‘Education makes you have more say in the way your life goes’: Indian women and arranged marriages in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper explores Indian women’s views on arranged marriages in the United Kingdom. It is based on research carried out with 32 Indian women studying at a university in the South East of England, UK. The article draws on Wenger’s social theory of learning to explore how Indian women’s participation in communities of practice in higher education contributes to their participation in arranged marriages. The concept of ‘social capital’ is used to discuss how women are able to negotiate their participation in arranged marriages, It is used to examine the knowledge and identity resources that women develop through their participation in higher education, which provides them with the means from which to develop the necessary ‘bridging ties’ leading to their active participation in the wider South Asian community.

Keywords:

• university
• education
• social capital
• bonding and bridging ties
• Indian women

Notes

1. Although there is evidence that families participate in the giving of dowries in the United Kingdom (Wilson 2006; Bhopal 2010), there is little evidence that points to the incidence of dowry deaths.

2. High‐profile South Asian women seen in this role include Pamella Bordes who hit the headlines in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s for being the mistress and escort of several notable figures including MPs David Shaw and Henry Bellingham as well as the billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. These headlines raised similar issues to the 1960s Profumo affair. More recently, Bangladeshi‐born Faria Alam’s affair with former England football team manager Sven‐Goran Eriksson led to claims that she was a high‐class prostitute (The Sun, 22 February 2008, ‘Faria Alam is £8k Hooker).

3. Recently the BBC reported that hundreds of South Asian school children in Bradford were disappearing from school registers and there was concern that that some (or all) of these children were being forced into marriages in which they had little or no choice (BBC Radio 4, Today, 11 March 2008, ‘Hundreds of Asian Children Disappearing from School Registers’).

4. Many of the women spoke about the diversity of their identities. Sometimes they described themselves as Indian and other times as British Indian/Asian. They emphasised their belonging to both aspects of their identity: their Britishness and their attachment to their Indian/Asian ancestral roots (for a detailed discussion of this see Bhopal 2010).

5. I discuss elsewhere how my identity as a British Asian woman affected my positionality within the research (see Bhopal 2010).

6. All names are pseudonyms.

7. Gurdwara is a Sikh temple and place of worship.

8. ‘Izzat’ refers to family honour, reputation and pride. It is usually women who are able to control the family’s ‘izzat’, this is based upon extent to which women’s behaviour is seen as acceptable within the family and community.