Kinship and Continuity
Copyright 2000 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V. Published by license under the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint, part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group.
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First published 2000 by Harwood Academic Publishers
This edition published 2013 by Routledge
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ISBN: 90-5823-076-7 (soft cover)
For Jonathan, Helen, Kate and Adam
CONTENTS
This book is about the families of labour migrants who first came to Britain from rural Pakistan in the 1950s and 60s. It is based on research which I began in 1979 but it is the result not of a single project but of several periods of fieldwork. My initial research was towards a D.Phil, thesis in social anthropology and took me to Pakistan, where I spent seven months living in villages with relatives of families living in Oxford. The thesis that I completed in 1984 stressed the social and cultural continuities between Pakistan and Britain: it was an argument against prevailing assimilationist assumptions.
Towards the end of this formal research period, I began teaching Urdu to people such as teachers and health professionals whose work brought them into regular contact with Urdu and Panjabi speakers, and I had this audience in mind, as well as an academic one, when I revised the thesis for publication. A Pakistani Community in Britain, (Basil Blackwell, 1988) contained the anti-assimilationist argument of my thesis and was also written with the specific objective of addressing many of the assumptions that non-Pakistani readers might make about British Pakistanis.
In that book, I attempted to convey the dynamics of Pakistani birdars (kinship groups) from the inside, and the letters I have from time to time received from Pakistani students and English professionals suggest I achieved some success. Last summer, during a conversation about the local mosques, a Pakistani taxi driver mentioned to me a library book about the Pakistani community that his wife was reading for her PGCE course. I only read the chapter on the mosques, because that is what I am interested in, he said, but the author described it just how it is; she really got into peoples heads, to know how they tick. I realized he was talking about my book and told him so. You did a really good job, he said, it portrays our community to a tee, adding, Your Mums famous! as he turned to my children sitting in the back of the taxi.
Such remarks are flattering, of course, but they also draw attention to some of the problems with conducting anthropological research among people with whom the researcher must continue to live and work. Some of my Pakistani friends think that I should not have written about caste, for example, or about mosque disputes, because to discuss such issues might show a community vulnerable to racism in an unfavourable light. I have tried to balance my responsibilities to those who have shared aspects of their lives with me with my desire to write as objective and accurate an account as possible; I have also tried to show how issues which generate controversy, such as caste or Islamic sect, in fact reveal some of the dynamics of the Pakistani presence in Britain.
The present book builds upon and extends the analysis of A Pakistani Community in Britain, but it is not the same book. I have conducted fresh fieldwork, which included renewing contact with families I had not seen for some years. I have updated all of the chapters where appropriate. My earlier discussion of caste, kinship and marriage is substantially extended and now occupies two chapters. This book also includes an entirely new chapter containing previously unpublished material about attitudes to health and illness.
First, I must thank Adam Kuper for a lectureship at Brunei University that has provided the structure I needed for completing this new edition. On the domestic front, I am immensely grateful to Josephine Reynell, for our anthropological conversations over family suppers and childcare arrangements, to Mary Worrall for her practical and moral support, and of course to my husband and children. Parts of this book have benefited from being read by friends and colleagues. In particular, I thank Shakil Ahmed, Jonathan Flint, Ronnie Frankenburg, David Gellner, Norman Lawrence, Adam Kuper, Ian Robinson, Georgina Robson, Richard Tapper and Josephine Reynell for their comments. I would also like to acknowledge the students at Brunei University who attended my course on Britains Ethnic Minorities last autumn and read drafts of some of the chapters.
Since this book expands and updates an earlier book, I also wish to acknowledge previous debts to friends and colleagues who read part or all of various drafts, or who discussed some of the issues with me. Thank you to: Zahida Abbasi, Helen Adams, Nick Allen, Michael Carrithers, Jonathan Flint, Nikki Van der Gaag, David Gellner, Marion Molteno, James Noel, Caroline Roaf, Ralph Russell, Fozia Tanvir and Brian Todd, who drew the diagram on page 74. Edwin Ardener at the Institute of Social Anthropology in Oxford introduced me to social anthropology as an undergraduate and encouraged me to embark on the research for a D.Phil., for which I was initially supported by a three-year grant from the Social Science Research Council (UK).
Finally, I must acknowledge my permanent debt to the Pakistani families who welcomed me when I embarked on my research, who continue to welcome me into their homes and their lives and have given so generously of their time and hospitality. I have decided not to name anyone in particular here, because most of them would prefer not to be named and in any case the list would be very long. I remain deeply indebted to particular friends for lengthy discussions that considerably aided my analysis and interpretations. I have changed the names of everybody I know, and corrupted some family relationships in order to preserve confidentiality. I hope that those of them who read this book feel it does them justice, and that their descendants will see some value in it as a portrayal of a part of their social history.
Here are approximations for pronouncing a few of the Urdu words that appear most frequently in the book:
birdar is pronounced something like biraaderi, with the emphasis on the first a which is long, like the a in father.
len-den is pronounced something like layna dayna. baithak is pronounced with the emphasis on the ai which is like the ai in air and the thak is pronounced something like tuck.
I have used an approximate transliteration system, in which the consonants are close to those denoted by the English letters. For simplicity, I have not, for instance, distinguished the guttural gh (as in ghusal) and the aspirated gh (as in gh); or the retroflex and dental t, d and r, or sounds which are nasalized. This transliteration does, however, note the difference between long and short vowels:
a is short, like the a in cat
