Shehri (city) brides between Indian Punjab and the UK: transnational hypergamy, Sikh women's agency and gendered geographies of power

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Sikh transnational marriages contracted between the UK and Indian Punjab. Ethnographic and statistical studies have found that transnational marriage is less popular among UK-born Indian Sikhs than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. Those who marry transnationally tend to be less educated than those who marry in the UK, and there is an apparent pattern in transnational marriages wherein UK-born men are likely to marry women from India who are more educated than themselves, or shehri (city) women as they are called in Punjabi. The paper explores two shehri brides’ lived experience of marriage and explores the constraints on their agency and the forms that it takes at a number of ‘geographies’ or scales: in their relationships with their natal families, with their in-laws, husbands, the labour market and the state. The paper argues that state discourses problematising marriage migration in socio-economic and integration terms must be critiqued, not only because the shehri brides go against classed policy framings of the migrant wife but also because such framings deny the agency of all migrant women as they struggle to move on with their lives over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational marriage
• gender relations
• British Asians
• South Asia
• Sikhs

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Filippo Osella, V. J. Varghese, Mike Collyer, Ben Rogaly, Roger Jeffery, Patricia Jeffery and Katharine Charsley, and the participants at the Marriage and Migration Network workshop at SFI, Copenhagen, in January 2014 and Intimacy and Equality: Uncomfortable Bedfellows at the Institute of Education, London, in March 2014, as well as the two peer reviewers and the editors of JEMS for all their constructive comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Similarities in the relationships between transnational marriage and education are shown between UK-born Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and German-born Turks, where transnational marriages are associated with lower education for men, but this association is not significant among women (Gonzalez-Ferrer 2006).

2. There are relatively few other studies of educational differentials in transnational marriages. Hooghiemstra (2001) finds that Dutch Turkish men are able to marry more educated Turkish nationals, while Celikaksoy, Nielsen, and Verder (2006) find that Danish Turkish men marry women less educated than themselves—perhaps compromising on education to obtain a wife with ‘unspoilt norms’—while Danish Pakistani men again marry more educated spouses from Pakistan. The complexity in these patterns and their lack of generalisability, as in the case of UK-born South Asians, speak to the necessity of ethnographic thickening.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework 2008–2011, during which time I was a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex.