Age, Narrative and Migration

The Life Course and Life Histories of Bengali Elders in London

Katy Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Whilst the vast majority of recent research on identity and ethnicity amongst South Asians in Britain has focused upon younger people, this book deals with Bengali elders, the first generation of migrants from Sylhet, in Bangladesh. The book describes how many of these elders face the processes of ageing, sickness and finally death, in a country where they did not expect to stay and where they do not necessarily feel they belong. The ways in which they talk about and deal with this, and in particular, their ambivalence towards Britain and Bangladesh lies at the heart of the book. Centrally, the book is based around the men and womens life stories. In her analysis of these, Gardner shows how narratives play an important role in the formation of both collective and individual identity and are key domains for the articulation of gender and age. Underlying the stories that people tell, and sometimes hidden within their gaps and silences, are often other issues and concerns. Using particular idioms and narrative devices, the elders talk about the contradictions and disjunctions of transmigration, their relationship with and sometimes resistance to, the British State, and what they often present as the breakdown of traditional ways. In addition to this, the book shows that histories, stories and identity are not just narrated through words, but also through the body - an area rarely theorized in studies of migration.

1 Journeys, Age and Narrative: An Introduction

One has constantly to learn in two directions: outwardly, toward the culture of the new home and inwards, toward relearning what one knew from the old. These crossed frontiers mark our personal biographies. They are the lines of forgetting and remembering, as from family photographs, old letters, documents of passage and new memorials

Feuchtwang (1992: 5-6).

This is a book about journeys, about travel and change, connection and disconnection. While many of the journeys we shall be hearing about involve travel over space, a physical shifting of bodies from one location to the other, the chapters that follow will also be centrally concerned with another sort of movement: over time. Here, the journeys are just as physical, but the movements I wish to chart involve the passing of individual bodies through the life course, histories that to a degree may be understood as collective but that are also intensely personal. This is a form of travel that we all engage in, whether we like it or not. Unlike the wings of a plane or the wheels of a car, time never stands still. Our bodies grow and change and decay, we move from one ‘age’ to another, endlessly reassessing our identities and our relationships to our bodies. Yet while this process is universal, it is not experienced by everyone in the same way. Where we are, both in space and in history, and who we are - our class, our gender, the cultures of which we are a part, plus the myriad of personal traits and proclivities that make up our selfhood - play a central role in how both sorts of journey are shaped and made meaningful. To this extent my subject-matter is common to all, as well as being highly dependent upon specific contexts.

In what follows, the context is one that might be described as ‘transnational’, a term that describes the long term and sustained movements and interconnectedness of people across national borders.¹ In this instance the transnational relationships I shall be describing are between residents of Britain and Bangladesh, or more specifically, Bengali areas of Tower Hamlets in East London and Sylhet District in the North-East of Bangladesh. Yet while both places are linked in vital ways, their cultures, political economies and social networks analytically inseparable, the people whose lives and histories I shall be narrating, both through their own and my words, live now in London. They are the first generation of Bengalis² to make Britain their ‘home’, even while retaining close links to Sylhet. Known genetically as ‘the elders’ in the day centre that many of them attended, all were reconciled, with varying degrees of happiness or discontent, with spending at least the immediate future in the UK. Their experience of growing old was thus intimately linked with their experience of Britain, their movement across the life course inextricably entangled with their movement between places. To this extent, what follows is both an ethnography of migration and an ethnography of ageing.

1. See Rogers 1986; Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Vertovec 1999; and Portes et al. 1999 (a Special Edition of Ethnic and Racial Studies).

2. The term ‘Bengali’ refers to people from both Bangladesh and West Bengal, in India. Yet while all of my informants were from Sylhet, in NE Bangladesh, I have chosen to mainly refer to them as ‘Bengali’ rather than as ‘Bangladeshi’. This is because, while the latter is geographically accurate, I find its implication of national identity problematic, and most of my informants generally referred to themselves as ‘Bengali’.

The book is also centrally concerned with narrative. All the following chapters are structured around the stories and accounts that elders gave of their lives, their histories and their feelings about migration. Later in this introduction I shall explain why narrative approaches can be so valuable in understanding the ways in which identities and histories are constructed and sketch a theoretical framework for their analysis. As I shall suggest, while by no means fictional or untrue, narratives are first and foremost stories, and it is through story-telling and the host of genres in which they are packaged that we convey our most personal experiences and memories, that we build meaning and construct identity. And as any astute viewer of Holly- or Bollywood films is surely aware, even the most apparently innocuous story is loaded with political meaning; for stories do not simply entertain or convey experience, they also comment upon it, and hence help to change it.

Life stories, experiences and feelings are not just expressed through what people say or write down. They are also conveyed through bodies and, in Judith Butler’s terms, the ‘performances’ that they give.³ While much of the book is concerned with the oral accounts given by the elders, I therefore also wish to extend my understanding of narrative to incorporate their embodiment. Somewhat surprisingly, the body is rarely mentioned in accounts of migration or migrant groups. Yet transnational movement is first and foremost a series of physical events, its effects experienced directly in the body; anyone who has undertaken a long-haul flight to a foreign place and then had to adjust to a different climate, diet and way of life can attest to that. What is the role of the body in expressing the shifting and multiple constructions of identity of different elders? How does the body, its physical presentation as well as stories about it, reflect history? And to what extent is ‘body talk’ used to convey other hidden or not so hidden meanings and messages, complaints, anxieties and forms of resistance?

3. Butler 1990.

Much of what I shall be describing is shared by a great many old people in Britain today. Poverty and dependence on the British state, racism and ageism are not the exclusive experience of first-generation Bengalis living in Tower Hamlets. Nor are feelings of nostalgia for ‘the good old days’, or critical feelings towards the younger generation, or resentment at how society has changed.⁴ It is probably true to say that all but the lucky minority of older people in Britain experience some feelings of regret or loss, and all look back to ‘the other country’ of times gone by. The similarities between my informants and non-Bengali elders living in inner-city Britain are hardly remarkable, for many of the structural factors that shape their lives are identical. The physiology of ageing and sickness is generally the same, even if experienced differently, and everyone who lives in the UK participates, to a greater or lesser degree, in ‘mainstream’ society and its institutions. In writing exclusively of Bengali elders I am aware of the dangers of giving the impression that they are an exotic ‘other’, their experiences completely different from that of, say, their English neighbours. The slippage from this into the assumption that cultural difference is the key to understanding all experience, as if ‘culture’ were somehow bounded and/or imported wholesale from Sylhet, is remarkably easy to make. Indeed, imputing difference, especially that based on culture, is a perilous affair, a point I shall return to shortly.⁵

4. See, for example, Mark Thorpe’s work amongst English old people in an inner city (Thorpe 1996).

5. Over-emphasis upon cultural difference has been interpreted by some commentators as a new form of ‘cultural racism’, distinct from but closely related to biological racism (Modood 1997).

But while they have much in common with other old and marginal people in Britain, there are also important differences between the Bengali elders included in this book and ‘the mainstream’. Racism and its interrelationship with economic and other forms of deprivation is an important factor here. While none of my informants are the ‘victims’ of global capital and imperialism, as was suggested, for example, by the Marxist theories of overseas migration and international dependency produced in earlier decades,⁶ as we shall see, their personal histories have been deeply affected by the broader context in which they have taken place. Colonialism, the international labour market and its shifting centres of demand and supply, the twists and turns of British immigration law and the relationship between this, national politics and institutional and other forms of racism are all crucial elements here. Thus, while the oral histories of the elders are testimony to the ways in which they have actively shaped their destinies, they have not done this in a political vacuum; underlying all the stories I recount here are power relationships, between people, places, and institutions.

6. As discussed in Gardner 1995; see also Addleton 1992.

The experience of transnational migration is another factor that has shaped the experiences and narratives of the elders in particular ways. The primacy of Sylhet or the desh (homeland; depending on context can refer to Bangladesh, Sylhet or one’s village) as both an idea and a set of social relationships and practices is key to this. As an anthropologist who has worked on issues of Sylheti migration since the mid-1980s and whose principal fieldwork before carrying out this research was in rural Sylhet, my main interest in embarking upon this study was in the relationship between migration and ageing, on the experience of ‘growing old in a second homeland’.⁷ It is for this reason that my research was located among first-generation Bengalis rather than, say, focusing upon a crosssection of elderly people in Tower Hamlets. For the elders I talked to in London, the ‘other country’ was located in the past, but it was also a physical place, located many thousands of miles away, but never entirely out of reach.

7. Norman 1985.

I shall be returning to questions of identity, age and migration in a short while. First, however, I wish to sketch out very briefly some of the most salient points arising from comparative work on South Asians in Britain and from recent approaches to transnational migration.

British South Asians: Changing Paradigms

Social anthropological perspectives on the presence of South Asian ‘communities’ in Britain have shifted substantially over the last three decades. This is partly the result of the radical shake-up caused by postmodern and post-colonial critiques of social science methodologies and epistemologies that has gathered pace since the 1980s, and that has forced social anthropology to reappraise both its forms of representation and many of its underlying conceptual assumptions.⁸ Yet while shifts in the perspectives of researchers are partly the result of changing theoretical paradigms within academia, they also reflect very real historical changes in the nature and profile of so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ in Britain. In what follows I shall not attempt to provide a comprehensive resume of research amongst British South Asians;⁹ merely to sketch in some of its more significant features.

8. Classic examples of post-modern critiques of social anthropology ...