. In the Northamptonshire study we found a remarkable scale and depth of racism in service provision. An Asian woman worker had told us, ‘Racism exists in one form or another in all services … this can take the form of lack of cultural awareness and understanding, racial stereotyping, as well as direct racist and discriminatory practices.’ Today in Northamptonshire, Anjona Roy says that racism is more intense. There is Islamophobia, there are all the racist policies which are being directed at asylum seekers, and there are also the growing activities of the BNP. All this means inevitably that the context in which Asian women have to interact with services providers is affected. Northamptonshire is not an exception in this respect. In the heart of a large Asian community in the north of England, Keighley Women’s Aid refuge had no Asian worker and no Asian women in the refuge for much of the 1990s. According to Shamshad Hussain,


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the women running the refuge appeared offended when asked why this was: They seemed to think I was racist for asking. They didn’t want to discuss it openly. It was like – as white working-class women, we are all subject to abuse, and being working class we should not be accused of racism. Eventually I rang up WAFE (Women’s Aid Federation) in Bristol. They told me that they had no governance or monitoring role in local refuges. (interview with author) Much has been written about how black women’s voices have impacted upon the discourses of feminism, but these experiences suggest that on a day-to-day level they have had very little influence on the practice of many white-dominated women’s organisations. Asian women’s needs cannot be met without an awareness of racism and a real commitment to fight it and the employment of Asian workers is a part of this. The Oldham Family Crisis Centre is interesting in this respect. It runs a generic refuge and second-stage accommodation and employs eight Asian workers. It also employs Asian women doing outreach work. Asked whether she thought there was a need for specialist Asian women’s refuges, Jenny Taylor, the coordinator of the centre, said: I think there is and women should have a choice; we have had women who say they want to go to an Asian women’s refuge and they should be able to. Providing specialist services is in essence simply about meeting the needs of our service users and doing it respectfully – being guided by them. She agreed that many generic refuges did not do this. ‘Race issues are hugely significant in all this’, she said, ‘South Asian women have experienced racism in some generalist refuges – which call themselves generalist but are really white women’s refuges.’ Under SP, a different contracted agency interacts with each aspect of a woman’s life. This leads to a fragmentation of services and the holistic nature of a woman’s recovery is not seen as anyone’s business. Ila tells of a young woman who had severe mental health problems: We were not able to support her alone and we had to send her to statutory services, but Asha carried on providing support. She eventually did a training presentation for us about her support needs. She arrived with a number of pieces of paper. She pinned one on the board, we did not know what


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to make of it because it was empty, then she pinned another piece, also empty. When there were only a few pieces left we could see that it was a bird, totally fragmented. She saw the services as totally fragmented, not meeting, not holistic. Supporting People policies are doing away with the very mechanisms that make women stronger – holistic treatment, educational recovery time, the creation of safe spaces where women’s experiences can be validated without fear of racism, outreach work and much else – but they are being couched in terms of choice, independence, even empowerment of the vulnerable. In fact, in some refuges residents’ opinions on services are being collated by SP staff, presumably in the interests of their ‘making a choice’. Imkaan’s research reveals how this ‘choice’ operates in reality: in one refuge workers noted, ‘we have one service being reviewed by a questionnaire, with little regard as to the literacy skills of women or whether they were able to fully participate in this’; in another they commented, ‘users were interviewed without staff present and without an interpreter. They got by because they used only English-speaking residents. This cannot be right’ (Imkaan 2005: n.p.). The Supporting People programme has been accompanied by very substantial cuts in legal services and, of course, by the increasing privatisation of the welfare sector. The underlying rationale of these policies is clear enough – vulnerable people are costing the state too much and they will be increasingly abandoned as Britain moves towards American-style welfare provision. The ideological message is that the withdrawal of the state from all responsibility is actually empowering for the individual, even if their survival is threatened.

FEMINISM IS NEEDED MORE THAN EVER As a movement we are now forced to defend what we have pressurised the state into providing us over the last 25 years. But we cannot do this effectively without an analysis of the concepts that are being used to justify the attacks – without taking apart the notion of ‘choice’, for example, which legitimises the withdrawal of services under the Supporting People policies and is also the message of the market as it insists that women can have it all and that those who cannot are ‘losers’. We also need to question the neoliberal interpretation of women’s empowerment, which does not acknowledge, or confront, the


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structures of women’s oppression, but ignores them, insisting that women can all be ‘powerful’, without taking power away from anyone else. At the AWU conference many of us felt that we needed to look once again at our own lives and those of other Asian women, at day-to-day pressures and conflicts and battles over issues of gender. We agreed that we needed from the base of these everyday experiences to build a transformational feminist politics, because now, in this supposedly post-feminist era, feminism is needed more than ever before. This kind of feminist politics cannot be primarily about negotiating rights from the state but is about changing structures of power and, inseparable from this, changing our outlook on the world. Many of us felt that in the new phase of British and American imperialism we cannot do this without building alliances and strengthening those which already exist – for example with women refugees from different parts of the world whose experiences have so much in common with ours. To be effective these alliances must be made outside the framework of the state. This is the crucial but enormously difficult objective AWU has set itself – more so in this phase when progressive movements with broad and transformational politics are few and far between. Whether it succeeds or not remains to be seen. What we do know is that when we bring our separate, often very different struggles as women together, they make each of us stronger where we stand. The women who spoke to me in the years that led up to the writing of this book told me of experiences which bear this out: the Burnsall strikers who, in the middle of an exhausting strike, found the energy to travel to London to show solidarity with low-paid refugee workers; Varsha, who fought patriarchal violence at home, took on racist immigration authorities and won, then against all odds helped to organise a self-help group for women facing the Two-Year Rule; and many others. In this period, when women’s struggles are both denied and portrayed as deviant, these voices remind us that we must acknowledge our battles and use them to reflect on the world we want.


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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. ‘Manpreet’ is a pseudonym. Pseudonyms of interviewees and informants are given in quote marks on their first appearance. A discussion of some of Manpreet’s experiences is to be found in Chapter 1. 2. In August 2005, Tony Blair announced plans for a number of changes in the law that signal a move to a far more authoritarian state. If these changes are made, the government will have the power to deport people (in contravention of Britain’s Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights) to countries that are known to practise torture. It will also be able to close places of worship, strip citizenship from existing naturalised citizens and widen the criteria for banning organisations. While the offence of ‘indirect incitement’ is already being considered, Blair’s latest proposal extends this to ‘justifying or validating’ the use of violence. As Tony Bunyan of the civil liberties group Statewatch says: The concept of what will become a crime seems to be slipping dangerously … Does this mean that anyone seeking to understand – without condoning – the use of violence will be classified as ‘justifying or validating’ it? If so, it will constitute a major threat to the freedom of expression and the freedom of the press. (Pallister 2005)

1 THE NEW ‘GOOD WOMAN’: RECONSTRUCTING PATRIARCHAL CONTROL 1. These lines are taken from a song by Samia Malik based on the translation from Urdu into English by Rukhsana Ahmad (Ahmad 1990) of an Urdu poem, ‘Anticlockwise’, by Kishwar Naheed. 2. The description of a woman as ‘her father’s elder brother’s daughter’ reflects the hierarchy of age within the extended family. 3. There were diverse sites of struggle between patriarchal values and those values that challenged them, ranging from exclusively female knowledge of natural medicine to irreverent songs and erotic poetry produced by and for women. Much of this was systematically crushed in the early colonial period. See, for example, Banerjee (1989) and Tharu and Lalita (1993). 4. See ‘Living without fear – an integrated approach to tackling violence against women’, available online: http://www.womens-unit.gov.uk/../1999/ fear/index.htm; and BBC News 22 June 2004, bbb.co.uk 5. I discuss Manpreet’s experiences in some detail because they help us to locate sexual abuse within the wider context of patriarchal relations and reveal how taking on the abusers can become a broader struggle against women’s oppression. 172


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6. During the trial of a particularly gruesome case in the Sessions Court in Delhi, the rapist, who had gouged out the victim’s eye, proposed that he be allowed to marry the victim ‘to wash off her stigma and re-establish her in society’. The judge took up the offer and delayed the judgement, giving the victim time to consider the proposal! When the victim refused, the judge then awarded the rapist a life sentence, saying the ‘last-minute marriage offer’ was ‘malafide’, since the accused had not expressed remorse throughout the trial (Liberation, Central Organ of the CPI(M) June 2005.

2 A THING OF BEAUTY AND A BOY FOREVER – CHANGING MASCULINITIES 1. When Punjab came under British rule in 1849, the peasants had a right to farm the land but had not owned it in the sense of being able to sell it off. The British established individual property rights, and a heavy land revenue tax. They also established a new law of inheritance that ignored all customary laws which gave women rights to land. When a man died his land was now equally divided among his sons. The farms, small to start with, became even smaller as a result of the inheritance law. After India became independent the first major changes came with the so-called Green Revolution in the 1960s. 2. The collective struggles of immigrant workers in this period were for decent wages, equality with white workers, better health and safety conditions, and job security; in these struggles they had to take on racist employers and often racist trade union officials as well. Sometimes, particularly in the 1970s and even in the 1990s, in the Burnsall strike, for example, these experiences brought together Asians across differences of religion and country of origin. Sikh–Muslim hostility did not affect these day-today struggles. 3. Vivek Chaudhary (1995) reports on the rape committed by a Sikh priest and Anita Johal tells of assaults carried out by a Hindu priest (Johal 2003: 36). 4. Even women who have married for love against their parents’ wishes have, in certain instances, when the marriage breaks down, been told that they are ‘cheap’ or ‘available’ because, as a woman from Azad Kashmir told me, ‘if you left your family for me, then you could easily leave me for another man’. 5. Similar pressures have been identified elsewhere, among African-American youth for example, and have been discussed in the context of the rise of drug-related crime, which is also an issue for communities like those in Luton. 6. Muslims and Hindus showed solidarity as workers in the Grunwick strike, for example, with no question of any feelings of hostility. 7. In 1992, the Sangh Parivar organisations demolished a fifteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh. Sadhvi Ritambara, a high-profile female Hindu activist, incited the crowds, urging men to remasculinise themselves by attacking Muslims. 8. Tanika Sarkar, describing the pattern of sexual violence, wrote:


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Dreams, Questions, Struggles The pattern of cruelty suggests three things. One, the woman’s body was a site of almost inexhaustible violence, with infinitely plural and innovative forms of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with a special savagery. Third their children, born and unborn shared the attacks and were killed before their eyes. (Sarkar 2002)

3 ‘MERCY AND WISDOM OF A GOVERNMENT’? RACE, CULTURE AND IMMIGRATION CONTROL 1. Violent men seeking contact with their children have successfully used multicultural arguments – that the children will suffer a loss of cultural identity because the woman would place herself outside the community once she left her husband (M. Patel 2003: 106). 2. There was also the humiliating and sometimes traumatic examination of genitals of children and elderly people seeking to join their relatives in Britain. 3. They were now not eligible for income support, job seekers’ allowance, housing benefit, disability living allowance, incapacity benefit or NHS treatment, and child benefit for their children can only be claimed by their husbands. 4. The lengthening of the probationary period also means that women are more likely to conceive, and that they and their children have to live in life-threatening conditions for a longer period. 5. There are also those labelled ‘overstayers’, these are women whose position has not been regularised by their husbands (the application form has to be signed by the partner settled in Britain) and who, through no fault of their own, are now ‘illegal’. In practice someone can become an ‘overstayer’ and have their application rejected even if it has been delayed for as little as three days. 6. While it is true that even the most isolated women are usually at least able to visit their GP, this often proves useless in terms of leaving a violent marriage, first because a women in this position would rarely visit a GP unless accompanied by family members and, second, because many GPs have been known to ignore or trivialise domestic violence. 7. ‘Black and Ethnic Minority’ refuges, which are often poorly funded organisations, are those who are most likely to take in women with no recourse to public funds who have been turned away by well-funded mainstream organisations. 8. The Council of Europe defines crimes of honour as follows: … a crime that is, or has been justified or explained (or mitigated) by the perpetrator of that crime on the grounds that it was committed as a consequence of the need to defend or protect the honour of the family … The use of the term ‘honour’ in this regard should be treated with considerable scepticism as it is the perpetrator of a particular crime who is allowed to define the meaning of honour. Thus shifting the emphasis from the fact that a crime has been committed against the victim and may allow the perpetrator of the crime to ‘manufacture’ a relationship so as to construct a defence for the crime and suppress real motives. (Gill 2004a: 33)


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4 MAKING A SPECTACLE OF ONESELF – SOUTH ASIAN WEDDINGS IN BRITAIN 1. Newly married women – Punjabi, Kashmiri and Gujarati – whom I had interviewed for my book Finding a Voice (1978), had not worn lenghas at their weddings. 2. British Asian brides in their mid-twenties sometimes adopt the doli as part of their wedding ceremonies. This is not meant to be a subversion of patriarchal values, however. It is an appropriation of images by the market, with the doli being taken out of its historical and cultural context and placed in a totally different one – of a woman feeling fulfilled and valued because she is being carried ceremonially on the shoulders of male relatives. 3. According to Brides magazine, the average cost of a wedding in Britain has risen by 20 per cent since 2001 and is now (2004) £17,739. However, weddings, as opposed to registry office marriages, appear to be far more common among South Asians in Britain than among the English. The expenses involved in British Asian weddings are enormous, even in working-class families. Sobia’s wedding, for example, was due to cost £25,000. Her parents are from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir and have a small corner shop in Luton. She regards the expenditure for the planned wedding as ‘quite modest’. It will include a week of singing by friends and relatives of the bride at her home, which is traditional in Azad Kashmir, and will mean serving food for at least 20 each evening; two Mehendi (henna) ceremonies – one for the bride and one for the groom – which will involve the cost of hiring two halls and catering for 200 guests each; the Nikkah or engagement ceremony, a few days later, again requiring a hall and catering for 300–400 guests; then the Ruchti, which will involve another hall and catering ‘of the highest standard’ for around 400; and finally there will be the Waleemah – the ceremony hosted by the groom with hall and catering expenses for another 400. In addition, there would be outfits for each occasion, cash and gold rings for the groom, presents for the groom’s family and costly presents for the couple, including furniture and gadgets from the bride’s parents. In other words, all the elements of a ‘traditional’ Azad Kashmiri wedding have been retained but, as in Azad Kashmir today, the consumption involved has been magnified several times over, and in the British market costs even more. 4. Dowries are not part of Islamic tradition and till recently they were not known in Bangladesh, but they are effectively routine in the Bangladeshi community in Britain.

5

PSYCHIATRY, VIOLENCE AND MENTAL DISTRESS

1. In Poppy Banerjee’s opinion, despite their lack of faith in GPs, women often do turn to them for help, but GP referrals for counselling still remain few and far between. Their attitude tends to be, ‘Why do you want to go to talk to someone else?’, reflecting a peculiar patriarchal possessiveness and also perhaps a lack of faith in talking therapies.


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6 CONTESTING (MIS)REPRESENTATIONS 1. Second Generation was a drama centred on the family of a Brick Lane businessman. No Angels is a series focusing on the lives of four nurses in Leeds.

7 STILL FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE – LOW-PAID WORKERS IN A GLOBAL MARKET 1. Farm labourers are described, for example, by Tom Davies of Provista, a labour provider: ‘British nationals who drifted in and out of the labour market … superseded by refugees who in turn have now been replaced’ (The Economist, 6–12 November 2004: 41). 2. This is also true of women in ‘professional’ jobs in Britain (see discussion in Chapter 1). 3. However celebrated the strike may have been, by and large, working-class and middle-class professional Asian women today have not heard of it. 4. For details see the TUC website http://www.tuc.org.uk/law/tuc-7395f0.cfm

8

DREAMS, QUESTIONS AND STRUGGLES – REFLECTIONS ON A MOVEMENT

1. AWU resolutions covered custody law, employment, education, mental health, the war on Iraq, the rise of right-wing religious groups in South Asia and the funding of Asian women’s groups in Britain. 2. These challenges included the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, who killed her abusive husband and was given a life sentence, but was released after a major campaign by SBS (P. Patel 2003). 3. Social housing is now dominated by huge organisations (7 per cent of Housing Associations – those with 2,500 plus homes – own 78 per cent of all the sectors’ homes), and while they are ostensibly not ‘profit-making’, they do in fact make profits which are then ploughed back into housing. In other words, they not only pay for themselves out of the rent they charge to homeless and vulnerable people – and many housing associations charge market rents to these ‘customers’ – but actually make a surplus out of this, which then masquerades as new state funding for housing.


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Index

abortion, 19 Abraham, Margaret, 85 Afghanistan, 52, 80 African Caribbean, 38, 73, 76 agency, 35, 88, 128 agricultural crisis, 141 Ahluwalia, Kiranjit, 176 Ahmad, Rukhsana, 172 Ahmed, Leila, 23 Akal Purkh ki Fauj, 49 alcoholism, 47–9 and domestic violence, 47 Alexander, Claire, 75 Ali, Nasreen, 51 Amnesty International, 83–4 anorexia, 26 Anthias, Floya, 3 anti-war demonstrations, 56 Archer, Louise, 52 arranged marriage, 10, 11, 18, 26, 28, 62, 89, 106–8 pathologisation of, 86 Asha Project, 162 Asian identity, 1, 16, 44, 74, 173 Asian Bride magazine, 96, 99, 101 Asian Women Community Workers’ Group, 162 Asian Women Unite!, 5, 163 national conference, 159 resolutions, 176 Asian women’s refuges, 163–70 assimilation, 74 Asylum legislation, 78, 153 and gender persecution, 82 Awaz, 161 Awaaz – South Asia Watch Ltd, 69 Azad Kashmir, 50, 51, see also Kashmiri community Ayodhya, 173 badnami, 2 Baghban, 135–6 bahu, 99–101

Banerjee, Poppy, 121, 175 Barelwis, 54–5 Bassi, Surinder, 152 Bend it like Beckham, 137, 138 Berger, John, 25, 36 Bezti,13 Bhabha, Jacqueline, 77 Bhaji on the Beach, 138 Bhangra, 48 Bhanot, Savita, 61 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 67, 69, 134 Bhatt, Chetan, 44 Bhopal, Kalwant, 106 Big Dreams, 130 biraderi, 50, 51, 54 Black Health Workers’ and Patients’ Group, 112 Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) refuges, 166, 167, 174, see also Asian women’s refuges Blunkett, David, MP, 86 Bollywood, 41, 96, 98–9, 134, 137 Bradford, 75 Brah, Avtar, 3, 4 Brides magazine, 175 Briggs, Jack and Zena, 91 British Airways, 149 Bukhari, Shahnaz, 81, 83 Bulhan, Hussein Abdilahi, 112 bulimia, 26 Bunyan, Tony, 172 Burnsall’s, 148, 149–55, 158, see also strikes Care Homes, 145–7 carers’ groups, 122 Caste, 11, 14, 18, 32, 46 in marriage, 18 and purity, 18 and women’s groups, 64 and redefinition of traditions, 65 villages based on, 51

184

Wilson 03 index 184

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Index CEDAW (UN Convention for Elimination of Discrimination Against Women), 25 Chadha, Gurinder, 137 Chakravarti, Uma, 12 Chamars, 44, 144 Chandlo, 104 Children Act 1989, 84 Charity Law, 164 Chaudhary, Vivek, 173 ‘choice’, notion of, 3, 91, 92, 170 Chudasama, Champa, 145, 151 citizenship, 86 colonialism, 13–14, 88–9, 104, 105 struggles against patriarchy, 172 and masculinity, 44 and migration, 14 and laws of inheritance, 173 Community (trade union), 148 community leaders, 56, 74–5 Conterio, K., 119 conversions, fear of, 66 Coronation Street, 1 Crawley, Heaven, 73 crimes of honour, see also honour crimes/killings, 174 Cryer, Ann, 87 culture, 8, 11, 73, 74, 75, 93 and honour, 93–5 British, 8 modern Gujarati Hindu, 63–4 and culture, 111 changes in Gujarati Hindu culture since 1990, 66 ‘cultural expertise’, 7 Dar ul Aman, 83 Desai, Jayaben, 60, 153 Dhaliwal, Sukhwant, 47 Dhingra, Leena, 133 Disco Dandia, 19 discourses of female inferiority, 12 of hindutva, 68 of the media, 7–8, 88 of weddings, 99 patriarchal, 73 racist, 50, 88 division of labour, 29–31

Wilson 03 index 185

185

Diwali, 62, 65 domestic labour, 11, 27–30, 109 changing nature of, 30 and violence, 30 and labouring jobs outside the home, 30 domestic violence, 34, 72, 78, 122, 126, 166 and agency, 34 and alcoholism, 47 and mental distress, 115 and Two-Year Rule, 81–5 Dosityo, 159, 163 Dowries, 2, 15, 43, 62 and class, 108 and Green Revolution, 43, 105 escalation, 104–6 among Patels, 105–6 among Punjabis, 104—5 East African Asians, 14 East African Asian refugees, 131 East is East, 131–4 Employment Tribunals, 155, 157, 158 empowerment, 170, 171 era of partnership, 155–8 European Convention on Human Rights, 172 faith communities, 48 The Far Pavillions, 128 farm workers, 139–45 Favazza, A.R., 119 female infanticide, 14 female sexuality, 10, 12, 13, 15, 36 lesbian, 21–2 femininity, 25, 42 feminism, 3, 170–71 feminist, 3 debates, 164 historians, 8, 88 post-, 3 perspective on Forced Marriage, 89 Fenton, S., 112 Forced Marriage, 86–8, 89–91 and ‘choice’, 91–2 as a specific crime, 92

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186


Forced Marriage Initiative, 76, 86–8, 90–1 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), 86, 90–1 Francis, Errol, 112 Futter’s strike, 129, 148, 162 GMB (General and Municipal Boilermakers), 154 GPs, 120, 174 Galiara, Zahira, 77 Gambinos, 57 gangs, 49, 50 Gangmasters Licensing Act, 140 Gardiner, Barry, MP, 69 Gardner, Joy, 78 Gate Gourmet, 149, 158 Gates, Paul, 148, 155 George Mitchell School, 17 Ghar se Ghar, 121, 123–4 Ghaus, Shakeel, 51 Ghosh, Chandra, 111, 125 Gill, Aisha, 85, 119, 174 Gill, Santokh Singh, 47 girls (aged 14–18), 16–22 global capital, 13–15 global workers 139–45 Godhra, 69 Goodness Gracious Me!, 133 Green Revolution, 43, 48, 105 and violence against women, 49 and dowries, 105 Grunwick’s strike, 129, 148, 149, 150–1, 162, 173 Gujarat massacres, 70 Gujarati community, 59–71 and Britishness, 63 history of migration, 59 marriage partners, 62 Gupta, Rahila, 163 Guru Govind, 48 Hai, Yasmin, 19 Halal, 123, 168 Ham Aap ke Hain Koun (HAHK), 134, 137 Harrison, D., 119 Highfield Minimum Wage Project, 145, 156

Wilson 03 index 186

Hijab, 22–5 Hillingdon Hospital, 148 Hindu Swayamsevak Samaj (HSS), 67 Hindu Sevika Samati (Samiti), 67 Hindutva, 68–71 Home Office, 72, 79, 80, 81, 82–3, 88, 90, 91 pathologising of South Asian marriage, 86 home-workers, 147 honour killings 15, 33, 93, 94–5, see also crimes of honour ‘honour’ and the media, 94 ‘honour’ and multiculturalism, 93 Housing Associations, 165, 176 Hudood Ordinance, 81 Human Rights Act, 172 Human Rights Watch, 70 Hussain, Shamshad, 75, 166, 168 Imkaan, 5, 84, 159, 167, 170 Immigration Act 1971, 76, 78 Immigration and Asylum Act 2004, 84 Immigration Appeals Tribunal, 80 Imperial Typewriters, 129, 148, 157 Inam, Muneeza, 164 Indian Workers’ Association (GB), 140, 151 infidelity gene, 7 Inqilab, South Asia Solidarity Group, 125 International Initiative for Justice, 68, 69, 70 Islam, demonisation of, 75 Islamic Human Rights Commission, 24 Islamic groups, new, 54–7 isolation, 115 izzat, 2, 13, 15, 21, 33, 36, 39, 49, 166 and property, 63 and capacity to consume, 63 Islam, Shahara, 26 Jabin, Talat, 80 Jafar, Abdulrahman, 57 James, Oliver, 20, 26

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Index Jats, 42, 46, 48, 143 and masculinity, 49 and production of sons, 43 Johal, Anita, 173 Johal, Sarbjit, 46 Joseph, Sarah, 57 Jouhl, Avtar, 140, 141, 144, 148 Jehangir, Asma, 81 Kabhi Khushie Kabhi Gham, 41, 134, 135, 137 Kabeer, Naila, 15, 143 Kandiyoti, Deniz, 29 Kashmir valley, 52 Kashmiri community, 50–5, 57–9 Kassam, Nadya, 22 Kaur, Darshan, 150, 152 Kaur, Jasbir, 112 Kelkar, Govind, 8 Khalistani ideology, 48 Kotli, 51 Kumar, Ram, 48 Kumars at No 42, 133 Lengha, 96, 97, 98, 99 lesbian, 21–2 Liberation CPI(ML), 173 Londec (London Development Education Centre), 17 low pay, 139–59 Low Pay Commission, 155 Luton, 57–9, 62, 121–5 Luton and Dunstable Hospital, 123 Lyon, Alex, MP, 78 male gaze, 25, 27, 62, 144 Malik, Samia, 172 Mamdani, Mahmood, 43 Mani, Lata, 89 market, 8, 14, 26, 27, 58, 59, 63, 136 and male gaze, 25, 27, 36 marriage negotiations, 105–8 masculinity, 41–71 and class inequalities, 16 and colonialism, 43 and emotions, 43 and insecurity, 61 and multiculturalism, 48, 64

Wilson 03 index 187

187

and nurturing, 61 and ‘others’, 43 and right-wing Hindu groups, 66–6 what is ‘normal’ for a man, 126 mass picket, 151, 154 mental health, 111–27 Mental Health Act 1983, 123 Mental Health Bill (2004), 127 Merali, Arzu, 24 Milni, 101, 103 militaristic ideology, 49, 53 miners strike, 151 Minimum Wage Project, Highfield, 145, 156 Modi, Anjali, 93 mothers and control of daughters, 30–2 mothers and violence, 32–4 motor industry, 147, 148, 149 Mouj, Anjum, 167 Multiculturalism, 64, 70, 94 and community leaders, 56, 74–5 and ethnicity, 74 justifying violence, 174 Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), 23, 56 Muslim Council of Britain, 56 Merali, Arzu, 24 Mirpur, 51, 175 Mukta, Parita, 29 NRI (non-resident Indian), 100, 137 Nagalia Shubhra, 70 Naheed, Kishwar, 172 Nathan, Dev, 8 National Hindu Students’ Forum (NHSF), 61, 68 Naz, Farah, 47 Naz, Rukshana, 32–3, 91 Newham Asian Women’s Project (NAWP), 112, 120, 159 No Angels, 129, 176 No Recourse to Public Funds Rule, 83–5 ‘normal’ woman, 116 North West Frontier Province (NWFP), 9, 80–81

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188


Northamptonshire Domestic Violence Black Perspective Task Force, 168 O’Brien, Mike, MP, 94 ODPM (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister), 166 Oldenburg, Veena Talwar, 14, 103, 104 Oldham, 5, 30, 72 Oldham Family Crisis Centre, 169 Oldham Law Centre, 80, 85 OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent), 161 outreach services, 167, 169 Patel community, history of, 105 Patel, Ila, 165, 167 Patel, Kalaben, 153 Patel, Kiran, 61, 106 Patel, Meena, 174 Pathak, Ila, 70 Patriarchal assumptions, of welfare state, 125 patriarchal bargain, 29 patriarchal control, reconstructing, 7–40 patriarchal gaze, British, 25 patriarchal ideology, 8, 15, 126 and female sexuality, 36 Taliban, 53 Western, 19, 27 patriarchal oppression, roots of, 7–15 patriarchal relations British, 19–20 reshaping of, 64 and migration, 44 and potential for change, 44 Pettman, Jan Jindy, 161 Phoenix, Ann, 57 Pirs, 54, 55 ‘A Place to stay …’, 5 police attitudes to domestic violence, 85, 122 honour crimes, 93 Greater Manchester, 130 racism, 85, 129–30

Wilson 03 index 188

policing of women, 143 power relations between women, 29 shifts in, 29 and sexual abuse, 35 Prasad, Raekha, 145 Probationary period, 78–86, 174 Primary Purpose Rule, 78 Prozac, 126 Psychiatrists (Royal College of), 127 Psychiatry, 111–27 and culture, 111 and violence, 111–27 Punjabi community, 41–50 purity, 10, 12, 18 and caste 14 Qu’ran, 25 Quigley, Joe 155 Racism anti-Muslim, 49, 50–2, 75, 132 and collective identities, 44, 173 defined away, 129–30 discourses, 50 at work, 44 internalised, 28 in generic refuges, 167–9 and immigration, 76–88 police, 85, 129–30 in service provision, 168 Ramgariahs, 44 Ramji, Hasmita, 29 Rao, Aparna, 10 Rashid, Pari, 121 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Samaj (RSS), 67 refugees, 78, 153, 171 rehab, 118 Rehman, Urmi, 97, 99 relocation (in Pakistan), 81 religious conversion, fear of, 66 reputation (good name), 63 Ritambara, Sadhvi, 173 Roshni (Luton), 121 Roy, Anjona, 163, 165, 168 Roy, Beth, 5 Rushdie, Salman, 51

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Index Sadiq, A., 112 Said, Edward, 50 Samad, Fauzia, 91 Sangari, Kumkum, 88, 89 Sangh Parivar, 66, 70, 173 and patriarchal relations, 67 Sangharika, Prafulla, 125 Sapne, Sawal aur Larai conference, 159 Sarkar, Tanika, 100, 173 Sarwar, Beena, 81 Sati, 88–9 Second Generation, 129, 176 Secret Policeman, 130 sexual abuse, 35–40 sexual liberation, 20 sexuality control over, 7–21 lesbian, 21–2 sexualisation of identity, 11, 22 Shah, Nafisa, 15 Shah-Islam case, 82 Shaikh, Zaiby, 47 Sharam, 12, 25, 35, 166 Sharma, Krishna, 160 Shutter, Sue, 77 secondary action, 151 self-harm, 119–21 Sewa International (UK), 69 sexual abuse, 35–40 Shashidharan, Shashi P., 112 Siddiqui, Hannana, 87, 90, 91, 93, 160 Siddiqui, Ghyasuddin, 53 Sikh community, 42–50 Sikh.net, 47, 48 Sivanandan, A., 70 Skychef, 148 Smethwick, 147 social housing, 176 solidarity strikes, 151 South Asia Solidarity Group, 71, 151 Southall Black Sisters, 71, 79, 121, 159, 160, 163 state and gender inequalities, 73 interactions with patriarchal power, 3 and race, racism, 72–95, 112

Wilson 03 index 189

189

reinforcing patriarchal relations, 76 managing patriarchy, 95 and patriarchal violence, 117 Statewatch, 172 Strategy on Women’s Mental Health, 125 strikes Burnsall’s, 148, 149–55, 158 Chix, 148 Futter’s, 129, 148, 162 Grunwick’s, 129, 148, 149, 150–1, 162, 173 Imperial Typewriters, 129, 148, 157 service sector, 148, 149 Suicide, 116, 119 Support groups, 151, 154 Supporting People Policy, 80, 165–70 and fragmentation, 170 and human rights, 169 sweatshops, 147–55 Sweeney, Anne Marie, 150, 152, 154 Sweeting, Helen, 26 Sylhet, 10, 97, 113, 114 syncretic culture, 68 syncretic religious practice, 71 Sufism, 54 Tabligh I Jamaat, 55–6 Taliban, 53, 80 Taylor, Jenny, 169 Tinker, Hugh, 14 Trade Union Congress (TUC), 151 trade union leadership, 154 trade union recruitment, 155 Two-Year Rule, 72, 76, 78–83, 160 Union of Post Office Workers, 151 US global strategy, 75 and Kashmir, 53 US laws on ‘abused immigrant spouses and children’, 85 US style of welfare provision, 170 Vaid, Sudesh, 88, 89 Valium, 126 Vaisakhi, 47

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190


Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 67 violence, see also domestic violence and British masculinity, 49 and control of women’s sexuality, 46 and gangs, 50 against women and Green Revolution, 43 against women, Labour government’s approach, 72 against women and the market, 14–5 virgin marrying a, 20 notion of, 20 virginity tests, 162 WAFE (Women’s Aid Federation of England), 166, 169 ‘War on terror’, 70, 94 Weaver, Matt, 165 Weddings, 96–110 Azad Kashmiri, 175

Wilson 03 index 190

expenditure, 103–8, 175 Punjabi song, 9 West, Patrick, 26 Wilson, Kalpana, 75 Women as commodities, 15, 58 as credible witnesses, 77 colonial images of, 128 as possessions, 10, 15, 51 Women of 10 Downing Street, 150, 155 women’s agency, 88, 128 Woodley, Tony, 158 Work care home workers, 145–7 unpaid domestic labour, 27–30 farm workers, 139–45 low paid, 139–58 World Trade Organisation, 141 Young women (aged 14–18), 16–22 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 3 Zindaagi Project, 121

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Wilson 03 index 191

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Wilson 03 index 192

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Wilson 03 index 193

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Wilson 03 index 194

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Wilson 03 index 195

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Wilson 03 index 196

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Wilson 03 index 197

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Wilson 03 index 198

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