Age, Narrative and Migration: The Life Course and Life Histories of Bengali Elders in London 9781474214278, 9781859733134

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Acknowledgements The Leverhulme Trust provided me with funding for 1996–7, enabling me to carry out the research on which this book is based, while the Research Development Fund at the University of Sussex funded an additional researcher on the project. Thanks are also due to my colleagues at the University of Sussex for allowing me additional research leave. In London, Mutmahim Roaf, Rupert and Rotna Williams, Kate Gavron, Hasina Haque, Mainul Haque, Abdus Shukur and Carol Yarde provided me with valuable help in setting up the research. Hajji Tasleem, The Palliative Care team at the London Hospital, Cathy Masterstone, Jane Eisenhower and Gulrook Begum were also generous in giving me their time. Sincere thanks too, to Asia Begum, Soa Bibi, Aymona Khatun and Malika Khanun, whose friendship touched me deeply. Papers based on some of the chapters included in the book were presented at departmental seminars at the University of Sussex; SOAS; the University of Manchester; the London School of Economics; and UCL. Conferences in which the research was presented include: The Life History Conference held by SOAS in 1998; the workshop on Transnational Migration and Household Ritual held at the University of Sussex in 2000; and the workshop on A Question of Identity held at the University of London in 1997. I am most grateful to colleagues at all these events for their comments. Finally I would like to thank Caroline Osella, John Eade, Naila Kabeer, Ralph Grillo and Fenella Cannell for their comments, help and encouragement.

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–1– Journeys, Age and Narrative: An Introduction One has constantly to learn in two directions: outwardly, toward the culture of the new home and inwards, toward relearning what one knew from the old. These crossed frontiers mark our personal biographies. They are the lines of forgetting and remembering, as from family photographs, old letters, documents of passage and new memorials Feuchtwang (1992: 5–6).

This is a book about journeys, about travel and change, connection and disconnection. While many of the journeys we shall be hearing about involve travel over space, a physical shifting of bodies from one location to the other, the chapters that follow will also be centrally concerned with another sort of movement: over time. Here, the journeys are just as physical, but the movements I wish to chart involve the passing of individual bodies through the life course, histories that to a degree may be understood as collective but that are also intensely personal. This is a form of travel that we all engage in, whether we like it or not. Unlike the wings of a plane or the wheels of a car, time never stands still. Our bodies grow and change and decay, we move from one ‘age’ to another, endlessly reassessing our identities and our relationships to our bodies. Yet while this process is universal, it is not experienced by everyone in the same way. Where we are, both in space and in history, and who we are – our class, our gender, the cultures of which we are a part, plus the myriad of personal traits and proclivities that make up our selfhood – play a central role in how both sorts of journey are shaped and made meaningful. To this extent my subject-matter is common to all, as well as being highly dependent upon specific contexts. In what follows, the context is one that might be described as ‘transnational’, a term that describes the long term and sustained movements and interconnectedness of people across national borders.1 In this instance 1. See Rogers 1986; Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Vertovec 1999; and Portes et al. 1999 (a Special Edition of Ethnic and Racial Studies).

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Age, Narrative and Migration the transnational relationships I shall be describing are between residents of Britain and Bangladesh, or more specifically, Bengali areas of Tower Hamlets in East London and Sylhet District in the North-East of Bangladesh. Yet while both places are linked in vital ways, their cultures, political economies and social networks analytically inseparable, the people whose lives and histories I shall be narrating, both through their own and my words, live now in London. They are the first generation of Bengalis2 to make Britain their ‘home’, even while retaining close links to Sylhet. Known generically as ‘the elders’ in the day centre that many of them attended, all were reconciled, with varying degrees of happiness or discontent, with spending at least the immediate future in the UK. Their experience of growing old was thus intimately linked with their experience of Britain, their movement across the life course inextricably entangled with their movement between places. To this extent, what follows is both an ethnography of migration and an ethnography of ageing. The book is also centrally concerned with narrative. All the following chapters are structured around the stories and accounts that elders gave of their lives, their histories and their feelings about migration. Later in this introduction I shall explain why narrative approaches can be so valuable in understanding the ways in which identities and histories are constructed and sketch a theoretical framework for their analysis. As I shall suggest, while by no means fictional or untrue, narratives are first and foremost stories, and it is through story-telling and the host of genres in which they are packaged that we convey our most personal experiences and memories, that we build meaning and construct identity. And as any astute viewer of Holly- or Bollywood films is surely aware, even the most apparently innocuous story is loaded with political meaning; for stories do not simply entertain or convey experience, they also comment upon it, and hence help to change it. Life stories, experiences and feelings are not just expressed through what people say or write down. They are also conveyed through bodies and, in Judith Butler’s terms, the ‘performances’ that they give.3 While much of the book is concerned with the oral accounts given by the elders, I therefore also wish to extend my understanding of narrative to incorporate their embodiment. Somewhat surprisingly, the body is rarely mentioned 2. The term ‘Bengali’ refers to people from both Bangladesh and West Bengal, in India. Yet while all of my informants were from Sylhet, in NE Bangladesh, I have chosen to mainly refer to them as ‘Bengali’ rather than as ‘Bangladeshi’. This is because, while the latter is geographically accurate, I find its implication of national identity problematic, and most of my informants generally referred to themselves as ‘Bengali’. 3. Butler 1990.

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Introduction in accounts of migration or migrant groups. Yet transnational movement is first and foremost a series of physical events, its effects experienced directly in the body; anyone who has undertaken a long-haul flight to a foreign place and then had to adjust to a different climate, diet and way of life can attest to that. What is the role of the body in expressing the shifting and multiple constructions of identity of different elders? How does the body, its physical presentation as well as stories about it, reflect history? And to what extent is ‘body talk’ used to convey other hidden or not so hidden meanings and messages, complaints, anxieties and forms of resistance? Much of what I shall be describing is shared by a great many old people in Britain today. Poverty and dependence on the British state, racism and ageism are not the exclusive experience of first-generation Bengalis living in Tower Hamlets. Nor are feelings of nostalgia for ‘the good old days’, or critical feelings towards the younger generation, or resentment at how society has changed.4 It is probably true to say that all but the lucky minority of older people in Britain experience some feelings of regret or loss, and all look back to ‘the other country’ of times gone by. The similarities between my informants and non-Bengali elders living in inner-city Britain are hardly remarkable, for many of the structural factors that shape their lives are identical. The physiology of ageing and sickness is generally the same, even if experienced differently, and everyone who lives in the UK participates, to a greater or lesser degree, in ‘mainstream’ society and its institutions. In writing exclusively of Bengali elders I am aware of the dangers of giving the impression that they are an exotic ‘other’, their experiences completely different from that of, say, their English neighbours. The slippage from this into the assumption that cultural difference is the key to understanding all experience, as if ‘culture’ were somehow bounded and/or imported wholesale from Sylhet, is remarkably easy to make. Indeed, imputing difference, especially that based on culture, is a perilous affair, a point I shall return to shortly.5 But while they have much in common with other old and marginal people in Britain, there are also important differences between the Bengali elders included in this book and ‘the mainstream’. Racism and its interrelationship with economic and other forms of deprivation is an 4. See, for example, Mark Thorpe’s work amongst English old people in an inner city (Thorpe 1996). 5. Over-emphasis upon cultural difference has been interpreted by some commentators as a new form of ‘cultural racism’, distinct from but closely related to biological racism (Modood 1997).

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Age, Narrative and Migration important factor here. While none of my informants are the ‘victims’ of global capital and imperialism, as was suggested, for example, by the Marxist theories of overseas migration and international dependency produced in earlier decades,6 as we shall see, their personal histories have been deeply affected by the broader context in which they have taken place. Colonialism, the international labour market and its shifting centres of demand and supply, the twists and turns of British immigration law and the relationship between this, national politics and institutional and other forms of racism are all crucial elements here. Thus, while the oral histories of the elders are testimony to the ways in which they have actively shaped their destinies, they have not done this in a political vacuum; underlying all the stories I recount here are power relationships, between people, places, and institutions. The experience of transnational migration is another factor that has shaped the experiences and narratives of the elders in particular ways. The primacy of Sylhet or the desh (homeland; depending on context can refer to Bangladesh, Sylhet or one’s village) as both an idea and a set of social relationships and practices is key to this. As an anthropologist who has worked on issues of Sylheti migration since the mid-1980s and whose principal fieldwork before carrying out this research was in rural Sylhet, my main interest in embarking upon this study was in the relationship between migration and ageing, on the experience of ‘growing old in a second homeland’.7 It is for this reason that my research was located among first-generation Bengalis rather than, say, focusing upon a crosssection of elderly people in Tower Hamlets. For the elders I talked to in London, the ‘other country’ was located in the past, but it was also a physical place, located many thousands of miles away, but never entirely out of reach. I shall be returning to questions of identity, age and migration in a short while. First, however, I wish to sketch out very briefly some of the most salient points arising from comparative work on South Asians in Britain and from recent approaches to transnational migration.

British South Asians: Changing Paradigms Social anthropological perspectives on the presence of South Asian ‘communities’ in Britain have shifted substantially over the last three 6. As discussed in Gardner 1995; see also Addleton 1992. 7. Norman 1985.

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Introduction decades. This is partly the result of the radical shake-up caused by postmodern and post-colonial critiques of social science methodologies and epistemologies that has gathered pace since the 1980s, and that has forced social anthropology to reappraise both its forms of representation and many of its underlying conceptual assumptions.8 Yet while shifts in the perspectives of researchers are partly the result of changing theoretical paradigms within academia, they also reflect very real historical changes in the nature and profile of so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ in Britain. In what follows I shall not attempt to provide a comprehensive résumé of research amongst British South Asians;9 merely to sketch in some of its more significant features.

Early Days In the early days (the late 1960s to 1970s) when few South Asians in Britain had been living in the country for more than a decade and the vast majority of adults had been born in South Asia, the task for social anthropologists seemed relatively straight forward. While sociologists tended to focus upon race relations, housing and issues of economic class, anthropologists paid more attention to the countries and cultures of origin of the new settlers. 10 Providing ethnographic descriptions of social networks, cultural customs and beliefs, and the social institutions of the homelands, most work aimed to provide knowledge of and insight into groups that seemed very separate from mainstream society and were still far from providing their own forms of representation.11 Such work was often influenced by Barth’s model of ethnicity, with its focus upon the formation of ethnic boundaries and social differences between insiders and outsiders,12 and is perhaps summed up by the edition of essays edited by James Watson, entitled Between Two Cultures and published in 1979. While not dealing exclusively with South Asians, the essays provide 8. Classic examples of post-modern critiques of social anthropology include Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986; and Clifford 1988. A useful summary of some of the debates is given by J. Spencer 1989. 9. For a recent bibliography of research amongst British Bangladeshis see Eade and Momen 1996. 10. See Eade 1995 for further comment. 11. Examples of early work of this kind include Jeffery 1976 and Dahya 1974. To my knowledge almost nothing was published over this period on Bangladeshis, but see Carey and Shukur 1985 for a more recent example. 12. Barth 1969.

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Age, Narrative and Migration descriptions of a variety of ethnic minority groups (Greek Cypriots, Pakistanis, Jamaicans and so on), detailing the background to their migration to and settlement in Britain and outlining salient features of social organization. The underlying assumption was that migrant groups partook of two distinct cultures (British and that of their country of origin); that culture and place of origin were synonymous; and that migrant groups could be meaningfully studied and understood as separate and bounded social wholes. Significantly, the younger generation (especially in the case of Jamaicans and Sikhs) are envisaged as caught between the two cultures. As a response to this and to racism, the book suggests that these groups have begun a process of ethnic redefinition: ‘entailing the active recreation of a new cultural tradition that only has meaning in the British context.’13 As we shall see, this description is surprisingly similar to contemporary understandings of so-called hybridity and Creolization amongst the younger generations. In another collected edition published in the same year (Minority Families in Britain: Support and Stress) the problems and stresses faced by South Asians in Britain are interpreted in terms of the interface of ‘traditional’ culture with the new environment, the migration process and settlement in a new society.14 Again, the culture and ‘traditions’ of migrants are represented as largely fixed, understandable in terms of places of origin and in opposition to those of the dominant society. Such approaches can be indirectly linked with the political project of multiculturalism. Here, the cultures (or ‘communities’ )15 that make up British society are understood as bounded and separate; ensuing political policies are supposed to cater for and incorporate difference.16 In popular versions of this model, identity is viewed as largely unproblematic, at least for the first generation. The problems that do arise are assumed to come from a clash of values and are experienced by second-generation children, whose unfortunate position ‘between two cultures’ leads them to endless conflict with their elders. For South Asians, such struggles are usually portrayed as taking place around the issue of marriage and restrictions upon the mobility of young women. While they are rooted in the theoretical 13. Watson 1979: 3. 14. Saifullah-Khan 1979: 37–59. 15. This is a highly problematic term, and has been usefully critiqued by (amongst others) Cohen 1985 and Baumann 1996. 16. Friedmann points out that this model of separate and bounded cultures, the basis of the political project of multi-culturalism, is essentially anti-modernist, giving the lie to the assimilationist paradigm that equated the modern state with a single culture (1997: 72).

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Introduction paradigms of the 1970s, we should of course remember that these understandings still dominate popular representations of South Asians today.17 Rather than sneering at them for their unsophisticated analysis with the benefits of a post-modern, twenty-first century hindsight, it is important to view the works of the 1970s and early 1980s within their historical context. While the ethnographic descriptions produced over this period reflect contemporary understandings of ethnicity and culture, they also are empirical accounts of how things were, back in those earlier days of settlement. The gaze of researchers is, of course, subjective, but there have been very real historical changes amongst Britain’s so-called South Asian ‘communities’. Working predominantly with first-generation migrants, many of whom were still largely orientated towards South Asia and held what Anwar dubbed ‘The Myth of Return’ (1979), it is hardly surprising that social anthropologists focused upon the social networks and institutions of South Asia, for these were often vital in helping the settlers make their way in the UK. The days of Asian dance music, British Asian cuisine and adult children who have never been to ‘the homeland’ were still far off. During the 1980s ethnographic studies of South Asian groups in Britain continued to be preoccupied with basic social and cultural institutions, often reflecting the themes picked up by anthropologists working in the countries of origin: marriage, caste, gift-giving and kinship and lineage dynamics were all important areas of study. Examples from the period include works by Pnina Werbner, writing of Pakistanis in Manchester (1981 and 1990), Parminder Bhachu on East African Sikhs (1985) and Alison Shaw on Pakistanis in Oxford (1988). Very little was published on Bangladeshis, reflecting the relatively late entrance of the group on to the British scene and their slower rate of family reunification.18 Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 3, it was not until the middle to late 1980s that the majority of wives joined their husbands and what is now often described as the Bangladeshi ‘community’ began to take form. While written within the dominant anthropological paradigms of the time, wherein representations of cultural difference had yet to be radically critiqued and ethnicity was still understood to be largely a matter of boundaries, much of the work produced over the 1980s acknowledges the 17. Recent examples of the perpetuation of this image include a series of special reports on forced marriage amongst British Pakistanis broadcast on BBC2’s Newsnight over 1999–2000, and the acclaimed film ‘East is East’ (written by Ayub Khan Din, and based on his stage play of the same title), which portrays the struggles of a mixed-race family, the sons forced into unwanted marriages by their overbearing Pakistani father. 18. See Peach 1990.

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Age, Narrative and Migration changing nature of ethnic group relations, paying attention to the emergence of the second generation, and the role of racism, gender and class; increasingly, the wider political and economic contexts of South Asians’ lives in Britain were being taken into consideration.19

The 1990s: Critiques of Cultural Essentialism Into the 1990s, assumptions concerning the nature of cultural differences between ethnic minorities and the ‘mainstream’ began to be increasingly attacked, especially by writers within disciplines such as critical theory and cultural studies. Accused of inherent essentialism, multiculturalism and the ethnographic accounts with which it is associated are presented in the most polemical of analyses as leading almost inevitably into what over the 1980s has been dubbed ‘cultural racism’, the association of particular races or ethnic groups not with biological characteristics, but with particular pre-defined cultures. Modood, for example, has shown how while the association of particular ‘racial types’ with particular cultures is linked to colonial discourses of the need to assimilate ‘uncivilized’ peoples into ‘civilized’ Europe, today they are flourishing as part of New Right representations in Britain of ‘cultural clashes’, in which culture is presented as fixed and immutable, as well as arranged hierarchically, with European, secular or Christian values assumed to be superior.20 In recent decades in Britain, this has often taken the guise of Islamophobia.21 This became especially explicit during the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, when British Muslims were increasingly portrayed in the media and the rhetoric of politicians as being rabid fundamentalists, steeped in the patriarchal traditions of their homelands and unable to adapt to the (naturally) superior secular culture of ‘modern’ Britain. After the events of 11 September 2001, Islamophobia has once again taken a central position in British race relations and international politics discussed in terms of a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which Islam is presented as backward and inferior. Here, it is not the racial characteristics of people that are deemed inferior, but their religious beliefs and ‘cultures’, often assumed to be one and the same. As we shall see, Islamophobia and the more general cultural racism in which it is based play an important role in the experiences of many of the elders. 19. See, for example, Werbner and Anwar 1991; Westwood and Bhachu 1988. See Eade 1996a for more detailed discussion of the theorization of ethnicity over this period. 20. Modood 1997. 21. Runnymead Trust 1997.

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Introduction The awareness that an over-emphasis on ‘culture’ and cultural difference can lead to the essentializing and ‘othering’ of minority groups has contributed to a significant shift in theories of ethnicity and diaspora in recent decades. In contrast to much of the work published over the 1970s and 1980s, leading contemporary theorists of diaspora, such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, for example, conceptualize culture in quite different ways. Although both are more directly concerned with AfroCaribbean experiences in Britain, their work has had an important influence on contemporary research and writings on South Asians. While I would not wish to simplify or conflate their approaches, both Hall and Gilroy argue forcefully against cultural essentialism. Hall, for example, calls for an end to the ‘essential black subject’ that will involve a recognition of the diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities that compose the category ‘black’.22 Drawing attention to the relationship between discourses of the ‘other’ and the operation of racism, he argues that issues of race are always articulated historically with class, gender and ethnicity, crossing and re-crossing them.23 As he argues: ‘There is a difference which makes a radical and unbridgeable separation and there is a “difference” which is positional, conditional and conjunctional.’24 In writing of such ‘difference’ and the cultural essentialisms that often accrue to it, the challenge is to show how its construction is fluid, shifting and contextually dependent. In a similar vein, Paul Gilroy argues that Britain’s black settler communities have forged what he terms a ‘compound culture’ from disparate sources.25 In his metaphor of the ‘Black Atlantic’ , he draws attention to the role of history and geography in the formation of this culture, using the image of slave ships crossing the seas of Africa and the Atlantic as living, micro-cultural, micro-political systems in which ideas, activists and cultural and political artefacts continually circulate.26 One of the important aspects of Gilroy’s work, as of Hall’s, is his stress upon context and history. Identity is not fixed or dependent upon a given ‘culture’, but the outcome of shifting positions. While ‘diaspora culture’ may produce ethnic absolutisms as part of its political project, these are not objective givens, but constructed as part of the cultural and political transfers between Africa and the North.27 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Hall 1992: 254. ibid.: 255. ibid.: 257. Gilroy 1993: 15. ibid.: 4. ibid.: 199.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Homi Bhabha has been another key influence in cultural and diaspora studies over the 1990s, especially in his development of the notion of hybridity. In this, Bhabha draws upon Bakhtin’s notions of linguistic hybridity to stress its subversive and resistant qualities. For Bakhtin, hybridity is ‘a mixture of two social languages within a single utterance’.28 This can take place both consciously and unconsciously; the main political effect of the former is that, by demonstrating the possibility of an alternative voice, the authoritative discourse is unmasked and undone. Bhaba transposes these ideas on to the colonial context, arguing that hybridity is the moment in which the discourse of colonial authority loses its univocal grip on meaning. Hybridity is therefore inherently subversive. Within colonial encounters it is also inevitable, developing into active moments of resistance and challenge that take place in a ‘hybrid displacing space’ arising from the interaction between indigenous and colonial cultures. In later work Bhabha has developed these themes into the notion of the ‘third space’ that migrants occupy; this is neither ‘one’ nor the ‘other’, but ‘something else besides’. Hybridity thus becomes the form of cultural difference itself: ‘the jarrings of a differentiated culture which challenges the centred, dominant cultural meanings.’29 Thus, as with Hall and Gilroy, for Bhabha essentialism is the ultimate evil. Migrants fall into a liminal and anomalous third space within the Diaspora, creating a cultural hybridity from the margins with vast potential transgressive powers.30 The effects of such approaches upon academic representations of ethnicity and identity in Britain have been wide-reaching.31 Rather than representing ethnic boundaries and cultural identities as fixed, stress is now increasingly laid upon fluidity and the importance of context. In the post-colonial age of Diaspora, migrants are not represented as members of bounded communities, but – in Bhabha’s terms at least – hybrids, whose cultural transgressions and cross-overs are to be celebrated.32 In accordance with such ideas, work produced over the 1990s has tended to move away from unproblematized descriptions of the cultures and social institutions of particular groups to more nuanced readings of the formation of identity and the multiple formulations of ethnicity. Religious identity, and especially the role of Islam, has been another increasingly important focus.33 28. Bakhtin 1981. 29. Cited in R. Young 1995: 25. 30. Bhabha, cited in R. Young (1995). 31. For detailed analysis see Werbner and Modood 1997. 32. The notion of hybridity is rigorously critiqued by Young 1995. See also Friedmann 1997. 33. Eade 1995: 173.

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Introduction Gerd Baumann’s work in Southall is an excellent example of these new approaches to ethnic identity.34 In Contesting Cultures (1996) he describes how people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds or so-called ‘communities’ in Southall subscribe to both what he terms the ‘dominant discourse’ (which associates particular ethnic groups with particular cultures) and the ‘demotic discourse’ (in which the congruence between community and culture is denied). As his ethnography shows, people chose between discourses according to context. Rather than rejecting the congruence between communities and cultures, the idea of a coherent culture is, in Rosaldo’s terms, ‘a useful fiction’35 that is used by groups at certain times. As Baumann concludes: ‘They are thus not the dupes of the dominant discourse, but neither are they the post-modern champions of a cult which worships “hybridity” or “border-zones” for their own sake . . . Southallians . . . develop their discursive competencies in close connections with the social facts of everyday life and they cultivate fine judgements of when to use what discourse in which situation.’36 From this, we can begin to understand how people shift their positions according to particular contexts. In some situations they may fix their identities as ‘Bangladeshi’ or ‘Muslim’, appearing to adhere to a pregiven set of traditions and essentialized cultural norms, while in others they identify themselves as something more hybrid or complex. This is certainly the case for many of the Bengali elders we spoke to, whose positionality has changed both over their life course and within specific contexts during the same period. We should not infer from this that such shifts in position are necessarily conscious, however, or that they are always freely made. Whilst the elders choose their identities and cultural positions, they also, at the same time, have identities and ‘cultures’ foisted upon them by others. Yet at the same time it is important not to lose sight of the conditions and contexts in which people resist hybridity and chose to essentialize their own cultural positions. As Pnina Werbner points out, counterpoised to the destruction of xenophobia are the cultural claims made by minorities to be recognized as different, and to retain their right to practise distinctive cultures and religions.37 To an extent this is the case for many of the elders included in the following chapters, who, for a variety of reasons, tended to present themselves as upholders of the ‘traditions’ in 34. 35. 36. 37.

Baumann 1996. Cited in Baumann (1996: 12). ibid.: 204. Werbner 1997: 3; see also Modood 1997: 158.

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Age, Narrative and Migration particular contexts – although, as we shall see, by no means unanimously or in all contexts.

Youth Culture, Gender and the Construction of Identity Much of the best work produced over the 1990s has focused upon the second generation, ‘youth culture’ and gender. While he is not writing specifically about South Asians, Les Back’s work on the relationship between ‘race’, class and gender amongst youths in London is a leading example.38 Appropriating the cultural traits of their Afro-Caribbean peers, which are seen as hip and masculine, white working-class boys take on the clothing styles and street talk of ‘blacks’ while deriding South-East Asian boys for being feminine. Similar themes have been touched on with South Asian youths, although here, religious identity is often a central focus of enquiry, a significant shift, related to although not simply caused by the Salman Rushdie Affair.39 Salli Westwood’s work in Leicester, for example, shows the interrelationship of gender, generation and ethnic identities in relationship to the politics of space in an ethnically mixed group of young men campaigning in neighbourhood politics.40 Here, a public notion of masculinity was drawn upon in order to construct a collective identity that in other contexts did not exist. Research conducted amongst educationally successful young Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets in the early 1990s shows how the second generation put together new, ‘hybrid’ identities that build upon Bangladeshi, Muslim, Bengali, British and local solidarities.41 As other research shows – amongst young Muslim women in Bradford, and young Bangladeshis in East London – Islam is often a central feature of young Muslim South Asians’ identity, offering a way forward in an apparent ‘clash’ between the ‘traditional’ culture of their parents and the secular culture of the British mainstream.42 To this extent, Islam may be an important component of an alternative version of Gilroy’s ‘compound culture’. Other work stresses the growing prominence of secular forms of cultural fusion, especially, again, in the context of youth culture. Music

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Back 1994 and 1996. See, for example, Jacobson 1997. Westwood 1995. Eade 1994. See Knott and Khokher 1993; Gardner and Shukur 1995.

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Introduction has been a central empirical focus for Gilroy for some time; long before Asian fusions became popular in Britain, he was drawing our attention to the linkages and cross-overs of black musical forms: British black music arising from Jamaican roots, American forms recorded in Jamaica, and so on43 In recent years in Britain, Asian fusions have become mainstream, especially in dance music,44 while British Asian artists such as Apache Indian have used Afro-American musical forms such as rap to sing about arranged marriages. Sharma, Hutnyck and Sharma’s volume on Asian dance music provides an interesting commentary on these cultural developments.45 The new emphasis on the second or third generation of South Asians in Britain is reflected in recently completed doctoral projects, many of which focus upon the ways in which young Asians combine diverse cultural elements in their lives.46 These are all useful contributions to our understandings of South Asian experiences in the Diaspora. They point to the shifting nature of identity, to mixtures, cross-overs and creative solutions to what is never a simple clash of cultures, for, as all the above work clearly shows, culture is never fixed. Yet while this work’s conclusions remain highly valid, the overwhelming interest in younger people can lead to significant gaps and silences. Where are the voices of their parents and grandparents? Are they subconsciously assumed to be less ‘hybrid’ and culturally creative, guardians of the ‘traditions’ whose study will lead to less interesting theoretical insights into the nature of cultural identity? Or is it simply that second-generation informants, with their fluent English, are so much more accessible? In carrying out the research on which this book is based, I was convinced that to understand the personal and collective meanings of migration to Britain in the latter half of the twentieth and the early twentyfirst centuries we must pay attention to all generations. Indeed, the unintended consequence of the contemporary stress on the younger generations is the impression that cultural adaptation and change takes place lineally. ‘Hybridity’, it would seem, is something that occurs with 43. Gilroy 1993: 15. See also Gilroy 1987. 44. Two of the most successful British Asian artists to have received mainstream recognition in 2000 are Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawney. 45. Sharma, Hutnyck and Sharma 1996. 46. For example, Philly Desai’s work amongst Bangladeshi youths in Euston, London (2000); Kate Gavron’s work amongst Bangladeshi schoolgirls in East London (1998); and Prinjha Sunman’s work on marriage amongst young Gujaratis (1999). See also Alexander’s ‘The Asian Gang’ (2000).

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Age, Narrative and Migration increasing exposure to the cultures of the new homeland, affecting the younger generation but not so much their parents, who remain orientated to their place of origin, just as in older models of change ‘immigrants’ were, over time, assumed to become assimilated into the mainstream. Yet, as my work indicates, this implicit understanding of the relationship between time and cultural change must be treated with caution. As we shall see, many older Bengali men have moved over their lifetimes to a position of increasing cultural boundedness, in which traditionalism and the gaze towards Bangladesh have become more important to them rather than less. To understand the shifting and diverse nature of cultural identities, we therefore need to pay attention to age and the life-course, viewing the ways in which identities are formed over many years and between and within generations.

Transnational Migration and the De-centring of Place Alongside the critique of conventional understandings of culture and identity within studies of diasporic groups has been growing emphasis upon the importance of movement, flux and displacement as key motifs of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The explosion of interest in processes of globalization is inextricably related to this.47 We are all interconnected now, it would seem; nothing is fixed, certainly not the relationship between culture and place.48 Indeed, while the idea of people and cultures being rooted to certain places has been questioned for some time within anthropology, the methodological and analytic implications of ‘unrooting’ culture are still being worked out.49 In a contribution to this project, James Clifford has suggested that the complex range of practices that constitute travel might become an important object of study, for it is through travel and movement that culture is constituted. As he puts it, within conventional understandings of culture, ‘Roots always precede routes.’50 Yet if travel were untethered: ‘. . . practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension.’51 In a related essay on the 47. There is not space for an adequate summary of debates surrounding globalization, but an introduction to some of the main issues is provided by Featherstone 1990; Robertson 1990; and Hannerz 1992. 48. See Gupta and Ferguson 1992 and 1997. 49. Hastrup and Fog-Olwig 1997: 1. 50. Clifford 1997: 3. 51. ibid.: 3.

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Introduction meaning of diaspora, Clifford enquires how discourses of diaspora invoke experiences of displacement, and of ‘constructing homes away from home’.52 I shall discuss the relationship between place, culture and travel, and the shifting constructions of ‘homes away from home’, in more detail in my concluding chapter. For now, what I wish to draw attention to is the increasing stress on movement, interconnection, and disconnection in contemporary writings on migration. Rather than involving a single journey over discontinuous space from a fixed origin to the place of settlement, entailing the crossing of cultural borders as well as national ones and with rupture as an inevitable outcome, migration and travel are viewed processually. In the global age, writers such as Clifford suggest, travel is a central practice, airports more significant sites of study than villages.53 Space is seen as continuous, the lines between ‘here’ and ‘there’ forever blurred; displacement is the core experience of the modern age.54 Empirically, these insights are linked to an important shift in the research gaze. Rather than studying ‘communities’ of migrant groups in fixed locations, the last decade has witnessed a swelling interest in the movements of people between places rather than simply the lives they make in one or the other place. As anthropologists of migration have pointed out for a while, many so-called ‘settlers’ actually participate in the economic, political and social life of both ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ societies. They are, in the buzz-word of the last few years, ‘transnational’ migrants.55 The growing body of work on transnational migration does not always agree on its causes and consequences, or even that transnational activity is particularly new; but all writers point to the significance of migrants’ multiple relations, which span national boundaries.56 One of the conceptual divides in the literature is whether this might be interpreted as the subversive dodging of state boundaries, the refusal of labour to stay local for global capital, or whether transnational migrants are modern Gästarbeiter, a reserve army of labour whose economic insecurity leads to permanent un-fixedness. The truth for the majority of

52. ibid.: 244. 53. ibid. 54. Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 10. 55. To the best of my knowledge, this term was coined in a collection of papers edited by Rogers, in 1986. 56. See Basch et al. 1994; Glick-Schiller et al. 1995; Vertovec 1999; Portes et al. 1999.

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Age, Narrative and Migration transnational migrants is probably somewhere in-between. For the majority, dual national allegiances and the circulation of people, goods, ideas and capital between places is the outcome of a variety of processes, a response to global forces that they have greater or lesser control over depending on who they are and where and when. As Basch et al. put it, with reference to their own case material: ‘For Caribbean and Filipino people, the ability to live transnationally is an accommodation both to the controlling forms of global capitalism and to their place within the global racial order. For them, transnationalism is a creative response to these processes.’57 Interestingly, much of the published work on transnational migrants deals with transnational processes in the Americas. The majority of the case studies presented in a recent special edition of Ethnic and Racial Studies (1999) on the topic were American in focus, and Basch et al.’s seminal contribution to the field Nations Unbound (1994) deals with Grenadian, Haitian and Filipino transmigrants who move between their homelands and North America. As the writers remind us, these case studies show how transnational processes depend upon the historical experience of each group.58 We must therefore beware generalization. The processes of dual nation-building and economic interconnectedness that take place between Haitians and Grenadians in North America and their homelands, and indeed, the scale of their movements between places are not necessarily replicated amongst migrant groups in Britain. This is to do with a range of factors, of which national immigration laws, local economies and the historical trajectories of each group are only some of the most important. Indeed, as the life stories of the elders show, as young men working in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, with their wives and children in Sylhet, they were much more transnational then than they are today. In those days the majority moved between both places more often and were more closely involved in the economies and politics of their villages as well as in Britain. As we shall see, today – for a variety of reasons – many are far less mobile. The geographical dominance of the Americas over the debate will no doubt change over the next few years. The British government, for example, has recently injected considerable funds into a programme of research projects concerned with ‘Transnational Communities’.59 Yet here too, as in the greater part of previous work, much of the ongoing 57. Basch et al. 1994: 10. 58. ibid.: 9. 59. The Transnational Communities Programme is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and is designed to run until 2002.

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Introduction research involves economic and political activities. These are usually (although not always) carried out by men. Indeed, within the field, there is an almost complete silence concerning the gendered dimensions of transnational activities.60 Yet individuals’ relationships to space and place are not equal, but articulate with power, both at the global and national levels and as constructed within households and other social institutions. As we shall see, for the first-generation Bengalis we conducted research amongst, this has had an important effect on the ways in which men and women have experienced transnational movement. To understand the changing nature of transnational migration, household and kinship dynamics, as well as those of gender, must therefore be central to the inquiry. Amongst Bengali transnational migrants, whether in Britain, the United States, the Gulf or Sylhet, these just as much as political or economic processes have helped guide the forms that it has taken. And closely interwoven with these factors are the rarely mentioned issues of age and the life course. For example, decisions concerning movement between places and participation in the societies, economies or politics of either Britain or Bangladesh are, as we shall see, often guided by the stages that men and women have reached in their lives. There are therefore a variety of histories of Bengali transnationalism, all of which we need to hear and none of which can be meaningfully separated out. One is the history of global capitalism and colonialism; one is the history of processes of inclusion and exclusion within Britain, as well as political and economic conditions within Bangladesh; and another is the history of the development of the Bengali and Muslim ‘community’ within Britain. And finally, there are the histories of tens of thousands of families and individuals, who have balanced the decision about where to go and when against all these processes, but also against their own personal needs and desires. This brings me to a point rarely discussed in academic accounts of transnational migration. Movement between places separated by thousands of miles involves a range of emotions, and these feelings, so hard to study for an outsider, lie at the heart of the transnational experience. This book is not primarily intended as an ethnography of emotion;61 yet the feelings of the elders are central to what they tell us about their past and present experiences. The pain of separation, regret, disappointment and a strong sense of loss or grief jostle for our attention with pride, excitement, contentment and acceptance of the way things 60. See Salih 2000; Alicia 2000; and Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997 for exceptions. 61. For discussion of the anthropology of emotion in South Asia see Lynch 1990.

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Age, Narrative and Migration have turned out. The presence of these varying emotions depends to a huge degree on the personal histories and characters of the individuals concerned. Yet running through nearly all their commentaries is a strong sense of ambivalence. Few of the elders, neither men nor women, were wholly clear about where they wanted to be, or indeed whether their movement to Britain was a good or a bad thing. For their generation, these mixed feelings are, I suggest, core to their experience of transnational migration. It is a theme I shall return to in more depth in my concluding chapter. Finally, space and place are far from politically neutral. At the international level this should be instantly apparent to anyone interested in the movements of people across national borders. Such movements in and out of Europe have of course been increasingly controlled by states over the post-war period and subject to both increasingly tight legislation and fierce political debate.62 As is clear from the elders’ stories, movements between Britain and Bangladesh have never taken place in a vacuum: they have always been constrained by border controls and shifting state immigration practices. As we shall also see, British space is permeated by relations of power. The early movement of Bengali men around the country (in the 1960s and 1970s) in search of work was structured not only by the domestic labour market and their positioning within it, as largely unskilled and often highly disposable cheap labour, but also by the racialization of British space. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, this has had a direct effect upon where our informants have moved to and where they live. In Tower Hamlets, for example, particular districts were thought of as more desirable by the elders because these were centres of the ‘Bangladeshi community’. Movement into other, non-Bengali areas of the borough was constrained by the fear of racist attack. I shall discuss this in more detail later in the book. Bearing this background in mind, let us now return to one of my central themes: the relationship between the life course, migration and gender.

The Life Course, Gender and Migration One of the central aims of the chapters that follow is to consider the ways in which the life course articulates with place and space. I am deliberately 62. See Clarke 1992 for discussion of immigration control policies in Britain in the post-war period.

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Introduction using this former term rather than the more loosely defined ‘age’, since as we shall see, although age appears to be an objective measuring of years and physiological change, the meanings that it carries are always socially constructed; discussing particular ‘ages’ without first carefully contextualizing them is thus not terribly useful. In contrast, the term ‘life course’ brings to our attention the way in which the roles and stages through which we pass are socially and culturally embedded. Put simply, the life course depends on how lives are lived. In rural Bangladesh, while people do not usually know their exact ages, their social roles and obligations are largely dependent upon what stage they have reached in the life cycle, whether they are married yet, have children or daughtersin-law, and so on.63 As we shall also see, one’s experience and ‘narration’ of the life course – bodily as well as spoken – are inseparable from gender, as well of course as a host of other contextual factors, including where one is physically located. They can also have an important effect upon decisions taken concerning migration. It is to this issue that I shall first turn.

Households, the Life Course and Migration In order to understand processes of transnational migration, the ways in which it is experienced and the outcomes it has on people’s lives, its interrelationship both with gender and with the life-course is central. Neither of these has received much attention in the theorizing of migration. Indeed, although the relationship between gender and migration is beginning to be interrogated,64 that between the life cycle and migration is scarcely mentioned in the available literature. Yet, as we shall see, decisions and strategies concerning migration are often closely interrelated with the life course. I suggest that an important way of analysing how both gender and the life course interrelate with migration is to study processes of decisionmaking and other migration-related practices at the level of the household. This is not only because relations of gender and generation are 63. Some argue that the term ‘life course’ is more useful than ‘life stages’, since the former emphasizes the inter-linkages of phases of life, rather than separate stages (Arber and Evandron 1993: 11; Pickard 1995: 14). In Bangladesh, where social roles and identities are linked to clearly defined life stages (for women, being married, being a mother and being widowed, for example) I am not sure that this distinction is so important. 64. Literature dealing with the relationship between gender and migration is still surprisingly thin on the ground; but see, for example, Buijis 1992; Chant 1992; Sweetman 1998; and Willis and Yeoh 2000.

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Age, Narrative and Migration located and constructed first and foremost within households, but also because, as Ursula Sharma has pointed out, migration is ‘a household process’.65 Who goes where, and when, is inextricably woven into household organization and the stages it is passing through. These factors are, in turn, governed by the cultural construction of household and kinship relations, as well as local economic and political conditions. In rural Sylhet, for example, decisions about the temporary labour migration of a son to the Middle East tend to be taken by the head of the household (usually his father). The desire for remittances is balanced against other labour needs within the household, and the availability of capital to finance the airfares and labour contracts, as well as what one might dub the local ‘culture of migration’, in which in rural Sylhet the travel of a member overseas is perceived as the prime way for a household to advance materially in the world. Significantly, this type of migration – risky, physically wearying and temporary – is embarked upon by younger men, often before they have married. Yet a son’s compliance with the decision may have more to do with filial obedience than a desire to travel or make his personal fortune; many of the young men I knew in Talukpur in the late 1980s did not relish their stints in the Gulf, and with good reason. Others went willingly; a small minority resisted. Here, the life course and relations between generations are clearly central, as are local constructions of gender. As Filippo and Caroline Osella have argued with reference to Kerala, migration can be key to the construction of masculinity; yet this changes over time and depending upon the relative success of the migrant.66 For women decisions to travel are based on very different factors and forms of power, yet both the construction of gender – the behaviour expected of women and men and the relationships they have with others – and the interrelationship of this with the life course are key. In Sylhet, for example, when a young woman is married to a Londoni (someone who is based in the UK) she rarely has much say in the matter.67 Marriage, and with it becoming a woman, is thus for many girls inescapably linked to migration, something that, as we shall see, is not at all new (although the form that movement takes and the distances involved are). For older women, however, whose husbands have died and who have adult sons in Britain, the decision 65. Sharma 1987. 66. Osella and Osella 2000. 67. We should not however assume that young women do not want to come to the UK or indeed that their marriages are forced. As the narratives cited later in the book indicate, most approach their journeys to Britain with mixed rather than negative feelings.

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Introduction concerning whether or not to join them is one in which they have far more control. For other women it is their duties as caring wives that bring them overseas to look after their ailing and ageing Londoni husbands. In this last instance, the life course and gender relations work alongside global and national labour markets to bring about particular forms of migration that have directly affected the changing demographic profile of the Bengali population in Britain. As younger men, many of the elders told us, they did not much consider bringing their wives to Britain. They were transnational migrants par excellence, working hard to remit as much money home as possible, and retaining close links with their villages, especially when they had wives and young children there. As they grew older, however, their needs as well as the character of the Bengali presence in Britain began to change. As some of the men and many of the women recounted, women came to Britain because the men were growing old and needed looking after. Significantly, too, changes in immigration legislation over the 1970s and the closely related shifts in Britain’s industrial sector began to make it imperative to bring children to Britain to settle if they too were going to work there as adults; British immigration law meant that their mothers had to accompany them. Here, then, the household development cycle, working in conjunction with global labour markets and British immigration law, produced particular migration strategies. I shall be returning to this particular example in greater depth in Chapters 4 and 5.

Constructions of Place: Desh–Bidesh over the Life Course As we shall see, decisions concerning migration are also based upon how people think about and construct different places, and this also depends to a degree upon the life course. Combined with this, places can become ways of talking about and imagining age and the life course; like the famous cassowary who was not a bird, they are ‘good to think with’.68 In imagining their future, for example, people may envisage themselves in places that are understood as more or less suitable for their ‘age’. At one level this is obvious: amongst the middle classes in Britain an exotic adventure in a far-flung destination is often an important stage in the development of a young person’s identity and adulthood, while old-age pensioners usually opt for a holiday location that is perceived to be more ‘restful’ or ‘sedate’. Migration, travel and movement may thus be 68. Bulmer 1967.

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Age, Narrative and Migration associated with people at certain stages in their lives, and home with others. We should not however assume that migration is always a young person’s game: witness the British pensioners who opt for a retirement in the Spanish sun.69 Yet on closer inspection, the relationship between place, space and the life course becomes more complex, partly because whatever ‘age’ one is or stage one is at, one’s needs and desires are never set or homogeneous. Amongst the Bengali elders included in this book, for example, the contradictions and ambivalence caused by transnational migration are partly transposed on to the never wholly solved problem of desh–bidesh (home and abroad). As I shall show in Chapter 6, while many elders imagine the desh (homeland) as the place where they will experience their twilight years and as the locus of their spiritual and emotional needs, their physical need for material security as well as good-quality health care means that bidesh (in this case, the UK) is actually a far more suitable location, at least for the satisfaction of their bodily needs. The contradictory statements that elders make about different places are, to this extent, a reflection of more profound contradictions in their lives, a theme that I take up in Chapter 9. The ways in which places and movement over space are understood and made meaningful thus depend upon context. Here, age and the life course are central, but so too is the wider history in which one has participated, geography, gender, life experience and so on. As we shall see from the elders’ narratives, accounts of migration tend to be told very differently by men and women. This is partly because gender helps to control and structure the access we have to places, our experiences in them and the way we perceive them; a trite example would be a British building site: a place of work and the construction of both buildings and masculinity for the men who are employed there, but studiously avoided by most women under a certain age. Importantly, too, gender affects the way we express places to others, not just our internal feelings about them. The construction of identity is key to this. As we shall see, the men we interviewed tended to talk about their experiences of migration to Britain in terms of work and activity; their masculine identities as mobile and active providers were inseparable from their accounts. In contrast, women’s accounts stressed familial relationships and their roles as dutiful wives and carers. Combined with this is the fact that men and women’s narratives of migration and place cannot be meaningfully separated from where they 69. King, Warnes and Williams 2000.

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Introduction are in the life course. The views we have of places are always filtered through the lens of our personal identity, and of course the life course is central to this. When an elderly murubbi discusses his past and present life in Britain, for example, what he tells us is centrally tied up with his current identity as a respectable and pious elder. Not surprisingly, his attitudes to migration and Britain have shifted over his life course, as have the ways in which he might talk about it: the imagining of desh–bidesh is not stable; it is a product of personal and collective histories and will always change over time. The geopolitics of location affects the construction of place too. In Sylhet, the stories that returned Londonis tell of Britain tend to be very different from those told by them in London. In the former location, the construction of status is often a key consideration. Bidesh is perceived by others as the place where fortunes are made, where there is plenty and where one’s life is transformed.70 In the latter location, it is the desh instead that is often (although not always) perceived in idealized terms, whilst accounts of life in Britain are far more realistic. The ways in which elders struggle to portray their ambivalence towards place and desh– bidesh will be the subject of my concluding chapter.

Place, Political Economy and the Construction of Age Just as places are perceived in different ways according to where one is on the life course, so too are the meanings given to the life course and ageing affected by place, culture and time. Indeed, anthropological research on ageing shows a wide variety in the meanings given it and the status and power of elders. As Myerhoff writes, age is: ‘. . . a biological building block that is very freely used by culture.’71 I shall be discussing the social construction of ageing and its relationship to the local political economy in Sylhet in more detail in Chapter 6. For now, let us consider the question in more general terms. In most parts of the post-industrial world today, becoming old is generally perceived as a problem. Indeed, much of contemporary social gerontology in countries such as Britain is founded upon this premise.72 Yet as Iris Marion Young has pointed out, it was only in the nineteenth 70. See Gardner 1993a for discussion of Sylheti constructions of the generic category of bidesh. 71. Myerhoff 1992: 109. 72. Arber and Evandron 1993: 9. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the medical field of geriatrics and the pathologizing of ageing, see Cohen 1998: 47–85.

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Age, Narrative and Migration century in Europe that a specific discourse of ageing began to develop in which old age was associated with disease, degeneracy, and death.73 This, Young suggests, was related to a more general medicalization of difference that took place in nineteenth-century medical discourse, in which normal/abnormal distinctions were grafted on to a moral order of good/ bad. The ageing body, understood as abnormal, was ‘bad’, the manifestations of ageing problems to be acted against. While medical science undoubtedly played an important role in these changing perceptions, the production of discourses of ageing cannot be understood separately from their wider political economy. Following Parson’s functionalist model of the relationship between social change and modernization, Cowgill and Holmes have argued that it was with the onset of industrialization and modernization in Europe that ageing came to be seen as problematic.74 Before then (and in non-literate societies today, the authors argue), the knowledge of elders was an important social resource; they controlled property and hence had political and economic power over their juniors.75 Economic changes unleashed by the onset of the industrial revolution meant that the traditional skills of older people were no longer needed; urbanization led to the breakdown of extended families, while improvements in medical technology caused people to live for longer. Meanwhile the growth of individualism and egalitarianism, so closely associated with Western modernity, further undermined the power and authority of elders. With little to contribute, and their children moving away to work in the new factories, it is hardly surprising that they were increasingly seen as a problem. This model is of course hugely simplistic. The ‘break-up of the extended family’ for example, has been exposed as a myth both in contemporary India76 and in nineteenth-century England, where historians argue that it never really existed in the first place. Indeed, even the primary assumption of the model – that the status of older people declines with modernity – has been questioned. Since not all so-called ‘traditional’ societies are the same, it is not possible to generalize about their treatment of the old. There is also evidence that in some ways the status of the old increases in industrialized and ‘modern’ societies.77 Clearly, we must beware simplistic and reductive dichotomies of ‘modern’ versus ‘traditional’ societies. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

I. M. Young 1997: 225. Cowgill and Holmes 1972; see also Keith 1982: 4–6; Bond and Coleman 1990: 10. See Meillassoux 1981. See L. Cohen 1998: 103. Keith 1982: 5.

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Introduction Yet while it is important to treat functionalist models of lineal change with some scepticism, we can also draw some useful insights from them. The most important of these is the focus upon the specific political, historical and economic conditions that contribute to particular discourses and material conditions of ageing, which I discuss in Chapter 6. In making this point I am not suggesting that the relationship is necessarily deterministic, or that material conditions and meaning automatically go hand in hand. Amongst many Bengalis in Tower Hamlets, for example, while materially it is extremely difficult for extended families to remain living together in the same council flat, and many households have members living in Sylhet or elsewhere in Britain, ideologies of the extended family tend to be largely upheld. People strategize and create new ways of coping; the extended family remains a meaningful unit, though manifested in different ways. Similarly, the range of influences on how we conceptualize and treat the old are highly diverse and cannot simply be ‘read off’ from a range of basic economic or social indicators. Bengalis in the UK are engaged in a range of highly complex practices and negotiations around what it means to be old; they are influenced by South Asian conceptions of ageing (which themselves are never fixed) plus those of the dominant culture in Britain. In combination with this, as transnational migrants they participate in more than one political economy. Indeed, in the global age, the association of particular places with one bounded political-economic system is misleading; our worlds flow into other worlds, we participate in several interrelated discourses at the same time. A second insight concerns the way in which under certain conditions old bodies can come to stand for other concerns. As Lawrence Cohen asks: ‘How and why might the old body serve as a critical site in the constitution of collective meaning and practice?’78 In the nineteenthcentury medical discourse that Iris Marion Young describes, the old became ‘other’, the physical manifestations of ageing one way amongst others (such as racism) for describing moral degeneracy.79 In contemporary inner-city settings, images of the aged may be ways in which groups assert their collective identities and draw distinctions between themselves and others. In Tower Hamlets, for instance, the image of the extended South Asian family who cared for and venerated their old was used both by Bengalis and English professionals as a way of talking about ethnic difference, while in contrast the image of the neglected and abused elder 78. L. Cohen 1998: 4. 79. Young 1997.

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Age, Narrative and Migration was used by some Bengali informants to express their fears and anxieties concerning ‘Westernization’ and the effects of living in Britain on their families. Ageing can thus become a metaphor for something else, ‘the problem of being old’ a framework for discussing the transnational condition, the endless ambivalence of desh–bidesh.

Gender, Place and the Life Course While we can generalize to a degree about old people within a given setting, without distinguishing between men and women our analysis is unlikely to be very astute. In talking about ‘the treatment of the old’ one therefore has to ask: ‘Which old?’ The answer to this may start with simple distinctions based on gender, but then has to go further, for as men and women we inhabit particular roles and are part of particular relationships that further affect how we experience our life course. In South Asia, for example, women conventionally gain status as they move from being a bride, to being a mother with sons, to being a widow with daughtersin-law.80 However, this is also crucially dependent upon kinship and class. A woman may not have sons, or she may be very poor. As Cohen has shown in his work on discourses of ageing in India, the weak and neglected ‘auntie’ is culturally constructed (and treated) quite differently from the venerated and cared for ‘mother’.81 The influence of gender on the life course can also change according to place, even for the same individual. In Bangladesh, for example, a high-status bideshi (foreign) female anthropologist may well experience the ageing process positively, as her social roles change from being a fictive ‘daughter’ to being an ‘elder sister’ to an ‘auntie’. Back in Britain, however, ageing may well be experienced in far more negative terms by the majority of women, something to be struggled against or denied. Even if she gains in economic power, a woman’s public status is centrally linked to sexuality and the appearance of youthfulness. For British men this is not so much the case, at least not until they retire or become physically frail. It is only much later in their lives that ageing becomes associated with femininity.82 As we shall see, for first-generation Bengali elders in Britain, their geographical location has had an important effect upon their experiences of ageing, and this is experienced differently by men and women. The 80. See Vatuk 1995. 81. L. Cohen 1998: 119. 82. Arber and Ginn 1991: vii; Pickard 1995: 250.

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Introduction men we interviewed, for example, spoke most bitterly of the change in status they have experienced since leaving work and of the lack of control they feel they have over their children, while the women tended to bemoan the lack of daughters-in-law in their houses. I shall be interrogating the relationship between gender, place and the life course throughout the book. A final point to be made here is that attention to the process of ageing – how bodies and the social roles they perform change over time – can lead to important insights in the theorization of the body and of gender. This point has been made by Sarah Lamb in her work amongst older women in West Bengal. As she argues, contemporary academic theories of gender and embodiment tend to assume, in the Western tradition, that bodies are bounded and localized. In West Bengal, however, bodies are seen as divisible, and include wider processes and substances than those within their own physical boundaries. They also change over time. Gender, as expressed and constructed through the body, is thus never fixed. What it is to be a woman (or a man) shifts significantly over later life.83

The Importance of Narrative In her acclaimed work with elderly Jewish immigrants in a residential home in California, Barbara Myerhoff shows the importance of life histories and story-telling in the creation of collective solidarity and identity.84 For her informants, whose history and culture had been violently torn apart by the Holocaust, the work of narrative was particularly crucial; the performances they gave helped them become visible, and ‘re-member’ themselves, for: ‘. . . without re-membering we lose our histories and ourselves.’85 While first-generation Bengalis in London have not suffered the trauma of mass genocide, like the Jewish story-tellers in Myerhoff’s work, stories about their collective and individual histories play an important role in the formation of their identities and the ways they invest their lives with meaning. Their narratives are thus central ways in which ‘we’ as outsiders might attempt to understand their experiences, for narratives both reflect history, experience and meanings, and help shape them. 83. Lamb 2000. 84. Myerhoff 1992. 85. ibid.: 240.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Many others have picked up on the efficacy of using life history approaches to the study of the elderly; indeed, life biographies have become increasingly integrated into the study of the aged.86 One of the reasons for this is that life histories contextualize an old person’s life; they show what has gone before to make someone who they are. Since old age is often a time when people re-evaluate and re-interpret their lives, the accounts they give are often particularly rich and nuanced. Older people also have much to tell us about the past. Yet, as I shall suggest in the next chapter, what is just as interesting as the objective ‘truth’ of what happened is how people interpret it and what it now means to them. This movement towards narratives and life histories is not confined to the study of the elderly, but can be found in much contemporary social science. Mumby argues that the popularity of the narrative approach is related to post-modernism and the associated demise of the grand narrative; multiple and diverse ‘little narratives’ continually challenge the stability of received knowledge.87 In social anthropology, where narrative approaches are now used in topics as far-ranging as the analysis of development practice and modernity,88 or medical anthropology,89 their relationship with post-modernity is rather more complicated. With their focus upon cultural diversity and the perspectives of ‘the local’, anthropologists have, after all, never been so concerned with grand narratives as other disciplines. Indeed, rather than simply offering an alternative to grand narrative, I suggest that the ‘little’ narratives of ordinary people appear to offer a ‘half-way house’ to some of the grave problems concerning anthropological representation raised by post-modern critiques. By citing informants’ words directly, authorial control appears looser; the subjects appear to ‘speak for themselves’, and anthropological generalizations become increasingly difficult to assert. The informants, it seems, have actively participated in how they are represented. Such appearances are, however, misleading. In basing this book around the elders’ narratives I am not claiming to have escaped the problems of anthropological representation. Indeed, the project of ‘giving voice’ is fraught with difficulty. As Julie Stephens shows in her fierce critique of various feminist anthropologists’ attempts to give voice to Third World women, their authorial control is actually as tight as ever. 86. For further discussion of the life history approach to the elderly, see Pickard 1995: 14–26. 87. Mumby 1993: 3; for discussion of the relationship between life histories and postmodernism see also Singer 1997: 7 and Chamberlain 1997. 88. For example, Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 1998. 89. See Good 1994; Mattingly 1998; Kleinman 1988.

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Introduction They chose what words to include, what to edit out, and how to frame the women’s words.90 In choosing to structure this book around narratives I am also not pretending that this makes it any more ‘objective’. As Chamberlain points out, this ‘illusion of authenticity’, plus the ‘fiction of authorial invisibility’ have, since the hostile reception of Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sanchez, been proved to be bogus.91 Each of the elders’ accounts and comments have been chosen and edited by me, and each is used to put across my particular point of view. Thus, while the people who so kindly gave me their time and stories were generally keen to recount their experiences and ‘be heard’, taken as a whole, the book is my narrative as much as theirs. This does not invalidate it; it just makes it one kind of truth amongst others. My reasons for choosing a narrative approach are therefore primarily to do with what narratives reveal about the nature of human experience and the ways in which it is made meaningful by them. As I have indicated, this is particularly useful during the later stages of the life course, when people tend to be more reflective and are in a position to contextualize their lives. And after all, the elders are better equipped than most to describe the nature of transnational migration to Britain since the 1960s. Through their recollections we see how migrant experiences are never fixed, how lives and the meanings given to them are made and re-made. Narratives can also be powerful tools in indicating the diverse elements that constitute identity, and the ways in which identities shift and are contested within the same individual, something I shall illustrate throughout the book. Stories – of where one has come from, and where one plans to go – seem particularly important for migrants. This is partly because they, perhaps more than others, need to give coherence and meaning to their experiences. In addition to this, narratives, like migration, are always characterized by movement, both within their internal form (from their start to their finish), and in the ways in which they are told. As Rapport and Dawson argue, as people tell different stories they move between different ‘habitations of reality’, endlessly remaking their language, and giving new meanings to their experience.92 As they write: ‘To recount a narrative, in short, is both to speak of movement and to engage in movement.’93 90. 91. 92. 93.

Stephens 1992. Chamberlain 1997: 137. Rapport and Dawson 1998: 27–31. ibid.: 28.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Crucially too, narrative approaches seem to be particularly pertinent during times of crisis or suffering. Indeed, medical anthropologists, whose informants are often in the midst of crises and trauma, were amongst the first to spot the usefulness of narrative both to their analysis, and to the treatment of the patient. Good suggests the following reasons why narratives are so useful in medical anthropology, and the different insights that their analysis might bring: Firstly, much of what we know about sickness, we know through the stories people tell; secondly, stories are the primary means for giving shape to illness experiences. Thirdly, illness narratives have elements in common with fiction, and can be analysed accordingly: as he writes ‘. . . narratives are organised as predicament and striving and as an unfolding of human desire’.94 Finally, once told, narrators lose control of their stories; they can thus be retold, and may be the source of contested judgements.95. I shall be discussing illness narratives in more detail in Chapter 7. Here, the point I wish to make is that, while not all are sick, all the elders included in this book have undergone a process of radical change and transformation in their movements between Bangladesh and Britain. Like patients dealing with an illness, they are in the process of making those changes meaningful, an endeavour that for transnational migrants is, I suggest, particularly challenging. Not only do they have important stories to tell, but their stories play a central role in the formation of their identities and, as with Myerhoff’s elderly Jews, in the reconstitution of their selfhood. Let us now consider what narratives are in more detail.

What are narratives and what do they do? Singer defines narrative as a self-contained account with a beginning, a middle and an end that has been told before. This, she argues, is quite different from simple, unreflexive memory.96 While I agree that we must distinguish narrative from memory, or unfiltered experience, neither of which narratives directly reflect, we need to beware of assuming that narratives have always been told before.97 In my fieldwork in Sylhet98 I recorded long and detailed accounts from women who told me that they 94. Good 1994: 164. 95. Good 1994: 118–64. 96. Singer 1997: 7–8. 97. After all, how many times does something have to be told before it turns into a narrative? 98. Gardner 1995, 1997 and 1999a.

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Introduction had never previously told their stories; yet what they produced were clearly structured narratives rather than simple and spontaneous accounts of their memories.99 Singer is however correct that narratives are not the same as memories, even if they are drawn from them. Accordingly, this book is not about memory. I do not know what the elders remembered, only what they chose to tell.100 Here, then, I define narratives simply as conscious and structured accounts of events across time.101 This can include the deliberately fictional (a novel, say), as well as accounts that claim to be based directly on ‘real’ experience. Throughout the book I shall be using the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ interchangeably. Whether told about one’s own or someone else’s life, these accounts always have a structure. As Cheryl Mattingly writes: ‘. . . stories concern action and experience. To put matters simply, stories are about someone trying to do something and what happens to her and others as a result.’102 Yet, as I shall argue in the next chapter, while it may be possible to strip a definition of narrative down to a bare minimum such as this, we should not assume that the structures that underlie stories are always the same. Narrative genres vary widely, and are closely related to existing cultural forms as well as the diverse construction of identity. This brings me to another, crucial point. Narratives are inherently social. As Mumby argues: ‘Narrative is a socially symbolic act in the double sense that (a) it takes on meaning only in a social context and (b) it plays a role in the construction of that social context as a site of meaning within which social actors are implicated.’103 Rather than listening passively, when we hear stories we react to them. They are therefore not simply ‘after-the-fact’ accounts of experience; they have rhetorical power, they are contested and negotiated and often change things. To what extent narratives might guide as well as express experience is a matter of debate. In her discussion of the relationship between narrative and experience, Mattingly describes a variety of shifting perspectives held by narrative theorists. These include the former view, that narratives simply reflect experience; the argument that narratives are cultural scripts 99. See for example ‘Ambia’s Story’ in Gardner 1997: 126–36. 100. This is not to say that remembering and forgetting are necessarily ‘closed books’ to anthropologists. For discussion of the relationship between the anthropologies of history and of memory, see Mitchell 1997. For a classic acount of social memory see Halbwachs 1992. 101. Rapport and Dawson 1998: 28. 102. Mattingly 1998: 7. 103. Mumby 1993: 5.

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Age, Narrative and Migration that provide guidelines for interpreting experience, and the understanding of narrative as performance, which creates as well as comments upon experiences. Taking this last perspective one step further, Mattingly argues that in the practice of occupational therapy that she researched narratives served as aesthetic and moral forms that underlay clinical action; therapists and patients not only told stories, they also created story-like structures through their interactions, what Mattingly terms ‘therapeutic emplotment’.104 Do we act out our lives according to the underlying structures of stories? Is experience moulded by the need to create plot, drama and resolution? Perhaps so: especially in the case of medical practice, where, interpreted as narrative, illness is in process rather than resolved, and patient and healer combine in following the plot through.105 In making this argument, however, we need to be cautious about what types of narratives and plots we are discussing. While in Mattingly’s research in Boston the emplotment of medical practice followed the same basic structure, plot types in general are not universal but culturally and historically determined. As I shall argue in the next chapter, the elders who participated in my own research tended to package their experiences in a variety of narrative genres. These are closely connected to gender, class and where one is positioned in the life course. Combined with this, the degree to which one can plot one’s own life depends very much on the amount of power which one has over events, something that varies widely between individuals. Finally, I am uneasy about where narrative plots are supposed to come from within Mattingly’s argument. Are they somehow pre-existing and pre-determined, or do we make them up as we go? If it is the former, then the argument seems to be in danger of collapsing into blunt structuralism. If the latter, then narrative becomes inseparable from individual experience, identity and inclination; where each ends and the other begins is impossible to say. In what follows, I shall argue that the elders’ experiences are expressed and made meaningful by them in particular ways for public consumption. These narratives, which often take the form of particular genres of storytelling, help form individual and collective identities. They are part of a variety of processes, often depending upon context and character. They alternately create status, reaffirm one’s role as husband, wife or parent, are a form of protest, resistance or claim, and help make what are often highly ambivalent experiences and emotions more whole. In the telling 104. Mattingly 1998: 2–3. 105. See also Good 1994: 144.

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Introduction of stories, people may follow particular plots, their characters taking a variety of culturally specific roles (the Migrant Adventurer; The Successful Provider, The Dutiful Wife and Mother, The Suffering, Pious Woman). In the emplotment of their lives these roles and narrative types may influence people’s actions and experience of events. The plots that they involve, however, are multiple, fluid and endlessly shifting. They are also far from the only influences that shape the elders’ strategies, and choices for power relations at both the global and the domestic end of the continuum are also of central importance.

The Politics of Hearing As has already been indicated, narratives are not told in a vacuum. Who hears one’s story and how that person reacts are key to both the form that the story takes and the results that it has. As James Wilce has shown in his work on ‘troubles talk’ in Bangladesh, both what is said, and how it is heard, are highly political.106 Complaints, he suggests, are ways of criticizing the social order. They can thus be read as forms of resistance; but how they are heard, and the response of the listener, depend a great deal on who is hearing as well as who is making them. When women complain, especially in ways that are challenging to the status quo, their troubles talk is apt to be interpreted as deviant and mad and violently quashed. Focusing upon the talk of the elderly in India, Cohen makes a similar point. As he suggests, voices have a complex typology, and each type of voice, be it angry, sad, repetitive or whatever, has a moral quality attached that is imputed by the listener and to do with the social role of the speaker.107 When old people are said to speak uselessly, babbling nonsense or bak-bak, this is less to do with the content of their speech, and more with whether or not they are viewed as productive, wise, or in some way contributing to the household. As he argues: ‘The line between productive wisdom and bak bak . . . depends not only on the content of the productive voice but frequently on the politics of hearing.’108 I shall be returning to the work of both Wilce and Cohen later in the book. While my own research has focused less upon hearing and more upon what is said by elders (all the narratives recited here were solicited by myself and were therefore unlikely to be dismissed as meaningless babble), 106. Wilce 1998. 107. Cohen 1998: 175. 108. ibid.: 176.

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Age, Narrative and Migration this emphasis upon the political context in which stories are told is highly important. As we shall see, narratives often have explicit or implicit political intentions. Stories about sickness, for example, often mask virulent complaints about life in Britain and the treatment that the teller has received. Likewise, stories of suffering comment upon the underlying causes, as well as containing the teller’s anguish. As political rhetoric they may be ignored, contested, denied, or dismissed as unrealistic claims upon ‘the system’. The Housing Officer whom I visited with Mrs Bibi ignored her stories of the sickness of her husband and grand-daughter, for example, and repeatedly told her about how many points her ‘case’ had been awarded and the bureaucratic requirements for re-housing. Likewise, the physiotherapist visiting an old man who was hoping she might help get him rehoused spoke over his stories of suffering to assert that he was quite able to use the facilities in his house (both examples are cited in Chapter 6). In London, as we shall see, the politics of hearing are often interwoven with the politics of ‘race’.

Narrated on the Body Our life histories are not simply expressed through words. They are also ‘told’ through our bodies, narrated physically through our postures, our medical histories, our movements, our aches and pains. Thus, while most of this book is concerned with the oral narratives of the elders, here I wish to extend my definition of narrative to incorporate its embodiment. As Elizabeth Grosz has argued, bodies can be read as texts, in which messages are inscribed. Drawing from the insights of Foucault on the relationship between power and the body, Grosz argues that bodies can be inscribed violently (for example, through the use of straitjackets) or in less obviously aggressive ways (the fashion for stilettos). They can also only be meaningfully ‘read’ according to a social system of organization and meaning.109 As she writes: ‘The body becomes a text and is fictionalised and positioned within those myths that form a culture’s narratives and self-representations.’110 In interpreting the elders’ bodies as sites of narration,111 we can learn a great deal about the multiple workings of different forms of power in their lives. As labour migrants, living through a particular period of global history, for example, many of the men have been marked in particular 109. Grosz 1997 (originally printed in Threadgold and Cranny-Francis 1990). 110. ibid.: 239. 111. Rapport and Dawson 1998: 28.

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Introduction ways. Their bodies today are testimony to the backbreaking factory or ‘sweatshop’ work they may have had to perform. The stress of separation from loved ones, of negotiating the boundaries of the British state, of racism, and of unstable labour markets have all made themselves felt, often contributing to the common complaint of high blood pressure, and, for many of the men included in this book, strokes. The influence of migration and inner city life on changing bodily habits is also important. Increased consumption of ghee and red meat has been associated with rising morbidity amongst South Asians in Britain, as have increased consumption of cigarettes and decreased levels of exercise. While these changes are not wholly to do with global power relations, there can be little doubt that the latter have played a central role in determining the movements of migrant populations and the economic niches they assume once they have reached ‘the new world’. Bengali women’s bodies are also marked by the diverse workings of different forms of power upon their lives. The practice of veiling (purdah) and its many expressions is just one example of this. As Grosz cautions, however, we must take care to ‘read’ bodily inscriptions according the appropriate social context. While in some instances the use of the burqua (long cape, used to cover a woman’s body, head and sometimes face) may imply – at the most simple level – the workings of patriarchy, in others the burqua may symbolize protest against Western imperialism or be worn as a sign of ethnic identification. As female migrants, whose movement into Britain is dependent upon their bodily status (whether or not they are married or mothers) some women may have undergone virginity tests; others may have given blood samples in proving their relatedness to particular men. The elders’ experience of being ethnically ‘other’ and of racism in London is also marked upon their bodies. The most explicit ‘narration’ of this was graphically displayed on the body of one young man at the community centre where much of the research for this book was based. The savage attack on him by white racists had left him physically disabled; he used the elders’ facilities since there was no other suitable place for him to go. Less explicitly, racism can mark the ‘other’ as different, ugly or invisible, behaviour that has specific consequences for bodily experience.112 I discuss this in Chapter 5, where we also see how women’s movement around East London is constrained less by the ideology of purdah, so frequently used to discuss ‘Asian women’, and

112. I. M. Young 1997.

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Age, Narrative and Migration more by their fear of racism and the division of neighbourhoods into ‘Bengali’ and ‘English’. The politics of transnational migration as well as the household and ‘community’ are thus all inscribed, in different ways, on men and women’s bodies. Yet bodies are not simply ‘acted upon’ by the forces of oppression. They may also be used by individuals (or their relatives) to make political points, to enact particular identities or make claims. This is not usually done consciously. In ‘narrating’ their identities as murubbis, for example, the elders may walk, talk and move their bodies in certain ways; they may wear particular clothes, make certain gestures and so on. These bodily narratives may alter according to context as well as over time. The actions of an old man hobbling on his walking stick as his physiotherapist urges him to become more physically independent should never be taken at face value. Thus, while difference may be marked upon a body by someone else, it may also be used to express difference by its owner.

Migration, Age and Bodily Experience There are two further reasons for my interest in the embodiment of the elders’ life stories. The first is that, as I have already noted, transnational migration is an intensely physical experience, an issue rarely mentioned in migration studies. This comes across very clearly in the narratives, where bodily experiences are both significant in themselves, and may signal wider issues and concerns. People’s initial movement to Britain, for example, is often described in terms of the change in temperature and extremes of weather that they experienced. The physical sensation of being too cold, of snow or freezing rain, is a key trope in many narratives. Its recollection may be a ‘peg’ on which other, more general memories are hung. It may also symbolize the teller’s sense of rupture and disjunction, of no longer being physically at ease. Smells, tastes and other physical sensations are other important themes in many of the narratives, and may help guide memories. On his return to Bangladesh, for example, Mr Haque (Chapter 3) recounts how the rice tasted wrong, and he could not stand the smell of the latrines. In contrast, Mrs Angura Bibi, in describing her longings for the desh, spoke of the sensation of sitting out of doors in the fresh air. A common phrase for describing one’s love of the countryside of Bangladesh is to talk of its ‘sweet winds’ (misti batash), recalling an image of the place through the physical sensation of taste.

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Introduction The physicality of migration is perhaps one reason why so many of the elders’ narratives revolve around stories of the body, especially when they become sick. Sick bodies are, after all, bodies ‘out of place’,113 and many of the elders feel that they, too, are out of place. Their focus upon dysfunctional bodies may thus belie a wider sense of dis-ease. This brings me to my final point. Ageing, however it is culturally constructed, involves a changing relationship with one’s body. As people grow less physically able, as illnesses increasingly dominate their lives and their mortality grows nearer, bodies that were once taken for granted become the focus of attention. Thus, in attempting to describe what it is like to ‘grow old in a second homeland’, it is hardly surprising that bodies, their sickness and their treatment should be central issues. I shall be particularly developing these themes in Chapters 6 and 7.

A Brief Chapter Outline In the next chapter I shall be expanding on the theme of narrative and examining a variety of narrative genres in which, I suggest, many of the elders’ stories are framed. As I shall argue, these are closely linked to constructions and expressions of gender as well as status. While only men recounted ‘Migrant’s Tales’, for example, with their focus upon the adventures of young, mobile and often adventurous migrants, women’s tales of migration tended to be organized around the themes of suffering, separation and the family. Depending upon the context in which the story is told, these can either add to the narrator’s honour, as the suffering servant of Allah, who accepts her fate, or can be read as hidden protest, forms of complaint directed at the wider socio-economic structures of which the teller is a part. I am not suggesting, however, that only women talk about suffering. As we shall see, men’s narratives of their lives in Britain often involve accounts of great hardship and emotional pain. Similarly, women in Britain are both physically active and have contributed to transnational migration through domestic and paid labour. Rather than producing a rigid dichotomy, what I am interested in drawing out are the ways in which particular rhetorics of migration are built into people’s narratives, and how these might be partly framed by gender, age and place. In Chapter 3, I turn to the detailed narratives of two elders, Mr Haque and Mrs Khatun. Part of my purpose here is to illustrate some of the more 113. McDowell 1999: 39.

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Age, Narrative and Migration general points set out in Chapter 2. Combined with this, as both accounts clearly show, crude generalizations about ‘first-generation Bengali men and women’ are simply not possible. Both Mr Haque and Mrs Khatun have negotiated their own paths through life: their choices, attitudes and ways of telling reflect their individual characters as well as the broader factors of gender, class and the global political economies that have helped to structure their particular histories. In Chapter 4, I turn to the men’s narratives of their migration to and settlement in Britain, interwoven with historical accounts derived from secondary sources. As the chapter shows, the construction of masculinity is key to the men’s accounts, for in them the themes of work, the ability to provide, and mobility are key. These constructions are not stable, but change over time. As they grow older, not only has the character of Bengali settlement in Britain, and hence the content of transnational relationships with Sylhet, radically changed, but so too have the identities of the men, many of whom are now preoccupied with their selfpresentation as respectable murubbi (elders). As I argue, the men’s narratives of travel and place have to be understood in the light of these changes: their histories are not objectively remembered series of past events, but always refracted through the lens of time, gender and selfhood. In Chapter 5 I turn to the women’s accounts of their movement to Britain. Like the oral histories of other migrant women, these tend to be organized around the themes of family relationships and community. Indeed, the majority of first-generation women have come to Britain through their relationships with others – as wives and mothers – and, as part of this, their roles as carers are key both to their own identities and how they are seen by others. These have not been their only roles, however. Although in contrast to their husbands most women downplayed the role of paid work in their accounts of migration, many have made important economic contributions to their households. Again, the theme of narrative and the construction of identity is crucial here. In recounting their stories to me, some women may have felt more comfortable in stressing particular culturally sanctioned roles (the carer; the dutiful wife) and less in discussing roles (the paid worker) that in Bangladesh are customarily associated with lower-status, poorer women. Combined with this, the chapter also focuses upon the varied ways in which different women relate to and operate within British space. Rather than their roles’ being determined by the practices and beliefs associated with purdah (the veil), as suggested by many accounts of Asian women, however, my research indicates that it is the material conditions of life in Tower – 38 –

Introduction Hamlets, their role as carers, and the racialization of space in the UK that are key. The theme of the body is developed in Chapter 6, where the various meanings of ageing both in Sylhet and in Britain are described. As I argue, ageing can be understood both as a set of physical, social and emotional experiences and as a set of ideas, used to convey feelings and beliefs about wider issues. Thus, while material conditions in Tower Hamlets have brought very real changes to how old age is experienced by many of the elders, the statements that people make about their situations and the idealized image of the murubbi, dutifully cared for by his or her family and respected by the wider community, can be deconstructed as critiques of the migration process, the younger generation, and the British state. In addition to this, elders are often keen to represent themselves in particular ways in order to gain the support they feel is their due. These are manifested through a variety of contestations around how their bodies should behave and the degree of dependency that they should have on others and non-Bengali professional carers. But as I also argue, there is an important distinction between bodily and social dependency, and the experience of physical incapacitation is described in highly negative terms by those who have suffered strokes or other forms of disability. In Chapter 7 I analyse the sickness narratives of the elders and their carers in more detail. Drawing on the last part of Chapter 6, in which we see how narratives of the body may be used to comment on wider concerns, to complain and to lay claim to various forms of support, I argue that narratives concerning the onset of illness, which are often extraordinarily detailed, can be read as political and social critiques, in which the ideal social order is contrasted with reality. The British state, and in particular, the health service, are often the targets of hidden protests regarding the treatment that individuals and their loved ones received. Underlying these criticisms there may also be a more generalized complaint concerning transnational migration. This is especially the case in many of the women’s narratives. In Chapter 8, I turn to the death of elders, describing how ‘good’ deaths are narrated as taking place at home, and the role of wives and other close family members in this. As I show throughout the book, transnational migration is highly gendered. When migrants die, women are often separated from the death rituals and burial of their husbands, which, owing to constructions of home and spirituality, usually take place back in the desh. Like all relationships, however, the relationship between the desh and Britain is not static; increasingly Britain is becoming Islamicized, and burials take place in the UK. – 39 –

Age, Narrative and Migration This last theme is continued in my concluding chapter, where I show how the construction of home, centred around the image of the desh, has changed over the life course of the elders. While on the one hand the elders glorify the memory of the desh as the place where they truly belong and to which they yearn to return, on the other their relationship to it has been irreversibly changed over the passage of time. The changing history of their own bodies and their family development cycles have both played a central role in this.

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–2– Ways of Telling1 Rokeya Khatun has produced tea and biscuits, shown me a letter from the Housing Office and taken a tray of food to her teenage son in the next room. Finally she sits down and nods that she is ready. As I switch the tape recorder on she pulls her scarf over her head, a gesture of formality and sharam (modesty). I start with the basic details: her name, where she was born and when she arrived in Britain. She responds in whispered monosyllables. The questions were meant to put her at ease but perhaps they are too similar to the officious interrogations of immigration officials. As the interview progresses however, her answers start to change. After ten minutes she is telling me a detailed story about how she fell sick after the birth of her second child, the kindly Indian man who took her to the doctor, her treatment and subsequent gynaecological problems. It is virtually impossible to interrupt the stream of words. Finally, an hour later, she stops. When I next see her at the Day Centre she asks me to return to her house. There are some details about Islam she should have included in her interview and she wants me to bring plenty of tapes to record them with. Research notes, July 1997

If narratives about the past are to be understood as social processes then we must pay as much attention to the form and contexts in which they are produced as to their content. In this chapter I wish to contextualize the elders’ stories by focusing upon the diverse ways in which they were told and the array of narrative styles and genres that they involve, as well as introducing the elders on whom the book is based. As I shall suggest, attention to the usage of different genres can tell us a great deal about those who are speaking and the context in which they speak. We also have much to learn from what people do not say; from their silences, omissions and contradictions.

1. A version of this and Chapter 3 was given at the South Asian Life Histories Conference, held at SOAS in May 1999. I am most grateful for the comments received there, and especially for Caroline Osella’s insightful remarks.

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Age, Narrative and Migration As was indicated in the last chapter, through their stories men and women produce particular versions of themselves. The men’s narratives tend to place themselves in the centre of action, for example; they represent themselves as active agents, only mentioning dependency when discussing the present. In contrast, women’s accounts are often more relational, focusing upon family and representing themselves in far more passive terms. Drawing on Grima’s work on women’s performances in Paxto2 I shall suggest that the tropes of suffering and sadness common to women’s accounts are a discursive style, in which women play out the codes of duty and sharam (modesty) so central to their selfhood. This does not mean that only women have suffered, nor that men are uninterested in their families, but rather that the rhetorics of migration are gendered: women and men emphasize particular themes in their discussion of life in Britain, and this reflects their gender and age identities, as well as the different experiences that they have had. Migration and place also influence the ways in which the elders talk about the past. While clearly their experiences of dislocation and relocation affect what they remember and what they tell, their material conditions – where they physically are – affect the way they tell it. Age, and the way it is socially constructed, is influential too. As part of their enactment of the role of murubbi (elder), the elders use particular narrative genres. Islam and religious myths are an important part of this. Finally, it is important to remember, that like all narratives, the accounts of the elders exist for a particular audience: in most instances myself or my research assistant, Mutmahim Roaf. Discussion of genres and modes of expression is therefore inseparable from an account of research methods. These too are shaped by place and history. First, however, a word about the terms I am using. By ‘genre’ I refer to specific types of narration that have particular conventions and expectations. As Elizabeth Tonkin suggests, genres label an agreement between speakers and listeners.3 For example myths, songs and what I have termed ‘migrant tales’ all involve different styles of delivery and interaction between speaker and listener. These genres are not always clearly separated or easy to classify. Whilst in the oracy4 traditions of Liberia that Tonkin describes, narrative genres seem notably clear-cut, amongst Bengali elders in London the boundaries are more fuzzy. As Wilce points out: ‘. . . genres are not fixed, given or neutral entities, but 2. Grima 1991. 3. Tonkin 1992: 51. 4. Tonkin defines oracy as skilled orality (Tonkin 1992: 4).

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Ways of Telling rather . . . as typifications of practice . . . they are fluid because they are constantly renegotiated and manipulated for ongoing sociopolitical purporses’.5 Before returning to these issues however, I wish to open the chapter with an account of my research and the location in which it took place.

The Story of the Research6 Unlike my doctoral fieldwork, which in anthropological terms was highly traditional (I stayed and worked in a village in Sylhet, became a fictive member of a family and by the end was no longer sure of the boundaries between participation and observation),7 the research on which this book is based was quite different, owing both to personal circumstances and to the material conditions of life in Britain. My original proposal was concerned with the processes of ageing and death amongst Bengalis living in different parts of Britain. I had hoped to conduct some of the fieldwork in Newcastle, where many of the villagers I had lived with in the late 1980s had settled, but personal circumstances (the birth of my first child) made this difficult. Eventually I decided to work in Tower Hamlets, where the largest Bengali ‘community’ in Britain is concentrated. Although I had few personal links with families living in the borough, I hoped that the many governmental and non-governmental agencies working within the area might provide introductions. Significantly, the population included enough older people to make my research worthwhile. In Brighton, where I had originally hoped to conduct comparative research, I soon discovered that there were hardly any Bengalis over the age of sixty.8 It did not take long for me to hear of a community centre in the borough where day-care facilities for Bengali elders were provided. In order to protect the identities of my informants I shall refer to this simply as ‘the day centre’. I have also changed all my informants’ names. With the agreement of the project director I decided to concentrate most of my 5. Wilce 1998: 222. 6. The research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship (1996–7). I am most grateful to the Trust for their support. 7. For a more detailed description see Gardner 1999a and 1997. 8. This has to do with economic conditions in Brighton and the history of Bengali settlement there. As in other towns around Britain, the small Bengali community in the city is centred around ‘Indian’ restaurants rather than the tailoring or heavy industry that employed Bengali men in the 1950s and 1960s. Developing over the 1970s and 1980s, these restaurants employ younger men, often of the second generation.

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Age, Narrative and Migration research amongst the elders visiting the centre. Workers there also very kindly introduced me to other users who were confined to home or who for other reasons no longer visited the centre (such as the widows of men who had died). The decision to base the research at this day centre has of course significantly affected my ‘sample’: the old people whom I got to know and whose stories were recorded all needed support above and beyond that which their families were able to give. Many had experienced strokes and were disabled; others simply needed the sense of camaraderie that the centre provided. The accounts that follow therefore cannot be generalized to all Bengali elders in either Tower Hamlets or Britain.

Introducing ‘The Elders’ In all, the research included twenty-three households, all of which had a member who visited the day centre or who was helped by its workers at home, and all of which originated from Sylhet District in Bangladesh. The details of these households are given in an appendix at the end of the book, and are based on information given by the elders during their interviews, rather than through formal surveying methods. From these households, eleven men and sixteen women kindly gave detailed interviews (in many cases during a series of meetings) in which they narrated their experiences of migration to and life in Britain, amongst a host of other topics. Of the men, all had either experienced a stroke, or were in some other way incapacitated through ill health. All were first-generation migrants, the majority arriving in Britain between the 1950s and the 1960s. A minority of the oldest men had worked as lascars (sailors) on East Indian ships before arriving in Britain; others had migrated directly from Sylhet in the ‘Labour Voucher’ period of the early 1960s (see Chapter 4). One, Mohammed Rahman, had lived in Singapore before Britain, while Fazlu Miah had been in the Merchant Navy before jumping ship in Liverpool in 1952. The ages of the men ranged from their fifties to their nineties: as I explain in Chapter 6, ‘age’ is a debatable category amongst older people from Sylhet; very few elders are sure of their precise age, and most cite what they refer to as their ‘passport age’ when asked. While one may generalize to a degree about the men’s experiences – all had worked in a variety of industrial settings in Britain over the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, for example, and all were now physically infirm – there is also, unsurprisingly, considerable disparity in their individual stories, their family circumstances and their attitudes.

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Ways of Telling The same is true of the women. Of those I spent most time with, the majority used the day centre in their capacity as ‘carers’ of disabled or sick husbands. Some of these women were now widows, but still kept in touch with the day centre for the social support it provided. While, as we shall see in Chapter 5, a minority of women came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, the majority had arrived over the 1980s, and some in the 1990s. Their ages ranged from the late thirties to the sixties. A smaller group used the centres not as ‘carers’ but as ‘elders’; like their male counterparts, these had either suffered a stroke or were in some other way too frail or disabled to be able to cope without some form of institutional support. Of my female interviewees, only two were in this category. Their limited representation in the research reflects both the degree of interest shown in participating by different individuals and the demographic profile of the Bengali population in Britain, where a recent Age Concern report, based on the 1991 census, cites 1,215 females over the age of sixty as opposed to 4,083 men.9 As well as these informants, I also talked to a wider range of men and women who used the centre, but who did not formally give interviews. The disparity in ages and migration experiences between the men and the women means that in the chapters that follow men and women are not equally represented, and also that meaningful comparisons between the two groups cannot be made. For example, my discussion of death practices and bereavement (Chapter 8) is confined to widows, for none of the men involved in the research told us that they had lost a wife. Similarly, the narratives of strokes and sickness are mostly men’s, since the women I met were mainly carers of stroke victims and not themselves infirm. Likewise, the discussion of changing relationships to Bangladesh and to Britain, as experienced over the life course, is mostly based on men’s accounts, for the vast majority of women had only been in Britain for five to ten years, and many had not returned to Bangladesh during that time.

Research Methods In addition to my work at the day centre, I visited and carried out interviews at several other sites. These included a hospice in East London; The Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel; Tasleem’s – the Muslim 9. Age Concern: Age and Race: Double Discrimination: Life in Britain for Ethnic Minority Elders (undated); produced in conjunction with the Commission for Racial Equality.

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Age, Narrative and Migration funeral directors situated at the East London Mosque; and another centre for Bengali elders that also operates in Tower Hamlets. Owing to my personal circumstances, plus the overcrowded conditions of many households in Tower Hamlets, living as part of a family seemed impractical. I therefore commuted from Brighton to London, writing up my notes on the train and fitting my visits into the structure of days at the day centre. Rather than simply dropping by to visit informants as I had done in Talukpur, the village where I worked in Sylhet, I rang first to make appointments, or arranged them through the day centre. To this extent my role as a researcher was more clearly delineated. While I hope that I became friends with many of the women who so kindly gave me their time, I doubt that they ever forgot why I was there. Ethically I think that this was an advantage. While I have had distinct qualms over the use of material collected in Sylhet, where many of the people I lived with (including myself at times) seemed to forget what I was doing, in London the research process was more formal. This meant that all the elders who gave interviews and narrated stories were fully aware that I was interested for the purposes of ‘learning about the experience of Bengali elders’ with the ultimate aim of writing a book for my university, in which their stories would be included. Initially, I visited the centre on a daily basis, sitting with the women on their side of the hall, helping to serve lunch, and participating in the activities that took place after prayers in the afternoons. It did not take long to make friends. Although somewhat rusty, my spoken Bengali was a great asset for public relations, as was the fact that I had lived in a village in Sylhet. Indeed, I soon discovered people who were distantly related to my own fictive family in Nabiganj. Almost immediately I was invited to visit women in their homes. When I explained to them that I wanted to hear their stories and ask them about their lives in Britain most were keen to help. I was introduced to other carers in their homes by the project’s ‘Carers’ worker, whom I often accompanied in her outreach work. As well as visiting women at home this involved accompanying them to the doctor or to the Housing Office, assisting in negotiations with other bureaucratic agencies (the DSS, immigration authorities and so on), and even, in one case, arranging a civil marriage between a husband and wife whose union was not officially recognized in Britain. After a while I was able to build up independent relationships and visit women alone. In Sylhet my fictive position as a village daughter enabled me to form friendly relationships with some of the older men, although these were never as strong as those I made with women. In Tower Hamlets, where I – 46 –

Ways of Telling was just another face at the centre, I was not able to draw upon this resource of fictive kinship. Although I did become friendly with some men, the majority of interviews with them were carried out by a research assistant, Mutmahim Roaf.10 This decision to use a research assistant was taken partly because of the relatively short time-span of the research (the interviews were carried out over a period of nine months) and the obvious advantages of doubling the time spent on the research. In addition to this, the aforementioned gender divisions at the centre meant that a male researcher was likely to have greater access to the men than me. Both Mutmahim’s and my role as researchers were structured in particular ways, the exchanges between us and the elders embedded in particular social and political relations. For example, the men Mutmahim interviewed spoke to him as a junior man who, at some level at least, was assumed to be an ‘insider’ to whom perhaps certain things could be told more readily than to an outsider like myself, but to whom at the same time other information or perspectives might not be given. The institutional setting of the day centre may also have affected the nature of the interviews. Perhaps because he was unmarried and many of the elders lived with their unmarried daughters, unlike myself Mutmahim was not invited to people’s homes. My relationship with the women was also of course deeply affected by my own positioning as a more junior, non-Bengali woman. My ethnic identity as ‘English’ no doubt influenced what many of the women were prepared to tell me about their experiences of life in Britain. For some women, whose contact with shada manoosh (white people) has been confined to state functionaries and professionals in immigration and housing offices, at hospitals and at the day centre, their narratives may have been affected by what they perceived I would want to hear, and what they thought it was appropriate to tell. Yet given that my relationship to them could never be neutral, the majority were remarkably candid. Indeed, to assume that personal relationships are totally dominated by the politics of identity is perhaps as misguided as to assume that they are not. The interviews that Mutmahim and I carried out involved questions concerning people’s experience of migration, their memories of Bangladesh and Britain and their employment histories, as well as their experience of health care, of growing old, and their family situations. Some interviewees needed substantial prompting. Others quickly launched into detailed narratives. We tried to be as open as possible in our questions, 10. This was kindly funded by the Research Development Fund at the University of Sussex.

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Age, Narrative and Migration hoping that our informants would take the lead, although sometimes it was difficult not to let what we thought of as the research agenda (ageing, migration, history) dominate. For example when, as sometimes happened, my interviewee started to tell a detailed story about Islam in Sylhet, I had to fight the urge to guide her back to a more ‘relevant’ topic. But, as I shall argue below, such religious stories are important ways in which people enact their status and identity. In planning the research I had hoped to use some the participatory methods that are currently fashionable in community development work.11 Time lines, for example, could potentially be powerful tools for eliciting life histories. Other methods, such as the drawing of maps by groups or individuals, might also lead to insights into how the elders viewed space and place. I also hoped to organize focus groups, both to discuss particular issues and eventually to review the research. In the end the only participatory method that I attempted was a focus group discussion amongst women at the day centre in which they discussed changes in their family life and their diminished power as mothers-in-law in Britain, amidst much shouting, hilarity, and general confusion. The reason I did not use the other methods was that they seemed inappropriate. As a younger woman, using the honorific apni to address the elders (who often referred more familiarly to me as tumi) it seemed disrespectful to ask them to draw maps or pictures, as one might a group of children. Since many of the women I worked with were non-literate, I also doubted that they would be comfortable with pens and paper, especially since Islam prohibits the production of bodily images. Likewise young people do not ask elders to sit together and discuss issues. I only felt able to organize the focus group discussion with the women at the end of my research and because of the more informal relationship I enjoyed with them. The narratives and quotations that the subsequent chapters are centred around are therefore the result of specific research methods. Each of these methods produced different types of text: the informal chats and participant observation turned into ‘field notes’, tape-recorded interviews transcribed and translated, and other types of data (for example concerning household structure and migration history) stored in note form. The narrative genres described below have been squeezed through the grid of these research and textual methods. They have been further violated by 11. Within development studies, these methods have been pioneered by Robert Chambers and other researchers at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. For an overview, see Chambers 1997.

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Ways of Telling their translation into English, often destroying the rhythm of speech and the poetic use of words.12

Bengalis in the UK: A Brief Description As we shall see in the next chapter, the Bengali population in Britain has undergone significant changes over the last few decades, and is still very much in flux. Census data indicate that as an ethnic minority they are one of the youngest groups. The 1991 Census recorded 163,000 ‘Bangladeshis’, of whom under half were under the age of sixteen and around three-quarters were under thirty-five.13 The population also has an excess of males within it, indicating a slower rate of family reunification in comparison with other South Asian groups within Britain: the 1991 Census recorded 10 per cent more males than females. Since the majority of families have been actively seeking reunification over the last two decades, at the time of writing (2001) this disparity may have already diminished. There is another important characteristic. Rather than being spread over a range of areas within Britain, the Bengali population is largely concentrated in London: 41 per cent live in inner London, with the largest proportion living in Tower Hamlets. Indeed, 25 per cent of the overall population of Tower Hamlets was Bengali in 1992;14 by 2000 this proportion will probably have significantly increased, owing to the prevailing rates of family reunification and population growth.15 Overall, the 1991 census showed that half the Bengali population in Britain were living in the most deprived wards of the country, whether ranked by unemployment, economic inactivity or lack of car ownership.16 As John Eade notes, the Bengali population in Tower Hamlets is generally described in terms of its problems: unemployment, racism, poverty and growing levels of crime.17 Indeed, in terms of the population as a whole, the 1986 Home Office Report on Bangladeshis in Britain states that they are the single most underprivileged group in the country,

12. On problems of producing written texts from oral narratives, see Trawick 1991. 13. Data cited by Phillipson et al. 1998: 281; see also Peach 1990. 14. Census Update 1992. Cited in Eade 1994. 15. The 1991 census reports 36,955 ‘Bangladeshis’ out of a total population of 161,064; source: Tower Hamlets Census information; http://www.eastendlife.net/index_1.htm 16. Law 1996: 85. 17. Eade 1994.

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Age, Narrative and Migration with 56 per cent of men aged over forty-five unemployed.18 As we shall see in Chapter 6, data gathered more recently within Tower Hamlets bear out the impression of high levels of unemployment, poverty and overcrowded living conditions. It should be noted that there are other, far more encouraging developments within the population: recent research, for example, stresses educational achievement amongst the younger generation.19 For now, however, let us now turn in more detail to the specific context of Tower Hamlets.

The Research Location: A Brief Background to Tower Hamlets The setting of the research, Tower Hamlets in East London, is very specific, and this has affected my ‘sample’ in particular ways. The politics and history of the borough vary widely between its different neighbourhoods. The area around Spitalfields and Brick Lane, for example, where many of the elders included in the research lived, has had a long history of immigration, including Hugenot refugees in the seventeenth century, Irish peasants in the 1840s, Polish and Russian Jews during the late nineteenth century and Maltese and Cypriots after the Second World War, 20 and a Chinese community concentrated around Limehouse. Bengali settlement is therefore just one stage in a long series of movements into the area, and – like those groups that went before – may not necessarily be permanent. In contrast, the Docklands, which lie to the east of the region, were largely populated up until the 1970s by stable workingclass communities based around the docks. Only when these closed and the area was redeveloped did these communities start to disintegrate; this period coincided with both the insertion of capital by city developers into certain parts of Docklands and the influx of Bengali families in the 1980s.21 Just as throughout its history Tower Hamlets has been characterized by a constantly shifting population, so too is its economic history highly varied. While the heavy industry of the docks has now almost wholly disappeared, to be replaced by ‘yuppy’ property developments connected to the financial centres of the City of London by the Docklands Light 18. House of Commons Report, Bengalis in Britain (1986–7) London: HMSO. 19. Centre for Bangladeshi Studies, 1994. Routes and Beyond: Voices of Educationally Successful Bengalis Roehampton Institute, London. 20. Eade 1989: 26. 21. Eade 1997.

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Ways of Telling Railway, Aldgate, and in particular Brick Lane, has long been characterized by the garment industry. As some of the elders tell us in their accounts of working as tailors and pressers in the 1950s and 1960s, this was originally dominated by Jewish proprietors. Today, however, the ‘rag trade’ workshops and shops around Brick Lane are mainly Bengali (the racialization of the garment industry in the borough is returned to in Chapter 4). Another significant change has been the development of Bengali-run ‘Indian restaurants’ in Brick Lane, as well as grocery, music and clothes shops catering for the local Bengali population. All of these co-exist with the redeveloped Trumans Brewery site, now home to smart internet companies and other white-collar concerns that have moved eastwards from the City. To the West, Spitalfields, once home to a thriving fruit and vegetable market, has also been redeveloped, and now houses a variety of cafés, workshops and small boutiques, catering largely for white-collar workers. The area where the elders live and where the day centre is located is therefore hugely mixed. While this variety sometimes exists within the same area – one might pass a mosque, a sari shop and a trendy coffee bar filled with e-commerce workers within a couple of minutes in Spitalfields, for example – in other parts of the borough there are distinct ethnic and economic differences. Thus, while the area between Shoreditch and Aldgate is where most Bengalis live, the Docklands wards of St Katherine’s, Shadwell and Millwall remain predominantly white. As we shall see, these differences have an important effect on housing choices and movement between and within areas in the borough amongst our informants. The recent history of Tower Hamlets has therefore been subject to a complex set of interrelated processes: industrial change leading to unemployment and economic decline; the rapid turnover of entrepreneurial concerns; ongoing immigration (caused both by the reunification of Bengali families over the 1970s and 1980s and the entry of many other groups into the area);22 the redevelopment and gentrification of some neighbourhoods; and, within the context of high levels of dependency on state support, growing pressure on what is generally poor-quality council housing. Housing is a major issue within the borough, where in some areas in the late 1980s over 90 per cent of the population lived in council accommodation.23 While there has been some recent redevelopment of 22. See, for example, Summerfield’s description of the Somali population in Tower Hamlets (1992). 23. Eade 1989: 21.

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Age, Narrative and Migration council stock, in the streets of Spitalfields and Shoreditch, where much of the Bengali population is housed, the accommodation is largely overcrowded and often damp. As we shall see in Chapter 6, many of our informants – all of whom lived in council accommodation – were attempting to be re-housed. These various pressures were exploited by the British National Party in 1993, when they successfully had a candidate – Derek Beacon – elected on to the council by white voters. Indeed, while the Labour Party was returned to power in 1994, resentment by some sections of the white population against their Bengali neighbours has been a constant feature of life within the borough, expressed both through a series of violent attacks on Bengalis by whites and through more invidious forms of racism. Within the Bengali population, as John Eade has shown, political representations and discourses have shifted over the last few decades.24 While in the earlier periods of settlement formal political representation was still limited, with the views of elders heard mainly through local gossip and mosques, more recently second- and third-generation Bengalis have become far more politically active within the borough, with a growing emphasis over the 1980s upon their distinct Sylheti, as opposed to Bengali, identities, thus challenging the dominance of middle-class Bengalis from Dhaka on the local political scene. Since then, and especially since the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, there has been a growing emphasis on Muslim identities – an issue I shall return to in Chapter 4. As this brief background indicates, the Bengali elders included in this book therefore live in a very specific context, one that is significantly different from the other parts of Britain where there is a sizeable Bengali population, such as Oldham, or Birmingham. While many of the elders had lived in other parts of Britain, and may move between Tower Hamlets and Sylhet, it is this particular setting that on a day-to-day basis influences their experiences and their narratives. From this, let us return to a closer consideration of narrative genres.

Narrative Genres in Sylhet To understand the ways in which the elders narrate their life histories in London, we need to know more about the narrative cultures in which they were brought up. These are not of course the only influences: not all stories are neatly ‘packaged’ into one or the other genre; but they are 24. Eade 1990 and 1992.

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Ways of Telling important, for as story-telling genres they are resources on which the elders may draw. Below I outline some of the narrative genres I encountered during my fieldwork in Sylhet. In doing this I am not intending to suggest that first-generation migrants import a set ‘tradition’ wholesale into Britain. Rather, a dynamic relationship exists between places. Ways of telling are influenced by transnational movement, just as perceptions of place and space – the migrant experience – are communicated in different ways according to particular cultural and social contexts. Unlike the non-literate traditions described elsewhere in the world in which skilled and socially recognized orators tell stories in a variety of genres (for example, formalized praising, warfare celebrations, epics, etc.)25 narrative styles in rural Sylhet tend to be less easy to distinguish, and co-exist with other non-oral forms. Bengal is of course famous both for its literature and, more recently, its films. While the majority of people in rural Bangladesh may not historically have had access to the ‘high’ literary culture of urban West Bengal, literacy is nonetheless highly valued. In Talukpur village approximately 50 per cent of the men and 30 per cent of the women were literate in 1987/8 (I defined this as being able to read and write basic Bengali). The majority of literate women were under the age of forty; a primary school built in the 1970s in the village had vastly increased the rates of female literacy. Those that could read had access to newspapers, novels, bazaar pamphlets and religious literature (including histories of Islam in Bangladesh and the stories of pir (Islamic saints), as well as discussions of scriptural matters). The most frequently read and highly valued text in the village was however the Quran. Many people who were unable to read Bengali could read and recite part or all of this, although only a few actually understood the literal meaning of the Arabic. Villagers were also exposed, in varying degrees, to a number of other narrative forms. Some households had radios or cassette recorders and were able to listen to popular songs and music, some of which were brought back by bideshis (foreigners; in this context, return migrants from abroad) from the Middle East or the United Kingdom. Tapes of religious preaching and prayer were sometimes played, as were recordings of political oratory (for example, I once heard a taped speech of Sheikh Mujib, the ‘father’ of Bangladesh, who was assassinated in 1975). Cassette recorders and radios tended to be owned mostly by young men, and were common status symbols of returnees from the Middle East.

25. See, for example, Finnegan 1967 and Tonkin 1992.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Talukpur now has electricity, but during my original fieldwork the only way one could run a television or video cassette recorder was by setting up a generator. This did occasionally happen (for example in very wealthy migrant households) and people also watched television on visits to Sylhet or Nobiganj towns; but at that time it could not be said that the viewing of films, soap operas or foreign imports was an important aspect of local culture. Trips to the cinema were not appropriate for women, and to my knowledge the nearest cinemas were in Sylhet or Habiganj towns. Jatra (traditional rural theatre) sometimes took place in the vicinity; but again, respectable women did not attend. When I revisited Talukpur in 1999 I found that despite access to electricity households did not regularly watch television or videos of Bollywood films. Instead, VCRs were more commonly used for viewing videos of weddings. These commercial forms aside, the most common form of entertainment in Talukpur was talking and the telling of stories. While oration is not formally renumerated, some people have reputations as being particularly good story-tellers (kicha: story). Story-telling sessions are usually spontaneous and take place within domestic areas such as kitchens or the yards of homesteads, plus more public, male domains such as tea stalls in the bazaar. Again, unlike the traditions described by Elizabeth Tonkin or Ruth Finnegan in Africa, they are not formally organized or accompanied by narrative techniques, such as music or drumming. I am wary of producing overly rigid categories, but in what follows I suggest that in rural Sylhet there are a variety of analytically distinct types of narrative. These include tales of misfortune told mainly by low-status men and women, religious myths, and ‘migrant tales’. While there are of course other types of story (for example, concerning magic-making) these particular genres are common ways in which narrators construct their personal identities and status. In addition to these, songs of romantic love, marriage and Sufi saints sung by women and low-status men offer opportunities for counter-discursive expression. Since these were not important to our research in London and I have discussed them elsewhere, I shall not describe songs here.26

Islamic Myths Stories about Islam, in particular those linking Muslim saints to the desh (land) of Sylhet, were frequently told to me during my stay in Talukpur. 26. See Gardner 1998; Narayan 1997; also Raheja and Gold 1994 on women’s songs and resistance in South Asia.

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Ways of Telling These are usually told by murubbi, those with special religious knowledge such as mullah (term used locally for men who have completed a madrasa training) or Hajjis (those who have performed the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca). While these are often narrated by men, older women – usually from higher-status households – may also tell lengthy religious stories. While at one level these myths can be understood as vehicles for the construction of status, displaying the religiosity and knowledge of the teller, at another they are highly contested. As I have argued elsewhere,27 the boundaries of what higher-status and richer members of the community construct as religious ‘orthodoxy’ are highly fluid in Talukpur; what is and what is not ‘proper’ Islamic conduct and belief is constantly debated and competed over. Thus the stories told by some people about local pir and their shrines may be dismissed as superstitious poppycock by others keen to assert their own status as more educated and orthodox. Women and lower-status men are far closer in their beliefs and practices to non-orthodox Sufi discourse than higher-status men, many of whom are returned bideshis (people who have been to foreign countries). Thus it was often women or labourers who told me lengthy narratives concerning the miracles of local pir,28 while Hajji men, keen to show their orthodox religious knowledge, would narrate stories from the Old Testament or concerning the Prophet Mohammed. Interestingly, many of these stories make a direct link between the lineage (bangsa) of the teller and the religiosity of their land. For example, a story I heard many times in Sylhet (as well as in London) concerned the burial of an ancestral pir in homestead land, thus transforming it into sacred territory. I shall elaborate on this in Chapter 8. While there may be a significant difference in the content of religious myths, the discursive style in which they are told is largely the same. The narrator speaks at length and does not expect to be interrupted. The details of the story also cannot be questioned by the audience, especially when it purports to be drawing upon a scriptural version of the story, for, if derived from the Holy Books, it is linked to the voice of Mohammed and is thus unquestionable. The use of Arabic, and prayers and blessings at particular points (for example at the mention of the Prophet’s name) reinforce the performance as religious and authoritative. Women tell and listen to such narratives with their heads covered. Thus whilst religious narratives in Sylhet are not as formal as those classically described by Bloch in his analysis of political oratory and 27. Gardner 1993b, 1995. 28. See Gardner 1995: 256–62.

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Age, Narrative and Migration ritual language in Madagascar,29 they too construct authority and prestige for the teller. Bloch argues that in Madagascar ritual language helps reproduce social hierarchy. In Sylhet, social hierarchy is highly fluid, one reason why the content of the myths is so contested.

Migrant Tales Another type of story commonly told in Talukpur concerns the adventures and successes of return migrants.30 Narrated by men, these place the teller at the centre of action, and may involve a series of complicated tricks and scams, showing his intelligence and cunning. Rather than retailing lengthy descriptions of place or travel, return migrants tend to talk about the places they have been in terms of the adventures and transformations they have experienced there. In contrast to the tourism of the English middle classes, places are not consumed as a series of objectified memories, descriptions and experiences, but acted upon: they are the domain of economic and social transformation. These stories exist for a particular audience that does not exist in Britain: villagers who have not migrated. Thus, while returnees tend to emphasize success during the time they are in Bangladesh, the stories told in Britain are not the same. As we shall see, many are far less positive, and often involve accounts of great hardship and suffering. As in the migrant tales narrated in London, getting lost and finding the way – often with the help of a friendly stranger – were common tropes in the narratives of both Londoni and Middle Eastern return migrants. This figure of the kindly patron (sometimes South Asian, sometimes a native) who aids the new migrant in his transformation from ignorant newcomer to a person with understanding (buji)31 is important to many of the tales I heard both in London and Sylhet. Through this trope, the narrator is stressing both his role as active agent and as part of a wider network of social links. Knowledge and understanding of the new place are also central to the tales. The negotiation of structure and agency is another common theme. As we shall see in the narrative cited in the next chapter, Mr Haque shows a keen understanding of the way his life has been curtailed and limited by 29. Bloch 1989: 24–7. 30. In contrast to these tales of migrant success, Watkins (2001) notes that amongst Pakhtun return migrants in the North West Frontier region of Pakistan, tales of suffering were a key genre. 31. See Blanchet 1996 for discussion of buji (understanding) in relation to children in Bangladesh.

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Ways of Telling political and historical structures, as well as stressing his own agency in forging his destiny. In the following example of a ‘migrant’s tale’, told in London, the agency of the teller, Abdul Ali, is clearly apparent, but underlain by his dependence upon networks of patronage in finding his way in Britain. Abdul Ali has divided his time between London and Sylhet since 1963, reuniting his family in 1973, and working in a variety of factories and workshops. He cites his age as seventy-six: Q: When did you first come to this country? I came at the end of 1963. I came at Christmas. I was in Karachi at the time. At Christmas the planes stop travelling. I was waiting there, and after Christmas they started up again so I got on and arrived here. Q: Where did you arrive to? I came to Mile End. My uncle had a restaurant there. I stayed and worked there for about a year and saved my money. I used to give it to my uncle to look after. When I’d saved enough money I bought a share in the house . . .

He goes on to describe a long-running dispute over this money and how it was eventually arbitrated by members of his lineage. Later in the interview, he says, in response to a question about how life in Britain has changed: Now, if you were to ask anyone on the streets please show me the way to somewhere, I’m lost, they’ll probably deliberately show you the wrong way. In 1964, I went to Stratford. I was on the bus, and instead of getting off at the right place I went to Stratford. I got off, and of course couldn’t work out where I was. So I asked a policeman. I told him ‘I live in Mile End and I’m lost.’ They (the police?) took me to the bus stop and waited with me, asking at the bus-stop if anyone was going to Mile End. There was a customer there who used to eat in my uncle’s restaurant. Well, he said that he was going that way, and he looked after me. In fact he took me all the way home. He was very kind, the police then were very kind. Men and women were all kind. Nowadays people aren’t like that. 5 November 1996

Tales of Misfortune One of the most common types of story I heard and recorded in Talukpur concerned the misfortune and grief (dook) of the narrator. These stories were nearly always told by lower-status women (or sometimes men) to an assembled group of household women, who would listen and exclaim at – 57 –

Age, Narrative and Migration her (or his) woes. Sometimes the narrators were family servants (kamla); often they were poorer relatives in search of help, wandering beggars and casual labourers. Their stories included the desertion of husbands and sons, the death of family members, land loss through floods or frauds, and a host of other disasters. Unlike what happens in the narrative forms described above, the speaker would talk quietly, often not making eye contact. She would also frequently be interrupted and sometimes contradicted by her audience. At particularly tragic moments she would usually cry. Similar reactions from the audience were common, although alternatively they might laugh or comment on the teller’s stupidity in taking a particular course of action. The stories would often end in an appeal for the ‘help’ of those listening, the narrator speaking in a plaintive wail.32 In his fascinating ethnography of ‘troubles telling’ in rural Bangladesh, James Wilce argues that complaints and the telling of misfortune can be interpreted as a form of protest, an activity that especially for women, is a risky business and liable to be violently repressed.33 While in the cases of madness and illness that he cites resistance and repression are clearly present, my material suggests that narratives of misfortune can also be interpreted as a form of symbolic capital: a means through which clients make socially sanctioned demands on their patrons. Here, it is the teller’s dependency on shahaja (help) rather than his or her resistance that is key. Such tales and performances of misfortune are closely tied to the practice of almsgiving. In order to gain alms, beggars tell their stories to householders, just as they might display a disabled body or a malnourished child. The more tragic the story, the higher the likelihood of success. As we shall see in Chapter 6, ‘troubles telling’ is also sometimes used as a strategy by elders in London in order to make claims on those who have control over important and scarce resources, such as housing or forms of social support. In combination with this, many people in Bangladesh have experienced horrendous events in their lives, for the nation’s history has encompassed war, catastrophic flooding, cyclones and famine, and in the countryside land-grabbing and violent extortion are common practices. To this extent tales of suffering have a similar function to group therapy; the telling and listening has a cathartic effect on all concerned. Taken alone, however, this explanation is too simplistic, for it is not only in the context of requests for help that people tell their troubles. Thus, while in some contexts trouble-telling may be interpreted as conscious or unconscious resistance, as Wilce suggests, or as symbolic 32. Possibly this is the same as the ‘creaky voice’ that Wilce describes (1998: 119). 33. Wilce 1998.

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Ways of Telling capital in struggles over resources, in others it is linked to the representation of the self as dependent, passive and honourable. In her analysis of the role of suffering in women’s performance in Paxto, North Pakistan, Grima argues that women prove their honour and dignity through their stories of sadness and pain.34 These ‘personal event narratives’ help construct women’s identities, demonstrating through the description of suffering and endurance the piety of the narrator. As Grima points out, in Islam pain and suffering are meritorious and redemptive.35 Grima’s ethnography is vividly reminiscent of my own experiences in Sylhet and Tower Hamlets. Many of the personal stories told to me by women in Talukpur involved a series of terrible events that the narrator presented herself as experiencing more or less passively. While many women have indeed suffered great loss and pain in their lives, especially when they are part of migrant families,36 in Sylheti as in Paxto culture it would seem the case that the recounting of these tales is an important way in which they construct their identities: as dependent and as passive and modest recipients of Allah’s will (amar kofal bhala na: the fate written on my forehead is not good). This does not mean that women are passive and dependent, but rather that these are the narrative idioms in which they chose to describe themselves. Similarly, it does not mean that in Britain tales of suffering are confined only to women, only that they are more common in women’s narratives. As we shall see, men also talked of suffering, especially in the early days of migration, when they lived in overcrowded conditions, worked seven days a week, and were separated from their loved ones back in Sylhet.

Ways of Telling in Britain As I suggested in the last chapter, place and transnational movement play an important role in the construction of narrative. This is both a methodological point (where the research is carried out influences what is told) and a theoretical one (the construction and telling of history has a geography: the way in which the past is imagined depends upon place and space as well as time). In Tower Hamlets, material conditions have a direct influence on the ways in which people tell stories. For example, 34. Grima 1991. 35. ibid.: 88. 36. And to this extent I am uneasy at the implications of Grima’s analysis – intended or otherwise – that the pain described by her female informants is constructed for purposes of image-building rather than reflecting objective conditions.

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Age, Narrative and Migration the structure of houses and flats makes ‘dropping in’ far harder in London than in Sylhet, where all baris (homesteads) are open and people walk into houses uninvited. The weather, which (except during a few short summer months) prevents people from sitting outside also plays a role. In the high-rise flats where many of my informants lived, sitting outdoors is impossible whatever the weather. Spontaneous sessions in which visitors sit down and tell their stories are far less likely to occur. Narration thus becomes a more private and intimate event. Furthermore almsgiving does not take place in Britain, nor do (Bangladeshi) beggars and labourers visit people’s homes in the hope of work or aid. The role of television and video cassette recorders is also important. As in nearly all British homes, television is a central form of entertainment in Bengali households, especially amongst the second and third generations, making the village practice of chatting and gossiping in the evening increasingly redundant. Young people also participate in a myriad of cultural events and performances, most far beyond the experience of their parents or grandparents. This is not to say that children never hear the stories of their elders; only that story-telling in the forms that I have described above is more rare. In Tower Hamlets the technologies of remembering have also shifted. Videos (of weddings or visits to Sylhet) and photographs (of relatives across the diaspora) may be used to record experience, although for older people neither of these seemed important tools in the actual telling of life histories. In the homes that I visited memorabilia from Bangladesh (calendars, posters and sometimes photographs of villages and relatives) were often displayed on the walls, as were Islamic artefacts from trips to Mecca (pictures of the Kaaba, clocks in the shape of mosques, Islamic calendars, etc.). Since most of the families I visited survived on very low incomes, the display of status-producing consumption goods was minimal.37 Finally, in Tower Hamlets there are additional public spaces for the recitation of religious narratives. While in Bangladesh mosques, madrasas and sometimes the homesteads of those wealthy enough to host a milad (religious occasion involving group prayer) are the usual venues for Islamic narratives, in East London community centres (such as the day centre) are important spaces where people demonstrate their knowledge of religious affairs. For the elders this may be key to group identity and their self-representation as pious murubii. The following is an excerpt from Mutmahim’s notes: 37. All households had televisions.

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Ways of Telling August Tufael [one of the care-workers] has been engaging the users today in a book looking at the history of the relationship between the Prophet and his followers. ALL are enthralled. Mr Haque gave an impromptu Koranic reading. Others praised him, all encouraged him, even though his recital was slightly incorrect. Tufael slightly corrected him. He took it lightly. One full hour passes without incident as everyone is listening to the reading.

Gender and Age in the Construction of Narratives Although none of the narrative forms described above are used exclusively by men or women, what people say and the way in which they say it are closely related to the construction of their personal identities. These are not fixed, but fluid. Indeed, as oral historians have pointed out, the very act of telling can be empowering, changing the way in which people see themselves.38 Similarly, narrative styles and genres change as people grow older and assume new identities and statuses.39 In Sylhet and Tower Hamlets religiosity and knowledge are central to the social construction of being a murubbi (elder); the narration of authority-building Islamic myths is an important part of this. These processes affect both men and women, although not always in the same ways. In the final part of this chapter I therefore wish to sketch out some of the differences between the ways in which men and women narrate their lives. These differences are not fixed and intransigent, but rather are poles on a continuum on which individuals are situated, positions that may change over time as well as according to where they are.

Women’s Narratives All the interviews that I recorded with women took place within their own homes. While some women (for example, Rokeya Khatun, from whom we hear in Chapter 3) spoke confidently, others were notably less expansive than the men, especially in answer to particular questions. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that, as researchers attempting to gather women’s oral histories in other cultural contexts have 38. See Perks and Thompson 1998. For discussion of feminist oral history, see Geiger 1992. 39. For an interesting discussion of how recollections are distorted by ageing, which is in itself socially constructed, see Spencer 1992. For discussion of gender and women’s life histories see Geiger 1986 and Bertaux-Wiame 1979.

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Age, Narrative and Migration discovered, women may be unused to speaking out and being heard, or to thinking of their lives as worthy subjects of discussion.40 In Talukpur, the majority of women did not think of themselves as knowledgeable of social or religious affairs; questions concerning Islam or politics were invariably answered by telling me to ‘ask the men’. Even in situations where they clearly had direct control over events, there was often a tendency to downplay their role in affairs, to avoid the first person or their own accomplishments.41 Their personal power thus remained hidden, at least at the level of formal expression. These images of women as passive and powerless are embodied by particular physical codes of modesty, which may inhibit women from speaking in certain ways: silence and down-turned eyes, for example, are highly valued signs of sharam, as is the covered head and immobility of purdah (the veil).42 We should of course beware of interpreting this too literally. As we shall see in Chapter 5, there is a crucial distinction to be made between the performance of appropriately ‘modest’ behaviour and other practices or interactions that construct and express selfhood very differently. Crucially too, the performance of purdah changes over a woman’s life cycle, as well as between places. It would therefore be simplistic to assume that women’s apparent reticence to talk is wholly because of their ‘silencing’ by patriarchal culture. As I discovered both in London and Sylhet, the majority of women I interviewed had much to say, but only on certain topics. For example questions concerning life in Britain and migration histories often drew blanks: Britain was simply bhala (nice); movements to and from places, or the employment histories of family members, were talked of vaguely. Yet the same women would speak at length about the sicknesses of their husbands or the birth of their children. To an extent the women’s reticence to talk of certain issues might have been because of my own identity as an ‘English’ researcher, to whom they did not wish to be impolite, or because of fears concerning their immigration status. But while it may account for some silence or awkwardness, I do not believe that this explanation takes us far enough. 40. For a wider discussion of the issues involved in collecting women’s oral histories see Sangster 1998. An interesting example of Afghan women’s response to the technologies of recording interviews is given by Mills 1991. More generally, the ‘problem’ of women who seemed to lack a voice was classically raised in social anthropology by Edwin Ardener (1975). 41. For a detailed discussion of the first person pronoun in narratives of complaint, see Wilce 1998: 44–80. 42. I shall discuss purdah in more detail in Chapter 5.

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Ways of Telling Rather, I suggest that, through the combination of silence and expansion within women’s narratives, we can learn much about how they think of themselves and how they wish to be seen. To this extent, the structural and ideological relations of which they are a part shape women’s histories.43 As we shall see, for the women narrators cited in this book, their embeddedness in family life helps shape their own view of life and identity. But this does not mean that this is the only way in which they think about and represent themselves. Rather, as Wilce suggests,44 personal narratives may be sites where alternative selfhoods are negotiated, a theme I return to in the next chapter.

Men’s Narratives In contrast to the women’s narratives, the men tended to present themselves as active instigators in their lives, placing themselves at the centre of their narratives and with far less reliance on ‘Allah’ or ‘what is written on the forehead’ as an explanation for what had happened to them. In their self-representation as pious elders, some men opened the interviews with a prayer. Others used religious myths to demonstrate their knowledge and religiosity, especially when they were talking in front of other men. This was done by some women too, but not to the same extent. As we shall see in the rest of the book, their working lives are central to the men’s identities, and much of their narratives were taken up in describing the work they did. Compared to many of the women, the men were also far more confident about making generalized pronouncements about ‘Bengali culture’, or social changes that had occurred in Bangladesh or Britain. I shall expand on these themes in subsequent chapters. In the next chapter, however, I shall turn from the general to the specific, introducing two elders and citing their narratives in detail. As we shall see, gender and age constantly shape the ways in which they narrate their life histories, as do the shifting global conditions and political economies that have underwritten their lives. And yet neither Mrs Khatun nor Mr Haque are passive to the structures that at first sight seem to dominate their lives. While the histories of Britain and East Bengal, of immigration controls or of industry and employment in Northern Europe and the Middle East may at one level seem to dictate their fates, their individual stories illustrate a degree of personal choice and agency as well as the effects of wider histories on their lives. 43. See Sangster 1998: 88; Cruikshank 1990. 44. Wilce 1998.

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–3 – Two Elders In this chapter I wish to extend my theme of the rhetorics of migration, showing in more detail how two individual elders narrated their experiences of migration to and life in Britain. Many of the idioms described in the previous chapter are present in the stories told by Mrs Khatun and Mr Haque. Yet while these roughly accrue to their gender identities (suffering, family and the body are important themes in Mrs Khatun’s narrative, while his personal mobility and agency are central to the way in which Mr Haque presents himself) it would be simplistic to argue that either narrative can be slotted into a set and dichotomous model of gender difference, in which women are understood only in terms of families and reproduction and men only in terms of productive work and physical mobility. Rather, what I wish to suggest is that while there are indeed certain modes of expression and rhetorics involved, and these are often related to the construction of gender identities and status, there are many other, crosscutting factors that influence what people tell and how they tell it. These do not necessarily fall neatly into gendered divisions. For example, while the majority of men, including Mr Haque, stress the importance of work in their narratives of migration, in other places in their accounts they also describe how they missed their families in Bangladesh, and the emotional distress caused by transnational separations. Similarly, while women often talk about migration in more passive terms, stressing their roles as wives and carers, in other parts of their narratives they may also describe themselves in highly active terms, indicating their autonomy and the degree to which they have exercised individual choice in their lives. This concurs with Wilce’s observations of ‘troubles telling’ in Bangladesh. Here, he argues, people constantly negotiate different forms of selfhood in their discursive relations, moving between dependency and assertiveness in shifting stances. Rather than the sterile dichotomies of autonomy versus embeddedness, or egocentricity versus socio-centricity used to describe the ‘East’ versus the ‘West’ in much classical Indian ethnography, people move between stances, sometimes within the same discursive interaction, or over the course of their lives. Narratives can – 65 –

Age, Narrative and Migration therefore be interpreted as displaying a dynamic tension between autonomy and social embeddedness; they may thus be interpreted as vehicles for the constant renegotiation of personhood.1 Mrs Khatun, for example, moves in her narrative from talking about her life in terms of her family and her connectedness to kin and community to other statements in which she represents herself very much as an autonomous individual. As she put it, for example: Sometimes when I think of all my problems I just want to jump into a car and drive and drive until I’m far away. There are also many themes common to the narratives of both men and women. Religious status is central to both Mrs Khatun and Mr Haque, for example, and the desh (homeland) is presented in similar ways by them. Both also share the sense of ambivalence caused by migration, even if it is expressed somewhat differently. Finally, Mrs Khatun and Mr Haque are very much their own characters. As for all our informants, one simply cannot generalize. Their histories have been shaped by their personal circumstances as well as their individual personalities. Their subjectivities are multiple and fluid, they rely upon their memories of actual experiences as well as their shifting fantasies of selfhood in the construction of identity. Not surprisingly, national and international histories as well as more personal ones play an important role in the accounts that both elders give. These histories are not narrated lineally, but recounted in fragments, and often in response to other questions; one therefore learns of the past through a gradual piecing together of information. The 1971 War of Liberation, and what this meant for people in rural Sylhet, was recounted to me by several women, including Mrs Khatun. Similarly, the Second World War directly affected her family through her father’s role as a sailor in the British Navy, but she tells me about it in response to a general question about her childhood. Mr Haque too is acutely aware of the dominance of global structures over his life; like many of his peers he cites colonialism as a central factor in the exploitations and deprivations he has faced. As we shall see however, he does not represent himself as passive, but rather, as a clever and confident manipulator of the system.

Mrs Rokeya Khatun2 Mrs Khatun was one of the first women I made friends with at the day centre, which she used in her capacity as a ‘carer’. Now in her fifties, she 1. Wilce 1998. 2. See Appendix, Household 17.

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Two Elders migrated to Britain in the early 1970s, a time when comparatively few Bengali women were in the country, living first in Birmingham and then in Manchester, and then finally moving to London. She has four sons, two married and settled elsewhere in London, and two living with her and her husband, Abdul Miah in their council flat in a dilapidated tenement building off Brick Lane. Abdul Miah had had a stroke six years earlier, causing paralysis and dementia. During the course of the research Mrs Khatun’s life was filled with the physical and emotional demands of caring for him. Unlike the majority of the other Bengali women at the day centre, Mrs Khatun speaks some English and is literate in Bengali. Perhaps this is one reason why she was the most articulate of the women I interviewed, speaking at length about her life, and describing in detail her feelings on leaving her village and coming to the UK. To this extent, she was an unusual informant. In other ways what she told me and the way she told it were similar to the stories of the other women: her story revolves around relationships with kin and her role as a wife and mother. Much of her account is within the idiom of suffering and loss; while sometimes expressing pain and anger, to maintain her honour she also volubly accepts her lot. Like many of the other women, sickness is a recurrent theme in her life history. Rather than reproducing the account as a whole I have re-ordered it thematically.3 While to some degree this interrupts the flow of memories and words, I do not think this does too much damage to the narrative. It was, after all, recorded over a series of visits; and what Mrs Khatun has to say was partially structured by my own questions.

Childhood, Marriage and War In response to questions concerning her childhood memories (which I thought might elicit descriptions of rural life in Sylhet in the 1940s and 1950s) Mrs Khatun told me about her family history, her structural place within it, and in particular, her father. Here, what is stressed is his role as a worker and a migrant and the devotion he gave to her. As in many women’s accounts, familial relationships are key, and seem to shape memories of place. Q: When you were a child, living in your bari, what do you remember? I remember as a child that . . . I was an only child. I am the only child of my

3. Interviews were carried out over August – December 1996.

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Age, Narrative and Migration parents. I am the only daughter. Before I was born I had a brother, but he died. After that I was born. That was when my father still worked on the ships; then he worked in oil. During the British war [the Second World War] he was on the ships. He was submerged under water for eighteen days and no bodies emerged. Q: Did he die? No, he lived on [but] his skin was like a crocodile’s, due to him being under the water so long. This was before I was born. Then, when I got older, I asked him what those things were on his skin and . . . He told me that he got like this because he was in the water a long time, when he was in the war. That he was in the boiler room, with boots on and a gas mask, and that the water did it. Q: So you didn’t see much of your father as a child? No, I did. It was before I was born that my father went abroad. He was working on the ships then . . . Everyone thought I would die. My mother used to tell me . . . She told me how when I was small my father used to hold me against his chest. I’d pee and poo on his chest.4 Today he is no longer of this world [she starts to cry]. Even at eighteen months he would hold my food in his hand.5 He always thought I would die, that he would have no offspring . . .

Later in the interview, Mrs Khatun returns to the theme of being an only child: We had three ponds near my bari and my mother and father were always worrying I would fall into one. I was their only child, they were always worrying that I would die, and then they would have no more children. Seven years after I was born my parents had another child, a sister for me. My parents were so delighted that they had another child. Q: Were you happy during this time? Of course I was. In my bari we had mangoes, jackfruit, grapefruit, all of which I was eating on my own.6 Q: What was your age when you got married? I was eleven and a half. When I came to London I added a few years to my age.7 4. Images of infants defecating on their fathers’ bodies, or their fathers cleaning them up were used in other accounts, to illustrate how devoted a father is. 5. This alludes to the feeding of infants in villages, where soft foods such as rice are placed into the child’s mouth with her carer’s fingers. 6. I am not sure here if she means she was happy to have no siblings, so that she could get more fruit. 7. For purposes of immigration. Presumably the wrong age was entered into her entry forms by her family.

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Two Elders Q: How did you feel about getting married? On my wedding day I wasn’t too happy. I knew I was not of marriageable age. . . . On the wedding day people they came with everything on cows . . . Two people came one with a few things like clothes. A few family members . . . there was no music, no dancing, there was nothing. Q: At such a young age, how did it feel to be staying with your in-laws? To tell the truth I didn’t really like it. Q: Why? I was alone. My husband was in London. I had my mother-in-law and one child [which she had at the age of eighteen]. There were only two adults and one child.

It was during this period, while she was staying with her in-laws with her husband in Britain, that the War of Liberation took place. As she recounts: We were scared. We were all very scared. We had our things, our clothes all tied up and ready to go. As soon as we heard that the Punjabis, the Pakistanis were coming to the village then we would all flee. I had all my clothes and those of my children tied up, ready to leave, in a basket . . . Day and night, Hindus and Muslims were heading north, east, west. Near my village and near the local town a lot of people were killed . . . Hindus and Muslims were tied up and killed. We were so scared that we didn’t eat during the day time . . . This was during the war, during the time of Sheikh Mujib. Q: And about three years later, Sheikh Mujib himself was killed. At that time I was in this country. Sheikh was murdered, Ziaur Rahman was killed. I was in this country. I saw the pictures on television. Q: How did you feel? I felt sad. Like Queen Elizabeth here, you have a queen. If she were to die everyone would feel some sadness.

Memories of Migration: Sylhet Town to Britain Later on in the interview Mrs Khatun describes travelling to Sylhet town to have a photograph taken with her son for her Londoni husband. This appears to have been a transformative moment for her; she had never been to a town before and now, captivated by its ‘bright lights’, her perception of her gram (village) was to be for ever altered. Interestingly, while she – 69 –

Age, Narrative and Migration appreciates the aesthetic beauty of rural Bangladesh, her definition of what makes a place beautiful or ‘nice’8 is centred around work and profit. I had never been to the town, I had always lived in the village. I went there first with my child; my husband had asked for a photo of us. Q: What was it like seeing the town for the first time? I left our village and came to a bazaar. I really liked it. Then we travelled further still and I saw more markets and houses – some pukka [stone]. I really liked it. It was Sylhet Town. When I returned to my bari (homestead) I didn’t like it any more. I wanted to find people to tell how nice everything I’d seen was, to describe the things I’d seen . . . Q: What did you like about the town? There were pukka houses, high-rise houses of four, five floors. There were rickshaws going around, cars, noises flowing, music playing. There were markets, and bazaar stalls, with people sitting in them; shops on different floors selling things, lights everywhere. It was the first time I saw things like this, you know. It looked really good. Even when I came to London I liked it. When I landed at the airport it all looked so beautiful. Sylhet airport isn’t that nice, not as nice as England. Q: What about the building where you live now? Do you like that? It’s lovely (shundur). Q: When I was in a village in Bangladesh I thought THAT was lovely, all the land . . . Yes, the village is beautiful – people ploughing the fields, fishing, carrying hay, people selling bananas, shouting ‘bananas for sale!’. That’s one kind of beauty: people working hard and making money to live. If sometimes you feel restless you can sit at the edge of the pond and look at the land beyond – the cows grazing, the sheep and the lambs. That’s also really nice. It keeps your head together.

Britain: Sickness, Suffering, and the Health Services Despite her comments about the desirability of urbanism and the modernity that the high-rise concrete buildings she first saw in Sylhet Town represented, Mrs Khatun’s descriptions of life in Britain are primarily organized around the themes of sickness and suffering. No doubt this is 8. The adjective shundur is used widely in many contexts, so is not perhaps as strong as the English term ‘beautiful’.

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Two Elders partly due to the particular medical history of her family, and her understandable preoccupation with her husband’s condition. Like many other elders we spoke to, an important factor in her consideration of which place she would rather be in – Bangladesh or Britain – was the medical services her family could obtain here. From our interviews this seems to be especially the case for women, for whom caring for children, husbands and elderly relatives is a primary role. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter 5, some of the women interviewed had come to Britain specifically to provide care, either for children or for ailing husbands; the advent of old age and illness in their men was a major reason cited to us by many women for the reunification of families in the UK over the 1980s. From this it is hardly surprising that experiences and memories of Britain tend to be structured around narratives of illness. Through her accounts of sickness and its treatment, Mrs Khatun is expressing and reproducing a particular image of Britain, as a place where medical services are provided, as well as an image of herself as a carer. There may be other important themes underlying women’s narratives of sickness in Britain. As Wilce has suggested, grumbling about illnesses is safer than attacking the structures that produce them, yet even the most somatic complaints tend to be commenting on a world-view. Even if unconsciously produced, these narratives can therefore be interpreted as veiled protest.9 While such an analysis works less well for narratives concerned with the sickness of their husbands, women’s preoccupations with their own physical complaints certainly seem to involve ‘hidden transcripts’10 in which British medical institutions and practitioners, plus the wider social and political relations of which they are a part, are indirectly criticized. In the next section of the interview Mrs Khatun describes arriving in Britain with a baby and an eight-year-old child. Note the figures of helpful strangers, upon whom she relies: Q: At the time you came to Britain, how did it feel? It was a very anxious time. My second son was only three months old. I had grown up in Bangladesh, so knew nothing of London: I couldn’t even turn off a light switch. Now villages in Bangladesh have electricity, but then they didn’t, and the toilets were rudimentary. So that was all different too. And on the journey to Britain [it had taken three days, flying via the USSR with Aeroflot] I had problems with my child because he was ill. He had flu and the injections gave him a rash . . . 9. Wilce 1998: 19. 10. Scott 1985.

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Age, Narrative and Migration She recounts how she stayed first in Birmingham, then moved to Manchester and finally to London. Almost immediately, she embarks on a horrific story concerning her reproductive health. In the following excerpt she describes how in those early days in Birmingham she was unable to communicate with the social services: They got an Indian lady. I could speak some of her language. They wanted to check various things. To stop me having any more children, they fitted me with a coil, which gave me terrible problems for about eight months. I had terrible bleeding – but only a little would come out. I screamed in pain, nothing could come out properly. Then after about eight months, when my child was at school I met an English man who did a lot of running about for me and took me to a clinic. After they’d taken it out they got a Bengali lady to explain things to me. Q: What were the doctors like to you? . . . At that time, when that old English man took me to the clinic I didn’t understand or speak the language and my child was still young. They sat me down and made me wait about two hours and then came with this Bengali lady who spoke English. They had a meeting about my condition and I was asked to return the following Friday. I went back with the English man and was taken in a mini-cab and they finally took the coil out. After that I finally found peace. It was putting it in that had made me so ill. Q: When they put the coil in . . .? I did not understand what they were doing to me, but they went ahead and did it. I was crying. Three people held me down as they did it. It was terrible. Especially because I did not understand what they were doing. Q: And your husband? He did not go with me. He only speaks a little English. Q: Did you tell him about it? Yes, afterwards, that they had done this to me. The way I know it now, well there are many people who could help me. There are different offices I could phone and say I’m Bengali and could they provide me with someone? I had many problems then, and there was no help . . .

While she initially described Britain in terms of desirably modernity, these tales of sickness and the treatment received imply to me that Mrs Khatun’s feelings towards Britain were not wholly positive. In Chapter 7 I shall discuss sickness narratives in more detail, suggesting that people’s accounts of illness in Britain often involve veiled and not so veiled

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Two Elders protests at the ‘system’, in which feelings of powerlessness and exclusion are voiced. Similar feelings of ambivalence are expressed later in Mrs Khatun’s narrative, where she discusses in which country she would prefer to live. As the following extracts indicate, migration has meant that in many ways there is now nowhere where she truly feels at peace. Separation, and the pain that this brings, is central to her life experience. Q: Which country is best for you? Staying here, the medical treatment is free. I can go to offices for help. They take me to the doctors, sometimes in a mini-cab. In Bangladesh, the biggest problem is the medicine. Q: What about cultural differences? In Bangladesh, people are content with a little. You give them a little money and they eat. Food is a big problem. You can’t get good fish or chicken! I never eat chicken there. Have you seen in the village, the chickens eating from the latrines . . .? Q: Everyone in your family is in the village? But for me, the village feels funny. You prepare food, and people arrive. How can you eat without asking them all? You need a lot of money. If my husband was of a pensionable age then perhaps we could go back and live off that money, but he isn’t old enough yet. Q: How do you like the ways of this country? London? In London it’s free . . .

Towards the end of the interview I ask her if she has been happy in her life. As with most other women, her answer is based around her relationships to others. But rather than these being relations of affinal or consaguinal kinship, the relationships she speaks of are with neighbours and friends at the day centre; in this, she has actively created her own sense of kinship and belonging in London. Suffering and separation from loved ones are also central themes: . . . (long pause). Really happy . . . I am sometimes, but that only happens once in a while. I married and had a son – that made me happy. I had a daughter and she died and I cried. My father died. My sister had a son, which made me happy. Q: But has coming to London made you happy? Coming to London has meant a great deal of hardship for me. I came to London with no Bengali relatives, no neighbours . . . I had to make other

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Age, Narrative and Migration people into my own. I now call Katy my sister. At the centre I call people mother, auntie . . . Q: So coming to Britain hasn’t brought you happiness? I felt happiness for my son, that now he would have a better chance in life. But I felt sad at leaving my parents after the war. I felt that I would never see them again. I went back after six years and my father had died. My mother also died. I was here and I never saw her body . . . mothers, they carry you in their wombs, they give birth to you, look after you and raise you. I still think about my mother and there is so much to think that my head becomes flooded with emotion. I cannot cope with it. Q: If you had seen the body? I would have found some peace. I would have washed her, dressed her and bid her a final farewell. I would have done the Islamic things. I would have prayed for her, read the holy books . . . Q: There must be many Bengali families who have left behind families . . .? People between two countries always feel sorrow. Mothers and fathers worry about what their child is doing in another country. The child sometimes finds happiness. According to Bangladeshi perceptions they are sleeping in a big bed, eating chicken and wearing expensive saris. But some only feel pain, like when a burning chilli is rubbed into your flesh, a burning pain like that . . .

Religious Myths and Stories of the Desh In contrast to her accounts of life in Britain, Mrs Khatun describes the desh in very different terms. In response to a question concerning change in Bangladesh for example, she launches into a long narrative connecting the soil of the desh with Muslim saints, which are in turn linked to both her consaguinal and affinal families. Rather than the material benefits and health care of Britain, Sylhet is being portrayed here as a spiritual centre. The ‘past’ is represented in religious terms, in which a story of the introduction of Islam to Sylhet leads into the genealogical history of Mrs Khatun’s family. The narrative is therefore stressing both the religiosity of the desh as well as the standing of her family, as a pir bangsa (lineage of a Muslim saint). Q: What is your village like? I suppose a lot has changed? A great deal has changed. I remember, it used to be full of trees and dark. In my bari [homestead] we have a pir. In our Bangladesh, around Sylhet and Chittagong, we had a pir-saheb, who came from Arabia. In those days the people of Bangladesh were Hindus. Only seven houses were Muslim. In one

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Two Elders of those seven houses, a son was born, a Muslim. The son completed Haj. That is why we do akika [ritual celebration on the birth of a son]. We slaughter a sheep or a cow, whatever we can afford, which we share and give out . . . One day some Hindus were bathing their children and a vulture dropped a piece of meat on to the ground where they were . . . When this happened the king said: ‘Ram, ram, look and see quickly who has slaughtered this cow.’ Then they discovered that a Muslim child had been born and a cow had been sacrificed for the child’s akika. The pir-saheb11 was extremely pious . . . his entire family was the same. He went to Mecca four times. I can’t quite remember where they were from, the name of the bari. After him, came three hundred and sixty other Arab people. It was with them, having left behind everything that they had, their family, wives and community, that Sylhet gradually became more Muslim. You know what? I was once a Hindu.12 After that we became Muslim. He [the pir] came to my father’s bari. There is still one [a saint’s tomb] in my husband’s bari. Q: There is a mazaar [saint’s tomb] in your bari? Yes. People still come. Every year there is a shinni [ritual distribution], a large one. Men, women and children all come. Also another nice thing about my bari is that every year at Ramzan Sharif [Ramadan], during Eid, in the Eid ghar, in the mosque, about two thousand people come to pray. There is also Bokra Eid and Shobrat – that’s when the moon is seen just before Ramzan . . . Those days are really nice, plus the day at the mazaar when we have a mela [fair] or urus [celebration or festival for the pir].

It is unlikely that such a story would have been told to me by a younger woman. Through this account, Mrs Khatun is demonstrating her status as a murubbi, as someone who has done Haj and holds religious knowledge and is able to pass it on in appropriate ways, as well as someone who comes from a high-status lineage. As is also clear in her narrative, her primary spiritual attachment is to the desh.

Mr T. Haque13 Mr Haque has been in Britain since 1963. He lives with his wife and his five unmarried children in a ground-floor flat on the Isle of Dogs. Another older daughter is married and living elsewhere in Britain. His family was reunited in Britain in the early 1980s. 11. Perhaps she is referring to the pir-saheb who sacrificed the cow for the baby’s akika. 12. I think she means here that her ancestors were Hindu. 13. See Appendix, household 4.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Confined to a wheelchair since a stroke, Mr Haque is something of a character at the day centre. He tends to fall into the role of joker, spending his days bantering with the care workers, and often talking in riddles.14 In his accounts of his life he also frequently contradicts himself. Although this may partly be due to forgetfulness, I suggest that it is also the result of his own ambiguous identity and uncertainty, as well as conscious game-playing and even resistance to the research. As we shall see, in his narratives he vacillates between representing himself as a trickster, continually dodging bureaucracy and seeking to maximize returns, and as a pious elder, with continual references to Allah and the afterlife. At times, he is clearly testing Mutmahim, dodging certain questions and attempting to trick him; at others he is apparently open and candid.15 I suggest that these contradictions in Mr Haque’s self-representation reflect the ambiguities of many male elders’ lives. As we shall see in the next chapter, many have moved over their life cycles from being ‘young, free and single’ in Britain to being in the role of respected murubbi. While this might be true for the majority of men throughout the world, a lifetime of transnational movement has sharply accentuated this sense of disjunction and ambivalent selfhood, for most Londoni men have switched between roles in the course of frequent journeys over space as well as over time. Let us start with an excerpt from Mutmahim’s notes, in which Mr Haque plays a trick on him in order to test whether or not the young researcher can be trusted. As is clear from this, Mr Haque is hardly a reliable narrator. Rather than taking his accounts as objective truth, his narratives are better interpreted in terms of how they construct ambivalent identities and a shifting sense of self: August 27th I went and sat next to Mr Haque . . . reminding him of his agreement to be interviewed. I had until this time been very unsure of his standing as a reliable person to speak to. He seems quite a lone figure, always taking up his chair in the corner of the room . . . He seemed to pause, there was a definite lull in his flow of words, which are not usually restrained. – What are you going to ask? – Just questions about your history, things you’ve done and seen. – What for? 14. I found much of what he said difficult to follow, and Mutmahim Roaf rather than I conducted the interviews cited here. 15. Interviews were carried out between September and November 1996.

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Two Elders – Well as I explained before, I’m here to research old Bengali people, and it’s from murubbi like you that we can learn. – Yes, so what’s it for? Is it for the government or for history books? I explained our aims . . . He began to talk, like he normally did with me, recalling how when he was young, he used to sing.16 – These things are good, aren’t they? It’s a skill of mine. I was also a cowherder at the time. He was telling me intimate things, that not only did he engage with unholy activities like singing, he was also low-class (i.e. a cow-herder). I began to realize that he was playing a game . . . I began to grasp his aims. He told me of his singing and cow-herding [to test me], so that knowing of his singing and cow-herding, I wouldn’t recount it.

Mutmahim decided that Mr Haque was wary of telling him too much about his past because for him as a higher-status murubbi it would be transgressive to talk too openly to a junior man. He was therefore testing him. After this exchange, however, he was subsequently extremely open with Mutmahim about his youthful days in Britain. Let us turn to the stories he told.

Migrant Tales Mr Haque’s narratives of migration and employment in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s are exemplary examples of the ‘Migrants’ Tales’ described in the last chapter. The familiar characters of ‘the helpful stranger’ monopolize the action, while Mr Haque himself is led from a state of ignorant innocence to ‘understanding’. Note how his memories of Britain compare to Mrs Khatun’s. Rather than his recounting his perceptions and experiences in terms of his relationships to family and neighbours, his Britain is a place of work and temptation. In his search for employment and profit, he is also highly mobile. While the narrative of his first years in Britain is long, it is such a colourful example of storytelling that I have decided to cite it in its entirety. In the first part of the tale, he describes the problems of finding work in 1960s Britain, as well as the sharp disjuncture in employment status17 16. For a Muslim, non-religious singing is prohibited, and only done by low-status labourers or Hindus. 17. As I argue in Global Migrants, Local Lives (1995), work is a primary indicator of social status in Bangladesh, with some jobs (such as digging earth and breaking bricks) only ever done by low-status groups (chotomanoosh). Arguably, these different status groups can be interpreted as Muslim castes (see I. Ahmed 1978).

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Age, Narrative and Migration that he experienced through moving between Sylhet and the UK. As he is at pains to point out, in Bangladesh he was an educated teacher (mastor), and thus unable to do labouring jobs. The first time I came [to Britain] I arrived in Preston, where a relative had a restaurant . . . after about one week I left for Bedford. Q: What did you do there? I joined the social security. One of my uncles took me there. I used to get £3, and from that I’d save £1. I stayed there for five weeks, but was unable to get a job. Then my uncle said that if I wanted to work he could get me into a factory which made bricks, but it would require a bribe of £80. I said, ‘I’m not going to pay a bribe to get a job!’ After all, I’d be put into that factory and all I’d be doing was breaking bricks!18 I cried, you know, really cried. I thought I should write a letter home and tell them I’d been unable to find employment and wanted to return. I sold one acre of land to get here, so I can sell another to go back, that would pay for my fare. So I told this to someone from our desh. He was an educated man; he wrote letters for people and read them. I went and told him about it all, and he gave me cigarette and we sat and smoked together. ‘So what am I going to do?’ I said. I can’t possibly do this type of work, it’s so hard. I’ve never worked in the sun in Bangladesh. I never ploughed the land, only a little. I did light work. I taught and ate. Well this man and I discussed things. He explained that God had blessed me, that I had come to England and could make a good living. It would be a very sad affair if I was to return to Bangladesh with nothing. After all, everyone expected me to achieve something. He said that I wasn’t totally a lost case, that I was a little educated, not a great deal, but I knew some of the language and so could find work. He suggested that I take a trip around England. I asked how to do this. The buses, he explained, were cheap and they took you everywhere. Go to Bolton, he said, and there you’ll find work, lighter work than here . . . go to Lancashire and get a job in the mills – only women work in the mills, it’s light, easy work.19 So what else was there to do but go? I had not had an easy time so far, so I went.

18. Breaking bricks is the epitome of low-status labouring in Bangladesh. While it seems unlikely that the factory in Bedford really involved such work, Mr Haque is clearly describing the disjuncture in status that his migration to Britain involved, from being a landowning grihosti (farmer) to a labourer. 19. It is interesting that it is hard labouring work that is problematic to Mr Haque’s status rather than ‘women’s’ work, which might not have appealed to many white British men of this generation.

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Two Elders In the next part of his story, Mr Haque describes the temptations that he found in his journey around Britain. As is clear from other men’s descriptions of this phase of migration to Britain, networks of friends and relatives, spread over the country, were central to his search for housing and work. So I went there [to Bolton] and met up with an acquaintance. He was a pimp, doing business with girls . . . after the business they share the money. He used to go and find which houses Bengalis were living in, that was his job. I greeted him and he said: ‘Master Saheb, what day did you get here?’ I told him I’d been here about a week and didn’t have any work. He said, come to my place, there’s plenty of work there. I had my bags ready, because I knew I would be moving. It was nearly 11 pm when he came [to pick me up]. I jumped up to open the door and was out. My uncle that I was staying with tried to stop me. ‘Where are you going?’ he said. ‘Preston’, I said. ‘With him?’, ‘Yes.’ ‘Don’t go with him, he’ll turn you into a pimp. He’ll make you mad. In Preston there are girls from Blackpool . . . you’ll go mad.’ ‘So what?’ I said, ‘There’s work there and I’m going to go.’

After trying unsuccessfully to find work in Preston, Mr Haque next moved to Accrington, where a friend had a cousin. Recounting how the coach trip cost £1.50,20 and he still found no work, he continues: I left Accrington and headed for Blackburn, where I met a rather distinguishedlooking gentleman, of our kind with a very pale complexion. I sent my salaam and we exchanged words. He asked me what I wanted and I replied that I was looking for accommodation. He said: ‘I have a house, but I don’t like renting rooms to Bengalis.’ But he said that he’d make an exception of me and that I could stay with him. He told me that he lived alone but he had a female friend who came to visit. He laid down a strict set of rules that I had to abide by; that I should never speak to the woman. I was to serve tea and make drinks and under no circumstance should I ever introduce another Bengali to the house. ‘OK,’ I said. His house was well-furnished, carpeted and all that. He had been a zamindar in Bangladesh. I said: ‘What about rent?’ He said, ‘No rent, just stick to these rules because once one Bengali hears then he’ll bring more with him.’ So in the daytime I would look for work and at night I used to go to this shop where a girl I fancied worked and I used to spend time with her. That’s all I did. But it wasn’t enough for me, and so I began to plan my move . . .

20. Like women’s detailed memories of sicknesses and their treatment, many men have an extraordinarily detailed memory of prices.

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Age, Narrative and Migration

Tricking the System: The Haj That Never Was Central to Mr Haque’s account of his life in the early days of migration to Britain is his self-representation as a skilled ‘operator’, constantly seeking ways of manipulating British bureaucracy and his employers. While acknowledging the power of the British state and the role of colonialism in forging the shape of his and his countrymen’s lives, in telling stories that stress his role as a trickster he seems to be emphasising his own personal agency within the dominant structure of global relations. After Scott, we might interpret such narratives (and the actions they recount) as ‘everyday acts of resistance’,21 not at the micro-level of intravillage affairs with which Scott’s ethnography is concerned, but the global level of transnational migration, state boundaries and bureaucracy. Similarly, Mr Haque’s actions in attempting to subvert national bureaucracies and boundaries lend weight to those who celebrate transnational activities as a form of resistance against the global order.22 Interestingly, while some of the story is taken up with getting money from the ‘National Insurance’, much of the trickery takes place not between Mr Haque and the British state, but between Mr Haque and his Gujarati employer. Before recounting Mr Haque’s tale of how he pretended to do Haj, I would like to cite other comments he made concerning ‘the British’. In conversation with Mutmahim, for example, he started to tell a story concerning how the British ‘won the war’ (a reference to British colonialism). This started with the comment: ‘The British, they know their maths,’ and led into a story concerning the dominance of the British over India: “They know their maths. We don’t and that’s why we lost. They smile at you as they stab you. We just scream and shout to no avail.” On another occasion, he comments that the British government, by giving him a pension, has turned him into a ‘dancing monkey’. ‘If only they would stop giving me money I would go away from here,’ he tells Mutmahim. ‘They’re [the British] all devils. You can’t see these things or understand, but they’re doing them.’ In the story that follows, however, he is clearly far from a dancing monkey. Perhaps this ambiguity reflects his own changing self-image, from being an active younger man, able to forge his own destiny, to becoming increasingly physically and financially dependent on the British state. So far in his narrative, Mr Haque has been describing how a friend took him to Dewsbury for tablique:23 21. Scott 1985: xvi. 22. See, for example, Portes, Guarnizo and Landholt 1999. 23. Dewsbury is the British centre of the Tablique Jamaat.

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Two Elders I said to him, why should I go to Tablique? He said he wanted my soul to develop. I said: ‘Is there any food there?’ He said, ‘Yes, plenty of food.’ So I thought, ‘That’s good, I can eat and sleep . . . People there would say: ‘Do your namaj,’ and I’d say; ‘Dhoor, beta [Oh man!], I’ll do it later . . .’ Another one of my friends, he was in tailoring, he told me that the first friend was about to do Haj. My boss at the factory – he was Gujarati and was himself a tabliqi man, he said: ‘Do you have the money [to do Haj]?’ ‘No’, I said. He said: ‘You have no code number [National Insurance] and you’re single.’ I said: ‘You lot keep cutting the money, what am I supposed to do Haj on?’; ‘I’ll tell you what’, he said, ‘can’t you get a code number and your children’s birth certificate?’ No I can’t,’ I said. ‘Who’s going back to the desh to sort all that mess out for me? I don’t really have anyone at home.’ He said: ‘You get me the stuff later. I’ll sort your national insurance number out now.’ So he somehow managed to phone the insurance office and the money they had cut, he got that back for me24 . . . So I thought about it and I saw that I needed another £400. He used to give me £20 a week and on top of that he’d give me another £20, making it £40. Plus I had about another ten weeks to go and I had got that £400. So I did my maths, you know that I can do my maths. I saw that I could make £800. Q: So you didn’t really intend to do Haj? Yes listen, by saying that I was going to do Haj I had another opportunity to go to Tablique. This time they were travelling to America. I wanted to get to America then leave them and go off on my own. I was going to do the tablique in America, the fare was £200 return, and the rest of the money I would save . . .

In this story Mr Haque seems to be presenting himself in defiantly non-religious terms. Combined with various machinations concerning money and documentation for the British state, the story is concerned with how he tricked his Muslim boss and his friends in the Tablique Jamaat in order to get money to go to America for non-spiritual gain. In fact, as he later recounts, he did eventually do Haj, but only because his parents-in-law came to Britain in the same year and urged him to accompany them. Such stories contrast vividly with accounts of the desh, in which he describes himself quite differently.

Status, the Desh and Religiosity In contrast to his tales of adventure in Britain, in which he continually presents himself as something of a free-wheeling rogue, in describing the 24. The details of this transaction are unclear, but I think that Mr Haque is referring to forged paperwork.

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Age, Narrative and Migration desh and his life before migration Mr Haque represents himself in dramatically different terms: as a respectable and educated teacher, and later as a pious and learned returned Londoni. This is partly do to with changes in identity that have taken place over time, as he has moved from being a single young man moving around Britain in search of work to being a householder, with a wife and children to care for, and more recently, a community elder. Particular life events – such as Haj25 – may also be important. Changes in role and identity take place between places too. It is this, I suggest, which lies at the heart of the transnational experience. Like so many other men of his generation, Mr Haque is continually striving to reconcile the contradictions in his life, embodied in different social, political and economic roles and played out in different places. To conclude this chapter, I would therefore like to turn to sections in Mr Haque’s interviews where he describes his status in the desh as well as his spirituality. The issues of ambivalence and contradiction raised by his narrative will be returned to throughout the rest of the book. The following excerpt is taken from Mutmahim’s notes: August 14th He told me that he used to be a schoolteacher. In 1948 he used to earn twenty taka, twelve in actual wages, eight in expenses. He recounted . . . a story about his days as a young teacher in town near the border with Mymensingh. In his role as a teacher local people gave him enormous respect and honour. At that time some Brahmins invited him to a festival where a guru was to be present. Although dignified, the guru was living off alms. As a person of some standing, Mr Haque gave him ten taka, boosting his status even more. ‘When I went into different villages,’ he said. ‘People would run two or three homesteads away just to get me a chair with arm-rests to sit on.26 Not everyone had good furniture then, did they?’

For returned Londonis the construction of pukka houses is a central status-building activity, visibly demonstrating the wealth and modernity of their owners to all who pass by. Indeed, Londoni villages in Sylhet are strikingly distinct from others in the district and elsewhere in Bangladesh: 25. After pilgrimage to Mecca, Hajjis return to their lives cleansed of sin. 26. Seating arrangements are central signifiers of social standing in rural Sylhet, and may be based in the zamindari system of land tenure. In answer to my questions about social hierarchy, for example, people in Talukpur in the late 1980s often referred to chotomannoosh (low-status groups) as being originally the raiyats (tenants) of zamindar, who would be seated on the floor (Gardner 1995: 141).

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Two Elders in the most wealthy thanas (administrative areas), such as Biswanath and Beani Bazaar, the local scenery of padi fields and betel nut trees is increasingly scattered with two- or even three-storey houses, often surrounded by ostentatiously high walls. Another way in which Londonis are changing local landscapes is through the construction of pukka mosques, again demonstrating the wealth of their benefactors as well as their religiosity. In discussing Islam in Britain, Mr Haque says: I am not in any committee or organization now, although in my village in Bangladesh I am responsible for the creating and building of the village’s mosque . . . I got together with the entire village and organized and helped27 to build the mosque . . . this was in 1975. It was after I came back from Haj that I had the idea. It was a Hindu village, but many Muslims had settled there, so I thought, if I make a mosque here then people can at least attend the Friday Prayer [Jumma]. Also they could hold shinni [ritual distribution] there . . . I thought a mosque would be a good idea. The land it’s on is mine, at the back of the village. I gave about a quarter of an acre, I gave it in the name of Allah. Now the mosque is about sixty feet long and two floors high. It used to be Hindu, it was a place where they did puja and now on that very site I’ve made a mosque.

His description of travel is also phrased in religious terms. In the final extract Mr Haque’s identity as an old man approaching death seems paramount to the way in which he talks about different places, which in his account are joined together and conflated through the familiar actions of prayer, played out across the world. As I shall argue in the next chapter, this is related to an important shift in identity that takes place over the latter part of the life course for many of the elders and involves an increasing stress upon Islam and religious piety. The ways in which Mr Haque represents himself are therefore far from unitary, but they do seem to accrue to both geographical location, wherein the desh is constructed in terms of status and religiosity and Britain is constructed in terms of mobility, agency and material success, and the life course, where ageing is associated with an increasing stress upon religion and ‘the traditions’. Q: What did you learn from your travels? There is not much to learn but I learnt that the world is a large place, that people populated it everywhere . . . there are many kinds of people. I have also prayed in every place. Delhi, everywhere. I have prayed because I know that

27. Through financial donations, not physical labour.

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Age, Narrative and Migration one day Death will come to me and that before that I must complete my namaj [prayer]. If my namaj does speak and testify for me then maybe I can avoid the punishments of Hell. I did it for the Afterlife. I did it for that, not this life . . .

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– 4– Men’s Histories: Narratives of Masculinity and Migration As the last two chapters have indicated, the telling of the past is a selective process: not all events are remembered or recounted by individual narrators. Others, however, are returned to again and again. In this chapter I shall delve more deeply into the men’s narratives of migration and life in Britain, juxtaposing their accounts with historical descriptions drawn from secondary sources. While each narrative is highly individual, the accounts tend to be structured around common themes, all of which contribute to and reflect the speaker’s identities as senior Bengali men in Tower Hamlets. The construction of masculinity and group identity are central to this. These have changed over the men’s lives, partly as a result of their own journeys through their life cycles but also owing to the changing political and economic conditions in which they have lived. Rather than a single discourse of masculinity, however, ‘being a man’ has meant many different things to individuals over their lives and involved a range of shifting performances and bodily expressions. Their narratives are therefore multi-layered, diverse and sometimes contradictory. As Caroline and Filippo Osella have pointed out in their discussion of masculine identities and migration in Kerala, we should beware of assuming that the fragmentation of identity is necessarily a result of migration. Despite contemporary understandings of migration as embodying a wider ‘post-modern’ condition in which: ‘binarisms and essentialisms, the hallmarks of modernity, are replaced by an appreciation of hybridity, dislocation and multiplicity . . . Ethnographies of migrant communities have revealed that everyday politics of identity entail a more complex and non-exclusive articulation between ‘hybridity’ and ‘essentialism’. 1 Indeed, the Osellas’ research in South India indicates that the experience and material rewards of migration to the Gulf feed into local identity projects that interrelate with the life cycle in a variety of ways, and often 1. Osella and Osella 1999.

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Age, Narrative and Migration involve essentializing strategies. Rather than fragmentation resulting from migration, they argue, it is an invariable component of all gender identities. As anthropologists such as Cornwall and Lindisfarne have shown,2 male identities are never fixed, even if they are presented in such terms. Instead, men – like women – negotiate between a variety of positions and subjectivities over their lives. As we shall see in what follows, many of the elders juggle between positions and identities that are highly fragmented and ambivalent, and those that appear to be more coherent and bounded. Their life courses, plus the history of Bengali settlement in Britain, have played an important role in these negotiations. These shifts in personal identity and selfhood in turn influence the construction of the past. As Paul Spencer has shown in his discussion of Maasai autobiography, memories of earlier times are always viewed through the distorting lens of today. For older people, this is in turn moulded by the social construction of ageing.3 In East London nostalgia, honour, and a new ‘traditionalism’, which is intimately related to becoming a murubbi as well as to changes within global and local forms of Islam, all play a role in what the old men told us. This does not mean that their histories are untrue or fabricated, but rather, as Hastrup puts it: ‘. . . the story of the past is . . . a selective account of the actual sequence of events, but it is no random selection’.4 This last point is just as relevant to the secondary sources from which I shall draw as well as my own account of the history of Bangladeshi migration to Britain. Rather than trying to compare oral histories with socalled ‘authoritative’ accounts produced by professional historians or social commentators, I take it for granted that both arise from particular social, economic and political contexts.5 What we might think of as formal narratives of history are just as open to contestation, contradiction and debate as those produced by non-professionals. Whilst some of these debates are concerned with verifying factuality or ‘what actually happened’, over recent decades a new question has arisen: ‘whose history counts?’ Clearly this is intensely political, striking at the heart of conventional assumptions concerning the making of history. The oral history

2. Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994; see also Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991. 3. Spencer 1992: 50. 4. Hastrup 1992: 9. 5. In her discussion of feminism and oral history, Geiger asks why, rather than using the accounts of ‘experts’ as a benchmark with which to measure oral history, we do not reverse the power relations and measure ‘authoritative’ accounts against those produced by oral historians (Geiger 1992: 310).

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Men’s Histories movement,6 feminism, and subaltern studies have all had an important role in the decentring of conventional Euro and androcentric history and in pointing out the multiplicity of accounts of the past. Attention to the voices of ordinary people can also help destabalize some of the assumptions inherent within macro-narratives of globalization. This is particularly the case when those people are migrants or transnationals who continually move between places: their identities and roles are never fixed. Rather than aspiring to a single, dominant location or set of ideals they are continually ambivalent about where they want to be and how they want to live, something we shall see throughout the book. As I have argued in my earlier work, conventional models of international migration, whether based around classical economic analyses of labour flows and demands or Marxist models of dependency, tend to assume that the dominant ‘centre’ that drives people’s movements across the globe is the North.7 These assumptions remain at the heart of many more contemporary notions of globalization, with their continued focus on core– periphery relations and the image of set and bounded places and power relations that this involves.8 While such models have been subjected to intense criticism by those stressing the decentralization of the global system, the fluidity of global processes and the delinking of culture from particular places,9 other dominant theories of globalization retain an assumption that the motor behind global change is technological and/or driven, ‘top-down’, by the North. Giddens, for example, has classically argued that globalization is the culmination of modernity, where technological developments permit social relations to be conducted at a distance, leading to changes in personal consciousness and ideas of self.10 Yet as Albrow, Eade, Washbourne and Durrschmidt argue: ‘. . . it is the social organisation of culture and technology conjointly which has recently turned the global point of reference into reality from a dream. Globalisation is an historically contingent outcome of numerous interacting elements, not a necessary culmination of an unswerving juggernaut.’11 By paying close attention to the testimonies of individual actors involved in the ‘disembedding’ effects of globalization, we see not only 6. For a general background to debates in oral history see Perks and Thompson 1998. 7. Gardner 1995; see also Addleton 1992. 8. For example, Wallerstein’s notion of a ‘world system’ assumes that the dominant powers within this are Northern (see discussion in Featherstone 1990; also Hannerz 1992). 9. See for example Friedman 1997; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Clifford 1997. 10. Giddens 1990, 1991. 11. Albrow, Eade, Washbourne and Durrschmidt 1994: 372.

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Age, Narrative and Migration how technological change and political and economic structures interact with diverse cultures to produce a range of meanings, but also how migration and the globalization that this contributes to and reflects is driven by a range of local factors, as well as the ‘juggernaut’ of modernity. The history of migration from Sylhet to Britain, for example, can indeed be traced to the colonial history of the region; but its particular riverine geography and local political economy are also important. Likewise the transition of Bengali migrants from ‘sojourners’ to ‘settlers’ in Britain12 is partly to do with the changing demands of industrial capital and shifting state immigration practices. But local cultural practices, the traumatic history of the infant state of Bangladesh and the life cycle of individual men were also dominant in household decisions over whether to bring women and children to settle in the UK and thus to transform the Bengali population into a settled ‘community’. In this the elders are both the subjects and the objects of history.13

A Short History of Sylheti Migration, from the East India Company to Labour Vouchers Pioneering Sylheti seamen in the Colonial Period Displacement, disjuncture and so on are often presented as distinctive features of the post-modern period; yet, as Van der Veer has pointed out, movement between places is nothing new. Indeed, global migration – sometimes over thousands of miles – had been taking place long before colonialism.14 It was the scale and nature of these movements that changed in the colonial period, rather than pre-colonial societies’ having been entirely static: people have always moved and culture has never been stable. The early history of Sylhet is one of constant waves of in-migration and settlement, from the Tibeto-Mongolian tribes that settled the area in about 2000 BC, to the Muslim invaders led, as legend has it, by the pir Shah Jalal in the fourteenth century.15 All Sylhetis are therefore genealogically linked to migrant peoples, as are the vast majority of humankind. With the advent of British rule in Sylhet in 1765, however, the character of migration changed, and it is from this that Sylhet’s distinctive link 12. 13. 14. 15.

Ballard 1994: 11–13. Hastrup 1992: 10. Van der Veer 1995: 3. Choudhury 1993: 9–16.

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Men’s Histories with Britain can be traced. As I have argued in my previous work,16 the special propensity of Sylhetis to migrate is related to colonial systems of land tenure, the British shipping business and the particular geography of the region. Let me take the latter two points first. As Yousef Choudhury has shown, British steamer boats on their way to Assam from Calcutta passed directly through Sylhet District, setting up direct links between the area and Calcutta, from which British trading ships embarked. Over the nineteenth century the steamer service expanded rapidly, employing increasing numbers of Sylhetis who worked in their engine-rooms.17 The steamers took the men to Calcutta, where because of their existing work experience they readily found work as lascars (sailors) for the British shipping companies based there. Gradually, as growing numbers of Sylheti men arrived in search of work, a network of Sylheti boarding houses and agents (or bari-wallahs) developed in the city: the network of patrons and services so characteristic of Bengali migration and settlement had begun. Today, many Londoni families trace their ancestry to these original seamen. Interestingly, too, the main steamer stations on the Kusiara river are prime Londoni areas today (Enatganj, Sherpur, Moulvi Bazaar, Baliganj and Fenchuganj).18 Hence the physical topography of Sylhet coincided with the labour demands of the East India Company to produce particular geographies of migration. Another factor, intimately related to British colonialism, may also have been important. In 1874 the British decreed that Sylhet should be part of Assam rather than Bengal. This changed the system of revenue collection operating in the district. Rather than creating a small number of large tenures, held by zamindars who acted as landlords to many small tenants (raiyats),19 as in the rest of Bengal, in Assam the British administrators dealt directly with the cultivators. A vast number of separate holdings were therefore created, the rent from each going directly to the British. The holders of these were known as taluk-dar. Few were as rich as zamindars, but as independent land-holders their status and economic means were considerably higher than those of the majority of raiyats in the rest of Bengal.20

16. Gardner 1995: 39–43. 17. Choudhury 1993: 29–34. 18. Gardner 1995: 41. 19. A term that in Sylhet today indicates low status and economic dependency. 20. I outline this argument in more detail in Global Migrants, Local Lives (Gardner 1995: 37–9).

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Age, Narrative and Migration A large proportion of Sylheti farmers were therefore independent cultivators with just enough extra capital to invest in the down-payments necessary for migration (the steamer fare to Calcutta, payments to bariwallahs and other agents, and more recently, air-fares). They also had an extreme dislike of manual work on other people’s land, which in terms of local hierarchies was performed by low-status raiyat. In a rural context where there were few opportunities for non-agricultural work, migration, which created wages to buy more land and thus increase the status and economic power of one’s family, was thus infinitely preferable to seeking manual work locally.21 The foundations for Londoni migration were being laid down. The working and living conditions of the lascars were however miserable. In Calcutta ruthless middlemen often swindled job-seekers of their money, and the British companies that employed them had little interest in their well-being. Working in the hot engine rooms of the ships, Sylheti seamen endured great hardship. Those that jumped ship in the ports of Britain were often reduced to begging. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the plight of ‘Asiatic Sailors’ was so great that ‘The Society for the Protection of Asiatic Sailors’ was established in Britain. This period has been described in more detail by Visram,22 Adams,23 and Choudhury.24 Over the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries a small number of Sylhetis began to settle in Britain. After the First World War, when considerable numbers of East Bengalis fought for the British, this group increased, as did the numbers of young men travelling to Calcutta in search of work on the ships. Most came from villages and towns that had pre-existing connections with other lascars who would help the newcomers find work and initial accommodation in Calcutta. This patronage meant that lascars became increasingly concentrated in particular areas in Sylhet and within particular lineages. As Choudhury argues, all hoped to become English articled seamen, who enjoyed far better working conditions and pay than the lascars. This process involved jumping ship in Britain, obtaining an identity card and making the transition to English articled seaman, something that many failed to do. The majority were either prevented from going ashore, or deported, or lived in penury in 21. As Mr Haque’s description of his search for work in Britain in the early 1960s shows, foreign employment was not always without problems (see Chapter 3). 22. Visram 1986: 34–55. 23. Adams 1987. 24. Choudhury 1993: 29–56.

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Men’s Histories Britain; but those that did make the transition made enough money to transform their family’s economic and social status back in Sylhet.25

The First World War to 1962: Lascars and ‘Labour Vouchers’ Although still tiny, in the inter-war period the Sylheti population in Britain began slowly to increase.26 Many more Sylheti men worked on the ships, and during the Second World War a considerable number of these were killed. Since they worked in the engine-rooms of the ships Sylhetis were particularly vulnerable when ships went down: in this, Mrs Khatun’s father (Chapter 3) appears to have had a lucky escape. As Choudhury describes, back in the villages people waited anxiously to hear the fate of their relatives and neighbours; because the men were employed through networks of kinship and community, a sunk ship might mean that a lineage would lose many of its men, or almost everyone in a village might be bereaved.27 Some of the older men at the day centre were lascars during this period, travelling around the world on the ships and finally coming to Britain in the late 1940s or early 1950s in search of work. In the following extract, Mohammed Rahman,28 who is now in his nineties and whose transnational life started when his uncle took him to Singapore to find work on the ships before the Second World War, describes his life as a sareng (ship foreman) in the following terms: I was a servant. I would go from country to country, take my papers and go to the shores and docks for a few hours, look around and then come back to the same ship. I had no place to stay and nowhere to go. That’s how I saw things and I don’t think there is a single place left of Allah’s planet that I left untouched. Russia, America, Italy, France and England. Of course I have been bought up from my birth working for the English, because at that time . . . the British controlled India. I have done it all . . . it was after I landed in Singapore that I learnt [ship work]. I trained and trained and slowly I learnt the ways and so I made my own path and lived my life. I used to take seventy or eighty people on a ship at a time. I was in charge and responsible for their work, who could do what and who could not . . . 18 November 1996. 25. ibid.: 51. 26. Choudhury estimates that the number of Bengali men in East London in 1939 was between 150 and 200 (ibid.: 68). 27. ibid.: 59. 28. See Appendix, household 23.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Like many of the men we hear of later in the chapter, Mohammed Rahman eventually came to Britain in 1963, where he worked in textile factories in Bradford, Halifax and elsewhere before settling in London. After the Second World War the number of Bengalis in Britain rose again. Most of the men living in the country were employed by restaurants or Jewish tailoring businesses. Nearly all lived in boarding-houses, sometimes owned by English landladies, sometimes by other Sylhetis or South Asians. While the majority lived in London, over the 1940s some began to move north to the Midlands or the textile belt, to find work in factories. These men were still very much ‘pioneers’, part of a tiny minority, who believed their stay in Britain to be temporary. The independence and partition of India in 1947 was an important watershed in the history of Sylheti migration. As the eastern flank of the new state of Pakistan, East Bengal (the area that is now Bangladesh) was divided from West Bengal in India and became East Pakistan. This meant that Sylhetis were now officially foreigners in Calcutta, and in their place the shipping companies started to hire Indians. From 1952 East Pakistanis needed visas and passports to enter West Bengal. The bari-wallahs sold their boarding-houses, and, like the lascars, returned to their villages. Over 1952–55, cut off from their source of employment, many Sylheti seamen faced destititution. Aftab Ali, the leader of the Seamen’s Union, attempted to help them by obtaining passports for work in Britain. Despite attempts by the government based in West Pakistan to block the passage of East Pakistanis to Britain, in 1956 he succeeded by obtaining six hundred international passports for the first seamen.29 Aftab Ali was clearly a central player in the promotion of Sylheti migration to Britain. In the same period he set up a Seaman’s Welfare Office in Sylhet Town, and next door, a travel agency, run by his family. Choudhury describes watching large crowds of men descend on the offices when they opened in 1956 clamouring for the passports. Word was beginning to spread of the profits to be made in Britain, and now it was not just the seamen who wanted passports.30 In 1956 one thousand passports were issued. Other men obtained ‘admissions cards’ from private institutions sponsoring visits to Britain,31 or medical passports enabling their holders to travel to Britain as patients. While many of the men taking up these passports were originally lascars, or had close relatives who had worked on the ships, others had 29. ibid.: 89. 30. ibid.: 95–8. 31. Some of which were bogus.

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Men’s Histories no pre-existing connections. The majority, however, came from areas of Sylhet that already had established links with Britain: they had therefore heard of the potential for making money there, and had contacts who would help them find work and accommodation. Most came from households with sufficient capital to cover the initial costs of migration (fares, accommodation, etc.). A minority came from poorer or landless households, but through local networks of patronage obtained loans that enabled them to migrate. Today, these families have usually transformed their economic and social standing.32 This period, from the late 1950s to 1962, was perhaps the ‘golden age’ of migration to Britain, when entry to the country was still relatively easy and the first immigration controls had yet to be introduced. In terms of political economy, post-war Britain still needed the cheap labour supplied by its ex-colonies, and the British authorities actively encouraged labour migration into the country. In 1962, work permits (known locally as ‘labour vouchers’) were issued directly from Sylhet Town. Now increasing numbers of young men began to leave for Britain. Most lived and worked in midland or northern cities such as Birmingham and Oldham, finding employment in heavy industry. Some went directly to London, working in the garment industry as pressers or tailors. For men usually staying in lodging-houses with other Sylhetis, this was a period of consistently hard work: they worked as many days and hours a week as was possible, remitting their wages to their families back in Sylhet. It is this period that is associated with Anwar’s ‘Myth of Return’.33 According to conventional accounts of the period, they were ‘sojourners’ rather than ‘settlers’.34 While they usefully demarcate different periods in the history of Bengalis in Britain, these labels should not however be taken too literally. Rather than there being a straightforward shift from being a sojourner to being a settler, most elders have oscillated in their attitudes towards Britain and their aspirations for the future. While men in this early period did not usually think they would stay in Britain for good, some married English women and had children with them here, or tell how on their trips to the desh they no longer felt as if they belonged. While the 1962 immigration legislation (described below) may have prevented many men from settling back in the desh for longer than two years, their own 32. I discuss the effects of migration on local hierarchies in detail in Gardner 1995: 128–60. 33. Anwar 1979. 34. Ballard 1994.

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Age, Narrative and Migration restlessness and inability to make a satisfactory life in a country that had changed radically in the years they had been away were also influential. As we shall see too, today many still do not identify themselves as ‘settlers’. Rather, movement between places is continual, both physically and emotionally. The history of Bengali migration does not of course stop with the introduction of labour vouchers. For the moment, however, let us turn to the narratives of the elders. As is shown below, the themes of work and mobility are central to their descriptions of the period. Many of the accounts are tinged with nostalgia: the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s is largely remembered as a place of welcome and plenty and their past, youthful selves for their active engagement with life. Paradoxically, while most Bengali men during this period were unambiguously geared towards transformations that they hoped would take place in the desh, since the Bengali and other Muslim communities in Britain had yet to be fully established many were also participating more in mainstream British society than they are today. To this extent, popular stereotypes of migrants’ adaptation to the ‘host’ society, in which levels of assimilation increase over time, are clearly misguided. Instead, the history of Bengali settlement in Britain and the stage of the life cycle that the elders have reached has often had the converse effect. While increasingly ambivalent about return to the desh, many elders today are participating far more in what they represent as ‘Bengali’ or ‘Muslim’ culture, and present themselves unambiguously as defenders of the ‘traditions’ of the desh. While their identities as younger men were certainly very different from those of their British-born sons, I suggest that this representation of themselves in culturally essentialist terms is something that has increased over their life courses, and is a reflection of the social role of murubbi (elders) as well as of contemporary conditions – of which Islamophobia is one of the most important – within Britain in general and Tower Hamlets in particular. I shall return to this point later in this chapter.

Young and Single: Narratives of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s Work and Masculinity As has been indicated previously, the narration of migration and place is closely tied to the construction of gendered identities amongst the elders. In the way that they talk about the past, for example, first-generation men – 94 –

Men’s Histories tend to represent themselves first and foremost as active and mobile providers, roles that feed into local constructions of appropriate masculinity in Sylhet and are in turn related to the life cycle. Before they were married, young men in Britain might have behaved somewhat differently, participating in more ‘transgressive’ forms of behaviour, such as having relationships with white women, visiting night-clubs and so forth. Now that they are householders and husbands, however, what is stressed in the narratives is that work, money and the ability to support and protect one’s household makes one a successful and honourable man. As we shall see, later in the life course, when a man’s working life has finished, other identities, such as being a religiously devout murubbi, become more important. The following accounts should therefore be situated within the shifting constructions of masculinity, which themselves change over time as well as between places. While separation from loved ones, suffering, and isolation are referred to less than in the women’s narratives, this does not mean that the male elders we spoke to did not experience them. Indeed, many of their accounts do touch upon such themes. Rather, what is at stake is a matter of emphasis, of what is prioritized in each narrative and how each narrator chooses to present himself. All elders remember their early days in Britain as times of unrelentingly hard work, a theme that came up again and again in the interviews. Just as Mohammed Rahman recounts his travels around the world in terms of his work as a lascar rather than in terms of the sights he saw, men discussing their lives in Britain in the 1960s tended to construct their narratives of the period around their role as workers, so central to their sense of self. This is not necessarily the same as Weber’s ‘Protestant work ethic’.35 Rather than the act of work itself bringing merit, it is its profits that are sought. In such narratives, Britain emerges first and foremost as a place of employment in which the remembered landscape is dominated by factories and workshops, and journeys are taken between industrial towns in order to seek employment. Indeed, many of the men’s accounts of the early years in Britain involve not only stories of the different jobs they did, but also their continual quest for work, which sent them all over the country. Such narratives reflect economic changes in Britain – the decline of textile industry in the Midlands and North, and the shift towards smaller enterprises, which for many men involved a physical movement to London. Not only the men’s vulnerability to unemployment, but also their willingness to seek new job opportunities is striking. As Abdul Miah, who is now sixty and has suffered a stroke, recalls: 35. Weber 1991.

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Age, Narrative and Migration I came to London first [in 1963], but I didn’t stay here. I left here and went to Birmingham, where I stayed for about six months, but I was unable to secure work. After that I came back to London and got a job in a factory. But it wasn’t a prestigious place – they got us in one door and out the other. So then I went to a place called Worcester, where I stayed for about fifteen or sixteen years. Q: What work did you do? I’ll tell you. I worked first of all in a leather factory . . . I worked in the boiler room . . . from that work I used to get all kinds of rashes that itched all over my body . . . So I never went back there, I went into ‘casting’ in a factory. I worked there for two years, but then they closed the place down and made all the staff redundant. Q: Where was this? Worcester. Same place. After they made us redundant I couldn’t find any more work. They said to us you won’t be able to get work around here any more. So then I came back to London . . . Abdul Miah,36 10 October 1996.

In the following passage, Abdul Ali (from whom we heard in Chapter 2) recounts how his employment in Britain was dependent upon changing economic conditions, with redundancy a constant threat. As he tells us, it was the Bangladeshis, rather than any other ethnic group, who lost their jobs. Indeed, as Kabeer points out in her study of the garment industry in East London, employment patterns are often racialized: the exclusionary practices of employers helped to confine Bangaldeshis to certain sectors within the British economy; as unskilled, casual labour, they were also more vulnerable to redundancy.37 I worked in Liverpool Street, in a factory [in 1963]. I worked on a machine. It was a shoe factory. On one side I would apply solution and on the other I would put together the layers of the shoe. I did this and managed for five years. From there I went to Bangladesh and stayed a year. After I came back I looked and could not find any work. The factory had been demolished . . . So I went to work for Ben Brothers. I spent two years there. After that I couldn’t find work again. I eventually went to work in Mile End Hospital, in the boiler room. I worked there for two years, but then they made all the Bangladeshis redundant and brought in machines to do our work . . . Abdul Ali, 5 November 1996. 36. See Appendix, household 22. 37. Kabeer 2000.

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Men’s Histories In answer to more general questions about their memories of Britain during this period, many men made comments similar to Abdul Miah, who has just told us of his working life in Birmingham and Worcester: I came here to work. The thing I did the most of was work. I remember the most about work . . . I did this kind of work or that kind of work . . . work, work and more work. During the holidays, when everyone gets time off, the people from our country they’d say ‘what’s the point’? Abdul Miah, 10 October 1996.

In answer to the question: ‘Did you miss your family?’ Jamil Ahmed replies: “I used to sleep, eat, work and sleep. Get up in the morning and work and work. I would just work and work, save and count my money.” In the following excerpt, Mohammed Rahman38 has spent considerable time describing working in a wool factory in Halifax in the early 1960s, and his subsequent employment in other towns in the north. In answer to a question concerning his memories of Britain he answers: As I said, I did so much and saw so much that I can’t even remember the names of places and things any more. Sometimes I was unemployed. At least these days you can get some work. When I first came [to Britain] you could spend a year sitting and waiting all the while looking and looking for work. The reason I didn’t work in London city was that the wages were terribly small. And the places I went to there was much work was in plentiful amounts and the wages were good . . . In London [compared to the other cities he lived in] you’d only get about £5. How can you eat from that? And then there’s your family, your mother and father left behind to provide for. I’ve spent all my life with these things on my mind, working, being redundant – it’s gone along like that [He starts to discuss another job as a hospital porter.] Q: But what do you remember about the country? What else can I remember about their country, dear man? You can’t compare us to them, what’s the point? In Bangladesh I would have earned one or two annas. Here there’s no point in talking about anything lower than a pound. I always used to earn fourteen to fifteen pounds. How much is that [in taka]? You calculate . . . 20 October 1996.

Since they were economic migrants, it is not surprising that the elders’ memories often revolve around money.39 In this sense the landscapes that 38. See Appendix, household 23. 39. For an interesting discussion of the link between masculinity and money in South India, see Osella and Osella 2000.

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Age, Narrative and Migration they create in their narratives of Britain do not involve physical space, but the gradations of profit and loss, earnings and expenditure: Without a doubt, Britain has changed. Before you could get a lot even with a little money, but now even with more money it’s hard to cope. Before it used to be twelve pence to a shilling, and even with a shilling you could buy so much. Abdul Matin, 5 November 1996. What else is there to say about this country? Allah granted me the ability to work. I earned good money. Top-press, £250 for forty hours, and underpressing about £150 to £175. Abdullah Ali,40 8 October 1996.

That narratives of Britain should be so centred around these themes of work and money is of course hardly surprising. It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that many men over this period spent almost every waking hour in the pursuit of earnings to send to their families back in Sylhet. In their dogged insistence to stick to these themes, however, I suggest that the elders are also making statements about their identities as Bengali men, for whom work and the ability to provide is a central aspect of masculinity and group membership. As Abdul Bari, who was previously married to an English woman and who has worked in the garment industry in East London since 1957, puts it: Q: What does it mean to be a man in Bengali society? To do the work of a man, wherever that is. Q: What work? Work, any kind of work, all work. Shopping, feeding your family and self. Now I cannot do that. My son does it. Abdul Bari,41 13 December 1996.

In answer to a similar question, Mohammed Rahman says: “To be a good husband you have to calculate costs. Everything must be provided for” (18 November 1996). The centrality of work and provision to the men’s sense of self is an important reason why many look back to those early days with pride and nostalgia. While it is true that many endured great hardships – separation 40. See Appendix, household 21. 41. See Appendix, household 12.

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Men’s Histories from loved ones, backbreaking employment in what were often unpleasant industrial environments, racism, loneliness, and so on – most elders present this part of their history as a happy time. No doubt this has much to do with their present situations: as physically dependent murubbi, for whom the bases of power and respect have in Britain been radically undermined. Abdul Khalique, who came to Britain in 1958, working all over the country, and who now lives with his younger second wife and children, who joined him in the mid-1980s, powerfully sums it up: Of course it was a happy time. At that time I couldn’t have been happier. I worked and earned. I worked the most and brought the biggest wage. I did things with it [the money]. I kept some, sent some home and now it’s finished. Abdul Khalique,42 14 December 1996.

While many of the elders talked about these times in positive terms, others spoke of the suffering they experienced in the early days of migration. As Abdul Matin says: [The work] was OK. I didn’t mind doing it. I was stronger then and quick to learn. Doing my own work I’d watch others work and learn their jobs too. But there was the cold weather and having to get up and work in the cold, I didn’t like that. Now my son I cannot even look after myself. I suppose if I had gone to school in this country, then I could have got better work. But I couldn’t go. I was a man with responsibility. I had left a family behind and was forced to take on work for six or seven pounds a week. Plus pay rent, eat and send money back. It was hard to cope and survive. 5 November 1996.

Boarding-house Days As well as working hard, many of the men told us about their experiences living as single young men in boarding-houses. While some emphasized the overcrowded conditions (with men sharing beds in shifts, for example), others spoke of the fun and companionship they had. Often the boardinghouses were owned by Bengalis or other South Asians. Sometimes they were run by white landladies. Choudhury, for example recounts his experiences in a boarding-house in Birmingham, in which the other lodgers included Irish and English occupants, and the landlady was white.43 If 42. See Appendix, household 5. 43. Choudhury 1993: 119.

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Age, Narrative and Migration things did not work out, then the men moved on. Most of the elders we interviewed had worked all over Britain; only a small number stayed in the same place. Wherever they went, there was a local network of other Bengali men – often relatives or neighbours from the same village – to help them find employment and housing and to keep them company. On their evenings off, they would go out together. Many of the elders described visiting coffee-houses and cinemas,44 or simply cooking together with other migrant men and sitting up late talking. In many of these accounts a strong sense of companionship emerges. Abdullah Ali recounts: It was a happy time. I sometimes went to the cinema. In those days the cinemas were much better in this country. They showed much better things, even from Bangladesh. Q: Where did you go out to [on your days off]? Just out. Two friends or four friends, we’d go out together, maybe to the cinema, or a coffee-bar or something. Abdullah Ali,45 8 October 1996.

As Mr Haque (see Chapter 3) puts it: I was on my own. I was a single young man. There were other single young men, like me, goondas [hooligans], they’d come round. It was like a little group of us goondas. Q: So you were a goonda? Oh yeah! We were. We did a lot of things, but forget that. [He smiles.] 29 November 1996.

Some of the elders had white girlfriends; a minority married them.46 These clearly did not see themselves solely as ‘sojourners’ in Britain, orientated only to returning to the desh. Instead, their roles and identities were multiple, depending upon where they were and with whom. However, during this period it is true to say that many of the men had more

44. Indian films were shown in a cinema on the Commercial Road. 45. See Appendix, household 21. 46. Of the twenty-three households included in our research, two of the men had married white women. Both were now divorced or separated from them. Other marriages with white women may have taken place that the elders did not choose to share with us.

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Men’s Histories contact with ‘mainstream’ British society than they do today, or at least with other ethnic minorities within Britain.47 This mixing with other groups is largely to do with the particular stage that Bengali settlement had reached in Britain. The Bengali ‘community’ had yet to be established; there were as yet few South Asian or Bengali shops or places of employment, few mosques and virtually no Bengali women. Today, reflecting their current orientation towards all things spiritual, the elders often recount these times in terms of Islam and their lack of religiosity. In these reflections, Spencer’s point concerning how the social construction of ageing affects what is remembered and narrated is clearly illustrated.48 As devout murubbi, they view past experiences and memories of Britain through the lens of their current preoccupation with God. As Abdul Bari puts it: I was a broken Muslim. I had a white woman. I never lost my religion but then I never really prayed or anything. That was how I lived. She never said to me not to pray . . . but you understand that that was a particular time for me. Everything was work, work, nothing else. 13 December 1996.

Other men comment upon how their employment stood in the way of being a ‘proper’ Muslim. The lack of places to pray was an influential factor, as were the types of work some were involved in. Fazlu Miah, for example, who is now in his seventies, and first came to Britain in 1952, recounts how as he approached middle age his friends suggested he should sell his share of a restaurant in which alcohol was served, for this was a haram (religiously forbidden) substance. Abdul Miah describes the situation in the following terms: At that time [the 1960s] namaj [prayer] wasn’t even done. No one prayed, it was such a time. There was no space for proper abolutions, no bathroom, nothing. All we did was work, eat and rest . . . so of my religious duties Allah will just have to forgive me. When I came here there were no mosques, we had nowhere to wash, we could not have water [for our ablutions], nothing. In the English factories they would not allow us water, not even a bottle to hold the water in. They’d tell us off. They would ask why we had it. It was a problem. 22 November 1996. 47. One elder, for example, comments that then, as today, he had little contact with the ‘pure English’. 48. Spencer 1992.

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Age, Narrative and Migration The men’s participation in non-Muslim and non-Bengali activities was also to do with Britain’s industrial history. During this period most men were employed as cheap, non-skilled labour by large factories in the Midlands and North. This meant that many of the men had contact with non-Muslims and non-South Asian workmates. As Mohammed Rahman comments on working in factories in the 1960s: Whichever person sees the empty place will come and sit next to you. You can’t say: ‘Hey! . . . go and eat with your own jaat [people/caste]!’ If you did you’d quickly lose your job. 20 October 1996.

Other men were employed in London in industries dominated by other ethnic minorities. Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s garment factories in East London were largely owned by Jewish and Cypriot entrepreneurs.49 Today, nearly all these businesses are owned by Bengalis. Abdul Bari, for example, recounts his early working life in East London in the 1950s and 1960s, employed as a presser. As he explains: I liked those Jewish people, they took really good care of us. They made you work, yes, but they had great respect for people, they took care of us. They made their money, and after a while, from when I came to work, they began to go back to their countries [actually most moved out of the East End to other parts of London such as Golders Green or Stamford Hill]. 15 September 1996.

Combined with the above, many men found that on trips ‘home’, things were not as they had imagined, and that they no longer belonged. These confused feelings were described by a number of elders, including Mr Haque (see Chapter 3): Q: How did it feel to go back? Everything felt different. The people especially looked really dark, and going to the toilet made me feel sick. After a few days it got better. But the food – the rice had grit in it, and the salt too. That also made me feel sick. 5 September 1996. I was not sure how I felt any more. It felt weird. I liked Britain, and in Bangladesh the people looked different, darker . . . but it was my place of birth Abdul Khalique, 14 September 1996. 49. Kabeer 2000: 200–12.

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Men’s Histories After a long period away, some found to their surprise that they were treated now as foreigners: So much had changed after eighteen years. I can remember not being able to find this road I was looking for, it was all so different. And the people around our house, ooh, they thought I was such a beautiful fruit. I couldn’t sit in the local bazaar in peace, I was always surrounded. Abdul Bari, 15 September 1996.

Thus, while all professed to dream of returning to Sylhet during this period, and some men did talk about their joy at returning and seeing their families, for others such a return seemed increasingly unlikely. In Britain their lives and identities had been for ever transformed. As Stuart Hall puts it: ‘Migration is a one way trip. There is no “home” to go back to.’50

Nostalgia for Times Gone By Racism and Mobility Looking back on this period, many of the elders express nostalgia for these ‘good old days’ in Britain, arguing that British people were more friendly and accommodating than they are today. Nearly all the men represented the Britain of the 1950s and 1960s as a more friendly place than now. A common explanation for this that they gave is that then the Bengali presence in Britain was far smaller. As Abdul Bari puts it: In those days the English used to see us as their own. But then slowly the number of Bengalis increased and now they hate to look at us with both eyes. They can’t tolerate our name. Q: Were there not many Bengalis at that time? No, it depended on the area . . . now [he raises his voice] there are ONLY Bengalis. You can’t see any English and you can’t get any maiya [love, affection] from them.

In his recollections of being employed by Jewish tailors (see above) he continues: The way people behave has changed too. Like fighting. Before, it was unheard of, all we did was work. Now they [Bengalis] fight the English all the time; 50. Hall 1987.

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Age, Narrative and Migration they even fight other Bengalis. And the Africans and black people were great, really nice, but now even they are involved. Everything has changed. Abdul Bari, 15 September 1996.

Other men told us how today their fear of racism prevents them moving freely around in London. This, they imply, has become worse over time: When I first came here I worked in factories for five years. I moved around freely, there was nothing to worry about. Slowly, slowly it began to get worse, particularly after 1972. That’s when the National Front emerged. They used to harass and intimidate people. They still do, even if they don’t hold any power. But still, even in daylight they’d scare people . . . Fazlu Miah, 3 November 1996.

Comments such as these reflect objective changes within Tower Hamlets, where growing unemployment and overcrowding have contributed to a misplaced sense of resentment amongst some whites towards the ethnic minorities who they imagine have taken their jobs and houses. National and global events over recent decades – such as the Salman Rushdie affair, the Gulf War and the events of September 11th, 2001 and the growing Islamophobia with which these are associated – may have also contributed to a growing sense of ‘otherness’ amongst the elders. Indeed, there can be little doubt that racism plays a part in the lives of many British South Asians: racial attacks and harassment are a constant threat to the elders, especially those living in more distant parts of the borough, such as the Isle of Dogs (the ward that the BNP councillor Derek Beacon won in 1993). Whether or not levels of racism have actually increased since the 1960s, when it was common to read signs on pubs or boarding houses declaring ‘No Blacks’, is however arguable. Indeed, national statistics suggest that levels of racism tend to be higher in places where there are fewer people from ethnic minorities.51 As we shall shortly see, the establishment of ‘the Bangladeshi community’ in the borough is closely associated with the perception of (relative) safety in numbers. Alongside these very real fears and experiences, I therefore suggest that these accounts of growing racism in Britain feed into nostalgic images of the ‘good old days’, which are also connected to the elders’ 51. ‘The hidden truth behind race crimes in Britain,’ Jay Rayner, Observer, 18 February 2001.

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Men’s Histories frustrations about their physical health and current circumstances. Perhaps too, they can be read as a collective justification for the privations that many of the men went through in the early days. In the old days, they seem to imply, English people were so much kinder to them; Britain was a better place. Although today the natives have turned against them, in those days the hard work and separations were worth it. As the above quotations indicate, the theme of mobility is also central to the ways in which the men talk about the past. Indeed, one’s relationship to space is key to the construction of gender and self in Sylhet. Women enact notions of modesty and purdah through curtailed movement and their (relative) confinement to particular places and spaces. Conversely, freedom of movement indicates active masculinity, something graphically reinforced by the economic success of young men travelling abroad. As we saw in Chapter 2, murubbi often tell stories concerning getting lost and being shown the way by a friendly stranger – metaphors perhaps for more general experiences involving disorientation and the help of patrons or strangers. Combined with this, many old men talk about how often they moved between places, comparing the freedoms of that time with their lack of mobility today. This constraint on mobility may be due to racism, dependency on family members or the state, or physical disability. For all men, it is expressed in terms of their contemporary lack of power and emasculation, an issue I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 6.

The Weather Many of the elders cited the climate in discussing how Britain has changed over the years. I suggest that this is a metaphor for the men’s increasing physical adaptation to British conditions over the years. The following examples are typical of a number where elders talked about the climate in response to questions about change in Britain: Q: So compared to the 1950s and 1960s, what do you think has changed in this country? There used to be mud and rain around here, now there’s nothing! After a lot of rain the water would be up to my knees under the bridges . . . Oh, the way it rained then, it was . . . I tell you, it was like an elephant pissing on you! [he laughs]. That’s how it rained. And if it snowed, the road would have to close. You could only go out once they cleared the roads. Now there’s no snow. Abdullah Ali, 8 October 1996.

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Age, Narrative and Migration I came on the 11th November 1957. On the eleventh month it was the time of pure winter. Eleven days I stayed inside the house, then when I did come out I had to cut my way through the ice and snow. It is so hot here now. I’ve not experienced this kind of hot in Bangladesh. The changes from then to now are like day to night. Abdul Bari, 15 September 1996.

The Establishment of Family and Community: the 1970s to the 1980s Family Reunification in Britain For many of our informants the late 1970s and 1980s were a period in which their lives became increasingly orientated towards family, community, and a more strongly Muslim identity in Britain. The reasons for this are located in a combination of interacting histories: British immigration law, events in Bangladesh, global labour relations and the individual life and household histories of the men all contributed. There are a number of reasons why Bengalis reunited their families in Britain in the late 1970s and over the 1980s. The first is to do with changes in immigration law, which in turn interacted with the stages many migrant households had reached in their development cycles. Immigration controls had been gathering pace over the 1960s, and were closely connected to shifting demands for cheap labour from British industry. Rather than seeking to attract workers from the ex-colonies, the British state now sought to limit their entry and status in Britain. The legislation also reflects the intensification of popular racist attitudes to the immigration that had been taking place over the period,52 as exemplified by the Race Riots of 1958 and Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Indeed, as Clarke argues, the control of black Commonwealth immigration and settlement that became a central feature of political life over the 1960s and 1970s became almost a British national obsession during this period.53 In 1962 the First Commonwealth Immigrants Bill restricted the admission of Commonwealth settlers to those who had been issued with employment vouchers. Without British citizenship, Pakistani passport holders on trips home had to return to Britain within two years. This

52. See Clarke 1992: 19. 53. ibid.: 20.

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Men’s Histories essentially meant that the movement of certain categories of people (i.e. non-whites) between places was to be restricted; the separation of families by law had also now become possible.54 Some, but not all Bengali men acquired British citizenship at this stage.55 Fearful of losing their rights in the desh, others chose not to. From this first piece of legislation, controls over immigration into Britain became increasingly stringent.56 The Immigration Act of 1971, for example, was another important turning point. This virtually ended all primary migration. The only non-white people now permitted entry were those allowed to do a specific job for a limited period; the state also had increasing power to deport people.57 Increasingly, Bengalis based in Britain began to worry that they would lose their rights to move between places, and in particular that if they were not brought to the UK as dependants (i.e. children under the age of eighteen) their sons would not be able to work in Britain. The 1962 law had made it illegal for children under eighteen to enter the country without their mothers, and so this meant bringing men’s wives to Britain too. These changes in British legislation did not always lead automatically to family reunification. For many migrant households in the 1970s, Britain was still seen not seen as an appropriate place for women and children. Bidesh (foreign countries) were still almost exclusively a male domain, while the desh was the locus of spirituality and honour, as embodied by the women who stayed there. The Islamicization of Britain was still in its infancy, and the country was still largely seen as a spiritually impoverished, not to say a threatening, place. Indeed, the lack of suitable housing and the levels of racist attack in East London were a major deterrent for many families considering reunification.58 Some men therefore delayed bringing their wives to Britain for as long as possible. In other cases women refused to leave the desh, sometimes leading to their husbands taking second wives in order that their children were accompanied by substitute ‘mothers’ into the country.59 Gradually, into the 1980s these attitudes started to shift and families were reunified. Sometimes this took many years; immigration controls increasingly involved a highly complex process of questioning and verification, made all the more difficult by the false claims that some men 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Fryer 1984: 383–4. Choudhury recounts how the process cost £1 and took two weeks (1993: 133). For a more detailed discussion of immigration legislation, see Clarke 1992. Fryer 1984: 385. Kabeer 2000: 198. Choudhury 1993: 141.

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Age, Narrative and Migration had initially made for tax and other purposes.60 In all cases, however, the effects of immigration controls were combined with changing collective notions about the suitability of Britain for family life, as well as the circumstances of individual households. For example, some men waited until the marriages of their older daughters in Bangladesh before bringing the rest of their families to Britain; others only brought their sons, or waited until they were nearly eighteen. In other cases (for example that of Soyful Bibi cited in Chapter 5) children arrived with their stepmothers, or their aunts and uncles, to be reunited with their blood mothers many years later when their fathers’ domestic circumstances in Britain changed. Another important explanation for the reunification of families over this period is to do with the history of Bangladesh. In 1971 this had become an independent country after a bloody war of independence from Pakistan. Many men in Britain during this period had to watch the television and read the papers to hear news of the war taking place in their country. As Choudhury recounts, some returned to contribute to the war effort, while others formed action groups based in Britain.61 The years following independence were traumatic. Famine, corruption, coups and the assassination of Sheikh Mujiib in 1975 may all have contributed to a growing number of applications for British citizenship and family reunification in Britain over the 1970s.62 Increasingly the perceptions of British-based Sylhetis were changing: Bangladesh was seen as a place of instability and want, a central theme in many of the comments of elders today (see Chapter 9). The main reason cited by the majority of men for bringing their families to Britain during this phase, however, involves both the development of the Bengali/Muslim ‘community’ in Britain, and their own life cycles. As many elders explained, as the numbers of Muslims increased over the 1970s and 1980s, and mosques, madrasas, and halal butchers were established, they began to feel that their families would be more protected and catered for than previously. As Kabeer has argued, in Tower Hamlets racism and discrimination have played an important role in the particular geography and character of the Bengali ‘community’. Families clustered in particular neighbourhoods in the borough that were perceived as safe, while white areas were seen as ‘no-go’ areas. Carey and Shukur noted in 1985, for example, that in one white estate, seven out of nine Bangladeshi families had to be evacuated after racial harrasment.63 In 60. 61. 62. 63.

Choudhury 1993: 141. ibid.: 156–70. ibid.: 173. Cited in Kabeer 2000: 268.

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Men’s Histories contrast, the more Bengalis settled in other neighbourhoods (such as Aldgate, Spitalfields and some parts of Bethnal Green), the more comfortable people felt about their families coming to Britain. The age that the men had reached was important too. As several of the women told us, they were ‘sent for’ by their husbands because they were growing old and needed someone to care for them. In the case of two of our informants, their marriages to English women had broken down. Their Bangladeshi wives (who may or may not have been married to them previously) were therefore brought to Britain to take these women’s places. As we shall see in the next chapter, it is personal and household histories that tend to be narrated by women, rather than those of the ‘community’ or global conditions in answer to questions concerning family reunification. The growing sense of ‘community’ in Tower Hamlets was linked to another change during this phase: movement from industrial cities, which had earlier provided employment, to London, where there were more facilities and provisions for Muslim Bengalis. The main reason for this was economic. Over the 1970s employment opportunities for unskilled workers in heavy industry began to fall drastically. Forced to find new economic niches, many Bengalis sought work either in the burgeoning ‘Indian’ restaurant trade, or in the garment industry based in Tower Hamlets. By this time both of these industries were tending to employ mainly Bengali or South Asian workers. Such shifts in employment should be understood less in terms of choice or ‘culture’, whereby Bengali workers are thought to want to ‘stick together’, and more in terms of pressing labour requirements in sectors where casual and unskilled labour is in demand, coupled with simuiltaneous discrimination in other sectors. In the 1970s, for instance, clothing provided 20 per cent of the available jobs in Tower Hamlets.64

Islamicization of British Space The growth of the Bengali community in Tower Hamlets is also associated with the increasing Islamicization of British space over the 1970s and 1980s.65 Increasingly, specific areas of Britain were becoming viable places in which to be a Muslim. In Tower Hamlets, for example, not only is the East London mosque a striking example of Middle Eastern architecture, 64. Kabeer 2000: 219. 65. For comparative accounts of this process in North America and elsewhere in Europe, see Metcalf 1996.

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Age, Narrative and Migration but with its prominent position on the Whitechapel Road, and the broadcast of its azan (call to prayer), it is a graphic claim to British space by local Muslims.66 This changing use of space is related to shifts in both religious practice and identity in several of the men’s accounts. While many talked of how difficult it was in the early days to practise Islam in Britain – both because the facilities were not present, and because of the shoytans (devils; temptations) that stood in their way, there was unanimous agreement that today Tower Hamlets is a far better place to be a Muslim than it once was. This is how Mr Haque puts it in answer to the cited question, followed by a confirmatory observation by Mr Matin: Q: What does it feel like being a Muslim in Britain, before and now? Now you can see – it feels like every road there is a mosque. Before there was no value attached to it. People prayed if they felt like it, if not they didn’t bother. Some didn’t even care. People now pray more, in mosques and at home. We even have visits from maulanas, [Islamic preachers: people with religious knowledge], they come from the desh, they go from here. It is going well. 29 November 1996. Nowadays we have mosques in many places, now for Muslims it’s easy and secure. Before, we didn’t have mosques – just one- or two-room affairs . . . now the government has allowed for many mosques . . . Everything has changed. There are mosques in so many places that you can pray everywhere. Abdul Matin, 5 November 1996.

The growing Islamicization of pockets of Britain is also connected to wider changes both locally and globally. These include the growing influence of Tabligh Jamaat (mentioned by several elders as important to their lives), the increasing Islamicization of the Bangladeshi state over the 1980s and 1990s (at least, until the election of the Awami League in 1996), the Gulf War, and the Salman Rushdie affair. As many commentators have pointed out, this last was an important turning-point both in the way British South Asian Muslims were perceived by ‘the mainstream’, and in the way they saw themselves. While popular discourses in the media during the period stereotyped Muslims from South Asia as fundamentalists steeped in tradition, who would never be able to fit into secular Britain, growing awareness of the explicit nature of Islamophobia within Britain caused some sections of the British Muslim population to 66. See Eade 1996b.

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Men’s Histories become increasingly militant. While not all Bengali Muslims in Tower Hamlets – or elsewhere – were involved in such debates (and certainly, not all were anti-Rushdie), during the period it is probably true to say that the majority were made increasingly aware of their ‘otherness’ and their Muslim identities.67 More generally, as John Eade points out in his discussion of nationalism within the Bengali community in Tower Hamlets, political discourses at both local and global levels increasingly encouraged the articulation of Islamic forms of solidarity rather than those based on secular allegiances or identities over the 1980s.68 Combined with this, processes of globalization and the formation of diaspora have often led to a heightened sense of ‘otherness’ and alienation that make the apparent unambiguity of Islam increasingly attractive for displaced groups.69

Old Age: Religion and Traditionalism All the above factors are important reasons why Islam appears to have become increasingly central to the lives of the elders over the last few decades. Other reasons are more personal, and are directly connected to the life course. While in their narratives of past selves the elders stressed work and money, for it was these factors that brought a younger man success and honour, today, as old men, religious achievements and devotion to Allah are more important. As we shall see in Chapter 6, the role of murubbi involves increased Islamic practice (prayer, the reading of the Quran, and so on) as well as the physical embodiment of Muslim identities through the growing of beards, wearing particular clothes and performance of Haj and other types of pilgrimage. For some men, this period of their lives involves a radical rupture with their past behaviour; ageing and sickness may have forced them, perhaps for the first time, to examine their spirituality and relationship to God. As many are aware, death may come soon. This may involve a great deal of painful reflection and guilt concerning past misdeeds. As one (Bengali) care worker comments: Yes, I think that some of the men are feeling guilty. But if they haven’t practised Islam in their past lives, Islam does not say they are totally ruined.

67. See Modood 1992. 68. Eade 1990. 69. See A. Ahmed and Donnan 1994.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Islam says that you still have enough time in the future. What is past is past. And if you are repenting the past, so you will be forgiven. But now you have woken up, from now on you should practise. 25 September 1996.

Asia Bibi,70 the second wife of Abdul Rahman, whose first wife was English, put it like this: Q: Why do you think old people become more religious? It’s a time when your death is imminent, that’s why. In my youth I did the work of the devil, but perhaps I also prayed. My mind wasn’t properly settled. Then, when you really become a murubbi, that’s when your mind settles on the work of Allah and the fear of Allah enters it. I could die any time, so I had better take the name of Allah. Whatever work I’ve done in the past I now ask Allah’s forgiveness. 27 September 1996.

Combined with these factors, the elders’ contemporary stress upon ‘traditions’ and more bounded, Muslim identities may arise from the sense of rupture with the past and social change that many have experienced in recent years, a theme that I shall be elaborating on in Chapter 6. Contemporary conditions thus encourage recourse to an increasingly essentialized identity. As Robert Young puts it: ‘The need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a counter sense of fragmentation and dispersion.’71 Thus, while their identities and subjectivities remain highly complex, I suggest that the elders are, conversely, involved in a process whereby they represent themselves in bounded terms as defenders of the ‘traditions’, and ‘proper’ Muslims. As the following quotations show, this is particularly the case when they are talking about the second generation. Mr Haque replies to questions regarding his identity in the following ways: Q: . . . You are Bangladeshi . . .? No. In one sense I’m British. I was born when King George was on the throne, not even Pakistan existed then. We learnt the song ‘Our Queen Victoria lives in Britain’ in primary school. In that sense we are British. In another we are obviously Bangladeshi. Q: What do you consider yourself to be? I am British. 70. See Appendix, household 18. 71. R. Young 1995. See also Werbner 1997.

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Men’s Histories Q: Your children were born here, what are they? They have all turned into cows. Q: Why? They’re not like me, they are more like the English people. They are not like my people. Q: Is it correct to think of them as Bangladeshi? By their skin colour you can, but not by their behaviour. Q: How does this make you feel? I’m sad. I don’t like it. They cannot speak and they do not know our ways. They only know about what the computer says. 5 September 1996.

Mr Miah’s reaction is similar: Q: Can people who don’t follow the traditional ways be seen as Bengali? No, I don’t think so. I’ll tell you. I have one son. If I say do your namaj, he says I’ll pray if I want to pray. If I hit him, I’m in trouble and if I say anything I’m in trouble . . . They were born into a Muslim house . . . namaj, fasting, they should learn. When he’s fasting, I catch him eating . . . They cause me so much stress [he sighs heavily]. Abdul Miah, 10 October 1996.

I shall continue these themes in Chapter 6. In the next chapter, however, I examine women’s accounts of the past. As we shall see, their relationship to space and place and the ways in which they talk about migration are radically different from those of the men.

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–5 – Women’s Histories: The Transnational Work of Kinship and Caring In this chapter I turn to the accounts of migration and life in Britain given by the women at the day centre. The majority of these were the carers of elderly male ‘users’, who were generically classified by other people at the community centre as well as themselves as sassi (‘auntie’). Most were in their forties to their early sixties and had arrived in Britain since the mid-1980s, although, as we shall see, some had been in the UK for far longer. The husbands of nearly all the sassis had suffered strokes. Others were women who had themselves suffered strokes, or who were in other ways frail or incapacitated. The oldest of these was in her nineties, but like many of the others had only been in Britain a few years, and was living with her son. As I described in Chapter 2, I met with both groups of women on a regular basis at the day centre, took trips with them, and visited them frequently in their homes. So far, published material on how British Asian women – especially those of the first generation – experience migration and transnationalism is relatively sparse.1 Yet as James Clifford points out, we must beware of privileging male experiences of travel.2 As we shall see, amongst our informants men’s narratives tend to be significantly different from those of their wives or mothers. This is a reflection both of the different experiences of each group – for gender roles and relations have significantly affected the ways in which they have experienced transnational migration – and of the different ways that men and women have of talking about their experiences, which is also closely related to the construction of gender identities. Similar observations have been made amongst many migrant groups. Writing of the oral histories of men and women who migrated internally to Paris after the First World War, for example, Isobel Bertaux-Wiame describes how the men structured their identities through 1. Wilson (1978), Barton (1987) and Gifford (1990) provide oral histories of South Asian women in Britain. See also Bald (1995). 2. Clifford 1997: 6.

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Age, Narrative and Migration accounts of work whilst women talked of family and relationships. While the men put themselves at the centre of their accounts, as active and mobile individuals who had done certain things, the women’s stories were centred around other people and were concerned with relationships rather than actions.3 As Bertaux-Wiame reminds us: ‘. . . every biographical account takes place in the present time and in relation to the present. For the person who tells his or her life-story, the first purpose is not to describe the past “as it was” or even as it was experienced, but to confer to the past experience a certain meaning.’4 Amongst the sassis these meanings are often inseparable from notions of appropriate femininity, duty and honour. Just as the men tended to stress waged work and mobility in their construction of themselves as active and successful men, the women’s accounts tended to focus upon their roles as caring mothers and dutiful wives and daughters-in-law. Yet, as we shall see, although many have come to Britain officially classified as ‘dependants’, and both they and their husbands use terms such as being ‘fetched’ or ‘sent for’ in describing their migration to Britain,5 their active engagement in the processes of transnational migration has been central to the success of their households in maintaining links between places. As Alicia has argued in her discussion of Puerto Rican women’s roles in transnational communities in Puerto Rica and the United States, women’s subsistence work, and in particular, what Di Leonardo has called ‘kinship work’6 has been crucial for the ongoing viability of transnational families and households; without such work, transnational migration simply would not be possible.7 Amongst the Bengali elders at the day centre, women have played a key role in maintaining links between places and allowing for successful migration strategies. Indeed, without their work – in caring for children, elderly parents-in-law, and increasingly, their frail husbands, at different stages in the life cycle of transnational households – the history of male migration to Britain and subsequent family reunification there might be quite different. In this sense it is not women who are the dependants, but men, upon their wives and mothers for the work they have done in holding households and bodies together.

3. Bertaux-Wiame 1979; for a comparative example, see Chamberlain, writing of Caribbean men’s and women’s accounts of migration (1997: 98). 4. ibid.: 29. 5. See also Kabeer 2000: 268. 6. Cited in Alicia 2000: 305. 7. Alicia 2000.

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Women’s Histories A second point that emerges from the women’s accounts of their lives in Britain concerns their relationship to British space and their relative mobility. As I shall argue, many of the sassis appear to be simultaneously both more physically ‘free’ in their movements in Britain and also more constrained. Yet rather than being regulated by the cultural norms of purdah, so often used by anthropologists as the framework within which to analyse the status of ‘Asian’ or ‘Muslim’ women,8 fear of racism and the practical constraints caused by their roles as carers of children and husbands have been more dominant in affecting the sassis’ movements around Tower Hamlets, London and the UK. As we shall also see, the life cycle of both women and their husbands has also been a central influence in their relationship to British space. As I shall suggest, this contradictory position, in which women experience both more mobility and more constraint, is one of the many ambiguities and contradictions of transnational migration in the women’s lives. First, however, let us return briefly to the Sylheti context, where women have always had a contradictory relationship with fixity and with travel.

Travel, Marriage and Migration in Sylhet One of the most obvious contradictions of migration is that, while travel overseas is of central economic and social importance to Londoni areas of Sylhet, fixity of place and of relationships were key to most of my female informants’ accounts of emotional well-being. This has important implications for the theories of travel current within anthropology and diaspora studies discussed in Chapter 1. While it is important to question anthropological assumptions that settled life is more ‘normal’ than travel, and to de-link culture from particular places, we must be careful to differentiate between the effects of uprootedness on men and women, for those gaining the most social capital from movement and travel are usually cosmopolitan men.9 As Fog-Olwig cautions, we must also be wary of over-emphasizing the importance of transience to people’s lives, or of assuming that place means nothing, for even if people do not identify with where they live, attachments to specific locations are often key to identity.10

8. Bald (1995). 9. Clifford 1997: 6; McDowell 1999: 207. 10. Fog-Olwig 1997.

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Age, Narrative and Migration For the women at the day centre, travel and physical displacement has usually meant separation from loved ones who provide vital emotional support. A degree of fixity in particular locations is crucial to most women, for only in certain places do the social networks through which such support is given exist. For women who need their extended kin physically nearby for cups of tea, company and everyday support (of which childcare may be economically crucial) the de-territorialized ‘technoscapes’11 of telephone, internet or global travel are irrelevant, especially when they are living on a low income. For these women (as for most people) where they physically are matters immensely to their well-being. As we shall see from the accounts of women who came to Britain before the ‘Bangladesh community’ had become fully established, or who lived in places outside ‘the community’, lack of Bangladeshi friends, relatives and neighbours was central to their experience of migration. Loneliness and yearning for close relatives left behind in Sylhet was almost universally expressed by the women I spoke to. These feelings of separation and social disjuncture may also exist when family members are in Britain; the physical arrangement of housing and scattering of close family across the city or country may mean that even if most of a woman’s family are reunited in Britain, their arrangement across space means she cannot physically get to see them. Yet this is less because of purdah and more to do with the costs of transport (usually Bengali driven mini-cabs), lack of time because of the demands of caring roles, and fears concerning the use of public transport, which relate more to racist attacks than to sharam (modesty). The social ruptures that travel involves should not however be exaggerated. For many women, movement to Britain meant that they were now reunited with husbands and/or children. In this sense, travel brings togetherness, not separation. Indeed, it is misleading to think of Bangladesh and Britain as two separate and bounded places that people move between. Rather, continual movement between Sylhet and the UK and the establishment of Bengali and Muslim social and cultural institutions within British space means that to a certain extent Sylheti Londoni society floats free from national boundaries, although it is always located in particular geographical locations within the diaspora (particular areas of Tower Hamlets, Oldham or Birmingham being key examples). Hence women can be seen as moving between locations within a similar social and cultural space, especially those that have travelled to Britain in recent years. 11. Appadurai 1990.

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Women’s Histories Moreover, although its nature has undoubtedly changed, travel should not be understood as anything new in Sylheti women’s lives, for as brides in a patrilocal society they have always moved between places and hence have always been separated from their loved ones.12 Indeed, the wedding songs that I heard in Talukpur were centrally concerned with themes of physical movement and separation. Likewise, the dramatic performances of brides on their wedding days that I witnessed, when they fainted or fell crying to the ground and had to be physically carried out of their houses, embody this.13 In the song cited below, explicit links are made between marriage, travel to a new place, and death. As this shows, themes of separation and loss are therefore already important to Sylheti narratives of female experience, and are not only caused by overseas migration: I am going to a new country today as a bride My father-in-law’s home is full of darkness Riding on the bamboo casket, four men will carry me on their shoulders In front and behind will be the bridal party They will read the Kolima [i.e. confess the faith at the funeral procession] Wife, son, daughter, sister and brother – all will become my enemy Ah, new bride I will leave my own country I will wear a white sari [i.e. funeral shroud]14

We should be careful not to take either the poetics or the performances of weddings at face value. While I am not suggesting that the emotion demonstrated by brides on their wedding day is not ‘real’, brides’ performances of suffering are important ways in which they demonstrate their honour and femininity, for to be anything less than overtaken by grief would indicate not only an immodest desire for marriage, but that the young woman in question did not adequately love her parents. In fact, as several women in both Talukpur and Tower Hamlets told me, their wedding day was a happy occasion for them, which they had eagerly awaited. Indeed, it is important not to confuse the performances that women give during their weddings as signs that a marriage has been forced (i.e. contracted against a woman’s will). As women in Talukpur explained to me, all women want to marry, and, despite the separations involved, a great many wish to come to Britain. 12. Except for those marrying patrilineal cousins, a practice that, as I argue elsewhere, is decreasing in Sylhet (Gardner 1995: 171–8). 13. See Gardner 1995: 187, 1997: 30–48. 14. Cited in Gardner 1998: 217.

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Age, Narrative and Migration For women whose husbands are or were in Britain, however, such unions involve a double dose of separation. This is especially so for younger women whose marriages have been contracted with Britishbased men within the last ten or fifteen years. While previously women tended to stay with either their in-laws or their own natal families while their husbands were away, more recently, as the Bengali population in Britain has become more established, the common practice has been for brides to join their husbands in Britain as soon as immigration procedures allow. For these younger women, marriage means moving not only from their natal households and villages but to another country where they may not see their parents or siblings again for many years, if ever.15 This has not, however, been the experience of the majority of women included in this research, who in the earlier years of their marriages tended to spend long periods in Sylhet while their husbands were working in Britain.

Talking about Transnational Migration Let us now turn to the ways in which the sassis described their travels to, and first experiences in, Britain. Initially I was somewhat disappointed by many of their accounts. Whilst a few women described their travels and early days in the UK in detail (for example, Rokeya Khatun in Chapter 3), the majority seemed to skip over what I thought of as important issues. Questions concerning the sights they had seen or cultural differences they had noted, for example, were often met with vague or blanket replies. London, a lot of women commented, was ‘nice’, and English people’s ways bhalo (good). What most women did want to talk about, however, was their family. Their narratives of Britain were largely concerned with who was where, their mental maps based on social networks rather than work or the aesthetic gaze of the tourist. To this extent, places and space appear in their narratives as relational.16 That many women had relatively little to say about Britain as an objectified place to be consumed and commented upon is also partly because the majority have tended to spend most of their time within the

15. In rural Sylhet marriages take place in two stages – the akt, when the union is legally contracted, and the rousmat, when the wedding feast takes place and the bride is taken by the groom’s party back to his home. In Londoni marriages, while the akt may take place before the immigration process is started, the rousmat often involves the bride’s journeying not to her husband’s village in Sylhet, but to his home in Britain. 16. McDowell 1999: 5.

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Women’s Histories Bengali ‘community’. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the building of a strong and close-knit community, clustered into specific locations within Tower Hamlets, is partly a result of the hostile and often violent treatment that Bengalis met with in other non-Bengali areas of London, as well as a result of the racialized structuring of housing and job markets.17 As we have also seen, most women did not arrive in Britain until the mid-1980s, when this community was firmly established. Partly because of this, the majority of the women at the day centre have been largely confined to Bengali space and society in Britain. While they may have travelled between specific locations within the country, they have not consumed its landscapes or exotic ‘otherness’ as British tourists to South Asia might. Their narratives are thus a function of their actual geographical movements across space as well as of the meanings they inscribe to such space, both of which in turn are centrally linked to their roles as Bengali and Muslim women in the UK. Finally, as I have already mentioned, the majority of women spent considerable time describing the suffering they had experienced in Britain. This is clearly a result of the split lives that most have led: loneliness and loss are very real issues for women of the older generation. It is also a function of the particular characteristics of my informants, who were mostly carers coping with very sick or senile husbands, often in poverty. Others were widows, or elders whose families could not support them. It is not therefore surprising that many were depressed. But, as I suggested in Chapter 2, expressions of suffering can also be interpreted as related to the construction of selfhood and gender. As Grima has shown in the case of Paxto women in Pakistan, tales of forbearance and duty in the face of adversity can be interpreted as ways in which women gain honour. Narratives that stress passivity and acceptance of their ‘fate’ are one way – amongst various others – of representing the self.

Household Strategies and the Work of Transnational Kinship While the men’s narratives of migration often stress the importance of relationships and networks between men in Britain in the early days, the role that women played in their lives, especially as their wives and mothers, tends to be less central to their accounts. This is partly because, back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Bangladeshi women were far outnumbered by men in Britain. Indeed, Choudhury cites census 17. See Carey and Shukur 1985; Kabeer 2000.

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Age, Narrative and Migration figures of 1961, which showed a ratio of Pakistani men to women of 40:1 (in 1961 the ‘Pakistani’ category covered people from both East and West Pakistan).18 Yet while the majority of women were still not physically present in Britain, the establishment and maintenance of transnational migration between the UK and Bangladesh was in many ways dependent upon the work that was done by them ‘at home’ in Sylhet. As I suggested in Chapter 1, migration from Bangladesh to Britain is intimately tied to household processes. Indeed, travel between the two countries is best understood not in terms of the movements of selfinterested and atomized individuals, but more as a web of links between groups of people that stretches between and interconnects places. These groups are not subsumed only by households, but encompass wider relationships between neighbours and relatives, which include both patrilineal and matrilineal kin, as well as in-laws. Decisions concerning when to, and who should, migrate are however closely linked to relationships and processes within the household, which is only viable when certain types of productive and reproductive work are done within it. As I noted earlier, I am not defining households as being rooted in a set physical location or as a single hearth, but more loosely, as a group of people tied together by common productive and reproductive interests. I am also not suggesting that strategies and decisions concerning transnational migration have been driven only by internal household processes, for clearly a host of other factors (the international labour market, immigration law, social and material conditions in Britain) have also been important. Rather, these various factors and processes have worked symbiotically to produce particular patterns of migration. Crucially too, the successful outcomes of strategies of transnational migration are dependent on the movement and work of women as well as men. For example, while many of the elders originally came to Britain as single young men, as time passed the vast majority married women in Bangladesh. These women usually took up their places in their husbands’ households in Sylhet as daughters-in-law, allowing their husbands’ households to ‘develop’ into their next stage of growth within Sylheti norms. Over the next decade or so, not only did most Bangladesh-based wives produce the next generation of children, but they also worked hard in maintaining their shoshur bari (father-in-law’s homestead). This involved not only domestic and agricultural work within the bari (for example, growing fruit and vegetables and the processing of crops), but the nurturing work of caring for children and ageing relatives, especially 18. Choudhury 1993: 132.

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Women’s Histories their parents-in-law. Other, more symbolic work, such as the preparation of foodstuffs and betel nut to send to relatives in Britain, helped to link people to places, and – as I have argued elsewhere – has been an important feature of British Bangladeshi transnationalism.19 More generally, wives at home helped maintain social connections for men abroad through visiting other households, the construction of friendships and other symbolic and sacred exchanges.20 In this – as Gilligan notes – transnational wives can be seen as ‘nurturant weavers’,21 helping create and sustain the networks of relationships between neighbours and kin on which male migration from the region has historically relied. In the accounts of several women, this period of their lives is described as one of anxiety and unhappiness, a limbo of work and waiting to be finally reunited with their husbands. In the following, Mrs Chapna Bibi,22 who has been in Britain since 1984 and whose husband, a presser in East London, died several years before I met her, says the following: What can I say? [she laughs] I was happy during my wedding. After that I didn’t think I could be happy again. My husband stayed with me then left for London where he stayed for seven years. Then he came back and stayed for one year, then he went off again. So I kept writing letters, asking ‘When are you coming back?’ Then he came home, and the Pakistanis came [i.e. the war of independence in 1971] and we were so worried he might be killed . . . the worry reduced me to tears, all I did was cry. So then I thought if I can join my husband in London then we can live together and be happy. 6 January 1997.

Joyful Bibi,23 whose husband is currently living with a second wife in Aldgate, recalls the following: Sassa [uncle: i.e. her husband] was working in Britain a long time before I came here, both before and after my marriage. After staying for a while in Bangladesh after the marriage, he went back to the UK. It was difficult . . . I didn’t like it. Suddenly I was alone with strangers. I felt bad . . . It’s best for husbands to stay, so that if you’re unwell, or anything, he can look after you. 3 October 1996. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

As described by Gardner 1993a. For example the ritual practice of the distribution of shinni; see Chapter 7. Cited in Alicia 2000: 303. See Appendix, household 8. See Appendix, household 19.

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Age, Narrative and Migration In some cases, men in Britain married English women, or had a Bangladeshi wife with them in the UK whilst their first or second wife stayed in the bari, her work in caring for children and relatives enabling the household to remain viable. While, as we saw in Chapter 4, family reunification in Britain was closely tied to changing immigration laws and the establishment of ‘community’ in Britain, decisions over when to bring families to the UK also depended to a degree on the life cycle of household members. Many women, for example, did not come to Britain until their work in Bangladesh was no longer necessary: older daughters married off, children’s education completed, or caring duties for elderly kin no longer required. In several women’s accounts, the needs of husbands in Britain had also changed; they had become sick and in need of care, or their relationships with English wives had broken down. In the following extract, Soyful Bibi24 recounts how she stayed with her in-laws whilst her husband had a family with an English woman in Britain. Earlier in the narrative she has mentioned that her husband married her so that his parents would have someone to care for them in Bangladesh. Now in her late thirties, she has been in the UK for two years, living on the thirteenth floor of a tower block off the Mile End Road. As she tells us, she was ‘sent for’ by her husband after he became sick and his English wife left him. Their only child, a son, was taken to Britain by his father when he was nine; when she arrived in the country she had not seen him for five years. The anger she feels at her husband and his relatives is plain, even as she wraps her narrative in the rhetoric of duty: My husband married me when I was thirteen . . . [after that] . . . he came back here [i.e. to the UK]. After that he returned [to Bangladesh] eight years later. Q: He returned [to the UK] straight after your marriage? Yes, he came here on his own. He stayed here and wouldn’t go back. People used to say, to him ‘Ya Allah, you married [her brother’s name] sister and then you leave her here, it’s not good. Everyone has a life to lead and by marrying her and leaving her here you are ruining hers.’ Q: And he never sent you money? No my dear, he never sent any money. I ate from the household of my brothers and father. I even raised my son there. Q: Didn’t your brother get angry? No my dear . . . he said that he’d given me away with his own hands and that getting angry wouldn’t do any good. If I’d chosen [the marriage] from my own will, it might have been different. 24. See Appendix, household 12.

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Women’s Histories Q: Doesn’t your husband have any responsibility to you? He was concerned with different things at the time – his children and wife here . . . whatever is written in your fate. Everyone needs a wife. I’ve accepted that. Q: [When he returned to Bangladesh nine years later] your husband had never seen your son? No. I had made him a nine-year-old boy before he saw him. He left him in my womb at two months and came here . . . I never lived in his bari because they [her in-laws] would take all his money [remittances]. They caused me so many problems . . . I used to pray five times a day, pray that Allah would grant my son some happiness. My life is over. I won’t have another life, will I? That’s it. That’s what I’ve come to accept, my dear. Q: Have you never said anything to him about how you feel? No my dear, I never say anything. Q: Why not? What will saying anything do? If I say something he’ll get angry. I’ve kept my own honour [izzat] and that’s the way it’s going to stay. 29 September 1996.

Transnational Motherhood Soyful Bibi’s story raises the crucial issue of what Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila term ‘transnational motherhood’.25 In the case of Latina women working away from their children in Los Angeles, for example, despite what are often many years of separation, much work is put by the mothers into retaining ties and relationships. Indeed, the glorification of isolated, privatized motherhood as found in Western Europe and North America is historically and culturally specific.26 Like Latina transnational mothers, some of my informants had also experienced different variations of mothering across continents. Again, these experiences are intimately tied to strategic decisions taken within the household concerning migration, as well as to British immigration law. For example, in the early days, sons were sometimes taken to Britain by their fathers, leaving daughters and mothers in Bangladesh. This was both in order to bring children to Britain before they reached the age of eighteen, when they were no longer classified as ‘dependants’ and able 25. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997. 26. ibid.: 333.

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Age, Narrative and Migration to gain entry, and in some cases in order that they might either benefit from British education, or engage in waged labour. Since legislation introduced in 1962 meant that all children entering Britain had to be accompanied by their mothers, in a few cases – when blood mothers were unwilling or unable owing to household circumstances to come to Britain – children were brought to the UK by the co-wives of their mothers or other female relatives.27 Continuing her life story, Soyful Bibi tells of how she was separated from her son when he was nine, eventually seeing him again after five years. The predominant reason for this seems to be that her husband’s other, English wife resisted her presence; and under British immigration law second wives were not eligible to enter the country without the first wife’s agreement: [At the time that my son left, my husband] never brought me with him . . . That other woman told him not to – the English woman. Q: After your son left, how did you feel? Aah, my dear. The days wouldn’t pass and the night wouldn’t turn into day. I had so many worries. I stayed [in my in-laws’ home] in such a state. Now I’m a lot better, you can at least look at me. My face was all broken; that old colour from my face has gone. Q: So why did your husband bring you here two years ago? He’s lost all his strength, and that English woman has left him. Now who’s going to look after him? Earlier, he cooked and fed that woman, and now he’s housebound, so it’s my job to do it. That’s justice in this world. Tell me, is that justice? . . . Before, you cook for that woman, and now you’re the one that’s weak it’s me that does it for you. That’s Allah’s justice. Let it be. I’m still accepting it. Just so that I might find Allah. Q: How was it seeing your son after all that time? Even now I’m here, my dear, if I just move a little away from where he’s sitting, my heart feels heavy, like I’m going to cry, even though he’s a young man now . . . 29 September 1996.

Such situations are not the norm. The majority of women I interviewed at the day centre had come to Britain with all their children. Those that had left children in Bangladesh did so because they had passed the age of eighteen and were therefore not permitted entry, or in the case of 27. Choudhury 1993: 140.

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Women’s Histories daughters had already married in Bangladesh. However, in two cases amongst my informants British-based women were bringing up the children of co-wives who had not been able to accompany them to Britain. In both of these cases, the women – both of whom, unusually, had been in Britain since the early 1970s – were childless, and their cowives had been denied entry to the UK. For these women, transnational motherhood has not meant separation from their own children, but caring for other women’s children. Anowara Bibi, for example, was caring for four school-age children in the one-bedroom flat she shared with her husband near Brick Lane when I met her. The children had only arrived a few months earlier; their mother, I was told, had not been granted permission to come to Britain. Sharing a bed with these children, and suffering from terrible arthritis in a damp flat, Anowara Bibi and her husband were desperate to be rehoused. In cases such as this, women’s caring work has enabled the movement of people between places, even when households are caught within the complexities of immigration cases that often take years to resolve, and flounder both on the tangled claims and applications that over the years some families have become involved in, and the extreme suspicion with which the British immigration service treats all entry applications from Bangladesh.

Early Days: First Experiences in Britain All the women described their early days in Britain to me in terms of other family members, either those whom they had left behind or those with whom they were now reunited. Overwhelmingly, they gave the impression that being physically close to those they loved was the single most important factor in their relative happiness. In the following quotation, for example, Chapna Bibi, who above has described how she waited in Bangladesh for her husband to return, describes her first years in London.28 In contrast to Soyful Bibi, Mrs Bibi’s narrative is seeped with love for her now deceased husband. In this part of the interview I had just asked when in her life she had been happy: When we arrived we went first to a hotel in London. We lived there for about six months, in Finsbury Park. I felt that those months we stayed together were happy. We were living in peace and had married off our eldest daughter.

28. Mrs Bibi’s story is continued in Chapter 7.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Later, I asked what she had heard of Britain before travelling there: My husband didn’t tell me anything. Other people told me things – that everything was nice and that I’d be comfortable and happy there. Q: What things did you notice when you first arrived? At the airport everything seemed lovely. There were lots of cars and planes and white people. Everything was different from Bangladesh. At first I didn’t see much of the country because I didn’t go out much. I visited relatives’ houses by car. It was summer. Everything was comfortable. But since then there have been so many problems in my life, so much suffering. Everyone has died in Bangladesh since I left, no-one is left . . . 15 October 1996.

For many women transnational migration means that they are continually split between their need to be with people in different places. As Malika Bibi,29 an old lady in her nineties who was living with one son in a housing estate in Brick Lane but whose other sons were in Sylhet, put it: ‘Night and day if I was a bird I would fly.’ In Chapter 3, Mrs Khatun describes the pain of separation as like a ‘burning chilli, rubbed into your flesh’. Social relationships in rural Sylhet involve networks of extended kin and neighbours as well as those of close family members. For all women, physical proximity to other Bengali families in Britain has been crucial. Those that came to Britain in the early days of migration therefore had particularly difficult experiences. In the following extract, Syeda Bibi30 describes her first years as a young wife in Hampton Court, where she lived when she first arrived in Britain in 1958. Q: I don’t suppose there were many Bengali women here then. How did it feel? I didn’t like it at all. I really hated it. I had to stay at home on my own and I really didn’t like it . . . I would just sit at home alone. Later [my husband] brought me a [sewing] machine and I used to work on that . . . Then slowly Bangladeshi women came here and I used to mix with them and became friends with them, so it wasn’t so bad after that. (undated).

29. See Appendix, household 20. 30. See Appendix, household 21.

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Women’s Histories Of her life in Birmingham in the late 1970s, Anowara Bibi – whose situation is described above – says the following: For six whole months I cried. I could not see any Bengalis, my dear, in Birmingham. Even here [in London] there were not that many. I had a brother who lived in Christian Street, I used to visit him, but I felt strange coming here in front of all those men. And I had a zaal [sisterly relation of husband] and would stay a few days with her and then go back. Q: Was moving from Birmingham to London a good decision? Everywhere is good. Birmingham has nice houses, there’s a garden in the front and the back. In London they have them, although I don’t. 5 October 1996.

In contrast to these experiences of isolation, particular areas of London (and other cities such as Birmingham and Manchester) are seen as desirable because over the years they have become sufficiently ‘Bengali’. This view of different areas of Britain concurs with the observations of the last chapter: small islands of ‘community’ exist within a Britain that is otherwise hostile and ‘other’. As Asia Begum, who has been in Britain for ten years, and lives in Aldgate, puts it: ‘To me, Aldgate is like my Bangladesh. It’s nearly all Bangladeshi, and in London not all areas are like that.’ Yet while housing provision, racism and economics have to a certain extent determined in which parts of Tower Hamlets the Bengali community exists, the sense of community – the building up of social networks of visiting and reciprocity – has been built through the work of the people within it. While men have undoubtedly played a central role in this, both at the levels of formal leadership and local politics, and also in establishing informal networks of friends, colleagues and neighbours, women too have actively created community. As Rokeya Khatun puts it in Chapter 3, ‘When I first came to Britain I had no-one. I had to make other people into my own.’ The physical arrangement of space in large cities such as London is however often a constraint on the development of social networks for women, for even if relatives live a few miles away, their homes might be difficult to get to, especially when they rely on mini-cabs for transport, an issue I shall return to shortly. The physical structure of housing is also important.31 Many women talked of their need for fresh air and open doors, remembering how in 31. I shall return to the vital issue of housing provision and its effect on older women’s lives in the next chapter.

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Age, Narrative and Migration the village the doors of people’s homes are always open. This is how Joyful Bibi,32 who lives in a high-rise flat and has been in Britain since 1984, puts it: When I first came [to London] I didn’t like it. Bangladesh is poor but it’s still lovely because it’s my own country and everyone is there. All my family are there but I came here alone. All the doors are closed here, so I don’t like it. Then slowly I began to like it more. Q: What do you like? I like going out. Fresh air is nice. In Bangladesh we spend time outside and we keep our doors open. We enjoy the fresh air and see our relatives and neighbours and chat together. Here if I go next door, the doors are always closed . . . Q: So what things do you like about this country? I like everything . . . Q: What things have you learnt? [She laughs.] Q: Have you been outside London? Yes, outside it’s nice. I’ve been to the fruit farm and places with John [the project director]. The park, Regent’s Park Mosque . . . where else did I go? Some park somewhere. Before that I went somewhere else . . . the seaside, Southend. Then I went to another fruit farm. I liked that. Q: Why? Because you can be outside and see people. October 14 1996.

Caring Roles Ideals of nurture and caring are as central to most older women’s selfimages as those of purity or modesty. While this may be changing for younger women, who (according to one of the Bengali professionals at St Hilda’s) are no longer quite so committed to notions of duty and care, for all the sassis whom I spoke to, ‘being a good woman’ was inseparable from being an unquestioning provider of care for one’s husband, children and elderly relatives, whatever the circumstances. This in turn is related 32. See Appendix, household 19.

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Women’s Histories to religiosity and one’s relationship with God. As Rabeya Khanun,33 whose husband has been severely incapacitated by a stroke, put it: Bengali wives should look after their husbands. If I don’t look after my husband now, what was the point of marrying him? Why have I eaten with him and stayed with him all these years? . . . In our country we have these duties because our religion tells us we have to. First you bow your head to the ground to Allah and then you do it for your husband. Our Prophet told us we had to respect our husbands. 3 August 1996.

Such ideologies have particular meanings for women caring for sick and elderly husbands in Britain, an issue I shall explore further in the next chapter. They also affect how and what women tell in narrating their life histories. As was mentioned in Chapter 2, nearly all the women I interviewed described the sicknesses of their husbands (or themselves) in incredibly vivid detail. Rather than their journeys across the world being life-transforming events, as in the narratives of , for example, Northern European cosmopolitans,34 it was bodily events – strokes, accidents or other illnesses – that had changed their lives. I shall return to this theme in Chapter 7. Here, I wish to focus on how the role of caring influences women’s perceptions of and relationship to Britain. For all the sassis, migration to Britain is perceived as a direct result of their caring role. As Soyful Bibi recounted earlier, her husband brought her to Britain because he had grown old and sick, his English wife had left and he needed someone to look after him. Many other women explained their movement to Britain in similar terms. Q: Why did your husband bring you to Britain? Did they bring women before? No, they didn’t. But now men need feeding and looking after . . . he was getting older. Soyful Bibi, 29 September 1996.

That women’s identities are so much based upon their roles as carers of men and children is exacerbated by the British state. Immigration procedures mean that women’s entry into the UK is dependent upon whether they are either wives, or mothers. The 1962 Immigration Act, for example, stipulated that children were only allowed entry into the UK if 33. See Appendix, household 7. 34. See, for example, Robertson, Mash, Tickner, Bird, Curtis and Putman 1997.

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Age, Narrative and Migration accompanied by their mothers,35 while the recently revoked Primary Purpose Rule meant that entry to Britain was refused if the primary purpose of the marriage was to obtain settlement in the UK. What this meant for Bangladesh-based women was that they could only enter Britain as ‘legitimate’ wives.36 For the vast majority of Bangladeshi women the only route into Britain has been in this role. Other contacts with the state (as well as non-governmental organizations such as Age Concern) reinforce such identities. The sassis at The Day Centre, are, after all, officially designated as ‘the carers’. This label entitles them to training (for example on stress relief and lifting), to particular services or resources (for example, home helps, or stateprovided washing machines) and crucially, to a small income (carers’ allowance). What is in Bangladesh a cultural ideal (women’s caring, nurturing role), is therefore in Britain formalized and officially labelled. Being a ‘carer’ is both a route into the country and a way of gaining benefits and extra support once inside. That they are first and foremost the carers of others means that the sassis whom I got to know have a particular relationship to British space. As many women told me, when they first came to Britain they had no time to travel around, because they were too busy looking after small children. As Mrs Khatun (Chapter 2) puts it: When I first came here I was living in Birmingham. I was unable to see things of historical interest. I stayed with my child, living in someone else’s house. I cooked, ate and looked after the child. That was all I did. 24 August 1996.

Lack of free time has also contributed to many women’s limited knowledge of English, which, as we see below, in turn affects their experience of space and place. Here, the relationship between physical space and gender roles is circular: housing constraints in Tower Hamlets mean that it is impossible for many people to live with their extended kin – the flats provided by the council simply are not large enough. This means that the mothers of young children have far less support from other family members in Britain than they would in Bangladesh. More than ever, they are tied into caring roles that in the bari would usually be shared with other women.

35. Choudhury 1993: 140. 36. This rule was changed in 1999. For further discussion, see Sachdeva 1993.

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Women’s Histories Despite these housing difficulties Britain is perceived by most women of this generation in terms of the material support and medical facilities given by the State to the sick and elderly. To them as carers, this is crucial. As Rabeya Khanun explains: London is a good place to be for us because in the villages [in Bangladesh] there are no services for old people. You’d have to go to Sylhet or Dhaka for medicine, and that would be so expensive. [My husband] needs regular injections . . . without all these things I wouldn’t be able to look after him and he’d die. 3 August 1996.

Such comments were common to nearly all my interviews with the sassis. While Bangladesh is desired for the social support it provides, Britain is desired for material security. As we shall see in Chapter 9, these sentiments are echoed by the majority of men.

The Garment Industry and Home Work in Britain While the sassis emphasized their roles as mothers and wives and the work of caring in their narratives, other studies indicate that many Bangladeshi women in Tower Hamlets have historically had another important role: that of wage-earner. Naila Kabeer’s study of Bangladeshi home workers in the borough, for example, clearly shows that many women earn wages in the garment industry, the majority working at home, rather than within factories and workshops.37 Indeed, while in the 1970s the garment industry formally provided 20 per cent of available jobs in Tower Hamlets, by the 1980s these jobs were radically cut back, with employers increasingly ‘putting out’ work to home workers in order to cut costs. The result was an unemployment rate of 60–70 per cent amongst Bangladeshi men in the borough, while many women became primary earners for their families38 – another possible reason why some families were reunited at this stage. As Kabeer argues, the notion that Bangladeshi women chose such work because of the cultural ideals of purdah needs to be strongly qualified. While working on a sewing machine at home fits into women’s domestic duties, and is often the only work that husbands keen for their

37. Kabeer 2000. 38. ibid.: 214.

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Age, Narrative and Migration wives not to be ‘seen’ by the community to be working outside will agree to, the Bengali community’s involvement in the ‘rag trade’ has also been stuctured by racism and by global economics. Indeed, informal employment in the garment industry in East London has often been the only option for an unskilled labour force who may face discrimination in other sectors. Thus, while lack of English and child-care responsibilities were cited as major obstacles to finding other forms of work by Kabeer’s informants, fear of racism and the unavailability of alternative employment were others.39 Of the sassis, only three explicitly spoke of doing home work in their accounts of life in Britain, and only one – Syeda Bibi (who came to Britain in 1958, initially living in Hampton Court) – told me that she was currently involved in waged labour (as a worker in a child-care scheme). Kabeer’s study indicates, however, that while the demands of caring for sick husbands or their own physical frailty may mean that few women at the day centre do such work now, there is a strong likelihood that at least some have been involved with the garment industry in the past. Indeed, while the sassis emphasize the culturally sanctioned roles of caring wife and mother, many may have made vital economic contributions to their households in Britain, especially in the context of growing male unemployment. Their silence over this aspect of their lives is, I suggest, partly a function of the research itself – which, unlike Kabeer’s study, was not focused upon women’s waged work in Britain and did not directly elicit information about home working – and also partly of the self-representation of my informants. As we have already seen, the sassis’ emphasis upon kinship and caring is a function of ideals of femininity and honour as well as the realities of their lives. Thus, while their contributions to both the logistics of transnational migration and the economic viability of their households in Britain as well as Bangladesh are beyond doubt, these are not topics on which the majority dwelled.

Freedom and Constraint: Mobility and Space in the UK As was suggested earlier, many women have experienced contradictory pressures in their relationship to space and their relative mobility in Britain. While the majority are physically more mobile than they might be in rural Sylhet – visiting the shops, for example, or picking up children from school – in other ways their movements are more constrained. 39. ibid.: 236–75.

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Women’s Histories Confined to small flats in high-rise buildings and fearful of moving into non-Bengali areas of Tower Hamlets, it is the material conditions of the borough, plus the ever-present fear of racist attack, rather than purdah that are the most dominant factors here. Indeed, as the examples given at the end of the chapter show, when they do move into ‘English’ space, the sassis are quickly reminded of their status as ‘outsiders’. As Iris Marion Young reminds us: ‘Cultural imperialism consists in a group’s being invisible in the same time that it is marked out and stereotyped.’40 Racial oppression, she suggests, usually occurs in mundane contexts of everyday interaction, and has specific consequences for the experience of the body. The embodied experience of others – gestures, avoidance of eye-contact marks or physical avoidance in public spaces, for example – marks status and ‘otherness’ . It would however be mistaken to dismiss purdah altogether in discussing the women’s relationship with British space, for notions of veiling, and the religiosity which they symbolize, play a key role in the way that many of the sassis represent themselves. Yet rather than being, in Kabeer’s terms, the ‘cultural dupes’ of many earlier accounts, which tended to represent Bangladeshi women solely in terms of fixed cultural traditions,41 the sassis constantly negotiate and redefine the varied practices of purdah. This, as we shall see, is fluid and flexible, and highly contingent on place, relationships and age. Before turning directly to the ways in which the sassis talked about purdah in Britain, and their relationship to British space, let me make a brief divergence to discuss ‘the veil’ in more detail.

Understanding purdah: a brief account That social practices can be mapped on to space, as well as expressed through the body, or in Grosz’s terms, ‘written’ on to it,42 is vividly illustrated by purdah, a set of beliefs and practices through which the link between geographical and bodily spaces is explicitly made.43 As has been described throughout the Muslim world, notions of purdah and the codes of honour and modesty that they involve are used in varying degrees to

40. I. M. Young 1997: 219. 41. A phrase used by Naila Kabeer in her critique of representations of Bangladeshi women that assumed them to be the passive victims of culture: Kabeer 2000. 42. Grosz 1997. 43. For a fascinating analysis of the relationship between domestic space and women’s bodies amongst women in Sudan, see Boddy 1982.

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Age, Narrative and Migration separate women and men into different spaces.44 In rural Bangladesh, for example, while women are associated with domestic space, the public areas of markets, fields and mosques are thought of as male domains where only women without male support – usually the poorest – are forced to go. To retain their honour and sense of sharam (shame/modesty), women are – in theory at least – expected to remain out of the sight of non-related men. This leads to certain spatial as well as bodily practices. Houses are divided by bamboo partitions into areas that are internal and domestic and areas where male visitors may be shown; in villages baris (homesteads) are often separated from the public paths or fields by fences made of banana leaves, or in the case of wealthy Londonis, imposing brick walls. Purdah is marked on the body in a range of ways, most obviously through the variable practice of veiling. While most explicitly this involves the use of burquas (long capes that in their most extreme form cover the woman from head to foot with only a grill for her eyes), scarves or umbrellas may suffice to cover heads and shade a woman’s face when a stranger passes on a village path or men come to visit. In the household where I lived during my doctoral fieldwork women retreated to their beds and used their mosquito nets to separate themselves and hide their faces when men came to discuss politics late into the night with their male relatives. Veiling therefore exists on a continuum. As women in Talukpur frequently told me when questioned about actions that in my naive interpretations supposedly transgressed norms, purdah is: ‘worn on the inside’. It is a state of mind as much as a set of obligatory rules concerning clothing or the separation of male and female spheres. Purdah is embodied in a range of other ways, all of which are flexible and depend on a variety of factors, including those of age, class and place. Thus, while the new bride (noton bau) seems to embody Western stereotypes of Muslim women as immobile, passive and secluded, this is only one particular performance of sharam. Later, as they move over their life course, women’s relationship to space changes.45 As they become older many women in Bangladesh as well as Britain are increasingly able to move into spaces normally reserved for men, such as the mosque or the market, and to take on bodily gestures and clothing not thought suitable for younger women. While heads are covered at particular times (the calling of the azan, during religious worship or on visits into public spaces), 44. A classic ethnographic description of purdah in South Asia is provided by Jeffery 1979. Mernissi (1975) and El Saadawi (1980) give feminist interpretations of its role in the subordination of women. For further discussion of purdah in Bangladesh see Gardner 1995 and 1998; White 1992 and Kotalova 1993. 45. Ardener 1993: 11.

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Women’s Histories older women tend to be less concerned with bodily signs of modesty such as downturned eyes, or hushed voices. As the female head of a wealthy household of adult sons in Sylhet told me as she sucked on her hookah: ‘I’m just like a man now.’ It is therefore crucial that purdah is not essentialized by those attempting to describe it as a series of fixed, immutable rules. Neither should we understand social and physical space as rigidly divided into separate male and female spheres, even if the formal ‘rules’ (neom) that many Muslim Sylhetis will happily cite when asked by visitors seem to stress such separation. Indeed, as a growing body of revisionist feminist analysis argues, theories of female subordination that rely upon models of public and private domains are not only empirically problematic, but are also inherently ethnocentric, for they reflect European epistemologies concerned with binary categories, dichotomies and bounded spheres.46 Gender roles are thus not fixed but fluid and flexible, and change over time and space. Whilst earlier studies of ‘women in Bangladesh’ relied upon relatively inflexible descriptions of purdah and the oppression that it was assumed this involved,47 more recent work indicates the ways in which norms of seclusion and modesty are negotiated by different women, and moves away from a focus purely on women as ‘victims’ of culture. With growing numbers of single women moving to Dhaka to work in the garment industry, for example, purdah is expressed through the use of burquas or umbrellas but does not prevent women from walking unaccompanied to and from the factories or travelling on public transport.48 This last example is of particular pertinence. As it shows, women’s lives in Bangladesh are rapidly changing. Economic development and globalization are creating new markets and new jobs, and, while they have never stayed in one place, more women than ever are physically moving. Yet while ideologies of gender are changing apace – for after all, peoples’ beliefs, dreams and aspirations are never set in stone – it would be simplistic to assume that culture simply moulds itself to material or economic circumstances. Indeed, ideals of appropriate behaviour are not homogeneous, and neither do they necessarily match actual practices. While to a certain extent material circumstances may force women to be 46. See Fishburne Collier and Yanigasako 1987. 47. For further discussion of research on Bangladeshi women see White 1992: 15– 26. For a classic critique of the portrayal of ‘Third World women’ in Western feminism see Mohanty 1988. 48. See Kabeer 2000.

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Age, Narrative and Migration creative in their performance of purdah, countervailing discourses of religious orthodoxy in Bangladesh stress an increasingly rigid interpretation of female seclusion.49 As I have argued elsewhere, migration to Britain from Sylhet is associated with growing Islamic orthodoxy. Women in Londoni villages are therefore often implicated in contradictory processes: while overseas migration may involve modernity and ‘Westernisation’ (for example, exposure to videos and TV; travel to cities and to Britain; higher levels of female education) as well as, in the absence of their men in the UK or the Gulf, women’s being left to head their own households, countervailing discourses of religious orthodoxy focus on the seclusion and purity of women as key to ‘true’ Islam.50 With their stress on women’s confinement to particular spaces, these ideological shifts often coexist uneasily with the mobility that migration entails.

‘Our Purdah is on the Inside’: Movement and Space in Tower Hamlets For all the sassis who I met at the day centre, life in Britain has involved important changes in their relationship to space and the form that their purdah takes. While there are of course differences in the levels of purdah that they adopt, according to their particular circumstances and the attitudes of themselves and their male kin, in general they are far more likely to move unaccompanied into the public spaces of roads, shops and other locations in the community (schools, health centres and so on) than they would do in rural Sylhet. This is partly because of the domestic demands facing them, as well as the material arrangement of housing, which means that confinement to the household would be impossible. It is also partly a function of their age – as married women, many of whom already have grandchildren or who have passed the menopause, the need to stay hidden from unrelated men is much reduced. Also of central importance, however, are shifts in the expectations of appropriate female behaviour in Britain. While – as Kabeer’s study clearly shows – there is a strong sense of the watchful eyes of the ‘community’, with the ever-present fear of gossip and criticism if women are seen to be behaving immodestly,51 Britain is also acknowledged

49. See Feldman 1998 for discussion of the political context of Islamicization in Bangladesh. 50. See Gardner 1993b, 1995 and 1998. 51. Kabeer 2000.

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Women’s Histories to be ‘more free’ in its ways. As we shall see, this relative ‘freedom’ is, for many of the women I met, mixed with countervailing pressures that circumscribe their movements and contribute to a far from comfortable relationship with their environment. Because in the majority of households men are out at work during the day, many Bengali women in Tower Hamlets move far more freely into ‘public’ spaces for shopping, to pick up children from school, or for other everyday chores than they would in rural Sylhet. While age changes relative levels and forms of purdah for all Muslim women in Bangladesh, in Britain the ageing of their husbands means that the sassis must taken on a far more active and mobile role. Here, bodily change and place work together to change women’s relationship to space. Most of the sassis whose husbands were badly incapacitated dealt directly with housing and DSS offices, visiting them in person when necessary, as well as dealing with household finances and doing the shopping. Indeed, as Rokeya Khatun (Chapter 2) describes, on visits back to Bangladesh, her sudden lack of freedom to do the shopping can come as a shock: In Bangladesh I couldn’t do my own shopping. Going to the bazaar is sharam [immodest/shameful]. Coming from London, the Londoni beti [migrant woman] goes shopping, but women aren’t supposed to go. Q: You shop here in London? I’m used to it now. It’s twenty-three years that I’ve been here. I don’t feel at peace if I don’t do it myself. In Bangladesh I have to give someone the money and say, ‘go and get this fish,’ and then they come back with another sort, so I don’t feel satisfied, and then my husband can’t eat it. And going back to Bangladesh from here, it feels difficult to adjust to not being able to do my own shopping. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. People would say I was bad. Even my husband wouldn’t let me go. 24 August 1996.

Lokki Bibi, a widow who has been living in Britain since 1984,52 makes the following comment: You’ve seen how in Bangladesh women only go to the market as a last resort. They cover their heads and have shame in their eyes. Those that come here – it’s a free country – whichever way they want to live, they can . . . back in Bangladesh even if a woman was hungry, she still wouldn’t go out. 20 July 1996. 52. See Appendix, household 2.

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Age, Narrative and Migration While these changing relationships to space and movement are partly tied to practical considerations, many women spoke more generally about their need to ‘adapt’ to life in Britain, arguing that purdah was not so much about adherence to a strict set of rules governing where they went or how they dressed, but about a state of mind. Joyful Bibi,53 who has also been in Britain since 1994, and is now separated from her husband, puts it as follows: Is it a problem for people who’ve come here to take up white people’s ways? No it isn’t. They’ve come to their country, so they have to adapt to their ways. If I don’t adapt, how am I going to get by here? I’ve got to live with you. It’s our culture that in Bangladesh women don’t go to the market, but here we do. I’ve got to go, but within purdah. Here, it’s easier to stay within purdah. Nobody can stop me being in purdah in this country . . . 10 October 1996.

As this last comment implies, purdah is a matter of internal spirituality rather than a set of fixed practices. Yet, while they are in many ways more mobile than they might be in rural Sylhet, with a higher level of involvement in activities such as shopping and movement alone into public areas, the sassis’ relationship with space in Tower Hamlets is in other ways highly constrained. Few have travelled much outside the borough, and most remain within particular neighbourhoods within it. Similarly, the informal visiting of friends and relatives that takes place within Sylheti villages is often far more limited, and most women rely upon Bengali-run mini-cabs rather than public transport to get around. Rather than cultural factors such as purdah, however, this is more centrally to do with the fear of racism, the material conditions of housing in the borough, and the women’s roles as carers.

Racialized Space: Inside and Outside ‘The Community’ Fear of racism is a central factor affecting the relationship of the sassis to British space. Indeed, as we saw in the last chapter, this has had an important effect on the development of the Bengali community in Tower Hamlets, where the clustering of families in particular neighbourhoods is perceived as the safest option in a part of London where racist attacks 53. See Appendix, household 19.

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Women’s Histories are commonplace. Thus, while the sassis and their families tend to feel relatively safe in areas perceived as ‘Bengali’ (such as Spitalfields, Brick Lane and surrounding streets, parts of Aldgate and Bethnal Green, and specific housing estates within those areas), other ‘white’ areas – such as the Isle of Dogs – are perceived as dangerous. As we shall see in the next chapter, this has an important effect upon decisions concerning housing. Fear of racist attack is accompanied by another concern that many women spoke of in discussing their reticence to go outside particular parts of the borough: lack of English. With the exception of Rokeya Khatun, none of my female informants could speak more than a few phrases of English. This is directly influenced by their role as carers, as well as their age. Although a few women had attended classes, most explained to me that by the time they came to the UK they were already ‘too old’ for such activities54 Combined with this, they said, they did not have time, for they had to care for their families, and could not get to classes situated some distance from their homes. Lack of English prevents many women from using public transport and/or moving into non-Bengali areas of London. As Chapna Bibi explained, while she felt able to walk down the Bethnal Green Road, where there are many other Bengalis, she was afraid of venturing into the interconnecting Cambridge Heath Road, because it was full of white people who might approach her and whom she would not be able to understand. This meant that she felt she could not go to the Housing or DSS offices unaccompanied. British space for the sassis is therefore, I suggest, mentally divided into areas of familiar ‘Bengaliness’ and more threatening English ‘otherness’. The former spaces are physically marked out by mosques, Bengali shops and street signs as well as by the bodies of other Bengalis, who are wearing the same clothes, speaking the same language and using the gestures with which they are familiar. The place smells and sounds familiar; Bengali or Bollywood songs may be playing in shops or on car stereos; if they live close enough to the East London mosque they may hear the azan; the pavements may even be splattered with the red juice of paan, the chewing of which is ubiquitous amongst women of the first generation.55 In contrast, non-Bengali areas are not places first-generation women tend to go to unaccompanied, and remain largely alien and unknown. If 54. It is worth noting in this context that a sizeable proportion of older Sylheti women are not literate in Sylheti/Bengali. 55. I am not suggesting that this is remotely the same as the desh (homeland), only that British Bengali space is marked in specific ways.

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Age, Narrative and Migration they have to travel over unfamiliar English space, most prefer to go by mini-cabs, or, if their family has one, private car. This makes them particularly dependent upon their families to take them around, or on money to pay for taxi rides, a factor that directly limits the interactions that many have with kin who, although living in East London, are not within walking distance. I shall return to this, and the implications it has for older women, in the next chapter. There are of course no hard boundaries between Sylheti/Muslim and English spaces. Both may co-exist within the same area – an English shop or housing estate may exist next to a Bengali one, or alternately ‘Bengaliness’ may be grafted on to what are essentially non-Bengali locations (by means such as the use of Bengali signs in the Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel). There are, however, places and areas that are definitely not Bengali and that first-generation women never, or only exceptionally, go to. In these spaces they are continually marked as ‘other’ and ‘different’. London’s West End is one example, as is the British countryside. To conclude this chapter I shall therefore describe two day trips I took with the sassis, both to places that are stereotypically linked to ‘Englishness’, both of which are now populated not with ‘authentic’ natives, but with tourists and/or ethnic minorities. In the first trip, the women travelled from the familiar space of the East End to Harrods, where they became tourists of a Britain that largely excludes them. Within the halls of the department store, and the McDonald’s restaurant where they ate their lunch, they were reminded of their status as poor and culturally excluded from the rest of Britain. In the second trip, to a fruit farm in Kent, the women re-enacted their memories of life in Bangladesh by physically going into the fields and picking fruit. Once again, their status as different and as inferior was marked out, this time by the anger and physical aggression of the English woman who managed the farm.

Trip to Harrods with the Carers We go by mini-bus. Most of the regulars are there: Mrs Khatun, Chapna Bibi, Soyful Bibi, Amina Begum and many more. Before we leave Abdul [a care worker] comes out of the centre and teases the sassis. ‘Don’t come back with a boyfriend!’ I say we’re going to Harrods to buy ourselves new husbands. We set off, westwards through the City of London. I ask Mrs Khatun if she has ever visited central London. ‘No, my dear,’ she says. ‘What time is there for that when I have to work so hard all the time?’

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Women’s Histories None of the women have been to the West End before. Aleya Begum comments on how old and grand the buildings look. Farzana (a professional carer, attached to the day centre) gives them a lecture on the sights, explaining how Shaftesbury Avenue is famous for theatres, where people dance and sing, which (she says) they wouldn’t like. In Harrods we look at the jewellery, food, glass and crockery sections. There is something vaguely surreal about wandering with the sassis through the halls of an institution that is supposedly the epitome of upper-class Englishness, a site where tourists can consume an authentic ‘English’ experience, but which in reality is owned by an Egyptian and displays goods that seem geared more to wealthy Arabs than English aristocrats. We pass towers of glittering jewels, glass sculptures costing thousands of pounds, gold plates and vast, sparkling chandeliers. We are watched warily by the store guards, who must guess that we have come to gawp and not to spend money. The younger women want to buy something, but it’s all too expensive. We eventually leave the shop and go to McDonald’s, which is packed. We sit down, and are stared at with extreme hostility by a couple of white punky types on the table opposite. Many of the women have brought their own food. Farzana (who studiously ignores the vile looks the men on the opposite table are giving her) takes orders. We get vegeburgers for all. The women sit and eat them and drink their diet-cokes, apart from Soyful Bibi, who packs all the unfinished boxes of chips away into a bag to give to her son. ‘I’d prefer to eat rice,’ she says. Research notes, 15 November 1996.

Trip to Fruit Farm with the Carers It’s a drizzly day at the tail-end of summer. The fruit farm is located off the M25 and the roar of traffic is inescapable. It is also full of other Asian women, either in family groups or on other community outings. The only ‘English’ people present are farm workers, either manning the shop where the fruit gets weighed or working in the fields. Most of the good fruit has already gone, and we spend much of our time trailing through the fields trying to find things to pick. The sassis break off into small groups, and wander along different paths and through different fields filling their bags. Despite the weather, most seem in their element: as household gardeners in Bangladesh, fruit and vegetables are something they really know about. As they get on their knees and pick beans, they seem to be re-living their time in the villages. After a picnic in the rain, for which everyone has brought large amounts of food: pilau rice, bhajis, kedgeree and so on, we decide to call it a day. As we head back to the bus, we pass a field where courgettes are growing. Recognizing the leaves, many of the women rush into it and start picking. I notice a battered white Mercedes turn in our direction and start heading our way. It is

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Age, Narrative and Migration driven by a hatchet-faced English woman who when she reaches the field leaps from the car and starts screaming at the sassis. When they do not respond she runs into the field and starts to pull them out physically, screaming that they must be stupid, for signs placed in the field forbid the picking of the young courgette leaves. I am overcome with mortification, both at the horrible behaviour of the farm manager, who is treating the elderly Bengali ladies as if they were animals to be herded out of her fields, and for the sassis who are being so humiliated. After more shouting hatchet-face asks Farzana for her card, threatening to write to the day centre to complain [she never does], for never has a trip been so badly organized and Farzana should have booked it in advance. As we leave, the sassis’ pickings are weighed. For some, the bill comes to over £10, more than they can possibly afford. Reasearch Notes, August 20 1996.

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–6– Ageing Bodies: Dependency, Ambivalence and Protest CARER ON THE RUN FROM AN UNCARING HOME OFFICE She’s twenty two, proud and pretty. With her looks and brains she could go far, which is exactly what the Home Office has in mind – about 3926 miles to be precise. Atia Idrees is to be deported to Pakistan as soon as police find her. She is a fugitive on the run, living in a ‘safe’ house somewhere north of Watford. ‘On the run’ is a ludicrous statement, because she is with her grandmother, aged seventy five, who is half blind and crippled with arthritis. Ms Idrees is in Britain only because of her gran and will return home as soon as she dies. Every day she tends for the old woman, feeding and washing her, reading to her from the Koran, helping her to dress, taking her to the toilet. It is a harsh existence for a young woman for which, until now, she has received £35 a week from Oldham Council. It is called a ‘care allowance’ and is paid to encourage ‘care in the community’, the cornerstone of government policy for the aged. The Home Office, however, says her grandmother should be put in a home – at an approximate cost to the taxpayer of £350 a week . . . The Observer, 9 July 1995.

Accompanied by a photograph of Atia Idrees, her face covered by a white chador so that only her resolute eyes are revealed, her caring hands gently clasped around her grandmother’s sleeping head, the above news item both feeds into and refutes many popular stereotypes of ‘South Asian immigrants’ in the UK. Ms Idrees is the epitome of the caring and dutiful South Asian woman, sacrificing her life in Pakistan and staying illegally in Britain so that she can live as a virtual recluse looking after her elderly and incapacitated grandmother. ‘I was in the house most of the time, had no friends, no social life. I make the meals, do the shopping and cleaning, make sure she takes all her medicines. I am all she has,’ she says later in the article. Rather than surrender their elderly female relative to the inappropriate and shameful fate of the non-Muslim old people’s home the state has to offer, Ms Idrees’s family have gone to extreme lengths to look

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Age, Narrative and Migration after her in her own home. They are a prime example of the caring South Asian family, who ‘look after their own’, pitted against the ridiculous legislation of the British state. Indeed, their cause is taken up by a liberal broadsheet in a way that would be unthinkable in the tabloids, where ‘Asians’ are more likely to be represented as riven by intergenerational conflict, or scroungers, a burden to the British state. While it involves a Pakistani family in Oldham rather than Bengalis in East London, the case of Atia Idrees aptly symbolizes many of the issues that lie at the heart of this chapter. Her grandmother embodies the dilemmas of many transnational families: the need to provide care to members separated by thousands of miles, and the problem of age and sickness in a context where strategies and resources are powerfully affected if not always dominated by the British state, yet the ideals of duty and familial care are still held dear. It is to these issues that I now turn. At the most basic level, the question I hope to answer at least in part is very simple. How are ageing and the physical changes it brings talked about and embodied among the elders we worked with? Underlying this question are more complex issues: How does ‘the problem of ageing’ stand for and symbolize other, more generalized issues, such as struggles between families and the state, or conflict between household members? What do narratives of the ageing body and sickness tell us about gender and class, or transnational migration? And to what extent do ageing, sick or incapacitated bodies become sites over which people contest dominant ideologies, or struggle over power and resources? As Lawrence Cohen suggests with regards to his Indian ethnography: ‘. . . Old people are good to think with: their abjection becomes a sign that fixes the blame for the decay in the order of things, assigns it to bad children, an exploitative society, the seductions of modernity, the cruelties of Western culture.’1 As in India, discourses of the ‘breakdown’ of the traditional joint family – what Cohen ironically dubs ‘The Fall’2 – are key to the way that ageing and physical dependency were spoken about by my informants. The roles of desh and bidesh are central to this. While ‘the problem of ageing’ symbolizes the wider concerns of both elders and those who offer care for them (non-Bengali professionals as well as family and friends) geography, or the symbolically polar opposites of Sylhet and Britain, are used by many of the elders to express their contradictory needs and desires. Within this the desh is generally presented as the place where 1. L. Cohen 1998: 303. 2. ibid.: 105.

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Ageing Bodies traditions are upheld and the social needs of old people are met, while it is said that in the UK bodily and material needs are taken care of but social breakdown has occurred; those living here thus experience isolation and anomie. I suggest that this sense of being split between places, pulled by the contradictory needs of bodily and emotional well-being underlies many of the elders’ experience of transnational migration. Dependence and independence are closely interwoven themes. Both have a variety of meanings and are contextually specific. The elders we spoke to feared physical dependency, yet at the same time, and in certain contexts, presented the ideal of the elder whose needs are totally taken care of by his or her family as symbolic of the upholding of tradition and the maintenance of social order. While none desire physical reliance upon their children or the state, the independence urged upon them by their professional carers and celebrated by mainstream British culture is often resisted. With this context the embodiment and narration of dependency may at times be interpreted as a form of protest, closely linked to the struggle over scarce resources which for all, as low-income inhabitants of one of the poorest boroughs in Britain, is an unremitting part of their lives. Implicit in this is of course a central question that I have not yet directly addressed: the social construction of ageing. What did ‘being old’ mean to our informants? How is the journey into the later stages of life marked and understood; what are the moralities and political economies that underscore being a murubbi? It is to these questions that I shall first turn.

Being a Murubbi As anthropologists have long pointed out, ageing and the self’s journey into later life are subject to wide cross-cultural variation.3 The construction of time and the life cycle, meanings given to the ageing body and the levels of power and authority experienced by old people vary widely, and, unsurprisingly, are usually closely related to political, economic and historical particularities. Indeed, while the functionalist attempts to produce lineal models of change from pre-industrial to industrial societies, which as mentioned in Chapter 1 may be overly

3. For examples of cross-cultural studies of ageing, see, amongst others: Katz 1978; Keith 1979; Fry 1981; Keith 1982; Nydegger 1983; Kertzer and Keith 1984; Sokolovsky 1987; Myerhoff 1992; Pickard 1995; Johnson and Slater 1993.

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Age, Narrative and Migration schematic and generalized, there can be little doubt that forms of work and property, as well as the role and value of different types of knowledge, are key to the status of the old. In what follows I shall sketch an ‘ideal type’ of good ageing, as represented to me by Bengali informants, both in Britain and Sylhet. As we shall see, while it is partly based on the realities of life in Sylhet, the myth of the village murubbi is also the product of nostalgia for a fantasized desh that has not changed and where social order and tradition seamlessly continue. This ideal feeds directly into popular stereotypes of South Asian families in the UK, who are said to ‘look after their own’.4 It is also a construction that in other contexts most of the elders acknowledge to be far from realistic.

Ageing in Sylhet Within the ‘ideal type’ of ageing in Bangladesh, the later stages of life usually involve an increased amount of status and power for individuals. As the heads of their households, male elders are in positions of authority over their children and control household resources. Until their father and mother die, the extended household is normally kept together and adult sons do not inherit land. To this extent the relationship between age and power has a material base, albeit one that is dependent upon having adult sons and owning property. If their husbands die before them, women also become household heads with considerable power and status, although authority within female-headed households may be more diffuse, with some decisions being taken by adult sons and others by their mother. Male power is formally enshrined in village politics too. In the village where I worked in the late 1980s, decision-making both at the level of lineage and sometimes of inter-lineage affairs within the community was carried out by male elders, who met formally to adjudicate disputes, agree on arranged marriages and generally oversee community or lineage-wide affairs. For a woman too, ageing is frequently associated with increased power and status, just so long as she has sons and comes from a household with some economic means. Even if her husband is alive and remains the household head, as the household development cycle progresses, a woman moves from being a junior wife under the thumb of her parentsin-law and for whom strict rules of seclusion may apply, to being a 4. Research in Britain that critiques this stereotype includes: Barker 1984; Fennell, Phillipson and Evers 1988; Donaldson and Johnson 1993; Walker and Ahmed 1994.

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Ageing Bodies mother-in-law herself, with sons and daughters-in-law of her own and for whom rules of purdah are of decreasing importance.5 This is a clear example of what Denise Kandiyoti has dubbed the ‘patriarchal bargain’.6 This bargain involves the internalization of patriarchy by women who stand to benefit from it later in their life cycle, and, Kandiyoti argues, can be found throughout North Africa and Western and South Asia. What Kandiyoti terms ‘classic patriarchy’ is reproduced through extended households, where in exchange for their subservience as younger women, older women gain power over the labour of their daughters-in-law. The loyalty of their sons is thus crucial to them. I shall return to what happens when that loyalty is no longer underpinned by material conditions later in the chapter. In conjunction with these material changes, age in Bangladesh is associated with increased knowledge and ‘understanding’ (Buje). Murubbi command respect for their dignity and their wiseness. To this extent, the status of murubbi is not necessarily connected with the passing of years. Becoming an elder is a social rather than a temporal process, and in describing when one becomes a murubbi all the elders included in this research used social criteria rather than referring to the passage of years. Indeed most elders do not know exactly how old they are; birthdays are not celebrated in rural Sylhet, and it is only because of immigration overseas and the need for documentation that children’s births are officially registered today. Older people involved in migration therefore have ‘official’ ages, for their passports, but these often have little to do with when they were actually born. Instead of the lineal time of Britain, age is measured in terms of social or physical events. Women, for example, most commonly talked about becoming a murubbi on the birth of grandchildren, the marriage of children, or the onset of the menopause.7 Other bodily events may also catapult an individual into the role of murubbi. A stroke, or the onset of other debilitating conditions, for example, may involve taking on the dress and other physical attributes of an elder, even for men in their twenties and thirties. In contrast with these more physically grounded definitions of ‘becoming old’ (burra) provided by the women, men talked about becoming murrubi when one has acquired a certain gravitas:

5. For further discussion, see Vatuk 1995. 6. Kandiyoti 1997: 90. 7. As Sarah Lamb has shown in West Bengal, women’s social roles are closely linked to their changing bodily states: Lamb 2000. See also Vatuk 1995.

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Age, Narrative and Migration Q: How would you explain what a murubbi is? What I mean is someone who is not only a certain age but must exhibit the religiosity needed to secure that position. They must be seen to be upholding that position by praying and things. Abdul Khalique, 14 September 1996. Q: What age does one become a murubbi . . . is it always over fifty? Baba, not always. Some people do the work of murubbis at the age of thirty. People may respect him and ask him to be present [at important events] on occasions. Mohammed Rahman, 20 October 1996.

Within this discourse becoming a murubbi is therefore ideologically as well as materially linked with increased status and respectability, both of which are inseparable from religious activity. Old people usually spend an increased amount of their time praying and reading the Quran, and many Londonis who can afford it have performed Haj.8 Older men physically demonstrate their religiosity with white prayer caps and beards; in London the Western styles of clothing favoured by younger men of the first generation are often swapped for lunghis, kurta or other traditional styles of dress, signifying their high religious as well as social standing. During their visits to the day centre Bengali workers often read to the elders from Islamic texts, and the men in particular spend much time discussing Islam and debating the finer points of the Quran. After lunch, when the women go upstairs to pray and have tea, the men perform namaj, symbolically going through the ritual movements of prayer from their wheelchairs. In their interviews and conversations many frequently returned to the topic of Islam, sometimes starting the interview with a prayer, and trying either to convert me, or to persuade Mutmahim to be a ‘better Muslim’. As I suggested in Chapter 4 while it is centrally linked to status and identity, it would be reductive to explain this increased religiosity solely in terms of conscious efforts to increase power and authority. As they approach death, it is hardly surprising that the thoughts of many of the elders turn to God and the afterlife.

8. Since pilgrimage to Mecca cleanses one of all previous sins, leading to a spiritual rebirth, old age – when many of life’s secular tasks are largely over – is thought to be a more suitable time for this. It is also possible for those who are unable to make the trip to pay for others to do it, reaping the same spiritual reward without having physically to travel to Mecca.

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Ageing Bodies

Dependency, the Decline of the Joint Family, and the Desh Alongside the image of the elder as powerful and authoritative is that of the extended family as the domain of unquestioning support and care for their older members. Here, it is useful to draw upon Sylvia Vatuk’s distinction between ‘young old’ Indian women and the ‘old old’, whose authority and autonomy is countered by their increasing physical dependence upon their family.9 As our informants told us, duty to and care of the old are important tenets of Islamic ideology, and generally envisaged as located within the household. As a Bengali professional at the day centre explained: We have a tradition that we should and have to look after our elderly people. This has descended down from our Prophet and the Quran. As people know, our religion and the source of our religion the life of our Prophet Mohammed . . . are saying that you have to look after your family. And in many places it says in the Quran that you should look after the elderly . . . If you don’t play a vital role in this you will be punished on the day of Judgement . . . not only this, you will have a disorganized family and society. 20 December 1996.

In a similar vein, another Bengali professional carer linked these ideologies of care less with Islam, and more with ‘Bangladeshi tradition’: Those of us who have grown up in Bangladesh . . . the way in which our parents looked after us when we were young, in our culture we are told that we must return these affections shown to us by our parents and our elders when they are old. It’s our culture, we have to do it. In Tower Hamlets, the Bangladeshis . . . that came here twenty to thirty years ago, they too are following the same old ways and their children, even their grandchildren are looking after them. [This is changing, to a limited extent, amongst those born here] . . . the reason for these changes again comes down to Western culture. Those born and raised here are more similar to their English peers, and so when their parents get old they don’t have time to do it [provide care] themselves . . . 25 September 1996.

Within the context of such discourses of ‘traditional culture’, dependency is not something to be feared, bringing with it the erasing of identity and the self, but part of the proper order of things. As Cohen perceptively 9. Vatuk 1995.

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Age, Narrative and Migration points out, in Benares the frail and physically elderly cared for in the family home were seen locally as: ‘. . . less bed-ridden than bed-gifted, the immobilised object of solicitude’.10 Indeed, while Cohen was impressed by the independence of residents in Nava Nir, an ashram for old people, locals saw it as a pathetic place, interpreting the elders’ lack of dependence on others as a sign that they had no one to pay them proper seva (duty, care).11 Yet, as I shall argue further on, while idealizing the honour and care which children should give to their parents, the elders at the centre demonstrated a good deal of ambivalence towards dependency. This is similar to the Indian elders amongst whom Sylvia Vatuk worked, who displayed what she terms ‘dependency anxiety’ . As she shows, this anxiety was rooted in different concerns than those of their American counterparts. While the latter value independence, the former are anxious that, if they are no longer viewed as contributing to the household, their relatives will not provide the sufficient care that is their due.12 Amongst Bengali elders in Tower Hamlets, I think it is useful to distinguish between ageing as physically experienced, whereby the increasing immobility and frailty that lead to dependency on carers for one’s bodily needs are seen in wholly negative terms, and ageing as ‘good to think with’, whereby the proper care of elders is symbolic of a socially and religiously upstanding society. In the latter, the family, and in particular, relations between generations, are key to Bengali narratives of ageing. As in India, the construction of good ageing among first-generation Sylhetis is strongly reliant upon an idealized joint family and of course gender relations, which means that women unquestioningly provide care to particular household members (husbands, parents-in-law, and sometimes parents). Cohen argues that the decline of this family is a central narrative in Indian gerontology and amongst the urban middle classes, for whom the elderly are now perceived as a ‘problem’. Within the genre, modernization is seen as causing the ‘decline’ of the joint family and hence the new problem of the old. The narrative posits a ‘before’ and ‘after’, where the former is characterized by Nydegger’s ‘gerontological myths’: the Golden Age, the Golden Isles, the Rosy Family.13 Before, the myth goes, Indian families respected and looked after their old. With the onset of modernization, however, families broke up and the old were no 10. 11. 12. 13.

L. Cohen 1998: 182. ibid.: 117. Vatuk 1990. Nydegger 1983; cited in L. Cohen 1998: 100.

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Ageing Bodies longer cared for. The villain of the piece is the West, which is well known for its cruelty to old people. The myth thus provides a post-colonial critique of imperialism, as well as tacitly accepting the epistemological assumptions of modernization theory. As was mentioned in Chapter 1, notions of modernization have strongly influenced academic understandings of ageing as well as popular ideas in India and Britain. Drawing on the work of Talcott Parsons,14 Cowgill links changes in the status and care of the old with processes of modernization. Within modernizing societies, he argues, traditional knowledge becomes obsolete, joint families turn into nuclear units and parental support – something that is increasingly necessary as a result of reductions in mortality – is viewed as a burden.15 As we shall see, while these ideas touch upon very real processes and material conditions in Tower Hamlets, the situation is far more complex than any evolutionary schema can allow. And while Cohen’s middle-class Indian informants presented the ‘problems’ of the aged as the result of modernity and the ensuing Westernization that (it is assumed) this brings, amongst many of the elders at the day centre migration is seen as the motor of change, and the blame put at the feet of British society at one level, and themselves for coming to Britain at another. The ‘Myth of the Fall’ is thus transposed on to geography: the Golden Isles exist in the form of rural Sylhet, and the Golden Age is distant in space as well as time. In the following quotations, two elderly men describe these changes in terms of their relationships with the younger generation: Before, when we saw a murubbi, we’d never have smoked in front of them. It was considered really insulting to their status. Nowadays though [these young people] will light up in front of you and push you aside to let them pass. Now it’s all about showing off. I look at the younger generation and I think, ‘you **** sons of ****, we’re here too.’ Now we have to salaam them. Day, night . . . In my forty years here, everything has changed. Abdul Bari, 15 September 1996. Q: Have you benefited from coming here? No, I have lost everything. I have lost my sons, they refuse to acknowledge me as their father, they don’t care. In Bangladesh they would have called me father, they would have washed my feet and looked after me by working for money . . .

14. Parsons 1949. 15. Cowgill and Holmes 1972.

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Age, Narrative and Migration [Our children] don’t even recognize us today. Bringing them here was our ruination. They are ruined. They would recognize me had I not brought them to this country. If they were in Bangladesh they would recognize me. Abdullah Ali, 23 December 1996.

Although these views were not held unanimously by all the elders – many have whom have only good things to say about their children – similar statements were repeated many times over in our interviews. Yet, as we shall see in Chapter 9, this idealization of Bangladesh as a place where the proper order would still be upheld co-exists alongside far more critical and realistic perspectives, sometimes held by the same individuals. Indeed, I suggest that the elders’ conceptual geography of ageing has two versions linked to the different ways in which they experience dependency. In the first version, the desh is presented as the Golden Isle, where elders are well cared for and dependency upon one’s children, who provide unquestioning care and respect, is part of the correct moral order. Britain, however, is the cause of familial conflict, a place where social isolation and rupture have taken place. In the second version, geography is expressed in terms of bodily rather than emotional or social needs. Here, the desh is a place of physical privation, insecurity and want, while Britain provides bodily comforts and care. The following comments echo the views voiced by women carers cited in Chapter 5: This country [the UK] for comfort, and security in travelling around is better. Fazlu Miah, 3 November 1996. For us now, for things we need, this country is better. I can get help here. If I can’t walk I’m given a wheelchair. Not so in Bangladesh. Abdul Khalique, 14 September 1996. At this moment, Baba forgive me for saying this, but this country is better for me. Why? Because at my age in the desh I can’t work. I’m blind, so no one would have me. I have eight dependants, and it’s not like I could work the land myself. I have about four acres in Bangladesh, and there are people who are sharecropping it. But that doesn’t always work. What if all the crops get washed away? Mohammed Rahman, 20 October 1996. Staying here, the medical treatment is free. I can go to offices for help. They take me to the doctors, sometimes in a mini-cab. In Bangladesh the biggest problem is the medicine. Mrs Khatun, 24 August 1996.

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Ageing Bodies Clearly, these constructions of ageing and their relationship to the desh and to Britain must be discussed with reference to people’s lives in the UK. But before turning to the political economy of ageing in Tower Hamlets, a number of qualifications must be made.

‘Tradition’, the Desh and the Joint Household Revisited The first qualification is that the maintenance of the joint household whose members care dutifully for the elderly is an ideal in Bangladesh, as well as among Bengalis in Britain. Indeed, research in Bangladesh clearly indicates that joint households are largely dependent upon a degree of wealth that is unobtainable for millions of landless families.16 Here, ‘nuclear’ type households are as much about poverty as about processes of modernity amongst the middle classes. Internal migration too, plays a factor, increasingly raising the issue of care for the elderly parents of those moving to cities or other districts in search of work.17 While class is therefore central to an individual’s fate in later age, so too is gender. As was mentioned above, while women from landed households with adult sons may indeed enjoy the benefits of increased authority and autonomy as their reproductive years draw to a close and their daughters-in-law arrive, this is not at all the case for all women. Indeed, research indicates that widows are one of the most vulnerable groups in North India, especially those without sons.18 Cohen, too, argues that, while elderly mothers are ideally provided with care from their children, elderly aunts are perceived differently.19 In other words, it is not family members per se who can make claims on the younger generation, but only those in certain structural positions. We must also distinguish between households and families, living arrangements and other activities. In the generalized statements described above, the family and the household are fused, whereas for anthropologists the terms are analytically separate categories, ‘family’ referring in most definitions to the general category of kin, whether consanguine or affines, and ‘household’ to those who share a common hearth. This latter definition is in turn contested by those who point out that, within contexts of migration, common residence does not necessarily define household membership; indeed, households may employ a range of strategies to 16. 17. 18. 19.

See van Schendel 1981; Jansen 1987; Gardner 1995; Z. Ahmed 1999. Kuhn 2000 . Chen and Dreze 1995. L. Cohen 1998: 119.

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Age, Narrative and Migration keep themselves symbolically, economically or politically together even whilst separated by physical distance.20 Other work, such as Carol Stack’s ethnography of low-income black households in Washington DC, corroborates this: households are often highly flexible, resourceful and shifting institutions, and we cannot make assumptions based solely on where people sleep or eat their meals.21 Clearly then, we cannot assume that because household or family members are physically apart – as they often are in Tower Hamlets – they are not employing a range of strategies in order to ‘be together’ in other ways. In Sylhet, for example, brothers who share a household (ghar) in the village, but are in fact separated through one of them living permanently in the UK, may still hold land together and divide the income. Alternatively, brothers who are said to live in separate ghar may at the same time be involved in a range of activities that enable transnational migration, such as the tending of the migrant brother’s land by the villagebased brother, or support given to his village-based wife. This in turn puts into question simplistic assumptions concerning the ‘decline of the joint household’, whether in South Asia or Britain. As Cohen argues, while the myth of the ‘Fall’ is largely unquestioned in popular and political discourses in India, anthropological research indicates that, although family and household organization may be changing, ‘the joint family’ is not necessarily in decline.22 This does not mean that there has been no change in household organization: only that we must be careful how such change is understood. In Tower Hamlets, as I describe below, there have been very real changes to household organization amongst Bengalis, and these have important material and social implications for the older generation.

Life in Tower Hamlets: The Political Economy of Ageing in East London It is important not to give the impression that the problems and concerns of my informants are the result solely of their transnational status or indeed, their ‘culture’, so often ascribed as the source of difference or difficulty amongst ethnic minorities. Many of the conditions that face elderly Bengalis living in Tower Hamlets are shared by older people of

20. With reference to Bangladesh ,see Z. Ahmed 1999 and Gardner 1995. 21. Stack 1974. 22. L. Cohen 1998: 102–3.

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Ageing Bodies all ethnic groups. Poverty, damp and overcrowded living conditions, high rates of unemployment, crime and under-funded public amenities are problems common to the majority of the borough’s inhabitants, whatever their country of origin. Yet, as Alison Norman has argued, ethnic minority elderly face a ‘triple jeopardy’ in their second homeland. Not only are they old, but they are also living in conditions of poverty and facing racism.23 Not surprisingly, most research that has been conducted amongst ethnic minority elders has focused upon such problems, paying particular attention to their access to services.24 While these factors, and by extension the role of the British state, are of central importance to how ageing is experienced amongst my informants, in the first part of this section I wish to focus on the household, housing and property. As I shall argue, while we must beware of reducing all experience to political economy, despite the elders’ apparent attachment to their roles as respected, authoritative and supported murubbi, in Britain the material conditions that underwrite such roles have been profoundly undermined. Within the elders’ narratives these changes are ascribed to two major factors: the role of the state in providing an income for sons, and council housing. To understand this, it is important to remember that all my informants were wholly dependent upon the state for their incomes – in the form of an old age pension, income support or a sickness or disability allowance. This is of course the product of the particular characteristics of the group with whom I worked, all of whom received various forms of support from the day centre, to which they had been referred through government or voluntary agencies.25 In addition, all lived in council accommodation. This can be compared with national data, and data obtained within Bethnal Green in a recent survey by the Institute of Community Studies.26 In the latter study, among the 99 Bangladeshi households included, 95.9 were living in council accommodation, and only 36.3 per cent cited a 23. Norman 1985. In other versions, this is recounted as a double jeopardy – of age, and of being a low-status immigrant (see Donaldson and Johnson 1993; Boneham 1989). Note the assumption that age is in itself a form of disadvantage. 24. See in particular Walker and Ahmed 1994; Bowes and Domokos 1993; Atkin et al. 1989; Fenton 1987. 25. Their dependency on state welfare is well above the national average; although pensioners in general in the UK are one of the most economically vulnerable groups. In 1996/7 70 per cent were dependent for 50 per cent or more of their income on state benefits, and 13 per cent received all their income from state benefits (http:// www.infoville.org.uk/health/organisations/health age.concern.htm). 26. The Institute of Community Studies very kindly allowed me access to data collected in Bethnal Green in 1996, part of a restudy of the classic research on which Family and Kinship in East London (Young and Wilmott 1986 [1957]) was based.

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Age, Narrative and Migration source of paid employment.27 Nationally, 35 per cent of Bangladeshis are council tenants and 37 per cent live in flats/bed-sits; 32 per cent have no access to a yard or patio and over half were classified as living in overcrowded conditions.28 Thus, while very far from unusual, the elders described in this book experience somewhat higher levels of social deprivation and state dependency than both national and local averages. These statistics need to be considered within the broader context of patterns of economic and racial inquality in Britain. Figures cited by Ian Law on housing tenure by ethnic group in the UK indicate that 37 per cent of ‘Bangladeshis’ live in local authority housing, compared to 21.4 per cent of whites and 10.4 per cent of Pakistanis. As he argues, while the housing sector is one of the most documented and well-established cases of racism in the UK, such figures cannot be explained wholly in such terms. Instead, the overall complexity of patterns of demand and supply needs to be considered: the preferences, aspirations and household strategies of different ethnic groups are linked to questions of wider structures of inequality, which encompass the labour market, education, health and so on.29 Within Tower Hamlets, high levels of unemployment and poverty in the borough as a whole, plus the depleted and poor quality of housing stock, have contributed to suitable council accommodation (especially that large enough to accommodate more than four or five people, and in the areas considered ‘safe’ and desirable by many Bengalis) being extremely scarce. As we shall see, attempts to be re-housed, often catalysed by the sickness/old age of household members and the stage the household is at in its development cycle, are a key concern for many of the elders. It is of course important not to generalize. Poverty levels and standards of housing varied within the group. Some elders lived with adult children who were bringing in a regular income, and these tended to be less materially deprived than others. Their flats were filled with furniture and electrical equipment, the walls freshly painted and decorated with Islamic pictures, prayer rugs from Mecca or photographs of Bangladesh, the kitchen cupboards and fridges stocked with food, just as one would

27. We need to treat this figure as a rough guide rather than a statement of fact. Answers were given in response to the question: ‘What sort of paid work do you do?’ While many people answered in terms of the whole household, we cannot assume that those answering necessarily spoke for other household members, nor that the replies always accurately represented reality. 28. Data cited in Phillipson et al. 1998. 29. Law 1996: 81–6.

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Ageing Bodies expect in any household in a wealthy country such as Britain.30 The better-off were accommodated in spacious and modern ground-floor flats, purpose-built for the physically frail and large enough to include their children. In comparison, some of the living conditions, especially in the old tenement blocks around Brick Lane and Shoreditch, were crowded and damp, their worn and vandalized stairways impossible for the physically frail to negotiate, making many virtual prisoners in their own homes.31 Others faced a daily struggle to make ends meet, eking a living from almost impossibly low incomes. This usually involved endless visits and phone calls to Social Security offices. For elderly people who don’t speak much English and to whom officials are not necessarily polite or helpful, the bureaucratic hurdles they must leap in order to obtain money to which they, like other British citizens, have an absolute right, often seem insurmountable. They are also directly linked to issues of institutional racism and social exclusion. Many of our informants – especially the women – were dependent on others to translate the letters they received from Housing and Social Security offices, facing long queues in community offices merely in order to have the various bureaucratic regulations and the ins and outs of their cases explained to them. Mrs Chapna Bibi,32 for example, was living with her son on a widow’s pension of £48 per week. Out of this she had to pay £10.50 a week on electricity, gas (her damp ground-floor flat was always freezing when I visited), and transport to and from the psychiatric hospital on the other side of East London where her daughter was being treated. Her son had had a job, but had recently been ill; Mrs Bibi was attempting to get an invalidity allowance for him of £37 per week. Meanwhile her rent was in arrears, and she had not been sent a new pension book, so she was unable to draw her pension. I spent many mornings trying to help her sort the situation out, examining the vast bureaucratic correspondence she had accumulated over the months and making endless phone calls from the pay phone she kept in her bedroom. Both the Housing Benefit office and the Housing Arrears Office told me she had to send in a letter from the DSS that had not yet arrived, and also to visit each office separately in

30. Of course this is a naïve expectation, for poverty levels in the UK have increased drastically in the last decade or so. Figures available from the Child Poverty Action Group indicate that, while one in ten people lived in poverty (defined as an average income after housing costs) in 1979, in 1998/9 this had risen to one in four (http://www.cpag.org.uk/). 31. See also Phillipson et al. 1998. 32. See Appendix, household 8.

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Age, Narrative and Migration order that they could each photocopy her documentation. The arrears had arisen, we discovered, because they had been charging her a ‘nondependants’ charge, for her son who had been earning over £6 a day. As he was no longer working they would change his status back to being a dependant, but not if he received invalidity allowance. The complexities of this seemed overwhelming even to me, a native English-speaker. For Mrs Bibi, negotiating the bureaucracy, plus her very real vulnerability to even the smallest unexpected drop in income, were a source of constant anxiety, making her highly dependent on others for help. What might be the implications of situations such as these on the experience of ageing? As I shall suggest further on, the ill-health and stress caused by bad housing, low incomes and the inadequate access to services suffered by a socially excluded group affect the embodiment of ageing in important ways. For now, however, I wish to focus on the social and emotional implications of poverty and state dependency and how they were represented to us by the elders. This varied slightly according to gender, but for both men and women housing and the role of the state were key to their representation of familial care and the experience of ageing in Britain.

Authority, the Family and the State A recurrent theme within the male elders’ narratives was the lack of authority they now had over their children. One of the main explanations they had for this involved the role of the state in providing the income that in Bangladesh a son would (ideally) be dependent on his father for. As Abdullah Ali put it: What my sons have to do, they will have to do alone; they don’t even recognize me as their father now. It’s the culture of this country, otherwise, had they been in Bangladesh . . . that son would have had to call out to his father. In this country he [the son] has his British government. There is no need for a father. Abdullah Ali, 23 December 1996.

Abdul Miah comments: This country has different laws . . . People seek their own path and don’t even bother to tell their father. We have had our way since our forefathers: each in turn has provided for the other. But in this country I’m not really providing for my sons, the government is. So they owe me nothing and I can no longer expect anything from them. 22 November 1996.

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Ageing Bodies Thus, while migration to Britain provided many men with the means to fulfil their paternal and masculine roles as workers and providers, in old age economic conditions in East London are seen by them as undermining their paternal authority. With no land or homestead to pass on, or hard-earned property in Bangladesh in which their British sons show little interest, the authority of fathers over their children is perceived to be severely diminished. This is also blamed, in more general terms, on British society. As Abdul Miah continues, on the theme of his relationship with his son: My son – I only have one son – doesn’t listen to a word I say. He goes down his path and I’m on another. He doesn’t accept my words, he doesn’t accept anyone’s words, and he’s only eighteen. He isn’t even that big physically . . . My own son doesn’t listen to me, he is seeking his own path. The other day I gave him some money, a little less than usual. He turned to me and said that now he will fill up his own forms and separate his money from mine. What else can I say? . . . I’ll tell you, it’s this country which has done it. Abdul Miah, 22 November 1996.

Here, Mohammed Rahman speaks in more general terms: There are many parents I know who are crying over [their children]. They wiped their bottoms when they were children and now the boys have grown up and are running away. At least in the village someone would say: ‘What are you doing, lad? That old man worked hard to bring you up, and this is what you do?’ But in this country, once they’ve gone, they’ve gone. Amongst my relatives there are seven and eight people in the same situation . . . I know some people who are really old but still have to work to feed themselves . . . That is what happens when you follow [the ways of] this country. 20 October 1996.

Housing and the Extended Family Housing arrangements were also key to the ways in which the elders spoke of their experiences. Interestingly, these were pin-pointed by women more than men as the cause of problems. Perhaps this is not so surprising in a context where (in extremely crude terms) men’s power rests with material resources and women’s with their role within the domestic domain. In terms of household organization, migration to Britain has led to radical changes. Not only are households and their members separated transnationally, but within Britain many families who – 161 –

Age, Narrative and Migration would be most likely to be physically living together in Sylhet are housed separately. As we have seen, in Tower Hamlets shortage of adequate council housing is crucial: there are simply not enough large flats available. Indeed, during the period of the research, local council policy explicitly prevented extended families from being re-housed together.33 As children grow up and get married, the shortage of space in council flats becomes particularly pressing, and only the most resolute and resourceful manage to stay together. Out of the twenty three households involved in our research, sixteen were nuclear (comprising only one generation with unmarried children) and nearly half had at least one member (such as an adult son) who would conventionally have been living with them in Bangladesh living either elsewhere in Britain or in Sylhet. Data from the Institute of Community Studies confirm the trend. Of the ninety-nine Bangladeshi households surveyed, only 19.1 per cent could be described as extended (with more than two generations present), while 61.6 per cent were nuclear (married couple living with their unmarried children).34 These figures result in part from the demographic profile of the Bangladeshi population in Britain, which is still very young. The National Survey of Ethnic Minorities carried out in 1994 found that only 4 per cent of Bangladeshi respondents were over sixty.35 However, it also points overwhelmingly to the prevalence of nuclear as opposed to extended households. While we cannot assume that their children always feel the same way, the break-up of their households into smaller, more nucleated units is something that many elders will go to considerable lengths to prevent. A theme that recurred in the old men’s interviews was the difficulty of balancing their need for suitable housing – on the ground floor, with disabled access, for example – with their need for their families to stay together. In many cases maintaining the extended family means facing impossible climbs up flights of stairs, and damp and cramped conditions, whereas the sheltered accommodation for the elderly offered by the council only ever houses one married couple. Re-housing may also entail being offered a flat outside the Bengali area surrounding Brick Lane and Spitalfields that all the elders favour over areas such as the Isle of Dogs, dreaded for their racism. The strategies employed range from adult children permanently ‘visiting’ their elderly parents in their purpose-built 33. Personal communication from Tower Hamlets Council, 1996. 34. Two per cent of the households were single-occupancy, and a further 8 per cent consisted of divorced or widowed women living alone with their children. 35. Cited in Phillipson et al. 1998.

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Ageing Bodies sheltered accommodation, to extended families living in appalling conditions. The worst case I came across involved a family of seven adults living in a tiny and extremely damp two-bedroom flat off Brick Lane. A great number of our informants had ‘cases’ with the Housing Office and were waiting to be rehoused. These changes have severe repercussions on the lives of the elders, and in particular on older women. As Mrs Khatun (see Chapter 3) put it: Even if I wanted to be happy here I couldn’t be. I have two daughters-in-law in two different houses . . . One lives in Whitechapel. If I take a mini-cab it costs about £1.50 each way. There are no buses there. The other lives near Cable Street, and that costs £5 to go there and back. It’s not possible to pay £5 daily to visit them.

Within Kandiyoti’s model of the ‘patriarchal bargain’, while this breakdown of the classic patriarchal extended family may mean that younger women escape from their mothers-in-law, it also means they can no longer look forward to an old age being cared for by junior women. As she comments: ‘For the generation of women caught in-between, this transformation may represent genuine tragedy, since they have paid the heavy price of an earlier patriarchal bargain but are not able to cash in on its promised benefits.’36 Men also have much to gain from extended households remaining together. As Mr Haque (see Chapter 3) put it: If you have one stick, then . . . but if you have ten sticks, then what will happen to the one? So it looks like ten staying together is the better. See, if ten of us wanted to stay together then even if someone wanted to pick a fight with us they would have to think carefully. But if you’re on your own, then you can be pushed about just like that. Five or six of you means support . . .

Abdullah Ali comments: Everyone wants to stay with their entire family, but this is not our country and they haven’t made their houses like this. My boys grew up and moved away. They had to. They didn’t leave the family, but it has grown into that. Q: Is it possible for us to stay together here? No, it’s not. It’s their law. They split us up. If we try to stay together, the government splits us up. 23 December 1996. 36. Kandiyoti 1997: 91.

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Age, Narrative and Migration In this part of his narrative, Abdul Miah blames daughter-in-laws, so often scapegoated as the cause of family conflict in South Asia, for the break-up of extended households: Today no one is willing to stay. New wives will say they want out. They want their own home, away from us. I’ve seen it, in this family I know. Both the father and sons are very religious, educated men. The son was married off by his father and now the wife wants him to leave his family and go and live with her. The parents are on tenterhooks about it. The son is looking for any excuse to leave and they are managing, softly softly, to keep him calm. 22 November 1996.

* * * I am therefore making a number of interrelated points. The first is that the elders’ narratives of ageing in Britain are organized around two main sites of conflict: the family and to a lesser extent, the British state. To this extent, ageing is ‘good to think with’: people’s disquiets concerning their vulnerability and deprivation in the UK, plus the social changes that have an immediate impact on their family lives, are transposed into discussions of ‘what it is like to be a murubbi’. As we shall see in the last section of this chapter, these anxieties are also physically embodied in demonstrations of ageing and ill-health that in some circumstances might be interpreted as forms of protest as well as being linked to attempts to claim resources. Secondly, notions of good and bad ageing tend to be transposed upon images of the desh and of Britain. They are also closely interrelated with extreme ambivalence towards dependency. In the first scenario, the social and bodily dependency of old age, experienced in the arms of one’s family in a fantasized desh, is seen in positive terms, a sign of tradition and religiosity and social order. In the second, physical dependency experienced in Britain, where one’s family cannot necessarily provide care, where one feels increasingly useless and unwanted and must continually struggle to obtain medical and social support, is something to be feared. And yet, ironically, it is only through the bodily manifestations of such dependency that claims for support – at least, from the British state – can be made. It is to this last point I shall now turn.

Good Ageing, Independence and Health-care Professionals As I have already indicated, the many guises of the British state – medical services, the DSS, the Housing Office and of course the Home Office and – 164 –

Ageing Bodies its control over immigration – are central to all the elders’ lives. Within this context, the narration and embodiment of old age and sickness do not exist in a vacuum; they are closely affected by the perceptions and views of the state and its servants, as well as of course the wider society in which the elders live. In what follows I shall suggest that the elders’ ambivalence over dependency is played out in certain ways in interactions between state professionals and elders. As we shall see, pressure is put on old people by their professional English carers to be as active and independent as possible. For their clients, however, embracing the independence that the professionals often urge upon them is a negation of what is seen as their due, as elderly relatives and as citizens. While clearly we need to be just as wary of stereotyping ‘English’ culture in Britain as that of other ethnic groups, it is probably true to say that within the dominant discourse ageing is seen as something negative and to be resisted: a ‘problem’.37 Those who can remain ‘youthful’ and fight off dependency for as long as possible are, it is assumed, the more successful and the happiest. Much literature on ageing in the UK takes this for granted. Arber and Ginn, for example, comment that: ‘A key concern of elderly people is to remain independent for as long as possible.’ 38 Associated with these negative images is the politicization of ageing in Britain, much of which stresses the ability of older people to be economically, physically or sexually active. A recent Age Concern campaign of billboards that showed a generously endowed older woman wearing a slinky black bra with the caption: ‘And it’s her age you notice first’, is just one rather dubious example of this. Recent legislation that would institute a voluntary code of anti-ageist procedures for employers is another. Amongst those who can afford good health care and the appropriate leisure activities, what has been dubbed the cult of ‘late youth’ is upon us.39 Within these attitudes towards ageing it is easy to discern a discursive link between independence and individualism: the ageing process is seen as threatening to one’s individualism, for, unless resisted, it can lead to dependency upon others.40 As we have seen, the attitude of our Bengali informants towards dependency is more complex, and is certainly not linked with the erosion or loss of the self. Indeed, as much South Asian ethnography indicates, South Asian selfhood is articulated largely 37. 38. 39. 40.

Bond and Coleman 1990: 14. Arber and Ginn 1991: 67. ‘Ring in the wrinklies’: Observer, 18 January 1998. Pickard 1995.

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Age, Narrative and Migration through familial relationships. Thus, while Western discourses of selfhood project and presume personal autonomy, South Asian personhood is publicly presented as socially embedded.41 This dominant discourse of ageing, in which personal autonomy is taken as a sign of healthy and happy ageing, was largely reflected in the work of the non-Bengali practitioners that I observed during fieldwork. For all, the assumption was that the aged and/or stroke victims should be helped to remain as physically active as possible. For the physiotherapists this was, after all, their professional raison d’être. As one of the physiotherapists at the day centre put it: ‘My biggest frustration is to get people to want to be independent.’ The director of another community centre providing services for Bengali elders in East London put it unequivocally: ‘We expect people to keep active.’ The planning of activities at this centre is largely based around this aim, with the provision of exercise classes, drama, art, and other activities. Sadly, the strategy did not seem to be working on the days when I visited, when the main activity at this particular centre was watching TV and sitting in the chairs arranged around the sides of the rooms. In discussing their Bengali clients nearly all the non-Bengali professionals repeated the idea that, unless they were offering material facilities, many elders resisted their help. They do not want to be active or independent, the professionals told me, but after a stroke or illness become completely dependent on their carers (usually their wives) and on the services and facilities provided by the state. This was a cause of frequent frustration. In one exchange, for example, a physiotherapist lost her temper when trying to persuade an elderly gentleman to take off his coat in front of her without assistance from his Bengali helpers: ‘Go on,’ she told him irately through an interpreter. ‘He can do it [alone]. He must.’ This apparent conflict between professionals desiring the independence of their clients and the elders’ lack of compliance was expressed in two areas of contestation during my fieldwork – over walking sticks, and over exercises. In these low-level struggles what was at stake was not simply the cultural construction of ageing as encoded in certain bodily practices, but more significantly the idea of independence. While propagated as good and desirable by English professionals, I suggest that this was rejected as threatening to the moral economy of ageing by the elders. This does not mean that they actively wanted to be dependent. Indeed, most faced their incapacitation and inability to carry out their previous

41. Wilce 1998: 36.

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Ageing Bodies roles with deep regret. But instead of fighting the bodily changes that had taken place, the elders tended to accommodate them, articulating them with particular social roles and embodied states. Within this context, the kinds of behaviour encouraged by the professionals ran contrary to their ideas of behaviour for their roles as murubbi, and by extension, what was their due as senior members of their families and as citizens of the British state. To describe this further, I shall focus on two central issues: the use of walking sticks, and exercise.

Walking Sticks One of the first things health-care workers attached to both day centres told me was that Bengali old people always demand walking sticks, whether they ‘need’ them or not. The walking stick, physiotherapists and centre leaders explained, is a symbol of status in Sylhet, indicating venerability rather than fragility. Walking sticks are therefore important objects of desire; but not any old stick will necessarily do. While fitting one old woman with a stick, for example, a physiotherapist recounted how the Bengali elders she worked with always demanded the thickest sticks possible, even though this had little effect on their relative toughness. The ‘cultural clash’ as expressed to me by English practitioners therefore involved a constant struggle over who was and who was not entitled to a stick. Physiotherapists’ efforts to persuade their patients that the sticks were not necessary were shunned. One physiotherapist decided that enough was enough and she would simply refuse to issue to sticks to those who did not need them. The result was uproar and conflict: the elders sent a delegation demanding their rights to sticks, and eventually the management gave in. Another physiotherapist told me that she often gave them to people whom she judged to be perfectly able to walk unaided.

Exercise A second area of contestation in which practitioners expect elders to conform to their ideals of active ageing is exercise. This is a particularly pertinent issue at the day centre because so many of the users have had strokes, and exercise is a necessary part of their recovery regime if they are to become ‘healthy’ in the English sense (active and independent). During the day, regular exercise sessions take place. In the morning men and women share the same hall (with women sitting apart from men at – 167 –

Age, Narrative and Migration one end), and often with the help of a volunteer or the physiotherapist spend their time walking around. In the afternoons, the sessions are more structured. Women and men separate into different parts of the centre and exercise sessions take place. Amongst the women, centre workers lead the group in a series of gentle stretching exercises in which most women participate with varying degrees of seriousness. While some obediently stretched their legs out and rotated their ankles and so on, in the sessions I attended others participated in what I can only describe as ‘taking the mickey’: laughing and copying the leader (who ignored them) in an exaggerated way. In their work with individuals, physiotherapists described (and I observed) similar strategies of resistance. ‘They won’t exercise’, I was frequently told; or: ‘He could do it for himself, but his wife refuses to let him out of his chair and fetches everything for him.’ Both of these areas of contestation are related to a more general struggle over relative levels of independence in which English practitioners have particular models in their minds about how they want their patients or clients to behave. Part of this struggle involves the role of wives or other female carers, who, in terms of the practitioners, do too much for their husbands, thus ‘allowing’ them to become increasingly dependent. Training for these carers has, however, proved difficult. This again is geared to helping women, many of whom are themselves physically frail, both to become more aware of the issues surrounding caring for a disabled or sick person at home (for example, explaining how to lift properly), and also themselves to remain active and mentally healthy (with discussion of exercise, stress management, etc.). Whether or not such training achieves its objective is, however, debatable. For example, during the research a training session on ‘stress management’ was held. This involved a trainer (talking through an interpreter) giving a lecture on stress and how to deal with it. While some women listened attentively, others wandered off in the middle of the session, and one particular woman declared loudly: ‘I don’t have time for this! There’s no medicine for worries!’ Later, I was told by another worker that the only way the Centre could get most women to participate was to pay them to attend. * * * These two examples, of what one might think of as the elders’ ‘low-level’ resistance to the modes of behaviour suggested to them by their professional carers, raise a central question: how are struggles – over relative levels of dependence and independence, over authority and status, and – 168 –

Ageing Bodies over the allocation of state resources – expressed through the embodiment and narration of ageing and sickness? And how have their histories, as migrants, workers and men and women with varying familial roles, affected the elders’ bodies and the way in which they talk about them? While the above section may give some clues, in the final part of this chapter I want to turn directly to the physical experience of growing older in Britain. In Chapter 7 I shall continue this theme through the analysis of sickness narratives.

Frail Bodies, Aches and Pains: Physical Complaints as Protests and as Claims Like everyone else’s, the personal and collective histories of the elders are recounted through their bodies as well as their spoken narratives. While of course each body is different and subject to a diverse range of events, transnational migration, hard physical labour, poverty and emotional conflict have all, to a greater or less extent, had a physical effect upon them. I have no medical or epidemiological expertise, and in what follows shall not be attempting to provide a detailed account of the medical states of my informants.42 Rather, as a social anthropologist, what I am concerned with is how their physical states were represented to me and the meanings they were said to have. As medical anthropologists have shown, illnesses may act as sponges, soaking up meanings from the societies in which they occur; the embodiment and narration of sickness is socially embedded, and not separable from its political, economic and cultural context.43 To conclude this chapter I therefore want to consider the relationship between social and material conditions and the presentation of particular bodily states, suggesting that in certain contexts bodies are used strategically in struggles over resources, and bodily complaints are utilized as a form of protest.

High Blood Pressure, Matha Gurai and Santi Clearly, the physical symptoms presented to us by the elders were directly affected by the particular characteristics of our research ‘sample’; as users 42. High rates of asthma, diabetes and gastrointestinal bleeding have been noted in medical research amongst elderly ethnic minorities; there is also some evidence of relatively high levels of disability amongst Asians in Britain: see Ebrahim and Hiller 1991. 43. See in particular Kleinman 1988 and Good 1994.

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Age, Narrative and Migration of the day centre many of them had experienced strokes and were disabled as a result. Strokes are linked to one of the most common physical problems we came across: high blood pressure. Many elders – women as well as men – told me of their problems of ‘pressure’, leading to dizziness (matha gurai), ‘hot heads’ and general weakness, complaints that I have also heard many times over in rural Sylhet.44 High blood pressure is of course caused by a variety of factors, all of which may be linked to the changes in lifestyle brought about by migration to Britain. A change in diet, from one high in carbohydrates and fibre (rice and vegetables) to one with increased fat levels (from the large amounts of ghee, red meat and salt consumed by the majority of Bengalis in Britain); smoking (mostly by men); and the stress caused by separation from loved ones, legal wrangles over immigration, racism and unemployment are all no doubt important. Cohen notes the centrality of high blood pressure, or what is colloquially known as ‘BP’ among middle-class Indians, in their narratives of ageing and health, arguing that it is discursively linked to the tensions caused by success.45 In Tower Hamlets, however, the Bengali men and women we spoke to made a direct link between the symptoms of high blood pressure and stress caused by the difficulties of migration and poverty. The women in particular tended to link their headaches and dizziness with the worries caused by their particular situations: ‘Chinta rogue’ (the sickness of worries) was a phrase I heard many times. Mrs Chapna Bibi, for example (this chapter) told me how her worries over money kept her awake all night, tossing and turning, and this was why her head spun. Lokki Bibi, a widow living with her adult children,46 said: My head ached like lightning. The doctor said my blood pressure was up to two hundred. Q: Because of your worries? What worries! All these desher–bidesher worries (i.e. worries caused by transnationalism). 30 July 1996.

In other instances, people used the idiom of santi (peacefulness) with physical health and comfort, and oshanti (disturbance) with physical 44. placing 45. 46.

In rural Sylhet matha gurai is treated by pouring water over one’s head, or by a cooling herbal preparation on it. Cohen 1998: 108. See Appendix, household 2.

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Ageing Bodies discomfort and illness. The attainment of shanti is seen as partly material – being secure and well provided for – but also social. Family harmony and togetherness were spoken of as a prerequisite for peacefulness. Thus illnesses were often thought of as the result of the anxieties and emotional pain caused by separation or family conflict. I shall be returning to this theme in the next chapter

Women’s Pains While some women explicitly linked pain and spinning heads with high blood pressure, others explained them in different terms. Another widow, Soyful Begum,47 describes her health as follows: My head spins, my feet hurt, my legs swell up. Q: Why? Allah knows. I’ve got arthritis (bhath) . . . I can’t sleep. When my head’s spinning I put water and Dettol on it. That works for the pain but then I get matha gorum (hot head). The pain stops me from sleeping, and makes me jump awake. 16 October 1996.

While I am not suggesting for one moment that these pains and discomforts are not real, I suggest that the idiom of the ‘spinning head’ is used by many elders – in particular, by women – to express a variety of emotional as well as physical problems. Indeed, the description of generalized aches and pains was common to women’s discussions both of their health and of their general situations. For the female carers of stroke victims or the very elderly, these pains have a very obvious cause. Left largely alone to care for their husbands, the physical demands of their roles exact a heavy toll. Thus, as we have already seen, many carers spoke of their bodily pains as the result of having to lift and care for their husbands. The following comment, made by Rabeya Khanun48 during a group discussion with other carers, is typical: We have problems with everything, getting them up, feeding them, we always have problems. You need to be strong to pick up him and put him to bed . . . When I pick him up it hurts my back. We have to feed him, wash him, clothe him. We have to do everything in the world for him. 47. See Appendix, household 11. 48. See Appendix, household 7.

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Age, Narrative and Migration For many women of this generation, suffering – both mentally and physically – is also tied to their honour and their religious status as good and obedient wives. In a group discussion of the problems they faced as carers of stroke victims, two of the women cited the following story, linking religiosity to duty to one’s husband and to physical suffering: Carer 1: Bibi Akea was buried underneath the stone . . . Carer 2: . . . she had the devil on her back so she raised her hands to Allah and cried out: ‘Oh Allah, you created me. Why was I unable to make my husband happy? What shall I do?’ Then Allah sent Gabriel down to show her the gates of Heaven, and while she was looking a forty-tonne stone landed on her chest. But she never felt the pain, for she died looking at the gates of Heaven. So even if your husband beats you, it’s good.

A third carer added: ‘Wherever he hits me, that part will go to Heaven.’ To interpret such talk solely in terms of religious status would however be reductive. As anthropologists have shown in a variety of contexts, people often engage in apparently contradictory discourses, one of which apparently accepts the status quo, and the other of which is more resistant or subversive.49 Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 2, Wilce has argued that ‘troubles talk’ and bodily complaints are inherently resistant. Illness narratives thus tend to be tactical without being necessarily conscious; they are ‘veiled protests’, easier to make than an explicit attack on social structure.50 I shall continue to explore this point in the next chapter.

Men’s ‘Disability’ and the Emasculation of Old Age In contrast to the more generalized way in which women spoke of their aches and pains, many of the men described ageing and ill-health in terms of immobility and bodies that no longer worked: they were, figuratively as well as literally, ‘dis-abled’. Here, their bodies rather than the family and the state are key in narrating their shift in authority and status. As the men represent themselves, the primary effect of ageing and ill health is that they have lost the ability to provide, hence their emasculation.51 As two elderly stroke victims put it:

49. Classic examples are Abu-Lughod 1986 and Raheja and Gold 1994. 50. Wilce 1998: 18. 51. For discussion of the relationship between ageing and feminization, see Arber and Giin 1991.

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Ageing Bodies Now all you can do is pray, wherever you are going to die, pray . . . Now no one will love you, your wife, your son, your daughter. You cannot do anything for them, cannot get anything or do anything. All day long all you can do is to sit at home asking for this or that. How long can you do that for? Abdul Khalique, 14 December 1996. Now there is no work and I just sit and sit and sit at home, my arse is so sore, please forgive my rudeness. What can I do? I can’t sit at home all the time and I can’t work? The doctor will not let me work. I can’t work. I’ll probably just die suddenly. Abdul Miah, 10 October 1996.

In his account of his stroke (which I give in the next chapter) Abdul Miah tells of how he has lost ‘his senses’. This leads into a story of his getting disorientated and not recognizing where he is – returning him symbolically to the role of the naïve young immigrant who gets lost. As we saw earlier, this is a common trope in many of the men’s accounts of their early days in Britain, before they found jobs and became mature workers and providers. As these quotations indicate, for many of the men the immobility and incapacitation of ageing and ill-health deeply undermine their identities as workers and providers, which as we saw in Chapter 4 were so key to the construction of masculinity amongst many migrant men of their generation. Immobility is not, of course, only an issue for men. While most of my female informants were the carers of disabled men rather than disabled themselves, at least two women (one of whom had bad arthritis and one who had had a stroke) complained of how physically active they had once been, and how physically dependent they had now become. The stress in these narratives on physical incapacity and immobility contrasts in interesting ways with the preoccupation with memory loss common to the discourses of ageing that Cohen describes in North America. As he argues, the personal and social stress of old age is embodied in different ways at different times for different communities.52 In the United States (and for the majority in Britain) it is their brains and their increasing forgetfulness, organized around the idiom of Alzheimer’s, that is the focus of attention, for within these societies memory is core to selfhood. In India however, memory did not anchor first-person narratives of ageing. Similarly, amongst my male informants, memory and brain function were never referred to (although erratic behaviour was sometimes described by female carers). 52. L. Cohen 1998: 125.

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Age, Narrative and Migration What I am therefore suggesting is that the various ways in which the elders describe their physical problems are linked to their social and political situations and can, in Wilce’s terms, be thought of as indirect resistance to the structures that frame their lives. I shall be returning to this in the next chapter, where protests concerning the role of the state – and in particular, medical personnel – are often key to the elders’ sickness narratives. To conclude this chapter, however, I wish now to indicate the ways in which sick and ageing bodies can become drawn into struggles over resources that the elders and their families often desperately need and the state and its servants are either unwilling or unable to provide. To illustrate this, let me start with one of the first visits I made at the very beginning of my fieldwork. Accompanying the carers’ worker, I went to council house of an old gentleman who had suffered a stroke. He lived with his wife and daughter, and was being visited by an occupational therapist in order to carry out a needs assessment. What his family required was a ground-floor flat, and, in order to get this, the old man and his wife had physically to demonstrate the extent of his incapacity to the therapist. Following the couple around the house, she watched as he got in and out of the bath, went up and down the stairs, lay down on his bed and was helped on to the WC by his wife. All these tasks were carried out with extreme physical difficulty. The end result however was that the therapist turned their application down. ‘He can do it,’ she said somewhat dismissively, ‘so long as he is supervised.’ Illness and disability are also of course directly linked to the financial support that people get from the state. Complaints, and the physical demonstration of incapacity, are thus key to maintaining incomes as well as access to suitable housing. In the following quotation Abdul Bari explicitly makes the connection: The amount of money I’m supposed to get, it doesn’t seem right. That carer’s allowance of £35 a week [given to his wife] . . . [I’m still incapacitated:] I can’t sleep at night, my hands shake. Also I have a problem with angina. So many illnesses, how many problems can I tell them about? Blood pressure! For that they give Ismail £350 a month. They give me £265. Q: Have you told them about your condition? They should know. Ismail hasn’t got half as many illnesses as me, yet he gets more money. When John [an English worker at the centre] was here he wrote it all down. My hands and legs shaking; that I cannot walk; that if I walk just a little bit this leg stops working. I told them all about it. 13 December 1996.

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Ageing Bodies I am not suggesting that the expression of such complaints is necessarily a conscious strategy, nor indeed that they are somehow fraudulent. After all, Mr Bari has spent almost his entire adult life working in British industry and paying his taxes; disability allowances and pensions are his absolute right. What I am interested in, however, is the way in which expressions of illness and suffering are necessary in order to gain access to services and resources. In a further twist to the elders’ ambivalence towards dependency, it is only after demonstrations of physical dependency that the state will help them. Since it is generally women rather than men who are in the position of caring for the sick, the link between bodily complaints and the inadequacies of the state for not providing them and their families with support is perhaps made more by them than by men. In their group discussion of the problems of being carers, many of the women linked their physical complaints with their need for more resources from the state. Their husbands were too heavy to lift, they said, and it hurt their backs. What they needed were home helps, or better accommodation. Underlying these complaints is a wider protest: it is because they are women that they are suffering. Rabeya Khanum explained it in the following terms: Are they ever going to send someone to look after him? No. So obviously I’ve got problems. Lifting him up and putting him down is too hard for women . . . With my husband, if they’d give a stick, if they’d give a better bed, that would help. Then we won’t have any problems. He needs a hard bed that he can get up from and a stick would help because he leans so hard against me when I support him. That’s my problem. My chest starts to hurt.

Bodily complaints are also central to attempts to get re-housed. In her quest for a larger flat, for example, Mustara Khatun53 constantly stressed the ill-health of her family members to the housing officer who was reviewing her case. Living in a small and damp three-bedroom flat with her wheelchair-bound husband, her two married sons, their wives and children and her teenage daughter, the family urgently needed to be rehoused. Yet because there were no flats large enough to accommodate the family together, each nuclear unit (the sons and their wives, plus Mrs Khatun and her daughter and husband) had to wait to be re-housed separately. Their case had been awarded 237 points and was therefore classified by the Housing Office as a priority, so it was simply a matter 53. See Appendix, household 3.

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Age, Narrative and Migration of waiting for alternative accommodation to become available, the Housing Officer explained. Yet to Mrs Khatun waiting lists and point systems were not the point. Her grand-daughter had pneumonia, she constantly told the Housing Officer, interrupting him as he launched into another long-winded explanation of the system. Her husband was sick, too, and could not use the bathroom because it was too small for his wheelchair. They could not wait any longer. The Housing Officer politely changed the subject, returning to his theme of points and waiting lists. In this case, the politics of hearing as well as of narrating were clearly central. While Mrs Khatun had certain stories to tell, which she felt might help her case, the housing officer did not want, or did not have the time, to hear them. * * * How are these preoccupations – with families, with resources, with migration and with one’s relationship to the state and its institutions – expressed in the more detailed narratives that people tell of their sickness and ill-health? In the next chapter I shall turn to these.

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–7– Narrating Sickness: Women’s and Men’s Accounts of Strokes and Chronic Illness Illness, especially chronic illness or severe disability, reveals much about how a culture conceives life in time, being as a kind of becoming, marked by transitions, transformations and the inexorable progress towards death. There is more than one kind of death possible, of course. Serious disability may allow you to live for years and years, for an entire span of life, and yet force death of self and the painful recreation of some new self. Narrative plays a variety of roles in this grim terrain.1

In this chapter I shall be focusing upon the ways in which the elders narrated illness: both chronic, long-term sickness and, more commonly, the life-changing event of strokes. As we shall see, the latter accounts tended to be remarkably long and detailed, embellished with dramatic flourishes and poetic detail. This is partly because strokes – which strike one down almost as if a blow from God – are inherently dramatic. Aesthetically they are excellent raw material for narrators: they ‘make a good story’, involving a strong plot2 (a central predicament, followed by a quest – the search for a cure), suspense and the opportunity for rhetorical elaboration. More importantly, though, accounts of strokes are often central to the elders’ life histories because they have had such a radical effect on them. This is the case both for the individuals who have suffered the stroke, and those who care for them, in particular, their wives. For both the sick and their carers, the onset of the stroke is recounted as a moment of transformation: the stroke struck and from then onwards, everything changed. In what follows we shall therefore be hearing from close relatives as well as the sick themselves, for illness does not exist only within the individual, but is socially embedded. Like all human suffering, it is positioned in a field of social relations.3 1. Mattingly 1998: 1. 2. For a wider discussion of plot in sickness narratives see Good 1994. 3. Good 1994: 161.

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Age, Narrative and Migration The use of narrative by medical anthropologists to access the meanings given to suffering by individuals and societies has grown increasingly popular in recent years. As Mattingly argues, three features make narratives especially appropriate for addressing illness and healing experiences: they are event-centred; they are experience-centred; and they do not merely refer to past experience but create experience for their audience.4 Combined with this, narrative is often an important part of the reconstitution of lives that have been severely traumatized or transformed by severe illness. As Byron Good writes: ‘ The imaginative linking of experience and events into a meaningful story or plot is one of the primary reciprocal processes of both personal and social efforts to counter the dissolution and reconstitute the world . . . the narratives are aimed not only at describing the origins of suffering but imagining its location and source and imagining a solution to the predicament. When the imagined outcome of the story fails to materialise however, when suffering is not relieved, neither narrative gains authority and the self is threatened with dissolution.’5 For some of the narrators featured here the latter might be said to be the case. They are no longer searching for a cure or a solution, but have, at least to an outsider’s eyes, given up. Yet while some of the elders who spoke to us were indeed depressed, I do not think we can necessarily assume that acceptance of one’s new role as a dependent and physically disabled murubbi means a dissolution of the self. Instead, as I argued in the preceding chapter, the elders are often adept at accommodating their new roles. While none welcome sickness or disability, physical dependency is not struggled against as it might be by many English patients. Thus, illness narratives give shape to experience, and indeed may partly guide it.6 As suggested in Chapter 1, narratives are not only structured by identity, but in turn may help structure it; people act out their lives within certain idioms: of honourable suffering, for example, or of active migration. Crucially, too, narratives are also vehicles for the communication of other anxieties, arguments and meanings. In telling stories of their sickness, the elders are often communicating other things about themselves and their histories. In particular, the themes of family and the state (or more specifically, the provision of medical care) that I discussed in the last chapter tend to be central to sickness narratives, as is the powerful undercurrent of ambivalence towards the desh and towards Britain. 4. Mattingly 1998: 8. 5. Good 1994: 118–21. 6. For a more detailed discussion of therapeutic emplotment, see Mattingly 1998.

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Narrating Sickness In nearly all the accounts, for example, family members are important actors. Rather than telling only of the physical experience of the stroke or its effects on the self, many of the narratives are also concerned with who was there and who provided help. Finally, like other aspects of their life histories, the form and content of the stories are inextricable from gender and the other components that make up an individual’s identity. As we shall see, while the men’s stories are told in terms of what they were doing at the time of the stroke and what they can now no longer do, women’s stories of their husbands’ illnesses tend to be centred around their caring role, familial relations, complaints concerning state medical services and their ambivalence towards Britain. Let us start with the men’s stories.

Becoming Dis-abled and Getting Lost In what follows, Abdul Miah describes what happened when he had his stroke in 1987. A transnational migrant since 1960, Mr Miah had already described in vivid detail his early days in Britain, the unrelenting work and the search for jobs that took him from Birmingham to Worcester and finally to London. Now, narrating the onset of his illness, work remains a central theme, but it is in terms of tasks that were interrupted and things he can no longer do. As he puts it, since the stroke he has ‘lost his senses’: Q: So tell me about your stroke. Were you here or in the desh? I was in the desh. I was sitting there, nothing to do or to eat. All you can do is chew betel nuts, so I was sitting on the veranda. My sister, from the next bari on the north side, came and asked: ‘Bhai-Saheb, what are you doing?’ I said: ‘Nothing, Sister, just sitting here.’ She noticed that my face had twisted up the wrong way. The day before I was at home and one of my goats escaped, so I went to tie it back up. I tried to tie a knot and I couldn’t. With this hand [shows his right hand] I could not tie a knot. I thought to myself,: ‘What is happening?’ That night and the next morning I still could not tie a knot, but I did not tell anyone, and left it at that. I didn’t understand that much. It was the next day that my sister came and noticed that my face had gone that way. I could not tell. She said: ‘I’ll be back.’ In her bari, she sent her son, her oldest – nice boy. She said: ‘Take your chacha [paternal uncle] immediately to Beani Bazar,’ where we went to the doctor who told me I had had a stroke. He gave me an injection. I stayed, and he gave me some tablets. I did that for a few days. And my sister said: ‘Massage that side of your face, it may do it some good.’ Slowly it did, and she said it was getting better.

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Age, Narrative and Migration But my speech . . . I could always speak and know what I was doing. I lost some of my senses. Yesterday I went to a place, a hospital, to see a friend of mine. I had been the day before. I walked and went to see him. I went yesterday to see him and looked for him but couldn’t find him. His children were there, but they didn’t recognize me. I went from where he was out through the passageway and back down from where I had come in. From there, I tried to figure it out again. His children finally saw me and said ‘Chacha is here.’ As soon as they said that I realized that I had found him. I said: ‘I have come to see your dad.’ They said they recognized me, but weren’t sure. That’s my problem. My head does not work. 10 October 1996.

As was noted in the last chapter, in many of the men’s narratives there is a strong sense of physical loss: of limbs and bodies and senses no longer doing the work they are supposed to do. When he is immobile, doing nothing, Mr Miah does not notice there is anything wrong with him. It is only when he attempts to tie a knot as part of his duties as a grihosti (householder) that he realizes something has happened to his hand. Similarly, he tells us of his contemporary condition through the trope of mobility, another central component of masculine identity amongst his peers. What is striking in his narrative is that it is his ability to orientate himself in the world that seems to most bother Mr Miah. Just like the naïve young immigrant, who understands nothing and has to rely upon the directions of kindly strangers, he is lost again. For some men, the loss of a working body is explicitly connected to their status and their ability to be heard. As Mr Rahman, who is blind, replies in answer to a question about when one becomes a murubbi: ‘What can I say? I can’t see. I have no eyes.’ Here, Mr Rahman seems to be implying that since he is blind, his views are worthless. As we saw in the last chapter, other men comment upon the inability of their bodies to work and hence to provide for their families. Here, Abdul Miah, who has earlier told us that his life is ‘finished’, answers a question about what he remembers from the past: What am I supposed to remember? I worked, I lived, and now it’s all over . . . Now I pray (Allah!), eat and sleep. What else can I do? If I could do something I would, but it’s not as if I have the strength to do so. I can’t go anywhere or do anything.

In the following extract, Mr Khalique narrates the event that changed his life so dramatically:

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Narrating Sickness It was morning time and I had just had my breakfast and was getting ready to go out. I went out to the bus-stop, not too far away, and waited for the bus. Suddenly I felt a sensation like a blast of wind on this side of my body. I felt my vision darken. I felt scared and sat down thinking it would go away. I tried to get up and saw that I did not have the strength. So I thought, ‘I’ll go home. My head’s spinning a bit, but it should go after I take some medicine.’ But I just could not walk. I somehow dragged my feet, one after the other, and made it back home. I got in and thought: ‘I’ll go upstairs and ring someone.’ I managed to climb about half-way up the stairs, but then I fell back, all the way to the bottom. I tried three times to get up again, but I couldn’t. I lay there. I came round and suddenly felt cold, but could not get up and open the door. After one hour of struggling, I opened the door. From the moment I walked in to the moment I managed to open the door, I spent a total of three hours like this. So I lay across the threshold of the door and eventually managed to get the attention of a Jamaican woman, who then took me to hospital.

After this dramatic and detailed description of collapsing and his repeated attempts to get the front door open in order to get help, Mr Khalique’s story fizzles out. His narrative is not overly concerned with searching for an explanation or a cure, only with the story of the three hours in which his body and his life were transformed. On his treatment, he provides only the following comments: Q: How long did you spend in hospital? Seven weeks, after which I came in and out. I couldn’t talk or anything but that slowly came back. 14 September 1996.

Perhaps this focus on the event of his stroke rather than its aftermath reflects the personal crisis that Mr Khalique was going through during the period of our research. His much younger wife and he were constantly at loggerheads, and both seemed to locate the cause of their marital problems in his medical condition. Interestingly, his wife gave an almost word-for-word account of what had happened to him: it was a story that had been told many times, the product not just of an individual, but a family who were all drastically affected by what had happened. Towards the end of the research the situation improved. Mr Khalique began to walk again, relations with his wife took a turn for the better, and he started to call out to us cheerfully rather than scowling from his place at the long formica table where he usually sat. As Mattingly reminds us, illness narratives are processual rather than static: they are ongoing, and when

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Age, Narrative and Migration we hear them we participate in imagining how they will end.7 Had we heard the story of Mr Khalique’s stroke at another stage in his recovery perhaps the plot and suspense of his narrative might have been different.

Cause and Cures: Political Critiques in the Narration of Sickness While some elders were uninterested in discussing either the causes of their sickness or possible cures, others provided a variety of commentaries on what had happened to them in the past and their current situation. Nearly all of these involved an implicit but nonetheless barbed critique of the medical care they had received. For example, an explanation for sickness that we heard again and again was that it was caused by the mistake of an individual doctor, usually administering the wrong medicine. This is often paralleled by another complaint: that the reason the condition has not improved is that the doctor refuses to give the right sort of medicine (often an injection, which ‘quack’ doctors are generally happy to give in Bangladesh, so long as they are paid enough money). Significantly, in answer to direct questions regarding medical personnel, most had nothing but praise for the ‘health services’. In this sense the ‘troubles talk’ of the elders can be read, as Wilce would have it, as (gently) subversive.8 In speaking of their illness, they were, I therefore suggest, also speaking of how they were treated by doctors, and also perhaps voicing a more general sense of their disempowerment in the context of the National Health Service and their dealings with medical staff.9 At times place becomes important to this, too. In the following extract, for example, Anowara Bibi10 discusses her debilitating arthritis and her inability to get the injections she wants in terms of the desh and her dissatisfactions with life in Britain. In this, her comments run contrary to the views of many other elders, who stressed that the UK’s medical services were better than those in Bangladesh: I go to the doctor and they look at me and say that I have no illness. They give me a report that I have no illness, and I say: ‘Look at me, I used to be a 7. Mattingly 1998: 13. 8. Wilce 1998. 9. Comparative research amongst South Asian elders elsewhere in Britain indicates a low uptake of medical services, due to racism, language barriers and general inaccessibility (Atkin et al. 1989; Bowes and Domokos 1993; Boneham 1989; Watters, 1994). 10. See Appendix, household 15.

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Narrating Sickness tall woman, like you, and now I’ve become so disabled. I’m in pain. I always have to walk stooped over and that gives me chest pains . . .’ The doctor [in Bangladesh] gives me injections, when my hip used to play up. It’s really worked. A lot of the pain has stopped . . . I am talking about when I was young. I couldn’t work, gather wood. And so when the doctor came I used to have him give me injections. In our country there is so much else . . . but these last five years the doctors [in the UK] won’t give me injections . . . For old people, Bangladesh is better. Right now, as the cold weather approaches, there’ll come a time when I won’t be able to move. The pain increases. And if you’re in a hot country, at the time, massage some oil in before you start to sweat. It’s really good. 5 October 1996.

Echoing similar dissatisfactions, Abdullah Ali tells of his stroke: I was performing my ablutions in the sink. I had washed one foot and I put up the other and suddenly fell over. That is how it happened. The doctor came to my house and checked things. They didn’t tell me it was a stroke at that time. The doctor kissed me and said: ‘Not to worry, Mr Ali. I’ll come and see you twice a week. I’ll give you medication to take at home.’ Yet now, when I go, they say they don’t have any medication for me. Q: What do you mean? That there is no other medication to give me. No more kabiraj [traditional healing]. Q: Are you not better? No. Q: What happened after the stroke? One side of my body was droopy. I couldn’t hold a cigarette. It always fell out. From this hand. I don’t smoke any more. My left side was the most affected. I had very little sensation in it. Even today it’s like that. Q: How long were you in hospital? They didn’t keep me in hospital for long. Recently I stayed there for nine days, otherwise they didn’t take me. Q: And were things explained to you? No. Who’s going to explain things to me in Bengali? The English doctor gave us medicine. We didn’t say anything . . . Now you have Bengali doctors and everything. At my Health Centre there are seven doctors. Of those there is one who is Bengali. A lady – Dr Haque. I go to her a lot. But she says: ‘Chacha, there is nothing left that I can give you. Whatever you’re taking now, there is nothing new to give you.’

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Age, Narrative and Migration What am I supposed to do? Hit her? But I still get dizzy spells. My head spins, my back hurts and my neck hurts. That’s why I have this cane. I was never a small man. Allah gave me great strength. And even though I was strong I never went out to fight anyone or cause trouble in my life. 8 October 1996.

The complaint that desired medicines are not given was echoed many, many times over in our interviews. It reflects both culturally conditioned attitudes to ‘Western’ medicine in Sylhet, where allopathic drugs and injections are seen as all-powerful, a highly desirable sign of modernity, plus a more generalized commentary on British (although not necessarily ‘white’ or English) doctors. In the parts of his narrative where he describes how nothing was explained to him, Mr Ali presents himself in notably passive terms, in direct contrast to the active terms in which he described his earlier life as a worker in the UK (see Chapter 4). They didn’t take me, he says; they didn’t tell me, and: We didn’t say anything. As we shall see, disempowerment and the implicit criticism of the system is also an important theme in women’s accounts of their husbands’ sicknesses. Underlying Mr Ali’s narrative is another issue. Whether or not it is intentional, in his account of the doctor who arrived with promises of regular visits and medication he seems to be implying that the doctor was somehow neglectful, if not directly to blame for the degeneration of his condition. The doctor’s breezy kiss, his cheery reassurance ‘not to worry’ all seem significant here. Indeed, his light-hearted reaction to his patient’s condition seem to be one of the most central themes in Mr Ali’s account. In other narratives these accusations are made more explicitly. On a visit to Mr Fazlu Miah,11 a sufferer from chronic asthma and diabetes, for example, I was told by his family that his epileptic fits were caused by drugs that doctors wrongly administered to him during a spell in hospital. His diabetes too, was, they believed, caused by the medicine given for his asthma. This in turn was caused by the cold and damp of Britain. None of these explanations are improbable. But I am not so much interested in their veracity as the messages that lie behind them, and for this we must explore the context in which explanations for illness are given. As Good comments, pluralism – the simultaneous drawing upon a number of different (and sometimes contradictory) causes and cures for any one illness is now virtually a truism within medical anthropology.12 11. See Appendix, household 16. 12. Good 1994: 155.

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Narrating Sickness Like many of us, Bengali elders and their families tend to subscribe to a number of causational models for illness.13 Just as help is sought from religious healers, kabiraj (‘traditional’ healers, using a variety of methods and available, often at considerable cost, in Britain) and doctors operating within the National Health Service, so are God, allopathic medicine, and possession by spirits such as jiin or bhut or the evil eye, sometimes cited with reference to the same ailment.14 What is important, however, is context. For example, Lokki Bibi a widow living in Shoreditch with her adult children (see Chapter 6), says the following: We have a kabiraj here. We have everything here. I went to one just the other day, because my head was aching . . . He’s Bengali, otherwise he wouldn’t understand. You go to your own kabiraj, don’t you? They give tapij (amulets) and pura pani [water that has been blessed]. Q: Why do you sometimes go to the doctor and other times go to the kabiraj? Well some illnesses doctors can cure and others the kabiraj can cure. Q: What sort of illnesses? Those caused by bhut [ghosts]. Q: Like? Pains [she points to her body]. In the Quran, different illnesses are listed and the right cure. If you go to the doctor, he’ll give you medicine for your tummy ache and then, if it goes away, you know it’s OK. If you’re eating and someone looks at you and then you suddenly feel ill, you know that person has done it. Then you go to the kabiraj and he’ll read the relevant bit of the Quran and do pani pura and you’ll be cured . . . My husband had a stroke. In our country they say it’s a bhut. In this country they say it’s a stroke. 30 July 1996.

Here, while Mrs Bibi appears to be saying on the one hand that certain illnesses are linked to different causational categories, she is also acknowledging that in different places different explanations are given for the same illness. What is important is where one is, and who one is talking to. What I am arguing, then, is not that my informants believed solely that their ailments were caused by rogue doctors. Rather, their explanations have to be situated within the context of their narratives. In these they 13. For example, is that runny nose caused by ‘being run down’, a dairy allergy, or catching a germ? Or perhaps all three? 14. For a more detailed discussion of traditional healers in Sylhet, see Gardner 1995; also Wilce 1998, writing of Matlab district, Bangladesh.

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Age, Narrative and Migration were partly telling me what they thought would be most suitable for my English ears.15 More significantly, they were also drawing a particular picture of themselves and the world in which they were situated. In this world, they are dependent upon the state, which does not always treat them well. They are also silenced by institutional structures and individual professionals, unable to complain directly about the quality of care they are given or demand the sort of care that they believe they should be given . As Mr Ali says, What am I supposed to do? The rhetorical use of sickness narratives to draw attention to wider problems is vividly illustrated by the tragic story that Chapna Bibi (see Chapter 6) tells of how her husband was taken ill. It comes in the middle of a description of her first days in Britain in the early 1980s. We came first to a hotel in London . . . We were living in peace and had married off our eldest daughter . . . [Then the Greek owner sold the hotel to a Sikh.] Now as soon as this Sikh man took over he stopped everything. No more cooking in the kitchens. This made it very uncomfortable, especially for my husband. Q: It was then that your husband fell ill? . . . Two days, three days passed and my children began to cry for rice to eat. My daughter’s father-in-law used to bring us food, curry and rice, but we were not allowed to eat this food in the hotel. If the governor saw us, he’d kick us out. Q: How long did it take you to get a council flat? It took two years after my husband fell ill. I worked very hard over those years. We suffered greatly in that hotel. I stayed in the hotel, but was not allowed to cook . . . But a little further away there was a church, I used to cook in there. But I had to eat the food in the church too, because they would check in the hotel . . . To begin with I did cook nicely there, but I suppose that eventually my husband became ill because of it. It must have caused him great sorrow to see us like that. The children would cry, the hotel owner would tell them to be quiet. My husband was feeling unwell [one day]; it was raining really hard outside and the children kept crying. He said that he could not bear it any more, that he would go and get some food from outside. I said that he should not go, that it was not good for him. But he insisted that I give him an umbrella. He wouldn’t listen to me, he could not bear to hear his children crying for food. He went outside for rice and the wind blew his umbrella away, but still he went, for the children. He bought the food in the end. 15. Many of the elders were so surprised that I knew about kabiraj, bhut and the evil eye that when I first mentioned them in conversations they did not recognize the words.

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Narrating Sickness He also became more ill through worrying, especially about Bangladesh. He had blood pressure and our doctor was called T. Ahmed. He went to T. Ahmed and asked for medicine and I don’t know, but I think he was given the wrong medication. As I was saying, I used to cook in a church then. So my husband came back and said he wanted to eat some rice. I gave him a small amount of rice to eat after which we came back home. I said to him to go on alone, that I would be coming along in a few minutes . . . and when I got home I heard that he had had heart failure. Q: So it was the doctor who made the mistake? I think the doctor gave the wrong medicine. The ambulance arrived and we called the doctor, but he never came. T. Ahmed never came and we never saw him ever again. There were so many telephone calls to him, but he never came. Even the hotel owner called to say that he should visit Mr Khatun, but he never came. 6 January 1997.

In this narrative Mrs Bibi cites three possible causes for her husband’s illness and ultimately, his death. All three involve implicit criticism of the political and economic marginality of her family, despite her insistence later in the discussion that Britain is a good and benign place. Firstly, inadequate housing is to blame. Living in hotel accommodation for two years before a council flat became available, Mrs Bibi was unable to cook and thus provide the nurture upon which her husband depended. In this, the turning-point of her story is when the hotel was sold by a Greek man to a Sikh, who forbade the preparation of food. It was then, she implies, that her problems started. Later in the narrative the children’s cries for food propelled her husband to venture out in the wet and windy weather. This is another turning-point in her plot, for it is only after this event that she turns directly to the onset of his illness. Secondly, Mrs Bibi asserts that her husband grew sick because of worry for Bangladesh. As we saw in the last chapter, worry – caused by migration, separation from loved ones and economic insecurity – is often cited as a cause of illness: desher-bidesher chintas (worries about home and abroad). But while this explanation is mentioned almost in passing, the main thrust of Mrs Bibi’s narrative seems to be that her husband grew sick because he was given the wrong medicine by a bad doctor. It is with the character of this doctor that she closes her account: his lack of caring for the plight of her husband seems to sum everything up. He gave the wrong medicine and then never showed up again. This may very well have been the case. However, the frequency with which the figure of the bad, uncaring doctor appears in sickness narratives, – 187 –

Age, Narrative and Migration and their centrality to the story, suggests something additional to me. The doctor and his mistakes become a metaphor for the shoddy treatment and sense of powerlessness that many older Bengalis have experienced in their dealings with the British state and – in this case – its medical personnel.

Women’s Narratives: Disempowerment and Silencing This last point comes across especially forcefully in some of the women’s narratives, where disempowerment in the face of medical institutions and personnel is a central theme. While in other parts of their narratives they may represent themselves as powerful and active, in their dealings with medical personnel they often appear to be forced into passive or silenced roles. Back in Chapter 3, for example, we heard how Mrs Khatun suffered terrible pain and discomfort when a coil was fitted, without her permission or even her understanding. As she says: I did not understand what they were doing to me, but they went ahead and did it. I was crying. Three people held me down as they did it. It was terrible, especially because I did not understand what they were doing . Alone in a foreign country (her husband is not mentioned in this part of her story, and does not seem to have helped her), Mrs Khatun is forced to rely upon the kindness of an English man who took her back to the clinic, where she was eventually provided with an interpreter. As she later comments: I had many problems then and I had no help. A short while later, she describes what happened when her husband had his stroke. One of the striking aspects of the narrative is how her role changes from being actively involved in the care of her stricken husband to being excluded and forced into passivity by the medical professionals involved. Like all accounts of the onset of a stroke, Mrs Khatun’s story is highly dramatic: Q: Tell me about your husband. It’s been two years since his stroke. When he had the stroke he was unconscious for three hours – you could just hear a slight breathing sound. Other than that, there was nothing. Q: What happened to him? I called one of my sons; all this happened quite quickly. I went to the kitchen to make some breakfast for my second son, he was going to a wedding. I told him to give some to his father and then I thought I’d ask him myself whether he wanted some tea or his rice. I opened the door and saw him lying on the floor. He was bunched up on the floor like a prawn, and was smiling. I could

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Narrating Sickness see that he was breathing. I called to my son: ‘Come quick, your father is lying on the floor!’ He came running. He [her husband] must have taken one bite of the food and then thrown it on the floor. The two of us managed to lift him back on to the bed. I kept pushing down on his chest to make sure that he carried on breathing; then suddenly a sound came out and I sensed something. His expression changed too. Then we called the ambulance. It came in about three minutes. They wrapped him up in a red blanket and must have spent at least an hour with him before they took him away. Q: Who went with him? My son. I didn’t go. They thought I’d be scared because it was my husband. They said I’d get scared or too agitated or have a heart attack or something. I was eventually taken to the hospital by a friend of my son’s. He regained consciousness after about three hours and at about eight o’clock I tried to persuade them to let me stay, but they wouldn’t. They said there weren’t any problems and they’d let me know if there were. I got someone to call at 2.30am and they said everything was alright. So I went at 8.30am the following morning and saw that he was senseless, that he’d had another stroke in the night. He couldn’t do anything that related to his senses. He couldn’t speak for a year. Next April it will be three years [since it happened]. April 10th. 24 August 1996.

The unspoken accusations in this account ring out loud and clear. Mrs Khatun was in charge of events up until the moment the ambulance men arrived, but they would not allow her to accompany her husband to the hospital because they thought she would be ‘scared’. Later, the hospital staff refuse to allow her to stay with her husband overnight, telling her they will let her know if there is any change in his condition. Yet when she arrives the next day she finds he has had another stroke, this time alone. As we shall see in the next chapter, the separation of women from their husbands at the times of their deaths is key to their constructions of whether or not they had a ‘good’ death, as well as to their experience of bereavement. Since caring is so central to their identities as good and worthy wives, being forced apart from a husband in his time of need is a hard blow to bear. While Mrs Khatun presents herself in her story as active and capable, other women speak of themselves in more passive terms in the context of illness. In the middle of a group discussion of the problems of caring for a sick husband alone for example, Mrs Nessa – who has only been in Britain a few years and is herself physically very frail – suddenly told the story of what happened when her husband was taken ill. While the narrative is partly a dramatic account of sudden illness, it is also very – 189 –

Age, Narrative and Migration much concerned with the teller’s identity and self-presentation as powerless and dependent upon others to do things for her. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 5, most of the women carers are far from passive in Britain; indeed, it is their children and husbands who tend to be dependent upon them, rather than vice versa. In this context however, Mrs Nessa talks of herself as completely lost. The main issue for the speaker here is communication. She is lost because she is in a foreign country, where she cannot speak the language and does not even know how to use a phone. As she repeats four times, I don’t know. If something happened to me I wouldn’t even know how to dial the phone. My son’s father has asthma, heart problems, so many problems I can’t name them all. He was just sitting there, then he started signalling to me that his heart had stopped. His arms and legs started shaking and he stuck his tongue out and I was completely perplexed. I couldn’t work it out. Then he had a fit and fell on the floor. He fell so hard it felt like the whole house was shaking. I touched his head, it wasn’t hot. I touched his chest, there was nothing there. I was completely lost. I called my son and said, ‘Son, look at your father.’ He said: ‘What happened?’ I said: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. You phone, because you know I don’t know how to use the phone.’ Undated.

* * * The need to be with one’s family at times of crisis, the importance of providing care for the sick and dying to women’s self-images as religious and honourable, the intrusion of the state in the relationship between the sick and their families: all these issues become even more pressing at the time of death. In the next chapter I shall suggest that dying in Britain, and the passage of bodies back to Bangladesh, is the final domain in which the anxieties and contradictions that underlie the experience of transnational migration amongst our informants are played out. Here, gender and the ways in which it influences people’s relative mobility, as well as their access to different places, becomes central.

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–8– The Final Journey: Death, Ritual and Return to the Desh1 Death is the final journey, one that all of us will eventually make. For first generation British Sylhetis, many of whom have spent a lifetime moving between places, endlessly evaluating their past, their present and their futures in terms of a shifting and fantasized ‘other’ land, it often marks the last physical movement of their bodies. Flown back to Sylhet by Bangladesh Biman and buried in the soil of their desh, they finally come to rest. In what follows I shall show that, like sickness, death is socially embedded.2 By listening to how it is narrated and understanding the practices it involves, we gain insight into the ways in which families and communities think about themselves, how they construct the ‘traditions’ of the past, and how they imagine their future. Indeed, many of the issues I have discussed throughout the book become particularly acute when people die. As we shall see, the shifting and variable forms of dependency that murubbi have on their families and on the British state are central to how people experience and talk about the death of loved ones. In addition, the extreme ambivalence which many of them feel towards desh and bidesh is given a new twist. Dying and death cast the problem of desh– bidesh into a different perspective: ambivalence seems to fall away; desh becomes the place where one truly belongs, the locus of spirituality and the self. These perspectives are invariably gendered. For the majority of widows, their sense of being split between places is made even more acute when their husbands are buried back in Sylhet. In contrast, for men who are dying, or planning to be buried in the desh, the issue is, perhaps, finally resolved. How does one research the experience of dying? Anthropologists such as Jenny Hockey, who worked amongst old people in a residential home 1. A version of this chapter was given at the Transnational Households and Ritual Workshop, held at the University of Sussex, in Spring 2000. 2. See Bloch and Parry 1982: 4.

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Age, Narrative and Migration in the UK, have shown that such fieldwork is possible.3 In my own research, however, I did not attempt to meet or interview people who were known to be dying. Instead, I concentrated on widows and professional carers of the terminally ill, particularly those based at a local hospice and The London Hospital at Whitechapel, as well as the Muslim undertakers Hajji Tasleem.4 My perspectives are therefore predominantly female: I learnt what I could about death from those left behind, and owing to the demographic profile of the group (Bengali wives are younger, and tend to die later) these are usually women. Many widows described their husbands’ deaths to me in extraordinary detail, reliving and reconstructing the trauma and pain of the event through their narratives. As in the onset of serious illness, the death scene of husbands not surprisingly appears as a key moment in the reconstruction of their histories. It is the time when everything is irreversibly transformed, when they move from the role of wife to that of widow, with all the social and spiritual meanings this has. And, like all the stories that women tell, the roles of both family and community, plus their selfconstruction as honourable, obedient and pious, are paramount.

Good and Bad Deaths, The Importance of Family and Home To open this chapter, let us listen to two different accounts of death. Like the English widows researched by Mary Bradbury, being at home and with close relatives is a central factor in the representation of their husbands’ deaths.5 In the first, the teller reconstructs her husband’s death in positive terms: she was able to perform her role as a carer without intervention from medical professionals, and he died in the bosom of the family. In the second, events were very different: our narrator lost control over her husband’s care, and he was left to die alone in a hospital, the terrible news broken to her via her daughter over the telephone. In the following account, Chapna Bibi, who recounted her husband’s stroke in the last chapter, tells how he finally died. In contrast to the onset of his illness, which she constructed in highly negative terms, as the result of bad housing and even worse doctoring, Mrs Bibi represents his death 3. Hockey 1990. 4. Yasmin Gunaratnam has also carried out fieldwork amongst South Asians in a London hospice (Gunaratnam 1998, 2001). For a wider discussion of death rituals amongst Hindus in Britain, see Firth 1997. 5. Bradbury 1999.

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The Final Journey as ‘good’. Key to this seems to be the fact that he was at home and surrounded by family and friends. Again, in contrast to her earlier account, in which, despite her efforts to cook for him in the church or to prevent him from going out in the cold wet night, she was powerless to change anything, here she appears as strong and active, in charge of events. The day before he died he was in hospital, but my husband died at home. You know, even the most important maulanas [Islamic preachers; people with religious knowledge] and Muslims die in hospital, but I only sent my husband to hospital in an emergency. He was very poorly. The district nurse used to come every day, mornings and afternoons. Well, she saw him and said that he was very sick. She said: ‘Don’t get alarmed, but Mr Miah’s condition has worsened.’ I told her that I wanted to know exactly what the situation was, that I had been looking after him for all these years, so she must tell me. So she said that Mr Miah might not survive for that much longer, that he must be sent into hospital. Then the next day another district nurse came, Rudina, an Indian. She phoned Dr Rahman [the GP] and he said he was too busy, that he could not come now. So she called for an ambulance and he was taken into the London Hospital. They took him into the Emergency and they did lots of X-rays and things and then they came out and said, no, he won’t live for more than two weeks, not more than that. He stayed there for one day and the next day they sent him to Mile End, where he stayed for another ten days. After ten days the district nurse and John [worker, attached to the day centre] went to see him and they told the doctor that I had been looking after him for the last six years. If he was going to die he should be given to me to take back home. Let him come home. If he recovers, then good. If he gets worse, then the doctors will still come and see him. They knew he was going to die. The day he died, it was a Friday. The day before, on Thursday, I went to the hospital to see a doctor. He said that if Mr Miah got worse, they’d take him in again, the nurses will come. But I am happy. He died on a good day: Friday, a holy day for us Muslims. It was also good because he died in Mohrarrum Chand [a lunar month in the Muslim calendar]. It was the 10th, in the morning. The ambulance people put him in bed, in that room, and left. I felt his hands and arms and they were cold as ice. I put socks and blankets over him, brushed his teeth for him and gave him blessed water from MeccaSharif. It is called zam-zam water. I put some on his face and his head, and had someone call the hospital. I got his drip ready, and sat down, my feet aching with pain. Even today, I feel the same pain. I kept looking at him, and I saw that he was breathing upwards. That is when I saw that he was taking his last breaths, his eyes were growing larger. I told myself, ‘it has never been like this’, so I told my neighbour to tell his son and his wife to come and see, come quickly. I said to call all my family, my elder daughter, my younger daughter, John at the community centre, my youngest son. The school was telephoned. John said he had an emergency to see to, but that he would be

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Age, Narrative and Migration there in fifteen minutes, that he was phoning the district nurse and the doctor. He said ‘I’m on my way.’ Everyone came. My youngest daughter’s father-in-law, he was in a mosque. Someone told him that Mr Miah had become much worse and to come quick. My eldest son-in-law came from hearing about it at work; the younger sonin-law came. Everyone came, no one was left. My son, though, was still at school. They had gone out for a day trip, for games or something. He was about fifteen then. The teachers were all looking for him. One of the teachers came, I think he’s from Calcutta. He immediately saw the state Mr Miah was in and called the school and said let the boy come home, his father doesn’t have much time left. The teacher saw him coming from outside and quickly went and got him. Finally he came in and everyone told him to put one drop of water in his father’s mouth. It was then that he died. At 1.07 p.m. At the time of Zumma [midday prayer]. 15 October 1996.

This account tells us a great deal about how Mrs Bibi has reconstructed her husband’s death. The dramatic thrust and suspense of the story lies in the urgent gathering of family and friends around Mr Miah’s deathbed. She goes to great lengths to list everyone who was there, and to tell of how people were contacted and informed of what was about to happen. Crucially, her husband does not die until his son finally arrives home and sprinkles a few drops of holy water in his mouth. That everyone was there is vital to her story and to her pride that she was able to arrange for her husband to die at home. As she starts her narrative by telling us, even the most important Muslims end up dying in a hospital. But not her husband. Mrs Bibi is intimately involved with her husband’s physical needs, as are all women caring for very sick and incapacitated husbands. Within her account, the level of loving bodily care she gives him is striking. She brushes his teeth, covers him with blankets, readies him for death. Indeed, her fate is so closely intermeshed with his, that, as she tends to him in his last hours, her feet and hands ache. Even today I have the same pain she says, her body taking on the suffering of her husband, her memories of his death for ever embodied by her own pain. This type of death is not however always possible to arrange. The need to control distressing symptoms, or the unexpected nature of death, often means that it takes place in a hospital or hospice. Lack of close kin who can provide palliative care for the dying may also contribute to the decision to go into an institution for the last weeks or days. The following story was told to me by Hasna Bibi, the widow of Abdul Wahed, who died in the London Hospital from diabetes and heart disease. Since I did not know Hasna Bibi well, I did not tape-record her narrative, and so must recount the story in my own words. – 194 –

The Final Journey Abdul Wahed was in his mid-80s. He had spent most of the last forty years in the UK working as a tailor’s presser, his wife and children joining him in 1989. His condition had been deteriorating over the summer, and on several occasions Hasna Bibi had taken him to the hospital, often waiting for many hours before the staff would allow her to see him. This time he was admitted on a Saturday and Hasna Bibi was sent home, having been told she would be contacted if there was any change in his condition. She spent most of Sunday with him and left him that evening. At 3 a.m. that night, she told me, she became extremely agitated, certain that he was worse and desperate to be with him. The next morning the hospital rang her home with the news that he had died in the night. Since she does not speak English, and there were no interpreters to hand, the news was broken to her fifteen-year-old daughter, who then had to tell her mother of her father’s death. In discussing her husband’s death, Hasna Bibi told me how distressed she was that she was not with him during his last hours. In her view, her husband’s death was not a good one, for he died alone, without family around him and with no prayers being said for him. Similar views were echoed by other widows, all of whom emphasized the importance of dying at home. In the following, Lokki Bibi (see Chapter 6) tells of her husband’s death: I told the doctor that I didn’t want him to be taken to the hospital, that I wanted him to breathe his last breath in this house. They did not take him [to the hospital]. He breathed his last breath here: he died in the sitting-room. All the relatives came and saw him. I was nearby, reading [from the Quran]. He died near me. 30 July 1996.

Soyful Begum, a widow who now lives alone in sheltered housing, says the following: For us, as Muslims [death] is better in the home. There are less problems . . . we want to die hearing the Kolimas. But it is not always possible to do that here in this country. If you’re just a little ill they take you to hospital. For us as Muslims, dying at home means that the four Kuls [Quranic Surahs] can be read for you. If Kolima Shadat falls on their ears then the dying will remember Allah . . . people say: ‘Allah, when I die let it be with the Kolimas in my ears.’ 16 October 1996.

Through such statements we hear of the centrality of home and the family; death is seen less as a medical or individual event than as one that – 195 –

Age, Narrative and Migration is inherently social. While the emotional need to be close to relatives is of course central to this, there is also a vitally important spiritual dimension to such statements, for, as the widows above have told us, it is at home where prayers can be said and readings from the Quran take place. In the context of death ‘home’ becomes a sacred domain; contrasted to this, the institutional settings of hospitals and hospices are profane, places where prayers and ritual do not normally take place. As we shall shortly see, the construction of domestic space as sacred, versus public, British space as profane is also played out transnationally. In decisions over where to bury the bodies of dead kin, it is the desh as a whole that is usually constructed as the more sacred location. First, however, let us consider in more detail those deaths that take place in institutional settings within the UK. As we shall see, while hospices and hospitals may insist on particular modes of behaviour, patients and their families may resist their attempts at control; what is at dispute goes to the heart of elders’ construction of family and selfhood.

Institutional Care for the Dying: Compromise and Contestation Despite the stated preference of all of our informants for the deaths of relatives to take place within the home, institutions such as St Michael’s hospice6 report increasing usage by the Bengali population. Lack of close kin living nearby, housing problems and the increasingly aged nature of the population are all contributing to this trend. Another factor may be the increasing awareness within the Bengali community that palliative services are available. Indeed, rather than the desire to be cared for by the extended family, staff at the hospice suggested to me that language barriers were the most important cause of the relatively low uptake of services: until recently, many people did not know they existed. Figures for 1995 and 1996 provided by the hospice show that of those Bengali patients who were receiving care from community palliative nurses,7 54 per cent of deaths took place at home, 22 per cent in the hospice, and 22 per cent in hospital. Comparative figures for community palliative care patients in general show that, in 1995, 41 per cent of deaths took place at home, 45 per cent in the hospice and 14 per cent in hospital. Thus, while it would seem that more Bengali patients die at home than 6. This hospice serves Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets. I have changed its name. 7. The majority of these would have had terminal illnesses, such as cancer.

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The Final Journey the average in Tower Hamlets, a considerable proportion also choose or are forced through circumstances to go into the hospice. In death, as in sickness, these patients and their families are therefore increasingly dependent upon the medical services provided by the state. And since death is culturally constructed and made meaningful and bearable through a range of ritual and non-ritual practices, it is hardly surprising that when it takes place in public settings such as hospitals and hospices it can become an area of contestation, in which different groups struggle to define meaning. Such negotiations can be more or less conflictual, depending upon the institutional context and individuals concerned. What are at stake are issues surrounding the appropriate treatment of a dying person and his or her corpse, and the appropriate behaviour of mourners, both of which are intimately linked to deeply held beliefs both within Muslim/Bengali traditions, and within Christian8 or secular health-care institutions in Britain. As we shall also see, ‘multiculturalism’ tends to be a series of concessions to those outside the liberal white/Christian mainstream rather than an equal weighting being given to the different traditions. Despite the best intentions of many staff, and often because of unavoidable practical constraints, in the end it is the culture of the white majority that dominates. The conflicts that take place are not wholly to do with different cultural ‘traditions’, however. It would be simplistic to present them as a straightforward clash between ‘Muslim’ or ‘Bengali’ beliefs and those of the secular/Christian majority. While this was the framework that many white professionals used to discuss the perceived differences between their ‘Bangladeshi’ and ‘English’ patients, shortage of resources (beds, staff time, space for grieving and prayer), language barriers, and the inexperience of many older people in dealing with the contemporary British state and the National Health Service and its attendant bureaucracy are also important. None of these factors is necessarily attached to a specific ‘cultural group’, but all may be experienced by a wide number of patients within Tower Hamlets. Rather than a series of conflicts, it would probably be more accurate to present the ‘interface’ between Bengali patients and the staff of St Michael’s and the London Hospital as a process of negotiation and compromise. The staff interviewed in both institutions were at pains to stress the degrees to which Muslim ‘needs’ (as they perceived them) were catered for. This often involves a reorganization of space to create the 8. I am not attempting to construct Britain as ‘Christian’, but referring to the Catholic tradition on which the hospice was founded.

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Age, Narrative and Migration impression of multiculturalism. Spaces made available for Muslim prayers in wards, posters hung over Catholic artefacts at St Michael’s giving information on Muslim festivals, and a non-Christian laying-out room in the hospice, used mainly by Muslim and Jewish families, are some examples. There are, however, particular issues that for practical as well as cultural reasons the two institutions are less able to accommodate. One of the main problems raised by staff involved the relationship between the institutions and the families of Bengali patients, who are presented as visiting in large and unmanageable numbers. In this context institutional constraints mean that the support, prayer and collective mourning of kin at the bedside of a dying patient – such an important aspect of a ‘good death’ in the widows’ narratives – are not always possible. Taking up large amounts of space in crowded wards (bays around beds only take about six people) and sometimes expecting to be able to heat up and feed their loved ones home-cooked food (prohibited by health and safety regulations) family members often cause serious practical problems for hard-pressed and under-resourced staff. As one worker put it: ‘A lot of the difficulty is that the West is so individually orientated that the concept that somebody isn’t separate from the family is a very difficult concept to handle.’ A second and related issue concerns language. Community palliative nurses at St Michael’s estimate that about a quarter of the patients on their list do not have English as their first language. For many palliative nurses, sensitive communication with patients is central to what they see as good practice. When the patient does not speak English and staff are forced (through lack of interpreters) to communicate via family members, they often feel frustrated. Worse, many fear that the messages about the illness and the options for its control are not getting across in the way that they would like. Here, deeply held beliefs surrounding individual choice and ‘rights’ come up against not only the practical issue of language, but also beliefs concerning the primacy of the family, gender relations, and alternative notions of appropriate treatment for the dying. All of these issues are encompassed by a situation that several nurses described to me: the involvement of English-speaking Bengali husbands as interpreters for their non-English-speaking wives. While (predominantly female and white) nurses wish to communicate directly with female patients, speaking to them personally and helping them choose pain relief and so on, husbands and other male family members often argue that as the heads of their families all communications should go through them. The shortage of interpreters experienced throughout Tower Hamlets is of course an exacerbating factor. At the Catholic St Michael’s – 198 –

The Final Journey (which was described to me by one staff member as a ‘matriarchal’ institution, since all its senior staff are female and it is headed by a matron) the control by male kin over female patients that takes place partly, but not wholly, because of language barriers, was presented to me by staff as ‘a major cultural challenge’. Families can also sometimes disagree with institutions over the appropriate treatment of dying patients. As one nurse explained, family members sometimes under-report the degree of pain that patients are experiencing as a result of the belief that the more pain is felt at death the less will be experienced after death (it is believed by most Muslims that the deceased feel pain until they are buried). This belief runs counter to the ethos of palliative care, which is to relieve the distress of the dying person. A second area of contention surrounding patients’ care can be that not enough is being done to sustain life.9 When a person is clearly dying, nurses told me, families sometimes insist on drips being erected in order to nourish them, or food being forced into their mouths. It is at the time of death, however, that problems, represented by the staff as to do with ‘cultural clashes’, are likely to arise. The main issue involves the differing notions of what constitutes a ‘good’ death. While for Muslim Bengalis a ‘good death’ involves being surrounded by kin reciting prayers, for many non-Muslims the ‘good’ death is one of peace and tranquillity. These different models can lead to tensions between groups. As one member of staff put it, when there are thirty or more people ‘screaming’ around the bed of a recently deceased Muslim patient, this could destroy the ‘peaceful’ death of a non-Muslim in the next-door bed. In her view such behaviour needs to be swiftly contained, for if a large and identifiable group are disturbing the peaceful death of someone else, they may cause considerable anger and resentment. The speedy removal of bodies to a non-denominational viewing room usually succeeded in doing this. As she continued: ‘The community relations we’re doing here isn’t just about caring within the hospice but can be an extension of good racial relations outside, so that people are seen to be behaving appropriately to other people.’

Laying Out the Body The ritual preparation of the body for burial is an important part of Muslim death rituals, and most non-Muslim staff working with dying 9 According to Muslim belief, every effort should be made to sustain life.

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Age, Narrative and Migration patients in the London Hospital and St Michael’s are aware that they should not touch a corpse themselves. Instead, they leave its preparation for family members or the Muslim undertaker, Hajji Tasleem, based at the East London Mosque. In both institutions bodies are rapidly removed to laying-out rooms, where, as one staff member at St Michael’s put it: ‘[People can] do what they want. They can sob, scream, use mobile phones and so on without upsetting the other patients.’ In rural Bangladesh bodies are washed and prepared for burial by close members of the patrilineage: men by men, and women by women. In London, this preparation is done almost entirely by employees of Hajji Tasleem. Workers there told me that although family members do sometimes attend the ghosul (ritual bath), most Bengalis are reluctant to do more than sprinkle zum zum pani in the deceased’s mouth or nostrils. The reasons for this, they thought, were that while in Bangladeshi villages it is relatively common to see corpses, here such sights are rare, causing the fear of dead bodies shared by most people in Britain. Combined with this, the majority of bereaved relatives lack confidence in how to perform the ghosul, knowledge that in Bangladesh would normally be held among lineage elders. In other words, in Britain such ritual knowledge has passed from the domain of the family, to that of private mosque-sponsored functionaries. This contrasts with Werbner’s finding amongst Pakistanis in Manchester, where she observed close family members actively participating in laying out the body of a dead woman.10 Within the Muslim tradition, (as it was represented to me in Sylhet and Tower Hamlets) it is important that bodies should be buried as quickly as possible, as the soul is not thought to leave the body until this point. Since the deceased is thought to experience pain before burial, procedures such as autopsies and embalming are, in theory, to be avoided at all costs. However, British law stipulates that post-mortems have to be carried out if death occurs unexpectedly. Most relatives find this highly distressing;11 but it cannot of course be avoided. In some cases bodies are not returned for several months, although employees at Hajji Tasleem report that some coroners in Tower Hamlets with experience of working with Muslims do attempt to return their bodies as quickly as possible. Most Bengali Muslims choose to wrap the corpse in a length of cloth and place it in a simple coffin. In some cases, bodies are buried in the 10. Werbner 1990: 169. 11. Although many British Bengalis choose to have their loved one’s corpses embalmed in order for them to be returned to Bangladesh, a procedure that, as Hajji Tasleem’s employees point out, is just as painful.

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The Final Journey UK without a coffin, although not all graveyards allow this, since it is thought that witnessing a non-coffin burial might ‘upset’ other users of the graveyard. The coffin is then taken to the mosque for prayers and either transported to one of East London’s Muslim graveyards, or to the airport to be transported by Bangladesh Biman to Sylhet.

Burial and Death Rituals in Bangladesh Like many Londoni men of their generation, the burials of both Abdul Wahed and Mr Miah took place in their home villages in Sylhet rather than in the country where both men had spent most of their lives. Neither of their widows returned to the desh for the funeral. Instead, they stayed in Britain while their sons accompanied the body. While I was told by Mrs Bibi that the chronic sickness of her daughter was the reason she did not attend Mr Miah’s funeral party, it is actually the norm for Britishbased widows to remain in Britain. One reason for this may be that in their capacity as carers, most have children or other dependants in the UK who cannot be left, and as we have seen, life in Britain increases the dependency of children or frail elderly relatives on individual women. Of equal importance is the religious injunction that widows should be secluded for forty days after the death of their husbands. Combined with this, in Sylhet funerals are the ritual domain of men, and not women. Indeed, in Talukpur during my fieldwork women were not allowed to enter graveyards or accompany funeral cortèges carrying the corpse, but had to watch at a distance. The same was true for a Bengali funeral I attended in London. The rituals surrounding death are therefore not only spread between places, but also highly gendered. This is of course hardly surprising in the cultural context of Sylheti Islam, where ideologies of purdah stress the division of male and female space and, in particular, rigorously exclude women from formal ritual domains such as mosques, Eidghar and graveyards. Yet while Sylheti Muslim rituals and the spaces over which they are performed are nearly always gendered, in transnational funerals different types of ritual are linked to different places. In Abdul Wahed’s case, female rituals took place in Britain, while the more formal male rituals took place in Sylhet. While I would not wish to characterize each place as generally associated with male or female ritual (for of course widows also perform rituals in Bangladesh and men bury their dead in Muslim graveyards in Britain), this division of ritual labour between places is suggestive of a more general observation. Firstly, for

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Age, Narrative and Migration many British Bengalis the desh is strongly associated with sacred capital; secondly, men have more opportunities to access this capital than women.

Widowhood Rituals in Britain When a Bengali Muslim man dies, his widow is expected to spend forty days in strict seclusion: a condition that few women can fully observe, especially not if they live in a nuclear household on a housing estate in Tower Hamlets. In her account of events, Hasna Bibi told me that she did manage to observe the forty-day seclusion, even though, as she explained, widows are allowed to leave the house in an emergency, such as cashing a giro check or visiting the housing office. As is customary, her wedding gold was removed by another related widow (her daughter’s mother-inlaw) and she changed from the brightly patterned saris of a married woman to plain white cloth. She also held a milad (religious event when the imam comes to pray) at her house and distributed shinni (ritual distribution of food, uncooked rice or meat) at the end of the forty days. Although excluded from the death rituals in Sylhet, she was therefore able to perform some ritual mourning in Britain, although today she says that her inability to accompany her husband’s body, or see where it was buried, is a cause of great sadness to her. A second set of activities that mark death in an important way involve the British state and the bureaucratization of death in the UK. After a person has died, dealings with state bureaucracy often take up considerable time, especially if they were household heads in whose name tenancies were held and pensions drawn. Crucially, too, widows must apply for their widow’s pension, a process that requires proof of marriage and the National Insurance numbers of their husbands. Hopefully this is relatively unproblematic: proof of marriage is usually a precondition to women’s entry to Britain. In some cases, however, their marital status, plus the age and working history of their husbands, is almost impossible to verify. This may be because, until recently, neither births nor marriages were officially noted in rural Sylhet (a practice that is only changing because of the demands of British immigration authorities). Many widows are therefore left with a huge pile of forms to ‘fill-up’ (a Banglish phrase) and most whose husbands used the facilities at the day centre appeal to care workers there to help them. This often means that the ‘rule’ of forty days’ seclusion is, like most neom (social rules), highly flexible and open to various interpretations.

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The Final Journey

Death Rituals in Sylhet Abdul Wahed and Mr Miah’s burial in their home villages in Sylhet was quite normal for migrants of their generation. Although sending bodies overseas involves the Haram (ritually forbidden) process of embalming, the Muslim undertakers Hajji Tasleem estimate that about 60–70 per cent of Bengali corpses are sent to Bangladesh by their British-based kin. There, they are usually buried in family-owned land close to patrilineal homesteads, or in some instances in graves close to the shrines of famous Sylheti pir (saints), which can be acquired at some cost. The usual reason given by the elders for returning bodies to Sylhet is that kin in Sylhet need to see the deceased one last time, and can regularly visit the grave and pray for him or her there. This prayer, informants told me, plays an important role in the soul’s journey to Heaven. Since there are no Muslim burial grounds within Tower Hamlets (owing to pressure on space) and visiting the ones at Tottenham, Walthamstow and Forest Gate involves lengthy and difficult journeys across north-east London, the ease with which graves in Sylhet can be reached by Bangladesh-based kin and the deceased thereby remembered is no doubt important. As I suggest below, however, shifting constructions of desh and bidesh, which link the former with religiosity and cutural capital and the latter with work and material gain, are also key. Once returned to Sylhet International Airport,12 the bodies of deceased migrants are transported as quickly as possible to their villages. During my visits to Talukpur, I have observed the return of dead Londonis on several occasions.13 In the most memorable, the corpse was transported in a traditional covered boat down the river, garlanded with flowers and accompanied by male relatives and a cassette recorder loudly broadcasting Muslim prayers. When there is a death people of two categories gather around the deceased’s bari. The first are relatives and neighbours, who come out of respect to view the body; a smaller group of lineage members usually participate in praying and burial rites. The second category are the local poor, some of whom are full-time beggars, who congregate at the bari at the time of the funeral to receive shinni (in this

12. The airport in Sylhet Town started to receive international flights, from Britain and the Middle East, in 1999. 13. In all the cases I came across, the deceased was male. The most probable reason for this is demographic: since men tend to marry younger women, their British-based wives are not yet at an age when death is common. I was told by my hosts that women may also be buried back in the desh.

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Age, Narrative and Migration case, alms in the form of rice, money or the most sacred form of shinni: meat from a sacrificed bull).14 The distribution of shinni is seen as an important way in which the soul is aided in its journey to Heaven (Behest). The investment into sacred capital seems very literal: the more resources are distributed, the more religious merit (suab) is generated for the dead. Similar thought lies behind the holding of milad on the anniversary of the death, or in the weeks leading up to Shabai Berat (an important date on the Muslim calendar, when prayers are held throughout the night to seek forgiveness for sins and build up religious merit), when the nights are filled with the sound of amplified prayer. As I have argued elsewhere, since both ritual distributions and milad require considerable resources, religious merit generated in this way clearly comes more easily to wealthy households.15 At the funeral of a wealthy migrant it is therefore common for literally hundreds of destitute people to wait with their begging bowls, squatting on the ground in long lines. After the shinni has been distributed by male members of the deceased’s gusti (patrilineage), the body is wrapped in its shroud, and carried on a palki (stretcher, made of bamboo) to the coverstan (graveyard), where it is buried and prayers are said. Unlike the public graveyards of Britain, in Talukpur coverstan tend to be patches of ‘wild’ land, rising like islands from the fields. Although agricultural land is divided between households, it tends to be clustered around the jointly occupied homestead, and the coverstan is communal, turned into a sacred site by the burial of an ancestor, several generations back, and marked by trees and in some cases stone tombs. Other graveyards exist around the shrine of local pir (Muslim saints), the most important of which is the shrine of Shah Jalal in Sylhet Town. Plots in the coverstan surrounding these shrines are often acquired by migrant families in advance, a wise investment given their spiralling prices.

Identity and The Sacred Desh Through the journeys of the dead from East London to rural Sylhet, social links are reproduced and places symbolically tied together across space. People whose relatives have spent most of their lives abroad can finally view their bodies; kinship ideology, which stresses togetherness and 14. Shinni in the form of sweetmeats are also commonly distributed by women to neighbours and village-based relatives in order to generate spiritual merit at times of special need, such as the exams of a child or sickness. 15. Gardner 1993b, and 1995.

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The Final Journey physical proximity, so sorely contradicted by overseas migration, is reinforced once more. Combined with this, generous distribution of alms at funerals and large-scale milad produce both sacred capital for the deceased, and also social capital – status, patronage and so on – for their living kin. Yet while instrumentalist explanations might take us some of the way in understanding them, the reasons why households now wholly based in Britain go against Islamic teachings, embalm the bodies of their dead and spend large amounts of money in returning them to the desh are more complex than they allow for. Indeed, transnational funerals reveal profound issues surrounding identity, perceptions of place, and the Islamization of space, both in Sylhet and in Britain. Muslim Sylhetis view their land as particularly holy, since the famous Muslim pir Shah Jalal, and his sixty disciples, are buried there. Thus, while the most sacred place for a person to be buried is Mecca,16 Sylhet is infinitely preferable to the decidedly non-holy land of the UK. As I was frequently told during my doctoral fieldwork, because of its religious history Sylheti land is particularly fertile and auspicious. This is physically expressed through a sacred geography of shrines, scattered across the Sylheti countryside. Crucial here, are links between the sacred history of Shah Jalal and his disciples, and the genealogies of local lineages. As I have argued elsewhere, the ancestors of Londonis are often re-invented as pir as part of the economic and social transformations caused by migration.17 There is therefore no strict division between the burial places of ancestors and the sacred sites of shrines. Viewed from this perspective, the burial of migrants – many of whom have acquired merit through the performance of Haj – in the soil of the desh both increases their own religious capital, and adds to the sacred nature of the land. Yet whilst the gaining of sacred capital is of prime importance, so too is the closely interwoven issue of personal identity. As we have seen throughout this book, many elders face their lives in Britain with deep ambivalence, and hold the dream of eventually returning to Bangladesh close to their hearts. In my concluding chapter, I shall indicate the extent to which the fantasy of the desh as the idealized place of return often coexists with other, far more realistic views of what life in rural Sylhet would really be like. These ambiguous feelings towards the desh, and its opposite, Britain, run through the narratives of many, if not all, of the elders. At the time of death, however, I suggest that there is a significant 16. Some of the richest Bengali Muslims have paid for graves in Mecca. 17. Gardner 1993b, 1995, 1999b.

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Age, Narrative and Migration shift in attitude. As the domain of the sacred and – inextricably – the site where the patrilineage is based (through the ownership of land and the burial of ancestors in its soil, as well as the physical location of many if not all patrilineage members there) it is to the desh that most elders feel their corpses, if not always their living bodies, should return. As Abdullah Ali put it: ‘The earth where I buried my father is where I want to be buried, that’s my idea. That’s the promise I’m going to make myself before I go back [to Bangladesh]’ (8 October 1996). Fazlu Miah commented: ‘It’s best to be buried in Bangladesh. It’s our own country, and our own earth’ (3 November 1996). To this extent the return of bodies to the desh represents the final stage in many migrants’ journeys: finally they are home, buried in the soil of their gusti. * * * To close this chapter, I wish to return to the issue of gender. As we have already seen, the practices surrounding death are highly gendered and are often spread transnationally between Britain and Bangladesh. This has important implications for the different ways in which men and women experience the death of those close to them. And we have also seen throughout the book, transnational migration is itself a gendered process. As the women’s narratives show, place and location tend to have specific meanings, organized around the need to be physically close to family members. Since death is a time when such closeness (and the ritual practices that express it) are understood as spiritually as well as emotionally vital, it is at the death of their husbands that for many women the transnational nature of their lives become particularly difficult to deal with. Indeed, one of the clearest impressions which I gained from my conversations with widows was that when their husbands are buried in Sylhet, those based in Britain find their bereavement far harder to cope with than those whose husbands’ bodies remain in the UK. This often agonizing sense of disjunction is a result both of the particular ways in which women’s identities are constructed, and also of the articulation of different forms of power with place. While it would be ridiculous to suggest that only women bear the emotional costs of separation, their movement between places is nearly always more constrained than that of senior men. At a general level this is because decisions concerning migration and the physical organization of the household between places are usually taken by men. This is not to say that women are totally powerless: women of the older generation, for example, often

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The Final Journey have a say in where they are located. I can think of at least two cases in Talukpur where women with adult sons in Britain have visited them there, not liked it, and chosen to return to the village. Yet while these women may have a degree of agency, they do not usually have the authority to dictate where other members of the household go, nor if their husbands are alive do they generally control the household finances or the paperwork that movement between Bangladesh and Britain requires. Thus, while poverty and the British State prevent complete freedom of movement between the UK and Bangladesh for both men and women, it is fair to say that women move between places even less than men. What this means in terms of the death of loved ones and the ritual practices that surround the mourning process is that religious ideology, which decrees that widows be secluded and prohibited from graveyards, plus their role as carers, which tends to be exacerbated by life in Britain, both add to the exclusion of women from their husband’s funerals. While it is true that even in Bangladesh women would not be able to accompany the body to the coverstan (and to this extent there is probably a degree of romanticism in women’s construction of ‘how things would be’ if they were in the village) the links made in local kinship ideology between local land, the gusti and physical togetherness all make it important for people to be close to the burial place of close kin. In the women’s narratives the themes of separation from relatives and their exclusion from the burial of kin in Bangladesh were returned to time and time again. As Chapna Bibi told me, this has been central to her experience of her husband’s death: Q: Do you think that if you had accompanied your husband’s body to Bangladesh you would have felt less grief at his death? I would have felt that at least I saw how he was laid to rest . . . with my own eyes. I think I would have felt a little more at peace, because I often wonder about how they did what they did when they took him to Bangladesh – who was there, who came, how his shinni was organized and how many people came. I didn’t see these things. I didn’t see how he was buried. 15 October 1996.

Lokki Bibi made the following comments: Q: Why was your husband’s body sent to Bangladesh? In Bangladesh he has children, they can see him. There are also other relatives, and the people generally can see his face. He can be buried in his own land.

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Age, Narrative and Migration . . . Q: How do you feel about him being buried there? Ah, my dear, I feel . . . [she starts to cry] It hurts. 28 October 1996.

In my concluding chapter I shall return to the recurrent theme of the desh, which seems so key to the ways in which the elders speak of their lives and of migration, as well as to their personal identities. For now, however, one final and crucial point is that the relationships between places described here are far from static. While the older generation of British Sylhetis tend to construct Sylhet as the primary site of their spirituality, and accordingly perform key funerary rituals there, this is changing, for the relationships that take place transnationally are never static . An important part of this process is that increasingly British sites are becoming Islamicized18 and burials are taking place in Britain, not Sylhet. As Hajji Tasleem pointed out, to a certain extent decisions over where to bury kin are based on practical considerations. If there was a cemetery next to the East London mosque, he suggested, many more families would bury their kin there. Not only would it be located within the heart of the Bengali community in Tower Hamlets, but the East London Mosque is itself a sacred site, despite being built on British soil. Thus, while regular trips to the Muslim graveyards at Forest Gate and Walthamstow may be so difficult that burial in Sylhet seems preferable, over time new sites will be found,19 just as the location of East London’s Bengali population will also no doubt change. As we shall see in the next chapter, we must be careful not to assume that places, and what they symbolize, stay the same.

18. For further discussion see Eade 1996b. 19. During my research negotiations were taking place about several sites in London.

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–9– Conclusion: Desh–Bidesh Revisited People between two countries always feel sorrow. Mothers and fathers worry about what their child is doing in another country. The child sometimes finds happiness. According to Bangladeshi perceptions they are sleeping in a big bed, eating chicken and wearing expensive saris. But some only feel pain, like when a burning chilli is rubbed into your flesh, a burning pain like that . . . Mrs Khatun (Chapter 3) 30 December 1996. Bangladesh is full of shoytans [devils]. My heart cries out for it, but I don’t want to go. It is the place of my birth, but now everything is just bribes [goosh]. Abdullah Ali, 23 December 1996.

The above quotation sum up many of the issues I wish to turn to in this concluding chapter. As Mrs Khatun so succinctly puts it, while those who stay on in the desh have certain perceptions of life in Britain, for those who have moved, their experience of life in the ‘promised land’ is often one of emotional pain and loss. The contradiction in Mr Ali’s statement speaks for itself: Bangladesh is the place of his birth, but now everything has changed and he both yearns for it and does not want to return. He is not alone in this almost palpable sense of conflicting desires, of being continually divided against himself. As I have suggested throughout this book, ambivalence towards different places, and by extension, the constant re-evaluation of one’s past, present and future locations are hallmarks of the transnational experience amongst the elders we spoke to. In what follows I therefore wish to focus more closely on what I have termed the ‘problem’ of desh–bidesh, the perpetual re-assessment of in which place it is best to be, the sense that wherever one goes, one has always left part of oneself behind in the ‘other’ place. This experience was vividly embodied for me by Abdul Sayeed, a returned Londoni, whom I first met in Talukpur in 1987. Like other men of his generation, Abdul Sayeed had spent most of his adult life in Britain, where he had married an English woman and worked as a chef in – 209 –

Age, Narrative and Migration restaurants across the Midlands. Now, he told me during our first meeting, he had returned to the village for good. His marriage to the English woman was over, and he would spend his old age with his Bangladeshi wife and son in his village house, which was gradually being rebuilt. A few months later, however, the story had changed. His heart was sick for Britain, he now said. He missed the family and friends he had there, and was worried about his business interests; soon he would be returning to the UK. This set the pattern for the next decade, in which his physical movements between Britain and Bangladesh graphically embodied his restlessness and inability to be ‘at home’. The last time I saw him, in the winter of 1999, he really had finally returned to Talukpur, but this time he had been diagnosed as having terminal cancer, and no further treatment being possible, was about to die. The pukka house in the family bari has never been completed. I shall return to Abdul Sayeed shortly. Firstly, however, let me turn to recent theorizations of place, identity and ‘home’. These take us a considerable way in trying to grasp the slippery relationships between the elders and their relationships with desh–bidesh, and indeed, with the whole web of relationships, imaginings and activities that transnational migration has involved. Yet as I shall argue, without a consideration of age and gender as two of the most central ways in which histories, desires and identities are constructed around particular places, and without these being carefully contextualized, such ideas are in danger of homogenizing the ‘migrant experience’. By analysing the variety of ways in which different elders think about the desh, and how these shift over time and depend upon particular contexts, we are returned to the central topic of this book: the relationship between the life course, migration and narrative.

Theorizing Place and Home in the Age of Migration As was mentioned in Chapter 1, during the last decade ‘traditional’ anthropological theories, which assumed that cultures and identities were rooted in particular, fixed locations, have been radically critiqued.1 This is in part due to the loss of anthropological faith in the very notion of cultural wholes, places and ‘peoples’ that are bounded and easily identified as ‘cultural regions’. It also results – and the two points are intimately related – from 1. For example, Gupta and Ferguson 1992, 1997; Clifford 1997; Hastrup and FogOlwig 1997; Rapport and Dawson 1998; Lovell 1998. As several of these writers have pointed out, it is important not to essentialize ‘traditional anthropology’.

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Conclusion the growing importance of processes of globalization to the people and groups that anthropologists study. In the early twenty-first century, it is argued, nearly everyone is a migrant, and movement is the quintessential experience of the age; ‘non-places’ such as shopping malls, railway stations or motorways have become the measure of our time.2 Indeed, Appadurai has suggested that we conceptualize this deterritorialized world in terms of ‘scapes’. These are: ‘. . . the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups which are spread around the world’.3 Ethnoscapes, for example, are the imaginary landscapes of migrants, tourists, refugees and other moving groups. It is not that relatively stable networks, communities and so on do not exist, but rather that: ‘. . . the warp of these stabilities is everywhere shot through with with the woof of human motion, as more persons or groups deal with the realities of having to move, or the fantasies of wanting to move’.4 As part of these processes, people’s relationship to particular places, like their self-identity, is continually changing, being made and remade over time and space. This is partly because global movement transforms one’s attachments to place in complex ways. As Chambers writes: ‘Migrancy, . . . involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain.’5 ‘Home’ is for ever altered; as Abdul Sayeed discovered, there is no simple ‘return’. Rapport and Dawson suggest that in order to understand these changing constructions of place, ‘home’ is an important analytic category, for it is often key to the shifting ways in which people talk about their identities and relationships. Whereas ‘home’ may once have been considered as stable and safe, now it has become something fluid: a set of practices, memories and myths rather than a stable or fixed ‘place’.6 This does not mean that ideas and practices of home become less important, or indeed that people are any less attached to particular places. As Karen Fog-Olwig shows in her ethnography of West Indians on Nevis, their propensity to migrate is balanced by an equally strong attachment to what she terms ‘cultural sites’, such as family houses or land located on the island. These accommodate local and global conditions of life for West Indians on the move, providing stable and significant points of 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Rapport and Dawson 1998: 6. Appadurai 1990: 296. ibid.: 297. Chambers 1994: 5. Rapport and Dawson 1998: 3–9.

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Age, Narrative and Migration cultural identity and helping to reconcile the contradictory conditions that they face in their global and de-territorialized worlds.7 I find this approach particularly useful, for by contextualizing the ways in which ‘home’ and its manifestations in various ‘cultural sites’ are thought about and acted upon Fog-Olwig shows the historically specific meanings that they have acquired for a certain group of people. Indeed, in considering more generally the shifting ways in which places are constructed and experienced it is important to demonstrate how these relate to particular social processes and relationships, as well as global and local histories. Rather than simply stressing fluidity and movement in the discussion of migrants’ identities and experience (terms that are used so often in the literature that they are almost clichés), we must also be careful to distinguish between different types of movement8 as well as different types of migrant. Who, we might ask, are the global migrants imagining and participating in Appadurai’s ethnoscapes? Are they all the same, and, if not, how do differences between them affect and participate in how they imagine the world? In order to answer these questions, I suggest that gender and age may be good starting-points. As we have seen throughout the book, the practices and meanings that constitute place and ‘home’ and the ways in which these are imagined by the elders articulate in complex ways with gender and generation. They also shift across space. As became clear to me as over the years I met with him both in Britain and Bangladesh, Abdul Sayeed thought of both places differently according to where he was. Indeed, like so many Londonis, wherever he was, he seemed to long for the ‘other’ place. As Said has suggested, migrancy and exile involve a constant quarrel with where one comes from9 (and, by extension, where one currently is). Abdul Sayeed’s perception of Britain and Bangladesh also shifted over his life course. As a young man, he told me, he only returned to his village a handful of times. While one part of him still identified strongly with Talukpur, he was also centrally concerned with his life in Britain, his English wife and the establishment of various restaurants in the UK. Over time, however, this changed. As with other men of his generation, his relationship with his English wife broke down, and his thoughts began to turn towards the desh as the place where he should retire, where, as an old man, he would truly ‘belong’. To this 7. Fog-Olwig 1997. 8. For example, temporary labour migration, political exile and tourism are all radically different: Rapport and Dawson 1998: 23. 9. Said 1990.

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Conclusion extent he subscribed to Anwar’s ‘Myth of Return’,10 but, as became clear, both his relationship to his desh and to Britain were neither fixed nor straightforward. Indeed, it was only as he faced death that he truly ‘returned’, if by this we understand return to be permanent. Like the study of gender, the study of ageing and the life course can therefore bring important insights to contemporary anthropological conceptualizations of the relationship between place, identity, movement, and ‘home’. The role of the body is central to this; bodies that move and change across space are also bodies that move and change across time. These changing bodies play an important role in how places are perceived and acted upon, for, as we have seen, places are not just ‘constructs’ existing in the imagination. They are also materially constituted locations, with very ‘real’ effects on people’s lives, their emotions and their bodily experiences and practices. Let us now return to the elders, and their various and shifting relationships with desh–bidesh.

The Desh, Migration and the Life Course How can I express my feelings about Bangladesh? It is the country of my birth, I’m never going to speak badly of it. Even if people say it, I would never say such things about my own country . . . It is my desh, so I have to say that it is good. But there is one thing . . . I worked and now I’m on a pension and get money; in our country that doesn’t exist. The bottom line is that you can’t get the laws of this country anywhere else. The Greatness in Great Britain will never go, and no country can compare to that. Fazlu Miah, 3 November 1996.

As we have seen, many of the elders have apparently contradictory views of Britain and the desh. This is in part a reflection of the general ambivalence that I have suggested characterizes their experience of migration to Britain. While some discuss migration in unambiguously negative or positive terms, for the majority, their emotions are mixed, the advantages of living in the UK juxtaposed in a variety of changing ways against the disadvantages. But there is more to such statements than a generalized sense of ambivalence. As I argued in Chapter 6, the desh has come to symbolize different things to men and women as they have grown older and their bodily, social and spiritual needs have changed. Combined

10. Anwar 1979.

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Age, Narrative and Migration with this are the objective changes within transnational relationships and activities that have taken place over the decades – the hardly surprising fact that transnational migration and the relationship between places that it involves are themselves unstable. In sum, we cannot fully understand people’s relationship to places or to movement without reference to time.

The Golden Land Let us start with the ways in which the desh was narrated by the men in their description of their early days in Britain. As we saw in Chapter 3, in those days Britain was largely perceived as a place of hardship, privation and work. In contrast, the desh was not only key to the men’s identities and sense of self, but the place where in general their emotional and spiritual needs were met, a place of bodily comfort, nourishment and nurture.11 In the following excerpt from Mr Haque’s life history (Chapter 3), he contrasts his memories of the joys and culinary pleasures of the desh with his working life and diet in Britain: What do I recall about Britain in the 1960s? I remember it all. But most of all I remember that I always thought of my desh, how I used to plough the land, sing and later how I used to write letters for people.12 Shopping in the market for fresh fish, jack-fruit . . . And of this country [the UK] I remember travelling around, how I went from place to place. Q: Was it a happy time for you? No. When I entered tailoring as a presser I worked hard. It was very demanding. I used to do everything. I used to buy a chicken, skin it, chop it up. I never threw anything away. With the skin I used to make one curry, with the guts another and with the meat another. It used to last me several days. 5 September 1996.

In describing Bangladesh as ‘the place of my birth’, (as did so many of the elders) similar links between the desh, nurture and kinship are being made. Mrs Khatun’s narration of her childhood, which is cited in Chapter 3, revolves around the relationship she had with her parents, and the food she used to eat: 11. I discuss the role of food from the desh for migrants in Britain elsewhere: Gardner 1993a. 12. He is referring to his role as one of the few literate men in his village.

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Conclusion Q: Were you happy during this time? Of course I was. In my bari we had mangoes, jackfruit, grapefruit, all of which I was eating on my own. 30 December 1996.

Here then, the desh is the ‘motherland’, a place of sustenance, to which in the early days of migration, the majority of the elders, believed they would eventually return. In the 1950s through to the mid-1980s this was often literally the case: men’s close relatives (especially their mothers and wives) were mainly located in the desh. Over time, however, and with the reunification of families in the UK, this has changed. In the following, Abdul Miah tells how, as a young man, he would yearn to return to his village, which he still identified strongly as ‘home’. . . . After five years in Britain I went back. I was just so happy. In the desh was my father, mother, my brothers and sisters, they were all around then. I still have brothers and sisters, and a chacha [paternal uncle] and chachi [paternal aunt]. On the day of departure, I was so happy. At Dhaka airport I went through customs, and someone told me to give the man a pound, quick give him a pound.13 I wanted to get to my bari so much that I gave him a £10 note. I wanted to see my father and my mother. But now I have no mother and no father and my brothers, I don’t really remember. What else can I tell you? I feel like going to Bangladesh now, but in my ill state . . . so I stay in a cold house. Sometimes I say to myself, I’ll go. I’ve got a daughter there, who’s married with kids. But I’d have to stay with her. I have my own bari, but who would look after me there? I’m ill. I think about that. How can I go and live in peace without my children? You tell me that. So I think about that mostly: where I will stay and who will look after me. In the old days everyone was there . . . 10 October 1996.

This statement indicates two important factors in Abdul Miah’s relationship with and perception of the desh. The first is that the social relationships that once bound him to it have changed: people have moved to Britain or died. The second is that his bodily needs are different. He is old and sick; he would be returning not as a triumphant son, flushed with success, but as a dependent elder, in need of care. In Chapter 6 I argued that these bodily changes, themselves closely related to the passage of time, have led to many elders’ concurrently

13. Presumably this is an allusion to a bribe given to customs officials.

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Age, Narrative and Migration retaining two imaginings of the desh. One is based on the material realities that they know are present in the desh, where there are floods, broken roads and cyclones, there is no National Health Service, and no economic security. The other is based on the rosily remembered land of times gone by, fed by both the nostalgia of old age and the images and rhetoric of Bangladeshi nationalism, which many elders were directly and indirectly involved with during the War of Liberation. This is the shonar Bangal (golden Bengal), the land of ‘sweet winds’ that many elders speak of. As Abdul Khalique puts it: I haven’t been to Bangladesh for thirteen years but if I do manage to go back I don’t think I will feel like coming back [here]. I won’t feel like leaving the golden land again. Bangladesh is the golden land. 13 December 1996.

As we saw in the last chapter, in Sylhet these images are interwoven with particular beliefs and ritual practices concerning Sylheti soil and its relationship both to local Islam and to kinship. Here, the land of the desh is understood as sacred. One’s bodily return to, and burial in it, adds to one’s sacred capital as well as reinforcing desh-based kinship networks and transnational linkages. In these religious narratives of the desh elders construct their spiritual identities, as well as bolstering the claims of their lineages to religious status.

The Desh Over Time: Shifting Images and Relationships Alongside the idealization of the desh however, are other images, and these are closely tied to the personal and collective histories of the elders. I am not arguing that when they were younger individuals imagined the desh in a homogeneous or wholly positive way, or indeed that all migrants do not have highly complex and often contradictory perceptions of their homelands. What I wish to suggest, however, is that images of home and of place are closely interwoven with the passage of time. The first point to be made here is that since 1971, when hopes for the newly liberated Bangladesh ran so high, the country has been beset with political and environmental problems. Since liberation there have been a series of coups, cyclones and disastrous floods, and even though the country is now run by a democratically elected government, the existing political climate is highly insecure, and hartals (national strikes, where one cannot move around or conduct business) and human rights abuses a

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Conclusion day-to-day reality. This, combined with the disjunction between desire, fantasy and reality that many of the elders experienced on their return trips to the desh, has contributed to a much more hard-headed, if not embittered, imagining of Bangladesh today. Part of this is related to the changes in identity that returned Londonis experienced. As we saw in earlier chapters, while several of the elders told us that they dreamt of glorious returns to the remembered places of their youth, not only have villages and homesteads physically changed, but they found that they were treated differently too. As outsiders in Britain, many discovered to their dismay they were now outsiders in Bangladesh as well. As Mr Haque put it in Chapter 3: ‘the people around our house, ooh, they thought I was such a beautiful fruit. I couldn’t sit in the local bazaar in peace, I was always surrounded.’ As this quotation indicates, the relationships between people in different places that transnational migration involves have been irreversibly changed, both by separation over space and over time. Thus, while for some elders relations with kin and neighbours in the desh have remained good, and arrangements concerning the farming of land, care of property and so on have been honoured, for others, disputes with desh-based relatives have soured their views of their home villages. And as many have discovered, property owners who are no longer resident are often vulnerable to land-grabbing and other forms of illegal behaviour endemic to Bangladesh. After eulogizing the desh, for example, Abdul Khalique goes on to explain how his brothers spent his remittances on land that they now refuse to share with him, and how he is no longer speaking to them. These types of experiences contribute to the following view, echoed by many different elders: Bangladesh is gone. Bangladesh is ruined [nostor]. Everywhere you go, no one understands anything except bribes. If you want to go to college you have to pay a bribe [goosh]. Even a worker who is supposed to look after your land . . . [will cheat you]. Bangladesh is bad. Abdul Matin, 5 November 1996.

Combined with this, as we saw in Chapter 6, Bangladesh today is also perceived by the majority of elders as a place of material deprivation and want. This has particular meanings for sick and elderly people, who need a dependable source of health care. Thus, while spiritually and emotionally many still perceive the desh as their ‘homeland’, in terms of their bodily needs and material security it is Britain that they acknowledge as the better place to live: – 217 –

Age, Narrative and Migration In this country [the UK] my children are learning. In Bangladesh I would not have been able to provide an education for them all. I would not have been able to feed them. In Bangladesh one night of rain can wash away hundreds of your crops, so how would I feed my children? Thieves, in the night, they would have taken everything. The land, the grass, the cattle . . . Mohammed Rahman, 18 November 1996.

This last quotation raises a vital point. Not only has the changing history of Bangladesh affected how elders think about the desh, but so too has the changing history of Bengali settlement in Britain. As time has progressed, the majority of families have now been reunited in the UK. This means that the desh is no longer the location of men’s basic bodily and emotional needs. With their wives and children with them in Britain, sustenance, comfort and emotional support are largely to be found in the UK. Combined with this, the needs of children in Britain also become important. Accordingly, education may be a key factor in household decisions about where to be based.14 Over time then, the social relations of transnational migration have shifted. An important dimension of this is that, as the first generation has grown older, their relationships with their children have changed. Now, rather than having dependants in the desh, to whom remittances must regularly be sent, many elders are physically dependent upon their children, who are based in Britain. The reluctance of these children to return to Sylhet was one of the prime reasons cited by our informants for staying in Britain. In these narratives of the desh they are literally caught between their desire for the imagined, golden land of the desh and their children’s orientation towards Britain, as their home. As several of the men told us, they would dearly love to return to Sylhet, but their children refuse to go with them; the shift in power relations and dependency of parent upon children – whether real or imagined – is powerfully invoked. In the following, Abdul Miah explains his quandary: For me, now, my country – Bangladesh – is good, it’s better for me. But I cannot go back. I have children and cannot go back without them, and if I do, how am I supposed to stay there? Whether I eat or not, I would go back [to Bangladesh] and stay there, but I cannot go back because of my children. You understand? I wouldn’t have to put up with the cold weather, I would not be so ill . . . I mean just the air, and the people would change things. 14. We should not assume that Britain is always the preferred location for the provision of education. Some men spoke of decisions to keep their children in Sylhet in order that they learn the Bengali language and receive an Islamic education.

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Conclusion Q: So if you had to make one country your permanent home, which would it be? My Bangladesh. Q: Why? It’s my own country. It’s the land of my birth. It’s my own country . . . Q: Don’t you see this country as your own? I do see this country as my own, but I’ll tell you: When we first came here all we ever thought about was working for four or five years and then going back. How could we go back? That was all we ever worried about. Now we don’t experience that any more. This country is partly our country. Before, I used to say that I would do five years and go. But now we have our families here, that’s what causes us to be stuck. And the thought of going back never occurs to THEM. 22 November 1996.

Mr Ali expresses his situation in the following terms: I thought I would work and retire, go back to Bangladesh, settle and live out the rest of my days religiously. Now I cannot go back: it looks like I’m going to stay here and die. Only Allah knows. If my sons cared they would notice and send me back, but they have not done anything . . . Abdullah Ali, 23 December 1996.

The Myth of Return Revisited Where is home? For many elders it seems to be both Bangladesh and Britain, depending upon which element of that bundle of ideas, practices and relationships that constitute ‘home’ they are thinking of, and the context from which they are speaking. As a set of social relations, home is dispersed between places, spread between Britain and Bangladesh in a way that few people can ever wholly reconcile. As the place where one’s basic bodily comforts and needs are provided, its location has shifted over their life course, both as a result of the interlocking of personal, local and global histories, and the physical changes that the elders have undergone as part of the life course. As a set of memories and myths and narratives, there are several versions of ‘home’: the spiritual homeland of Sylheti pir and shrines; the ‘Golden Isles’ of nostalgia, heavily influenced not only by the passage of time, but also by the distances between the place that is remembered and those that remember. Finally, ‘home’ is the place where

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Age, Narrative and Migration one grew up, but that one has left, irretrievably, behind; where economic and social relations have broken down and that is ‘ruined’ and must be rejected. Different elders subscribe to these images to a greater or lesser extent. For nearly all, however, their attitudes to place are underlain by deep feelings of rift and division – the passages of space and time have both irreversibly altered what home means and the practices it involves. Thus, while the desh and return to it are mythologized in a variety of ways, the ‘Myth of Return’ is highly complex, changing over the life course of individuals and over the history of Bangladesh and the Bengali population in Britain. And while some elders do eventually return to their home villages, few things are quite how they expected them to be. The conceptual terrain beneath them shifts once more, and the myth changes. While some may find elements of what they think of as ‘home’ in Sylhet, for others, such as Abdul Sayeed, ‘home’ perhaps becomes Britain, or simply a set of memories and narratives concerned with the past. As Berger suggests, for migrants, home is: ‘. . . no longer a dwelling, but the untold story of a life being lived’.15 The ways in which time and space have changed the imagining of desh–bidesh are perhaps summed up by the following quotation, in which the siting of religious propriety and social order has shifted from Bangladesh to Britain, as evidenced by the conduct of women in each place. While not all of the elders would subscribe to such views, many would certainly agree with the essence of the statement: the desh has changed beyond compare; it is to the new world that they must now look: I was listening to the sermons given by a Moulvi [Islamic cleric] and he was saying that there is no respectable place left in Dhaka to walk. It’s just ladies and more ladies. They wear their saris around their hips . . . there is no road for us to walk in to save our honour. Boys go out walking with their girls and fathers say: ‘Look at my son go, isn’t it all nice?’ In Dhaka there is nowhere to walk, because of all these women . . . Q: What about this country? This country is much better. Before women would wear clothes around their thighs, now they wear trousers and live well. They really conduct themselves; this country has gone up a great deal. Now very few women walk around exposing their thighs. They wear trouser a lot more. They didn’t when I first came here. Abdullah Ali, 23 December 1996. 15. Berger 1984: 64; cited in Rapport and Dawson 1998: 27.

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Conclusion

Concluding Remarks: The Life Course and Narrative in the Study of Migration As I suggested in the introduction to this book, in order to understand processes of migration, their effects on groups and individuals, and the meanings that they are given, an understanding of their relationship to the life course, age and generation is crucial. Yet while current theories of place, movement and diaspora show a keen awareness of the nonfixedness and multiplicity of selfhood, stressing the fluidity of people’s identities, the free-floating nature of deterritorialized culture, and so on, very little serious attention has yet been given to the relationship between movement over space and movement over time.16 One way in which this might be theorized is through a detailed analysis of the ways in which the life course has affected the actions and imaginings of a specific group of people on the move. Histories – of regions and nations and global processes, as well as of individual people and their families – all interweave with the passage of time, marked both socially and physically, to produce particular practices, meanings, and myths. The life course is of course not culturally neutral, nor is it unaffected by particular geographical locations, for these involve very real material conditions and power relations. Indeed, where one grows old, and the relationships and practices that each location involves, have an important impact on what ‘old age’ means and the ways in which it is narrated by words and by bodies. Crucially, too, the meanings and practices of the life course are centrally affected by gender. Indeed, just as Lamb has suggested in her West Bengali ethnography, that gender and the body cannot be theorized without reference to age,17 neither can ageing or the life course be understood without reference to the social construction of gender. As we have seen in the case of the Bengali men and women included in this book, while many of the problems faced by them were similar, gender relations – themselves constantly changing both in Bangladesh and Britain – had a key influence on the ways in which they experienced and narrated migration, as well as on the issues that they faced in their everyday lives in Tower Hamlets. As feminist geographers and anthropologists have shown, space and history are always gendered.18 16. In this context Rapport and Dawson refer to Schwartz’s description of ‘migrants of identity’: American youth whose quest for identity takes them not just across space but also over time. This is used as an anchor of identity by the youth, cultural differences becoming synonymous with generational differences (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 3). 17. Lamb 2000: 15. 18. See, for example, Ardener 1993; McDowell 1999.

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Age, Narrative and Migration In order to incorporate such understandings into a more nuanced and less homogenized conceptualization of global movements such as labour migration, I suggest that researching the life histories and other narrative forms of individual migrants might be a good place to start. There are two central reasons for this. The first is that, through listening to the stories of older people, one may begin to see in quite simple terms how things have changed over their life course. While I am not claiming that the histories recounted by the elders are objective (or indeed that that they are less objective than the ‘official’ accounts of secondary sources) their narratives give a clear sense of the history of Bengali migration to and settlement in Britain. At times these are in close agreement with the broader national and global histories of labour markets or immigration law. At others they seem to present slightly different, alternative versions of history. The reunification of families in Britain over the 1980s, for example, was not so much because of shifts in immigration law, many of the women told me, but because the men had grown old and now needed their Bangladeshi wives to come and care for them. In contrast, men tended to recount such histories in terms of their perception of place and the way they and their fellow Bengalis or Muslims were changing it: British space was becoming sufficiently Islamicized and enough Bengali or Muslim networks and services were in place for (parts of) Britain to be suitable places for their wives and children. There is a second, more anthropologically compelling reason why narratives are important in the analysis of the relationship between place, life course and gender. This is that, as we have seen throughout the book, narratives are central to processes of identity-formation and selfhood. Thus in order to answer the question: ‘What does it mean to be an elderly first-generation Bengali woman in Britain?’ attention to her various narrative forms, as well as to the content of what she says and does, is key. As Rapport and Dawson argue: ‘In a particular socio-cultural environment, the self is given content, is delineated and embodied partly through the narrative construction of stories.’19 As we have seen, these stories and the identities that they help to construct shift both over time and over space. Like the bodies that narrate them, they are constantly changing. Narratives must thus always be placed in context: the stories that men and women tell depend, at least in part, on where they are and who their audience is. Finally, narratives can convey hidden meanings. They can be interpreted as forms of protest and claims. By carefully situating the conditions of 19. Rapport and Dawson 1998: 28.

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Conclusion their production we can begin to glean how the relationships and conditions of movement are far from politically neutral, but are often contested and complained over. And as both Wilce and Cohen have shown, attention to the politics of hearing – especially, perhaps, for the old and the sick – is as important as the politics of speaking.20 This comes across particularly strongly in the interactions that many of the elders experience with white professionals and other servants of the British state. Of course, narrative approaches are not the only way in which the relationship between the life course and migration might be studied. Another might involve qualitative research overtaken over a long period of time (three or four decades rather than a number of years) as well as being sited in the different places that migrants move between. Through this one might truly begin to understand the complex ways in which the ageing bodies of men and women articulate with migration, place and the different practices and meanings given to the life course. There are many practical reasons why the latter strategy is difficult to arrange, the fixed time-span of most research grants being one of the most obvious. Thus, although I have worked in both Sylhet and Britain, like so much anthropological research, the fieldwork on which this book is based only took place during a short time-span, and I acknowledge that this is potentially a drawback for work that attempts to understand how people’s understandings and experiences change over time. Combined with this, my focus was largely upon elders, rather than involving a more intergenerational approach. We have heard nothing from the second generation, who are sometimes (but not always) castigated by their elders or taken by them as symbols of social disintegration. A different study might focus in detail upon relations between generations, interrogating, for example, how the relationship between people and place becomes transformed not only over the course of an individual’s life, but also in what might in other contexts be referred to as ‘the household development cycle’, but here is seen as less cyclical and more in a continual process of change. This would involve consideration of shifts within as well as between generations; it might also show how the different generations influence each other and the dialogues, negotiations and contestations that take place between them – something that I have been unable to do. Finally, I am aware that in this research I am partaking in what one might think of as a ‘double colonization’, involving research both amongst

20. Wilce 1998; L. Cohen 1998.

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Age, Narrative and Migration a different ethnic group and old people, whose physical experiences of ageing I am still many years from sharing. As Cohen puts it: ‘The study of generational difference is fraught with its own colonialism; most gerontologists are simply not that old.’21 In some (but let us not assume all) ways I have been a privileged outsider in the production of this study, and my work reflects many of the problems that such a position entails. I am not a first-generation Bengali struggling with poverty, racism and sickness in Tower Hamlets; I am not privy to the intimate content of family relationships; I have not lived the histories I replicate; there is so much that I cannot hope to know or understand. It is important, however, not to essentialize the positions of ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’. Indeed, as Kirin Narayan suggests in her discussion of the category ‘native anthropologist’, while being reflexive about our positions in the production (and consumption) of research, we should also be wary of simplistic divisions of people into ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Instead, she argues, it is more useful to focus on shifting identities in relation to the people and issues an anthropologist hopes to represent, melting down what apparently seem to be ‘obvious’ divides (such as those of ‘race’ or ‘age’).22 Thus, while there may be much that an apparent ‘outsider’ does not understand, there is also a great deal to be shared. Perhaps the sentiment is naïve, but I believe we should endeavour to bridge difference and not create it by a politics of identity that decrees that only people in certain positions ‘speak for’ others. What I hope is that, with all its unavoidable gaps and silences, this book will, at the very least, act as a stimulus and a starting-point for others in the production of alternative stories. Finally, I would like to close with one last quote. In doing this I do not wish to give the impression that this provides a ‘full stop’ to the end of my story, or that what is said somehow defines where the elders ‘are at’, for as we have seen, where they are at is constantly changing. Indeed, there is no full stop to the narration of migration. There is, instead, a never-ending series of voices, each narrating a slightly different history, each with a slightly different perspective. Some argue, some agree; some speak in hidden codes; some tell it straight. And while some are heard and attended to, others are ignored. Crucially, though, all are placed in time and space. And just as one story ends, another begins. As Abdul Khalique puts it:

21. L. Cohen 1998: 293. 22. K. Narayan 1993.

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Conclusion It’s not a question of [Bengalis in Britain] becoming spoilt. Everyone has their own ideas about what is best of them. Today you are studying, and that will be good for you later. Well the same is true for everyone following different routes. Those that gamble away all their money can be said to . . . but this is neither here nor there. But if your child grows up here, not wanting to go back to Bangladesh, and gets a job or starts a business, well what’s wrong with that? . . . It’s not a question of becoming spoilt, it’s a question of change. 14 December 1996.

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Glossary The following are Sylheti/Bengali terms used in several places in the text: Azan: call to prayer Bari: homestead Bideshi: foreigner; migrant overseas Burqua: long coat worn by Muslim women, covering the head and sometimes much of the face. Chador: scarf worn by Muslim women to cover the head and chest Desh: homeland Eid: Annual celebration in Muslim calendar Eidghar: ritual space for community prayer at Eid. Ghar: household Gram: village Grihosti: farmer Gusti: patrilineage Lascar: sailor Londoni: someone who lives in, or has migrated to, the UK. Maulana: an Islamic preacher; a person with religious knowledge Mazaar: shrine Murubbi: elder Namaj: prayer Pukka: stone Purdah: female seclusion, ‘the veil’ Pir: Muslim saint (in the Sufi tradition) Sassi (chachi): ‘auntie’ Sharam: shame / modesty Shinni: ritual distribution, often of food Taka: Bangladeshi currency; about fifty to the pound

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Appendix: Basic Household Information (All names have been changed; men and women are married couples, unless otherwise stated. In order to further protect the identity of informants, some of these details have been scrambled.) 1. Angura Begum and Abdul Matin Address: E2; council flat Household details: one son – came aged 5, without mother. They have married daughter in B’desh. Adbul Matin has first wife, came 25 years ago. She lives separately. Abdul Matin came to UK 1964, worked as tailor in Brick Lane, unemployed for eight years. Stroke victim Angura Begum – been here 6 years; she’s in 50s. 2. Lokki Bibi Widow E2; council flat Household details: elder son (visiting from B’desh), married daughter and son-in-law plus children. She has 3 daughters, one son; one daughter currently married in B’desh; rest in UK. She came to UK in 1984; now aged 63. Husband died of stroke. 3. Mustara Khatun and Mohammed Ullah E14; council flat: seeking rehousing Household details: married son, daughter-in-law and child; 2 unmarried sons, both in higher education. Mustara Khatun came to UK with children in 1984. Mohammed Ullah had stroke, now in wheelchair. 4. T. Haque and Aymona Khatun E14; council flat Household details: 3 unmarried adult daughters; 2 sons; one daughter married in Sylhet. – 229 –

Appendix T. Haque arrived UK 1963; Aymona Khatun and children, 1980s. T. Haque had stroke 6 years ago, now partially disabled. 5. Rabeya Khanam and Abdul Khalique E3; council flat Household details: 2 school-age daughters. Abdul Khalique had English wife, with 2 children; arrived UK 1958; he’s 65. Rabeya Khanam in UK since 1985; she’s 36. Abdul Khalique had stroke in 1991, now partially disabled. 6. Soa Bibi and Ataur Rahman Address: E14; council flat Four children born in Bangladesh, two in UK Household details: 3 unmarried sons. Ataur Rahman arrived UK late 1950s – worked Birmingham and Oldham, then London. Soa Bibi came in 1985, with children; she’s in late 30s. Ataur Rahman had stroke 2 years ago, now wheelchair-bound and senile. 7. Rabeya Khanun and Dorus Ullah Address: E14; council flat Household details: two adult sons, one married (plus wife and small children), one in higher education; another adult son with wife and 5 children in same council block; eldest son in Bangladesh; two daughters married in Bangladesh. Dorus Ullah arrived UK 1957, in Birmingham before London; Rabeya Khanun arrived in 1982; she’s in her sixties; Dorus Ullah had stroke several years ago; died during research. 8. Chapna Bibi Address: E2; council flat Widow Household details: teenage son and married daughter (currently separated from husband; children with husband). Another married daughter elsewhere in UK; third married daughter in Bangladesh. Chapna Bibi arrived UK in 1984; husband arrived 1963; he died several years ago. 9. Sufia Bibi Address: E1; council flat Separated from husband – 230 –

Appendix Household details: unmarried adult son and daughter. Another married son in UK; other adult children in Bangladesh. Sufia Bibi came to UK 1984; husband in 1960s, worked as presser in East London. She’s in her fifties/early sixties? She had a stroke 12 years ago, is now disabled. 10. Syeda Nessa Address: E2; council flat Husband currently in Bangladesh with second wife. Household details: lives with son; other children in Bangladesh. She came to UK in 1980; husband came to UK in 1950s; worked in Birmingham, then restaurant trade in London. Husband had a stroke 7 years ago. 11. Soyful Begum Address: E1; sheltered housing for Bengali elders Widow Household details: she lives alone. Has 2 married daughters in Bangladesh. Husband came to UK in 1960s; she came to UK in 1989. She’s in her mid sixties? 12. Soyful Bibi and Abdul Bari Address: E3; council flat Household details: teenage son and nephew. Abdul Bari came to UK in 1957, worked as presser; married English wife in 1963, now divorced. He had 5 children with first wife. Soyful Bibi in UK since 1994; son came to UK in 1989. Abdul Bari had stroke in 1991; he is in sixties; she is in late thirties? 13. Hasina Begum and husband Address: E14; council flat Household details: two teenage daughters and one son; one married daughter in UK. Husband arrived UK 1955, worked as tailor in London and in factory in Welwyn Garden City. Hasina Begum arrived UK 1985. She had a stroke in 1992 and is now disabled; she is in her forties?

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Appendix 14. Abeda Bibi Address: E1; council flat Widow Household details: teenage son; married children in Bangladesh. She came to UK in early 80s; is now in fifties? 15. Anowara Bibi and husband Address: E1; council flat (1 bedroom, seeking rehousing) Household details: four young children from husband’s second marriage; AB has no children of her own. Husband arrived UK in 1962; AB arrived UK in 1977. She suffers from debilitating arthritis. 16. Fazlu Miah and wife Address: E14; council flat Household details: 3 children; eldest have learning disabilities. He suffers from chronic asthma and diabetes. He’s in fifties? 17. Rokeya Khatun and Abdul Miah Address: E2; council flat Household details: teenage son and adult son; 2 married sons live elsewhere in London. Abdul Miah arrived UK 1963; Rokeya Khatun in 1973. Abdul Miah had stroke in 1990. Rokeya Khatun is in fifties? 18. Asia Bibi and Abdul Rahman Address: E1; council flat Household details: separated adult daughter and children, teenage son; adult son married in UK. Abdul Rahman originally a lascar; married English woman in 1950s and had 8 children with her; now divorced. Asia Bibi came to UK in 1986 with 3 children. Asia Bibi is in fifties; Abdul Rahman in eighties? 19. Joyful Bibi Address: E14; council flat Household details: husband lives in E2 with second wife and children; Joyful Bibi lives with adult son, daughter-in-law and 4 young children. Husband originally worked in Birmingham. Joyful Bibi arrived UK 1984; she badly broke her leg and now disabled. – 232 –

Appendix 20. Malika Bibi Address: E1; council flat (2 bedrooms, seeking rehousing) Household details: son (in sixties) and daughter-in-law, plus four adult unmarried children. Soyful Bibi in her nineties; she came to UK in 1992. Son came to UK 1964, worked as tailor in East London; 2 other sons in Bangladesh. 21. Abdullah Ali and Syeda Bibi Address: E1; council flat Household details: 11-year-old son from second wife. Syeda Bibi is third wife; she has no children. Adult children from first and second marriages in UK; youngest still in Bangladesh. Abdullah Ali arrived UK in 1957; worked as tailor; father a lascar; he is 67. Syeda Bibi came to UK in 1958; she has worked as a childminder; she is in fifties? 22. Abdul Miah and wife Address: E1; council flat Household details: teenage son and daughter; one married daughter in UK; one married daughter in Bangladesh. Abdul Miah arrived UK in 1963; worked in Birmingham, Ipswich, Worcester and London. He’s in early sixties. 23. Mohammed Rahman and wife Address: E1; council flat Household details: 4 sons and 1 daughter, eldest son is 16; another son disabled from polio. Mohammed Rahman is blind. Went to Singapore with uncle in 1909 as small child; originally came to UK before WW2. He is in nineties. Current wife is his second.

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Index

Index Significant information in footnotes is indexed in the form 23n6, ie. note 6 on page 23 Aftab Ali 92 ageing and body 37, 39, 149, 213 constructions of 23–6 gender and place 26–7, 212 good ageing 164–9 narratives of 147–76 political economy of 156–64 problems of 146–7 see also elders and Chapter 6 Ahmed, Jamil 97 Albrow, M. 87 Alexander, C. 13n48 Ali, Abdul on early days in Britain 57 on employment 96 Ali, Abdullah on Bangladesh 209, 219 on burial 206 on the desh 220 on employment 98 on extended family 163 on health care 183–4 on loss of authority 160 on social life 100 on the weather 105 on young generation 153–4 Alicia, M. 116 Americas, transnational migration 16 anthropological paradigms 4–14, 210–11 Anwar, M. 93, 213 Appadurai, A. 211 Arber, S. 165 Asians in Britain see British South Asians Avila, E. 125 Back, Les 12 Bakhtin, M. 10

Bangladesh instability of 108, 216–17 life course 19, 21–23 perceptions of 209, 212–13, 217–19 see also desh; Sylhet Bangladeshis see Bengalis Bari, Abdul on early days in Britain 103 on Jewish employers 102, 103–4 on masculine identity 98 on religion 101 on state benefits 174–5 on visits to Sylhet 103 on the weather 106 on young generation 153 Barth, F. 5 Basch, L. 16 Baumann, Gerd 11 Beacon, Derek 52, 104 Begum, Asia, on Bengali community 129 Begum, Soyful on death 195 on illness 171 Bengali community Britain 49–50, 101 establishment of 108–11, 121, 128–9 Tower Hamlets 49–52, 109, 129, 140–1 Bengalis, identity 2n2 Bertaux-Wiame, Isobel 115–16 Bhabha, Homi 10 Bhachu, Parminder 7 Bibi, Angura, on return to Bangladesh 36 Bibi, Anowara children of 127 on early days in Britain 129 on health services 182–3 Bibi, Asia, on religion 112

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Index Bibi, Chapna on Bengali areas 141 on early days in Britain 127–8 on husband’s death 192–4, 207 on husband’s illness 186–7 poverty of 159–60 on separation from husband 123 worries of 170 Bibi, Hasna, on husband’s death 194–5, 201–2 Bibi, Joyful on housing 130 on purdah 140 on separation from husband 123 Bibi, Lokki on doctors 185 on freedom 140 on husband’s death 195, 207–8 worries of 170 Bibi, Malika, on separation from family 128 Bibi, Soyful, on caring duties 124–5, 126, 131 Bibi, Syeda on early days in Britain 128 employment of 134 Bloch, M. 55–6 boarding-houses 99–100 body and ageing 37, 39, 149, 213 burial of 201, 203–8 and gender 27 and narratives 34–7 physical complaints 169–76 role of 2–3 Bradbury, Mary 192 Brighton, Bengali community 43n8 Britain immigration legislation 21, 106–8, 131–2 Islamicization of 109–11 perceptions of 209, 212–13, 217–18 racialization of space 18, 140–2 see also state British National Party 52, 104 British South Asians anthropological paradigms 4–14 illnesses of 169n42 buji 56

burial bodies sent to Sylhet 201, 203–8 in London 208 burqua, use of 35, 136 Butler, Judith 2 caring, narratives of 130–3 Chamberlain, M. 29 Chambers, I. 211 childhood, narratives 67–8 children, transnational 125–7 Choudhury, Yousef 89, 90, 92, 99 Clarke, J. 106 Clifford, James 14–15, 115 Cohen, Lawrence 25, 26, 33, 146, 151–2, 155, 156, 173, 223, 224 colonialism 88–9 Commonwealth Immigrants Bill (1962) 106 complaints, bodily 169–76 Cornwall, A. 86 Cowgill, D. 24, 153 Creolization 6 cultural differences, dying 197–9 cultural racism 3n6, 8–9 Dawson, A. 29, 211, 221n16, 222 death at home 192–6 and desh 191, 201, 203, 204–6 and gender 201–4, 204–6 in institutions 196–9 narratives of 39, 192–6 rituals 199–204 dependency, of elders 151–5, 157n25, 166–9 Desai, Philly 13n48 desh and death 191, 201, 203, 204–6 as the Golden Land 154, 214–16 image of 39–40, 94, 154–5, 209–25 narratives of 74–5, 81–4, 213–20 desh-bidesh and death 191 and life course 21–3, 213–20 problem of 209–10 diaspora, meaning of 14–15 disability, narratives of 172–6, 179–82 Durrschmidt, J. 87

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Index Eade, John 49, 52, 87, 111 ‘East is East’ 7n18 East London mosque 109–10, 208 education, preferred location 218 elders care of 145–7 dependency of 151–5, 157n25, 166–9 and gender 26–7 identities of 86 narratives 27–30 research subjects 44–5 state care 164–9 see also ageing; murubbi embalming, of bodies 200n11, 203 emotions, of migrants 17–18 employment of migrants 78, 93, 95–9, 102, 109 of women 133–4 exercise, by elderly 167–8 families decline of 152–4 extended 161–4 reunification in Britain 106–11, 124 Fog-Olwig, Karen 117, 211–12 Friedmann, J. 6n17 fruit farm, visit to 143–4 garment industry, women workers 133–4 Gavron, Kate 13n48 Geiger, S. 86n5 gender and ageing 26–7 and death rituals 201–4, 206–8 identities 85–6, 115–16 and migration decisions 20–1 and narratives 61–3, 65–6, 115–16 youth culture 12–14 see also men; women Giddens, A. 87 Gilroy, Paul 9 Ginn, J. 165 globalization 14, 87–8 Golden Land, view of the desh 154, 214–16 Good, Byron 178, 184 Grima, B. 42, 59, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth 34, 135 Gunaratnam, Yasmin 192n4

Haj 80–1, 150 Hajji Tasleem see Tasleems Hall, Stuart 9, 103 Haque, Mr on the desh 83, 214 on early life in Britain 78–81, 100 on extended family 163 on identity 112–13 on Islam 83–4, 110 narrative of 37–8, 63, 65–6, 75–84 on return to Bangladesh 36, 81–3, 102 Harrods, visit to 142–3 Hastrup, K. 86 health care narratives of 182–8 state provision 164–9 high blood pressure 170 Hockey, Jenny 191–2 Holmes, L. 24 home, identity of 210–13, 219–20 Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. 125 households and life course 19–21 traditional 155–6 transnational strategies 121–5 housing physical constraints of 129–30, 132, 161–4, 175–6 Tower Hamlets 51–2, 158–9 hybridity 6, 10, 13–14, 85 identities and the desh 204–6 gendered 85–6, 115–16 and narratives 61–4, 178–9 shifting 11, 81–2 Idrees, Atia 145–6 illness, narratives of 39, 70–3, 169–76, 177–90 Immigration Act (1962) 131–2 Immigration Act (1971) 107 immigration legislation, Britain 21, 106–8, 131–2 Institute of Community Studies 157, 162 institutional care 196–9 Islam as cultural identity 12 death rituals 199–204 and elders 150

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Index importance of 111–13 myths 54–6, 74–5 problems involving 101–2, 110 Islamicization, of British space 109–11 Islamophobia 8, 94 Jews, and Bengalis 102 Kabeer, Naila 96, 133–4, 135 kabiraj 185 Kandiyoti, Denise 149 Khalique, Abdul on Bangladesh 102, 154, 216, 217 on disability 173 on early days in Britain 99 on having a stroke 180–1 on life course 225 on murubbi 150 Khanun, Rabeya on caring role 131, 171 on support services 133, 175 Khatun, Mrs Rokeya on Britain 71–4 on caring role 132 on childhood 67–8 on the desh 74–5, 154, 209, 214–15 on extended family 163 on freedom 139 on health services 72, 154, 188 on husband’s stroke 188–9 on marriage 69 on migration 69–70 narrative of 37–8, 41, 63, 65–75, 128 Khatun, Mustara, housing needs 175–6 labour vouchers 93 Lamb, Sarah 27, 149n7, 221 language, barriers of 198–9 lascars 89–92 Law, Ian 158 legislation, immigration 21, 106–8, 131–2 life course 19, 21–3 and desh-bidesh 213–20 of migrants 18–27, 221–5 Lindisfarne, N. 86 Londoni status of 82–3 wives of 20–1

marriage arranged 7n18 narratives 68–9 Sylhet 119–20, 120n15 to white women 100n46 masculinity, narratives of 85–6, 94–9 Matin, Abdul on Bangladesh 217 on early days in Britain 99 on Islam 110 on money 98 Mattingly, Cheryl 31–2, 178, 181 memories, and narratives 31 men disability of 172–6 illness narratives 179–88 narratives of 38, 42, 85–6, 94–113 see also gender Miah, Abdul on Bengali identity 113 on the desh 215, 218–19 on disability 173, 179–80 on employment 95–6, 97 on extended family 164 on loss of paternal authority 160–1 on religion 101 Miah, Abdul (husband of Mrs Kahtun) 67 Miah, Fazlu on burial 206 on the desh 154, 213 illness of 184 on racism 104 migrant groups, anthropological paradigms 4–14, 210–11 migrants emotions of 17–18 life course of 18–27, 221–5 Myth of Return 93, 219–20 narratives of 56–7, 71–2, 73–4, 77–9 perceptions of home 209–25 migration bodily experience 36–7 and gender identity 85–6 history of 88–94 narratives of 94–103, 120–7 transnational 14–18 misfortune, narratives of 57–9 mobility, of women 117, 134–44 Modood, T. 8

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Index place and ageing 26–7 and home 210–13 see also Chapter 9 and life course 21–3 poverty in Britain 159n30 of elderly 159–60 Powell, Enoch 106 Primary Purpose Rule 132 purdah 35, 38, 62, 117, 135–40

money, narratives of 97–8 Mumby, D. K. 28, 31 murubbi image of 39 Islamic role 111, 150 meaning of 147–50 narrative genre 42 see also elders music, youth culture 12–13 Myerhoff, Barbara 23, 27 Myth of Return 93, 219–20 myths, Islamic 54–6, 74–5 Narayan, Kirin 224 narratives of ageing 147–76 of death 39, 192–6 definition 30–3 of the desh 74–5, 81–4, 213–20 early days in Britain 99, 103–6, 127–34 embodiment 34–7 and gender 61–3, 65–6, 115–16 genre 42–3 hearing of 33–4 and identities 178–9 of illness 39, 70–3, 169–76, 177–90 importance of 27–34 and life course 221–5 men’s 38, 42, 85–6, 94–113 as stories 2, 54 in Sylhet 52–9 in Tower Hamlets 59–61 women’s 38–9, 42, 61–3, 115–17 see also under personal names National Survey of Ethnic Minorities 162 Nessa, Mrs, on husband’s illness 189–90 Norman, Alsion 157 nostalgia, for early days in Britain 103–6 Nydegger, C. 152 old people see elders oral history 86–7, 115–16 Osella, Filippo and Caroline 20, 85 Parsons, Talcott 153 participatory research methods 48 passports, issue of 92 patriarchal bargain 149, 163 physiotherapy 167–8

racism 3–4, 35 cultural 8–9 fear of 104–5, 140–2 Rahman, Mohammed on Bangladesh 218 on being a sailor 91–2, 95 on blindness 180 on the desh 154 on employment 97, 102 on loss of paternal authority 161 on money 98 on murubbi 150 Rapport, N. 29, 211, 221n16 religion see Islam research project 43–9 rituals, of death 199–204 Roaf, Mutmahim 42, 47, 76–7 Rushdie, Salman 8, 104, 110 Said, E. 212 sassis, narratives of 115–44 Sawney, Nitin 13n46 Sayeed, Abdul 209–10, 212–13, 220 Scott, J. 80 second generation, hybrid identity 12 Second World War 66 Shah Jalal 205 sharam 136 Sharma, Ursula 20 Shaw, Alison 7 shinni 202, 203–4 sickness see illness Singer, W. 30, 31 Singh, Talvin 13n46 social anthropology, changing paradigms 4–14, 210–11 sojourners or settlers 93–4 Southall, ethnic groups 11

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Index space Islamicization of 109–11 racialization of 18, 140–2 women’s use of 134–44 Spencer, Paul 86, 101 Stack, Carol 156 state attitudes to 80 dependency on 160–1 health care for elderly 164–9 status in Sylhet 82–3 of women 26 Stephens, Julie 28–9 story-telling, life stories 2, 31 strokes 170, 177, 179–82, 183–4, 188–9 suffering, narratives of 73–4 Sunman, Prinjha 13n48 Sylhet ageing 148–50 marriages 119–20, 120n15 memories of 69–70 migration decisions 20 migration history 88–94 narrative genres 52–9 as ‘other country’ 4 return of bodies 201, 203–4, 216 visits by migrants 102–3 see also desh Talukpur village 53–4 Tasleems, undertakers 200, 208 television, role of 60 Tonkin, Elizabeth 42 Tower Hamlets Bengali community 49–52, 109, 129, 140–1 day centre for elderly 43–4 extended families 25 Islamicization 109–11 narratives in 59–61 services for the elderly 156–64 Transnational Communities Programme 16

transnational migration 14–18 women 121–5 see also migrants; migration transport, use by women 142 Van der Veer, P. 88 Vatuk, Sylvia 151, 152 videos, role of 60 Wahed, Abdul, death and burial of 194–5, 201–3 walking sticks, use of 167 War of Liberation (1971), narratives 66, 69 Washbourne, N. 87 Watkins, F. 56n30 Watson, James 5–6 weather, British 105–6 Werbner, Pnina 7, 11, 200 Westwood, Salli 12 Wilce, James 33, 42–3, 58, 65, 182, 223 women bodily inscriptions 35 caring role 130–3 and children 125–7 early days in Britain 127–34 employment 133–4 illnesses of 171–2 migration decisions 20–1 mobility of 117, 134–44 narratives of 38–9, 42, 61–3, 115–44, 188–90 role of 116 status 26 and transnational migration 117–27 widowhood rituals 201, 202, 207 see also gender and Chapter 5 worries, of migrants 170–1, 187 Young, Iris Marion 23–4, 25, 135 Young, Robert 112 youth culture 12–14

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