Kinship and Continuity by Alison Shaw

Author:Alison Shaw [Shaw, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9789058230751
Google: KVQ5Lxd8rNMC
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2000-01-15T04:57:36+00:00

6

HONOUR AND SHAME: GENDER AND GENERATION

Tariq had been seeing Rubina for about one year without his parents’ knowledge before deciding to ask his father for permission to marry her. Tariq’s parents were disappointed to hear of their son’s intentions because they were already arranging a good match with a relative’s daughter but they agreed to speak to Rubina’s parents] Rubina’s parents, however, rejected the proposal, so Tariq and Rubina decided to elope and get married elsewhere. Her family alerted all contacts in Britain, but failed to trace her. A fortnight later, Rubina returned home of her own accord, to tell her parents of her marriage. Her enraged father took her back to Pakistan, where, several months later, she was married to her father’s brother’s son.

Some months after Rubina’s elopement with Tariq, another Pakistani girl, Jamila, eloped with a Sikh boy. Her outraged brothers and their friends took revenge on the boy’s male relatives by assaulting them one evening and threatening their lives if Jamila was not returned to them. A few days later, Pakistani friends in the midlands telephoned Jamila’s parents to tell them where their daughter was, and Jamila’s brothers fetched her home. Jamila’s parents took her to Pakistan for nine months and then brought her back to England for a six-month period of religious instruction under the guidance of a pīr (saint). She continued to live with her family for two years until her marriage to a cousin in Pakistan took place.

Elopements like these from time to time provide dramatic news headlines in the local press, and they are not confined to Oxford. A recent television documentary draws attention to the extremes to which dishonoured Pakistani families may go in their attempts to salvage their pride when daughters reject arranged marriages and elope with and marry white men. The film, based upon the stories of six young Pakistani women in Yorkshire, shows that families may keep errant daughters as prisoners in their own homes, or else issue death threats and engage ‘bounty hunters’ who tap into south Asian networks across the country seeking information about fugitives1. The price such couples pay for their love, poignantly described in a book written by one of the couples depicted in the film, is high indeed2. In Bradford, the number of girls being sought by bounty hunters has apparently doubled in the past four years, according to a unit established to help young Asian women who refuse to go through with arranged marriages3. The recent call for more government support and protection for young women forced into arranged marriages follows the life-sentence upon a mother and son for murdering a daughter (whose husband was in Pakistan, and whose father was dead) for the dishonour of her adulterous pregnancy4.

None of the Oxford incidents, as far as I know, has involved a Pakistani woman eloping with an English man — the elopements have been of Pakistani girls who have run away with other Pakistani, South Asian or Muslim men. And none of these cases

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