Overcoming domestic violence
PADMINI SWAMINATHAN
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This book, though autobiographical in nature, reveals the rot that afflicts South Asian communities
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SHAME: Jasvinder Sanghera; Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline, 338, Euston Road, London NW1 3BH. £ 12.99.
"Shame" is a severe indictment of the celebrated Asian `family/community', where family honour and community norms, however oppressive, repugnant and violent, mattered more than anything else, including victims' lives. The book is a first person account of the author's struggle not only to survive the oppression and overcome unimaginable forms of adversial reactions to her attempts to live her life on her own terms; it also led her to set up Karma Nirvana, a community-based organisation that supports South Asian women affected by domestic violence and honour-based crimes.
Sanghera's narrative of her growing-up in Derby is replete with accounts of the lengths to which her mother went to preserve the `family's good name' and present a good face outside so that anything unpleasant ipso facto had to be buried within the confines of the family. By the time Sanghera reached teenage, three of her sisters were married and preparations for the marriage of the fourth were already on. The question of whether the sisters were happy in their marriage did not arise since the mother always nipped any note of dissent by sternly reprimanding them; other members of the family were admonished if they attempted to speak on behalf of the daughters, while the matter itself was usually brought to a close by the mother's declaration: "It is your duty to have a respectable marriage and to uphold the good name of your family".
Ostracised
Even as countries of the South struggle to make access to school universal, South Asian communities settled in countries where the access is not only universal but also mandatory, have yet managed to [mis]use their ethnic and religious status to deny their daughters access to schooling beyond basic levels.
When Sanghera's pleas to her mother to let her continue schooling rather than get her married to a total stranger were turned down obstinately, she fled her home. The fact that the person she chose to run away with (Jassey) belonged to a Scheduled Caste led to her ostracisation. Her mother's words of curse when she tried to explain over phone the reasons for her defiant behaviour were to haunt Sanghera all her life. The rest of the book is a poignant account of how a young Sanghera, barely out of her teens, ill-equipped educationally and financially, coped with harsh reality.
Sanghera, together with Jassey, proved her mother wrong almost every inch of the way and yet the latter's reluctance to acknowledge her achievements underscored the community's hold on the mother. Years later at a "Listening Skills Course", when Sanghera had to speak from personal experience, all the "deepest, ugliest feelings" that she had suppressed for long burst forth. Also for the first time Sanghera realised that her `experience wasn't shameful or disgraceful', that she was not the perpetrator of any crime but had, on the contrary, been the victim of cruelty, denial and disownment. With this realisation also came a torrent of angry questions: Why did Mum maintain that unhappiness was just a normal part of married life? Why did she not protect her daughters? Why did she treat them like puppets? Couldn't she see that we had a right to choose, to our own fulfilling lives?
Food for thought
The urge to experience romantic love, the craving for kindness, and the desperate moves and compromises to save her marriage — in recording and reflecting on these aspects of her life, Sanghera provides readers with much food for thought. There is a frank admission of wrong decisions taken, but there is also the determination to move forward in life and, more important, provide her children a childhood "full of unconditional love that I wanted for myself', and save them from the "hurt I've known".
Sanghera's work among the South Asian community women makes her recount and re-live her own experience again and again since the stream of victims of domestic abuse is endless; it has made her expand the scope of her work to move beyond Derby and also involve police officers, social workers and teachers in the issues facing Asian women in Britain.
This book, even if autobiographical in nature, reveals the rot that afflicts South Asian communities and which in turn translates into human rights violations particularly for the girl children and women of these communities. What it does not speak out, but clearly implies, is the inability, even reluctance of the British state, to confront these communities on such issues. What is being camouflaged in the name of protecting cultural and religious rights of ethnic minorities is the denial of basic citizenship rights to the most vulnerable in these communities for whom community and family honour takes precedence over violence to self and even life.
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