Or not quite. This (unexpected) post was inspired by having (unexpectedly) read all of Sathnam Sanghera’s If You Don’t Know Me By Now, or The Boy With The Topknot, as it is now apparently called.
I found myself – unexpectedly YET AGAIN – warming to the author and finishing it in the space of about 6 hours. Given that he sets himself up as a spoilt tosser (lots of brand-name dropping at the start…), that was a genuine shock. A sign of good writing, especially since my animosity fell quietly away without my even noticing. It comes highly recommended – I laughed heartily out loud at points.
The book got me thinking about a whole load of things, not least interracial relationships (which I will accordingly be posting about in further, anguished detail soon!) and the different positions of the genders in Indian society. Anyone who’s already read Shame by Jasvinder Sanghera will know this already, but guilt and shame are used to emotionally blackmail girls into ‘behaving’ in SA (and other) cultures.
That’s the thing – as Sathnam demonstrates in his book, guilt can be (and is) used on men too, but shame is a much more gendered weapon. Since men are automatically assumed to be superior to women, women must consider themselves grateful if they land a husband (the ‘right kind’ of husband, especially). I have hopes that women fighting back and refusing to abort their female children (as chronicled in my previous post), plus the seriously skewed sex ratio due to female-foeticide folly, will mean things start to turn around in India.
We are in ‘the West’ though, are we not? Surely, the thinking goes, since Western values are so wonderful and liberating, everyone will adopt them. Unfortunately, as SS points out in his book (p.46), in: ‘A Study of Changes in Marriage Practices among the Sikhs of Britain’ (Jagbir Jhutti, Oxford University, 1998), the author concludes that:
‘no evidence of a complete assimilation into British society has been found. The study shows that rather than rejecting their cultural traditions, i.e. arranged marriages, the second and third generation Sikhs have played an active role in maintaining such traditions.’
Given the paramount importance of marriage to Indian society (just TRY and find a popular soap or film where marriage doesn’t figure in some way or another!), that’s pretty definitive. Guilt works very well to maintain the state of affairs as described above, but shame plays an even bigger part. Why? Well, shame essentially harnesses the power of Chinese whispers. It conjures a powerfully persuasive straw-mob, making a female incessantly paranoid about ‘what people will say.’
To return to what I said earlier, Indian women are indoctrinated to believe that their marriages are the focal point of their lives and that they should be nigh-on grateful for a husband. Shame is incredibly powerful because it jeopardises all this. It reminds women that their finding a ‘suitable boy’ is contingent upon the ‘suitable’ society set accepting them. Forced marriages aside, this is still a clever and subtle form of emotional blackmail. It implies not that your choice would be suspended (as it would be if you were ‘forced’), but limited and effectively useless. If you don’t play the game, you won’t get the guy you like!
See, the reason this is so clever is because it has a veneer of liberality about it. The girl isn’t being directly forced to choose a particular guy. It also absolves the parent of blame; they are simply making her aware of how others think and act (they may believe this guff themselves). You are bringing the power of the mob to bear on an individual, knowing full well they will likely buckle under its weight. Believe it or not, the racial element comes in very useful here. For example, Sikhs are a minority in India, but they are much more visibly a minority here.
This undoubted enhanced visibility of us SAs here, even when unspoken, is a powerful, powerful tool. When you say a girl will be shamed, you do not simply mean that she will be humiliated. You mean that her prospects as an attractive commodity for sale on the marriage market will suffer big-time. Not any marriage-market either, but the community marriage market.
See, horrible as it is to say, I really don’t think many SA girls actively choose to fall for non-SA guys. There are some, whose liberal backgrounds mean it’s not a big deal. I’ve noticed that in areas where there is a lower concentration of SAs, the resident SAs often tend to be a bit more open. That’s not to say that they won’t rediscover ol’ conservative values come marriage time though! Those who’ve lived around many other Asians, however, are all too aware of the ‘Asian Network.’ The ‘Asian Network’ being the intricate system by which everyone in the world knows each other and gossip about you is always likely. By which verboten behaviour may be broadcast to undesired ears.
Asians in these areas also tend to have less interaction with non-Asians because… well, quite bluntly, they don’t have to (might I just say, this is observation rather than absolute, stated fact!). This can mean that naturally, traditions die that bit harder. The combination of the factors just described tends to make shame very effective. A provinicial mindset develops in many young Asians (often, few in London will have travelled to other areas outside their own, and without their parents, by choice). Many will often also be spoon-fed political beliefs and attitudes by their parents.
This means that many will initially plump automatically for a partner of the same background. I will raise my hands here: guilty as charged. Like many other Asian girls, I deludedly believed that picking someone who ‘got’ all the rites, rituals and language was preferable to explaining it to somebody else. I wasn’t even religious, or particularly traditional, as some are! The possibility that patriarchy might have brutalised the men too, never crossed my mind. Neither did the possibility that I could meet someone non-Asian, and not of my religion, who was as interested in Indian culture and my religion, as I was.
As a wise woman once remarked: ‘Just because you’re born into it [ a culture], it doesn’t mean you understand it or appreciate it.’ The sort of men who ought, in an ideal world, to have been my natural allies, were themselves running scared. A lack of interest in Indian culture itself – the music, films, etc. – due to associating ‘culture’ with ‘tradition,’ and their own personal hang-ups, left me cold. One was trying to reject it altogether, a bit like SS at the beginning of the book. His bad experiences with Punjabi culture meant that all Indian culture was now off-limits. The most frequent problem I noticed was how emotionally stunted many of them were. They had been fucked over too, but unlike me, they wanted to ignore and flee from that reality.
When I met my partner, I was in a relationship with such a man and was looking for a free-event-going companion. Much to my embarrassment, it took only 3 meetings for there to be cocked-trigger intensity between us. My ludicrous and primitive assumptions about ‘gore’ (white people, in this case white men) were dislodged by pure chance. Like so many SA girls, I had let a simple fear and lack of reflection dictate what I thought. White men interested in SA girls were probably weird Orientalist types, it was all about the sex, they wouldn’t ‘get’ all the little bits of Indian culture that belonged to me. Nor would they understand my attitudes about love and dating, and my very specific, very urgent needs…
This is a very convenient side-effect of growing up under Indian ‘mob mentality.’ Both indirectly and directly – not least through the racism of Asian parents, which is more common than expected – SAs are taught to see others as they see themselves. The ‘Western’ notion of viewing individuals as just that is dangerous, because it admits the possibility of there being non-Asians who are technically ‘suitable’ partners.
The interesting and hypocritical twist that SS’s book allowed me to observe, is that for boys, it is not so much Indian mob mentality, but British mob mentality to which they adapt. This seems to be the case more for Sikh boys, however, since they are more visibly ‘different’ than other SA minorities. The very fears that lead so many girls to commit themselves to lives they don’t deserve and aren’t happy with, drive boys to discard their visible ‘otherness’ – with the fear simply being generated by the ‘other side.’ A brilliant example is how Sathnam loses his topknot during adolescence, because he just wants to fit in.
Conveniently, however, since men are superior to women in SA culture (as previously stressed), women ‘pick up’ the religious tab. Behind some of the guilt and shame is a real fear of erasure among diasporans, and instead of proactively educating boys about their heritage (which would require men to step in!), the traditions are drummed into the women. To return again to SS, he described how he was his mother’s ‘religious experiment’, his brother and father having cut hair, and remarks that she became increasingly religious as she got older.
In Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Communism is afforded the status of a ‘new religion’ (see Preface!) and this helps shed some light onto why women actually seek to preserve traditions. In a world where women cannot help but be aware of their blatant second-class status, of sexual double standards and a personal insecurity about the state of the world (it is set during the Cold War…), a clear belief system is necessary to make connections and render existence worthwhile. In SS’s book, and in the lives of many SA women, the pretence that women are goddesses, morally superior, etc., is sorely challenged by the reality of domestic violence, being denied proper education, being wrenched from one’s family, MIL abuse, etc.
If there’s something to really bring home the reality of the myth of post-feminism and progress in equality – it’s domestic violence. When you factor in that SS’s mother was no Anna Wulf, free and able to constantly write and analyse her feelings and the cultural alienation and isolation, the appeal of religion is obvious. War is traumatic, but being ripped from your homeland and transferred to a poor copy of it (aged 16), never having contact with its other (foreign) residents and facing a violent, mentally-ill husband and his judgemental superstitious family… well gosh, that sounds like a fair recipe for trauma!
To end on a random note, religion paradoxically permits these women individual freedom, even as they are bound to a watchful wider religious community. A better way to deal with things, as SS understands, is to talk about them. Honestly and painfully. The absolute, abysmal failure of so many SA men to express themselves and to relate to their wives, and children, is quite frankly pathetic. Take, for example, the plot of a recent Bollywood smash hit, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. A man who has been hastily arrange-married to a young woman is in love with her. However, she’s not ready for that, given that her father and previous fiancé just died.
Does he invite her to talk over the grief? Does he give her a hug and relieve her briefly of her wifely duties? Does he offer to send her to counselling, so she can work through it on her own, if she so pleases? No – he dresses up as another man altogether, infiltrates her dance class and becomes her dance partner! AND SHE FALLS FOR IT! It could only happen in Bollywood. Now, the film in question was quite sweet, but… do you SEE what I frickin’ well mean?!
