Book Review of Amrit Wilson’s Finding A Voice: Asian Women in Britain

Finding a Voice – Asian Women in Britain

by Dr Fatima Rajina

Following World War II, many former subjects of the British empire were arriving in the metropole. The new migrants were no longer exotic beings ‘over there’ but were now ‘here’ amongst us. Initially, the wider British society was getting to grips with South Asian men, but more South Asian women, wives, daughters, and mothers were arriving with each decade. This rupture in the gendered migration would lead to some of the most significant moments in history, witnessing collaborations between African-Caribbean and Asian women. The latter, who have historically been constructed as meek, timid and forever silent, subverted all the imposed stereotypes and changed the landscape for other South Asian women. These women took on industrial bosses as they did with the Grunwick Strike (1976-78), even when they encountered defeat, they always stood with their head help up high.

I read the first 1978 edition of Finding a Voice in 2018. While I was reading the book, I realised that so little has changed for South Asian women in the UK. The structural subjugation and denigration of South Asian women continue; it’s just that they are manifested in different ways. While the taxonomy of ‘race’ is ever precarious in categorising people and the goalposts changing, South Asian women have been forged in different ways in the contemporary imagination, primarily through religious affiliations.

In this thoroughly detailed book, Amrit Wilson intricately narrates South Asian women’s stories and their encounters with the British state’s violence. How so many of these women were failed, both locally and nationally, from universities to hospitals to, at times, by their own community. We learn about the multiple, often entangled, migration patterns to the UK whether directly from the Indian subcontinent or through previous migration to East Africa. People’s complicated and complex class, caste and land-ownership backgrounds very much informed these different migration patterns, a correlation evident in the wealth we see today in the respective South Asian communities.

Wilson, very diligently, takes us on this journey in the book where we hear the women’s voices directly through multiple languages, such as: Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and English.

‘People should know’, she said, ‘that we can speak, we have feelings and that we have thoughts. Write what you and I talk about, what we think.’ (p. xv).

Wilson assures readers that we WILL hear the women’s voices directly. She refuses to cater to the violent, white gaze that silences women while, somewhat ironically, meting colonial stereotyping of these women as silent. There are multiple ways in which the state becomes entangled in South Asian women’s oppression, and Wilson takes us on a journey to showcase these examples in candid and raw ways. The readers are exposed to how newly arrived women would go through a ‘sexual examination’ at the border. Such examinations ‘had become common practice at Heathrow immigrant Department, apparently carried out at the whim of the officials’ (p. 88). This would be used as a way to determine if they were ‘too old’ to be dependent, thereby declaring their entry fraudulent. If a woman’s medical report stated her as not a virgin, she’d get disowned by her family.

The women who had children found themselves as part of the state’s experiment in bussing their children to schools outside of their catchment areas. This state intervention attempted to manage the Asian communities by coercively enforcing assimilationist tendencies because they feared they would become the majority in schools closer to their homes. Bussing, contrary to ‘assimilating’ the young people, opened up opportunities for racists to attack young Asians. Wilson provides the example of a young Pakistani boy in October 1975 who ‘was killed by a gang of white boys at a bus stop’ (p. 113). The state intervening to tell women how best to raise their children is not new. Contemporarily, we see this unfolding through the Prevent Strategy, a government policy designed to surveil young, predominantly Muslims and, by extension, create a matrix for people to grass on one another. The state instrumentalising the South Asian Muslim woman’s body is always hanging off a thread, dangling between two positions: one where these women require liberating but, simultaneously, these women can help the state in managing their own communities, including their own children.

Away from the state’s gaze, Wilson also taps into the struggles the South Asian women had to put up with within their own communities. This included the joy many women felt at earning their own money (chapter 5) despite receiving little support from their families – something that would have been unthinkable if they had remained in their respective countries. However, this romanticism of earning money was very quickly met to realise how these women were being exploited across the factories, mills and sweatshops. Surinder, a Sikh woman expands on this:

‘For a long time I never realised how badly paid and overworked I was, but what made me feel bad in those days was the rudeness and lack of respect with which I and other Asian women were treated by the supervisors. Now I have begun to understand, bad pay, rotten conditions and this insufferable contempt shown to us, it is a part of the same picture.’ (p. 62)

The maltreatment of South Asian women workers is captured in striking ways (pun intended!) by Wilson as she narrates the fight the Grunwick Strikers had to go through, also known as the Strikers in Saris. Through this strike, we learn about the sheer levels of humiliation so many women were experiencing because of how they were racialised. This moment in history also illustrates the multiple fights the Gujarati women had to put up with, including challenging the patriarchal ways the Gujarati community expected women not to cause too much noise. Wilson interviews one of the Grunwick strikers, Jayaben Desai, who clarifies this:

‘Personally I don’t think it is traditions which are weighing them down but the fact that they have no support at home. Their husbands don’t want them to do anything which is not passive, and in the end women end up believing the same.’ (p. 76)

Despite being confronted with these gendered expectations, Jayaben Desai and Kalaben Patel continued to mobilise other women to join them on the picket line while families prevented other women from taking part. It is also noteworthy to mention how the owner of Grunwick, George Ward, an Anglo-Indian attempted to intimidate the women. He resorted to insulting the women by saying how he will ‘tell the whole Patel community that you are a bad woman!’ (p.77). This is an important point to consider given the fact that he recognised that these women were required to follow a particular behavioural code as ascribed by their community but specifically their caste heritage.

The respectability politics women are required to abide by is enforced by observing the woman’s dress. For example, Wilson talks to women about how they negotiated and navigated dress. Both Sikh young girls from Newham and Birmingham, explain how their families were not happy when they chose to wear a t-shirt and a pair of jeans. The shalwar kameez functioned as the site where women’s bodies were analysed. The dupatta or chunni, the scarf, had to be used to cover one’s head and to make sure it ‘folded over her chest and having over her shoulders or loosely placed around her neck’ (p. 48). The decision around what to wear did not solely rest with the woman alone but the nuclear and extended family. If the woman was married, this also tended to rest in the mother-in-law’s hands.

Wilson very poignantly captures the way so many of these women experience isolation. Arriving in a new country and trying to settle in, adapting to the grey weather and adopting this new environment as their home was not an easy one. The women share their deep reservoir of memories, of communalism and collective creations of womanhood in open spaces. Now in the UK, space was experienced in a carceral sense. This sense of womanhood, or lack thereof, made it very difficult for many of these women who had been socialised into communal living, including getting help with raising children. This loss meant women did not have access to spaces where they could deposit their thoughts, share their love, loss and, in some sense, it ruptured their sense of self. Losing the self in a country that did not want them, and where racism was a part of these women’s daily encounters (p. 26).

Wilson portrays these women as survivors and, additionally, she so effectively showcases the multi-layered ways in which these women experience oppression. She questions how the state also participates in using the woman’s body as a site of violence and using that to manage its borders. She also acknowledges how there has been a splintering of identities among the Asian community along religious lines. With the rise in Hindutva politics, supported by India’s current government, it has further entrenched this divide. My only criticism of the book would be the lack of references to the ways in which colonialism and colonial experiences in the subcontinent informed and shaped the experiences here in the UK. In order to understand the multi-faceted brutalisations South Asian women encounter in the diaspora, it is vital to link it back to colonialism.

Despite this, I am hopeful and optimistic we will be able to build solidarity across the different ethnic and religious communities among South Asians. The re-centring of marginal voices opens up the possibility to avert the gaze away from the dominant narratives entrenched in saviourism. We need to recognise that we are currently residing in the metropole of the British Raj that once ruled over our ancestors. This colonial metropole is where we need to remember that it still uses women as its greatest weapon against different communities. This weaponisation is disguised behind grand words like liberation, empowerment and emancipation. We need to resist this age-old tactic of divide and conquer by the colonisers and build bridges that will help find ourselves in each other. As Rabindranath Tagore wrote in his Ekla Cholo Re song (Walk Alone My Friend) in 1905:

‘If no one answers your call,
Then walk alone, (be not afraid) walk alone, my friend.
If no one talks to you,
O my unlucky friend, if no one speaks to you,
If everyone looks the other way/turns away and everyone is afraid,
Then bare your soul and let out what is in your mind,
(be not afraid) Speak alone, my friend.
When dark clouds cover the sky, When darkness engulfs the truth,
When the world cowers and bows before fear,
You are the flame, The flame that burns you and banishes darkness from the world,
(be not afraid) Burn alone, my friend.’ (My translation)

Dr Fatima Rajina is a Legacy in Action Research Fellow at the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University.