The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis 9781474215763

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List of Illustrations

Maps 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

Immigrant Sending Districts in Pakistan The Central Residential Cluster 1963 The Central Residential Cluster 1976-77 Percentage of Asian Households out of Total Households The Pattern of Movement of Asians in South Manchester Percentage of Asians out of Total Asian Population in Three Boroughs (Manchester City, Stockport, Trafford) 4.1 Neighbourhood Wedding Guests of the Bride's Family in the Central Residential Cluster Genealogies 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 6.1 8.1

Chain Marriage and Divorce The Constraints of Affinity (Samir) 'Connecting' the Biraderi (Hanif) Marriage Options (Yasmeen) Rifat's Relatives in Manchester in the Mid-1970s Genealogical Links of Kin Present at a Wedding (Ibrahim)

Tables

1.1 Life-Styles and Housing 1.2 Socio-Economic Characteristics of the Asian Population in Manchester City 1.3 The Asian Population of Manchester, Stockport and Trafford 3.1 The Pakistani Caste (rat) Hierarchy in Manchester 3.2 Social Mobility of Pakistanis in Manchester 6.1 Density and Compactness in Hamid's Network at Three viii

Preface

This book contains an analysis of some of the findings of a research project funded by the Social Science Research Council UK, which I conducted among Pakistanis in Manchester during the years 1975-79. I would like to thank the Council for its generous support. Since I have remained living in the city, I have supplemented the fieldwork data collected during this period with more recent research, conducted at intervals during the 1980s. Writing this book has been both challenging and enjoyable, largely because of the help of a great many people. Without doubt, the greatest debt is to all my Pakistani friends who not only offered me and my husband food and hospitality, but trusted me and gave me so unstintingly of their time and ideas. It is impossible to thank all the many people who have been generous and kind to me, so I will mention only a few: Majid and Shaheen Khan, Munir and Shahnaz Choudri, Nazir and Qamar Ahmed, and all their friends; Chaudry Muhammad Amin and Gulzar Chaudry, Dost and Azra Muhammad, Mr. and Mrs. Barkat Ali, Maulana Habib and Salima Ur Rehman, and all their children. My research assistants and friends, Zeitoun, Aftab, Lubna and Saleem, also deserve special thanks for their patience and cooperation. Dawar, Khawar and Nasir Ghaznavi took some of the best pictures in the book. In preparing the manuscript Munir Choudri and Majid Khan gave immeasurable help, always basing their advice on their rich cultural knowledge and understanding, and I am extremely grateful to them for their generosity. I spent long hours discussing the research with Tim Ingold, Clyde Mitchell and Maureen Michaelson, all of whom gave me invaluable comments. Robin Ward provided encouragement and moral support, as well as intellectual stimulation; Rosemary Mellor, Penny and Chris Fuller, Sarah Southwold, and David Rheubottom made insightful comments on individual chapters. Discussions of my research in the Manchester Anthropology Seminar, in the Aston Seminar on Ethnic Enterprise and in the Pakistan Workshop were especially helpful. I am grateful to the participants in these sessions for their comments. John

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Preface to the Paperback Edition

The re-issuing of The Migration Process in paperback is an opportunity to reflect back on key themes of the book that, in retrospect, appear more sharply, and to respond to some of its critics. The Migration Process is the first volume in the Manchester Migration Trilogy, a series of three monographs based on my research in Britain and in Pakistan over a period of over two decades. The trilogy traces the historical development of an ethnic community from the early days of young male migration to the United Kingdom following World War 11, to the present diasporic mobilisation around transnational identity politics and religious belief. The second book in the trilogy, Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims: the Public Performance of Transnational Identity Politics, published in 2002,' is concerned with communal politics and the complexity of identifications and orientations of Pakistanis, who see themselves at once as British and Pakistani citizens and as members of a world Muslim umma. The third book in the trilogy, Pilgrims of love: the Anthropology ofa Global Sufi Cult, also published in 2002; examinesmystical Islam and its followers in Britain and Pakistan, and traces the national, regional and transnational connections developed and sustained by Sufi disciplesin the context of postcolonial world migrations.

The Centrality of Class As the first book in the trilogy, The Migration Process analyses the economic and social dynamics of settlement and community formation that set the scene for the other two books.The book's main focus is on the complex processes of stratification, gender relations, ritual and life style which migration has generated.

1. JamesCurrey, London, 2002 and School of American Research, Santa Fe, 2002. 2. C. Hurst Publishers, Condon, 2002, and Indiana University Ress, Bloomington, 2002.

Introduction

Since the Second World War, new communities of South Asians have emerged throughout the Western industrial world. The South Asian diaspora now includes communities in Norway and Denmark, Holland and Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. Without doubt, the largest South Asian diaspora to emerge in the past forty years is located in the United Kingdom. This book is an ethnography of one. British community - of Pakistanis resident in Manchester. The community is a complex one, for it includes both professionals and factory workers, and increasingly, a large proportion of its members have become, and are becoming, traders and manufacturers. A community is 'born', according to the great Punjabi Muslim poet Iqbal, when it reaches a state of 'self-consciousness'. It is born when it 'createth its own history' out of a 'thousand images' (Iqbal, The Mysteries of SelfIessness, de Bary 1958: 205). British Pakistanis in South Manchester create their community out of their shared memories, their myths, about the early years of their migration to Manchester. Their community is born out of their common perceptions of the society in which they live. Pakistani settlers do not simply share a culture deriving from their place of birth; the 'taken-for-granted' features of this culture are no longer natural and self-evident. They have to be renewed and relocated in this new context. Moreover, Pakistanis in Manchester have also had to evolve localised ideas about status, power and leadership, ideas which have a far-reaching influence on their conduct and expectations. What Pakistanis have to face - as immigrants to Britain - is the problem of history and their particular part in it; the historical disjunction between past and present, between there and here. Although they may experience this disjunction as a personal predicament, any resolution to it can only be achieved collectively. It is, above all, in the context of daily interactions with fellow Pakistanis living locally, in Britain, that they can recreate their culture and traditions, their common iinages, idioms and values. It is in this context that they must re-negotiate the social categories they share and which link the present with the past.

Chapter 1 Chains of Migrants: Culture, Value and the Housing Market

In Manchester . . . one grew accustomed to one's friends being Jews or Germans or both, or Armenians or Turks or both, but to be a Tory - now, that was the stigma of uncleaness. (R. Ryan, granddaughter of C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian; cited in Kennedy 1970: 130).

Manchester: Growth and Decline Manchester has been a city of immigrants since its emergence as a great industrial metropolis at the end of the eighteenth century. The industrial growth of the city and its prominence throughout the nineteenth century in the world cotton trade attracted to it many 'strangers' or 'foreigners': German merchants, Jewish tailors, Italian and Greek traders, Irish workers. Immigrants came to the city as pedlars and hawkers, traders and merchants.' Often despised initially, they nevertheless came to play a major role in the industrial growth of the city. Immigrants not only built great warehouses, exporting cotton goods and machinery throughout the world, but also a city of culture and radicalism, bringing with them new ideas and founding such cultural landmarks as the Halle orchestra or the University. As a city in transition, nineteenth-century Manchester encapsulated the contradictions of its age: while ideas of liberalism pervaded the fight for free trade and abolition of the corn laws, nineteenth-century Manchester, with its squalor and poverty, was also a city renowned for its sordid slums. Engels, who recorded them for posterity, was himself a merchant of German origins. Because of its commanding industrial position in the North it was the seat of constant industrial ferment and many trade unions, indeed the trade union 1. For the history of Manchester see Kennedy (1970), Shercliff (1960), Williams (1976), and Frangopulo (1%2; especially 109-23).

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Chapter 2 Chains of Entrepreneurs: The Production of an Enterprise Culture

Entrepreneurial Chains Manchester has traditionally been the business and commercial metropolis of a wide area, and the economic structure of the city has provided opportunities for Pakistani enterprise not always found elsewhere. Whilst the small Lancashire cotton-mill towns attracted an unskilled and low-paid labour force occupied in primary cloth manufacturing, Pakistanis in Manchester turned, almost from the start, to the manufacturirig and distributing of ready-made garments, following other migrants before them into the local 'rag trade'. The first Pakistani immigrant entrepreneurs in Manchester were men from Jullunder and some adjacent districts in East Punjab. The majority came from families of small farmers, and after Partition, they were joined by relatives and friends who had settled in Pakistan as refugees. By the early 1950s these migrants from Jullunder were already established as pedlars, market traders and wholesalers. Pakistani entrepreneurship thus tended during its formative years to take the form of entrepreneurial chains, with the consequent creation of clusters of migrants from the same areas of origin in particular sections of the trade. These networks provide essential information on the setting up of businesses, the length of time they take to establish, the initial outlay required, the particular problems typical of the business, the expertise needed, the availability of labour. Such information cannot be measured adequately in quantitative terms, but it is clearly essential for the establishment of viable small businesses during their formative years. In these chains the pioneers form pivotal points of growth. To give substance to these chains let me recount briefly a few of the links which clustered around one of the early, and legendary, Pakistani pioneers in the local garment industry.

Chapter 3 Marriage, Exchange and the Reproduction of Inequality

Equality and Inequality The majority of Pakistanis who arrived in Manchester came as strangers, knowing very few of their fellow migrants. Their continuous residence in the city has been associated with an enormous expansion of their friendship and acquaintance networks. Large cities create a variety of settings in which townsmen encounter one other, from casual interaction in shops or cafes to daily encounters in the neighbourhood and common work in factories or in business enclaves; people .forge new friendships as part of their common involvement in the garment industry, weekly worship at the mosque or more intimate meetings in the homes of mutual Mends. Lie labour migrants on the Copperbelt or in Indian cities, interaction between Pakistanis in town is ordered on the basis of a set of mutually shared social categories, according to a scale of prestige, on the one hand, and social distance, on the other (cf. Mitchell 1956a; EJerreman 1975). Two discrete classificatory systems based, alternatively, on area of origin and zat (translated throughout North India as 'caste') serve to map socially significant relations, and to locate fellow migrants along two kinds of scale: on the one hand, a scale of social distance conceived in egalitarian terms and, on the other hand, a ranked hierarchical scale partly defined by class athibutes such as wealth, occupation or education, and partly based on Muslim zat membership. The first kind of scale tends to guide labour migrants in their choice of trusted Mends, who are very often recruited from the same area of origin, whilst the second is significant in the establishment of new ties of kinship and marriage, which are usually contracted on the basis of caste and class statuses.' 1. Mitchell (1956a) discusses social distance in relation to area of origin and tribe. Cf.

Chapter 4 Circles of Trust: Women, and the Control of Ceremonial Exchange

Neighbourliness in the Residential Cluster Immigrant ghettos have often been described as places of intense sociability, as 'urban villages', and in Manchester, too, the village-like characteristics of the central residential cluster are, perhaps, its most marked feature. Yet surprisingly, to a passerby through the neighbourhood on any grey Manchester morning, the streets would seem virtually deserted. Here and there a woman may be seen walking down the narrow pavements, going shopping or visiting a friend. On market days, women carrying shopping baskets converge at the local market. Here all is colourful excitement, as vendors display a variety of goods, from vegetables and meat to new clothes, handbags and household utensils. The market is a central place for women to meet their friends and exchange news and gossip, while buying a few household goods and picking up a length of material at a bargain price, another item to hoard for the day when a daughter marries or the long-awaited trip to Pakistan takes place. In the afternoon the streets of the neighbourhood suddenly come to life. Women walk along in twos and threes as they return from school, surrounded by children. The latter rush back and forth, excited to be released from captivity. Young teenage boys return on bicycles from various high schools. After school some of the children go off to the homes of one or other of the local Koran teachers for an hour or so of Koran instruction. On the long summer evenings children play in the streets, and on weekends one may see families going visiting, dressed in their best. But on the whole, social life takes place in the seclusion of the houses, behind closed doors and drawn curtains. For even in this neighbourhood the homes are fortresses of privacy, the street merely a meeting place for polite greetings and brief exchange of gossip. Once in the home, however, sociability with neighbours, friends and 122

Chapter 5 Giving to God: The 'Naturalisation' of Ritual

At the centre of the whole Javanese religious system lies a simple, formal,

undramatic, almost furtive, Little ritual: the slurnetan . . . [it] is the Javanese version of what is perhaps the world's most common religious ritual, the communal feast, and, as almost everywhere, it symbolises the mystic and social unity of those participating in it. Friends, neighbours, fellow workers, relatives, local spirits, dead ancestors, and near-forgotten gods all get bound, by virtue of their commensality, into a defined social group pledged to mutual support and cooperation. (Geertz 1960: 1) Sacrifice and Migration Acts of sacrifice or offering have always been regarded as taking place in the context of 'natural' groups of kindreds or locally-based communities. For labour migrants this 'natural' community cannot be simply 'renewed'; it must be reconstructed. Moreover, its very reconstruction is problematic, for it implies a shift in commitments from migrants' natal home to their new place of domicile. The performance of sacrifices or ritual offerings away from home effects for Pakistanis, as labour migrants, a crucial transition. The very structure of the ritual dictates that its efficacious performance is contingent on the mediated ritual support of significant others: kin, friends, neighbours and the poor. The holding of sacrifices and offerings, hitherto unambigously associated with 'home' in its broadest affective and moral sense, is predicated, in other words, on the reconstruction of a moral universe, and in order to achieve this reconstruction, migrants must reconstitute crucial moral categories of the person. Once reconstructed, rituals of offering and sacrifice come to be powerful focuses for sociability. A family's current intimate circle, as well as its widest network of acquaintances, is gathered in order to seek blessing, redemp-

Chapter 6 Circles of Trust: Multiple Domains of Exchange

The 'Culture of Friendship' among Elite Pakistanis' As an important commercial and educational centre, Manchester has attracted a proportionately large number of educated Pakistanis. Many came as students and remained, with or without completing their studies. Some were, in the 1970s, working in factories or in other blue-collar jobs, but the majority were, and are today, professionals and businessmen. The professionals are mainly accountants, lawyers and doctors; the businessmen own travel and insurance agencies, exportimport companies of various kinds, construction firms, retail shops and a variety of other businesses, predominantly within the garment or clothing industry. Some hold executive positions in British or Pakistani companies and banks. Others work for the local authority as teachers or community workers. Some are employed by government departments as engineers or accountants, while still others are employed by independent and voluntary agencies and public organisations. Most elite immigrants come from cities, while the villagers come from land-owning families. Such families usually hold posts in the rural administration, own mills and markets and have close links with the urban elite (cf. Alavi 1973, 1983; Saghir Ahmad 1977). Thus, those of both rural and urban origin come from the relatively small Pakistani elite and middle class, and have friends or relatives occupying prominent positions in the civil service, in the army, in large business firms or in the intelligentsia. They form a kind of outpost of this elite, and continue to maintain numerous and active links with its members. Today this 1. I define the term 'elite' rather loosely to refer to migrants originating from propertied, middleilass, primarily urban, educated backgrounds in Pakistan. Many of these came as students and were, at the time of my research in the mid-197Os, either professionals or businessmen, but some still worked in factories (none do so at the time of writing).

Chapter 7 -

Circles of Trust: From Commodities to Gifts

The 'Strength' of Friendship Pakistani factory workers in Manchester, both men and women, often develop vast networks of acquaintances over time. They also evolve some very close friendships. As they find themselves in novel contexts, they extend their relationships beyond primary village and kin networks. The expansion is generated by current experiences and common interests. It is articulated culturally within the idiomatic framework of an elaborate grft economy. For our purposes here, the fundamental distinction between gifting and commodities relates to the different relationship set up by a transaction. A @, whether in the form of a good or a service, is essentially inalienable. It implies permanent debt and, reciprocally, permanent trust. Gifts thus reflect the long-term durable nature of social bonds. What has been most remarkable in the British context has been the efflorescence or extension of the Punjabi Muslim gdt economy, alongside a more extreme reliance on the market and on commodity relations. Among Pakistani factory workers it is often men who dominate the choice of close family friends, and it is important therefore to examine the nature of friendship between men. Male friendships among Pakistanis are deep, emotional and enduring. The 'culture of friendship' amongst men recalls male friendships in societies with institutionalised men's houses (as among the Pathan, cf. Barth 1959) or male coffee houses (as among the Greek, for example). The all-male lodging houses and factories constitute natural contexts where friendships between men develop. Factory work side by side provides an important context in which close friendships are built up. The work experience is so fundamental to men's world view and sense of identity, and the time spent at work -

Chapter 8 Hierarchical Gift Ec'onomies

For giving is like the flow of water which goes from the high level to the low, from the rich to the poor, from the older to the younger. (Punjabi saying quoted by Eglar 1960: 109)

It is sometimes assumed that commodity-based economies displace gift economies, or that the two economies may be regarded as successive phases within an evolutionary schema (for a critique cf. Gregory 1982, Long 1986, Richard Werbner, 1989). It has also been argued that 'classbased' societies do not develop real gift economies (Gregory 1982; but cf. Moms 1986). In South Asia, a highly elaborate ceremonial gift exchange system has historically flourished side by side with a tributary and, more recently, a capitalist, commodity-based economy. In particular, it should be noted, land in contemporary South Asia is a transactable commodity, privately owned and unevenly distributed. The South Asian gift economy is fundamentally linked to the reproduction of a hierarchical caste system and may be typified as a 'hierarchical' gift economy, in contrast to gift economies based on the exchange of women (either direct or indirect), the inalienability of land and incremental or competitive gift exchange between equals. Hierarchical gdt economies are based on the exchange of labour (as in the jajmani system), endogamy (i.e. the non-exchange of women), hypergamy and a tendency to direct gifts unilaterally towards superiors, on the one hand, and inferiors or dependents on the other. Although the obligation to give, and thus create a debt, is characteristic of hierarchical gift economies, 'gifts to God' - often in the form of agonistic giving to communal causes - are a major feature of the system. Moreover, incremental competitive exchange between equals frequently takes the form of giving to dependents, rather than directly to the competitor himself. Totemic and caste systems may be regarded as logical inversions (Lbvi-Strauss 1962: 109-34). In one, interdependency between groups is created through the exchange of women and food, in the other, through

Chapter 9 Wedding Rituals and the Symbolic Exchange Of Substance

'Who has given the bride? To whom then is she given It is love that has given her; It is to love that she has been given Love has given; love has received Love has filled the ocean' (a Hindu hymn of marriage, cited by Uvi-Strauss 1969:489) The Meeting of Two Loves

Marriage, says Uvi-Strauss 'is an arbitration between two loves, parental and conjugal. Neverthelesss, they are both forms of love, and the instant the marriage takes place, considered in isolation, the two meet and merge; "love has filled the ocean".' As they 'intercross they must momentarily be joined, and it is this which in all social thought makes marriage a sacred mystery' (ibid.). For Pakistanis a wedding is about a transfer of love, nurture and authority. That each involves both dependence and a mutual interdependency is deeply rooted in Punjabi culture. For Punjabi Muslims male power, ttfqat, is physical force or strength; it is also the power of office, the power of authority. Female power, sabr, is the power to endure, to bear hardship. A woman, they say, has greater endurance than a man. Active and passive, male and female, each form of power complements the other. Yet a woman, they say, does have tdqat as well; it is the power to link together families (or, they say, destroy them). A man, they say, is not bothered with this kind of thing. A woman creates these links with gifts and love. She destroys them with hatred. A marriage thus brings into the family a new person who will either glorify it and extend its ambit,

Chapter 10 The Organisation of Giving and Immigrant Elites

Rich Man, Poor Man or a Community of Suffering The gift of the bride as tribute, and the unilateral flow of prestations accompanying her, reflect, we saw, the hierarchical nature of the gdt economy among South Asians. In communal terms, Pakistani weddings may also arguably be said to constitute the apex of direct, competitive exchange between familial groups. Typically, such gifting creates deferred debts and a future obligation to reciprocate incrementally. While it focuses on the domestic reproductive cycle, the feasting and display at weddings enables Pakistanis to assert their relative status competitively, and weddings are thus markers of class and wealth in the local context. The display of current wealth and status does not, however, confer moral authority, and in the competition for ethnic leadership and local hegemony a different form of competitive 'giving' dominates local power struggles and rivalries. Weddings, like other forms of potlatch, are occasions for the saaificial destruction of wealth in the form of food and other valuables. Yet this destruction differs fundamentally from 'gifts to God' which are directed towards axiomatically defined communal causes. Such giving leads to the accumulation of communal or corporate wealth (cf. Gregory 1980, 1982) while it legitimates claims to hegemonic leadership. To be a recognised leader, to be worthy of this distinction, an officeseeking Pakistani must gain the esteem of his fellows through current, and continuing, public action. He can rarely rely on credentials of birth or family' status. The demand for current proof of dedication and legitimacy stems from a commonly held view among local Pakistanis that, since they shared an early period of poverty and hardship, they are essentially equals (cf. P. Werbner, 1980b: 47-8). Hence, none may be automatically elevated above their fellows. In this final chapter I discuss

Conclusion

Capital Accumulation: The Creation of a Culture of Entrepreneurship My aim in this book has been twofold: to analyse the economic bases which have enabled British Pakistani immigrants to move in substantial numbers into self-employment, and to show how economic behaviour is constituted socially and culturally. I have argued that migration needs to be seen as a process, in which recognisable social and familial phases are associated with different forms of economic saving, investment, enterprise and consumption. Migration is also a process because change occurs cumulatively: it is initiated by a select few, and its viability rests on a succession of others following the path carved out by early pioneers. Each migration phase, we saw, has its own unique, culturally defined priorities - the absolute sharing and equality between single male factory workers in a pioneering phase is replaced, at a later phase, by 'structured' generosity and differentiation, as immigrants accumulate capital and wealth. Early definitions of honour and reputation among equals are overshadowed by definitions of status based on economic success. Familism comes to dominate friendship as religion increasingly dominates communal affairs. Wage earners move into self-employment, and the virtues of autonomous self-sufficiency are extolled. Immigrant entrepreneurial success is often seen to stem from institutional arrangements for pooling savings in the form, for example, of rotating credit associations (Light 1972). In the case of British Pakistani entrepreneurs, such organisational resources have been supplementary rather than central to the process of capital accumulation. Most important for this process was the creation of 'beneficial economic cycles' during the initial phases of migration, together with an ongoing extensive reliance on credit distribution networks. Benefiaal economic cycles emerged first in housing, which became a form of capital investment utilised to draw rent from successive waves of incoming migrants. Each wave of migrants became landlords to the

Appendix 1 Maps and Figures of Chapter 1

The maps and figures presented here are based on three sources: the Manchester Ratepayers' List of 1963, the voters' electoral rolls of 1969-70, 1975-6 and 19767, and on the 1981 census. I wish to thank T. Gluckman for assisting me in the laborious task of copying the entries in the electoral roUs. Asians and Pakistanis were identified in the two former cases by their names and this, of course, introduces a margin of error into the figures. In 1963 few Asians were British citizens, and therefore there was little point in examining the electoral rolls for this earlier period. Migrants who had come to Manchester in the 1950s already owned their own houses, however, a fact reflected in the ratepayers' book. The percentages presented in Map 1.2 are unlikely to represent the actual number of Asian migrants in the total population, since each property owned by an Asian would be likely to house a jar& number of single men as paid lodgers. Significance must be attributed, therefore, primarily to the relative distribution of Asians in the various neighbourhoods, rather than to their actual proportion in the population. By 1%9, and particularly by 1975-7, most Asian men had acquired British citizenship, and it was felt that the electoral roll would give a fairly accurate picture of their relative distribution in different neighbourhoods. The rolls were checked for accuracy by looking up people I knew personally, and were found in all cases to list them, although there was a time lag of about a year in recording their movements. However, once again the percentages given may not be entirely accurate; and it is the relative distribution which is the most significant fact to emerge. The picture compiled through these sources was found to reflect accurately the impressions and memories of Asians regarding their settlement patterns, a n d this gives it additional validity. The percentages given do not reflect the fact that the Asian population in the inner city tends to be younger than the non-immigrant population, with more children of school age. This fact is more evident in the proportions of Asian children attending local schools (cf. article by Auriol Stevens in Observer 8 July 1979). Maps 1.4 and 1.6 are based on the 1981 census. The census ascertained country of birth rather than ethnic self-ascription. It also only collected information relating to household heads born in the New Commonwealth and Pakistan (as a single category). It nevertheless has the advantage of giving a very comprehensive picture. Map 1.4 was based on the following set of calculations: -

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