As an epistemological category of analysis, diaspora cannot remain separated and distinct from the intersectionality of class, race, gender and sexuality (Farahani 118). In considering the diasporic experience of Muslim women, which constitutes the major thematic concerns of fictional works written particularly since the last decade of the 20th century, religion emerges as another significant co-ordinate along with class, race, gender and sexuality. This paper examines how in Farhana Sheikh’s The Red Box the Pakistani immigrants in England negotiate their religious identity and accommodate to or feel constrained by visible Islamic symbols like the purdah (veil).
Farhana Sheikh’s The Red Box charts the identity travails of three sets of Pakistani women in England belonging to two generations — Raisa, Tahira and Nasreen and their mothers Sabah Ahmed, Nargis Rashid and Bulquis Ehsan. Raisa is a teacher engaged in a research project about the identity and value systems of British Muslim immigrant women — how they live, how they have become who they are, what they think is important, what they suffer and how they fight back.
The Purdah and Islamic Identity
Symbols of Islamic identity, the purdah for example, assume particular significance for a Muslim community residing in an alien environment. The contours of the purdah in The Red Box are to be outlined in the light of the immigrant status of its Muslim women characters. While the first-generation women create their own cultural space and guard it zealously against the onslaughts of the host culture, their daughters find themselves increasingly caught between the conflicting pulls and drives of their parent and host cultures.
Racial Prejudice and Discrimination
Purdah in The Red Box also operates on the symbolic level of the racial divide between the white English and the brown desis. The segregation along racial lines serves as a community purdah, the immigrant Asian community being demarcated by its dress, colour, religion and language. The Asians are ostracized and humiliated, their rights curtailed, opportunities robbed. The law is discriminatory. It is an institutionalised form of racism that the Asians have to encounter.
Preservation of Honour
For the Muslim community in The Red Box “the pressure to preserve izzat is increased by the fact of living in the midst of a different culture” particularly because “that culture is perceived as both seductive and immoral” (Williams 49). Families exercise greater control over the mobility of girls lest they should develop liaisons with English boys thereby threatening their izzat.
Sexual Morality and Transgression
In the Islamic moral code, mixing with the opposite sex and having sexual relations outside marriage constitute the ultimate transgression. Of all the bad things a girl can commit, “sexual transgression is the worst, a cardinal crime, worse than the taking of a life” (RB 212). But as Raisa and Tahira come to discover, the application of the laws of sexual morality is not uniformly binding on men and women.
Identity Crisis and Resistance
The determination of identity is problematic for the younger women in The Red Box, caught up as they are in the cultural flux. Raisa and Tahira experience an identity crisis, torn between the purdah-like restrictions of their indigenous culture and the autonomy of the West. They are neither wholly English nor wholly Pakistani.
Female resistance to oppression and exploitation in The Red Box is individual as well as collective. A shared experience of racial oppression engenders collective resistance and reaffirms pride in one’s indigenous culture. Farhana Sheikh underscores the need for consciousness raising and female solidarity.
Works Cited
- Farahani, Fataheh. “Sexing Diaspora: Negotiating Sexuality in a Shifting Cultural Landscape.” Muslim Diaspora in the West: Negotiating Gender, Home and Belonging. Eds. Haideh Moghissi and Halleh Ghorashi. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 105-134.
- Jain, Jasbir. “The Male Presence in the ‘Purdah’ Novel.” Margins of Erasure: Purdah in the Subcontinental Novel in English. Eds. Jasbir Jain and Amina Amin. New Delhi: Sterling, 1995. 216-30.
- Sheikh, Farhana. The Red Box. Calcutta: Rupa, 1991.
- ---. “Spotlight: Writing Amidst the Alien Corn.” Interview with Lakshmi Holmstrom. Indian Review of Books 1.6 (1992): 22-24.
- Williams, Patrick. “Inter-Nationalism: Diaspora and Gendered Identity in Farhana Sheikh’s The Red Box.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 30.1 (1995): 45-54.