Deranged Marriage

by Sushi Das

  Around that time I came across an article in my college magazine titled Tug of War. It was written by Faraza, a Muslim student with whom I had a loose friendship. She was finger-thin with sharp, pointy elbows and exceptionally fine features, except for a podgy nose that didn’t seem to belong on her face. We used to share our anxiety over arranged marriages. Being a Muslim, her parents were much stricter than mine. I was moved by her article. ‘Everyone feels sorry for the Muslim girl,’ she wrote. ‘They pity her because she misses out on so much enjoyment; because she has no freedom of choice and because she has to have an arranged marriage.’

  I admired her for her clarity of thought and for trying to explain her relationship with her parents: ‘It is not like the relationship between a prisoner and her captors, as some tend to think. There is love and filial loyalty as in any normal Western family. The young Muslim will eventually have to make a choice, because society makes it impossible to stay on the cusp forever. What many do not realise is that it is not really a choice between two cultures. It is more a choice between risking it all in order to find one’s true identity and happiness, and taking the easy way out by compromising and following the kind of life one is expected or born to lead. The final decision has to be made alone, and it is alone that one bears the responsibility for the consequences. Too few have the courage and strength to take that responsibility in order to lead a life that is real and true to themselves.’

  Once I had read her words, I could not unread them. Once you know an idea, how can you unknow it? One day I’d have to stop standing on the cusp and make a decision, and I’d have to make it alone. Either I must go through with an arranged marriage, as I was expected to, or I must break out of the system, face the consequences and bear the responsibility. I resolved to find Faraza the next day and talk to her. Without knowing exactly how, I thought we might be able to help each other. I looked for her everywhere at the college, but nobody had seen her around. I asked one of my lecturers about her whereabouts and she told me Faraza had returned to Yemen. Apparently she had left without saying goodbye to anyone. I felt sudden fear and rushed to seek out a mutual friend at the college, who was also a Muslim. I figured she’d know the details.

  ‘Where is Faraza?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s gone back to Yemen.’

  ‘With her parents? But why?’

  ‘They took her back,’ said the girl. ‘They’re keeping her there under heavy restrictions.’

  ‘Oh my god.’

  ‘Faraza was a sad case,’ she said blankly. Her use of the past tense unnerved me. Faraza’s article had appeared in that week’s edition of the college magazine: her last shout before they took her away. The last time I had seen her was in the library, sitting at a desk taking notes from a text book, her long hair hiding her face. Were they going to force her to marry someone in Yemen? Maybe she had agreed to marry him. But why the heavy restrictions? What had she done? Perhaps they’d taken her back to be de-Westernised? How does that work? How do you de-Westernise someone? Do you make them wear traditional clothing? Do you forbid them from speaking in English? Do you stop them from reading Western books, watching Western movies, listening to Western music? Do you isolate them in a religious environment? Do you slap their face? Do you beat the living daylights out of them?

  There’s a difference between forced marriages and arranged marriages. A forced marriage involves duress and a lack of consent from one or both parties. In an arranged marriage, the families organise the marriage but the choice of whether to accept the arrangement is up to the couple. That’s the theory. If only it was that clear.

  Most people deplore the idea of forced marriage, not only because the individuals concerned are allowed no choice, but because the arrangement of such marriages can involve physical violence, usually to get the woman to submit.

  But people are less resistant to the idea of arranged marriages because they see them as a cultural phenomenon, and, as I’ve said, often justify them by the spurious argument that they have a high success rate. There’s no denying that many arranged marriages are happy and successful. But there’s also no denying that arranged marriages can involve mental manipulation or emotional coercion. We cannot conflate the emotional coercion behind some arranged marriages with the brutality of forced marriages or honour killings. But nor should we blindly accept arranged marriages, because what lies behind them is not just occasional emotional coercion but an entire social system that has its roots in the subjugation of women.

  My parents would never have turned to using physical force, and they were open-minded compared to some, but coercion has many faces: your mother will suffer a heart attack if you ruin our izzat. How can you be so selfish and do this to your parents? If you destroy this family’s name no one will marry your sister, so you’ll be ruining her life too.

  Mum and Dad feared what might happen to them if either of their daughters brought shame on the family. Nobody in our family had broken ranks and refused an arranged marriage before; no one had had a love marriage. There was no shortage of rumours to fuel my parents’ fears, particularly rumours of girls raised in Britain who had become ‘too Westernised’ and had run off to marry an Englishman. They were ‘bad girls’ – selfish, wild-eyed maniacs who had dived into the ditch of ill-repute and pulled their families down with them. I didn’t actually know any girls like that, but I heard a lot about them at social gatherings where middle-aged Indian women would gossip, their gasps and tut-tuts bouncing off the walls like ping-pong balls.

  One can only imagine the kinds of taunts these girls might have been subjected to, not to mention the taunts their parents would have faced. In the crevices of my memory, where the thinnest chink of light barely illuminates, I have a recollection of an Indian man, his shirtsleeves rolled up, waving his hands about wildly, standing at the top of the stone steps that led to his front door. He was shouting at another man who was leaving his house: ‘Just you wait, just you wait till your daughters grow up.’

  He must have been at the receiving end of taunts about whatever it was his daughters had done. I don’t know how far back that memory goes, but I remember his pitiful attempt to fight taunt with taunt, as he wiped away tears with the palm of his hand.

  The disconcerting feeling that other Indian families were always watching and passing judgment was a poison that laced social interaction as I grew up. While I agonised about being married off to a stranger, Mum and Dad’s big fear was loss of face. I was not unsympathetic to their plight. I imagined myself standing at the altar in a white wedding dress and Indian people taunting my dad as he yelled, ‘Just you wait, just you wait till your daughter grows up.’ I imagined Indian women nudging each other, their breathy gossip drifting out from behind their hands as Mum and Dad quickly passed them in the street, heads lowered in shame. I imagined my parents’ phone falling silent for lack of friends willing to call. I could frighten myself better than anyone else. I could summon guilt in a flash.

  Things might have been different if my parents had been part of a mere handful of Indian migrants who came to Britain in the 1960s. They might have dissolved into British society seamlessly. But they were part of mass migration. At that time, migration from Punjab was so commonplace it was as if whole towns and villages had uprooted and transplanted themselves from India to Britain. Migrants brought with them entire social systems – the lock, stock and barrel of family hierarchies. Mores, norms and rituals were all part of the cultural baggage they carried with them – baggage they clung on to after they arrived. Because that’s what migrants do – they don’t just transplant their physical bodies to a new land, they bring with them their modes of operating, the structures that hold their communities together and the language that lubricates the whole machinery. Culture from the old country serves as a raft to hang on to in uncharted waters. But by the time they are settled in their new country and the raft is no longer needed, it’s been around so long it’s become a crutch, a habit, a comforter like a child’s fav
ourite blanket.

  It’s been an odd kind of reverse colonisation by the Indians in Britain: chicken tikka masala, Diwali, multicoloured saris, Bollywood movies, bhangra rap, the corner shop, IT companies, the steel industry. But any kind of colonisation has a dark side: unhappy arranged marriages, crippling pressure for larger and larger dowries, oppressive social policing of young people who don’t toe the line, social coercion, domestic violence, honour killings.

  Many Indian migrants of the 1960s had roots that went back to farming communities. Outside influences can badly disrupt the established order of things in such small, close-knit communities. Village life was about making the most of the land people tilled, within the confines of whatever Mother Nature bestowed or inflicted. From a brutally economic point of view, many sons meant many workers to farm the land, and therefore prosperity. Sons could even travel far and wide to cities to earn money, if necessary.

  Women performed the role of producing and looking after the economic providers – men. Boiled down to the basics, a woman’s womb is the vital vehicle through which labour, in the form of sons, is delivered. That labour can farm the land or even be part of an army to act as security. No wonder, in a patriarchial society, men would want to exercise control over women, and therefore their wombs.

  So a woman must marry a man who is chosen not by her, but by those wiser and older than her, such as her parents and other older relatives – people who are charged with keeping her under control. It’s not difficult to picture the problems that might arise in keeping order within a community if a woman were to have control over her life by choosing her own husband. She might choose a man and move elsewhere, making her womb redundant to that community, or she might marry an outsider who doesn’t conform to that community’s norms. These scenarios ultimately threaten the stability or survival of a small rural community by changing its make-up.

  A system of morals that venerates family honour, especially if it links honour to the womb, acts as a useful device to keep women under control. Responsibility for protecting honour is placed on their head. So it is they who can be legitimately punished if there is any deviation from the moral code. Beating a woman keeps her fearful and under control. Disowning a woman by banishing her or destroying her through murder eliminates the threat to the community.

  If women themselves can be co-opted to dish out punishment to other women, even better, because then rebellious women, who dare to exercise choice, cannot form a collective force against men. Harsh mothers-in-law and village gossips successfully police their gender’s own oppression. One of the best ways to co-opt women is through a hierarchy that places married women who produce sons at the top and childless women at the bottom. A woman who produces no children may be considered a witch, a bringer of curses, by other women. This keeps the women divided and therefore weak. The whole community is then safe from internal threats (women who won’t do as they’re told) through fear. And we all know that fear is the mother and father of obedience.

  There will be people who disagree with my interpretation of things, perhaps even dismiss it as radical feminist blathering. But what other explanation is there for such heinous crimes as honour killings committed by men, sometimes with the help of women? We simply can’t dismiss such murders as rare. Globally, it’s estimated that about five thousand women were the victims of honour killings in 2000 (the most up-to-date figure I could find). According to the United Nations, such killings are believed to be on the rise and they happen in many different countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Sweden, Uganda and the United Kingdom.

  I know of one honour killing in Australia, and in Britain about twelve or thirteen people, mostly women, are killed every year to ‘protect’ their family’s honour. (Men murdered in honour killings are more often than not the boyfriend of the rebellious girl.) These numbers suggest that the honour system is very much alive among some in the British South Asian community. Many Asians, such as my parents, migrated to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. But many are born in Britain too, like my brother and sister. And if you think it’s the older generation that is most likely to perpetuate the honour system, think again.

  In 2012, a BBC survey about the honour system found it was strongly supported by young Asians in Britain. That’s a surprising result since one would imagine a second generation to be more relaxed about anachronistic traditions. The survey interviewed 500 Asians between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four and found that 69 per cent agreed that families should live according to honour. A worrying 18 per cent felt that behaviour by a woman that could affect her family’s honour, such as disobeying her parents or wanting to leave an existing or prearranged marriage, justified physical punishment. Frighteningly, 6 per cent of young Asian men said honour killings could be justified. That compares with 1 per cent of women who thought killings could be justified. On the face of it, these results are remarkable and inexplicable. Clearly, there needs to be a mindset change here.

  In reality, nobody knows how many women are murdered in honour killings each year, whether it be at the hands of male relatives or male relatives in cahoots with their mothers-in-law. Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service estimates there are about 10,000 forced marriages every year in Britain.

  So is it possible to discern why people hold on to the honour system so strongly? Hatred of Western ideals is one explanation, because they threaten the normal workings of some non-Western communities. A global study by an American think-tank called the Middle East Forum found that 58 per cent of victims were murdered for being ‘too Western’ and/or for resisting or disobeying cultural and religious expectations. Being ‘too Western’ included being seen as too independent; not subservient enough; wanting an advanced education and a career; having non-Muslim, non-Hindu or non-Sikh friends or boyfriends; and wanting to choose one’s own husband.

  In countries such as Britain, Canada and Australia, which have significant numbers of Asian migrants, forced marriages and the emotional coercion that frequently lies behind arranged marriages can go undetected for years, particularly if the wider community sees such practices as foreign customs not theirs to judge.

  When I was a teenager, the likes of Enoch Powell had been comprehensively shunned and multiculturalism was the new black – so to speak. It was only when media reports revealed brutality towards Asian women who tried to escape arranged marriages that the authorities stepped in. Yet there was little support for young women scared of what the future held for them, partly because they did not wish to expose their families’ private lives to external scrutinisers and partly because there was an unwillingness by the wider British community to interfere. Multiculturalism at its worst.

  Thankfully, the British government no longer sees forced marriages as a foreign custom in which it has no right to intrude. It views them as human rights abuses, and in 2012 passed a law to make them a crime. Years earlier it established the Forced Marriage Unit to help victims. In 2011 the unit dealt with 1500 cases, a third of whom were minors – schoolchildren who suddenly became wives. The youngest was reported to be just five years old. Every year the unit rescues hundreds of women (British citizens) taken overseas for forced marriages. The government has produced official guidelines for its departments on how to handle cases of forced marriage. These are positive steps forward but progress is always resisted by those who can’t let go of the past.

  In 2002 the British government wanted to start a discussion about arranged marriages and whether Asians could marry Asians brought up in Britain rather than importing marriage partners from places such as India and Pakistan. I’d say that’s a perfectly legitimate topic for discussion. But when the then home secretary, David Blunkett, suggested arranged marriages should involve partners from Britain and not the Indian subcontinent, he was accused of ‘attacking Asian culture’. These were his exact words: ‘We need to be able to encourage people to respond particularly to young women who do actually want to be ab
le to marry someone who speaks their language – namely English – who has been educated in the same way as they have, and has similar social attitudes.’

  I believe there are many young Asian women brought up in Western countries who would prefer to marry an Asian man also raised in a Western country, rather than one raised in the subcontinent. But Blunkett was accused of causing offence, and the criticism came from interesting places. Habib Rahman is the head of a charity called the Joint Council on the Welfare of Immigrants. ‘Everyone despises forced marriages,’ he was reported as saying. ‘But such an attack on the institution of arranged marriage is an attack on the whole communities of the Indian subcontinent’.

  Rubbish! It should be possible to discuss arranged marriages without anyone being berated for daring to question the way the Asian community behaves when it arranges the marriages of its sons and daughters.

  The arranged marriage cheer squad has sought the moral upper hand for some time, arguing that such marriages represent stronger family bonds, longer-lasting relationships and superior moral values. They use rising divorce levels in Western love marriages and the disconnectedness of the nuclear family from their wider family and community networks to support their case. They also frown on the higher priority given to individual self-fulfillment over family values. These are undoubtedly legitimate issues of concern.

  But it is not arranged marriages per se that allow for strong family bonds, successful relationships and moral uprightness. It is people who make these things happen. Unquestioning support for arranged marriages wilfully overlooks the subtle manipulation and emotional coercion that can lie behind them. Multicultural sensitivity is one thing, but allowing cultural relativism to compromise women’s human rights is quite another.