Twice migrants: East Africam sikh settlers in Britain
- London Tavistock 1985
- 205p.
Based on fieldwork conducted by the author among the Sikhs in Britain, this book focuses on the marriage patterns of a single community with a common history of migration from India to Africa, and from there to the UK, from the mid-1960s onwards. East African Sikhs are successful settlers: they were able to establish community and technical skills before they migrated, and to migrate in complete family units, and consequently established themselves rapidly as a community in Britain. But despite this, the community has remained highly traditionalistic, maintaining a cultural conservatism and accentuating certain features of the traditional cultural patterns - for example, the marriage and dowry system - in spite of the absence of reinforcement from a home country. Their command over mainstream skills, combined with a lack of 'home' orientation, has catalysed the settlement process and the formation of a 'British Asian/Sikh' identity. This new ethnography, by an anthropologist who is herself a member of the community she studied, provides fascinating and important insights into the adaptation of a strongly traditional group to life in urban Britain. The author: Parminder Bhachu carried out her doctoral research among Sikhs while at the University of London and later as a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations at the University of Warwick; she is currently at the Thomas Toram Research Unit, University of London.