This book explores the lives and struggles of two generations of British Asian women to present a political account of their experiences: personal and public, individual and collective, their struggles take on power structures within the family, the community and, on occasion, the British state.
Combining their personal testimony within a theoretical framework, Amrit Wilson locates their experiences in the wider context of global and regional politics. She examines what impact the feminist movement has had on their lives, and explores issues such as domestic violence, Asian marriages, representations of Asian women, mental disturbance and suicide.
This book explores the lives and struggles of two generations of British Asian women to present a political account of their experiences: personal and public, individual and collective, their struggles take on power structures within the family, the community and, on occasion, the British state.
Combining their personal testimony within a theoretical framework, Amrit Wilson locates their experiences in the wider context of global and regional politics. She examines what impact the feminist movement has had on their lives, and explores issues such as domestic violence, Asian marriages, representations of Asian women, mental disturbance and suicide.
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Overview
This book explores the lives and struggles of two generations of British Asian women to present a political account of their experiences: personal and public, individual and collective, their struggles take on power structures within the family, the community and, on occasion, the British state.
Combining their personal testimony within a theoretical framework, Amrit Wilson locates their experiences in the wider context of global and regional politics. She examines what impact the feminist movement has had on their lives, and explores issues such as domestic violence, Asian marriages, representations of Asian women, mental disturbance and suicide.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745318479 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2006 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.47(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Amrit Wilson is the author of Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain (Pluto, 2006), The Challenge Road: Women in the Eritrean Revolution (1991) and US Foreign Policy and Revolution: the creation of Tanzania (Pluto, 1989) and the co-editor of The Future that Works: Selected writings of A.M.Babu (2002).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The New 'Good Woman': Reconstructing Patriarchal Control
Even if my eyes become the soles of your feet This fear will not leave you ...
(From 'Anticlockwise' by Kishwar Naheed)
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)
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 market-led 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 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,
(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 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 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 '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.
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 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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dreams, Questions, Struggles"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Amrit Wilson.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The new 'good woman': reconstructing patriarchal control
3. A thing of beauty and a boy forever - changing masculinities
4. 'Mercy and Wisdom of a government'? Race, Culture and Immigration Control
5. Making a spectacle of oneself -South Asian weddings in Britain
6. Psychiatry, violence and mental distress
7. Contesting (mis)representations
8. Still fighting for justice -low-paid workers in a global market
9. Dreams, questions and struggles - reflections on a movement
Notes
Bibliography