Marriage Rows

It’s an old South Asian story: boy meets girl just before the wedding. Boy marries girl whether she wants to or not. Girl loses her identity, her sanity and, sometimes, her life. At age 15, Jasvinder Sanghera was hurtling toward just such a fate. Born of Indian immigrants in the gritty English East Midlands city of Derby, she was about to be wed to a man she had never seen in a place, Punjab, she had never been.

Sanghera’s story took a detour. She ran away from home, married someone of her choosing, raised three children, earned a university degree and braved death threats to launch an organization that helps women in Britain’s South Asian community escape forced marriages. That’s a success story to inspire anyone. But, as Sanghera writes in Shame, her affecting new memoir, she has never quite escaped the penumbra of her family. She has never fully recovered from their response when, shortly after running away, she phoned home offering to return. “Don’t bother,” her mother said. “In our eyes, you’re dead.”

The weight of family and community hangs over Shame like a doting parent. As Sanghera notes, nobody really knows how many young people in Britain are pressured into matches they don’t want. The British government’s Forced Marriage Unit deals with more than 250 cases a year, but Sanghera’s group, Derby-based Karma Nirvana, alone takes on seven new ones a week. Police in Britain are investigating scores of suspected “honor killings” of women resisting arranged marriages. Tellingly, the suicide rate among young South Asian females is three times the national average.

What saves Shame from becoming another BBC documentary on the horrors of forced marriage (the network has interviewed Sanghera on that topic) is the author’s own story, recounted deftly and without apology. Like all good heroes, she is deeply flawed and strongly conflicted. “By day I fought for the rights of Asian women,” she writes, “and by night I craved acceptance from the very community I rejected.”

Sanghera is certainly no angel. Though underage, she flees Derby with her older, lower-caste boyfriend Jassey, to her family’s shame. The young couple settles in nearby Leeds, where Jassey, a trained engineer, sells cheap watches in a market stall to support them. Sanghera rewards his good-humored steadiness with an adulterous affair and a divorce. Then she ditches her lover, finds another husband and leaves him as well, temporarily losing custody of a child.

But when an older sister burns herself to death to escape an abusive marriage, Sanghera begins to realize the toll that custom and oppression are taking on Asian women. While raising children alone and pursuing a college degree on virtually no money, she launches Karma Nirvana (from Sanskrit words connoting action and enlightenment) in a spare room at a Derby women’s shelter.

Today, the group maintains homes for abused Asian women in Derby and nearby cities, and Sanghera lectures widely on the problem. But she has paid a price for her fame. “People here regard me as a woman with no shame, hence the book’s title,” says Sanghera, in a strong Midlands accent, from her home in Derby. “I get intimidating phone calls, saying my kids will be hurt, my legs chopped off if I don’t return their daughter. I’ve had human feces smeared on my window and signs painted on my car.” Her brother was beaten by a gang for being the brother of “that bitch who helps girls run away from home.”

Sanghera, now in her early 40s, reconciled with her parents before their deaths, but most of her seven siblings, including her only brother, refuse to talk to her. “They cross the road when they see me coming,” she says. “Family means a lot to Asians, but, in the past 25 years, I’ve never heard from anyone in my family on my birthday, not even a card. That still hurts.”

Sanghera would like to see a law against forcing someone to marry. A Liberal-Democrat member of the House of Lords introduced a bill to curb the practice by civil means. It was debated on Jan. 26 but has little chance of becoming law without government support. Sanghera intends to expand Karma Nirvana, eventually to Scotland and Wales, and dreams of a “national network of friendship for women like me, women who are alone. We will send them birthday cards.” As Sanghera has learned from the tumultuous life described in Shame, there is more than one kind of family.