Raced and Gendered Subjectivities in the Diasporas: Exploring the Role of Generationally Transferred Local ‘Subjugated’ Knowledges in the Education of Canadian Ismaili Women of Indian East African Heritage

by

Nazira Mawji

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

© Copyright by Nazira Mawji (2018)

Raced and Gendered Subjectivities in the Diasporas: Exploring the Role of Generationally Transferred Local ‘Subjugated’ Knowledges in the Education of Ismaili Canadian Women of Indian East African Heritage Nazira Mawji

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

Ugandan Canadian Ismaili Muslim women are often subsumed within the larger immigrant

‘South Asian’ (Brown) women collective and pathologized as passive or docile victims of oppressive systems rather than actors who express a feminist commitment. This thesis is an inquiry that transforms this stereotypical image by examining the local forms of agency exhibited by fifteen twice/thrice immigrant East African Ismaili women who trace their roots to the Indian subcontinent. Through life narratives of five triads of three generations of women from the same families – Grandmothers, Mothers and Daughters – I historicize the experiences of the women of the first two generations in two different geographical locations, East Africa and

Canada, to demonstrate how the encounter between a) traditional gender role expectations, b) the modernizing policies and gender reform strategized by the third and fourth Aga Khans, and c) newer influences in the places of settlement cause these women to experience contradictions in their multiple subject positions in their intersectional locations of gender, race/colour, class and religion. As a result, these Ismaili women create, utilize and transmit local knowledges, based on

ii a local ideology, to subsequent generations of women that enables them to negotiate cultural patriarchy and White hegemony to establish home and belonging in places of settlement. This local ideology teaches them to be mindful; to practice ethics of hard work, diplomacy, and resourcefulness; to make investments in family and community and not physical places or material things; and to attain self-sufficiency through formal education and financial independence. Through the locally constructed covert and overt resistance technologies women create and utilize, these Ismaili women demonstrate that their agency is endemic to their diaspora history, taking subtle and ambivalent forms as the women negotiate at the margins of power, at times constrained but also resisting and undermining power relations to survive and even thrive in diaspora space.

iii Dedication

This work is dedicated to my grandmother, Ba; my aunt, Mama; my mother, Nurbanu; my two daughters, Elysha and Yasene; and the brave women who tell their stories in this study.

iv Acknowledgments

Considering that this thesis journey has spanned a decade to come to fruition, the people who have propelled me through this endeavour have taken on mammoth significance over the years.

My deep gratitude goes to my thesis committee: My thesis supervisor, Dr. Sherene Razack, for her constructive critical insights into my research, her unstinting faith in me; her advocacy on my behalf, and her incalculable reinforcement during my doctoral journey – a journey fraught with countless obstacles; to Dr. Yasmin Jiwani and Dr. Sunera Thobani for their heartening encouragement, their critical insights into women’s resistance and the location of Ismaili women in Ismaili history; to Dr. Minelle Mahtani for prodding my inquiry with critical questions; Dr. Jim Cummins for stepping in timely so I could keep my defense date; and to Dr. Antoinette Gagne, whose inestimable help during the last leg of the thesis journey spurred me to the finish line. Also, I am grateful to Terry Louisy for his efficacious measures to make this research possible; to my colleagues and friends, Dr. Shelina Kassam and Dr. Omisoore Dryden for their support during the doctorate process; and of course, to the Ismaili women without whom this academic pursuit would not have been possible.

My special thanks to my family, who have been the inspiration for this project: my mother, Nurbanu, who is a participant in this project, but who also, until her death in December 2017, partook vicariously in the doctoral process; my two daughters, Yasene and Elysha, who have inspired me every step of the way with their loving, motivational urgings, and their unshakable faith; and to Dr. Allison Burgess, who has deftly trod the line between family, friend, and colleague, supplying me with immeasurable emotional, technical, and professional support to make this study possible.

Last, but not least, I am indebted to my husband, Saifu, who encouraged me to embark upon this academic journey in the first place, to pursue my passion to tell my story…and that of the three generations of women in my family.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments...... v Table of Contents ...... vi List of Figures ...... vi Introduction ...... 1 Chapter One: Historicizing the Ismaili Community Landscape ...... 10 Chapter Two: The Role of Local Knowledges in Defining Women’s Agency ...... 46 Chapter Three: Methodology and Conceptual Framework ...... 84 Chapter Four: Out of India, Into Africa: Women’s Early Immigration Experiences ...... 125 Chapter Five: Locating the Indian East African Ismailis in ...... 161 Chapter Six: Grandmothers: Learning From Older Women ...... 204 Chapter Seven: “I take care of myself”: Gaining Independence Through Struggle in Canada .. 252 Chapter Eight: Survival Lessons in the Diaspora ...... 325 References ...... 380 Appendix A: General Information of Study ...... 391 Appendix B: Summary of Study for Participants ...... 393 Appendix C: Consent Form ...... 397 Appendix D: Question Guide for Semi-Structured, Conversational Style Interviews ...... 398 Appendix E: Description of Participants in This Study ...... 402

vi List of Figures

Figure 1: Plot graph, from Chavez (2008)...... 85

Figure 2: Concepts related to Brah’s diaspora space...... 111

Figure 3: Concepts related to Collins’ local knowledges...... 115

Figure 4: Concepts related to Vinthagen and Johansson’s everyday resistance...... 120

Figure 5: Venn diagram depicting integration of concepts for conceptual framework...... 121

Figure 6: Grandmother participants...... 204

Figure 7: Mother participants...... 252

Figure 8: Daughter participants...... 325

Figure 9: Visual representation of participant triads...... 414

vi Introduction

“‘We mhindi, we are quiet,’ Mumtaz says. ‘We have learned to be quiet. We obey our men, even our sons when they become men. But we give our daughters gifts. Things we cherish, things of value …Things of value to us, things that have nothing to do with men, or their world. Things men cannot touch, even in their dreams.’” – Tasneem Jamal, Where the Air is Sweet (2014, p. 236)

This is a qualitative three-generational study of Canadian Ismaili Muslim diaspora women of Indian East African Heritage. Working with oral life accounts of five triads – each composed of one grandmother, one mother, and one daughter – from five Canadian Ismaili families, including my own, I have explored the capacity of these particular fifteen women to be makers, users and transmitters of local knowledges. I examine how these generationally passed-on, local, subjugated knowledges are mobilized to navigate boundaries of race, gender, class, cultural patriarchy, and age in their daily lives, within the context of different historical periods in two different geographical locations: East Africa (in particular, Uganda) and Canada. In so doing, I show how the women enact a local form of agency.

This introduction is organized in the following manner: I begin with an anecdote that frames an important moment in my own immigration history. This incident occurred in England in 1975 and provides a point of departure for my study through my own Canadian immigration experience as a woman of -Indian East African heritage. I then move to outline the topic of my study, along with the rationale for my choice of topic. I follow this by the presentation of the research questions that structure my study, the rationale for the naming of my participants, and brief summaries describing the contents of each chapter in this research project.

Since life stories play a prominent role in this study, I begin with my own narrative – one that has played a significant role in directing the focus of this academic endeavour. After losing our home in Uganda in 1972, my husband and I attended a formal interview session as part of the formal application process for Canadian immigration from England. After interviewing my husband, the Canadian immigration officer quizzed me about how I proposed to earn a living in Canada. Re-glancing pointedly at our application forms, he added rather tersely: “You are a teacher. We don’t need teachers. We have plenty of our own already. You will not find a

1 teaching job. Not in Canada!” To further fortify his comment, lest I had missed his point, he added, “If your spouse was not an engineer, you would not have made it thus far in the Canadian immigration process.” I was silenced.

What this episode communicated to me was that as a ‘Brown’ woman, I was not valued as highly as were ‘home-grown’ (probably White and middle-class) Canadians: my academic qualifications, the caliber and extent of my professional teaching experiences over two continents, my fluency in the English language, and my individual personality/character traits were not viewed as potential attributes that would open up doors for me in Canada. Was I not worthy? Was I even ‘visible’? Or, on the contrary, was I even more visible on account of my race and colour? Upon reflection, with the bile, these questions surfaced too. Notwithstanding the existence of the infamous Canadian quota system, I was expected to believe that ‘colonial’ Canada was doing me a favour, at least from what appeared to be the perspective of one White middle-class official representative of the country that I was hoping to embrace as ‘home’.

Today, as I stand on the brink of completing my dissertation journey, having lived in Canada for some forty-plus years, and having taught in Canada from the first year I stepped foot in the country, I realize how my reaction that day long ago was not unlike the one described by Avtar Brah when her position changed overnight in 1972, much like my own. She went from being an East African-Indian student in the United States to becoming a political in Britain, and “within weeks of being in London [she] had been called a ‘Paki’” (1996, p. 3). Like me, that day, she, too, had been temporarily silenced. Just as the “insult and denigration implied in the word ‘Paki’” was felt palpably by Brah in the sense of the “materiality of what we call the real” (Brah, 1996, p. 11), I felt my immediate response to the immigration officer was not just an oversensitive reaction: It felt ‘real’ and it “became a part of my reality” (Brah, 1996, p. 11). This autobiographical introduction serves as “a disruptive device that reveals my narrative as an interpretive retelling,” whereby “the deeply invested self that speaks the events relies heavily upon the hope that its version will resonate with meaning constructed by my various ‘imagined communities’” (Brah, 1996, pp. 10-11). Like Brah, at this time, “I interrogate my own political biography … because it is closely tied up with my intellectual labour” (1996, p. 10) through this study.

2 Topic and Rationale

This study is grounded in the experiential narratives of twice and thrice immigrant ‘racialized’ women with a Khoja-Indian heritage who form a part of the Canadian East African Ismaili Muslim community. The overall goals of this study are to identify the local forms of agency that are practised particularly by the immigrant women of the first two generations and to understand how this local agency helps them to survive in diaspora space. In particular, through these women’s life narratives, I a) explore how the women create, utilize and transmit a local form of education to the subsequent generations of women, which helps them to create ‘home’ for themselves and their families in places of settlement; b) examine how such subjugated knowledges are passed on; c) analyse how these knowledges affect the subjectivities and identities of the women in my study; and d) discuss how this local education contributes to an agency that is both local and contextual to particular lived experiences, as made evident by the practices of the fifteen immigrant women participants I interviewed. Through an examination of their history and the oral life stories in which the women describe their practices, this study traces the role of local passed-on knowledges in enabling women to negotiate the boundaries that have been delineated by patriarchal cultural norms within their own community, as well as the gendered and racial boundaries that have been defined by White hegemonic norms within the larger society. I examine ways in which women make use of these locally passed-on knowledges to create home in two places of settlement – East Africa and Canada. The generational family triad structure (expounded at length in Chapter Three) has been designed to identify and trace, through the women’s life narratives, the passed-on local resistance practices that have been transmitted from grandmothers to mothers to daughters in this study.

Carolla Conle (2000) explains how a research topic is arrived at through a ‘telos-tension’ process that “happens to you if you get, or give yourself, permission to get on the road intellectually on which you are already travelling existentially” (p. 211). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, experience-based research on African Canadian diaspora women has gained momentum (Henry, 1998). However, research on Canadian women with heritages in the Indian subcontinent still lags behind. In fact, Himani Bannerji’s comment on the lack of representation of Canadian Brown women’s writing may well be stretched to make a case for lack of research on these particular women: Bannerji (1990) explains how in Canadian anthologies, it is “enough to have a

3 ‘Black’ sample” of writing, so that she “fall[s] … somewhere between the cracks because we are not quite black, though politically the metaphor applies because whatever is not white is black. On the other hand, there is no category called ‘brown’” (p. 150). Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva make a similar point. In the introduction to their anthology, they proclaim, “despite the success of similar identitarian maneuvers by African Americans and other Asian Americans – there is so little emphasis on South Asians” (1996, p. 4). They justify their North American anthology of works by and on South Asians as “an effort to disaggregate the group ‘Asian’ by focusing on a subgroup that is not often recognized or represented” in spite of the “growing South Asian presence in the United States and Canada” (Bahri and Vasudeva, 1996, p. 1).

Academic research on the subgroup comprised of Canadian women of Indian East African heritage is sparce. These women’s stories are relegated to obscurity, remaining buried and denying their experiences value and validity. Providing them with a site to speak through this study gives them “the ability to take [their] place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have [their] part matter” (Heilbrun, 1988, p.11) in their current home – Canada. Although this study is based on the experiential life stories of one small subgroup of a ‘minority’ Canadian Ismaili community, I have no doubt it will speak to Canadian women from other ‘minority’ cultural, ethnic, and diaspora communities. The potential for such a study to speak to a wider readership is articulated by Vassanji, a Canadian writer of Indian East African descent. Referring to his writing on Indian East African subjects who have immigrated to England and Canada, Vassanji claims that his work appeals to a wider community of people. For example, Vassanji maintains that “people who’ve moved from Nova Scotia to Toronto tell me that they can appreciate my stories because they speak to them of their experiences of marginalization” (as cited by Makokha, 2006, p. 25).

Research Questions

Sandra Harding (1991) observes that traditionally, research on and about women has been based on questions from the perspectives of men. Contending that racialized groups have not had the political clout to resist labels ascribed to them by dominant White males, Joyce Ladner (1987) argues that research from the point of view of ‘minorities’ has therefore been made unthinkable. Sofia Villenas (2000) reiterates Ladner’s point as she conducts research on her own Xicana cultural group of women, claiming that it is difficult to get away from the Western mindset.

4 Similarly, Patricia Hill Collins (2009) confesses that she has “found [her] training as a social scientist inadequate to the task of studying the subjugated knowledge of a Black woman’s standpoint” (p. 270). Feminists advocate for shifting the focus of inquiry in research to fit the perspectives of particular women in cultural groups so that “the research questions that emerge may be different” (Harding, 1991, p. 30; also see Ladner, 1987). To this, Leslie Bloom (1998) adds the importance of focusing also on questions that participant-subjects may have about their own lives. Taking into account all of the above, I have framed my study through the following questions:  Who is the Canadian Indian, East African gendered and racialized post/colonial subject?  How is she theorized? What kind of local ‘knowledges’ does she possess? How does she utilize these knowledges?  Through what agencies does she transmit her knowledges to the next generation of women? What is the epistemological value of these lessons?  How does each generation of women, located in their particular histories, in/form the subjectivities/identities and the local knowledges of the next generation of women? How is this reflected in their practices that help to navigate race and gender boundaries in diaspora space? These questions ‘name’ my participants in this study as Ismaili Canadian Indian, East African women.

What’s in a Name? Why ‘Ismaili Canadian Indian East African Women’?

‘Naming’ my participants for this study has proved to be a difficult and contentious task: I have deliberately deferred from using the label ‘South Asian’ to describe them, despite the prolific use of this term in academia. African researcher Julius Kisito Makokha makes a credible case for ‘labeling’ people for academic purposes and maintains that “labels for identifying people are usually connected to the locations of those people’s societies” (2006, p. 1). However, this approach has proved problematic for the participants of this study. In the quotation below, M. G. Vassanji trenchantly underscores this dilemma: I grew up … an Indian African of third generation on one side, fourth on the other, speaking – besides English – Swahili, Gujarati, and Cutchi. My family had lived in and over these generations. Like schoolchildren my age, I looked to England for ‘civilization’; I went to the United States for a university education … in the early 1970s

5 … and I wound up in Canada pursuing a job and finally bringing up a family … What is one’s identity under these circumstances? (1996, p. 119)

Vassanji’s point is well taken. I take exception to the term ‘South Asian’ that is “most often used to describe people who either come directly from or can trace an origin to the Indian subcontinent” since “one may well ask just who does ‘South Asian refer to?” (Bahri and Vasudeva, 1996, p. 3). This ‘denatured’ category, which could equally cover Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, suggests a false homogeneity creating false generalizations. As Vassanji so aptly observes, “in the suburbs of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary … the term ‘South Asian’ would be quite alien” (1996, p. 116). As well, Bahri and Vasudeva remind us that ‘South Asian’ “for the most part has enjoyed academic rather than popular success” (1996, p. 7). Concurring with this perspective, Vassanji adds that ‘South Asian’ is not just “purely geographic, artificial, recent, and entirely devoid of any imaginative force,” but it [also] fails to describe “whether or not he or she comes from the subcontinent directly or …via the Caribbean, Africa, Fiji, Mauritius and so on” (1996, p. 116), a salient point for the twice and thrice immigrant women in this study. When asked, the majority of the women in my study showed a preference for the term ‘Indians from East Africa’, or ‘Indian East African’, a term I have thus adopted for this study to describe them. In this sense, ‘Indian’ does not refer to their nationality or even a ‘country’; rather, it is used simply to describe their cultural heritage from the Indian subcontinent. The ‘East African’ part of this term simply denotes that they came to Canada via East Africa.

Overview of Chapter Organization

Chapter One maps the socio-religious fluid identities of the participants in this study – the Canadian Ismaili women of Indian East African heritage – through the identification of several ‘ruptures’ in their Ismaili community history. It then traces the modernizing gender reforms that were mobilized by the Ismaili III and Aga Khan IV that influence the identities of Ismaili women, and through them, the identity of the Ismaili community as a whole. Chapter Two examines various forms of agency of racialized women through selected literature. These scholarly works a) identify forms of agency demonstrated by women located in religious collectives, b) investigate the kind of local education older colonized women in families transmit to the younger female members to help them survive daily living, and c) demonstrate tactics that

6 immigrant racialized women utilize to balance ‘belonging’ in their own patriarchal cultural communities and in the larger society in their places of settlement. The research design is presented in Chapter Three in two sections. The first section identifies participant selection criteria; mode of participant selection; methods in fieldwork and ethical considerations including my role as an ‘insider’ participant-researcher. The second section outlines the theoretical and conceptual frameworks, I have employed in this dissertation. It identifies three key concepts that provide an analytic lens through which the life narratives of the women in this study are examined to arrive at an understanding of a local form of agency practised by them. Chapter Four and Chapter Five each provide the background context for the experiences of the women in this study. The focus of Chapter Four is centred mostly on the lives of oldest generation of women – the Grandmothers’ Group – and to a lesser extent, the middle generation of women – the Mothers’ Group. It identifies reasons for the stronghold of cultural patriarchal mores and their effects on the identities and the lives of the Ismaili women in East Africa from the late 1920s to 1972. It demonstrates that as the internal (community) and external (national) conditions changed in East Africa, the women exhibited a growing awareness of their unpredictable economic futures and a desire for achieving self-sufficiency. Chapter Five historicizes the landscape of the Ismailis in Uganda leading up to in their eviction in 1972. It nests the Ismaili presence in Uganda in the period of the British colonial rule, and it identifies the role of immigrant Indian (including Ismaili) traders in Britain’s imperialist policies, as well as the tense relationship of these traders with the indigenous Ugandans. This chapter also maps the uncertain and perilous predicament of Ismailis in Uganda as the British switched their support from Indian traders to the indigenous Africans just prior to Uganda’s independence from Britain. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how neocolonial polices and internal conflicts among different indigenous factions between 1962 and 1972 portended a bleaker future for Ismailis in Uganda.

Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight demonstrate how the Ismaili women in this study have created, utilized, and transmitted local knowledges to women of succeeding generations in order to help them survive cultural patriarchy and White hegemony in two different places of settlement – East Africa and Canada. Through their oral life narratives, the women show how this local form of education – primarily learned by observation and through stories – informs a contextual version of women’s agency. This agency is reflected through their covert and overt everyday resistance tactics and enables them to survive and even, at times, thrive in diaspora space. In Chapter Six,

7 the women of the Grandmothers’ Group identify role models from their respective families who transmitted a local education that taught them to work within patriarchal boundaries in order to retain their dignity and gain some respite in their daily lives. This chapter demonstrates how, as the women of the Grandmothers’ Group made use of these locally inherited lessons in their respective daily lives, they displayed their own agency to younger generations that followed them, through mostly mundane and hidden everyday resistance practices.

In Chapter Seven, the participants from the Mothers’ Group reveal how their identities have been shaped by their particular histories in two geographical locations. Similar to the Grandmothers, these women identify older role models from whom they acquired everyday resistance tactics based on local wisdoms. These women from the middle generation show how, oppressed by gender and race (and colour), they have mobilized technologies of resistance based on the local lessons they learned that allowed them to cross patriarchal and racial boundaries. Chapter Eight, the final analysis chapter, begins with a short introduction of the youngest women in this study – the women from the Daughters’ Group. It reveals how local lessons from their grand/mothers have taught these Daughters a particular notion of ‘home’ in diaspora space that is achievable through relationships, values and reliance on the Ismaili community. The Daughters express how they have learned from their respective older role models resistance tactics based on a local ideology of home and nation that allow them to navigate patriarchy and White domination. The final section of this chapter concludes the study, underscoring the need for more research on the Canadian-born third generation of women in this study, who trace their histories to the Indian subcontinent through their own stories to shed more light on the contextualized notion of racialized women’s agency.

Overall, this study is an attempt to give voice to women whose absence in official history has often led to the distortion of their identities. For reasons explicated at length in Chapter Three, my voice and the voices of the other two women in my own triad are presented in the third person, in the same way as those of the other participants in this study. Although I work with the experiences of other Canadian Ismaili women with an Indian East African heritage in this study, this is – quite literally, as well as figuratively – an investigation into my own story too. The intent of this study is neither to be prescriptive, nor to “drive to a single conclusion or even claim authority,” but rather to “arrive at a series of related points from all directions, like people

8 coming to board a train that will take them away. I sit among them, but the journey is not mine alone” (Kumar, 2000, p. 15).

9 Chapter One: Historicizing the Ismaili Community Landscape

Locating My Participants

On September 12, 2014, the Direct Energy Centre on Toronto’s Exhibition grounds opened its doors to tens of thousands of Ontario’s Shia Imami Ismaili Muslim Canadians who were gathering to watch a live webcast of the opening of the Aga Khan and the on Wynford Drive in Don Mills, Toronto, Canada. Spilling over into four immense exhibition halls, the Ismailis punctuated the speeches of His Highness the Aga Khan, and of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with animated applause and toured the new buildings virtually for over three hours with undisguised pride.

The fifteen participants in my project all avidly participated in these momentous opening rituals of the Ismaili Centre and the Aga Khan Museum through live webcasts in organized Ismaili gatherings in their respective Canadian cities. Nine of these fifteen women, whose ancestors had settled in Africa somewhere between the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries as part of the larger Indian diaspora, were born and raised in East Africa. Most of them arrived in Canada from Uganda in the early-1970s, and at the time of this live webcast, had spent some 40-plus years in Canada. These participants are part of the Indian East African Ismaili diaspora, thousands of miles away from the land where they were born. Although the last generation of women in my study is Canadian-born, their subjectivities and identities, like those of their mothers and grandmothers, are embedded in their Indian-East African-Canadian Ismaili community identity. Canadian Ismailis today – such as those gathered to watch the webcast – are a culturally diverse group from different parts of the globe: they did not arrive in Canada at the same time nor from the same place. They came under different circumstances, and with different cultural, economic, social, and political histories. However, they all share – in Canada and globally – the same Ismaili institutional and religious practices under their leader, His Highness Shah Karim al-Husayni, the fourth Aga Khan. The Ismailis, whose total number is oft-quoted as being fifteen million but which has never been verified (Steinberg, 2011), are scattered across the globe: they live in Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Africa (including East Africa – Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), the United Kingdom,

10 France, Switzerland, Portugal, the United States, Canada, and in smaller numbers in other parts of the world. The Ismaili community members in Canada hail mainly from countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, far western China, Iran, Syria, Singapore, Australia, and different parts of Africa.

As mentioned above, the participants in my research project belong to this last group, often referred to as the East African ‘Khoja’ Ismailis, an identity defined in this chapter. Although I refer to religious and Ismaili institutional practices that may involve a culturally diverse Ismaili Muslim group in Canada, for the scope of this study, I have focused only on the issues that affect the identities and knowledges of my particular participants, the Canadian Ismaili women of Indian Khoja-East African heritage. This chapter is an attempt to place the women in my study into the landscape of the larger Indian East African Ismaili Muslim community, since membership in the Ismaili community touches their day-to-day material, religious and social relations through their daily practices. These relations, in turn, have real effects on their subjectivities and identities, and their local knowledges through their lived experiences, as I demonstrate in subsequent chapters in this study.

This chapter is organized in two sections. The first section maps several chance and random events that have shaped Muslim Ismailism and contributed to its formations and reformations through history, and in the process, have effected transformations in Khoja Ismaili identity. The second part of the chapter traces the Ismaili community social reform implemented by Sultan Mohammed Shah, hereafter referred to as Aga Khan III, and to some extent by his successor , Aga Khan IV, that has played a key role in reconstituting the identities of Ismaili women, and through them, the identity of the East African Ismaili community as a whole. This section begins by demonstrating that the kind of gender reform initiated by the two Imams was far from unique: it does this by identifying similar modernizing projects that have been initiated through a focus on reforms on the roles and status of women in nations and in the initiatives mobilized by Indian Muslim reformers on the Indian subcontinent. This in no way suggests that such reforms were initiated only by on the Indian subcontinent; however, an elaborative reform mandate is not within the purview of this study. The rest of this chapter identifies the gender reforms that were carried out by the Ismaili Imams and which affected the Khoja East African identity and, through that, the identities of the participants in this study.

11 Section One: The Shia Muslim Ismailis’ Location Within the Shi’i-Muslim Identity

The Shia Imami Ismailis, an off-shoot of the larger Shia Muslim community, are followers of Prince Karim al-Husayni, or Aga Khan IV, who claims direct descendency from Prophet Muhammad through b. Abi Talib (656-661 C E), the Prophet’s cousin, and his wife, Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. Aga Khan IV succeeded his grandfather, Aga Khan III, as the 49th Imam of the Nizari Ismailis on July 11, 1957, at the age of twenty (“The Ismaili Community,” n.d.). His Ismaili followers refer to Aga Khan IV as ‘Hazar Imam’ or ‘Imam-e-Zaman’, which translates roughly as ‘Imam of the time’, a term of reference that reflects their fundamental religious belief in the concept of Imamate. According to the Aga Khan Shia Imami Ismailis, the Imamate complements the Qur’an and is “a divinely sanctioned and guided institution, through whose agency Muslims are enabled to contextualize the practice of their faith” (Nanji, 2007, p. 210). Consequently, Ismailis often refer to the Imam of the time as ‘The Living Qur’an’. During his recent address to both the houses of the Parliament of Canada on February 27, 2014, the Aga Khan connected his location as ‘Imam’ directly to the institution of Imamate: “I have the great privilege to represent here the Ismaili Imamate, this institution, beyond the borders and for over 1,400 years, defines and is recognized by a growing number of states as the succession of Shia Ismaili Imams” (AKDN, 2014a, n.p.).

The Aga Khan highlights how the Imamate, as an institution, not only forms a fundamental doctrine of the Shia Ismaili faith, but also extends “beyond borders” to define his community through its central belief in the ‘succession’ of Shia Ismaili Imams through nass (designation). The birth of this doctrine of ‘succession’ of designated Imams is traced by Ismailis to the events leading to the Shia-Sunni divide at the death of Prophet Mohammad, and it is a crucial marker of their Shia Ismaili Muslim identity. To demonstrate the birth of Shi’ism and to trace the development of the doctrine of the Imamate as it affects Shia Imami Ismaili community identity (and through that the identities of the women in my study), I endeavour to provide the following brief historical background of the Indian East African Khoja Ismailis.

12 The establishment of the Imamate in Ismailism.

The events leading to the origins of ’s major divisions – Sunnism and Shi’ism – also contributed to the birth of the Imamate, a fundamental mainstay of Shi’ism, and particularly of Shia Ismailism. According to the officially recorded history of Islam, the death of Prophet Mohammad in 632 CE resulted in a crisis of succession; as khatim al-anbiya (seal of the prophets), Mohammad could not be succeeded by another nabi (prophet). However, in response to the Muslim community’s need for a leader to ensure unity among them, certain distinguished Muslim leaders at the time chose the Prophet’s successors – the caliphs – who supposedly embodied religious and political leadership for the Muslim umma (community). The first three caliphs were Abu Bakr (632-634 CE), Umar (634-644 CE), Uthman (644-656 CE), and the fourth caliph, was Ali b. Abi Talib (656-661 CE) – the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. It is this last caliph, Ali b. Abi Talib, who holds a distinctive position in that the supposed dispute over his position became the ‘event’ that eventually led to the Sunni-Shia divide (Daftary, 1998, p. 23- 25).

The Shias deem that a smaller group of Muslims in Medina held not only that Ali was more qualified as khalifat rasul Allah (successor to the messenger of God), but also that the Prophet himself had appointed Ali as his successor. This was done through “designation or nass instituted through divine command” (Daftary, 1998, p. 23), which, shortly before his death, the Prophet announced at Ghadir Khumm. Furthermore, it is believed by the Shias that even “Ali himself was convinced of the legitimacy of his claim to leadership” (Daftary, 1998, p. 23). Those who supported Ali as the Prophet’s designated successor came to be known as ‘Shi’at Ali’ (the ‘Party of Ali’), and with the expansion of their numbers over time, they called themselves ‘Shia’. Needless to say, Islamic history claims that the Shi’at Ali protested the designation of the three previous caliphs by the majority of the Muslim community. It was this objection that caused the rift between the supporters of Ali and the rest of the Muslim majority, and which led to the beginnings of the institution of Imamate for the supporters of Ali. Azim Nanji (2007) offers that a Shia “historical understanding thus locates itself within a framework of interpretation supported by Qur’anic verses and Prophetic Hadith” (n.p.) to sustain the continuation of the Imamate based on the designation of the heirs of Imam Ali and his wife Fatima, and through them to the ahl al-bayt (house of the Prophet)

13 Purportedly, it was not until the time of the fifth Shia Imam – Ja’far al-Sadiq (d. 765 CE), who claimed direct lineage to Prophet Mohammad – that the doctrine of Imamate took on the notion of full religious authority that is exercised by the current Imam, Aga Khan IV. At the death of this fifth Imam, the Shia splintered into several groups, one of which can be identified as the group representing the earliest Ismailis, according to Daftary (1998), and is named after the son of Ja’far al-Sadiq (and the designated heir claimed by one faction), Ismail. So fundamental was this doctrine of Imamate to the religious beliefs of the Shia communities that over time, the question of the ‘rightful’ succession to the Imamate was the cause of many more schisms among the Ismailis themselves (Daftary, 1998, 1990).

Observance of the doctrine of Imamate as a basic tenet of the Shia Muslim faith means not only the acceptance of, but also the devotion to, the legitimate successors of the Prophet, thus connecting the Imamate to the notion of wilaya (devotion) to the Imams (Nanji, 2007). Various splits over the course of the last 1,200-1,400 years have fractured the Shia Ismailis into distinctive separate groups (some of which no longer exist), which are altogether different from the community that today calls itself the Shia Imami Ismailis (Daftary, 1998, 1990; Steinberg, 2011). Of these sphincter groups, the Shia Imami Ismailis, the followers of Aga Khan IV, form the largest Shia Ismaili group today. For this group, the concept of Imamate and the ‘rightfully designated’ Imam has been further defined over time, setting them apart from other Shias in their identity as a community.

The juridical and philosophical bases for the Imamate: The Fatimid Period.

It was not until the Fatimid Period of Ismaili history (909-1171 CE) that the Ismaili doctrine of Imamate was constructed, through a juridical foundation based on Qur’anic and historical evidence and a philosophical foundation based on a theory of divinely ordered system of governance. First, the historical evidence that was used to justify Ali b. Abi Talib as the most worthy successor of the prophet, and therefore the most worthy to receive devotion (wilaya) as the ‘rightful’ Imam, was the following: Ali’s close proximity to Prophet Mohammad; indications of the Prophet’s preference for Ali throughout the former’s life; and the Prophet’s farewell pronouncement at Ghadir Khumm, which designated Ali as his successor. Based on this historical evidence, in the Ismaili view, although the function of prophethood had ended with

14 Mohammad, the role of religious guidance to interpret God’s message was passed on to the institution of Imamate. In other words, “Ali was granted the authority to interpret the Holy Qur’ān and to initiate change in society in accordance with these principles adapted to the context of time” (Nanji, 2007, n.p.; also see Nanji, 1974). De facto, this also meant that the designated Imam of the time deserved the love and allegiance of the community, whether or not during his Imamate he also fulfilled the standing of political leadership. Steinberg (2011) reinforces this crucial point when he speaks to the importance of the Ismailis’ total devotion of the current Imam, Aga Khan IV, who neither controls any geographic territory nor is a political head of a state:

Among the religious elements of Isma’ili life, none is more central than devotion to the imam. It could be described, in fact, as itself constitutive of Isma’ilism. And it is not that the Isma’ilis are devoted simply to this imam, Prince Karim the Aga Khan, and to his particular personality and traits. Certainly they are devoted to that, also, but more importantly, they are devoted to the timeless institution of the imamate, to the reality that underlies any particular imam who is but a manifestation of that institution … According to Isma’ili doctrine, the presence of an imam is a fundamental property of the cosmos itself. Devotion to the imam is the most essential act in life. Moreover, throughout the history of dissidence and schism, people who rejected the imam did not stay in the community as critics but tended to form a new sect; thus total devotion is seen as a criterion of membership. Nondevotion is by definition nonmembership. (p. 102)

An Ismaili philosophical discourse thus became fused with the above juridical theory, forming the basis of the Ismaili doctrine of Imamate, which involved the organization of human beings, through governance, into “a divinely ordered pattern” that would benefit society as a whole to attain greater happiness (Nanji, 2007, n.p.). In this case, specifically, this fusion of the philosophical and juridical bases contended that the interpretation of the Qur’an by the Imam of the time enabled his followers to maintain a fine balance between material and spiritual matters that resulted in ‘adl (justice), a by-product of this balance that benefitted individuals as well as the entire society in which they lived. Within this fused interpretation, both din (religion) and dunya (the physical world) become necessary components of the equation that ensures the proper

15 ordering of society, and it is the Imam’s guidance that sustains the equilibrium between these two spheres of life (Walker, 1999, as cited in Nanji, 2007).

The philosophical discourse relating to the doctrine of Imamate was further extended by Ismaili philosophers, through the introduction of the concepts of ta’lim (authoritative teaching from the Imam) and ‘ilm (knowledge), in their attempts to connect juridical views of Imamate to haqa’iq (higher truths) of religion. According to this philosophy that became attached to the doctrine of Imamate, such knowledge of (pertaining to the outward appearance of Islam and its practices – the ‘exoteric’) and (pertaining to the inner meaning of the Qur’an – ‘the esoteric’) could only be achieved through the teaching of the Imam of the time, thus placing the knowledge of the esoteric within the domain of the Imamate. Through its current designated Imam, the Imamate serves to interpret the deeper metaphorical meanings of the Qur’an so that followers may learn its metaphysical and philosophical implications, leading to the understanding of esoteric knowledge. This role of the Imamate was further formulated and reinforced during the Period (Daftary, 1998, 1990) between the years 1090 and 1256 CE, when a Nizari Ismaili Shi’i state existed for about 166 years, with its centre at Alamut, a fortress aerie in the mountainous region of Daylam in northern Persia, and its territories extending into various parts of Persia and Syria. This Nizari Ismaili version of the doctrine of Imamate was transported through Persian dais or pirs (missionaries) to the Indian subcontinent somewhere during the first half of the thirteenth century, or possibly even earlier, during the Alamut period. It was this Nizari Ismailism that is said to have been inherited by the Khoja Ismailis – the antecedents of the women participants in my project – during their conversion from to Ismailism in the Indian subcontinent.

A brief history of Nizari Ismailism and Nizari Imams in Persia.

As Ismaili history reports it, the Ismaili state in Persia came into existence just as the Ismail Shi’i power of the 18th Ismaili caliph-Imam, al-Mustansir, was waning in Egypt. This Ismaili state in Persia was formed through the efforts of an Ismaili revolutionary, Hasan Sabbah, who was a devoted supporter/follower of Imam al-Mustansir, and an Ismaili da’i (missionary) who had spent three years furthering his Ismaili education in Egypt and nine years thereafter occupying himself with the mission of spreading the Ismaili faith, mostly in Persia. It is quite possible that, realizing he could not count on help from his Ismaili Imam in Cairo to overcome the Seljuk

16 Turks – who were Sunni Muslims and whose rule over Persia was detested by the local people – Hasan Sabbah developed a revolutionary strategy to attempt to overcome the Seljuk Turks. Again, it may well have been for national reasons (which he shared with the other Persians) that he was able to gather an army of Persian Ismailis and train it into a highly disciplined and indefatigable force that is reported to have helped him launch attacks on the Seljuk Turks in Persia and Syria. Having won the Seljuk stronghold atop the mountain crag in 1090 CE, however, he fortified Alamut to withstand long sieges, and he was supposedly able to take Quhistan and Rudbar from the Seljuks to form an independent Ismaili state. Continuing with his conversion practices, Hasan Sabbah was able to grow his support and take over more fortresses in Persia and Syria; the people of the latter state were ready too to throw off Seljuk hegemony in their land and were being converted to Ismailism with the help of the da’ is (missionaries) sent by Hasan Sabbah to Syria.

Just as the revolt was spreading with success in Persia, the Ismaili Fatimid caliph-Imam, al- Mustansir, died in Cairo in 1094 CE, and a dispute over his successor split the Ismailis into two divisions: Nizari and Musta’li. Using this dispute as a reason, Hasan Sabbah, who now occupied the position of the leader of the Ismailis under Seljuk rule, officially cut all ties to the Fatimid establishment in Egypt. He openly declared his allegiance to Nizar as al-Mustansir’s designated successor and the next Ismaili Imam, and his decision was reportedly unanimously supported by the Ismailis of Persia. Nizar, the 19th Imam of the Persian Nizari Ismailis, was executed in Egypt the year following his father’s death. Historians of this time period report that the Nizaris believed that as a descendent of the Ismaili Imam, Nizar had been smuggled out of Egypt and brought to Persia, and that he would assume his responsibilities as their Imam once it was safe for him to do so (Daftary, 1998). Also, it is believed that Hasan Sabbah did not reveal the identity of the successor of Nizar to the Ismaili Imamate; however, the official story unfolds to reveal that until that time, the Ismailis followed the (the chief representative of the Imam), who in this case was Hasan Sabbah. Again, it is stipulated that it was at this time that the “Nizari community re-defined itself into an autonomous state” (Daftary, 1998, p. 135): it is possible that they were an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1991), cohered also by the use of Persian as their religious language.

17 When Hasan Saba died in 1124 CE, it is believed that two other hujja succeeded him to represent the absent Imam and lead the Ismaili community, each appointed by his predecessor. Hasan (also known as ‘ala dhikrihi’ I-salam), claiming to be the progeny of Nizar, declared himself to be the 23rd Imam of the Nizari Shia Ismailis in 1164. Apparently, he was succeeded by another four Imams, each designated by the previous Imam. It is during this period that Nizaris believe that Alamut continued to function as the central headquarters for the Nizari Imams, who connected the ‘imagined (Nizari Ismaili) community’ that supposedly stretched from central Persia to Syria. Again, it is believed by Nizaris that the Alamut period came to an end when the Nizaris succumbed to the Mongols in 1256, during the Imamate of Rukn al-din Khurshah, the 27th Imam of the Nizari Shia Ismailis.

Although the Nizari Ismaili state in Persia apparently came to an end in 1256, when Rukn al-din Khurshah, the successor of Jalal al-din Hasan, surrendered Alamut to the Mongol invaders, the Nizaris believe that their doctrines of the institution of Imamate that contributed to Nizari Ismaili identity was transported to the Indian subcontinent through the da’is (missionaries) sent from Persia.

The fate of the Nizari Ismailis: A contested history.

The five centuries that followed the fall of Alamut in 1256 are referred to as “the longest obscure phase in the entire history of Ismailism” (Daftary, 1998, p. 159), filled with gaps and fissures in Nizari Ismaili history and contested by many. It is speculated that as the Nizari Ismaili communities in Persia and Syria became more isolated, practising local variants of Nizari Ismailism mixed with other Shia and Sunni religious traditions, their counterparts in Central Asia and India expanded considerably and, in time, overshadowed their co-religionists in Persia and Syria. The ancestors of the women in my study are possibly the inheritors of these Indian variants of Nizari Ismailism, though we cannot be sure. The historical gaps are filled in the following manner: It is believed that although the Nizari Ismaili Imams continued in the progeny of Imam Rukn al-din Khurshah, the last lord of Alamut, they practised taqiyya (precautionary dissimulation of religious beliefs) and concealed their identities mostly under Sufi, Sunni or Ithna’ashari () disguises for two centuries. The Ismaili Imam that followed Rukn al-din Khurshah, Shams al-Din – who is supposedly synonymous in some accounts with Shams- I Tabriz, the spiritual guide of Jal al-Din – surfaced in the unpublished travelogue of the

18 Nizari poet Quhistani (1320) and, at his death, the Ismaili line is believed to have split into Muhammad-Shahi and Qasim-Shahi schisms.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Nizari Qasim-Shahi line of Imams ‘emerged’, beginning with Islam Shah (the 30th Imam) in 1463 in Anjudan, Central Persia, around Mahallat and Qumm, where the Ismaili community had previously settled. Still under the guise of Sufis, the Imams restored and revitalized their da’wa (proselytizing missions) not only to acquire new converts locally, but also to reaffirm their authority over the Nizari communities in Central Asia and India. After the collapse of Alamut, these far-flung communities, such as the one in India, had been possibly commanded by hereditary pirs (missionaries) who, having acquired financial autonomy, had become independent of the Imams. It is believed that the Imams began a restructuring, requiring the da’is to take orders directly from the Imam and deliver the collected religious dues from the Indian Ismailis to the Imam regularly. In addition, the Ismaili Imams reinstated the teachings of the Alamut period through a claim of their spirituality and their sole authority in matters of both zahir and batin knowledges (Daftary, 1998). Daftary traces the moves of the succeeding Qasim-Shahi Nizar Imams of Persia to Kahak until 1722 – to Shahr-I Babak in Kirman in the mid-1700s, to Yazd in 1815, and then to Qumm and Mahallat around 1834, with Imam Hasan ‘Ali Shah through the inscriptions on burial places, mausoleums, properties of the Imams, and the recorded political appointments of the Imams. Finally, Daftary identifies the 46th Imam, Hasan Ali Shah, as the first Imam who was bestowed the royal title of Aga Khan (lord and master) by the Qajar King in Tehran and given an appointment to the governorship of Qumm, the properties in Mahallat, as well as a hand in marriage to one of the King’s daughters. The last four Nizari Ismaili Imams who bore the title ‘Aga Khan’ are supposedly the descendants of this Qasim-Shahi line of Imams and the antecedents of the current Imam, Aga Khan IV. However, this history remains contested.

The Khoja Ismailis of the Indian subcontinent: Conversion from Hindu to Satpanth Ismailism.

Asani (2001) identifies the Ismaili religious tradition of belief in the esoteric as a way of explaining the ambiguity of Nizari Ismaili identity. His explanation emphasizes the Ismaili belief in a unitary spiritual reality for what may seem externally to be disparate doctrines and practices. He concludes that Ismailism’s “motivation to integrate, reformulate and acculturate to different

19 environments” problematizes the definition of Ismaili religious identity throughout Ismaili history (p. 96). Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the early history of Ismailism in South Western India means “the ambiguity of identity has been a prominent characteristic of Nizari Ismaili communities” (p. 96). Faisal Devji describes the ‘Khoja’ Ismailis of the same region during its early history as “a Vaishnav panth, a Sufi order, a trader’s guild and a caste” (Devji, as cited in Asani, 2001, p 158.). This is a possible description of the ancestors of the women in my study, ancestors who were believed to be indigenously Hindu for thousands of years prior to their relatively recent reconstitutions into some form of a ‘Hindu’ Nizari communal organization.

The early conversion history of Ismailis on the Indian subcontinent remains obscure and contested, owing to the paucity of reliable sources; however, most of the early Indian proselytizing history is put together through (hymns of devotion; also ‘sacred knowledge or wisdom’ in Sanskrit), which formed the indigenous religious literature of the converted Khoja Ismailis of the Indian subcontinent. These ginans, which occupied (and still occupy) an eminent ritualistic role in the daily religious practices of the Nizari Khoja community in their jamatkhanas (congregational places), were composed in various “Indic languages and dialects of Sind, Punjab and ” (Daftary, 1998, p. 177). Believed to have been communicated orally for several centuries, they were then scripted mainly in Khojki (a script developed in Sind by the ) and ascribed as the poetical works of the few pirs or di’as sent from Persia by the Ismaili Imams to organize Ismaili proselytizing missions in India between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Daftary describes the composition of these ginans as “a diversity of missionary, mystical, mythological, didactic, cosmological and eschatological themes” with “ethical and moral instructions for the conduct of religious life … guiding the spiritual quest of the believer” (1998, p. 178). Some of these depict the “anachronistic, hagiographic and legendary accounts of the activities of the pirs and their converts” (Daftary, 1998, p. 178) and provide some possible insights into the conversion history of the Khoja Ismailis in India. Although their reliability as historical resources, particularly with accuracy of dates and events, is under some question, a closer scrutiny of the style and content of the ginans (still recited today in Canada by the Ismailis) allows for an understanding of influential Indian esoteric elements, and particularly of the influences of the Hindu customs that have possibly come to define Khoja Nizari Ismailism. This is demonstrated by the prominent use of traditional Hindu imagery, symbolism, and mythology in the language of the ginans.

20 Shams-al-Din is the earliest da’i (missionary) to be mentioned in the ginanic literature; after him, his great-grandson, Pir Sadr al-Din (who is believed to have died anywhere between the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth centuries) is recognized as the composer of the largest number of ginans. Pir Sadr al-Din is also credited with being the builder of the first set of jamatkhanas in Sind, Punjab, and Kashmir, and he is recognized as the founder of the Nizari Khoja community in India (Daftary, 1998, p. 179). He is reputed to have converted large numbers of the trading caste of into the Nizari Ismaili community, and to have begun what came to be known as Satpanth (the ‘true path to salvation’), a version of a Nizari- related ‘Indian’ Ismailism. Indeed, Pir Sadr al-Din is attributed with the political act of naming of this Satpanth community by conferring on them the title ‘Khoja’– a derivative of the Persian word Khawaja (lord or master) – to replace the Hindu Thakur by which moniker these ‘Khojas’ were previously addressed (Daftary, 1998, p. 179). His son, Pir Hasan Kabir al-din is believed to have continued in his father’s footsteps, converting more Hindus into Satpanth Khojas and encouraging closer ties between the Nizari Khojas and the Suhrawardi Sufi order, being himself recognized as a Sufi ‘master’ in Sind. This political act is supposed to have assisted the Nizari Khojas to “blend more readily into the religious, cultural and social structure of Sind, attracting less attention to themselves as Ismailis and escaping persecution by Sind’s Sunni rulers” (Daftary, 1998, p. 180). However, these Nizari Khojas in Sind did not become persecution targets of their Sunni rulers because of their Hindu acculturation and their continuation of the traditional Hindu way of life (Daftary, 1998, p. 180). It is believed that the practices of these Khoja Ismailis were so close to Hindu traditions that after the spread of Satpanth Ismailism into Gujarat and Kathiawar, the Nizari Imam sent Pir Dadu to Sind in the second half of the sixteenth century to help stop Nizari Ismailis from reverting to Hinduism or to Sunnism, which were, at that time, the principle religions of the Indo-Muslim society in the area (Daftary, 1998, p. 182).

The reasons for the spread of Satpanth Ismailism, and with it, the popularity of its religious literature, the ginans, are still not absolutely clear. Daftary (2011) speculates that it is quite likely that the creative Hindu-oriented strategies and practices that the pirs employed to convert Hindus to Ismailism worked because their Hindu audience could easily identify with them. It is also possible that even before the pirs arrived on the scene, the seeds of Satpanth had already been sown in the terms of some of the Hindu concepts and themes, through earlier influences in places like Sind and Gujarat, and that the Nizari Ismaili missionaries made use of them to further

21 consolidate the conversion process. The ginans, however, attest to the resourcefully inventive attempts made by the pirs to optimize the appeal of their message in a Hindu setting, especially considering that the Nizari proselytizing in India was directed principally to convert the rural uneducated lower castes of Hindus. Ginans sung well into the 1990s by the Ismailis of East Africa, as they had been sung by the early Hindu converts, provide evidence of how the proselytizing pirs in India “turned to Indian vernaculars, rather than and Persian used by the educated classes, in order to enhance the effectiveness and spread of their message” (Daftary, 2011, p. 183). It was for this reason possibly that the pirs also utilized Hindu figures of speech and mythology, interfacing their Islamic and Ismaili doctrines with myths, images, motifs, symbols, and concepts with which the Hindus were already familiar (Daftary, 2011, p. 183).

Furthermore, Ginans were composed in Sindhi, Gujarati, and Punjabi, and the pirs made of this strategy – of acculturation through the adaptation of indigenous Indian languages and Hindu religious traditions and concepts – to convert large numbers of Hindus from the lower castes into newer versions of Ismailism. In particular, the speculation that the Ismaili Imamate was expanded within the context of Hinduism is based on evidence of the ginans: these “present the Imam as the long-awaited savior within a Vaishnavite framework concerning the ten descents (dasa avatara) of the Hindu deity Vishnu through the ages” (Daftary, 2011, p. 184). Although the worship of idols (prevalent in Hinduism) was believed to be condemned by the pirs, “a variety of symbolic correspondences and equivalences were established in some ginans between Hindu and Islamic concepts and figures, facilitating the transformation of the religious identity of the converts from Hinduism to Satpanth Ismailism” (Daftary, 2011, p. 184-185). The converts were possibly being taught that the way to escape cycles of , as dictated by Hindu beliefs, was through the acceptance and practice of Satpanth Ismailism; simultaneously, they were possibly being taught that the Qur’an was the last of the Vedic sacred books, whose true meaning could only be transmitted by the representatives of the true Imam, the pirs (Daftary, 2011, p. 185).

It is surmised that Satpanth Ismailism continued to evolve in India after the time of the pirs; it continued to adopt themes and theological concepts arising out of the interlap between Hinduism and Ismaili Islam and other Indian influences, including , Trantrism and Bhakti traditions (Daftary, 2011, p. 183). Wladimir Ivanow describes Satpanth as “a transition between Ismailism,

22 Sufism and Hinduism” (as cited in Asani, 2011, p. 101). Asani surmises that “on account of the uniquely constructed multivalent Satpanth formation,” the Khojas could don multiple social identities all at once, crossing between them with ease (2011, p. 101). Asani continues, “they were members of a mercantile group who followed Satpanth, ‘the true path’, a tradition that could be simultaneously understood within both Islamic and Indic doctrinal frameworks” (2011, p. 101). At times, together with the need for the dissimulation for long periods as Sunnis or Shi’is, the Satpanth Khojas in India possibly reverted to using Hindu customs and decrees as opposed to those of Islamic law. Asani conjectures that in the early nineteenth century, “the Khojas claimed several identities simultaneously” and that their religious life was “a unique blend of Hindu and Muslim, as well as Shia and Sunni customs and beliefs” (Masselos, as cited in Asani, 2001, p. 157).

The History of the Ismaili community, to which the fifteen participants in this study belong, has been dotted with ruptures: the Ismaili formation has been neither seamless nor uncontested. One such ‘rupture’ occurred in its modern history. The modern period in Ismaili history began in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Ismaili Imams transferred their residences first from Persia to India, and then to Europe (Daftary, 2011). Upon the death of the 45th Ismaili Imam, the successor Imam of the Ismailis, his son Hasan ‘Ali Shah, was appointed governor of Qum and then of the province of Kirman in Persia. He married the daughter of the Qajar King of Persia and was granted the title of Aga Khan. However, deterioration of relations between the first Aga Khan and the Persian King led to military confrontations, and, defeated, fled to Afghanistan with his large entourage and cavalry in 1841 (Daftary, 2011). A close association developed between the British in India, and the Aga Khan, who had finally settled in Bombay with his retinue, was welcomed by his Ismaili followers. At this time, the Khoja Ismaili identity had been strongly influenced by Hindu customs as well as traditions from and Sufism (Daftary, 2011). As Aga Khan I began to assert his authority over the Khoja community, he was publicly challenged by dissident groups within the Khoja collective. This resulted in a series of lawsuits against Aga Khan I, such as the ‘Great Khoja Case’ of 1851 and the ‘Aga Khan Case’ of 1866, when the colonial British in India were attempting to ‘fix’ the various and diverse communities into religious categories so they would be more easily ruled according to “a Western understanding of religion and laws of religious groups” (Hirji, 2011, p. 133). Although Aga Khan I lost the first case, by the time the second challenge was made to the authority of the

23 Aga Khan as the sole leader of the Khoja Ismaili community from dissidents within the community, the British were “less tolerant of liminal groups and demanded more clarity about who was a Hindu and who was a Muslim” (Hirji, 2011, p. 135). The Plaintiffs in this case claimed that the Khoja Ismaili community was Sunni Muslim and not Shia as claimed by the Aga Khan; the Aga Khan therefore had no authority over that community (Hirji, 2011, p. 135). In the British court’s ruling, the plaintiffs lost and the authority of the Shia Imam over the Shia Imami Ismailis was recognized, giving a new community identity to the Khoja Ismailis, and Aga Khan I “was now legally recognized as the supreme religious leader of the Ismaili Shi’i Khojas and had the final authority in all their communal matters” (Hirji, 2011, p. 135). The Khoja Ismailis lost their tradition of self-governance; at the same time, their identity was fixed in a British court of law and provided Aga Khan I and the successive Imams with “the legal means to uphold formal membership criteria for the community and the terms by which his own authority over the Khoja Ismailis could be maintained without further challenge” (Hirji, 2011, p. 136). The woman participants in this study, as a part of the Khoja Ismaili diaspora and its descendents, inherited this Shia Imami Ismaili identity.

Connecting the current Imam to the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims: The doctrine of Imamate.

It is unquestionable that the current Imam, Aga Khan IV, is regarded as the sole authoritative religious leader of the Aga Khan Shia Imami Ismaili community; although never proved conclusively, the Aga Khan claims his lineage to the ahl al-bayt, the family of Prophet Mohammad, through Ali b. Abi Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, and the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. His role through the institution of Imamate appears to extend into social and political arenas as well, so today, in the twenty-first century, the Ismaili community functions as a global formation, a polity without territory or borders, but with its own constitution and leadership in the Imamate (Steinberg, 2011). It is through the institution of Imamate that Aga Khan IV is regarded by the Ismailis as their 49th and current Imam and “an intermediary between the divine and human realms” so that “only he is sanctioned to prescribe doctrine and practice,” and “only he can elucidate and explain the truth behind outward messages of Islam” (Steinberg, 2011, p. 10). As Steinberg clarifies, though Aga Khan IV has made no claims to a standing of divinity or deity, through the recognition of his designation (nass) as the Imam of the

24 time, he is believed – by the global assemblage of the Ismailis – to possess Nur (the Light of God), which gives him a divine mandate.

In the following excerpt from his speech to the Canadian Parliament on February 27, 2014, the Aga Khan sums up the role of the Imam within the concept of Imamate as developed in the first part of this chapter:

The Ismaili imamate is a supra-national entity, representing the succession of Imams since the time of the prophet. But let me clarify something more about the history of that role, in both the Sunni and Shia interpretations of the Muslim faith. The Sunni position is that the Prophet nominated no successor, and that spiritual-moral authority belongs to those who are learned in matters of religious law. As a result, there are many Sunni imams in a given time and place. But others believed that the Prophet had designated his cousin and son-in- law, Ali, as his successor. From that early division, a host of further distinctions grew up – but the question of rightful leadership remains central. In time, the Shia were also sub- divided over this question, so that today the Ismailis are the only Shia community, who throughout history, have been led by a living, hereditary Imam in direct descent from the Prophet. (AKDN, 2014a, n.p.)

This part of his speech serves to succinctly sum up the Shia concept of Imamate and the role of the leadership of the Imam: it also provides a quick distinction between Shia and Sunni Imams to locate the Ismaili identity within this Shia-Sunni context. In the same speech, Aga Khan IV further clarifies the breath of the role of the Ismaili Imam that reflects the fused discourses of Ismaili juridical theory and philosophy of governance as it applies to the practical everyday lives of his Ismaili followers, including the women in this study. First, invoking his religious authority as Imam over aspects of the ‘spiritual’ lives of his Ismaili community, Aga Khan IV explains how and why his role extends beyond his religious leadership and into matters “in family life, in business, in community affairs” (AKDN, 2014a, n.p.) – the material aspects of the lives of the Ismailis in accordance with the belief in the inextricability of the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’ in Islamic obligations. Most of the women in the first two generations in my study, through their stories, attest to this role of the Imam and his impact on their daily lives in East Africa and Canada.

25 The Ismaili Centre in Toronto, whose inauguration event was summarized at the beginning of this chapter, was by no means the first Ismaili Centre to be built in Canada; however, it had come a long way from the first jamatkhanas built by Pir Sadr al-Din in Sind, Punjab, and Kashmir. The places of worship are physical metaphors (besides having other functions) for projecting Ismaili Muslim community identity, a sentiment that is best encapsulated by the Aga Khan’s words in his speech commemorating the opening of the Toronto Ismaili Centre: “One of the ways in which Ismailis have expressed their identity wherever they have lived is through their places of prayer, known today as Jamatkhana” (AKDN, 2014b, n.p.). The Aga Khan appears to make it clear that one of the most salient symbolic functions of these ‘ambassadorial’ centres (which include The Aga Khan Museum, The Global Centre for Pluralism, and the Delegation of the Imamate – all located in Canada), is to represent the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslim identity – who they are – an identity leitmotif that is repeated in his rationale for housing the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada.

In the first part of this chapter, I have traced the random forces at work which interrupted the picture of homogeneity of the Ismaili community: these forces continue to show that the Ismaili community identity is complexly constituted and is in the process of being reconstituted again in the Canadian context. I have attempted to show how the Imam exerts his authority over the community through the historical institution of the Imamate, with its religious/devotional ideologies and institutional practices that continue to contribute to the construction of Ismaili subjectivities. However, these devotional and non-devotional ideologies and practices have themselves been constituted by chance incidents or accidents, as demonstrated through the formation of Nizari Ismailism, and the constitution of ‘Khoja’ Ismailism in particular. The Ismaili formation reflects all of the influences that form its current practices; these continue to affect Ismaili identities today, including those of the women in my study.

If the first section of this chapter provided a macro picture of the forces at work that contributed to the constitution of the Nizari ‘Khoja’ Ismaili identities, the second section of this chapter serves to demonstrate how Ismaili identities have been reconstituted through the gender reform policies and edicts of Aga Khan III and Aga Khan IV, thus affecting the identities of the entire Khoja Ismaili community, and especially those of the Khoja Ismaili women therein.

26 Section Two: Muslim Women and Community

Section Two demonstrates how ‘Khoja’ Ismaili community identities have been reconstituted through gender reform projects, particularly those initiated by Aga Khan III and continued by Aga Khan IV. These projects were reinforced by the Imams’ edicts and membership rules within a colonial context. Two main factors reveal that the programmes of gender reforms initiated by Aga Khan III in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries were less unique than may be commonly understood, although it is argued that the programmes of the two Imams were more radical than those of other Muslim reformers on the Indian subcontinent: women’s roles were being redefined in other Muslim states; and on the Indian subcontinent itself, other Muslim (and Hindu) reformers were also proposing changes to re-define gender relations and the role of women in their respective communities.

Muslim women and nation.

Historically, women have served to define the state/communities through their various roles (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989). Using Yuval-Davis and Anthias’ work, Alicia Lazzarini (2005) identifies five key ways women have served the state: they are biological reproducers of the preferred national cultural group; they promulgate the ideological borders between ethnic groups; they communicate cultural boundaries and the national culture; they represent nationality; and they contribute towards economic, military, political and national struggles. The re-making of gender relations and the role of women was increasingly being defined in the early twentieth century as central to the modernization projects of nationalist movements; the change in the role and status of women was considered to be crucial to the liberalization of the entire community or nation.

Lazzarini asserts that “Women citizens are significant as integral state subjects because in the Western dominated international political system, reforms in women’s rights bring legitimacy, and also because women’s participation is required in nascent economic and political systems” (2005, p. 22). Therefore, women were mobilized in liberation movements in states such as Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt and Iran in the twentieth century; their role “as public actors [was] integral to the state’s claims of equality of citizens,” since women “act as laborers, producers, and ideological and physical reproducers of the nation” (Lazzarini, 2005, p. 23). For example, to

27 found the Turkish Republic in 1923, Kemal Ataturk supported Turkish women’s involvement in the economy through Islamic justification: the ideal Turkish woman who was included in the citizenship of the state was to be defined by a civil code adopted from Neuchatel, Switzerland instead of the Shari’a. Under this law, women were given equal civil rights – polygamy was abolished, women were granted rights to divorce and inheritance, a minimum age for marriage for men and women was established, women were granted equal pay for equal work, education was made mandatory until age eleven, and women were granted the right to vote (Lazzarini, 2005; Abdulla Abu Shehab, 1992). However, the modernizing project of the kemalist reforms for the status of women foregrounded the visibility of the ‘new Turkish woman’ in order to show the state’s break from the past (Abdulla Abu Shehab, 1992). Women’s education was established to enable her to carry out “the highest political duty of becoming better mothers” (Lazzarini, 2005, p. 29) but “in the private realm women understood they were to remain under a patriarchal system of authority” (Lazzarini, 2005, p. 31).

The ideal Turkish female subject represented the new, modern Turkish Republic and provided labour for the new market society, and although ostensibly she manifest the modernization and reinvigoration of Turkish society following the collapse of the , she was constituted anew “to establish legitimacy in the Western eyes” (Lazzarini, 2005, p. 33). The Turkish nationalist project in of the late 19th and early 20th centuries which was influenced by Western models of modernity, emphasizing principles of Western European Enlightenment such as science, rationality, and progress, was intensified during the early years of the establishment of the Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk around 1923. The modernist reformers under Kemal identified the emancipation of women as “an indispensible precondition for the nation’s civilization” (Yegenoglu, 1998, p. 127).

Similar agendas flavoured the modernizing projects of other Muslim states like Tunisia, Egypt and Iran; however, it is not within the scope of this study to elaborate on those projects here. It suffices to demonstrate that women’s reform was neither a novel concept nor a project unique to the Imams of the Khoja Ismaili community. Turkey’s example demonstrates how women’s access to education, to employment outside the home, and to the right to divorce and remarriage were reforms that were vital to the modernization of the family in communities and to the development of modern capitalist nations across the colonized world in the early twentieth

28 century. For instance, the speeches delivered by Kemal throughout the country reflect the tenor of the edicts made by Aga Khan III to the Ismaili community as evidenced later on in this chapter. Meyda Yegenoglu observes how “In the new ideal to be striven for, the education of women for the wellbeing of the nation and for reaching the desired level of civilization was emphasized time and again” (1998, p. 132). So, in a 1923 speech, Kemal proffers that “A civilization where one sex is supreme can be condemned, there and then, as crippled” and identifies the “failures in our past” to “the fact that we remained passive to the fate of women” (cited by Yegenoglu, 1998, p. 132). Kemal’s speech below, as cited by Yegenoglu, demonstrates how Kemal’s views mirror the edits delivered by the Aga Khan III to the Ismaili community emphasizing the ideal of equality between men and women:

Let us be frank: society is made of women as well as men. If one grants all the rights to progress to the one and no rights to the other, what happens? Is it possible that one half of the population is in chains for the other half to reach the skies? Progress is possible only through a common effort. (Yegenoglu, 1998, p. 132)

Following a similar logic, Aly Kassam-Remtulla argues that “the Ismaili women were used as sites and gauges for displaying ‘modernity’ of the Ismaili community” and that “the Aga Khan III’s reasons for instituting such changes [pertaining to women’s status] were not simply his desire to improve the status of women, but to further his own and his community’s political and economic standing by showing adherence to European values” (1999, Chapter 3, p. 5). These understandings of women’s reform as being both positive moves forward for women and markers of religious modernity further complicate the multilayered experiences of women in the Ismaili community.

Muslim women and education.

On the Indian subcontinent itself, various Muslim reformers were working in the late nineteenth century to reform women’s conditions in their respective communities. Again, it is evident that the third Aga Khan was not alone in focusing on women’s reform; current literature identifies the following names more frequently as notable Muslim reformers: Syed Ahmad Khan, Nazir Ahmad, Altaf Husayn Hali, Shaikh Abdullah, Ashraf Ali Thanawi, and Sayyid Mumtaz Ali. Though, again, it is not within the scope of this study to develop the contributions of each of

29 these reformers, a brief note on the work of some of these men to change the status of women serves to juxtapose the gender reform policies of the third and fourth Aga Khan that are developed later in this chapter. The intention is not to compare and evaluate the various reforms or strategies so much as it is to historicize the gender reforms mobilized by the Ismaili Imams.

Barbara D. Metcalf (1994) frames Muslim reformers on the Indian subcontinent according to three different reformist movements, two of which enable me to show very briefly how the Muslim reformers’ ideologies were guiding their interests in shaping women’s status and knowledge. Meanwhile, Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s work reflects the ideology of the late nineteenth century ulema (Muslim scholars of Islamic sacred laws), who needed female participation in religious schools so that they could then influence their families. Through his writing of the Bihishti Zewar, Thanawi maintains that both men and women possessed the same faculties and that, if educated properly, women had the same potential as men; therefore, girls and boys should be taught to read the same Arabic texts so that girls could also attain the status of learned scholars. His anecdotes and stories did not distinguish between men and women, but rather implied a common standard for both. The qualities that represented proper Muslim women were identified by him as follows: her spoken language was clear and correct; she observed her religious obligations correctly; she kept her house in good order; she maintained the correct hierarchical relations with everyone; and she could write letters and manage intimate matters without disclosing them. His work “embodies an entire female curriculum in itself, from the alphabet to modes of letter writing, polite conversation, recipes, medicines, managing household accounts, sewing, and … rules of religion” (Devji, 1994, p. 23). However, Thanawi’s writing lacks the logistics of how women can achieve this, and “by showing a strong preference for [women’s] seclusion, Thanawi thus limits his own proposal” (Khoja-Moolji, 2011, p. 6).

As with Thanawi, other social reformers’ intentions for the education of Muslim women were also directed by what they considered “the behaviour of the uneducated woman, given over to customary practices and unfamiliar with Islamic teachings” (Metcalf, 1994, p. 9). Unlike Thanawi, however, the respective gender reform agendas of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Nazir Ahmad, Shaikh Abdulla Hali, and Mumtaz ‘Ali were influenced to some extent by the European criticisms leveled against Islam traditions such as polygamy and seclusion. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan – the founder of Aligarh College – favoured the education of boys over girls and felt that

30 religious education sufficed girls whose fathers and husbands could impart education for their daughters and wives in the home. His focus on education for women reflected that “women were to live through their male relations” and that women needed education only so that “they can guard the domestic sphere and instill the proper values in their children (especially sons), who will then perform the important tasks of Islam in society” (Minault, as cited in Khoja-Moolji, 2011, p. 6). In contrast to Ahmad Khan’s views, both Nazir Ahmad and Shaikh Abdulla Hali espoused more direct intervention in the education of Muslim women. Nazir Ahmad’s instructive novel the Mirat al-arus (published 1869) portrayed the heroine, Asghari, as an ideal Muslim woman who “was educated, a capable manager, a companion to her husband and a goad to his career, but she never violated social norms” (Minault, 2007, p. 77). In fact, Ahmad’s ideal Muslim woman “observed strict purdah and always gave her elders and in-laws their due respect” (Minault, 2007, p. 77). Ahmad’s work did not over-emphasize religion in the curriculum for girls and included subjects like geography, of which Thanawi did not approve. In fact, Ahmad’s focus was to sway his readership to believe that education would help Muslim women to “best perform their domestic and religious duties to the benefit of all” (Metcalf, 1994, p. 11). Shaikh Abdulla Hali’s Majalis un-Nissa similarly revealed the benefits of women’s education; he encouraged a basic vernacular education for females in the seclusion of their own homes.

Unlike the other reformers mentioned so far, Mumtaz ‘Ali is identified with the westernizing movement attached to Aligarh and his pioneering role in Urdu journalism for women (Minault, 2007). His position was influenced by the Christian missionaries who were critical of the status accorded to Muslim women, by his empathy for his own sisters, and by his perception of women as both nurturers of children as well as companions for their husbands (Minault, 2007). Convinced that the status of Muslim women in Islamic law was much higher than the status they were accorded through customary adherence, Mumtaz ‘Ali set about to change Muslim practices and women’s acceptance of the practices such as polygamy, widow remarriage, and inheritance laws. He founded Tahzib un-Niswan (The Women’s Reformer) in Lahore with his second wife, Muhammadi Begam, a periodical that survived his lifetime. The periodical’s contents dealt with novel ideas on “housekeeping and childrearing, featured and encouraged creative writing by women, discussed women’s legal rights in Islam and the necessity for the mothers of the next generation to be educated” (Minault, 2007, p. 71). At the same time, it “invited letters from its readers to the editor, Muhammadi Began, who as a woman understood their problems” (Minault,

31 2007, p. 71). Minault claims that although Mumtaz ‘Ali’s periodical was not the only one available to women in Urdu, it “changed the lives of thousands of purdah-observing women over the years by giving them a window on the world beyond the narrow walls of their zananas (women’s quarters in the household)” (2007, p. 71). Thus, Mumtaz ‘Ali’s work on gender reform reflected the wider movement for Indian Muslim women’s well-rounded education during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century to help them fulfill their domestic roles and to be companions to their husbands (Khoja-Moolji, 2011).

The Remaking of Ismaili Subjects as Muslims: Top-Down Gender Reform

In her work, Ismaili researcher Shenila Khoja-Moolji (2011) identifies the Aga Khan’s chance encounters with a number of pioneering women in his life who influenced him of the crucial role women played not just in the progress of a family but also in the life of a nation (2011; also see Asani, 2008). Khoja-Moolji claims that the third Aga Khan’s belief that women’s influence was crucial to society’s progress led him to target gender reform by using his full authority as Imam to bring Ismailis into modernity. In the excerpt below, the Aga Khan III himself substantiates this claim:

Experience shows the strong possibility that the active influence of women on society, under free and equal conditions, is calculated not only to bring about practical improvement to the domestic realm, but also a higher and noble idealism into the life of the State. … No progressive thinker of today will challenge the claim that the social advancement and general well-being of communities are the greatest when women are least debarred, by artificial barriers and narrow prejudice, from taking their full position as citizens. (Aga Khan III, 1998, p. 111)

The philosophy encapsulated in his speech above apparently led Aga Khan III to enact modernizing gender reforms wherever possible through the Ismaili membership rules that were articulated in the Ismaili Constitution, and to reinforce these rules through firmans (edicts) which were read daily in jamatkhanas (congregational prayer houses) to his jamat (followers). A close scrutiny of his firmans reveals that the Aga Khan made strategic use of this medium to address issues that could not always be legislated directly through membership rules. Versions of the Ismaili Rule Books and his firmans reveal that Aga Khan III dealt with an extensive range of

32 topics that affected the reconstitution of Khoja Ismaili identity (Adatia and King, 1969); however, in this section, I identify only those rules and firmans that display the Imam’s attempt to bring equity in Khoja Ismaili women’s lives, which would subsequently affect their location in the community, and through that, their identities.

The third and fourth Aga Khans’ membership rules and firmans primarily addressed the following issues: the marriage contract laws addressing polygamy, marriage, divorce, widowhood, and remarriage; freedom for women from physical seclusion and seclusion through traditional attire (including the veil); encouraging social and professional interaction between women and men through the comportment of the jamat (followers); and the formal education of girls and women. The focus of these changes – the site of Ismaili women – had a critical impact on the redefinition of the East African Ismaili community, and on the identities of the Ismaili women, thus affecting the lives of the women in my study. Below, I identify the various mediums through which this change was enacted by the Imams: the marriage contract, female seclusion, and education policies.

The marriage contract.

The marriage law reforms were introduced and implemented gradually through the Ismaili Constitution in an attempt to address the issue of protection of women who were still financially dependent on their husbands. This was an attempt to provide Ismaili women with more equity in marriage partnerships and free them from the gender roles accorded to them through patriarchal norms carried to East Africa from the Indian subcontinent. One example pertains to polygamy. In 1905, polygamy was still legitimized by the Ismaili Constitution, provided that financial maintenance for the first wife was guaranteed. However, in the Constitution of 1946, polygamy rules were modified to allow a man to marry a second wife only if his first wife was severely ill, insane, cruel or unable to bear him children, any one of which was to be authenticated by a medical certificate. Also according to the 1946 Constitution, a wife was able to challenge her husband’s application to marry another wife. In the case where the Ismaili Council approved such an application, it was on the proviso that the husband was able to deposit enough money with the Council to invest and use the income to provide for the financial needs of the first wife (Asani, 2008). By the time of the 1962 Constitution, under the aegis of Aga Khan IV, polygamy was totally prohibited in the Ismaili community, and marriage partnerships for Ismailis were

33 sanctioned as long as, at the time of marriage, neither party had a living spouse (Asani, 2008; also see Kassam, 2011). These membership rules regarding the phasing out of the practice of polygamy were at the same time reiterated and reinforced through firmans made by Aga Khan III (Adatia and King, 1969; Kassam, 2011), which were repeatedly read out in jamatkhanas.

Under the marriage contract rules, the Ismaili Constitution also addressed the practice of divorce within the Ismaili community; as Asani explains it, “the autocratic and ‘virtually unfettered right’ of a husband to repudiate his wife, which is widespread in many Muslim communities, was denied” (2008, p. 289). In her research, Dana April Seidenberg clarifies the location of Asian East African women in cases of divorce by quoting a businesswoman discussing how, for Indian Muslim women, “Marriage was a terrible gamble; if it didn’t work it was the woman who paid the price. If she stayed with her husband her life might be miserable. If she was divorced she returned to her parents’ home as an outcast” (1996, p. 99). The traditional patriarchal emphasis on maintaining the father’s (as well as the husband’s) good name after marriage, which was expected to take place through the performance of expected gender conduct and practices in the ‘husband’s home’, made divorce totally unthinkable – this reality was articulated by all five participants in the Grandmothers’ Group of my study. My participants’ accounts revealed how they, through examples and actual words, were raised to understand that they actually had no recourse of return to the parental home if they found their married lives insufferable, since “the institution [of marriage was] predicated upon the eternal indissolubility of the marital bond” (Seidenberg, 1996, p. 98).

The Ismaili Constitution consequently addressed the issue of divorce within the Ismaili community so that a husband had to justify his reasons for divorce before a tribunal of the Ismaili council, which, as an extension of the Imam’s authority, could grant or deny his petition (Asani, 2008). The Ismaili Constitution also addressed equity of gender, which was established to enable Ismaili women to petition for divorce too. However, in any case, divorce was only granted once the tribunal, which was to include at least one woman, had established that the marriage was absolutely irreconcilable. Regardless, a woman now had official rights in this domain; she could now petition for divorce after failure to receive maintenance from her husband for a full year and/or for a husband who had become impotent after marriage. In the event that a

34 woman was granted a divorce, there were rules enforced to ensure that she and her children were provided for by the husband (Asani, 2008).

At the same time as these constitutional changes were occurring, Aga Khan III first directed his firmans to remove the stigma held by the Ismaili community towards divorced women by reiterating that “it is against the principle of Islam not to get married to a divorced woman” or widows and that “[a] man should happily marry a divorced woman or a widow” (Adatia and King, 1969, p. 188). On this issue, Zain Kassam maintains that by directing his firmans against the ostracism of marrying divorced women and widows, Aga Khan III was attempting to delicately move “the emphasis to the woman herself rather than her virginity” (2011, p. 256) and thereby loosen the hold of practices of patriarchal traditions that were tied to the purity beliefs entrenched in Ismaili identity. Second, to enable women to reach an equitable partnership with men through marriage, Aga Khan III stressed in his firmans the equal responsibility of both women and men in maintaining the dignity and duties of husband and wife, as revealed in the excerpt below:

A careful study of the very extensive material indicates that the trend of His Highness’ thinking basically cut across the old Hindu ideas of marriage being something set up with little reference to the individual as an arrangement between two large family groups. Rather, he saw it as a contract under God between two of the faithful, wherein the husband looked after and cared for his own household and the wife in a position of dignity did her own work in it, caring for her husband and children and actively building the whole. (Kassam, 2011, p.188; also see Kassam-Remtulla, 1999)

Through his firmans, Aga Khan III worked towards the establishment of free choice in marriage, which he described as the “holiest of blessings,” emphasizing that if for some irresoluble differences the union failed, he endorsed “a healthy, wholesome, unashamed divorce” (Qayyum, as cited in Asani, 2008, p. 290). Many other changes were introduced gradually on the issue of marriage. For example, child marriages were banned according to the Constitution, as were marriages arranged between families for monetary reasons. According to the 1926 Constitution, no girl could be married before she was fourteen. Evidenced by the ages of the five Grandmother participants of my study at the time of their respective marriages, these rules were being

35 observed in the 1940s, although they were not observed in their respective mothers’ times (as evidenced by their stories). During the Imamate of Aga Khan IV, the 1962 Constitution raised the required minimum marriageable age to sixteen (Asani, 2008). At the same time, earlier constitutions outlawed marriages performed by parents in proxy, so that by the 1946 Constitution, the bride was required to “take her seat open-faced next to the groom” (Asani, 2008, p. 289) and was required to sign the marriage agreement. Hence, the Ismaili rulebooks show that parents were forbidden to arrange marriages contrary to the wishes of their daughters by this time.

These changes to minimum marriageable age requirements were made to enable not only a freer participation of Ismaili women in events concerning their own lives, but also to provide them with opportunities to extend their formal schooling. Aly Kassam-Remtulla maintains that the “Khojah Ismaili marriage became a site of intense reform” to move the Ismailis away from ingrained Hindu traditions (1999, Chapter 4, p. 14) and into modernity. The arrangement of the marriages of the five women in the Grandmothers’ Group of my study reflected these changes. It is clear these changes occurred slowly, but they were already affecting the identities of the girls and women in the East African Ismaili community as a result of the changes to the Ismaili constitutions and the firmans of the third and the fourth Aga Khans.

Female seclusion.

According to the traditional practices carried to Africa by the diaspora Ismailis, the mobility of Ismaili women was restricted by their seclusion at the beginning of the twentieth century. This seclusion was maintained through the female body by certain traditional requirements of women’s attire (such as the veil, the burkha, long head scarves or pacharies) and through traditional gender role expectations. The latter isolated women in the domestic sphere in the home, thus limiting their social interactions outside of the home. Marc Van Grondelle maintains that Aga Khan III “acted from a deep sense of dual loyalty: to Britain and to Islam” to bring about changes to the location of women (2009, p. 40). Similarly, researcher Simonetta Calderini (2011) asserts that Aga Khan III brought about the modernizing changes affecting the seclusion of Ismaili women through attire, not just by utilizing the colonial discourse of the veil, but also by drawing upon his understanding of Islamic history and through his interpretation of the Qur’an for the Ismailis. Calderini supports her claim through the example of the third Aga

36 Khan’s firman, pronounced during his second visit to Zanzibar in 1905, in which he addressed the women in the Ismaili congregation:

The external burqa [veil] is not for you, but [better] for you is the veil of the heart [dhill], [sic] have modesty [aya: shyness, modesty] in your heart, [sic] fill your heart with modesty all the time. You [women] should not cast your eye on other men except your husbands; do not have any thoughts for other men. If in your mind there is desire for other men, you will not gain from your prayers. (2011, p. 56)

Calderini maintains that the Imam mobilized the Ismaili concept of ta’wil (inner meaning) through his edict to provide a deeper interpretation of the Qur’anic verse that addressed modesty, claiming that the “garment of piety (libasal-taqwa)/God consciousness is the best” (2011, p. 56), to move the community away from the focus on traditional outer apparel of women. Adatia and King (1969) have maintained that the practices of Ismailis, based on their inherited Indian past, took time, even in matters of dress: they claim that Aga Khan III used his firmans repeatedly by references to Islam to direct them towards modernity. Perhaps the most dramatic and revolutionary social reform Aga Khan III undertook besides “women’s consent and full participation in all marriage ceremonies” (Kassam-Remtulla, 1999, Chapter 3, p. 5) was to decree that Ismaili women adopt a simple knee-length European dress in keeping with the Euro- African environment, instead of wearing the Indian attire covering the full female body.

Although he had made this firman in the mid-1940s in Nairobi, the Ismaili community was slow in responding (Calderini, 2011). Consequently, following the 1952 Ismaili leadership (all-male) conference in Evian, the Aga Khan legislated a dress policy for Ismaili women in East Africa. He justified it through his belief that for Ismailis to have “retained an Asiatic outlook in matters of language, habit and clothing, would have been for them a complication and in society an archaic dead weight for the Africa of the future” (Aga Khan III, 1954, p. 188) in an East Africa poised for independence. In the excerpt below, Seidenberg’s description of the dress traditionally worn by both Indian Hindu and Muslim women in East Africa during the first half of the twentieth century provides the background against which the third Aga Khan ‘mandated’ a dress policy for Ismaili women:

37 [Hindu and Muslim Asian women had to maintain] twenty-four hour coverage as one had to cover one’s face in the presence of the husband’s father, elder brother or uncle in the house. This was the respect shown to the elderly people. Nobody thought to question these practices. In the street if one saw men in your family, one covered one’s face. (1996, p. 102)

Calderini contends that “a change in dress among the Isma’ili women of East Africa was visible within a few weeks of the Imam’s directives” (2011, p. 57). The impact of Western dress on Ismaili women’s psyche could not be underestimated, as evidenced by the views expressed by other Indian groups in East Africa who watched this dramatic change. Indeed, this change in dress, decreed by the Imam and adopted readily by the women of the Ismaili community, raised questions of moral laxity of Ismaili women by other Indian groups in East Africa, Hindu and Muslims alike, “because baring one’s legs as a female being is a chose fatale to the Indian mind even in 1965” (Bharati, 1965, p. 26). Kassam-Remtulla maintains that Ismaili women could now be recognized as distinct from other Indian women “solely on what they were wearing – especially the fact that Ismaili women rarely wore ‘Asian’ clothes in public” by the mid-late 1950s (1999, Chapter 4, p. 18).

Concomitantly, to loosen the stronghold of traditional patriarchal practices of female seclusion, Aga Khan III delivered firmans to Ismailis in East Africa to locate the Ismaili women on a more equal social and economic footing to their male counterparts. Twinning his Ismaili philosophy with the principles of the Qur’an, Aga Khan III told his community in Bagamoyo, in Tanganyika in 1899 that men and women were given equal responsibility in daily matters like prayers (Kassam, 2011), and that since men and women were regarded as equals in the Ismaili faith, unrelated men and women should treat each other as siblings and/or parents in their daily interactions (except of course those who were married). Through this firman and its repetition, the Imam attempted to enable a bonding of community members taking care of the traditional concern for female purity by keeping inappropriate matters of sexuality between the sexes in check and allowing for the freer participation of female members in social and professional capacities. By basing his edict both in the Qur’an and in Ismailism, the Imam afforded credibility to the notion that women who chose to step out of traditional roles of child-rearing and

38 housework to venture into work outside the domestic sphere were to be respected (Kassam, 2011).

This edict was complemented by other pronouncements that guided Ismailis from continuing the practice of the physical seclusion of women, either in the home or behind a veil. Likewise, in 1920, Aga Khan III cautioned those Ismailis of Karachi who still insisted on keeping their women indoors or behind veils to desist, else they not be considered true Ismailis (Kassam, 2011). Again in 1937, in Mombasa, Aga Khan III advised his male followers to give up the old patriarchal habits that expected women to follow their lead, and asked them instead to walk alongside women (Kassam, 2011). Kassam offers the theory that these edicts were meant to extend Ismaili women’s relations to all men while dealing with the notion of mahram as interpreted in the Qur’an, whereby women were restricted from displaying their zina (‘adornment’, representing a woman’s sexual traits) unless accompanied by members specified on their mahram list. Through the invocation in the firmans of the familial bonds between Ismaili members, the Imam attempted to encourage social and professional interactions (without the veil) between Ismaili men and women while preventing illicit sexual interaction and encouraging mutual respect instead (Kassam, 2011). This led to several changes, enabling women to not only share the same prayer hall with men in jamatkhanas, but also allowing them to lead a congregation that included males in prayers. As a result of these changes pertaining to the location of Ismaili women within the community through the policies and firmans of Aga Khan III and, later, of Aga Khan IV, Ismaili women were appointed to positions on the Ismaili councils and/or put in charge of certain Ismaili events towards the 1960s. Although Ismaili women were still not readily able to step out of their ascribed gender roles in the domestic domain and seclusion in the homes, the stories of the oldest women in my study reveal that the process had already begun by 1960s.

Education policies.

The third Aga Khan’s modernizing policies, through membership rules and firmans, also emphasized higher formal education for Ismaili girls and women. The reason(s) for his policies are unclear: Did Aga Khan III believe that Ismaili women provided sites from which to affect the identity of the entire community? Did he do so to reflect the liberal traits of Ismaili Islam? Did his policies reflect his belief in the formal education of Ismail women for their own financial

39 independence and wellbeing? Or did he believe that the influence of formally educated women would be of benefit to the entire Ismaili community? Or perhaps all of the above? Kassam articulates the reasons believed by most East African Ismailis behind Aga Khan III’s guidance regarding the education of women:

Aga Khan III upheld the full human dignity of women and subverted patriarchal assumptions of women as the weaker sex whose morality must be guarded by men or whose sole function was to attend to child-rearing rather than being economic agents in their own right. To effect such a change of consciousness within own community, he chose education as the means by which women could take charge of their own destinies… The coupling of education with the ability to support oneself financially cannot be underestimated. In paving the way for Ismaili women to go to school, to receive both the quality and length of education that would make it possible for them to enter the professions and to strive for financial self-sufficiency. (2011, p. 257-259)

The third Aga Khan’s firmans advocating the importance of education for girls began within the first decade of the twentieth century. Concomitantly with these firmans, Aga Khan III also established an infrastructure of Ismaili schools and programmes that were overseen by an appointed organization of local Ismaili councils with mandates specified in the Ismaili rulebooks. The education of Ismaili children was overseen by an Ismaili Education Minister who was positioned within the Ismaili council and who reported directly to the Imam, as specified under the Ismaili Constitution. The Ismaili councils, under the direct guidance of the Aga Khan, mobilized programmes to provide access to primary education for Ismaili children in small towns and primary and secondary education for Ismaili children in large towns, through Aga Khan Schools. Aga Khan Student Hostels were built in large towns (around the 1930s) to support the education of children (mostly boys) whose parents lived in small hinterland townships where schools/teachers were not yet readily available. Until the early 1960s in East Africa, under the British colonial rule, schools and school programmes were segregated along racial lines between Europeans, Indians, and indigenous Africans, although from the mid-1920s, the colonial administration provided some form of education for the indigenous Africans through government or missionary schools. The education of diaspora Indian children had been left to their respective communities. Ismailis, who from the time of their earliest organizations saw themselves as

40 distinct group (Morris, 1968; Kassam-Remtulla, 1999), prioritized the education of Ismaili children. This gave prominence to their religious identity among other Indians and the other racial groups in East Africa.

At first, Ismailis set up their schools and programmes through the help of Ismaili philanthropists, and later, they did so through officially appointed councils under Aga Khan III, whose policies were directed to move the Ismailis into modernity. Although earlier smaller local Ismaili schools had operated as religious schools attached to jamatkhanas, the first official Ismaili girls’ school – opened in 1905 by Aga Khan III (Khoja-Moolji, 2011; Keshavjee, 2004) – was also an Ismaili community religious school. The firmans of Aga Khan III directing the education of girls on the Indian subcontinent and in East Africa started in the early 1900s. For example, in 1915 in Bombay, the Aga Khan’s firman was directed to Ismaili girls, from whom he asked for rigorous and concentrated application at school. He told them that if they were denied permission to attend school by their elders, “say to them, ‘No! We will go to school and study thoroughly’” (Kassam, 2011, p. 258). In 1920, in Karachi, Aga Khan III explained to the jamat (Ismaili followers) educating girls was a necessity for their own happiness; in particular, he expounded his philosophy that education would help a woman earn an income if she happened to be in a failing marriage or if her husband was unable to earn (Kassam, 2011). Likewise, in 1925, in Zanzibar, he admonished fathers for failing to educate their daughters and advised them to do so immediately. At this time, he explained at length how girls needed education to be self- sufficient, and advised the girls to insist on getting an education if their fathers refused to send them to school (Kassam, 2011; also see Asani, 2008). In 1926, in Nairobi, he likened boys and girls to the two human eyes that were both necessary for perfect vision, in order to emphasize that the essential differences for intellectual capacity between the biology of males and females did not exist (Kassam, 2011). Also in 1926, while addressing the Ismaili women in his firman, he said, “Your Imam has brought you total freedom,” adding “I do not want Ismaili women dependent on anyone-their parents, husbands, or anyone except God” (Asani, 2008, p. 287). By this time, two secular girls’ schools had already opened, in Nairobi in 1918 and in Mombasa in 1919, and by 1925, an Aga Khan boys’ school was already offering Cambridge Preliminary exams (affiliated to the education system in Britain) for Ismailis (Keshavjee, 2004). In Mombasa in 1937, Aga Khan III addressed an all-male Ismaili Education Board – a body instituted to

41 provide education for Ismaili children – to implement plans to prepare girls to enter professions that would make them financially self-sufficient (Kassam, 2011).

By the time the first two Grandmother participants of my study were born, at least one Ismaili school had already been established in all major towns throughout East Africa, without any aid from the colonial administration. Already, the Ismaili governing bodies under the auspices of Aga Khan III were insisting that the curriculum in their schools “should conform with their own special requirements of Westernization” (Morris, 1968, p. 148). The oft-repeated codified firman (first delivered in Mombasa in 1945) quoted by Ismailis the world over was thereafter repeatedly read in jamatkhanas all over East Africa for at least two decades, regarding preference to be given to the education of girls over boys for parents who could not afford to educate both (Keshavjee, 2010; Adatia and King, 1967). The fact that almost all of the participants in my study (including some of the women of the youngest generation, who were born in Canada) could quote this firman verbatim proved its vital role and efficacy in changing the lives of East African Ismaili women and girls.

This message from the Imam was in contradiction to what Ismaili girls were being prepared for by their families at that time. It was also significant that by the time the five oldest women in my study were going through schooling in East Africa, the firmans of the Imam were already emphasizing the importance of education for girls. This was a time when at least Ismaili primary schools (and even some Ismaili secondary schools in larger towns) had already been established for some time in East Africa. Seidenberg offers insights about how women with a few years of schooling found employment in community schools at a time when trained teachers were almost non-existent but when the demand for education for Ismaili children was rising:

Woman’s work outside the home was still within the familiar confines of child-care. … A few Asian women with some years of experience of schooling were allowed to work as primary school teachers. They taught simple mathematics and languages in schools set up to provide education for their own community members’ male and female children. (1996, p. 101)

Clearly, the secular education of girls in East Africa, at least at a rudimentary level, was taking place as a result of the firmans of Aga Khan III and the organization of Ismaili schools through

42 local Ismaili councils by the end of the 1920s. At the same time, the stories of at least three of the five women in the Grandmothers’ Group of my study hinted at the tension they felt between wanting to get more education and falling in with the traditional expectations of their respective families, who wanted their girls formally schooled but not too schooled to make them ‘unmarriageable’, and who married them off as soon as they had finished a few years of primary schooling. In the following quotation from Keshavjee, she sums up the reasons for the disconnect between the directives of the Imam and the ability of his jamat to follow his edicts, and the ensuing consequences in the lives of the Ismaili women:

Despite these directives from their Imam, the community was ill equipped to follow these directives, and was conflicted by its adherence to an ingrained traditional Indian cultural behavioural pattern with regard to education for its women. The orthodox religious and cultural traditions and poor economic conditions were dominant contributing factors in precluding these women from acquiring a formal education; and the parents were too mired in their economic struggles to distance themselves from the clutches of the sociocultural taboos of the day. … Ismaili women dropped out of school at the end of the elementary level of education or at junior high school because they knew no better, felt the economic need to do so, or they were encouraged by the extended family to leave and prepare themselves for marriage and a good secretarial job. There were virtually no role models of educated and/or professional women to emulate at that time. (2010, p. 110)

By the time of the 1952 Ismaili Conference in Evian, when English was made the mandatory language of instruction in Ismaili schools, all five of the oldest participants in my study were married, and all of them had had one or more children. By this time, the Westernization policies of Aga Khan III had had some effect on the Ismailis, which was supposedly reflected in The East African Commission Report. This report identified the Ismailis as practising their Islamic religious doctrine but becoming “more and more Europeanized in their way of life” and summed up the Ismaili community’s main interest “in the future progress on Western lines” (East African High Commission, 1957, p. 2).

By the mid-1950s, the external conditions in East Africa were changing politically as the British colonials made preparations to hand over governance to the indigenous Africans in Uganda. In

43 1957, the death of Aga Khan III brought a new Imam, his grandson, Shah Karim al-Husayni (Aga Khan IV) into the office of the Imamate and into the religious and social orbit of the Ugandan Ismaili community. This new Imam followed in the footsteps of his grandfather; throughout the 1960s, Aga Khan IV continued to emphasize in his firmans the value of higher education for boys and girls as “an asset which you have to yourself and no one can take it away from you... that once you have a professional degree, whether you be a woman or a man, this is a very great asset through your lives” (as cited in Keshavjee, 2010, p. 114). These firmans from the Imam came at a time when Ismailis, alongside other Indians in Uganda, could no longer count on their hold over the business sector. After Uganda’s independence from British rule in 1962, the aspiring indigenous Africans were tearing down the colonially instituted, economically segregating systems, stepping into jobs and positions that had been previously occupied by Indian Ugandans, including Ismailis. As Keshavjee asserts, this made the Ismaili community more open to their Imam’s firmans about educating their women, especially since Aga Khan IV expanded the mandate of his Ismaili institutions in East Africa in the 1960s, to build “world-class coeducational schools ... [with] academic curricula and extracurricular activities, which were on par with world-class education,” enabling Ismaili students “to compete for entrance into Ivy League universities upon completion” through international scholarships made available to Ismaili women through Ismaili community resources (2010, p. 113).

Calderini (2011) points out that such reforms – equating civilization with progress, as was exemplified by the West – were also taking place in Turkey, Iran, and to some extent, in Egypt. However, she attributes the success of the modernizing project of the third Aga Khan on the flexibility in the Aga Khan’s approach to applying his modernizing directives according to the cultural requirements of the countries in which the Ismailis lived and to his religious and spiritual authority over the Ismaili community. By the time the Ismailis were expelled from Uganda in 1972, the modernizing gender reforms that had been initiated by the third and fourth Aga Khan had already had noticeable effects on the location of Ismaili women of the younger generations in this study, as revealed in their oral life accounts.

In Section One of this chapter, I attempted to trace the forces that went into the cultural, religious and social constitution of the Indian East African Ismaili complex through diverse random events. I demonstrated how the Ismaili Imam, through the historic re/definition of the office of

44 the Imamate and as reconstituted through the Imam’s claim to descendency from the ahl al-bayt (the house of the Prophet), contributed to the formation of a version of the Nizari Ismailism in the Indian subcontinent – a heritage to which the women in my study lay claim through their oral life stories. This history showed how the Nizari branch of Ismailis is believed to have contributed to the philosophy practised today by the Ismaili community: by recognizing the Imam-occupier of the institution of Imamate as having ilm (authoritative knowledge), Nizari Ismailism supposedly defined the role of the Imam as one in which he interpreted the deeper meanings of the Qur’an for his followers as they pertained to their spiritual and to their material everyday lives. This first section also demonstrated how this version of the Nizari branch of Ismailism was transported to the Indian subcontinent through the Nizari di'as (missionaries), who were responsible for converting some of the local Hindus from the lower castes into ‘Khoja’ Ismailis through Satpanth (the true path) Ismailism. It also demonstrated how chance events led to the re/formulation of Ismaili identity in the British colonial legal system.

Section Two of this chapter moved into the modern period. First, I attempted to show how the gender policies enacted by the two Imams were not so unique. I traced the changing role and identity constitution of Muslim women in the modernizing projects of the nation in the early twentieth century, and I mapped the attempts of Muslim reformers in the Indian subcontinent to demonstrate how gender reforms were being enacted in spheres other than the Ismaili polity. The juxtaposition of wider reform projects with those of specific gender reform policies that were mobilized by Aga Khan III and Aga Khan IV demonstrates how the identities of East African- born Indian Ismaili women were shaped by the modernizing policies of the third and fourth Aga Khan through social reforms that were addressed through Ismaili membership rules, the expansion of the Ismaili infrastructure and repeated firmans (edicts). These policies and decrees spoke to marriage contract laws, the seclusion of women, the comportment of the Ismailis, and the formal education of girls and women, and demonstrate how they played a critical role in the redefinition of the identities of the Ismaili women. They have further impacted the identity of the larger Khoja Ismaili community, as is made evident through the life narratives of the Ismaili women in my study in the subsequent chapters of this dissertation.

45 Chapter Two: The Role of Local Knowledges in Defining Women’s Agency

This study investigates the particular local forms of agency practiced by immigrant Ismaili Muslim women with an Indian East African heritage. Like racialized women everywhere, the women in my study navigate patriarchy and White supremacy, and, as immigrants, they pursue home and belonging in diaspora. What does women’s agency look like under these circumstances? Racialized and immigrant women are often understood to possess little agency. They are assumed to be passive subjects. In exploring women both as actors and as acted upon, it is necessary to go beyond the stereotype of passive immigrant and racialized woman, theorizing the features of agency and what we might tentatively call a feminism, practiced by women who are seldom recognized in the West as feminist subjects.

This chapter examines scholars who have sought to examine immigrant women’s agency. I draw upon these approaches to formulate a methodology for my own study. The works I examine in this chapter are organized into three groups. The first group comprises three ethnographic studies that theorize the agency of women located in religious collectivities. These three studies demonstrate the importance of the local. Specifically, these works take into account the women’s particular histories to understand how women exercise agency. In the second group, I examine scholars who explore the role of informal knowledge and how older women ‘agents’ in the home teach women how to resist oppression and how to survive in diaspora space. The last group comprises four studies that explore how a place of settlement is converted into ‘home’ by immigrant women who struggle to find ‘belonging’ within their own cultural traditions and within the newer environments to which they have migrated. They display their own brand of agency as they juggle multiple and contradictory subject positions that result from the transference of local knowledges by the older women in their respective families.

Religious Women

The women in my study carry traces of their Gujarati Hindu roots (see Chapter One) and their location within a syncretic Nizari Khoja Ismaili community that exposes them daily to practices of some Hindu traditions even today. To understand notions of selfhood and agency from the standpoint of women whose Hindu roots lie in the Indian subcontinent, I explored Vaishali V.

46 Raval and Michael J. Kral’s “Core Versus Periphery: Dynamics of Personhood over the Life- Course of a Gujarati Hindu Woman” (2004). This work has offered some novel techniques for exploring a Hindu woman’s notion of her ‘self’ as connected to agency within the larger Hindu Indian collectivity. Raval and Kral’s work corrects the general misperception that an Indian Hindu woman’s identity can be conceptualized only in relation to the collective and be defined only in relation to others within the roles prescribed by Stridharma (code of conduct for women). They also make a case for using local concepts that are endemic to the culture of the subject under investigation in order to understand women’s agency.

Through a case study of Anita, an Indian Hindu immigrant woman from the Brahmin caste, Raval and Kral explore how Indian Hindu women do not see themselves exclusively in relation to others in their community – an aspect which, according to Raval and Kral, is often missed because in most social science literature, Hindu women’s identity is depicted as static and without reference to time. Raval and Kral note the vital importance of selecting appropriate tools for an investigation of women’s identities and agency: they maintain that her gender and her location within a particular culture need to be taken into account when selecting the tools for such an inquiry. Raval and Kral use a local cultural concept that ‘speaks to’ the woman in their study, which enables them to investigate the personhood of an Indian Hindu woman as “subjectively experienced” (p. 168). In particular, they use the concept of Astitva (existence), as opposed to employing more Western concepts such as ‘identity’ or ‘self-concept’, to elicit answers regarding their subject’s selfhood. Raval and Kral claim that the connotations of “to stand out, to emerge” inherent within Astitva enables the sixty year-old Anita to articulate her “emerging and becoming” (p. 168) as a more dynamic process through which she traces the transformations in her life to demonstrate how her meaning of ‘existence’ changes over the course of her life. In other words, Raval and Kral claim that the use of a local concept, Astitva, allowed them to explore through Anita’s stories how “existence is experienced within the conscious life of an individual” (p. 168).

Raval and Kral show how, through Astitva, Anita presents her selfhood as fluid rather than static: through the integration of “particular cultural/religious idioms” that she is able to utilize “to experience and explain her sense of being” (p. 168), Anita is able to disclose a sense of self as “being at least partially separate or separable from others” (p. 174). For example, Anita shows

47 this through her explanation of the core (spiritual) and the peripheral (related) dimensions of her existence. Anita identifies the core dimension of her existence as being eternal (akin to the soul), grounded in the Hindu religious philosophy, its discovery being the main and individual goal of her existence over a lifetime. By contrast, Anita describes the peripheral dimension of her life as related and differentiated existence that is connected to social relations (with family, children and kin) and to her profession. Of the two dimensions, Anita identifies the core (and individual) aspect of her existence as the main goal of her life, which is to attain moksha (the event of merging of the self with the Ultimate) through several rebirths: this is, as she claims, her individual pursuit throughout her life.

The use of Astitva allows Anita to show that her agency emerges out of her multiple and contradictory subject positions. Through her stories, Anita emphasizes the dependency of her subjective wellbeing on the social approval and acceptance she receives by performing social and family duties to fulfill the expectations that others have of her. However, Anita also reveals that important as this social approbation is to her very existence, it does not dictate her behavior throughout her life. For example, Anita reveals that certain events in her existence, like the death of her child a month after her birth, compel Anita to assume more autonomy in her life instead of just submitting to the will of others. That such transformations are characteristic of Indian Hindu women is substantiated by this study through reference to other current studies which indicate that “as Indians age, there seems to be a shift towards a more autonomous lifestyle with increased responsibility and a sense of agency” (p. 178). Raval and Kral claim that these studies demonstrate that the first three stages (child, virgin, junior wife) for a Hindu woman is characterized by dependency, but as the woman reaches motherhood and secures the status of the principle “feeder” (p. 178) in the household, her autonomy grows until she is an elder when her dependency sets in again. From the use of Astitva, Raval and Kral are able to show that far from being totally devoid of agency, Hindu women attain some autonomy during middle adulthood at least.

Raval and Kral’s study also throws some light on the connectedness of a fluid identity and the local form of agency shown by Indian Hindu women that can get obscured by its type and function. For example, they suggest that Anita’s choice to become more autonomous is made in relation to others, in this instance, in order to fulfill her responsibility to her child. Thus, this

48 study reveals that the use of the local concept, Astitva, enables an understanding of agency through autonomy as conceived by an Indian Hindu woman “not on the dimension of separateness from-relation to others, but rather in terms of agency-dependency on others” (p. 178). In other words, Raval and Kral’s study contributes to the understanding that in a collectivist culture, agency can be both relational and autonomous so that relatedness coexists with self-identity allowing the gendered agent to “merge, blend, and unite in ‘relatedness,’” emerging as a ‘self,’ and to “then merge again, and re-emerge” (p. 175) each time as a subtly different ‘self.’

Raval and Kral’s work emphasizes the cultural context of autonomy. Traditions of collective interrelatedness do not preclude women within that community from having a consciousness of their inner ‘selves’ and an understanding of themselves as ‘agents’ “who are at least partially responsible for the origins of their own actions” (Lamb as cited in Raval and Kral, p. 179). My own study also exemplifies how the notion of autonomy can be visualized from a broader lens so that, for example, observation of both autonomy and interconnectedness does not cancel out agency, but rather, co-joined, they simply reveal a different form of agency. Lastly, Raval and Kral’s work also demonstrates through the location of their particular subject, Anita, that agency within the same community cannot be generalized and that a woman’s shift to autonomy is due to more than just time-related cultural changes. It is also affected by class, formal education, career opportunities, financial autonomy and direct influences from Western cultures, all of which affect the agency of the women in my study as well.

Raval and Kral’s work helps me to be more consciously aware of how identity and agency of women may be explored and conceptualized culturally, using tools that allow for voices to be heard that may otherwise be misrepresented or subjugated by dominant discourses. However, although the women in my study may still carry vestiges of their Indian Hindu roots, their identities have been affected by many influences through their immigration histories and by the leadership of their Imams. The policies of Aga Khan III, as elaborated in Chapter One, were aimed at ‘de-Indianizing’, modernizing, and ‘Islamizing’ Ismailis using Ismaili women as sites in many instances, affecting their identities more directly. Since the women in my study are Ismaili Muslims, I also examined the work of Saba Mahmood, who explores the local notion of agency and subjectivity from the perspectives of a particular community within the large Muslim Umma.

49 Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005) shows resourcefulness in its demonstration of Muslim women’s identity and agency. This scholarly work shifts the notion of women’s agency from one limited to “the binary model of subordination and subversion” (p. 7) to an alternate consideration where “modes of action [are] indebted to other reasons and histories” (p. 14). To affect this, Mahmood presents a notion of agency mediated by cultural and historical conditions which constitute different kinds of knowledges and subjectivities for women circumscribed by their gendered location in Islamic scriptures interpreted by the (male) 'ulama. Mahmood presents a notion of agency demonstrated by the women from the mosque movement, a sub-set of the larger Islam revivalist Dawa Movement within Islam that emerged in Egypt in the 1970s, which emphasizes the cultivation of a moral and ethical life as guided by the Shari'a. Mahmood maintains that if ‘agency’ means effecting change in the world and in oneself, its definition cannot be established in advance: agency then must emerge from “within the grammar of the concepts within which it resides” (p. 34), since it can be comprehended only “from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment” (p. 15).

Making selective use of Butler’s theory of reiterations and locating the potential of agency within structures of power, Mahmood moves away from the notion of the doing and undoing of social norms as impositions and resignifies them as the very material through which the women of the mosque movement constitute their internal selves. As well, Mahmood mobilizes Foucault’s perspectives on ethics and “the paradox of subjectification” to show the particular kind of agency these women demonstrate. Mahmood’s work shows how through actions the women choose to carry out daily on their own bodies, on their own thoughts, through their conduct and way of being in response to specific relations of subordination, they transform themselves into virtuous subjects. In other words, Mahmood presents these particular women’s willing submission to painful regimes of disciplinary practices and to hierarchal structures to be able to acquire the ability to internalize the ethical codes required by the social norms into their daily lives, as ‘agency.’ Seen from this perspective, Mahmood contends that agency is not something that resists the disciplinary structures of social norms, but rather, it finds ways in which it can “inhabit” them (pp. 14-15). Agency, as portrayed by Mahmood, becomes the way the women of the mosque movement live these social norms, aspire to these social norms, and work to perfect themselves according to these norms through the construction of their subjectivities that are

50 invoked through a set of moral codes. Mahmood maintains that since these Muslim women willingly embrace a “malleability,” which she defines as “less a sense of passivity than one of struggle, effort, exertion and achievement” (p. 29), they may appear docile and passive while they are actually actors exemplifying a local form of agency.

Mahmood’s work reveals the agency of these particular women through their creation of a particular brand of local pedagogy and curriculum – a medium of transmitting local knowledges – through which these ethical values are cultivated. Mahmood shows how through the organization of regular meetings, women from different socio-economic backgrounds meet, during which time they provide each other with lessons on Islam scriptures, social practices and forms of bodily comportment considered germane to the development of the ideal moral self. As Mahmood’s work discloses, through these local lessons, the saliency of eternal signifiers such as ritual practices, comportment, attitude, and dress are examined as reflected through movements of the body – a vehicle the women consider necessary to achieve a pious and virtuous self.

During these meetings, the women learn to connect the ‘body to soul’ movements that apparently help them to “achieve harmony between intentions, desire and thought, and actions, speech, and gestures through ascetic practices” (p. 131). Mahmood points out that the object of this local pedagogy is to make the prescribed practices “natural to one’s disposition” (p. 131) so that ritualistic practices become “sites where the self comes to acquire and give expression to its proper form” (p. 131). For example, Mahmood shows how the site of daily prayers performs the function of doing what god wants them to do and becomes a practice through which the yearning for worship in the prescribed manner and attitude is engendered. Likewise, Mahmood shows how for the women of the mosque movement, the wearing of the veil expresses ‘true modesty’ and functions as a site through which modesty is acquired. Mahmood maintains that it is through such ritualistic practices that the women learn to connect their interiority to their exteriority so that bodily actions (such as saying daily prayers and wearing the veil) create a virtuous self who desires those actions. Such agency, as interpreted by Mahmood, requires a paradigmatic shift from its politically feminist counterpart, which tends to valorize a more gender-based emancipatory model. This model, she claims, may well obscure other forms of agency whose meaning and effect do not fit its logic.

51 Mahmood’s study makes a compelling argument for investigating the particular forms of agency of women from different Muslim communities: she observes that feminist scholarship on racialized women’s agency is crucial at a time when all Muslim women are herded into a single, nebulous entity by Western media which portrays them as “incomparably bound by the unbreakable chains of religious and patriarchal oppressions” (p. 7). Her observation that acts of agency of racialized women may be constructed differently and therefore get ignored at best or labeled as passivity or docility at worst resonates with my study. Mahmood’s study contributes to my understanding of women’s agency in that far from carrying a fixed meaning, agency of women arises from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions for its enactment. In this sense, Mahmood’s work offers the understanding that agency of women is both produced within relations of power and realized within structures of power: it is local and contextual to the histories of the particular group.

Much as it has to offer, Mahmood’s work has limitations. Mahmood brushes aside gender subordination within the Dawa movement within which the women of the mosque movement are circumscribed, a subordination I find difficult to ignore. Mahmood claims that the ‘selves’ the women of the mosque movement seek is exemplified by the lives of the Prophet and his Companions; however, paradoxically, it is the male ulama that control the examples that must be followed to achieve virtuosity. Similarly, Mahmood concedes that the discussions in which the women participate in order to acquire a virtuous self remain within the conventions and arguments established by male Muslim jurists. As well, the women of the mosque movement are circumscribed by their location in various ways vis-à-vis the social norms of the community. For example, Mahmood points out that the women face several limitations: they are barred from carrying out da'wa to men; they cannot deliver the Friday sermon or lead men in the sermon; men remain the custodians of women; women’s voices can invalidate acts of worship; and women are not regarded on an equal footing with men. In fact, the women in Mahmood’s study carry the principal responsibility for maintaining the sanctity of the male–female relations since, according to the juristic Islamic tradition, they are regarded as the provokers of sexual desire in men.

These conditions make it difficult not to think of these women’s practices to achieve a virtuous self as religious indoctrination rather than agency. Openly claiming to move beyond this aspect

52 of gender subordination within the movement, Mahmood focuses on “how the women of the mosque movement work on their practices to become desirous subjects” (p. 112), albeit, of a male, authoritative discourse. She invokes the work of the political theorist John Christman to assert that since these women are making a choice out of their own free will, out of the choices available within their own traditional culture and their social reality, their practices exemplify autonomy.

Although the participants of my study and the subjects of Mahmood’s study are all Muslim women, the Ismaili Muslim women occupy a significantly different location with their Ismaili Muslim community, and they experience a different social reality. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the social reform for Ismailis started by Aga Khan III from the end of 1800s and continued by Aga Khan IV was an effort to locate the Ismaili women on equal footing with the men within the community. This was done by promoting formal education for both Ismaili boys and girls, by fostering a social environment where Ismaili men and women worked and prayed together, by encouraging the removal of the veil and by prescribing a Western dress for all Indian East African Ismaili women. Therefore, I have sought out studies by Ismailis exploring the notion of informal knowledges and agency of Ismaili women. The few studies on Ismaili women I was able to locate focus more on women’s agency through formal education, such as works by Keshavjee (2004; 2010) and Mamodaly and Fakirani (2012). However, an anthropological study by Parin Dossa (1988) offers a perspective on local agency demonstrated by Ismaili women through the role they play in the immigration resettlement process in Canada.

In “Women's Space/Time: An Anthropological Perspective on Ismaili Immigrant Women in Calgary and Vancouver,” Dossa (1988) endeavors to show how immigrant Ismaili women demonstrate a particular kind of agency through the key role they play in the resettlement process of their families in Canada. Much like Raval and Kral’s and Mahmood’s works, the value of Dossa’s study lies in the way her research is conducted to elicit the local viewpoints of her respondents using a different strategy. In Dossa’s case, she arrives at an understanding of the agency displayed by Canadian Ismaili women through their practices assuming that “their ideas and perception may be expressed in ways other than direct expository speech” (p. 49). Dossa’s work is based on a case study of a core group of 25 Ismaili immigrant women with an Indian East African heritage who have been in Canada for between 10-17 years. In her study, Dossa

53 demonstrates how these women have been able to adapt to their changing roles in a Western environment to accommodate two different space/time locations – that of home and that of work – to create an ‘open’ space for themselves and their families, which helps them survive in diaspora space.

Dossa portrays the Ismaili women’s agency through their roles as nurturers through the traditional guardianship they assume to help fulfill the Ismaili religious doctrine of Din (spiritual) and Duniya (material) the two dimensions of one reality – the spiritual and the material – co-joined symbiotically through which the Ismailis experience cyclic movements in different temporalities and spaces in their daily lives. Somewhat similar to the Indian Hindu woman’s conception of the core and relational aspects of existence in Raval and Kral’s work, Dossa’s work reflects the theorization of these two dimensions through a space/time ideology in the lives of the Ismailis which she presents in the following manner: The material dimension (Duniya) is associated with daytime, when Ismailis experience space and time through an outward movement that is reflected through a network of social relationships with family and friends. Conversely, the spiritual aspect (Din) is connected to dawn and dusk, when unity and repose apparently take over, and it is experienced as an inward movement. These two temporalities are crosscut by different spaces so that the space of jamatkhana (place of congregation for Ismailis) represents the spiritual inward dimension while family and kin mark the social space of the material outward dimension. The Ismaili women – mothers and wives – as nurturers mediate the cyclic movements between these two dimensions – from the material exterior to the spiritual interior in cycles of culinary and ritual practices. The Ismaili women supervise these cycles of movements so that food preparation and serving of food to family and friends represents the outward material world, and they supervise the appropriate meals and the ablutions at home prior to jamatkhana attendance to initiate the inward spiritual cycle. Dossa claims that through the function the women perform, they maintain social ties and religious connectivity for their families and, in the process, display their version of a local agency.

Dossa demonstrates that in spite of the drastic changes in the women’s lives in Canada, they have not relinquished their agentic roles: she demonstrates this change in women’s location through a space/time medium. She maintains that immigration to Canada has resulted in a change of location in space and time for Ismaili women, which she demonstrates by contrasting

54 their location in East Africa in one space – that of the home – to two spatial modalities in Canada – that of home and of work, which has resulted in “condensed time” (p. 58) for the women. For example, Dossa claims that in East Africa women spent four to five hours in the kitchen daily, which allowed them ‘open’ time for social relationships with children, with other women in the household, with neighbours and visitors, and the time to foster social relations between family members. By contrast, Dossa maintains that in Canada, Ismaili women have had to condense their nurturing roles in their domestic lives to facilitate their work outside of the home, which is fragmented by “technical time,” preventing them from developing social relationships (p. 56). Consequently, Dossa proclaims that for these women the once “open space of the home is now condensed to accommodate career and work roles at the same time their work space is confined and fragmented with little bearing on home life” (p. 58).

Dossa’s work sets out to show that in spite of this major changes to their lives, the Ismaili women “are not passive recipients of the forces encroaching in their lives” (p. 59); they still retain both their social and spiritual nurturing in order to accommodate their families’ resettlement in Canada. She maintains that the Ismaili women achieve this by creating ‘open space’ through the reorganization of their use of time in the social space of the home to accommodate social ties with families and friends through food sharing and by observing certain practices that allow the families to attend jamatkhana. Using an example of the occasion of a jamaati Satado – “an event that takes place twice a year when the Ismailis are required to attend jamatkhana for 7 straight days” (p. 59), Dossa demonstrates how the Ismaili women facilitate jamatkhana attendance: they prepare meals during the previous night; they oversee their children’s ablutions; they stagger meal times; they ensure the departure of the family for jamatkhana by a specific time; they cancel all extra-curricular activities for their children; and they postpone all social engagements for that period. Dossa identifies the agency of the Ismaili women in relation to the outcomes the Ismailis accrue as a result of women’s role in accommodating jamatkhana attendance for themselves and their families in a new place of settlement.

Dossa asserts that by enabling their families to attend jamatkhana, the Ismaili women create “core cultural time” (p. 60) in which all members of the community participate, linking “the material and the spiritual time” and thus “expanding and opening up the constrictions of space

55 compartmentalized by their lives in their Canadian homeland” (p. 60). According to Dossa, during this jamatkhana time, the Ismailis experience the time of the spiritual interior through religious sacra, ritual practices and prayers, opening up time through which the Ismailis confirm their interconnection and single-heartedness, and re-establishing meaning to their existence (p. 60). This experience of the core cultural participation sustains Ismailis in their material lives so that they are able to create an ‘open space’ by recalling this experience to mitigate difficulties they encounter in their daily lives. Dossa maintains that this experience of core cultural time enable the Ismailis to “acquire some understanding and control of what might otherwise be a foreign and even a threatening environment” (p. 60). In this way, Dossa’s work reveals the particular agency of Ismaili women: they enable the opening up of space, which allows the women and their families to cope with the reality of their lives so that “they are able to go about their labour with some vision and purpose” (p. 60).

Though Mahmood’s and Dossa’s respective studies display women’s agency from within Muslim religio-cultural boundaries, they each reveal a different perspective of women’s agency. Still, they both contribute to my understanding that there is no fixed definition of agency, but rather that agency must be examined within the particular context of women located in various particular communities. Dossa’s work identifies the critical role the immigrant Ismaili women play in the resettlement process of their families in Canada, and through that role how these women demonstrate their version of agency. Although both Dossa’s study and my own explore the notion of agency practiced by East African Ismaili women with an Indian heritage that help them and their families survive in Canada, we take different approaches to examining the agency of Ismaili women. Dossa’s work focuses on the women’s agency shown through their nurturing role in facilitating unified community relatedness by mediating material and spiritual spaces, which sustains the Ismailis in times of difficulties in Canada. My focus, on the other hand, is to investigate the local agency of Ismaili women through generationally transmitted local wisdom that helps them to survive in two different geographical locations.

Although the works of Raval and Kral, Mahmood, and Dossa have not offered me concrete lenses to apply to my study, they represent the kind of work done in the field of agency of racialized women: they offer tangible ways of exploring women’s subjectivities and of preventing women’s agency from being obscured or ignored. Raval and Kral’s study underscores

56 the importance of utilizing local concepts to explore women’s own notions of selfhood and agency; Mahmood’s work demonstrates how women articulate their own notions of agency by disciplining their bodies and minds to create subjectivities within the boundaries that circumscribe them; and Dossa’s study reveals how immigrant women demonstrate their agency by organizing activities for their families that help them create a space within the place of settlement that can transform the latter into home. All three works contribute to the understanding that women’s agency is always local and in context, and that it may take various different forms based on different local knowledges.

Local Knowledges

In order to gain a better understanding of how local knowledges inform the practices of the women in my study, I examined the works of Sofia Villenas (1996; 2000) and Yvonne Bobb- Smith (2003). In “Una Buena Educacion: Women Performing Life Histories of Moral Education in Latino Communities” (1996), Sofia Villenas conceptualizes the agency of the immigrant women in her study through their roles as providers of a local education. She utilizes the education narratives of ten immigrant women from Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador and Colombia who are residing in Hope City (pseudonym), North Carolina to demonstrate how they rear their children using their own cultural definitions of what it means to be ‘educated’ and ‘knowledgeable’. Focusing on the theme of ‘the cultural production of the educated person’, Villenas distinguishes between the formal education the children of the Latina women receive in state schools and the local, informal notion of La educacion their mothers provide in el hogar (the home). Villenas defines La educacion as ‘moral’ education through which the women in her study claim to produce children who are “educated in morality, respect, work, and religious value,” with different types of education prescribed for boys and girls that they cannot learn at school.

Villenas’ work demonstrates that although the women’s views differ on the importance and purpose of formal education in their lives of their daughters, the women all agree that girls need to be taught to be good virtuous daughters, good wives, and good mothers, and to take care of their children, the husband, and the home. Far from challenging their duties of cooking and attending to their husbands, most of the women in the study share the belief that formal higher education for women is to equip women to fend for themselves “in the absence of the husband as

57 well as to help out the husband and the family who could not survive on a single salary” (p. 225). By contrast, the Latina women believe that their location in the domestic domain is their chief responsibility and that their purpose in transmitting La educacion is to rear “decent and hardworking people who have respect for their parents and elders, and who keep their obligations to their families” (p. 273), something they find lacking in the dominant culture.

By connecting women’s roles as transmitters of local education to the purpose that transference of local knowledges serves, Villenas reveals the particular kind of agency that the women in her study demonstrate. Villenas concedes that the local educacion both keeps patriarchy in place and teaches women to survive patriarchy in a patriarchal society where potential ill treatment, molestation, and incest remain unpunished. At the same time, Villenas maintains that the Latina women reared on this local education are far from “‘disempowered,’ passive housewives” (p. 77): she substantiates their practices of overt resistance through examples of their historical activism in the organization of labour and other movements in Latin America. However, Villenas also ties such Latin American feminism to women’s local issues: Latina women enact agency overtly only when women are unable to maintain the functioning of their hogar (home) as a result of government and/or economic repression. To highlight this local form of Latina women’s agency, Villenas contrasts the local feminism espoused by Latin American women to Western feminism. In so doing, she demonstrates that the former is uniquely related to the “daily and differing struggles of Latin American women” (p. 268) for which they seek social justice, not for individual gain but for “their families and for their work as mothers” (p. 269).

Villenas connects this version of agency to the one practised by the Latina women of Hope City. She maintains that the Latina women in her study “present themselves as agents and conscious decision makers who choose to enfrentar el hogar (take up the challenge of the home) ... thus be in charge of the moral education of their children,” which she claims is contrary to Western feminism that sees the domestic realm as the source of all women’s subjugation (p. 273). Thus, Villenas identifies a particular form of agency practised by the Latina women in her study, one which mostly works within imposed boundaries by utilizing mundane, everyday practices to resist oppressive conditions through historically-learned everyday resistance tactics against conquest and subordination or “the ‘infrapolitics’ that have been carried on and (re)created for centuries” (p. 26). Villenas’ work demonstrates that simply by choosing to place a value on their

58 cultural knowledges and choosing to take up the challenge of transmitting a local form of education to their children, the Latina women of Hope City are actively engaged, as agents, in discarding the perceptions of the dominant culture that regards Latina culture as substandard or insignificant.

Villenas’ work is valuable for my study in the way it a) demonstrates the way local education is defined by women of another immigrant community in North America; b) shows the role of such local education and the way it is delivered; and, c) depicts a local form of both feminism and agency practiced by immigrant women through their actions and transmission of local knowledges. As well, Villenas’ caution to researchers against falling unwittingly into the Western discourse of feminism is well placed. She points out that by highlighting the agency of racialized immigrant women in terms of ‘resistance’ without due scrutiny may cause exoticism to obscure the local theorizing that may be “rooted in the mundaneness of everyday practices” (p. 88). Despite its value, Villenas’ work, rooted as it is on Latina American women with their particular religious and cultural histories, emphasizes the significance of moral education over formal education for women that is not reflected in the stories of the women in my study. Although the local education imparted by the women in my study does share some aspects with the moral education transmitted by Villenas’ respondents – of ethical values like hard work, perseverance, and responsibility – it also encourages formal higher education and financial independency for women through the pursuit of professions for their own wellbeing and independence. This ideology is shared by Yvonne Bobb-Smith, a Trinidadian Canadian who, like Villenas, examines the value of generationally transmitted local education of Caribbean women in the home and through their agency.

In I Know Who I Am: A Caribbean Woman’s Identity in Canada (2003), Bobb-Smith investigates ‘home’ as an educative institution where young Caribbean women learn survival and resistance tactics from older women through the ethic of independence. Bobb-Smith describes ‘home’ for the younger Caribbean women as a learning site where they “memorialized the tremendous strengths” (p. 129) demonstrated by the older Caribbean women such as mothers, grandmothers, aunts or guardians and acquired a knowledge that enabled them to meet the challenges of life and prepared them to resist “the double jeopardy of imperialism and patriarchy” (p. 73). Bobb-Smith’s work describes these older women as local feminists and as

59 “moving forces” who were advanced in their thinking and passed rules of survival on to the younger generation of women through a unique pedagogy (p. 129). This pedagogy, used by the older women much like Bobb-Smith’s adoptive mother, Tan Georgie, was partially adapted from the strategies of the African-inherited Anancy, who, through acts of deceit and mischief, was able to “hoodwink or outsmart his victims” and gained notoriety for “his manipulation of the White man’s power” (p. 130). These adapted Anancy strategies by the older women are identified by Bobb-Smith to include “critical thought, forms of complicity, wit, and even conspiracies to enable the oppressed to surmount domination” resulting in “planned acts [that] taught this group of Caribbean women, in their homes, about survival and resistance” (p. 130).

Bobb-Smith refers to this experience of learning generationally transmitted resistance in the home as “socialization” (p. 131) through the observation of the behaviors and attitudes of various older women towards their responsibilities in their homes. What the younger women observed was that the “older Caribbean women were consistently self-reliant, in spite of limited education, restricted autonomy, and little or no dependence on unions” (p. 40). Bobb-Smith provides an example of this generationally transmitted special knowledge through the practices of her great- aunt, Tan Georgie, who, when faced with economic crisis as a result of the failure of her husband to provide for his family, refused to become a victim. Instead, Bobb-Smith observes her great- aunt start a baking business that utilized a traditional oven in her backyard and helped her family maintain their standard of living (pp. 40-41). Through such examples of local lessons, Bobb- Smith foregrounds the transference of the ethic of independence to the next generation of women. This ethic of independence that teaches women resistance for survival is defined by Bobb-Smith not as a character trait but as a feminist ethic connected to women’s agency, whereby an action is taken as a result of a situation in which “the traditional notions of gender, is oppositional or contradictory to a Caribbean woman’s vision of herself” (p. 89).

In particular, Bobb-Smith shows how this ethic of independence leads Caribbean women, including Bobb-Smith herself, to learn resistance strategies from the older women who socialized them “to negotiate their identities in situations of domination before their migration to Canada” (p. 131). Bobb-Smith’s work demonstrates how in such negotiations, the younger women observed the older women act “as agents aggressively or sometimes humbly, and connected themselves as subjects, to discursive systems which otherwise would have degraded

60 or victimized them” (p. 131). Defining resistance of Canadian Caribbean women as an inherited legacy that comprises “a set of specific cultural or political responses to everyday life experiences” (p. 131) of oppressive and dominant and exploitive systems, Bobb-Smith presents an understanding of locally learned resistance reflected through its distilled components. The local lessons teach several aspects: the value of education; the means of gaining economic independence; the perpetual striving for self-definition; the continuous consciousness of community; recognition of race and class oppressions; and the significance of spirituality.

Bobb-Smith’s work portrays the potency of such passed-on local lessons of resistance partially through her own ‘journey’ of self-definition, displaying her local agency in the process. To begin with, Bobb-Smith demonstrates how she took up the prospect of immigration to Canada as a domestic worker since it was the only way she could access educational opportunities to escape abject poverty. Her socialization through local lessons from older Caribbean women equipped her not to be deterred when she encountered racial oppression upon her arrival in Canada; these resistance strategies taught her to focus on her educational goal. Bobb-Smith conveys the power of the lessons she learned by showing how she was able to achieve two Bachelor degrees seven years from the time she arrived in Canada as a domestic labourer. Thus, Bobb-Smith claims that her “experience of being ‘forced’ to assume a domestic service worker identity (very often despised and socially degrading) had been subsumed” (p. 48).

Next, Bobb-Smith displays how the locally inherited lessons on resistance kicked in when she was encouraged to seek employment positions outside of Toronto. After graduating with a degree in Library Science, she ignored the employment offers in Southwestern Ontario by deconstructing the “controlling image – passivity and dependence – to initiate [her] own Caribbean/Black women’s identity” (p. 51). Instead, Bobb-Smith sought and acquired a librarian’s position with The Canadian Hospital Association. Bobb-Smith demonstrates that in spite of encountering racism everyday in a position “that could have been easily construed as a reserve for a White middle-class person,” she was able to garner “a degree of professional acceptance from her colleagues” after she succeeded in converting the library into a Canada- wide facility (p. 51). However, the passed-on lessons in the ethic of independence caused Bobb- Smith to become dissatisfied with “experiences that minimized or marginalized [her] identity” (p. 51). This led her back to Trinidad and Tobago for the next 20 years, where she participated in

61 the reconstruction of Caribbean society at the end of colonialism. Once again, Bobb-Smith experienced ostracism from the Caribbean society, since the various consecutive job positions she occupied all “fell outside the construction of a Caribbean female identity” (p. 52). Aware that she was “shifting into a place…where Caribbean women were not expected to be seen” and that she was “competing, as a Black woman, in a very senior authoritative position” (p. 53), Bobb- Smith claims that she used her inherited legacy of resistance that was passed-on from the older Caribbean women to remain resilient.

This agentic action allowed her to “negotiate [her] identity as a Caribbean woman and national among people with whom [she] belonged, sometimes balancing on an uneven terrain of gender and power” (p. 54). Bobb-Smith identifies the local lessons that helped her in this ‘journey’: she claims that she acquired academic qualifications that were respected, and she overcame the doubts and fears associated with being Black, all the while asseverating her management and leadership capabilities, integrating her “career, [her] voluntarism, and [her] personal life ... to make a statement of who [she] was then” (p. 54). However, when she encountered race and gender oppressive situations, she turned once again to education as a strategy to achieve her liberation by acquiring a Master’s degree, followed by a doctorate in 1998. Bobb-Smith demonstrates a story of resistance and survival as an immigrant woman who minimizes constraints that would “weaken” her immigrant identity (p. 55). Her work credits the actions of the earlier generations of Caribbean women for allowing her to see the connection between independence and “the promotion of self worth” (p. 137-138). Her work underscores the potency of such local passed-on knowledges to provide her with the “invisible armour” (p. 138) of resistance strategies, freeing her from victimization in the private or the public spheres and teaching her to see the connections between independence and self-reliance to bring about social change.

Although Bobb-Smith’s ‘journey’ for self-definition at times echoes the male-centered liberal enlightenment narrative, her work offers a perspective of a local agency of women that is achieved through a local education provided by older women in the home and which resonates with my study. The histories of the women in our respective studies are very different; however, each of our studies identifies the potency of a local education combined with formal education, supported by the ethic of self-reliance and of community support. Of particular interest to my

62 study is Bobb-smith’s notion of ‘home’ for an immigrant woman: her work emphasizes that the concept of ‘home’ in the diasporic imagination benefits immigrant women for whom ‘home’ extends beyond the limits of a physical site. By exploring the notion of ‘home’ through her diasporic Caribbean woman’s “measure of self” (p. 14), Bobb-Smith transforms it into a dynamic metaphoric learning site. Drawing upon Carol Boyce Davis’ notion of ‘home’, Bobb- Smith links ‘home’ to identity and origins, making it into a mobile learning space where she acquires a repertoire of experientially-tested strategies that offer the potential for liberating opportunities for immigrant women in any place of settlement. Bobb-Smith’s notion has helped me to further explore the meaning of ‘home’ for the diasporans in my study beyond a physical location, for which I also turn to the works of four women descendents of immigrants.

Creating Home and Belonging in the Diaspora

Studies of South Asian women that explore women’s use of local agency to create home and belonging in diaspora space offer specific insights for my particular study. British diaspora theorist Gayatri Gopinath, for instance, shows how evolving cultural practices in diaspora space may lead to a reconstitution of a nation to create home and belonging for ‘South Asian’ diasporans. However, as Villenas does above, Gopinath is quick to point out how such practices may at the same time reinforce cultural patriarchy. She identifies the limits in the theoretical concept of diaspora, which make it difficult to think of diaspora in terms other than that of “patrilineal, genealogical economy that even the most useful work in diasporic thinking … tends to replicate” (1995, p. 304). Identifying the Greek derivation of the term ‘diaspora’ with the “image of scattered seeds” that “are metaphorical for the male ‘substance’,” Gopinath proclaims that from its very derivational understanding, ‘diaspora’ as a movement of people foregrounds “a system of kinship reckoned through men,” which forecloses any discussion of the location of women diasporans (p. 306). She faults Paul Gilroy for failing to consider the impact of the Asian cultural presence in Britain, and for omitting a meaningful dialogue with gender in his “conceptualizations of ‘race,’ cultural production, and the black Atlantic diaspora” (p. 305). She concludes that through this elision, Gilroy maintains the Black/White binaries contributing thus to a legacy of narrow gender and sexuality conceptualizations in many diaspora theories today.

In her work, Gopinath conceptualizes bhangra, a rural folk music and dance originally performed by men and brought to Britain from Punjab by immigrants, to show its vital role as a

63 syncretically evolving diasporic phenomenon from the 1970s to the 1990s. She observes its impact on South Asian identities and community formation to establish a sense of ‘belonging’. Gopinath traces the evolution of bhangra from its initial use as a performative ‘tool’ to construct a shared Asian ethnic identity “in the face of white racism [and] the elision of South Asians within a binary racial discourse of black and white” (p. 308) in Britain to its more potent role in subject formation and diasporic ‘belonging’. In particular, she shows how bhangra reworked “the hierarchical relation between diaspora and nation” (p. 304) as a result of its reconstitution in British diaspora space by the South Asian youth, who, through its integration with genres like reggae, rap, techno, and house, and English lyrics, made Bhangra ‘British’.

Gopinath claims that this ‘British’ version of bhangra “demands not only that diaspora be seen as part of the nation but the nation be rethought as a part of the diaspora” facilitating the reconfiguration of “the way in which a nation is constituted” (p. 304) to include its South Asian immigrants and their descendants. In so doing, Gopinath also dislocates the ‘home’ country, India, from its location as an originary site, and re-situates it as “but one of many diasporic locations” (p. 304). In other words, Gopinath shows how a performative cultural practice has enabled the South Asian immigrants and their descendants to cross local borders of religion, class, caste, language, and nationality to forge an imagined community that disrupts the White/Black binary in British space. Gopinath claims that this bhangra, as a common performative and shared phenomenon has created transnational communities; it has transcended national boundaries to replicate local South Asian versions of bhangra in “Toronto, Vancouver, Port-of-Spain, New York, Delhi, and Bombay” (p. 308).

Gopinath’s work is relevant to this study, especially in her use of a syncretic, deeply-rooted cultural phenomenon as a strategic conceptual tool to theorize local forms of identity, and in the ways that she shows how South Asian identity achieves ‘belonging’ in diaspora space. In spite of their appeal, theories of cultural syncretism like Gopinath’s also have limitations. In fact, Gopinath herself concedes that male artists like Apache Indian who have used the ‘evolved’ bhangra lyrics and staged performances not only do very little to enable women to navigate their subordination, but they actually retrench women’s subordination in the nation. Gopinath maintains that the diasporic male “fluid, celebratory, and syncretic” ‘Indian’ subject (p. 315) can only be realized through the contrasting constructed reification of the South Asian women as

64 dependants in the lyrics and performances of bhangra. Through her analysis of the performances of particular bhangra artists, Gopinath shows how Brown women continue to be ‘outsidered’ through their portrayal as insubstantial, ephemeral forms who can only be made ‘real’ through the fulfillment of their ascribed roles as signifiers of “male ethnic or communal affiliation, or as reproducers (both literally and metaphorically) of culture and community” (p. 315).

By contrast, the life stories of the women in my study show that although they do not hanker after an originary homeland, they are able to perceive themselves as doubly ‘outsidered’ by cultural patriarchal conventions and White hegemonic practices in diaspora space. Their oral self narratives demonstrate their use of a local form of agency as they participate in a wide range of informally-learned covert and overt tactics to negotiate cultural and White national boundaries that circumscribe their daily lives and keep them and their families from ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in diaspora space. Similarly, autobiographical works by three descendants of women offer some invaluable insights in understanding the vital role played by generationally-transmitted, gendered teaching (sometimes augmented by formal learning and newer influences) in diasporic women’s attempts to establish ‘belonging’ and arrive home to some degree in places of settlement.

I discuss three works briefly here: Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women (2006) by Jean Said Makdisi; The Warrior Woman: Memories of a Childhood Among Ghosts (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston; and Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color (2004) by Carole Ione Lewis. Even as these three self-referential works fall short of providing me with useful concepts with which to analyze the stories of the women in my study, they reinforce the understanding that diasporic women’s identities and agencies cannot be considered either in broad (one-fits-all) generalities or in isolation from their specific circumstances in time. These autobiographies show that agency needs to be theorized based on the experiences to which the particular women – like the women in my study – are subjected in their multiple locations at the intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the context of their specific cultural, socio-political and geographical histories. These three autobiographers show how the contradictions in their respective subject positions, as manifest by their growing feelings of disconnect from the diasporic spaces in which they live, cause them to examine their identities through passed-on knowledges from their women antecedents. For all three diasporic women, ‘breaking the silence’ through their autobiographical writing has been a culminating act

65 that demonstrates their overt agency – an act experienced as both fearful and freeing. This sentiment was also expressed by most of the women in my study as they related their stories, which they understood would be, in a way, openly represented through my writing. In their respective autobiographies, Makdisi, Hong Kingston, and Lewis each identify themselves as ‘outsiders’ in diaspora space – a location shared by the women in my study. These autobiographers steer me towards considering the agency of the women in my study from more local perspectives and in context. These three women demonstrate how local wisdom and formal education, combined with newer stimuli, have helped them to navigate boundaries and arrive at more ‘fluid’ and more complex understandings of their identities and of their sense of ‘belonging’ in diaspora space.

As I demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 5, issues of ‘home’, ‘belonging’ and ‘outsiderness’ are often entangled with post/colonial histories. Post/colonialism has often caused forced movements of people out of their homelands through slavery or by creating harsh economic conditions and socio-political divisions among populations. The women in my study share similar histories of displacement from homeland with Jean Said Makdisi, and they share their identification as ‘outsiders’ in their respective places of settlement as a result of colonial policies. Therefore, the examination of Makdisi’s generational autobiographical work has enhanced my understanding of the complex condition of the women in my study. In Teta, Mother, and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women, Jean Said Makdisi identifies her own feelings of ‘disconnectness’ from her ‘home’ in Lebanon with her complex Christian family diasporic history of displacement from the women in her family, particularly her grandmother (Teta) and her mother (Hilda). Makdisi traces her legacy of being an outsider to Teta’s and Hilda’s loss of their homeland, Jerusalem, beginning in 1922. Makdisi identifies 1922 as a time when Britain and France appropriated lands from the Ottoman Empire, arbitrarily drawing lines through villages, changing citizenship laws to establish nationality patrilineally and disenfranchising local Arab women in the process. Makdisi speaks to the far-reaching, profound effects of such losses of ‘homeland’ when she proclaims that “it is only recently that I have come to understand how deeply affected we have all been by the Palestinian experience, how we have lived our lives in its shadow ... since 1948 we have been outsiders – not only my parents, but their children, and I fear, their children’s children as well” (p. 31). The narratives of the women in my study resemble Makdisi’s sentiments about how European imperialism has played a significant role in making them and

66 their children ‘outsiders’ in diaspora space, causing women to create local gendered knowledges to help negotiate their tenuous locations in different places of settlement. Owing to some noticeable parallels between the location of Makdisi’s women and the women in my study, I have found Makdisi’s exploration of diasporic women’s identities and her treatment of local agency somewhat beneficial for this study.

In her work, Makdisi identifies post/colonialism as one of the chief causes for middle-class Christian Arab women like Makdisi’s grandmother and mother to create, practice and pass on a local wisdom in order to be able to survive as outsiders in diaspora space. Particularly, Makdisi demonstrates how women like Teta (her grandmother, Munira) and her daughter, Hilda (Makdisi’s mother) are shaped by colonial policies and wars and by the White American Christian missionary teachings – lessons that get incorporated into Teta’s local ideologies and transmitted through her daily practices to Hilda and to Makdisi herself. For example, Makdisi brings attention to the British colonial practices beginning in 1920s to direct Palestinian girls and women solely towards a domestic education, inculcating “a deep interest in Britain … making students’ real surroundings feel dull and uninteresting” (p. 257), a situation not too dissimilar to one claimed by women of the oldest and middle generation in my study. As well, Makdisi points out how this type of domestic training for women and girls emphasizing cleanliness, order, hygiene, mothercare, etc. was also reinforced by the teachings of the White American Christian missionaries which informed Teta’s daily practices filtering down to her female children.

However, as Makdisi demonstrates through Teta’s and Hilda’s experiences that life under colonialism, American missionary rules and the war (particularly) in Lebanon puts them on shaky ground, especially since the loss of their homeland in 1948. Their experiences teach them that as ‘outsiders’, they must learn to negotiate their daily lives with caution and vigilance, teaching their female children to value personal relationships, moral values, and formal education above material wealth. Makdisi rationalizes that “with their backs to the wall” (p. 62) after the loss of their Palestine, both Teta and Hilda transmit local lessons to their female children that reflect a protective “exercise in self-containment, in turning inwards, in self- absorption” (p. 62) within the safety of a domestic sphere, an education already encouraged by both the colonials and the missionaries. Makdisi maintains that much like her mother, she too is taught that “the world outside the ken of domestic life did not belong to me, or I to it” (p. 63), so

67 that “political awareness, not to mention involvement, was almost entirely absent from our domestic involvement” (p. 62). These local passed-on knowledges teach Makdisi to see herself as her husband’s ‘helper’ and to perceive of housework as a mark of distinction and an indication of her modernity (p. 325). Makdisi reveals that these local lessons teach her that, as a woman, it is her responsibility to hold back “the outside forces threatening the interior” (p. 59) through deep courage and stoicism, ensuring that “marriage and the home were comfortable and easy, shady and pleasant oases created to protect the family from the killing sunshine and the burning heat of the world outside” (p. 35).

Makdisi’s description of her social reality, of being taught to turn inwards and remain disconnected with the outside world of politics is reflected in the East Africa stories of all women in the first two generations in my study. Although their histories and geographies differ from Makdisi’s women, the stories of the women in my study reflect how their destabilizing post/colonial diasporic experiences in their race and gender contribute partially to their creation of local gendered ideologies that guide their daily practices to reflect a local agency.

More importantly, for my study, Makdisi demonstrates how diasporic women’s identities are often conflicted by the newer influences in places of settlement, subjecting them to contradictory experiences. Also, Makdisi’s intergenerational work offers the insight that women’s experiences of locations and dislocations in diaspora space contribute to their contradictory and multiple subject positions: these constitute their particular ‘realities’, which result in their agentic practices. Makdisi’s work enables me to see that agency is always ‘local’ and in context: it is neither fixed in advance nor static but changes to suit different and differing circumstances in time and space, and it is not necessarily manifest in grand gestures.

Makdisi clarifies this aspect through the identification of several influences and events in her own life. For example, when Makdisi settles in North America with her husband, she feels compelled to examine the epistemological value of the informal lessons she has received from her grandmother and mother that have prepared her to see marriage and domestic life as ends in themselves. She claims to do so because she is subjected to newer influences around her, like the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the women’s movement, to which she is drawn. Makdisi concedes that despite becoming an invaluable asset to her husband in furthering his

68 career, and despite becoming a highly skilled housewife who produced two healthy children as Teta, Hilda and her English teacher, Mrs. Bowen-Thompson “had said all women should” (p. 325), she experiences dissatisfaction with her life as if “a great hole, a huge emptiness, seemed to open up in front of” her (p. 118). These newer influences take on further meaning after Makdisi and her husband return to Beirut, where she teaches at the Women’s College. Makdisi describes how she is overcome with even more frustration and boiling rage as the newer influences hint at other possibilities. On the college campus, she is “nobody’s daughter, nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother, nobody’s sister: just myself” (p. 128). By contrast, she feels pressure to combine “the demands of professional and domestic life to the high standards that [she] had been taught” (p. 128). She is unable to protest when her mother and her friends treat Makdisi’s profession as ‘entertainment’ (in contrast to her domestic work, which is treated as her real station in life) and when her husband refuses to credit her role in his enormous professional success.

These injustices begin Makdisi’s journey to reexamine her own identity through the expectations she learned through the local teachings of her grandmother and her mother, and in so doing, she comes to a newer understanding of her own identity and their identities as well. Makdisi points to religion, especially the American and British Christian missionaries, social situation and geography as the main factors that distinguish women like Teta and her sister Amelia from their contemporaries who became feminists participating actively in politics. However, in examining her grandmother’s and mother’s lives through journals, letters, foods, places, and historical documents, Makdisi comes to realize that although the agency of women like Teta and Hilda is left out of official historical records, “they – and I – had had much to do with [history’s] inner workings, even while often being alienated from its outer forms” (p. 12).

Makdisi makes several observations about the agency of diasporic racialized women and about her own diasporic identity that are relevant to the women in my study. First, Makdisi foregrounds the importance of context when exploring the agency of women diasporans. Isolating and diminishing as the passed-on lessons from Teta and Hilda seem at first, Makdisi declares that she came to a newer understanding of the reasons behind the local lessons she received, particularly the lessons that led her to become the stoic maintainer of calm inside the home while shutting out the political events outside the home. Makdisi asserts that the role has allowed her to survive and to make her family survive in diaspora space among “the landslides of

69 history that might otherwise have engulfed us” (p. 58). In other words, Makdisi professes to learn that these passed-on knowledges from Teta and Hilda help her realize that “convention is powerful glue that holds things together when society is in danger of being unstuck” (p. 58), especially during the long war in Lebanon.

Next, Makdisi’s work points out how the agency of women like Teta and Hilda can often be obscured in the “small, hidden processes of everyday life” if agency is defined only to describe “the dramatic moments of grand gestures” (p. 208). To prove her point, Makdisi displays instances of an everyday type of agency of the diasporic women in her family through specific examples. For example, her great Aunt Amelia cannot become the principal of the girls’ school she has co-founded in Cairo because that honour is reserved only for White Americans. However, Makdisi describes how for fifty years Amelia becomes the conduit through which Arab culture is reinforced at the school, reminding the American teachers and administrators that “they had entered no cultural vacuum, but a living, real world about which they had much to learn” (p. 198).

Similarly, Makdisi asserts that the context of the long war in Lebanon allows her to see the generational teachings from her grandmother and mother in a new light. For example, Makdisi sees her mother practice resistance through her regular walks to Makdisi’s home during the war in Beirut amidst the Israeli bombings in 1984. Makdisi describes how her mother’s beauty in her elegant dress picking her way through the ruins and the garbage-filled streets caused heads to turn creating “a powerful reaction in others” (p. 365). Makdisi learns that this was her mother’s way of standing up to the war: her mother’s stoic elegance was perceived by all who saw her as “a refusal to give way to depression that everyone (and most of us) felt during the war” (p. 365). In fact, Makdisi realizes her mother’s action “somehow created a sense of repair where there had been nothing but desolation” so that “people saw it as a restorative, a statement of affirmation in the midst of the war’s massive denial” (p. 365). Makdisi concludes that such everyday, small acts as those carried out by her great-aunt and her mother makes her realize that women of the younger generation like herself had misjudged the strength of their fore-mothers, and the “inner price they have paid” for their agency through practices that have ensured their own and their children’s survival to “make life simply continue” (p. 11).

70 Makdisi contributes to my understanding that diasporic identity is multiple and often contradictory: she claims to come to an understanding that “elements of obedience and restraint inherited from all these sources are woven into my being, together with elements of dissatisfaction and rebellion inherent in the legacy” (p. 208). Makdisi maintains that she has inherited a complex ‘education’ from multiple sources so that her identity is shaped by local lessons from her grandmother, mother and aunts: the influences of feminists like Khalidy, Tohmeh, and Shaarawi and others like them; the simple classrooms of the foreign missionaries; the Palestinian experience and all the wars results from that; the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s; the long war in Lebanon; and her own domestic and professional lives (pp. 208, 209). With this new understanding, Makdisi claims she feels more at home in diaspora space. Similarly, in The Warrior Women: Memories of a Childhood Among Ghosts, Maxine Hong Kingston (1976) also shows how her protagonist comes to the realization that her fluid identity is constituted from the influences of many women in her life.

Through her protagonist, Kingston displays how first American-born female children of Chinese immigrants attempt to make sense of their conflicting and simultaneous existence within both the American individualistic ideals and the ethics of the Chinese traditional collective. Kingston exhibits how second generation, racialized female diasporans, who exist in the ghostly in- betweenness of at least two cultures and seem to belong to neither but are exposed to both, arrive ‘home’ in diaspora space. This work proves useful to my study partially in that it reflects the unstable and paradoxical location articulated by the first generations of women born in places of settlement – East Africa and Canada – to which their parents immigrated. The women in my study demonstrate similar (though not the same) internal conflicts between seeking self- actualization through various influences in their lives and committing to the social responsibility of the collective will (according to the patriarchal traditions) to create home and belonging in places of settlement.

Kingston’s autobiographical work displays the kind of micro-processes in which female children of diasporans engage in places to which their parents immigrated, to navigate their ascribed locations, arriving at a more fluid and tentative sense of both identity and belonging in diaspora space. In particular, Kingston shows how her protagonist utilizes the cultural strategy of ‘talking story’ passed on from her mother. With this tool, the protagonist is enabled to fill in imaginative

71 details into bare-bones stories of women, both real and mythical, to help her work out how she can belong to the Chinese collective and feel self-esteem in her gender within its ideology which claims “it is more profitable raise geese than daughters” and equates female children with “maggots in rice” (p. 45). Kingston’s work provides the awareness that passed-on knowledges transmitted by women diasporans may indeed be contradictory: she shows how the protagonist experiences paradoxes in her gender as a result of the passed on knowledges from her mother, Brave Orchid. Through talking story, Brave Orchid appears to be contravening the ideology of the Chinese collective by teaching the protagonist that she (even in her gender) can become a heroine, a swordswoman like the mythical Fa Mu Lan, and that the protagonist has failed if she grows up to be just a wife and a slave (p. 25).

Through the talking-story, Brave Orchid fills the protagonist’s head with possibilities of ways to circumvent the will of the collective. Brave Orchid shows her daughter how she uses the money her husband sends her from America to improvise an independent life for herself after attending medical school and turning herself from an economic drain to an economic gain. Paradoxically, Brave Orchid also teaches her daughter that, as a female, she must adhere to the expectations of the Chinese village collective if she does not want to be ‘eradicated from existence’ like No- Name Aunt. The protagonist learns from her mother that identity is not individually established, but rather it is socially negotiated in relationships within the ideology of the Chinese village collective, and, further, that those who defy this rule get ejected from the security and protection of the community. Kingston shows how Brave Orchid uses talking-story to teach the protagonist local lessons in belonging to the Chinese collective: women must remain decent; adventure and self-fulfillment is for men only, and women are the appointed guardians of this tradition.

Kingston’s work offers particular perspectives on home and belonging in diaspora space: she demonstrates how the first generation of immigrant women sees home and belonging differently from their American-born children. Brave Orchid transmits a particular concept of ‘home’ to her daughter: ‘home’ for her is both a physical place (New Society Village in China by the River Koo), to which they will return eventually, as well as the patriarchal rules of the Chinese village collective. These generationally transmitted local lessons go against the grain of what the protagonist is exposed to through her formal education in America. The latter teaches her American ideals of democracy, freedom, equality, individual will and the freedom of expression,

72 resulting in contradictions in her subject positions that lead to her mental breakdown in childhood.

Kingston shows how such experiences of contradictions in subject positions may compel diasporic women to explore their selfhood – who they are – to be able to find belonging and arrive ‘home’ in some capacity in diaspora space. Kingston contributes to my understanding that agency can take particular cultural and individualistic forms to help children of diasporans in the struggle to reach ‘home’. In other words, Kingston’s work displays how the protagonist utilizes a strategy passed on by her mother – ‘talking-story’– to arrive at an understanding of her identity that is both Chinese and North American. In so doing, Kingston’s autobiography contributes to an understanding that although such locally transmitted knowledges may aid the successive generations of women to process their subject positions, the process itself is both precarious and freeing.

This paradox is reflected in the struggle Kingston’s protagonist demonstrates through her talking stories. In effect, the protagonist learns that by ‘breaking the silence’ through her writing, she is betraying the Chinese collective and her family; but in not speaking out, she is yielding to the patriarchal boundaries that keep her repressed in her gender and rob her of self-worth. Kingston demonstrates that talking-story provides the protagonist with agency: the protagonist is able to take the liberty of creatively fleshing in skeletal stories with details to break the Chinese villagers’ dictum to their American-born Chinese children that silence is essential for the survival of their community in the ‘land of the ghosts’. At the same time, through her protagonist, Kingston demonstrates that agency comes at a price: she exhibits the micro- processes through which female children of diasporans struggle to come to terms with who they are. As Kingston’s protagonist defines other women in her life, they also help her with self- definition. She sees bits of herself in all the women; they represent her fears but also her hopes and desires. The ‘talking story’ of No-Name Aunt represents the protagonist’s fears of being rejected by the collective if she pursues individual fulfillment, which runs contrary to the tradition of the Chinese village community. Kingston shows the protagonist’s struggle between what she wants to do and what she is told to do if she wants to be accepted by her family and the Chinese village collective, both of which offer her protection and safety.

73 ‘Talking-story’ about Brave Orchid’s actions shows the protagonist that the North American ‘ghosts’ – the White people – are as scary as the ghosts and dragons in her mother’s stories, and from the Chinese perspective, individualism of the ‘ghosts’ is shallow and isolating compared to the communal relationships offered by the Chinese collective. The protagonist’s reconstruction of the ballad of Fa Mu Lan allows her to explore an alternate possibility of how a woman may keep her femininity yet be valued as a woman within the Chinese village perspective. Kingston shows how the protagonist, in her struggle to reconcile her belonging to both North America and the Chinese collective, practices imaginative agency as Fa Mu Lan. In this way, by keeping to the traditions of the Chinese collective but blending gender roles to remove patriarchy, the protagonist hopes to legitimize adventure for women and gain her self-worth as a female. In this role, the protagonist discovers that although she achieves much as a woman, she is unable to remove the traditional patriarchy of the collective. In the end, once she has achieved her goal, she has to accept her traditional role as mother, daughter-in-law, and wife, all of which make her even more aware of the inextricability of her gendered location within the patriarchal norms of the Chinese collective culture.

The ‘talking-story’ of her Aunt, Moon Orchid, allows the protagonist to see that there are certain advantages to conforming to cultural norms despite the inability to reach a perfect solution. The use of talking-story allows the protagonist to understand that her aunt’s insanity and untimely death could have been prevented if she had stuck to the ideology of the collective. As well, it is through her talking story that the protagonist discloses the torment she perpetrates on the silent Chinese girl to get her to speak. Kingston shows how it is through this device that the protagonist is able to articulate her own fears of being unable to escape her own silence, which keeps her from belonging in North America where her experiences clearly inform her, “If you don’t talk, you can’t have a personality” (p. 180). These stories allow the protagonist to come to the realization that although the ideals of the collective may limit an individual’s freedom, they also provide the individual with clear rules of conduct and a more durable sense of belonging. At the same time, Kingston demonstrates how the protagonist fears that she will never find home in North America because her silence keeps her from becoming a cheerleader or a pompom girl, or to get dates, or talk for job interviews leading her to ask questions about the threat of deportation (not to mention expulsion as is the case with women in my study) faced by immigrants from places of settlement: “Where can they send us to now? Hong Kong? Taiwan? ... We don’t belong

74 anywhere since the revolution. The old China has disappeared while we’ve been away” (p. 184). Kingston shows that it is through this legacy of an informally transmitted education that the protagonist, as an American-born child of racialized immigrants, comes to reconcile for herself that her paradoxical identity is shaped by who she is in relation to all these women, as well as by the influences of North American values.

Kingston’s work shows the potency and power of generationally transmitted knowledges and the strategic use women diasporans make of these local knowledges to negotiate home and belonging in diaspora space. For example, it is through ‘talking story’ – a passed-on legacy – that Kingston’s protagonist is able to gain the understanding that diasporic identity is paradoxical, messy and constantly in flux. Also, Kingston’s work shows how the use of a locally learned tactic enables the protagonist to come to the realization that there is more than one point of view; there is more than one reality – a learning that allows the protagonist to connect to the Chinese collective on the basis of some rather than all shared requirements, and on her own terms. Kingston’s work elucidates how it is through the learned practice of this strategy that the protagonist becomes aware of the real world outside her ‘talking-story’ allowing her to become an agent of her own life through the choices she makes in her particular social reality. For instance, the protagonist refuses to be forced into the role of a helpless housewife, dependent on a husband when she says, “No husband of mine will say, ‘I could have been a drummer, but I had to think about the wife and kids. You know how it is. Nobody supports me at the expense of his own adventure’” (p. 49). Kingston demonstrates how it is through the practice of ‘talking- story’ that the daughter of Chinese diasporans to North America is able to transition from a voiceless woman into an articulate narrator of her own reality. Kingston’s work elucidates that the agency of diaspora, racialized women is complicated by their locations in multiple, contradictory, and changing subject positions. Therefore, Kingston’s autobiography compels me to look closely at the connection between local teachings of the women in my study and their particular histories and geographies as they attempt to find home and belonging in diaspora space for themselves and their families.

In a similar way, Carole Ione Lewis’ Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color (2004), furthers an understanding of how achieving belonging and arriving ‘home’ in diaspora space for racialized women diasporans is a complex, and often, a life-long struggle.

75 Through her autobiography, Lewis shows that for Black woman descendants of the African diaspora, living in North America is a continuous battle – a generational ‘work in progress’. She connects issues of belonging and home for the Black American women in her family in North America to their perpetual struggle to create a safe space where they are validated and honoured unconditionally, regardless of their gender, race and colour. Tracing her life through those of her great grandmother, Francis Anne Rollin; her (maternal) grandmother, Be-Be; her paternal great aunt, Ionia (Sistonie); and her mother, Leighla; Lewis is able to portray how her attempts to feel at home in North America has also been a generational struggle against the legacy of ‘secrets’ that she has inherited from these women. Lewis’ work reveals how such secrets between women lead the women of successive generations (like Lewis) to feel alienated and experience feelings of shame, fear, and anger that keep them confused, conflicted, and estranged from each other and from belonging in America. Lewis demonstrates how she must first learn that she is not alone in feeling like an outsider: the lessons she receives from her paternal great grandmother, Francis Rollins, and from Be-Be, her maternal grandmother, teach her that she is a recipient of an accumulation of sorrows from her foremothers who have all, like her, longed for a home where they are truly valued in their gender and race/colour within their own families and within the larger North American nation. This lesson enables Lewis then to confront her alienation to be able to pursue in her endeavour to work her way ‘home’.

Lewis’ work guides researchers to extend the notion of ‘home’ for diaspora women beyond the boundaries of geographical spaces as well as to understand the paradoxical nature of passed-on local knowledges from women predecessors. Lewis shows how locally inherited legacies may contribute to confusion and conflicts among generations of women in their search for ‘home and belonging’ in diaspora space. She does this by showing how she is freed to be able to arrive ‘home’ only after she is able to come to understand the legacy of pride, shame, fear, and anger she has inherited from the lessons she receives from her great grandmother. In particular, Lewis’ work provides the understanding that ‘home’ for racialized diasporans and their descendants is never simple (p. 6): Lewis ties ‘home’ to acts of revelation and validation – both of which, she claims, were missing from her life until her encounter with her great grandmother’s diary.

Lewis demonstrates that the legacy of shame, fear and anger she inherits based on her blackness and ‘bad’ hair is never addressed openly by her mother or Be-Be or Sistonie. Lewis feels “there

76 was something essential they weren’t telling me,” which was responsible for preventing them from feeling “at home with one another and with our lives” (p. 5). In fact, Lewis shows how this shame, anger and fear were actually amplified by the women’s practices, keeping her further from ‘home’ in America. She demonstrates how both Leighla and Be-Be indirectly emphasize the connection between lighter skin and straight hair with survival in America to Lewis, a darker child with ‘fuzzy, woolly nappy hair’ (p. 112). Consequently, Lewis learns through a forced childhood regime of hair-straightening practices that it is important to distinguish herself from “a little pickaninny [who she found out was what slave children were called]” (p. 44) and be “constantly on the lookout for breaks in that very fine line that separated [her] from them” (p. 44). At the same time, Lewis observes how her mother and Be-Be indirectly convey to her that they at least can enjoy exoticized lives as a result of their lighter skin and ‘good’ hair. Filled with fear and shame, Lewis, wraps her hair in scarves and covers her blackness in long skirts and capes, and boots even in a 1960s New York where “Black people’s Afros were growing immense” (p. 100). To be accepted by her mother and by the White people in America, Lewis shows how much she craves to be more ‘Creole’ like her mother, but she knows that she unable to escape her blackness and her ‘bad’ hair inherited from her father – a physiological inheritance of which Lewis is constantly reminded by her mother (p. 46).

This leads Lewis to question whether or not the validation she lacks from her mother is due to her skin and hair because she feels her mother “…on some level, wanted daughters …who were neat and perky, privileged and white” (p. 87). Lewis shows how similar lessons get transmitted from her great-aunt Sistonie that keep Lewis from ‘home’ both in her family and in the larger American society. Lewis describes her great-aunt, a social reformer and a doctor, as being similar to other professional Black women of her time, who, to survive as Black women in America, embraced the Victorian values of the rich Whites to disprove the myth held by White people that all Black people were “loose, immoral, uncivilized, even animals” (p. 15). In fact, Lewis contends that like other middle and upper-class Blacks, Sistonie finds it necessary to “be even more conscious of propriety than whites in order to prove good social standing – a propriety often confused with skin color and free birth” (p. 15). As a result, although she is proud of her great-aunt, Lewis simultaneously learns to feel alienated from family and country by her Black skin, experiencing fear, shame and anger in the process.

77 Lewis’ work directs researchers to look beyond the boundaries of physical property and material belongings when investigating issues of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ for diasporans. Lewis’ search begins with what she learns from and about Frank, her great grandmother, who is willing to share her experiences with Lewis through her diary, validating her experiences instead of forcing her to change (for example, her hair) to fit into America. Lewis maintains that she is able situate her anger as an inherited trait from her great grandmother, who “too felt she was not American because she was not accepted into the American body politic” (p. 123) and had struggled to find ‘home’. As a result, Lewis demonstrates how she feels less alienated because Frank communicates to Lewis, through her practices, that she is not afraid to express her opinion and stand up for her rights. For example, Lewis finds out that Frank refuses to sit in a segregated pew in a church, and even files a suit (and wins) against the captain of the ship who refuses her a first class seat. Consequently, in her work, Lewis reveals how she is able to identify with Frank in a way that she has not been able to do with the other older women in her life. She discovers that Frank was not only “opinionated, witty and intelligent” but also “angry and determined” (p. 106) enough to encourage Lewis to be “tenacious of our rights or else we will be sunken by these Americans” (p. 123).

As well, Lewis shows that it is from Frank she feels validated in her gender. She acknowledges to herself that although only the Whipper male lives had been celebrated in her family, the intellect, wit, and strength of women like Francis Rollin had been ignored. From Frank’s diary, Lewis discovers that her great grandmother was very literary, well-read, and moved in highly erudite social company; she was courted by famous and erudite Black men, and through her work with Martin Delany, she was personally connected to famous Black activists like the Lewis Hayden and his wife, who “in 1868 … had turned their home into a busy station on the Underground Railroad” (p. 103). Through a close investigation of Frank’s life, Lewis learns that “her intellectual legacy” is not just inherited from the male side of her mother’s family, and that in spite of her “grandfather’s pronouncements about the Whippers – all those great men of worth,” (p. 103) the intellectual credit to her great grandmother had been ignored. By contrast, Lewis realizes that “Francis Rollin’s diary seemed to be about a different world, and it was begun before she was even married to a Whipper” (p. 103), showing her great grandmother was respected in her own right. Lewis shows how these lessons lead her to understand that “it was the pride of family that kept secrets and told lies – the pride that told of the men and not the women,

78 the fair-skinned and not the dark, the privileged and not the poor – which had kept me from home” (p. 7). Lewis maintains that it is through such insights made available through her foremother, Frank, that Lewis is able to situate her anger, and begin to understand how both gender and colour discrimination in her family and gender and race/colour discrimination in America have engendered contradictory feelings of pride, fear and shame resulting in friction between women in her family and kept her from ‘home’.

In particular, for my study, Lewis’s work exemplifies how the struggle for finding home and belonging for racialized women and their descendants can be a complex process; the struggle may span over generations. Lewis demonstrates the lessons Frank’s diary teaches her: her foremothers “had also struggled to feel at home in the world” (p. 7), having descended from ancestors who had travelled Europe, Africa, America, and Hispaniola. This lesson is unlike the one conveyed by her mother, Be-Be, and Sistonie about the importance of practising propriety to fit into America as an ‘outsider’. Instead, Francis Rollin shares with Lewis “her troubles and experiences with me – more openly than my mother, Be-Be, or Sistonie had ever been able to do” (p. 105), enabling Lewis to reinterpret her feelings of pride, shame, fear and anger, to arrive at an understanding of home and belonging through a bigger generational picture.

Through this revelation, Lewis claims she feels more reassured and less alone to discover that her great grandmother “too had given thought to issues [she] had been struggling with for years” (p. 104). This leads her to understand that although for four generations, “we have been called by a number of different names: Indian, colored, Negro, black, African American … none of these fits. Each merely serves to keep us from feeling truly at home in America” (p. 7). With the realization that the diasporic struggle to find ‘home’ can span generations, Lewis is able to get past her anger enough to understand why her constant moves between the United States and Europe have only led her to experience “things didn’t quite work there, and they didn’t quite work here, either” (p. 95). This realization also allows Lewis to put her short-lived marriage to Andre, the son of an Alsatian millionaire, into perspective as her attempt at looking for validation in spite of her blackness and gender. She realizes how, through this marriage, she had sought acceptance from her lighter-skinned, straight-haired mother, whose pride was based on her White French ancestry in the distant past. As well, Lewis realizes that her own marriage had been her attempt to find peace and fulfillment through unconditional acceptance by Andre’s

79 white mother, which would help her escape “that depressing feeling of being thought inferior to the society I lived in” (p. 79). Lewis’ work provides the understanding that the struggles for racialized diasporans to find ‘belonging’ may span generations, during which time the different names such as Indian, South Asian, East Indian, visible minority, and ethnics may each serve to keep diasporans from truly feeling at home in Canada.

Lewis demonstrates that ‘home’ for diasporans and their descendants is a not a static piece of real estate; it is a more fluid concept. In particular, Lewis identifies how a sudden and tragic loss of the Saratoga house on George Street (like the tragic loss of home in Uganda experienced by many of the women in my study) may lead diasporans to a reinterpretation of ‘home’ in diaspora space. When Lewis finds out that her mother has sold the Saratoga house, the passed-on lessons from her great grandmother ‘kick-in’ to help her work out a definition of ‘home’. As Lewis observes the small clearing where once the Saratoga house stood, she comes to the conclusion that she must first confront her own pride to understand the source of the shame and fear she feels that keeps her from home. Lewis acknowledges that her location in her race/colour and gender excludes her from ‘belonging’. She admits something she has denied out of her own anger and pride because she has craved “to be so much larger than black and white … [not wanting] to be limited by color or by nationality or by gender” (p. 93). However, Frank’s role- modeling as a Black person and a woman allows Lewis to take up the challenge to create ‘home’ for herself and her family by “finding a way to accept this embattled United States, which for better or worse is mine” (p. 245). This acceptance allows Lewis to see that she had ‘glimpses’ of home and belonging in Be-Be’s Saratoga house because there her grandmother had endeavoured to create a safe space in which Black people and women could be honoured. To replicate this ‘home’, “after all the rootlessness of the past years, after the centuries of homelessness among women in my family” (p. 251), Lewis is able to turn an old Victorian house in upstate New York into ‘home’. Even with this home, Lewis concedes that she is still far from feeling completely at home in America; however, Frank’s informal lessons transmitted over the years have taught Lewis that ‘home’ is her foremothers’ passed on legacy – to retain her “sense of entitlement in the world [through] the strength in her endeavour” (p. 260).

80 Conclusion

The literary works reviewed in this chapter convey certain common themes that resonate with my study: they all emphasize the critical role racialized women’s generationally transmitted local knowledges play in teaching them to resist domination in order to survive; they show that racialized women’s agency cannot be defined by pre-fixed criteria, but rather takes shape within specific socio-cultural and historical contexts; and they each point out that racialized women’s local agency is dynamic and manifested in many different forms. First, all of the scholars underscore the key role played by locally transmitted knowledges across generations for providing women with lessons of resistance to oppressive systems of patriarchy and White domination. For example, Mahmood shows how woman of the Dawa movement teach women to inhabit the social requirements of the moral codes of the collective through a local pedagogy based on scriptures, dress and comportment, attitudes and ritual to create the desired moral identity. Dossa demonstrates how, through passed-on knowledges, Ismaili women learn to play a critical role as nurturers, mediating the material and spiritual spaces to achieve family and community connectivity to enable their families’ survive in a foreign environment. Likewise, Bobb-Smith exhibits how older Caribbean women transmit to the subsequent generations of women local ways of resisting patriarchy and imperialism through a local ethic that highlights the relationship between self-reliance and self-respect and teaches women to connect themselves to discursive systems that would have otherwise denigrated or victimized them.

Second, all the studies point to the local and contextual nature of women’s agency: the agency of women in the works examined in this survey is related to their particular cultural histories, a theme that is also developed in my study. For example, Mahmood suggests that women’s agency emerges from the systems of subordination that are the condition of its emergence. The women of the Dawa movement make choices out of the alternatives available to them within their cultural and social realities. That these conditions, as well as newer influences and formal education, contribute to women’s resistance practices is emphasized in Makdisi’s work and is reflected in other studies in this review. Makdisi shows how these conditions, along with particular cultural, socio-political and religious histories of the Arab women in her family, constituted their resistance acts based on a locally transmitted wisdom which helped them navigate boundaries of patriarchy, colonialism and imperial wars in order to ensure the survival

81 of their families. Through these acts, Makdisi asserts that the women in her family affected the inner workings of history although colonialism and religion denied them participation in its outward forms. To a certain extent, Kingston’s work echoes themes in Raval and Kral’s and Dossa’s work of what women’s agency means within the historical specificity of the community collective. Kingston demonstrates how children of Chinese immigrants to North America stretch boundaries in an attempt to fit into the traditional patriarchal collective as well as assume identities invoked by newer influences advocating individualism to find home and belonging in diaspora.

Third, the literary works surveyed demonstrate that women’s agency is dynamic, often messy, and manifest in various guises, as my own study uncovers. For example, Mahmood points out that racialized women’s agency is not necessarily demonstrated through a binary model of subordination and subversion, and so the meaning of ‘agency’ cannot be fixed in advance. Hence, Raval and Kral’s, Kingston’s, and Dossa’s respective works advise researchers to use discursive lenses specific to cultures to examine particular women’s agency. While Raval and Kral use Astitva (existence) to give voice to an Indian woman’s agency, Kingston employs talking-story to make her Chinese-American protagonist’s agency ‘audible’ to readers, and Dossa uses the Ismaili ideology of Din (the spiritual) and Duniya (the material) through movements of time and space orchestrated by Canadian Ismaili women to get at the understanding of these particular women’s agency.

On the other hand, Gopinath, points out how although use of certain cultural tools in diaspora space can reconstitute a place of settlement into home, it may at the same time be used to deepen the hold of cultural patriarchy. The literature reviewed also shows that agency of racialized women is messy and complex: it can take the form of ordinary acts; it is often contradictory; and can come at a cost to the agent. For instance, both Makdisi and Villenas show how agency of the respective women in their studies are reflected not in grand gestures but in small, imperceptible, ordinary acts that allow the women to resist imperialism (in Makdisi’s case) and to resist patriarchy and White American dominance (in Villenas’ case). All of the writers demonstrate how women’s agency can be contradictory. For example, Villenas demonstrates how the resistance practices passed on through local knowledges help the Latina women in her study to survive patriarchy, but the same practices also keep patriarchy in place. While Raval and Kral’s

82 study reveals that agency of women can be both interconnected (to community) and autonomous, Lewis’ work reveals how find ‘home and belonging’ in her own birthplace requires ongoing work that spans generations. Kingston demonstrates that women’s agency can be paradoxical; however, she also reveals that the resistance practice of talking-story allows the protagonist to arrive at the understanding of the existence of more than one reality/point of view. This makes it possible for her to find ‘belonging’ and ensure her survival in diaspora through partial and polythetic connections simultaneously to both the Chinese patriarchal collective and the White dominant nation.

The exploration of these works has provided me with insights into the critical role of local knowledges in the survival of racialized immigrant women and their families in diaspora space. These works have shaped my methodological design and choice of conceptual tools to analyze the stories of the fifteen Ismaili women I interviewed, in order to examine the role of generationally transmitted local knowledges in shaping agency of women in this study. The chapter that follows is divided into two sections: Section One outlines the Research Design of the study, with its various components, the methods used in the study, my position and role as a researcher-participant, and the methodologies used in this study. Section Two identifies the conceptual tools used to analyze the collected data for this study.

83 Chapter Three: Methodology and Conceptual Framework

This qualitative study explores the way twice and/or thrice immigrant Ismaili women utilize and transmit local knowledges that enable them to negotiate patriarchy and White supremacy to establish home and belonging in diaspora space. As the last chapter demonstrated, racialized women are often seen as passive and acted upon rather than as actors who express a feminist commitment. This chapter outlines the methodological approach of my qualitative study and identifies the conceptual tools that I have used to demonstrate that the Ismaili women in this study do indeed practise agency through local acts of resistance.

This chapter is divided into two main sections. Section One provides the research design encapsulating the methods and methodologies used in this qualitative study. It is framed by the research questions that guide this study, followed by participant selection criteria, mode of recruitment of participants, and methods of fieldwork. Next, this section identifies ethical considerations, inconsistencies in the study, and the effects of my positionality as an insider participant-researcher on this study. Section One concludes with the identification of the two methodologies utilized to examine the agency of the participants in this study. Section Two provides the conceptual framework that guides this study: utilizing three key concepts – diaspora space, local knowledges, and everyday resistance – I analyze the stories of the women in my study to arrive at the notion of agency practised by them.

Section One: Research Design

The research questions that guide this study reflect a qualitative constructivist critical feminist paradigm that assumes that there is no ‘universal’ woman, and no ‘universal’ women’s experiences, thereby shifting the focus of inquiry to the perspectives of particular Ismaili women who are situated in particular cultural as well as individual locations (Harding, 1991, p. 30; also see Ladner, 1987, p. 79). The following questions guide the research process that investigates the particular agency of the Ismaili women in my study:  Who is the Canadian Indian, East-African gendered and racialized post/colonial subject?  How is she theorized? What kind of local ‘knowledges’ does she possess? How does she utilize these knowledges?

84  Through what agencies does she transmit her knowledges to the next generation of women? What is the epistemological value of these lessons?  How does each generation of women, located in their particular histories, in/form the subjectivities/identities and the local knowledges of the next generation of women as reflected in their practices to navigate race and gender boundaries in diaspora space?

The participants of this study are Canadian Shia Imami Ismaili Muslim women: they were selected for this study according to criteria that fulfill the very specific needs of my study. To identify and examine the particular forms of the agency of these women in my study, I have traced the local passed-on knowledges transmitted across three generations of women from the same family. In other words, I have examined how local knowledges were transferred across vertical lines, that is, across three generations of women in the same family – in a triad – from grandmother to mother to daughter. At the same time, I have explored the commonalities and differences between the passed-on knowledges along horizontal lines, that is, across the Grandmothers’ Group, the Mothers’ Group, and the Daughters’ Group. Hence, the family triads embedding these structural aspects are integral to my study, and only participants who fulfilled this integrity were eligible for participation. The following two sets of criteria were used in the participant selection process. (A) General Criteria of Selection for Generational Triads Ismaili women were selected for the study based on the following general criteria:  All three women from the same family were able and willing to participate, comprising a triad of a grandmother (maternal or paternal), a mother (who is the former’s daughter or daughter-in-law), and her daughter;  They hailed from an Indian East African heritage, and they or women in their triad had experienced the Ugandan expulsion in 1972;  All three of them had lived in Canada for at least a decade. (B) Specific Criteria of Selection for Generational Triads Women were selected for the study based on the following specific criteria:  The grandmother participant in the triad was born in India and immigrated to East Africa in her youth, or she was born in East Africa. The grandmother participant was 80 years old or older at the time of the interview in Canada;

85  The mother participant in the triad was born and raised in East Africa, and lived in Uganda prior to ’s expulsion edict in 1972;  The daughter participant was born in Canada. She was at least 17 years old at the time of her interview.

The Canadian Ismailis hail from many different cultural, racial and geographical heritages. The participants were screened according to the above factors to avoid misrepresentations and sweeping generalizations across this diverse community. In the case of the Ugandan Ismailis, their particular experiences as a result of their forced eviction from Uganda with loss of home and property set their experiences apart from the other Indian East African Ismailis who immigrated to Canada. The above set of selection criteria dictated my mode of recruitment of the participants for this study.

Mode of recruitment of participants.

The main method of participant recruitment for my study was through word-of-mouth in the Ismaili community. I spoke directly to Ismailis I knew in the Greater Toronto Area at jamatkhanas, and I called up acquaintances in Vancouver and in the Greater Toronto Area to request their help in identifying women who would be willing to participate voluntarily in an Ismaili women’s generational project. I located three Ismaili ‘contact’ women who played prominent roles in the community social activities in the Greater Toronto Area and two more in the Vancouver area (a total of five). I spoke to these women in person and/or over the phone, describing the nature of my project in detail and requesting that they help me locate potential participants. Subsequently, I emailed/mailed each contact person the written recruitment information for my proposed study (see Appendices A and B), asking the women to share this information with potential participants who fit the triad requirements and who showed interest in participating in the study. I made regular reminder calls to the five contact people and followed up their proposed leads, calling potential participants and mailing the written recruitment information to them as well. As the recruitment process snowballed, I was able to secure a total of five triads (one being my own) and a total of fifteen women for this study.

These participants comprise women of two generations of East African born Ismailis with an Indian heritage and their Canadian-born descendents. Generational references to the women in

86 this study are made according to the following groups: the Grandmothers’ Group (Khairoon, Noorbhegum, Zuleikha, Fatma, and Sakina); the Mothers’ Group (Nurjhan, Farida, Shirin, Zareena, and Khatoon); and the Daughters’ Group (Farene, Nasrin, Salima, Zarah, and Karima). In 2012, these women ranged in ages from 17 to 90 years old. At the time of the interviews, all the women from the Grandmothers’ Group were retired, although one woman in this group still worked from her home. In the Mothers’ Group, two women were employed full-time, and three were retired, from which one was pursuing post-graduate education. In the Daughters’ Group, the oldest was married with two children under age ten, and the rest were still students pursuing university education. Detailed profiles of the participants in this study are found in Appendix E.

Fieldwork.

The data collection process lasted from 2012 to 2014. It included conversational style semi- structured interviews, observations, personal writing submitted by some participants after the interview process, follow-up telephone conversation type interviews, document and text analysis, reflective field notes and journal entries, transcripts exchange with participants, and follow-up telephone calls and emails. The data collection was done in two major cities, on the East and West coasts of Canada.

Once the participants were selected, I talked with the women individually, in both cities, on the telephone and/or in person to explain the nature of the study in detail once again, and to answer all their questions/concerns. I sent out consent forms (see Appendix C) to all the women, following up with telephone calls to go over the information on the forms. Once the signed consent forms were returned to me, I called the participants individually to set up mutually convenient dates, times, and venues for the interviews.

Most of the women chose to be interviewed in their homes; two of the interviews were conducted over Skype; and all interviews were audio-taped with the permission of the participants. All follow-up conversations/interviews were conducted over the telephone. Prior to each interview, I reminded the women that they did not have to answer any questions that made them feel uncomfortable. Interviews were conducted in English, Gujarati and Cutchi, sometimes interspersed with Swahili words as requested by the participants to ensure ease of participation and to minimize power differentials as much as possible. Although there were some emotional

87 moments (with tears) during the interviews as women described loss of home, spousal abuse and/or death of their spouses, and the expulsion experience itself, none of these moments seemed to deter the women from participating in the interviews. In fact, they insisted they wanted to tell their stories.

During the interviews, I made very few notes, choosing instead to listen and observe my participants. Subsequent to each interview, I listened to the tapes again and wrote up my notes on the encounter: these included both the pre- and post-tape talk, my reactions and observations about the interview, the duration of each interview, and a brief description of its location. Also, I examined the trajectory of my research, refined some of the interviewing techniques, and tweaked the research focus of the study.

During the course of the fieldwork, I transcribed the interviews in full. Transcribing the tapes myself gave me the advantage to listen repeatedly to the tapes to deduce certain patterns in the stories of my participants, which I added to my field notes and/or journals. Simultaneously, I identified major themes and ideas related to the topic evolving from the interviews in my notes and journals, and I used them to generate a report on each participant. I sent copies of the transcripts to the participants for their corroboration of the information and requested that participants tag misinformation and identify information they did not want me to use in my study. At this point in the process, some of the participants chose to send me additional anecdotes/articles relating to their expulsion experiences and/or the settlement process in Canada. Once, I received this information, I updated my reports on each participant. Follow-up phone call interviews with each participant provided me with some clarification on issues raised by emerging themes during the transcription process. This process directed me to probe deeper into the histories – religious, cultural, and social – of the women in my study, including the immigration history of the receiving country, Canada, to which most of the women in my project immigrated after their expulsion.

Rather than seeking to prove an existing theory, in this study I was exploring how immigrant racialized women exhibited agency in diaspora space. Therefore, I used an ‘abbreviated’ constructionist version of the grounded theory approach for the coding of the collected data. Glaser and Strauss’ The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967) introduced qualitative researchers

88 to a new methodology: Grounded theory enabled new contextualized theories to emerge from the gathered data itself (induction) through the manifestation of particular repeated patterns exposed in the data (deduction) based on a coding paradigm. Contrary to the more positivist approach of the classical Glaserian version claiming the ‘discovery’ of theory from data, for the coding I took the constructivist approach that emphasized the constructed nature of theory, which underscored the position that “the interaction between the researcher and the participants produces the data, and therefore the meanings that the researcher observes and defines” (Charmaz, 1995, p. 35).

This particular use of grounded theory introduced the notion of reflexivity by foregrounding the value-laden nature of a qualitative study such as this one in which I am positioned as an insider researcher-participant. The use of the ‘abbreviated’ form in my study meant that this theoretical approach was used mainly for coding of the interview transcripts, facilitating theory generation through categorization of data. Using grounded theory, I conducted a page-by-page coding of the data (stories) in the transcripts under descriptive categories: family immigration history to East Africa; economic/political/religious status in East Africa; ascribed roles of women in their location as daughters (in-law), wives, mothers, grandmothers; levels of formal education; work inside/outside of home; Ismaili religion and women’s lives; lives under British colonialism/relationships with colonials and with indigenous Africans; lives in an independent Uganda; expulsion stories; immigration and settlement stories; definitions/descriptions of self- worth demonstrated in stories; Canadian identity; generational differences described in stories; and others.

As patterns of similarities and differences (across individuals, horizontal groups and generations) in different geographical locations emerged, I generated analytic/thematic categories for each generation of women in different geographical locations and folded the descriptive categories into these thematic categories using computer-generated tables. I used certain quotation-lines from the women’s stories to generate thematic categories separately for each generation of women. For instance, for the Grandmothers’ Group, I used “We had to be stubborn for Survival” as a category title that represented analysis reflecting the survival philosophy espoused and passed on by these women to the next generation. I also used the line from one of the women in the Mothers’ Group, “I wouldn’t be the kind of woman I am if I didn’t have the kind of mother I

89 had” to analyze and categorize all experiences in that particular group that represented local passed-on knowledges from their women role models

In this analytic organization, using the descriptive categories and detailed stories in the transcripts, I identified and grouped the constraints that emerged in the women’s lives and the ways they dealt with those constraints under the following categories: gender and race constraints; patriarchal constraints; women identified as major influences in the lives of subsequent generations of women; practices of women enabling survival identified by their grand/daughters; and particular instances/ways women adapted/modified and utilized tactics used by their grand/mothers and their effects. The stories that illustrated the themes articulated in each of those categories were added to the categories in the tables generated for each woman and arranged generationally. The transmission of particular local lessons from one generation to the next, the changes in tactics affected by newer influences in the lives of the women, the way these lessons in survival tactics affected the self-hood of women, and the emergence of a local gendered passed-on wisdom/philosophy were traced through the comparison of the analytical information organized in categories (which included quotations from participants) between generations. Wherever the women’s stories/quotations fit more than one category for each generation or were repeated by the next generation, I made special note and placed those stories in the relevant categories for both generations using a differentiating colour-coding. Inconsistencies in stories and discrepancies in the use of tactics were also entered in a separate category that was created in each generational table. The use of this system of coding enabled me to extract key themes contributing to the agency of the women in my study.

Ethical considerations.

I built safeguards into the data gathering process to lessen the psychological risks to participants, to ensure the anonymity of the participants within each triad and between the triads, and to protect all identifiable information during and after the interviews. Each participant was interviewed separately, and no information between women of different triads or between women in the same triad was discussed. In this study, I deliberately excluded high profile or well-known figures that would be readily recognized in my writing, thus perhaps placing the identities of the other participants at risk. I was aware that speaking about the Ugandan expulsion and Canadian resettlement experiences might upset some participants, causing them undue grief

90 as well as compromising the study if they failed to move beyond the point of healthy and fruitful engagement in the interview process. I was prepared to handle such a situation, should it arise, by moving the discussion away as deftly and discreetly as I could through diverting questions on safer topics until the participant had resumed calmness.

All information – transcripts and audio-tapes – were stored securely. I ensured that no real names were used in this study; all women were given pseudonyms. I endeavoured to make generic references to groups or agencies, places of employment and jobs, and I have changed the names of places, in some cases, to protect identities. I did not employ a transcriber for the audio-tapes but transcribed all interviews myself, thus increasing confidentiality. All participants received copies of the transcripts and were given the opportunity to change/supplement information. Lastly, I treated my own triad in the third person instead of the first in my analysis chapters, to make it indistinguishable from and consistent in format with the rest of the triads. I was aware that this would introduce certain aspects of bias in this study, but I worked on the assumption that all studies, qualitative or quantitative, contained bias and that my study in no way detracted in value as a result of this aspect of treatment. This treatment has been a further attempt to ensure the anonymity of all the participants, a point I address at length below.

Anomalies: Voice and bias.

This study also includes my own triad, comprised of my mother, my daughter and I, so it is my generational story too. As I mentioned above, this study contains some unavoidable inconsistencies, but they do not detract from its inherent overall value. I chose to deal with the interview process for my own triad, and the use of ‘voice’ to represent all of us – the women participants in this study – in the following ways: First, to ensure the consistency of this study as much as I could, I located a fellow doctoral student at OISE, University of Toronto, who was willing and able to conduct interviews with the women in my triad (including myself) using the same interview format and guide I used for other participants (see Appendix D). This student was informed in feminist research methodologies and in the academic and scholarly expectations of the research process. She was willing and able to abide by the ethical expectations regarding confidentiality for this study. She understood that her participation in my study was limited to conducting at one three-hour interview each with my daughter, my mother, and me separately at mutually convenient times and places, and that she was not privy to any information on the other

91 triads in my study. Also, she was willing and able to operate the audio-tape device needed for the interviews.

I arranged two meetings with this voluntary interviewer prior to the interviews: during the first meeting, we discussed my research topic, my thesis proposal, the Informed Interviewer Consent Expectations, and the Interview Guide with the semi-structured questions, at the end of which I gave her copies of all the documents. During our second meeting, I answered questions she had on my research topic, and we set up my interview date, time, and place. As well, she interviewed my daughter separately at a mutually convenient date, time, and place. Initially, the plan was for the same student to interview my mother; however, since my mother later expressed language concerns, and the student was not conversant in Gujarati or Cutchi, I conducted the interview with my mother. This action was taken to allay my mother’s language concerns and to provide her with the confidentiality she requested. The interviews conducted by the volunteer interviewer were tape-recorded; she turned over the tapes to me at the end of each of the two interviews she conducted. I transcribed the tapes for my own triad. Therefore, I assume full responsibility for the bias this anomaly introduces to this study.

The second anomaly that exists in my study concerns the use of voice. As already mentioned, I am both a participant and a researcher in this study as a part of a triad that includes my mother, my daughter and me. One of the salient concerns I identified very early during the participant recruiting process was the reason for the reluctance of Ismaili women to participate in this study: they feared being recognized by community members in the relatively small Ugandan Ismaili community in Canada in a project that involved the disclosure of information of a sensitive nature. Many women who were eligible for participation and did want to participate declined for this reason; some women communicated experiences that could be construed as being abusive, which they felt would endanger their relationships if the information were somehow exposed. The reassurances I provided (for example, that I would only use pseudonyms, and that I would change names of birth places) did not quell their fears or their reluctance to participate. A few of them indicated that if one triad (mine) remained identifiable, there was little to stop those Ismailis interested in identifying the participants in my study to work out the identities of the others by a process of elimination. This concern and my belief in the intrinsic value of this study guided my decision to withhold the identities of all the participants in my study, which

92 necessitated the use of the third person for my own participation in this study. In other words, whenever I have referred to “the women in my study”, I have included myself and the women of my own triad in this epithet. Although this may not be the ideal resolution, embracing anonymity in this study has allowed me to recruit participants and enabled me to engage in a valuable endeavour.

Third, the generational aspect of this study introduced some bias in the selection of participants. The sudden expulsion of Ismailis from Uganda caused the scattering of family members, making it difficult to locate all three women from the same family for the purposes of this study and limiting the number of potential triads available for this project. However, those women who did participate were eager and willing to share their stories in a project that represented them not as victims but as ‘survivors’ and ‘thriv-ers’ who demonstrated how they used the wisdom of their female foremothers to surmount the boundaries of race/colour and gender that circumscribed their daily lives. Lastly, my position as a Ugandan Ismaili woman researching other Ugandan Ismaili women and their descendents as well as my location as a participant in this study introduced further complications that I have addressed in the following segment.

My location in the research as an insider-outsider.

As an Ismaili woman who has shared a particular history with the participants and as a participant-researcher, I have been positioned as an ‘insider’ in this study. My insider location has been partially reflected through Banks’ topology, in which researchers have been variously positioned along a continuum of closeness to and distance from the ‘indigenous’ community being studied along lines of intellectual, cultural and social commonalities. Under this model, the indigenous-insider researcher positioned closest to the community has been recognized as someone who “endorses the values, perspectives … and knowledge of his or her community and culture and is perceived by the people within the community as a legitimate community member who can speak with authority about it” (Banks as cited in Chavez, 2008, p. 475). By contrast, at the extreme opposite end of the continuum, Banks has positioned the external-outsider as someone who has been perceived as being socialized outside of the community being investigated but who has upheld its values. No one position along the continuum has been perceived as having complete advantages according to Banks.

93 Traditionally, different types of potential have been attributed to the outsider or insider researcher positions: while an outsider might run the risk of imposing her own values, beliefs and perspectives on the lives of the research participants, an insider bias may contribute to the researcher’s imbalanced analytical conclusions through a “rose-colored observational lens or blindness to the ordinary” (Chavez, 2008, p. 475). Although Banks’ linear topographic arrangement has positioned me closest to the community being studied – as an insider – it has failed to address the complexity of my ‘insider’ researcher’s role or my experiences as a participant-researcher. Clearly, this insider location has armed me with some unique methodological advantages in the research process (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Naples, 1996; Labaree, 2002). Yet, at times, I also found myself positioned as a ‘relative’ outsider, leading me to conclude that “insiderness or outsiderness are not fixed static positions, but rather they are evershifting and permeable social locations” (Naples, 1996, p. 140) in constant need of negotiation.

Figure 1: Plot graph, from Chavez (2008).

Throughout this study, my position as an ‘insider’ researching women in my own community has shifted contextually based on my interactions with participants and my perceived closeness to

94 them. The positional shifts I have experienced during the research process have been succinctly captured in Chavez’s (2008) representation (adapted from Labaree, 2002), which has been reproduced in Figure 1. Here, axes x and y, respectively, indicate the degree of insiderness and outsiderness I have experienced in the research process. Chavez’s point A corresponds to the methodologically advantageous position of an insider-outsider researcher like myself, who is a member of the Ismaili community – one who has been both subject and object of my study. Axis z reflects the degree to which an ‘insider’ researcher like myself has experienced shifts in positionality at different moments in time, based on how I was socially situated to/by my participants during the research process.

This shifting location has affected the process of the research itself from access to community, to data collection, interpretation and representation for this study. For example, three of the five women in the Grandmothers’ Group began their respective interviews with “I have nothing of value to contribute to your research” and “I am not educated; I don’t think I have anything worthwhile to say” and “We women have not done anything of value. I don’t know if you’ll find anything useful in what I have to say.” Although, as an Ismaili woman, I was perceived by these women as being an insider, they simultaneously located me as an ‘outsider’ based on my age and my “university-educated” persona. However, our joint negotiation through talk at the beginning of the interview more or less located me as the ‘daughter-student’ who was eager to learn about my heritage according to the cultural social norms; this subsequently resulted in a flood of oral histories from these women of the oldest generation in my study.

Similarly, at other times, I saw an advantage in my location at the insider-outsider location (point A in the figure). For example, as the women in the Mothers’ Group related stories of their struggles to acquire higher education in Canada, I became more of a distant observer since I had arrived in Canada after already acquiring an undergraduate degree, which had allowed me more accessibility to employment and further educational opportunities. As well, this difference caused at least two of the women in this group to distance themselves from me on account of my formal education on some related topics, as demonstrated by point C on the figure. As Merriam et al. have observed, “Factors such as education, gender, sexual orientation, class, race or duration of contacts may at different times outweigh the cultural identity we associate with insider or outsider status” (2001, p. 412). The shifts in the degree of insiderness also provided me

95 with opportunities of self-reflection as a subject and object of my research through a shared condition with the women of this middle generation. For instance, I could relate to their stories of the struggle of carrying the dual burden of work inside and outside of the home as we all endeavoured to create home for ourselves and our families in Canada as first generation immigrant Ismaili women.

My insider-outsider position was further complicated by the generational aspects of this study: for example, the women of the youngest generation at times treated me with the deference accorded to the social conventions in my position as an older Ismaili woman, which made me question what they were not telling me during the interview, or what they were deliberately telling me because they did not want me to think badly of them. As demonstrated by the figure above, in this study, I understood my insiderness not as a ‘fixed’ position but one that increased or decreased depending on generational affinity, past relationships, topics of discussion, perceived levels of similarities/differences, and assumed identities that provided me with complications as well as advantages in this study.

Complications to my insider location.

My insider position as an Ismaili woman introduced several complications in the study. As already mentioned, I found it difficult to find participants: as an Ismaili ‘insider’, I was seen as someone who was in a position to divulge family ‘secrets’ that may discredit the reputations of their families. This aspect affected the ready availability of potential participants and introduced a bias in participant selection for the study. Often too, I discovered that the women discussed their interviews with other women within the same triads who had yet to be interviewed. Therefore, as an insider, I wondered how much this previous interaction ‘biased’ the responses of the women who were interviewed subsequently, but I learned to ask the same questions in different ways or several times during the interviews to mitigate these potential biases (a point I elaborate later on in this section).

Although the participants were aware that the interviews were to be conducted one-on-one, two of the participants were accompanied by a family member. Both these were Skype interviews; in one, a woman from the middle generation had invited her daughter along, and in the other, a participant from the Daughters’ Group chose to be interviewed in a room where her husband

96 worked on his computer in the background, clearly within earshot. Thus, I experienced constraints in my insider location: I felt that an “outsider may well have, without repercussions, requested for the additional members to leave” (Chavez, 2008, p. 489) or even rescheduled the interview. However, as an insider, I felt disadvantaged and chose not to take such a risk. Doing research from insider positionality, Merriam et al. describe the discomfort of a similar situation during which the sister who accompanied an interviewee sat with her back to the interviewers punctuating “our interview with loud chuckling and asides to her sister about the silliness of our questions” (2001, p. 413). Although neither of the uninvited people, in my case, participated in the interview verbally, I wondered for whom the interviewees were relating or ‘performing’ the stories, and how the ensuing results of asking the uninvited people to leave would have affected the participation of the interviewee. Making note of the possible effects of this discrepancy, I chose to accept their presence.

In my insider location, I discovered I had to manage such complications with quick, on-the-spot decisions. As well, I found that although the interviews were scheduled for three hours, I could not bring them to a close at the end of the set time like an outsider may have been able to do. Almost all of the interviews, except for one that lasted for approximately two hours, went over the set time limit, with some even stretching to five hours. As a result, I was left to manage masses of information when listening to tapes and transcribing them, lest I miss something. As well, positioned on the inside, I sometimes missed what I culturally accepted as the ‘norm’, unable to separate what I knew from what I saw and had “difficulty with recognizing patterns due to familiarity with the community” (Chavez, 2008. p. 485). My position as an Ismaili woman gained me legitimacy with my participants but inhibited the way in which I could question my participants. For example, at times during the interviews, women would make such deferrals as, “You know how men are,” or “You know what it is like to be a woman in our community,” and “You’ve been through this as a young girl. We all have.”

This was even further complicated by the generational aspect of my study, when women sometimes responded to my questions with “My mother must have already told you this,” or “why don’t you ask my daughter about this?” and “Ask my mother; it is from her I learned how to respond to such situations.” To deal with this as an insider, most often, at the start of each interview, I requested that the participant respond to questions fully even if she felt that as an

97 Ismaili woman, I was already privy to the answers. This technique usually worked, but at times it did not. In these cases, I had to compensate with different follow-up questions that allowed for more elaborate responses. However, at times, as an insider, I automatically responded with ‘So true. I know just what you mean’, or ‘Yes, I have been there myself, but tell me anyway’, a reaction which “was dangerously close to leading rather than redirecting the participant” (p. 489) and perhaps biased the ensuing response. These complications in my insider position have made me reflect on how my insiderness has introduced constraints as well as providing me with advantages in this study.

Advantages to my insider location.

Overall, I found my insider location to be more of an asset than an impediment. As an insider, I acquired quick access to the community and its social and religious activities, I experienced expediency in rapport-building with the participants, I obtained a more nuanced perspective of non-verbal communication, and overall, I experienced an easier acclimatization into the field. More specifically, this insider location enabled me to practise a qualitative feminist methodology more consciously in order to examine the local agency of the women in my study through attention to particular interviewing techniques, as well as through conscious use of words and through the use of the local languages spoken by most of the participants in my study. My insider positionality helped me negotiate a modified interview structure: I realized that the traditional interview format (Fontana and Frey, 2005) would prove less beneficial to my research. Instead, I conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews directed by the interview guide but adopted more of a listener and ‘conversationalist’ role, allowing the participants to examine the topic more freely and enabling them opportunities for “the exploration of incompletely articulated aspects of women’s experiences” (DeVault, 1990, p. 100). Only in the case of one participant from the youngest generation, (at her own request) I adopted a direct question-answer technique.

This less formal interview style was further enhanced by the cultural norm observed by all except for four women (of which two were interviewed on Skype): they offered me tea and snacks before the beginning of the interview, which helped ease the transition into a more relaxed interviewing ambience. To put my participants at ease, as an insider, I was informed enough to utilize this brief social conventional ‘ice-breaker’ time to casually set up the audio recorder before beginning the interview. Aware that “interviewing is not merely the neutral

98 exchange of asking questions and getting answers” (Fontana and Frey, 2005, p. 696), but a “linguistic event in which the meanings of questions and responses are contextually grounded and jointly constructed by interviewer and respondent” (Schwandt, 1997, p. 79), I eased into each interview with more general topics of immigration histories of families, veering towards the women’s own life stories, and guiding the participants towards more specific topics as the interview progressed.

Being a cultural insider, I was more aware that gathering useful stories of these particular women’s experiences extended beyond encouraging women to talk and that “the concepts we have learned as sociologists may distort women’s accounts” (DeVault, 1990, p. 100). In my case, the personal investment in finding answers to questions as an insider researcher-participant made me more sensitive to the words I used to construct my questions. For example, I was aware that most of the participants in the study could not really grasp the concept of ‘local knowledges’ and almost none of them could readily relate to the nuances inherent in the concept of women’s ‘local’ agency. Therefore, as an insider, in my questions, I kept away from unfamiliar concepts and terms in favour of words, concepts and metaphors in the languages with which the women were familiar, encouraging them instead to relate stories about challenges in their daily life practices that contributed to the focus of my study. For example, being an insider, I was able to use words or concepts that were close enough to the experiences of the women enabling some women to venture into the “realm of not-quite-articulated experience … where the respondent tries to speak from experience and finds language wanting” (DeVault, 1990, p. 103).

Grandmother Sakina exemplified this aspect (and appeared to arrive at a newer understanding) as she groped for words punctuated by gaps in her sentences as she attempted to define the nuances with which she regarded the women who imparted to her a local wisdom to negotiate daily life. Haltingly, Sakina was able to get across the understanding that although her grandmother and mother-in-law taught her invaluable lessons through their daily practices (i.e., tactics of everyday resistance), she discovered that they had their faults too. In other words, she observed that she did not romanticize them as faultless heroines. In such cases of faltering responses, my timely nods and eye contact in my insider position resulted in productive results. As well, I discovered that as an insider there were some questions that were ‘taboo’ and caused a shift in my insider position to that of an ‘outsider’, impeding a healthy exchange. For example, when I asked

99 Grandmother Khairoon why her husband did not chastise his male friends whose inappropriate sexual advances were making Khairoon feel compromised, I realized almost instantly that I had crossed a line when after she burst out with “That’s what I’m saying!”, she immediately ‘corrected’ herself with “Because he trusted me,” and then refused to discuss the topic any further.

A different kind of shift occurred when I listened to the stories of the youngest generation in my study: I became a more distant observer as they talked about the self-imposed pressures of excelling equally in their chosen career fields and as mothers and wives. Also, my insider position at some moments made me sensitive to responses from women that reflected practices of a local feminism without the women labeling them as such: such moments allowed the participants, including myself, to recognize not only our shared experiences but also to arrive at a new jointly-constructed learning. It created that “‘aha’ [moment] … that serves as a pointer toward a new way of seeing the world” (DeVault, 1990, p. 100). Such moments were clearly evident at times during the interviews. For example, Grandmother Sakina exclaimed at one point in the interview, “I hit the nail on the head!” to reflect her sudden discovery that she did not even realize she was learning lessons from her female role models because of the way they imparted those lessons. Similarly, Grandmother Khairoon demonstrated how during the process of the interview she had arrived at increased self-respect through a newer understanding of her ‘self’ when she proclaimed, “As I’m talking, I’m just realizing now how much I did accomplish” as she described her social role in the Ismaili community activities. Similarly, Shirin from the Mothers’ Group demonstrated her newer understanding of patriarchal constraints in her home, which contributed to her actions of defiance (covert acts of agency) when she declared, “Talking to you just now, I just realized how just how much I was a prisoner in my own home because of a domineering father.” Likewise, Salima from the youngest generation in the study expressed a newer understanding of the concept of agency as reflected through her stories of her grandmother’s practices: “I realize as we are talking that my grandmother is far from the down- trodden woman I have led myself to believe.” My position as an insider, a woman with a shared history, and a researcher-participant enabled our engagement in the interview process so that together my participants and I were “constructing fuller answers to questions that cannot always be asked in simple, straightforward ways” (DeVault, 1990, p. 100).

100 As an insider researcher-participant, my investment in the study also extended my observations beyond the interview to listening to the tapes and to scrutinizing transcripts and “even more broadly, to the ways we work at interpreting respondents’ accounts” (DeVault, 1990, p. 101). In an age where interviews have proliferated in our societies, it is possible to neglect the details revealed in the process of the interview (Fontana and Frey, 2005). Although transcription has been often regarded as a mechanical task, I chose to transcribe entire transcripts, utilizing my insider position to interpret content through nuances of expressions, voice inflections, silences, hesitations and pauses, exclamations, emphases, length/shortness of responses to particular questions and choice of languages. I listened to the tapes several times, cross-checking the responses with the detailed interview notes describing the participants’ less evident behaviours, non-verbal gestures and ‘performed’ selves I had observed in my location as an insider and according to the shifts in my location. Although I recorded laughter and tears, repetitious phrases such as “you know,” “understand?,” “you see,” and other such observations, I did not use them systematically in my analyses nor represented them in the final text as I could have.

After much rumination, I observed standard spelling and punctuation, removing repetitious words or hesitations in speech, including all ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ that showed the speaker’s struggle over meaning in the final text. This was a strategic choice as a feminist insider to “cast talk into a form which is easier to read and more compelling” (p. 107) to secure a hearing for the participants in this study who might otherwise not be heard by an ‘outside’ community of readers. Although such smoothing over of talk runs the risk of distorting the words of the participants in this study, this strategic choice as an insider has enabled me to provide larger segments of stories of my participants to maintain their sense of presence in the text for the imagined community of readers.

In this qualitative research study, I have also struggled with the representation of the ‘truth’ of my findings in my positionality as an insider, both as an Ismaili woman and a researcher- participant. This has influenced the design of this qualitative study, the methods and the methodologies I have employed. While an insider has been perceived in the positivist tradition as having closer access to complex meanings of the experiences of the members in her own community (Merton, 1978), this study has revealed that even as a woman and a member of my own community, I could not always occupy a complete insider location throughout the research

101 process. Therefore, as an ‘insider’ constructivist, postmodern researcher, I have conceded to the value-laden aspect of qualitative research study such as this one (Janesick, 2003). I have understood the ‘reality’ of my participants as locally and contextually constructed based on their experiences, and this ‘reality’ is subject to arbitrary acts of power within which their subjectivities are constituted and constrained resulting in different kinds of resistance acts that display their local forms of agency. To examine the kind of agency and feminism exhibited by the fifteen participants of this study, I undertook ethnography (oral life stories) inflected with methodological practices associated with Michel Foucault’s notion of genealogy.

Methodological Practices: Ethnography and Genealogy

Ethnography.

Ethnography has been recognized as a method, a theoretical tradition, and a philosophical paradigm in the field of anthropology that has traversed disciplines (Tedlock, 2003, p. 166). Rather than just producing new information or research data, ethnography is the process that joins research design, fieldwork, and methods of inquiry to produce “historically, politically, and personally situated accounts, descriptions, interpretations, and representations of human lives” into a written, oral or visual form (Tedlock, 2003, p. 165). A historical background of ethnography shows that anthropologists have embraced a wide range of ethnographic methods, including the use of questionnaires, fieldwork, participant observation, bi-cultural participation, and insider participation (Tedlock, 2003, pp. 166-171). The diverse styles of ethnography have been described in classical, modernist, feminist, postmodernist, poststructuralist terms, and “thousands of works written in many languages and genres that have been encoded as ‘ethnographic’” (Tedlock, 2003, p. 171) have produced biographies, life stories, life narratives, memoirs, autobiographies, field diaries, chronicles, novellas, novels, short stories, plays, travelogues, and dissertations such as this one. Along the way, ethnography has undergone a change from participation observation to observation of participation “in which ethnographers both experience and observe their own and others’ co participation within the ethnographic scene of encounter” (Tedlock, 2003, p. 180).

102 Genealogy.

Foucault attempts to define genealogy by contrasting it with archeology: if archeology is the “analysis of local discursivities,” then genealogy is “the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play” (as quoted in Scheurich and McKenzie, 2005, p. 849). In other words, genealogy examines the processes, procedures, and apparatuses used in the production of truth and knowledge in order to understand “which kind of practices, linked to which kinds of external conditions, determine the different knowledges in which we ourselves figure” (Tamboukou and Ball, 2003, p. 4).

In my study, the shared theoretical orientations of both ethnography and genealogy have a) facilitated a challenge to the authority of universal scientific knowledge; b) enabled possibilities for venturing beyond definitions of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ imposed by dominant power/knowledge regimes; c) allowed for the reclamation of body, emotions, and experience into research and analysis; d) aided the focus on contextual and local perspectives of resistance practised by the particular women in my study instead of excluding their form of agency through a one-size-fits- all general theory; e) assisted to recuperate silenced and excluded subjects; and f) demonstrated the significance of the political aspect of research that makes ‘agency’ possible (adapted from Tamboukou and Ball, 2003, pp. 3-4).

I have benefited from the inconsistencies that exist between ethnography and genealogy. As Deborah Britzman asserts, theorizing in ethnography “has become more tentative and less concerned with the old struggles of establishing authority as a way of research” but “is more concerned with the archeology of construction” (1999, p. 29). She points out how this shift in poststructural theories has affected ethnographic theorizing, raising concern about “what it is that structures meanings, practices, and bodies; and about why certain practices become intelligible, valorized, or deemed as traditions, while other practices become discounted, impossible, or unimaginable” (pp. 29-30). This poststructural unease has impacted the way I perceive knowledge in my study as “constitutive of power, and agency [as its] constitutive effect, and not the originator, of situated practices and histories” (p. 30). For example, in my study, traditional ethnography has guided me to examine agency through subjects who act against unequal hierarchal power relations for social justice. However, the use of genealogical theory at the same

103 time has enabled me to interpret domination and the resistance of the women in my study through the analysis of power/knowledge regimes, allowing me to ‘think otherwise’ about power (Tamboukou and Ball, 2003) and to “read against the ethnographic grain” (Britzman, 1999, p. 29). As well, although genealogy’s emphasis is on subjectivities compared to ethnography’s focus on subjects, the use of genealogy has enabled me, through the notion of the subject as a social construction of discursive practices, to demonstrate how the women in my study have learned resistance as a result of their location in contradictory and multiple subject positions (Davis, 1992).

Methodologically, I encountered a few difficulties wearing both hats – of an ethnographer and a genealogist – although in both locations, I started with a research problem that shared the “‘discomfort’ about how things are going” (Tamboukou and Ball, 2003, p. 12). As an ethnographer and a genealogist, I found it difficult to maintain a distance from my participants and/or data, albeit, at different stages and junctures of the research process. For example, as an ethnographer and a genealogist, I was conducting a study that included me and my triad (consisting of my mother and daughter) as well as the women with whom I not only shared a religious community affiliation but also my Indian East African heritage, as well as my immigration history. Hence, I occupied an insider location on multiple levels from which it was difficult to distance myself easily; I have elaborated on this location and its ramifications already in this chapter. As Tamboukou and Ball assert, “the management of this involvement/distance is a most ‘dangerous’ and risky task for both the ethnographer and the genealogist” (2003, p. 12). As my research questions have demonstrated, I started with the problem from the present, which emerged from my observation of the practices of older Ismaili women who displayed acts of compliance and resistance in dealing with borders and boundaries in immigration sites. Mainly, from genealogy, I have borrowed a concept that enabled me to explore the construction of subjectivities, identities, and the local agency of the three generations of women in my study from their experiences and allowed me to explore their narratives against their histories in the geographies of diaspora space.

Heterotopic space.

In this study, for the genealogical approach, I borrowed the notion of heterotopic space. The use of Michel Foucault’s heterotopic space has enabled me to map, microscopically, the power

104 relations and discursive forces which intersected with the Ismaili women’s identities in diaspora space and to uncover the circumstances that influenced the construction of a local wisdom to guide their practices in daily lives. The conception of heterotopic space has emerged from Foucault’s identification of the critical role ‘space’ has played in the analysis of his work: he maintained that the “present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (Miskowiec, 1986, p. 22), highlighting that “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space” (Miskowiec, 1986, p. 23). Foucault has pointed out that we do not occupy a “homogeneous and empty space ... in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things … [but] we live inside a set of relations” (Misokowiec, 1986, p. 23) to which “we are drawn outside ourselves, in which, as a matter of fact, the erosion of our life, our time and our history takes place” (Foucault, 1998, p. 177 [emphasis mine]). Foucault named this outer space constituting our experiences as ‘heterotopias’: this is defined as a contested space with “the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (Miskowiec, 1986, p. 24).

Foucault connected this outer space to cultures, so that in spite of being ‘outside’, heterotopias “are most forcefully intervening in what is happening inside us … they are planes within the space, which ‘eats and scrapes away at us’” (Tamboukou, 2004, p. 189). Also, Foucault distinguished between two different forms of heterotopias, of which I have adopted the ‘crisis heterotopia’ for this study. Foucault defined this form of heterotopia as “privileged, sacred, or forbidden places [that are] reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis” (Miskowiec, 1985, p. 24). These heterotopias created other sites, for instance, like a honeymoon trip – a site ‘outside of the home’ where in some cultures, the “young woman’s deflowering could take place ‘nowhere’” (Miskowiec, 1985, p. 24). Therefore, these sites within heterotopia accommodated subjects in transition, such as the participants in this study, as established by the social practices of cultures.

I adapted this notion of Foucault’s heterotopia to define a site ‘of crisis’ from which the women in my study have offered their stories: I maintain that the larger diaspora space as a heterotopia for immigrant women offers new geographical sites away from the geographical site of the ‘home’ they had left behind to construct a new ‘home’ once again. This space allowed these women to transition from ‘belonging’ to the old to forming attachment to the new site. In this

105 respect, although heterotopia was the space of contestation and struggle for these immigrant women ‘in crisis’, it simultaneously became a space of hope. In this study, heterotopic sites within diaspora space facilitated two aspects of analysis. First, it facilitated the exploration of the subjectivities and local knowledges of the women in my study through their location in a diaspora space that had both physical and metaphorical properties of Foucault’s heterotopia. This heterotopic space comprised ‘real’ sites, including diasporic journeys and geographical sites of home country and resettlement country/ries (Brah, 1996, pp. 182-183) in which the women in my study have been located. This notion of the heterotopia connected genealogy to ethnography: as affirmed by their narratives, this space provided a physical resettlement site within the larger metaphorical diaspora space where home and belonging were constructed and contested as a result of the multi-locationality of the women across cultural and psychic boundaries (Brah, 1996, p. 194).

Importantly, in this study, this quality of the heterotopic space facilitated the opportunity to understand how the particular Ismaili women constructed knowledge about themselves and their social world through their practices, revealing the diverse ways they worked upon themselves to become what they were ‘becoming’ (Tamboukou, 2003). In their location in this physical heterotopic site, as their life stories revealed, the women enacted practices which demonstrated that their subjectivities were not just the effects of power but were also being developed in the process of resisting power that would make them into who they were becoming. Hence, the use of heterotopia within the larger symbolic diasporic space (that is, a space occupied by immigrants) enabled me to demonstrate how these particular women’s ‘location in crisis’ provided them with the ‘shift in gaze’ through which they came to the realization that they did not fit the storylines within which they had been ascribed positions (Davis, 1992) culturally and as racialized subjects. The practices of the first two generations of women in two different geographical sites, as reflected in their life stories, demonstrated how the women constructed technologies of resistance through local ways that were culturally and experientially available to them, in order to deal with the contradictions in their multiple subject positions. In so doing, they were not only fashioning new subjectivities for themselves, but they were also learning ways in heterotopic sites within the larger diaspora space to establish home and belonging to some degree, passing on these local knowledges to the next generation of women in their respective families.

106 Second, the physical location of the women in my study in a heterotopic space has enabled me in the genealogical tradition to read their life narratives against the available written secondary literature that trace their cultural, religious, colonial, and immigration histories through random beginnings, interrupted events, and unforeseen directions as described in Chapters One, Four, and Five. This history sheds light on the discursive forces that have contributed to the multiple and conflicting subject locations of the women in my study and their subsequent creation and use of local knowledges, as revealed in their life stories.

Oral life narratives.

For this study, I have used oral ‘life narrative’ as a methodology that reflects “a somewhat narrow term that includes many kinds of self-referential writing, including autobiographical acts” (Smith and Watson, 2001, p. 3). Although I have treated the stories of the fifteen Ismaili women in my study as autobiographical acts, I have disassociated myself from viewing oral autobiography in the traditional White Western male mode of self-storying that “celebrates the autonomous individual and the universalizing life story of the Enlightenment subject” (Smith and Watson, 2001, pp. 3-4) as canonized in the tradition of Georges Gusdorf and Karl Joachim Weintraub. From Smith and Watson’s work, I adapted eight characteristics, listed below, to collect subjective data and to guide the choice of concepts (as elaborated in Section Two of this chapter) to analyze the life narratives of the fifteen women in my study.

In oral life narratives, narrators:  Tell about their own lives from an internal or external point of view – or from both;  Offer their life accounts while they are living;  (May) exercise the initiative of blurring boundaries between different forms and styles of narration. As well, they may utilize certain structural features employed in the novel/short story fiction such as plot, dialogue, dramatic monologue, and setting;  Refer to a world comprising their lived experiences, even if that ‘world’ is grounded in part in cultural myths, dreams, fantasies, and subjective memories including nostalgia. Their self-stories are anchored in their own temporal, geographical, and cultural environments;

107  Present some ‘facts’ (such as date of birth, date of immigration, etc.). However, life- narratives cannot be perceived as historical records/facts of the narrators’ lives. Rather, life-narratives offer subjective ‘truth’;  Offer stories that are central to an understanding of larger issues concerning them and the world around them;  Perform rhetorical acts by justifying their own insights, maintaining their standing, disagreeing with accounts of others, settling scores, transmitting cultural information, and improvising desirable futures for themselves. In this sense, they are creating ‘history’ for themselves in the way they offer stories about themselves;  Assume a tacit, intersubjective ‘pact’ between themselves and their readers. In life narratives, the listeners/readers expect the life narrators to remain faithful to their personal memory archives. Autobiographical ‘truth’ may cause the stories of the narrators to appear inconsistent, or ‘shifting’. One of the objects of this autobiographical ‘truth’ is for the narrators to arrive at a shared understanding of their ‘realities’ with the readers through the establishment of an intersubjective relationship.

The characteristics above provided a broad schema for viewing the life narratives of the women in my study within the ethnographical approach. Based on these characteristics, the components of memory, ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ as they relate to the stories of the women in my study have been understood as subjective and subject to change over time. Bateson captured the subjective, contextual, and contingent nature of memory as she composed the lives of five women through their life stories:

I have not tried to verify these narratives. They are autobiographical … shaped by each person’s choice and selective memory and by the circumstances … Each of these women is engaged in inventing a new kind of story … it is impossible to know what their memories of the past will be when they bring them out again in the future, in some new and changed context. (1990, p. 33-34)

The meaning that Bateson has brought to memory as a construction that is subject to change over time has meant that in this study, memories have not been understood as duplicates of events but fragments out of which past events have been constructed and have been recalled into certain

108 moments “for reasons that are important to someone” (Tierney, 2003, p. 305). As well, this understanding of the contingent and situated nature of ‘reality’ in life stories, which has been vital for this study, has been expounded by Carola Conle:

Each telling happens from at least two time perspectives, the ‘then-perspective’ of the contents of the story and the ‘now-perspective’ available at the time of the telling. The now-perspective changes with each telling, as new information, new circumstances influence the teller. The told event therefore is not ‘reality itself’ but reality from a particular vantage point, the current now perspective. As the vantage changes, so does the story and with it the reality we are able to perceive. (1999, p. 15)

As elaborated by Conle above, ‘reality’ invoked through memory in life stories of the women in my study has been understood as being specific to the time of the telling and considered not as “isolatable fact” but as “situated association” (Smith and Watson, 2001, p. 18). ‘Truth’ in the life narratives of the women in this study has been perceived as lying “outside a logical or juridical model of truth and falsehood” so that “[w]e need to adjust our expectations of the truth told in self-referential narrative” (Smith and Watson, 2001, pp. 12-14). For example, Blaise has offered the understanding that “everyone’s fiction is almost completely autobiographical,” adding, “what makes it fiction, is usually, its degree of disguise” (1993, p. 12). Similarly, Fish has maintained that “autobiographers cannot lie because anything they say, however mendacious, is the truth about themselves whether they know it or not” (as cited in Smith and Watson, 2001, p. 12). On the other hand, life historian Tierney has contributed to the understanding that ‘truth’ in life narratives is “situated within a series of complex and ambiguous political and cultural relations” (2003, p. 301).

This point has been best exemplified in Tierney’s comment regarding the self-referential work of Reinaldo Arenas. Reflecting on Arenas’ claim that witches have played a significant role in his life, Tierney asserts that if the research focus were pursuing empirical evidence on Arenas’ self- narrative – that is, on whether or not witches existed – or, if the research focus were on the question of Arenas’ psychic condition in believing in the supernatural, then it has much to lose. In other words, Tierney’s advice has been to “come to terms with alternative realities” so that the interpretive focus has not been deflected by trying “to find or explain away witches” but to

109 “reflect back on why such a question is important [for Arenas] and others are not” (2003, p. 310). Hence, the focus of this study has been neither to pit the truth of any one reality over another nor to gauge the ‘truth’ of the self-narratives of the participants; rather, the focus has remained on the exploration of the notion of agency of the women in my study through their realities as evidenced by their experiential narratives.

In other words, my focus has been directed at exploring the local knowledge of the participants “not as an objective truth or a reflection of reality” but “with knowledge as human construction, an agreed upon map or model” whereby “arriving at a truth or reality, an exact replication of experience, is not an object” (Mulholland and Wallace, 2003, p. 6). The object of the study was to understand “the evident perspectives of those who tell about their lived experience” (Mulholland and Wallace, 2003, p. 6). The life narratives of the women in this study have been understood, therefore, as culturally and discursively situated in local cultural forms, which may be in need of representation in ways that do not exclude them. Certain key concepts I selected to filter these narratives have proved beneficial in this respect. Section Two identifies the conceptual framework for this study. As evident from the methodological approaches outlined above, the following three concepts are of central importance to examine the local agency of the women in this study: diaspora space, local knowledges, and everyday resistance.

Section Two: Conceptual Framework

In this section, I demonstrate how concepts of diaspora space, local knowledges, and everyday resistance have provided the theoretical lenses through which I have identified the local agency demonstrated in the oral life narratives of the women in this study. These concepts have illuminated how the participants have navigated boundaries of cultural patriarchy and White hegemony in order to help themselves and their families to survive and even thrive in diaspora space.

Certain recurring themes have surfaced in the oral life stories of the women in this study. Their life narratives have demonstrated how their daily lives have been circumscribed by multiple, tenuous, and shifting positionalities at the intersections of religious, cultural, social and political conditions in two places of settlement. Here, in their gender and race, the women have been ascribed a location outside full membership of family/community and nation. However, the

110 recurring themes of resistance and agency identified in their oral life stories have also divulged the vital role these women have played as ‘agents’ in creating ‘home’ in two geographical spaces by mobilizing mostly small and indiscernible tactics acquired from local lessons inherited from the older women in their families. Since these themes could not be adequately analyzed through a single concept, I adopted three concepts from different theorists as lenses with which to scrutinize these themes. Although each conceptual tool has provided a different analytical perspective, together they have offered ways to explore the theme of these particular women’s agency through a combined focus on intersectionality, subjectivity, identity, experience, and power.

First, I used the concept of diaspora (with its subtext of home) with the notions of borders/boundaries and the politics of location embedded within Avtar Brah’s (1996) larger symbolic diaspora space to historicize the location of the women in my project and to explore their notions of ‘home’. Next, from the work of Patricia Hill Collins (2009), I borrowed the theory of local knowledges to identify the use of shared specialized (and subjugated) local knowledges that are created and transmitted by racialized women, based on their particular experiential worldview in their intersecting locations, to form oppositional knowledges that help them survive in daily life. Last, I adapted Stellan Vinthagen and Anna Johansson’s (2013; 2014) lens of everyday resistance to explore the local agency of the women in this study that is expressed mostly through mundanely ordinary and silent tactics that are socialized into their daily lives and which help them negotiate restrictive boundaries undetectably.

Diaspora space.

Figure 2: Concepts related to Brah’s diaspora space.

111 James Clifford has brought to our attention that diaspora “experiences are always gendered” and that the “tendency for theoretical accounts of diasporas and diaspora cultures [is] to hide this fact” by talking “of travel and displacement in unmarked ways, thus normalizing male experiences” (1994, p. 313). This study focuses on the analyses of themes arising from the diasporic experiences of fifteen Canadian Ismaili Canadian women from an Indian East-African heritage. The themes arising out of the life narratives of these women cannot be explored in a vacuum: the diaspora landscape in which the women’s realities have been constructed through their lived experiences in their locations in gender, race/colour, class, culture, age, and religion need to be historicized first. To locate the women in their immigration histories, I have utilized the conceptual tools embedded under the aegis of Brah’s metaphorical diaspora space (see Figure 2).

First, I have utilized Brah’s “image of a journey” (1996, p. 182), which is central to the concept of diaspora, to historicize the landscape occupied by the women in my study (see Figure 2). The image of a journey has provided a lens through which to examine a) why/when/how the women travelled, and b) how they and their descendants have been inserted into the places of settlement according to “class, gender, racism, sexuality, or other axes of differentiation” and how that has affected their lives (Brah, 1996, p. 182). This has facilitated the deconstruction of the systems of power that operate to ascertain how these women are situated in the places of settlement, since the “discourses, economic processes, state policies and institutional practices” are critical to their future (Brah, 1996, p. 182). This space has been inhabited not only by various groups of immigrants and their descendants, but also by those who are self-constituted as indigenous and/or by those who constitute themselves as ‘entitled’ through (colonial) territorial appropriation. Infused with power relations, this terrain has been intersected by borders and boundaries where ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ have been constantly contested by all who inhabit it. The notion of border embedded within the concept of diaspora reveals a regular feature of the diasporic positionality – a ‘politics of location’ – experienced as “contradictions of and between location and dislocation” (Brah, 1996, p. 204) by immigrants in a heterotopic diaspora space. These socially constructed borders have been inscribed by political, cultural, economic and psychic lines of separation, which have “everyday effects in real lives” (Brah, 1996, p. 194). Locating the women in this study through the concept of diaspora and the notion of borders has enabled me to explore the subjectivities of the women through the theme of location and

112 dislocation across gender, class and racialized boundaries. The use of diaspora as a concept has demonstrated how politics of location/dislocation work to mobilize the diasporic women’s transgressive journeys across boundaries of patriarchy and White dominance to inscribe emergent identities that unsettle ‘tradition’ and problematize the notion of a fixed and stable diasporic identity. Hence, Brah’s concepts of diaspora, borders and politics of location have offered a conceptual grid for locating the women in my study within their specific histories and geographies, helping construct the conceptual backdrop from which to analyze the emergent themes that surface in their life narratives.

Second, Brah’s the subtext of ‘home and belonging’ located in the concept of diaspora, along with that of ‘borders’, has facilitated the analysis of the themes of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ that has proliferated in the stories of the women in my study. Caribbean-Canadian Yvonne Bobb- Smith (2003) has demonstrated that the notion of ‘home’ in the diasporic imagination does not always translate into a physical site, as elaborated in Chapter Two. By exploring the notion of ‘home’ through her diasporic Caribbean-Canadian women’s identity as “a measure of self” (p. 14), Bobb-Smith transformed ‘home’ into a dynamic local learning site linked to identity and origins. For Bobb-Smith, ‘home’ in diaspora became a mobile learning site of local knowledges that she accumulated by observing older Caribbean women use the ethic of independence as they assumed responsibilities for their families and activated community support in their struggle against patriarchal, colonial and capitalist domination. In this sense, ‘home’ in diaspora translated into a ‘portable’ toolbox of experientially tested local strategies transmitted by older women, which offered potential liberating effects for immigrant women in any place of settlement.

Using the subtext of ‘home’ in diaspora, Brah (1996) theorizes three different sites that invoke ‘home’ in diaspora, which have proved useful in this study: the home of the nation, as invoked by the narratives of the nation; home as a physical place of everyday living; and home as a mythic place versus home as the potential site of new beginnings. Questions of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ have surfaced repeatedly in the narratives of the women in my study: Was home a geographical territory such as India or Uganda or Canada? Did home translate into more than one place in their imagination? Was home even a physical site? Carole Boyce Davis has asserted that “Migration creates the desire for home, which in turn produces the rewriting of home”

113 (1994, p. 113), an aspect which has been reiterated in the women’s narratives. Brah’s notions of ‘home’ for diasporans have also surfaced in the narratives of the women in my study. One notion of ‘home’ in diaspora space has been invoked in a politically racialized discourse of belonging/not belonging to the nation, exemplified by Idi Amin when he “asserted that people of Asian descent could not be ‘of’ Uganda, irrespective of how long they had lived there” (Brah, 1996, p. 3; also see Bannerji, 1997). Conversely, this notion of ‘home’, as a racially charged discourse articulated orally, has been invoked differently in Canada. This is evident as it surfaced directly in the stories of nine out of fifteen women in my study, through their constant encounter with the question “Where are you from?” asked by White Canadians, usually of British descent. In the following excerpt, Carole Boyce Davies has articulated the relationship of this interrogation to psychic borders and the ‘national’ narratives of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’:

When a white person asks a Black woman where she comes from, the implicit assumption is that she does not belong here. Further the term ‘immigrant’ with which many Black people in large European centers are marked, is a term which, Stuart Hall asserts places one so equivocally as really belonging someplace else. ‘And when are you going back home? Is the completing rhetorical gesture. (1994, p. 114; also see Shadd, 2001)

Recurring themes of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ that have emerged have shown how “[s]elf- reflexive autobiographical accounts have often provided critical insights into the politics of location” (Brah, 1996, p. 180) that the immigrants experience in their daily lives. As well, Brah’s subtext of ‘home’ has facilitated the investigation of ‘home’ as a social and psychic “site of the everyday lived experience” that allows people to ‘feel at home’ in the space of the neighbourhood, town or city. This notion of ‘home’ has enabled the identification of heterotopic sites within the town or city, such as the communal ‘home’ of jamatkhanas (congregational prayer houses) and sites within the physical house, like the kitchen, as a result of the bonding and the solace these sites have provided. This sometimes even extends the notion of ‘home’ to include other more symbolic heterotopic sites, such as ‘ethnic’ food and familial relationships within and outside of the physical nation space, that have the potential to turn any physical site into ‘home’.

114 Brah’s subtext of ‘home’ as a part of the concept of diaspora has enabled a comparative analyses of the mythic ‘home’ versus ‘home’ as a potential site for new starts. This mythic ‘home’, defined by Brah as the place of ‘origin’ in the diasporic imagination to which a return has been neither possible nor necessarily desired but one that has been familiarized through social relations and sense receptors (of scents, sights, and sounds in memories often tinged with nostalgia), is a site the immigrants have left already. Stuart Hall ascribed the psychic need for this ‘mythic’ home as a way to reconnect the feelings of loss of identity to a place from the past in order to “restore an imaginary fullness or plentitude to set against the broken rubric of our past” (2003, pp. 235-236). By contrast, the consideration of the new place of settlement as a site of ‘new beginnings’, as made possible through the concept of diaspora, has allowed for the analyses of themes reflecting changes in women’s roles and identities influenced by newer stimuli in two different ‘homes’ (Brah, 1996). The use of Brah’s concepts has helped me to investigate the contextual realities of the women in my study through their shifting diasporic experiences at the intersections of race/colour, gender, class, religion, and nationality. This led me to analyze how their particular social ontologies contribute to the construction, use and transmission of local gendered knowledges to help them navigate cultural and White hegemony, and to turn diaspora space into ‘home’.

Local knowledges.

Figure 3: Concepts related to Collins’ local knowledges.

I have utilized Patricia Hill Collins’ concept of intersectionality as it is articulated with the construction of local subjugated knowledges (what Collins calls Black feminist thought) to analyze how the creation, use, and transmission of local knowledges (see Figure 3) by the

115 women in my study have played a significant role in their lives. Collins’ concept of intersectionality has positioned the women in my study in mutually constructive social phenomena, such as race, class, and gender, to encounter “a distinctive constellation of experiences based on [their] placement in hierarchical power relations” (1998, p. 205). Collins has demonstrated how this can result in women’s particular world views or experiential realities; she has highlighted how African-American women and other social groups positioned within unjust power relations have demonstrated “the stimulus for crafting and passing on subjugated knowledge” (2009, p. 11) to resist oppression, a theme that has likewise emerged in my study through the women’s life accounts. Through the concept of intersectionality, Collins is able to bring back localized consideration of experiential reality into the orbit of local knowledge- construction, As a result, Collins has contributed the consideration of localized investigations involving experience, identity, culture, and history as they have contributed to processes of subordination and domination.

The value of Collins’ Black feminist epistemology for my study has been in its ability to enable an exploration of how subordinate groups such as Ismaili women create local knowledges that foster their empowerment based on their experiential and constantly evolving worldview in their intersecting locations. Collins has demonstrated how worldviews, contextual to women’s intersectional positionalities, may enable women of different groups to construct oppositional subjugated knowledges and resist suppression. Collins exemplified this by describing how Black American women have been able to construct and reconstruct distinctively Black and female forms of resistance from African-derived self-definitions of enslaved communities (honed in the rural South and the Northern urban ghettos), and from experiences gained from their gender/racial outsider-within locations in domestic work. In particular, Collins’ theory on local knowledges has proved useful in exploring how women in my study have done the following: a) constructed knowledges that are both hidden and suppressed but which support their resistance practices; b) shared and passed-on such local knowledges, constituting a collective wisdom (a local standpoint) based on their experiences expressed by both ‘organic’ and formally educated intellectuals; c) valued such a shared wisdom even above formal education; and d) assessed the value of such wisdom on lived experience and by its emancipatory effects on women’s daily lives. Collins’ theory has promoted an understanding of why such local knowledges of particular

116 groups both remain ‘subjugated’ in the sense that they have been repressed/delegitimized by the dominant culture and have also been kept ‘hidden’ by the oppressed groups themselves.

While examining the subjugated local knowledges of the women in my study, I have found Collins’ theory of different levels of local ‘knowledges’ insightful: it has demonstrated that subjugated knowledges of specific groups may be more complex than they first appear, and that local knowledges may be constructed by ‘organic’ intellectuals within that specific group. Collins has made this apparent through the two levels of interdependent knowledges she identified in African-American women, both of which stem from a shared local wisdom of Black women. The first level represents Black women’s standpoints that are reflected in the “common- place, taken-for-granted knowledge” that is shared among the African-American women and which reflects issues dealing with daily living such as “how to style our hair, characteristics of ‘good’ black men, strategies for dealing with White folks, and skills of how to ‘get over’” (Collins, 2009, p. 38). The second level, which subsumes the first, has been represented by the “more specialized type of knowledge” (Collins, 2009, p. 38) identified by Collins as Black Feminist Thought, which has articulated local theories arising out of lived experiences of this particular group of women. This knowledge, Collins maintains, has been able to provide women with “a different view of themselves and their world than that offered by the established social order,” guiding women “to value their own subjective knowledge base” and offering them local tools to resist their subordination (2009, p. 169). As expressed below, Collins’ claim that the crafters of this second level of knowledge may include ‘organic intellectuals’ has had specific meaning for my own study:

Black women intellectuals are neither all academics nor found primarily in the Black middleclass. Instead, all U.S. Black women who somehow contribute to black feminist thought as critical social theory are deemed to be ‘intellectuals.’ They may be highly educated. Many are not. (2009, p. 17)

Here, Collins has deconstructed the concept ‘intellectual’ by demonstrating how, for instance, Sojourner Truth, a nineteenth century Black activist, though illiterate, fit into the second category of constructing local knowledge, reiterating that “Not all Black women intellectuals are educated. Not all Black women intellectuals work in academia” (p. 18). Citing Collins, Bannerji

117 observes, “‘mothers, teachers, churchmembers, and cultural creators’ become intellectuals” (2000, p. 543). Bannerji adds, this way, “not just written sources, but spoken word, oral traditions and interactions of community produce knowledge,” which when “infused with Afro- centric feminist sensibility” could become the core of specialized knowledge for any particular group of women (2000, p. 543).

Of special benefit to my study has been Collins’ observation that the particular levels of local knowledge displayed by a particular group of women may be accessed and evaluated in ways other than those of Eurocentric academia. She has shown this by distinguishing between two types of knowing demonstrated by Black women. Collins has maintained that since “knowledge about the dynamics of intersecting oppression has been essential to U.S. Black women’s survival,” being able to live life as Black women requires wisdom. Subsequently, Collins has pointed out that “African-American women give such wisdom high credence in assessing knowledge” (2009, p. 275). Quoting Geneva Smitherman, an African-American linguistics professor, Collins demonstrates how, from the perspective of Black people, written texts can only provide a limited understanding about life and survival in the world so that “Blacks are quick to ridicule ‘educated fools’” since “they have ‘book learning’ but no ‘mother wit,’ knowledge, but not wisdom” (p. 275). Collins has, therefore, asserted that the ability to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom that is underpinned by experience has contributed to the very survival of Black women, emphasizing that for subordinate groups “[i]n the context of intersecting oppressions … knowledge without wisdom is adequate for the powerful, but wisdom is essential to the survival of the subordinate” (p. 276). Hence, for my study, Collins has furthered the understanding that for particular racialized women, knowledge claims by ‘experts’ have been deemed more credible when substantiated by lived experience rather than by written texts, statistics or by theoretical knowledge. Collins’ perspectives on the nature of local knowledges, the significant role of ‘organic’ intellectuals in the construction of local knowledges, and the role of experience in assessing the credibility of local knowledge claims have provided the lens for analyzing the local knowledges of the Ismaili women in this study.

Collins has also articulated that Black women have been provided with a “unique angle of vision” concerning Black womanhood, unavailable to other groups like the women in my study (2009, p. 39). Bannerji has voiced the question foremost in my mind as I have examined the

118 potential use of Collins’ concept of intersectionality as it collides with her concept of local knowledge: “Can women from non-African descents [like the group of Ismaili women in my study] be producers of Black feminist thought?” (2000, p. 543). Bannerji also claims that Collins’ answer to the question has been in the affirmative, as she has separated Black feminist thought from “biology or even possibly from African history in the U.S” (p. 543). Honing in on Collins’ claim that “separation of biology, from ideology must be made” (1990, p. 20), Bannerji has reiterated Collins’ response, that “you don’t have to be African American to be a Black feminist and produce that kind of knowledge” (p. 543). Collins’ claims that since Black feminist thought was deconstructive, “Its task is ‘exposing a concept as ideological and culturally constructed rather than as natural or a simple reflection of reality’” (cited by Bannerji, 2000, p. 543). Collins has categorically maintained that “Black women’s leadership in producing Black feminist thought does not mean that others cannot participate” (2009, p. 39). However, Collins has added that “It does mean that the primary responsibility for defining one’s own reality lies with the people who live that reality, who actually have those experiences” (p. 39), thus opening up the availability for the use of Collins’ concepts for this study.

The value of utilizing Collins’ concept of local knowledges was reinforced by another aspect of Collins’ work. As in my study, the crucial role of mothers in subordinate cultures as crafters and transmitters of local lessons of resistance tactics was also identified in Collins’ study of African- American women. Collins has underscored “[t]he mother/daughter relationship” as “one fundamental relationship among Black women” through which “countless mothers have empowered their daughters by passing on the everyday knowledge essential to survival as African-American women” (p. 112). Collins has maintained that this was substantiated by the “Black daughters [who] identify the profound influence that their mothers have had upon their lives” and supported through autobiographies where mothers and daughters materialized as central characters (p. 112). Learning to negotiate boundaries from mothers, grandmothers, and aunts has been a recurring theme in the stories of women in my study, one that identified the crucial role of local resistance tactics passed-on generationally by women to teach women local survival techniques for daily living.

119 Everyday resistance.

Figure 4: Concepts related to Vinthagen and Johansson’s everyday resistance.

This study examines the contours of a local agency demonstrated by the Ismaili women participants through their resistance practices that Stellan Vinthagen and Anna Johansson (2013; 2014) have defined as everyday resistance (see Figure 4). I have utilized the concept of everyday resistance to demonstrate how the Ismaili immigrant women in my study, marginalized within their own culture by gender and within the larger nation in places of settlement by their gender and race, mobilized local passed-on lessons of everyday resistance from their respective older female role models to navigate boundaries that circumscribed their daily lives. Although Vinthagen and Johansson have claimed that their work on everyday resistance is still in the process of “trying to find its basic grammar” (2014, p. 2), it has nonetheless offered practical tools to investigate the theme of a local form of agency demonstrated by the women in my study through their use of everyday resistance practices.

Vinthagen and Johansson have combined resistance theories from Hollander and Einwohner (2004), Michel de Certeau (1984) and James C. Scott (1985) to define everyday resistance practices generally as culturally formed, undetectable and non-dramatic tactics employed by people in their everyday lives, which might undermine power as opposed to the more openly expressed, political demonstrations. The following fundamental assumptions of everyday resistance practices identified in Vinthagen and Johansson’s (2014) theoretical platform have framed the investigation of everyday resistance practices in the life accounts of the women in my study. Everyday resistance  Is an oppositional practice – a social action that involves agency;

120  Is historically entangled with everyday power rather than separated from, dichotomous with or independent of it;  Is heterogeneous and contextual to culture, time, place and changing situations rather than a one-fits-all static universal strategy.

As well, everyday resistance as it is understood in this study follows key properties identified by Vinthagen and Johansson: a) it is carried out normally, sometimes with political intentions but typically in a habitual, semi-conscious manner; b) it is non-dramatic, non-confrontational, but has the potential to undermine power without being detected or defined as resistance by the hegemonic discourse; c) it is carried out by individuals or groups without formal organization or leadership, but it is encouraged by cultural traditions; and d) it has the potential to develop into more overt forms of resistance practices. Therefore, filtering the narratives of the women in my study through the conceptual tools offered by Vinthagen and Johansson has enabled me to perceive the agency of the women in my study as situated in specific historical and geographical contexts and in cultural traditions along a spectrum from hidden subversion to more overt resistance tactics.

Combining Concepts

Figure 5: Venn diagram depicting integration of concepts for conceptual framework.

121 Through the combined use of Vinthagen and Johansson’s, Collins’, and Brah’s conceptual tools, I have been able to reach a more complex understanding of the agency of the women in my study (see Figure 5). I have treated the resistance practices of the women in my study through their local ideologies as a part of a continuous dynamic interaction with power in the Foucauldian sense, so that although power can take more stable forms of domination and hierarchical structures in their lives, it can also take productive, decentred, heterogenic and plural forms (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2014; Collins, 2009; Brah, 1996). Vinthagen and Johansson have highlighted how the influence of the interrelation of resistance and power in ongoing “spiral- dynamics of actions and reactions, innovations and counter-innovations, measures and counter- measures” (2013, p. 30) has contributed to the multiple experiences of the resisters whose “constant learning from what earlier generations have done evolves” (p. 31), building on the “methods of resistance that people are familiar with” to form “repertoires” of resistance (2014, p. 6). On the other hand, Collins’ theory has underscored how “Oppression and resistance remain intricately linked such that the shape of one influences that of the other,” reminding us that “this relationship is far more complex than a simple model of permanent oppressors and perpetual victims” (2009, p. 292). Vinthagen and Johansson have conceded that acts of resistance have to be carried out by someone “since all acts have actors and rely on some form of agency” (2014, p. 36). However, they have simultaneously emphasized that although “subalterns do resist … resistance does not ‘originate’ within the subject” but emerges as a result of the “combination of subjectivity, context, and interaction” (p. 36). Since the exercise of power can only constitute subjectivities in a partial sense, these theorists have claimed that the resulting gaps therefore offer the potential for resistance (2013, p. 30).

To this notion of agency, I have added Brah’s perspective (1996) in order to capture the complexity of such everyday agency as displayed by the women in my study. Brah’s theoretical filter has allowed me to understand how although agency is not a voluntarist action of the subject, agents such as the women in my study can be subjects of actions as a result of the contradictions they have experienced in their multiple and shifting subject positions. Working through her concept of an intersectional diaspora space, Brah has approached agency by demonstrating how diasporans have continuously been engaged in identity processing in their intersecting locations of gender, class and race as they have attempted to establish ‘home’ in places of settlement. Having established (much like Collins, 2009) that these locations produce

122 different experiences and therefore result in different perceptions of reality, Brah has traced the connections between experience and subject-formation with identity, taking a multi-axial performative perspective of power, much like Vinthagen and Johansson (2013; 2014). First conceding that power may oppress, discriminate, subordinate and regulate subjects through structural and institutional hierarchies, Brah has demonstrated how power is at the same time “the very basis of agency [and] is the very means of challenging, contesting and dismantling [those very] structures of injustice” (1996, p. 242). She has achieved this by identifying both experience and subjectivity as sites. Brah has recognized experience as a site for processing subjectivity where multiple, provisional and discrepant positions have been assumed under specific cultural, political, and economic conditions. At the same time, Brah has also identified subjectivity as a site wherein the shifting, unpredictable, and multiple nature of the subject-in- process is experienced as identity or the ‘I’.

Based on this understanding, Brah has presented a dynamic notion of agency by claiming that although the ‘I’ may be the effect of certain discourses, practices, and/or institutions, the subject does not in fact ‘disappear’. On the contrary, the subject continually forms and reforms to engage as an ‘agent’ of actions influenced by the shifting political and cultural conditions in specific geographical contexts. Following Brah’s concept of agency, I have been able to understand the women subjects of my study as agents of local practices whose agency has occurred as a result of ongoing contradictions experienced by them as subjects positioned in multiple and shifting intersectional locations in diaspora space (1996, p. 243; also see Collins, 2009, p. 292). I have combined this understanding of agency from Brah with Vinthagen and Johansson’s lens of everyday resistance (2013; 2014) that occurs as a result of the entanglement of power and subjectivities to understand how the women in my study have practiced a form of ‘everyday agency’ based on their particular local wisdom to navigate boundaries of cultural patriarchy and White hegemony.

The following characteristics from Vinthagen and Johansson (2013; 2014) outline the characteristics of everyday resistance, which I have adapted to analyze the agentic practices of the women in my study. First, the agentic practices of everyday resisters are often resourceful, mundanely ordinary and often hidden. These practices undermine power in particular social sites. Often being neither recognizably dramatic nor daringly heroic, the practices include coping,

123 survival and accommodation techniques, making it difficult to perceive them as ‘resistance’, sometimes even by the resisters themselves. Second, these resistance tactics are practised routinely and are so totally integrated into the daily social lives of the resisters that the tactics are indistinguishable from normal living and cultural tradition and often perpetuate some disciplining structural hierarchies. Third, the resistance practices are not static; they are fluid and built on the resistance practices of the older women, and they are creatively modified to suit specific contexts of circumstances, space and time. Fourth, these tactics are often carried out in tandem with more open strategies of resistance. All these characteristics are used in complex combinations by the resisters although consciousness of intent in the agents will vary immensely. Hence, I have used the concept of everyday resistance, augmented by understandings of agency from both Collins and Brah, to analyze the oral autobiographical accounts of the women in my study to investigate their covert and overt tactics that reflect their localized form of agency.

Concepts borrowed from Avtar Brah (1996), Patricia Hill Collins (1998; 2009), and Vinthagen and Johansson (2013; 2014) have provided the theoretical framework for investigating the agency of the fifteen Ismaili women in this study. Brah has contributed the genealogical investigative tools of diaspora, as well as borders and boundaries (with the subtext of ‘home’) embedded in the metaphorical diaspora space. Collins has contributed a filter to decipher the stories of the women through intersectionality as it articulates with the theory of local knowledges as subjugated opposition knowledges that African-American women use to fight oppression. Vinthagen and Johansson have provided the theoretical framework of everyday resistance that subaltern groups utilize to subvert oppressions silently through culturally learned techniques in certain social contexts, identifying forms of agency that may otherwise escape recognition. Through their combined conceptual tools, the theorists have contributed different angles of theoretical vision to bring into focus the form of agency practiced by the group of women in my study through their oral life narratives.

124 Chapter Four: Out of India, Into Africa: Women’s Early Immigration Experiences

“We are never more (and sometimes less) than the coauthors of our own narratives…the story of our lives is always embedded in the story of the communities from which [we] derive our identity” — Alasdair McIntyre (1984, p. 221)

This chapter locates the Khoja Ismaili women who comprise the Grandmothers’ Group of this study on the East African diaspora terrain. It identifies the conditions that prevented newer outside influences from penetrating the lives of these women and lessening the hold of cultural patriarchal mores that defined their daily lives in their families through a Khoja Indian community tradition that was transported from the Indian subcontinent. This chapter further exposes the changing conditions internal to the Ismaili community (through initiatives of Aga Khans III and IV) and external to the Ismaili community (through influences from East African society through self-government). These factors shaped the lives of the Ismaili community and its female members in East African space beginning from the 1950s and led to Ismaili women’s consciousness of their precarious locations within both their families and the larger East African nation, revealing their desire for more autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Drawing on the stories of the five Ismaili women from the Grandmothers’ Group (four of whom are at least first generation East African-born Ismailis) and existing literature on diasporic Indians in Africa, I demonstrate how the following three conditions contributed to the insularity of the immigrant Ismailis and their descendents in East Africa, in turn affecting the circumscription of the Ismaili women in diaspora space: First, preoccupied by the settlement process itself, diaspora Ismailis were focused on little else besides eking out a living while dealing with the hardships of limited resources and rough living conditions until the mid-1950s. This preoccupation resulted in the continuance of the traditional patriarchal cultural practices that accompanied the diaspora Khoja Ismaili community from their place of origin to their place of settlement, reinforcing practices that designated specific roles to its gendered members. Second, as shown by officially recorded history, the Ismaili Khojas in the Indian subcontinent, like other converted Muslim communities, were practising endogamy even before they set off for East Africa, although they still continued to share an appreciable number of Hindu ideologies and

125 practices with other communities. Ismaili Khojas brought this practice of communal in-marrying to East Africa, minimizing the influences of newer stimuli and preserving patriarchal traditional mores for the female members of the community.

Third, these ingrained expectations for women were further crystallized for the participants of my study by the encounter between the Khoja Ismailis and British colonialism. In particular, the colonial racial segregation policies in East Africa, compounded by the meeting between colonial European Darwinian theories and the traditional Indian ‘purity’ beliefs inherited by Ismailis through their Khoja–Indian background, caused the Ismailis to become even more inward- looking, creating further restraints for female members of the community. As a result, the stories of the five Grandmothers in my study reveal that their community insularity subjected them to limited interactions not only with the Europeans and the indigenous Black East Africans, but also with the male members of other immigrant communities from the Indian subcontinent who had also settled in East Africa. The resultant exclusion of newer external cultural influences on Ismailis caused the traditions of the original Khoja Ismaili homeland to endure over a longer period in East Africa, along with their concomitant practices. Utilizing the women’s life narratives, I demonstrate how these three conditions reinforced the insularity of the diaspora Khoja Shia Imami Ismailis, thereby preserving and perpetuating the patriarchal Indian mores defining gender role expectations carried across the Indian Ocean. The five women’s life stories show how this resulted in restraints on their daily lives within their respective families and within the East African Khoja Shia Imami Ismaili community until the 1960s.

The oral life stories of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group in my study spoke to their respective mothers’ lives as pioneering diaspora women who arrived in Africa, not as primary immigrants but as those “as wives, uprooted from their families in South Asia to fulfill their marriage vows and mission of motherhood” (Seidenberg, 1996, p. 98). The narratives of the women in my study reveal that, caught up as they were with their respective families’ endeavours to survive in a new place, these diaspora female pioneers endured economic hardships, lack of resources and harsh living conditions in their new place of settlement. In her study, Dana Seidenberg (1996) postulates that these Asian women pioneers in the East African space chanced upon a heavier burden than the one they had left behind in India. Meanwhile, Zarina Patel, testifies that these diaspora Indians and their families “survived on minimal

126 margins of profit” as they “penetrated right into the hinterland, traded with the African in the reserve” from the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century (1997, p. 18). The narratives shared by the five oldest women in my study reflect these exacting conditions, both in their own lives and those of their respective mothers’ during the first half of the twentieth century in East Africa. The Grandmothers’ accounts reveal how the ingrained traditional cultures that were inherited from the “the converted Isma’ili communities in India [which] synthesized their Hinduistic background with their Islamic beliefs” and which “followed them, like all other Asians, to their countries of adoption in Africa,” which were “steeped in gender biases” (Keshavjee, 2004, p. 216).

Locating Women’s Identity in Their Khoja Ismaili Background

It has proven difficult to discuss the persistent hold of patriarchal ‘Indian’ norms on the Ismaili women in this study without falling into the trap of mobilizing ‘naturalized’ colonial discourses – particularly the hierarchies that have been instituted by British colonialism in their efforts to organize the once diverse and syncretic communities of the Indian subcontinent into fixed and immutable categories for ruling between 1858 and 1947. The Ismaili ‘Khoja’ identity was officially ‘reformulated’ as the Aga Khan Shia Imami Ismaili community identity (shared by the women in my study) in 1866, in a British legal court on the Indian subcontinent, which is discussed further in Chapter One.

These Ismailis descended from the ‘Khojas’ – a small Muslim group originally believed to be members of the Hindu Lohana trading caste – with a fluid identity made up of several religious traditions and strongly “influenced by their Indian cultural ancestry” (Asani, 2001, p. 156). They interpreted the concept of the Imam through “a reformist interpretation of the concept of the avatara from Vaisnava Hinduism” (Asani, 2001, p. 156), which personified the first Imam, Ali, as the “long-awaited tenth avatara of the Hindu deity Vishnu: they understood Islam as the conclusion of ‘Vaisnava Hinduism’” (Asani, 2001, p. 156). Even as late as the nineteenth century, according to their understanding of Ismailism, the Khoja Ismailis found it difficult to perceive themselves as “true Hindus and true Muslims” (Asani, 2001, p. 156); instead, they “claimed various identities simultaneously” (Asani, 2001, p. 157). Like they had done on the Indian subcontinent, having immigrated to East Africa, the Ismaili community continued to follow many Indian Hindu norms that were its inherited legacy: marriages were arranged and

127 were accompanied by a various rituals and ceremonies that reflected their Hindu past; until the twentieth century, widow remarriage remained unthinkable; and the personal law in matters of inheritance followed practices of Hindu “customary law” (Asani, 2001, p. 157.). In addition, Ismaili ritual prayers were recited in Indian languages (Asani, 2001, p. 158; also see Hirji, 2011) and rituals such as the ghat pat (still observed today in Canada) reflected practices of the Shaktipanthi (Asani, 2001). Ginans (poetic hymns) recited daily in Ismaili places of worship – jamatkhanas – spoke of the Imam and pirs (Ismaili missionaries) through Hindu metaphors. Ismaili Khojas in Bombay and Gujarat not only had Hindu names (which they brought to East Africa), but they also “dressed like Lohana Hindus and followed Hindu property law” (Hirji, 2011, pp. 133-134).

Given these contexts, it comes as little surprise that the oral stories of the first two generations of women – the Grandmothers’ Group and the Mothers’ Group – reflect the cultural patriarchal expectations of this legacy in their roles as wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. In particular, their oral life accounts demonstrate how these women’s notions of womanhood was constructed, at least partially, from the patriarchal cultural traditions that were based on Hindu ideology and which were reinforced by the British imperialist impetus to administer their subjects through the institution of ‘caste’ categories. All of the women from the Grandmothers’ Group and some of the women from the Mothers’ Group in this study make direct references to the ideals of womanhood from Hindu religious scriptures/epics and/or reflect on their ties to Hindu identity. For example, Grandmother Sakina proclaimed, “We were more like Hindus in East Africa: none of the men in our family ever attended jamatkhana,” while Grandmother Zuleikha offered, “Our families were more like Hindus; my grandfather was vegetarian, so we ate only vegetarian food, which was cooked by women in our joint family.” Grandmothers Khairoon and Noorbhegum both made more specific references (as did Sakina) to the influences of stories from Hindu epics: Khairoon claimed that “We were told stories from the Mahabharata … these stories played a huge role in our lives … instructing us how to behave as women,” and Noorbhegum remembered how her mother-in-law gave her and her children constant examples of Sita and Draupadi from Ramayana and the Mahabharata, respectively, to guide their lives. Farida from the Mothers’ Group related how she was influenced by her mother’s Hindu practices regarding women’s submissive roles, partaking of vegetarian food, and belief in reincarnation. All of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group attested to being taught the roles of the ideal wife, mother, and woman

128 – either directly or indirectly – which seem to reflect ideal womanhood as personified by women in Hindu ideology, as reflected in the Hindu practice of Stridharma (the code of conduct for a wife). This wifely conduct is summarized by Prabhati Mukherjee:

The basic tenets of Stridharma were fidelity and loyalty with which a married woman served her husband and his family…. There was no other god for a woman but her husband, and by serving him she attained heaven. She must be kind even to an unkind and irate husband, obey him…. She should respect and serve her parents-in-law. A good wife should decorate her house, supervise the cooking, feed members of the family, guests, and servants. She should manage the house and look after the welfare of family members and be kind to the bramana-s. She must be righteous, contented, good-natured, charming, sweet-tongued, cheerful in disposition, disciplined in her habits and faithful to her husband. (1978, p. 13)

Local expectations reflecting this patriarchal Indian tradition – ones that defined Ismaili women’s practices in her family and in her particular roles as wife, mother and daughter-in-law – were echoed in the stories of (especially) the Grandmothers in this study. The women in the Grandmothers’ Group claimed that such patriarchal expectations intensified the arduous experiences of diaspora Ismaili women, mothers and daughters alike. How did these hardships translate into the lives of the five women of the oldest generation in my study?

Zuleikha, whose father’s family had emigrated from Kathiawar at the turn of the nineteenth century, described the effects of deprivation in the lives of her mother and grandmother in her father’s home of modest means in Africa, where she grew up:

He went to India to get married. Then he brought her to Africa, you know. She had a hard life. Life was hard for these Indian women who came to Africa, you know. And they were women. They couldn’t say anything … anything, you know. My grandmother died at fifty- something. But she looked like eighty-something. I remember watching her die, you know. My mother died when she was only twenty-nine, you know. She had five kids before she died. When my last sister was only two and a half. I remember her always not feeling too well. I was only twelve, you know. I don’t think my mother’s family in India even knew my mother was dead … or if they ever found out, you know.

129 The severing of familial cords, along with facing the tough living conditions, lack of amenities, and a generally hard slog, caused the women in Zuleikha’s accounts to age and/or die prematurely. They succumbed to the inflexible expectations of gendered traditional roles in their respective husbands’ homes, irrespective of the cost; there was no other recourse for them in their location according to the old cultural mores that had accompanied them and their families from the Indian subcontinent.

Rashida Keshavjee’s (2004) research on Ismaili women in East Africa concurred with Zuleikha’s account in that some of the former’s respondents (who correspond in age to the oldest generation of women in my study) “had lost their own mothers in infancy and were brought up by relatives” (p. 187). This demonstrated that illness and loss of life for Ismaili women were not uncommon – the result of the austerity of daily existence compounded by the cultural demands of traditional gender expectations. As Zuleikha’s narrative demonstrated, men, unlike women, had the choice to remarry according to those same traditional mores; consequently, her father remarried almost immediately after her mother died, as Zuleikha explains below:

My father married again…I say it was six months’ later. But my sister thinks it was three or four months after [our mother died], you know. What did I know? I was only ten– twelve, you know.

In her account, Zuleikha disclosed how women like her mother and stepmother faced not only external physical hardships owing to the lack of subsistence resources, but also their financial dependency on their husbands in a patriarchal inherited culture, which made them helpless in the face of internal conflicts and abuse:

Life was hard for women. My stepmother was ill too… after a while, you know. Men sometimes took it out on the women, you know. I used to hear [my father and stepmother], you know… in the bedroom. Slap! Slap! I could hear her: “Man-eh maro nahi! Man-eh maro nahi! [“Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!”], you know. A lot of men hit their wives … when they thought wives don’t do what they want, you know. I thought he didn’t hit my own mother. But my older cousins tell me he did. When she didn’t cook what he liked … you know. Sometimes I think there was no money to do that.

130 Zuleikha’s description of her step-mother’s position was reminiscent of her early description of her mother’s gendered location in a patriarchal tradition, which was summed up by Zuleikha as “And they were women. They couldn’t say anything … anything, you know.” Her research of “Asian” diaspora women in East Africa led Seidenberg to draw the following conclusion about the location of such women, whose lives were regulated by entrenched patriarchal cultural traditions that had followed the diaspora Indians across the Indian Ocean divide to East Africa:

What is well-known is that the ideology of the day, the glue of shared experience camouflaging the fundamental inequality of existing power relations between [Asian] men and women, had around the turn of the century reached its full-blown height. Nowhere was this gendered ideology stronger than in the overseas European colonies where the distance between modern feminism and social reality was enormous. In these conservative port towns along the East African Coast – Mombasa, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar and such provincial hinterland colonial capitals as Nairobi and Kampala – Asian women continued under the influence of a social construct deeply rooted in India’s mythical past. (1996, p. 94)

While Zuleikha’s narrative exemplified the fate of women who were totally dependent on their husbands within the culturally-defined space that was allocated to them, Noorbhegum’s family story regarding the deprivations suffered by women in East Africa just after the first decade of the twentieth century demonstrated the fate of Ismaili women who lost the ‘protection’ of their men through untimely death in an alien environment, especially where immigrants often could not ward off new illnesses. Noorbhegum described the plight of her then-six-year-old mother, when her mother (Noorbhegum’s maternal grandmother) was forced to take over the running of a small business in a coastal East African town after the death of her father (Noorbhegum’s grandfather):

Then my mother’s father died, you see. He got some illness, you see. But he had started a small [retail] store. Selling cloth, you see. My naanima [maternal grandmother] helped him sometimes. But my ma was just six. She had a sister … four years old, and a younger brother. So, my grandmother had to take over the store. Full-time. She was very young. My mother had to look after the children … she cooked … she cleaned … washed clothes … at

131 six. Naanima took care of the store, you see. When they were older, my uncle and aunt attended the jamatkhana school and learned to read and write [in Gujarati], you see. But, my ma … she never learned to read and write. Her mother could read and write. But not my mother.

Seidenberg’s inquiry on diaspora Indian women in East Africa reveals that although “there were few Asian women in private enterprise and even fewer in public life” around 1914 “when women were forced to pick up the pieces and become the bread-winners in their families, in a short time they had to acquire the skills they had been prevented from learning” (1996, p. 100). In Noorbhegum’s view, during the settlement process, while her maternal grandmother – a widow (to whom remarriage was not an option) – took on a role outside of the gendered expectations, her daughter – Noorbhegum’s mother –fell into the culturally expected gendered role of running the household at an incredibly young age. As a result, Noorbhegum lamented that in spite of the availability of a basic literacy program (through the Ismaili religious school), Noorbhegum’s mother remained illiterate. Other participants in my project attested to the harsh circumstances in their childhood homes in East Africa. Khairoon recounted how, when her father (who owned his small business) died prematurely in a small town in the East African hinterland, her father’s younger brother, who had been working for her father, seized the business. Khairoon’s mother had no recourse in the small local Ismaili community, among whom gender biases steeped in the traditional Indian mores neither condoned property being passed on to a woman who had no male heirs nor granted her the choice to run her own business. Khairoon’s story also depicted the rudimentary living conditions she and her four sisters faced in ‘Kakah’s home’, where they spent their childhood until they married:

There were only two rooms in the house. We were five sisters and all that. Kakah [Uncle] and Kakih [Aunt] had one room, understand? The five of us shared the other. Three of us slept on mattresses on the floor. The other two [slept] on the only bed in the room. And at night … during those days, scorpions and other poisonous insects came out. There were dirt floors in the room. So every Tuesday when they collected cow droppings from the roads … they mix these with sand. Then they spread the mixture on all the dirt floors on the house, understand? No, no. All the furniture would be moved outside first. Left outside in the sun. To kill germs, you understand?

132 The grass cows eat makes their droppings good. For killing germs. So the dung, when it is drying in the sun, you can see those, what do we call them? Yes, worms. Worms. You can see them coming out of the droppings. Once the droppings are dry completely, they mix them with sand. Then spread this [mixture] on the floors. Every Tuesday, they would collect the cow dung from roads. I think that’s when the farmers pass through the town on Tuesdays with them [cows]. All the houses were made of dirt. The roof was metal. The rest was dirt. We lived in the rooms at the back. The small front room was the shop, understand?

These basic living conditions for diaspora Ismaili families were not just confined to small towns in the hinterland; poverty and lack of finances forced Ismaili women, in their roles as housewives and mothers, to cook and bring up children in cramped places in the main towns in East Africa. This exposed them to other kinds of dangers as well. Sakina’s narrative provides insights into how, fraught with danger, the small spaces that were shared by large numbers of family members often became exacerbated by the myriads of tasks women juggled daily. In the case of Sakina’s family, such a circumstance proved to be fatal when Sakina was about twelve. She related how her mother was busy with housework and minding several young children simultaneously when one of Sakina’s brothers, just a toddler then, chanced upon a bottle of kerosene that was used to light lamps and small stoves and drank from it; needless to say, he died immediately.

The narratives of the five Grandmothers revealed that these early diaspora Ismaili women faced multiple hardships. Loss of small Ismaili businesses in their place of settlement resulted in women having to live apart from their husbands and take up the full responsibilities for their children and their in-laws, as well as working outside the home to supplement incomes. Fatma provided such a tale from her childhood in the early 1940s when her father lost his duka (small retail shop) in a small town in Uganda and had to drive transport trucks between Uganda and the neighbouring Belgium-colonized African territories. Fatma described her observations of her mother: “she ‘lived on edge’ because the murrum roads between the territories were narrow and deadly for drivers, particularly during the rains.” Fatma divulged that her mother often voiced her concern; if her husband died, how would she support her family? Fatma’s narratives also disclosed that while her father lived away from home for long periods, her mother had to work hard to take care of the children, her husband’s parents and their extended families (as was

133 expected of her in her gender and location according to the cultural mores), and supplement her husband’s income by taking in sewing.

These childhood life accounts of the five oldest Khoja Ismaili diaspora women in my study cover the period between the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century. The women reveal how their respective mothers’ lives and their own childhoods were so taken up with battling the hardships in East Africa that they had little time or energy for anything other than to fall in line with the expectations of a patriarchal culture that exacted from its women a submissive and uncomplaining role. In her study of East African Ismaili women, which corresponded in time and age to the five oldest Ismaili women in my study, Keshavjee describes life during this period as “fraught with difficulties of dependency, subservience, lack of economic resources and bitter struggles with regard to basic subsistence needs” (2010, p. 102). In addition to corroborating that “most of these women came from a world in which their spectrum of experiences included a required submissive role for women in the Indian culture,” Keshavjee also identified “[colonially-induced] political strife and racial segregation in an African country” as adding to the burden of the women (2010, p. 102). These colonial policies of racial segregation in East Africa contributed to further seclusion of Ismaili women within their traditional patriarchal culture that required specific roles of its women within their families and in the community, which, in turn, prevented their exposure to newer cultural influences in East Africa.

The Effects of Cultural Isolation on the Women in the Grandmothers’ Group

Through their accounts, the women in the Grandmothers’ Group revealed that they were very much isolated within their own cultural community between 1922 and 1951. As young women, all of the participants in the Grandmothers’ Group, like most of their Ismaili counterparts, attended gender-segregated Ismaili community schools for girls between 5-9 years old. Upon immigration, Sakina, the youngest Grandmother participant, continued her education at a girls’ government-run Indian school in Kampala from about 1945 until 1950. Both Khairoon and Fatma indicated that they attended Ismaili community primary schools in small hinterland East African towns within small insular Ismaili communities, while Zuleikha and Noorbhegum attended Ismaili community schools in larger towns, which were also surrounded by insular Ismaili communities. Khairoon, who attended an Ismaili community school for eight years, responded to the issue of the racial composition of her school only after she was directly

134 questioned about it, and the shortness of her response on the issue ‘spoke volumes’. By contrast, her lengthier explanation for sharing a class with three boys signaled that that situation was far from ‘normal’ in most Ismaili community schools during that time, warranting a lengthier explanation:

No, no. There were no Africans in my class … or in the school. No Africans. There were no Europeans either. No. But we were three Ismaili girls and three Ismaili boys in my class. Because our school was small, you understand. And there were not many students in the higher grades. But the teachers were strict. We were not allowed to talk to the boys or sit near them, you understand. Although we wore short dresses [she extends her hand almost to her ankles] our heads had to be covered at all times with our pacharees [long head scarves]. Understand?

As evidenced from her stories, Khairoon attended school sometime between 1927-1938, when schools were racially and ethnically separated and run by the Ismaili community for children of its own members, staffed by its own members or members of the larger Indian community, and attached to the local jamatkhanas or located close by. Likewise, as there were separate schools for local Africans and Europeans, as per the racial policies of the colonial administration and community preferences, the children of different races very rarely (if at all) socialized on an equal basis during childhood. H. S. Morris contends that in Uganda, education was developed along “lines of racial segregation,” which “was partly … a decision of practical convenience and was seen as such by most Indians” rather than being “one of considered racial prejudice” (1968, p. 148-149). Be that as it may, although most Ismaili boys and girls attended separate community schools, Khairoon’s small town had to run mixed gender classes in the higher (primary) grades in her school, which was a departure from the traditional cultural norms; however, it was done to accommodate the lack of student numbers and the scarcity of teachers in the hinterland.

The fact that Khairoon (and other women in this study) constantly referred to the indigenous Black people of East Africa as ‘Africans’ in their stories, and did not use the same descriptor for themselves but instead referred to themselves as ‘Indians’ or ‘Ismailis’, spoke to the question of both identity and identification by race. Researcher Aly Kassam-Remtulla attests to this identification by race for Ismailis when he observes, “While Ismailism is a religion, for me and

135 many other Khojas, it is also about a racial and cultural community” (1999, Chapter 4, p. 13). Kassam-Remtulla underscores the significance of racial segregation to Ismaili identification in general when he concludes from his research on the Ismaili community that Asians in East Africa have a legacy of separating themselves from the indigenous population, since “the Asian experience in East Africa has been profoundly shaped by occupying and maintaining a middle position” (1999, Chapter 3, p. 11). He explains, “since achieving European status is unlikely, Asians are careful not to fall into the African category” (1999, Chapter 3, p. 11).

The only capacity in which all women mentioned a connection to the local African people in their stories was in the form of a daily domestic working relationship. The Grandmothers’ accounts relate how Asians employed local Africans in their homes as domestics and how their men folk employed them in their small businesses in positions such as waiters, bakers, cleaners, and general workers. Fatma related briefly how once they had acquired a little financial stability in the late 1950s, her husband took her and the children for a holiday to the beach in Mombasa by car and they took along their male domestic worker so that they could relax while he took care of the day-to-day chores. All of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group mentioned how they used to employ the locals as ‘servants’ and ‘ayahs’ (baby-minders) once their economic status improved in the 1950s, mostly in their “husbands’ homes.” However, this relationship – although it involved daily encounter with the indigenous Africans – hardly warranted much social interaction on equal terms between the Ismaili women and their paid domestics. At the same time, the women’s stories revealed that this relationship was far from a distant ‘clinical’ one. Sakina’s daughter, Shirin, laughingly recounted how her mother employed an ayah for years who did all the household chores but often bullied her mother and got away with it. Similarly, both Sakina’s and Khairoon’s stories very briefly mentioned the industrious indigenous women they relied on in their small tailoring businesses in Kampala in the mid-late 1960s. Zuleikha’s daughter, Zareena, recounted how her mother used to ‘protect’ the local Africans who were employed in their home from a husband who was short-tempered and demanding. “My mother”, Zareena recalled, “always sympathized with our servants when my father was harsh with them. She had lived through Apartheid in South Africa and had stones thrown at her by White boys. She knew what it felt like.” Khairoon talked very briefly about how her family’s “African night watchman” used to intercede on her behalf when her husband beat her, and Noorbhegum recounted how every night she used to feed the night watchman who were employed to guard

136 their house along with their neighbours’: “It would be cold at night, and he needed some nourishment to be able to stay awake,” she explained.

Zuleikha was the only woman in the Grandmothers’ Group who had an equal business liaison, albeit briefly, with a local African woman. She narrated how she went into a daycare business in partnership with an ‘African’ woman for a couple of years in the mid-1960s, before the woman was impregnated by a parent of a student at their school, which was attached to one of the local churches. Zuleikha explained how, as a result of the incident, she lost her contract to run the daycare programme through the church facilities and had to find another location to accommodate her students. Such examples demonstrated that the relationship between these women and the autochthonous peoples employed mostly in Indian households were more complex than the women were able to articulate; the women’s location in the racially structured space in East Africa that ‘naturalized’ their separation from that of indigenous Africans did not equip them with the language to be able describe this complexity. What appeared to surface from the narratives of these five oldest women in my study was that the unequal footing of this relationship meant there was little influence from the indigenous cultures to attenuate the strength of the patriarchal traditions that reigned unchecked in the lives of these Ismaili women.

Likewise, there was a general absence of Europeans in the stories of the five Ismaili women in the Grandmothers’ Group. Fatma addressed this limited European–Ismaili social interface in East Africa with, “No, we never had much contact with Europeans. Only at Christmas time when we would send gifts to them. You know, to the Europeans … they issued our trading licenses each year. Before independence.” Sakina’s daughter, Shirin, points out only that her mother sent her and her sisters to an all White private school. Perhaps there was a slight exception in the cases of Noorbhegum and Zuleikha. Noorbhegum’s daughter, Nurjhan, talked briefly about how her father (Noorbhegum’s husband) employed a White English woman in their new clothes’ boutique for a couple of years in the late-1950s, before he was forced to declare bankruptcy: “We left for Kampala and we never heard from the woman again, although we did socialize with her and her family for a couple of years until 1959,” Nurjhan recalls. Similarly, Zuleikha mentioned in passing a few encounters with Europeans: she worked briefly for an Italian ‘boss’; she employed a “White woman to play the piano” at her (church) daycare facility in post- independence Kampala briefly in the late-1960s; and she employed “a White woman at [her]

137 [daycare] school in 1971 just before the Asian Ugandan exodus.” Khairoon talked about her brief experience as a (unqualified) librarian’s assistant at a modern Aga Khan Secondary school in Kampala at the end of the 1960s – a school which was administrated by a White male principal. She qualified, “but I had very little actual social contact with him,” and then added, “but he knew of my (good) reputation.” On the whole, the stories from these five women participants demonstrate that they had little social interaction with the Europeans in East Africa: their lives were more insular, at least until the mid-1960s, and were bound within the traditional gender expectations of an Indian culture that had travelled with their diaspora community to East Africa.

If the deeply ingrained values of the Indian subcontinent endured among the Ismailis in East Africa as a result of the diaspora Ismaili community’s preoccupation with hardships during settlement and as a result of the racially structured space, the contemporaneous encounter between European Darwinian theories and Indian purity beliefs that were inherited from the Ismailis’ Indian cultural background contributed no less to the longevity of the practices of gender restrictions for these Khoja Ismaili women in East Africa. The result of this on the Ismaili community, as made apparent by the life narratives of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group, was to make it more restrictive and insular. This had at least a two-fold effect on the lives of the Ismaili women in my study. First, as a result of minimal exposure to other cultural influences, and compounded by the lingering Indian ideology that based the status of its male members “on female chastity of their sisters and daughters whom they gave in marriage and secondarily on that of the women they took as wives” (Seidenberg, 1996, p. 94), the discourse of patriarchal traditions were kept alive, which resulted in a close supervision of female sexuality. As reflected in the narratives of the oldest generation of women in my study, this ‘supervision’ was displayed through the early training that was provided for these women in certain gender-based skills in their respective parents’ homes, followed by early arranged marriages for them. Second, the purity beliefs that were inherited by the East African Khoja Ismailis from their cultural traditions contributed to the practice of racial and ethnic endogamy, or the practice of community in- marrying, among the Ismailis (Morris, 1968, p. 310). In turn, this contributed to further isolation of Ismaili women through cultural boundaries that were impenetrable from the kinds of external influences that may well have moderated the hold of the patriarchal traditions.

138 Purity Ideals: Training Girls for Marriage

This patriarchal Indian ideology, linking the prestige of its men to the purity of their women, directed the lives of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group towards early arranged marriages within the Ismaili community. These were preceded first by early training for the roles they were required to fulfill as chaste wives, respectful daughters-in-law, and dedicated mothers. In other words, these women were groomed to move from the supervision of their fathers to the supervision of their husbands to ensure that their ‘good’ behaviour would contribute to the good reputation of their male relatives. This had the effect of removing aspirations of independent volitions from the women’s lives, which is corroborated by Seidenberg’s research on East African Indian women:

The segregation of [Indian] women [in East Africa] into their own spheres was fundamental to the organization of social space; the family and marriage were the two basic concepts that determined the status of Indian women in society…. From birth little girls were given a tradition saturated education, taught as they were to regard marriage as the only acceptable career open to them – that the most important thing in life was finding a husband, and after that becoming the perfect housewife and mother. (1996, p. 95)

The life accounts of all five Grandmother participants in my study corresponded with Seidenberg’s evocation of this culturally defined “sphere” that was assigned to diaspora Ismaili women living within the traditional Khoja Ismaili organization of social space in East Africa between the years 1922 to 1951 – the years encapsulating the time during which the oldest Grandmother participant was born through the year when the youngest Grandmother married. My direct inquiry regarding the choice women had to do something other than marry elicited shock of incredulity from both of the oldest Grandmothers in the participating group, Khairoon and Noorbhegum. Khairoon exclaimed, “What else was there to do for women at that time [except get married and have children]?” Noorbhegum accentuated the traditional customary relationship between the act of marriage for women and the reputation of the patrilineal family:

It would be a blot against my father’s family name! If I did not marry for any reason, you see. As if no one wanted to marry me because my father’s family was not good enough. Or that I had a bad reputation. That I gave my family a bad name, you see.

139 Here, Noorbhegum unintentionally discloses how the discourses of purity ideals inherited by the Khoja Ismaili community from its past meant that sexual purity of the daughters lent status to the patrilineal family. Additionally, both the words and the attitudes of these two women, which were echoed by Zuleikha, Fatma and Sakina, underscored the extant discourses of the time in the East African space reflecting the ‘unthinkability’ of choice for Ismaili girls. In fact, these women’s very status depended on the maintenance of the good reputation of their respective families, which marriage and subsequent domestic life would help the women achieve. Even Sakina, the youngest of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group, who married a decade after Khairoon, in 1951, confessed that looking back she realized that she, much like her friends, had been reared to consider marriage as the only ‘pre-ordained’ path in her life; she explained that any other option would have been “impossible to even imagine.” All of the Grandmother participants in my study substantiated the primary role played by a family’s reputation in making a girl marriage-marketable. All of them also described in detail the traditional practice of checking out the reputation of the prospective wife’s family – the father’s good name – as the foremost criterion for families seeking prospective wives for their sons. This standard was echoed in the stories of all five women, elaborated by Fatma thus:

Girls with fair skin were valued more. Even when parents from our tradition went to check out the [prospective] daughter-in-law, they would say, ‘She’s too dark’ or ‘My, she’s so beautiful [fair]!’ They did choose on that basis. But, according to our old traditions, what was even more important was the reputation of the family. Who her parents were. What people said about the reputation of the father … of grandfather. What the community said about her mother. What the father did for a living. Only then would they even look at the girl. Only then would they even consider [the shade of] her skin. Good parents … mothers with a good reputation were those who had trained their daughters well. To keep the father’s good name. To be good wives. Be obedient daughters-in-law. To fit into the husband’s family. No matter what.

The narratives of all five women echoed Fatma’s introspection. Fairness, equated with beauty, was an important quality, but the reputation of the father and often of the grandfather too topped the list of the criteria for the bride-selection search, and the girl, once married, was to maintain her reputation by being a compliant wife and mother “No matter what” the circumstances.

140 Noorbhegum, a very fair woman with light-brown eyes, described how her future jeth (husband’s older brother) saw her at a jamatkhana during a visit to her town, and only after he had checked out the reputation of her father from the local Ismaili friends and acquaintances did he advise his father to arrange a marriage between Noorbhegum and his younger brother. Noorbhegum went to great lengths to explain that the maintenance of the good name of the father’s family – and, once married, of the husband and his family – was given paramount emphasis in these women’s lives. Khairoon described the fate of an older sister who was caught by Kakih (Aunt) when she was receiving a love note from an Ismaili boy: Her sister’s life changed for the worse. Kakih slapped her for every minor slip-up in the house, often put hot chilies in her mouth, and kept her indoors and doing more than her share of the household drudgery work, which was always minutely criticized. Her sister’s childhood ended abruptly in an early arranged marriage, demonstrating that she could not veer from the traditional gendered expectations and give the family a bad name by engaging in unsanctioned, self-directed behaviour that could cast aspersions not only on her sexual purity but also on the good name of her Kakah (Uncle). Sakina, meanwhile, elaborated on how once she got married at sixteen, her mother was forced to oversee the running of the small bar and restaurant that had been started by her husband (which served mainly indigenous African and poor Indian clientele) and which was located in what was considered a less reputable part of town. Since the business was doing poorly and Sakina’s father was forced to work as a clerk in another town to make ends meet, her mother had to step in to run the business. Sakina explained how a woman working at that time, in the mid-1950s, and especially one running a bar/restaurant, was seen as a blot against the family’s reputation. Consequently, Sakina was forbidden by her husband to visit her mother or take the children to visit her.

On the other hand, the women’s stories at times also suggest that they may have regarded marriage as a way of gaining some personal control over their own lives, which would have been unattainable in their ‘fathers’ homes’. Zuleikha enunciated this hope. She confessed that although marriage for her was an inevitable certainty, she did indeed want to marry to escape the drudgery she had observed her mother and stepmother suffer in her father’s home. She claimed to see marriage perhaps as a way to improve her own condition as somebody’s wife. At the end of this story, Zuleikha shook her head and, accompanied by a self-deriding laugh, observed:

141 When I got married I didn’t even think of what would happen to me, you know. I just thought I am getting married. I’ll be O.K. I will listen to my husband, you know. I’ll be a good wife. All that kind of stuff.

Zuleikha’s words demonstrate that she had been taught that, as a “good wife,” her place was to yield to the will of the husband, in accordance with the cultural mores. However, she expressed the hope that her behaviour as an obedient wife would lead her husband to grant her some choices in her married life, which she had seen denied in her ‘father’s home’. Simultaneously, her attitude when delivering this narration clearly conveyed that things had not worked out for her in her married life as she had ‘naively’ hoped.

The control over female sexuality, through training that preceded marriage to make women marriage-marketable in East Africa between the years 1922-1951, began early in childhood, as evinced in the life accounts of the five oldest Ismaili women in my study. Their narratives indicated that the molding of girls for marriage was achieved through skills-training in cooking, sewing, cleaning and general housekeeping that were given greater prominence over formal schooling. This informal education emphasized the instillation of attitudes such as compliance, obedience, devotion, and submission, as well as the acquisition of particular domestic skills to enhance the girls’ eligibility and boost the reputation of their families. In the narrative below, Khairoon describes a typical day in her childhood, enumerating the daily domestic chores assigned to her and her four sisters that taught them their place and function through daily practices to prepare them for marriage:

We [she and her four older sisters] used to cook. In the afternoon, clean the kitchen. And the boy [their part-time male domestic help] used to wash the dishes and the clothes. We sisters had cooking turns, you understand. One day Sultan would cook, another day Gulzar. But we all had to help though. Sultan, the oldest, before she married, mended our clothes and altered passed-down clothes for us. She also helped Kakah [Uncle] in the store everyday. So, whoever was not cooking that day had to clean and tidy up the outside and the inside of the house. Then we would have to take up our knitting. And crocheting. Understand? We knitted entire bedspreads. Complete with animal designs … horses and

142 elephants … we learned to do that. And curtains. We crocheted curtains with beads. With peacock patterns.

Khairoon’s voice still carried traces of the pride she had felt in carrying out so commendably and without question the skills she had been taught to prepare her for early marriage and to enable her to carry out her expected roles as a wife and mother. On the other hand, Zuleikha’s daughter, Zareena, mentioned how Zuleikha’s interest in a career was quelled by a father who asked her instead to learn to “navigate your pots and pans” starting at age twelve, bribing her sometimes with some pocket money as an incentive. The life narratives offered by Fatma and Noorbhegum in relation to marriage preparation closely resembled those of Khairoon; they described early preparation of marriage through practices that taught them how to be quietly compliant, uncomplaining, industrious, and devoted future wives, daughters-in-law and mothers. Keshavjee (2004) sheds some light on this topic when she describes the location of Ismaili girls in East Africa in the early part of the twentieth century as one where they were also seen “largely as human resources for doing domestic chores, be it looking after the younger brothers and sisters, cooking, cleaning” (p. 188) so that, in Seidenberg’s words, “if exterior formal schooling for women was minimal, the educational experience at home was intense; stubborn adherence to lived experience passed down from generation to generation” (1996, p. 106).

Khoja Ismailis and Racial and Communal Exclusivity

The notion of racial exclusivity based on inherited cultural traditions from the Indian subcontinent was not new to the diaspora Indians; they brought this notion with them to Africa, where it received a further boost through its encounter with the European Darwinian race theories and the colonial organization of East African space along racial lines. It manifested itself in East Africa in the form of endogamy, or racial/ethnic in-marrying, within the respective diaspora Indian sectarian communities (Morris, 1957, p. 310). Rasna Warah, a diaspora Indian East African reporter and author clarifies the view that “racism is far too ‘developed’ a concept for the average Asian whose vision of the world rarely goes beyond caste and religion” so that “Asians are not so much racialist as they are communalist” (2005, p. 218-219). Based on that, she concludes that because of the distinctions in East Africa between the values of the different diaspora Indian ‘castes and sects’, it became more problematic for Asians to “transcend racial barriers” so the “caste, religion and European Social Darwinist theories of human development

143 made the Asian look at the African as a separate and unequal entity” (Warah, 2005, p. 219). Warah conveys the depth of this traditional antipathy for dark skin by tracing its centrality in the caste system through the connection of its roots to the invasion of the Indian subcontinent by the fair-skinned Aryans from Central Europe during fifteenth-century B.C. Through this connection, Warah underscores the stronghold of what she terms “caste ideology” in the Asian psyche, which equates lighter skin colour with Aryan descent and therefore with higher caste pedigree among Indians in general:

Caste prejudices therefore, easily [sic] translates into colour prejudice in the Indian context. This explains to some extent why intermarriage with whites is still acceptable to many Indians, but such a marriage if the partner is African or of darker complexion is not. It also explains why integration of Asians in Africa has been slow compared to integration of Asians in say, Britain or Canada. (2005, p. 221)

In his research on Khoja Ismaili East Africans in the Kenya of 1990s, Aly Kassam-Remtulla (1999) concludes that while all his informants preferred for their children to marry within the Ismaili community, they also all provided the same hierarchy of racial preference – one that had been also repeated to him by parents – which was for Asian over European over Black, in that order.

Since Gujarat and Punjab diaspora Indians “carried with them concepts of ritual pollution and divine purity” (Pant, cited in Seidenberg, 1996, p. 95), this Indian-Hindu ideology became a deterrent to social contact or relationships outside of a particular Indian ethnic community or race. In fact, the diaspora Indians “feared becoming impure, unclean, just being too near the black African” (Pant cited in Seidenberg, 1996, p. 95). Furthermore, the taboos attached to deviating from the practices of the ancestral Indian purity ideals meant that “if social mixing between Indian women and men of different Asian sectarian groups or Europeans was thought to be an abomination, no two groups were farther apart on the sociological spectrum than Asian women and African men” (Seidenberg, 1996, p. 97). This is also reinforced by Khoja Ismaili researcher Ali Asani, who underscores that Khoja Ismailis, even during the post-colonial period (post 1962-1963) in East Africa, were unable to give up their racial biases because “notwithstanding the Aga Khan’s policies toward integration, bonds with their ancestral [Indian]

144 culture have proved too strong to break” (2001, p. 164). This ingrained relationship between the Ismailis’ ‘communal’ or ‘racial’ biases with their Khoja past is underscored by H. S. Morris, who, using the 1899 consensus of Gujarat, points out that local Hindu Muslim converts (such as the Ismailis) on the Indian subcontinent “tended to be endogamous” (1968, p. 75). As was the case with other diaspora Indians, Ismailis immigrated to East Africa with this preference of racial and/or communal exclusivity (Kassam-Remtulla, 1999). This preference for ethnic and racial exclusivity was further buttressed in East Africa’s racially structured space during the colonial period. At the same time, the colonial administration’s need for the diaspora Indians’ trading activities in East Africa guided its policies regarding the Indians. Although the colonial administrative policies prevented the participation of diasporic Indians in political activities, it freed them from external pressures that may have caused the various Indian communities to come together politically, and it perhaps encouraged more inter-marrying between the different Indian communities. Morris (1968) reports that of approximately 190,000 Indians living in East Africa in 1950, approximately 111,000 were Hindu and 79,000 were Muslim, while in Uganda just before 1950, the Indian communities contained 20,441 Hindus, 11,172 Indian Muslims (of which the Shia Muslims numbered 6,648), 1,211 Ithna’asharis, and 347 Daudi Bohoras, compared to 2,573 Sunnis. Generally, diaspora Indians were small-scale traders with dukas (small retail shops) and often used their profits to open more small dukas in other nearby towns, employing members of their own communities or their own relatives, keeping their respective communities exclusive and insular.

All five women in the Grandmothers’ Group related how their fathers or grandfathers came to Africa as a result of such a family arrangement. Zuleikha’s story resonates with those from Khairoon, Fatma, Noorbhegum, and Sakina. Zuleikha substantiated this point as she explained how “Our families came from India … they were very poor. My grandfather came first. Then his brothers followed.” Fatma described how her father’s older brother came to East Africa first, followed by her father once the older brother had found stable employment. Sakina recalled, “My father-in-law came [to East Africa] alone and then he called all his brothers one by one.” This system of “the use of communal and kinship ties” (Seidenberg, 1996, p. 26) not only had advantages for the Indians over the Arabs and the indigenous Africans in trade itself but it also helped maintain social exclusivity of each diaspora ethnic community. Seidenberg reports that in 1967, ninety percent of the 281 Asian co-owned businesses around Nairobi were “shared

145 exclusively between [male] members of the same family or sect,” thereby helping to support close patriarchal relationships with their dependents while maintaining the exclusivity of diaspora Indian communities (1996, p. 26). Khairoon showed how her father’s uncles and cousins bought wholesale goods from one another in East Africa to sell in their shops:

We had lots of guests at home. Often. There was this other beautiful neighbouring town where my other uncle lived. In A______, we also had cousins. Lots of them. We would spread sheets on the ground and they would sleep there. Then they would leave after buying some goods from the shop. Others would come from V______, to buy goods. There was another uncle there with his shop. And cousins.

This relationship maintained kinship ties, but it also strengthened Ismaili inter-community relations by keeping out influences from other ethnic communities.

This context explains why the stories of the five women in the Grandmothers’ Group were silent on the topic of inter-racial alliances and marriages. The segregation, and close supervision, they experienced added to the chasm between the social/economic worlds of the three different races and made the possibility of marriages between Ismaili women and indigenous Africans or Europeans unthinkable. If interracial marriage was not within the ken of these women, neither was the possibility of marriage between members of the larger Indian community in East Africa, which was composed of different religious/sectarian groups. Early marriages arranged by Ismaili parents within the community took care of any deviation from the social expectations of the Ismaili community regarding marriages. All of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group in my study were married off in their teens, except for Noorbhegum, who married at age 18; Khairoon, Zuleikha, Fatma, and Sakina were all married at age 16, and they were each engaged for a year prior to their respective marriages. By the time these five women were to marry, their prospective husbands came from a pool of Ismaili men who were themselves East African-born Indian Ismailis. All of the women attested to leading very closely supervised lives prior to their marriages, but four of the women confirmed that they were at least allowed to see their prospective husbands once, in the company of their parents, before the official confirmations of their respective engagements. These brief encounters between the betrotheds, however, did not mean that the girl had the choice to accept or refuse to marry the man who had been selected by

146 the parents. Keshavjee (2005) maintains that all Ismaili girls during the time the women in the Grandmothers’ Group married did so in their mid-teens, and some were neither consulted nor even allowed to meet their prospective husbands prior to the event. Khairoon, who married in 1940, related this predicament; she recounted how she was neither consulted nor had even set eyes on her prospective fiancé and met him only after her official engagement to him: “That was the traditional [Indian] custom for many women in my time,” she shrugged and said in a flat voice, as if to indicate that according to the age-old Indian mores, she had no control over such important decisions in her life. She described her engagement to the man she married only a few months later:

He in town only recently – three months, I think. From India, you understand? When I went to khane for the Punje Bhenu majlis [a religious prayer service exclusively for girls and women], my friends said to me, ‘Khairi, it’s your engagement tomorrow! Tomorrow is your engagement! I thought, ‘My engagement? They’re just teasing me. Let them! But the Mukhi and Kambarya [the two officially appointed local religious leaders of the Ismaili community] came home the next day to get my signature … to make it official, understand? I signed. No, I didn’t know what he looked like. When we used to go to jamatkhana, our pacherees [long head scarves] draped our heads to cover half our faces, understand? We walked close to Kakih [Aunt] with our heads bowed and our eyes on the ground.

Shirin Walji, a Tanzanian Ismaili historian, has been forthright in pointing out that not only did Ismailis marry exclusively within the community, but also that Ismailis marriages were very rare between members of differing social status within the community. According to Walji (1974), marriages were arranged to benefit the two families through the union of their children, rather than being a result of the compatibility of the marrying couple. Morris cites the cultural tradition of such arranged marriages as “one of the most formidable obstacles to the amalgamation of these immigrant Indian communities with one another or with other sections of the population” (1957, p. 309).

Fatma demonstrated how young girls who were reaching a marriageable age were often removed from environments that would tempt them to cross community borders and encourage cross-

147 community partnerships. Fatma exemplifies this below as she recalls the decade when she and her husband lived in a small town in Uganda with their three children:

My husband and his brothers were in business together. They were beginning to do well. So they bought another small food store in T______, and sent us there, you know, to manage it. That’s the first time I lived away from my in-laws. There were very few Ismailis in T______. But I made friends with my neighbours who were Punjabis. I used to socialize with the Punjabi women, you know, like exchange recipes, … knitting and crocheting … have tea together sometimes. And our businesses there were doing well. But we had to move once the children became older. They needed to socialize with other Ismaili children. So we moved to Kampala, where there was a larger Ismaili community. But we sent away Farida (her only daughter) a year before we moved, to live my husband’s brother and sister-in-law. She was already thirteen. We felt she needed to be around Ismailis. So we moved her there a year before we could sell and move.

The Ismaili practices of the times regarding pubescent girls were made explicit in Fatma’s story; pubescent girls needed to be shielded from social interactions with males from other Asian communities. This tradition was of such significance to Fatma’s family that in spite of their robust businesses in T______, they (with the undisputed sanction of the husbands’ brothers, who were his business partners) moved to Kampala where larger numbers of Ismailis resided, and where her daughter could attend Ismaili schools.

Khairoon related a rather extreme example depicting the policing of ethnic borders through marriage:

[My sisters] told me Ma [my mother] was dead. Understand? For years and years I believe that. But I used to have this dream … often. Especially when I was quite young. I used to ask my older sisters: ‘I have this dream where I’m crying, “I want my ma! I want to go to Ma!”And I am wearing this dress of blue net material.’ But my sisters used to tell me, ‘It’s only a dream. And you know dreams are not real’. But I discovered this was true. Years later. Nobody told me the truth for a long, long time. Understand?

148 In this narrative, Khairoon relates how when her father died (when she was not yet two), her Kakah (her father’s younger brother) seized her father’s small business in a East African town and turned Khairoon’s mother out of their home with her five children, putting them on a small stipend that barely paid for their upkeep. Being unable to feed her children and surviving on the charity of neighbours and friends, Khairoon’s mother took up the offer of marriage from a Muslim-Punjabi man who was prepared to convert to Ismailism and adopt her five children. Khairoon’s Kakah, who occupied a high position on the Aga Khan Council in their hometown, refused the man’s proposal for marriage to his widowed sister-in-law and vetoed the Muslim- Punjabi man’s request for conversion to Ismailism. Outraged by the request, Khairoon’s uncle sent a man to snatch the five girls (aged 12 and under) and bring them to his home. Abandoned financially and cut off from her children, Khairoon’s mother married the Punjabi man and was able to stay in touch with her four older daughters through an uncle, once the daughters were married and had moved out of Kakah’s home. Khairoon, who was the youngest, was never told the truth to spare her pain; however, her pain was evident during the interview when she lamented many times, “I never saw my mother. I never knew what she even looked like.” As Seidenberg so aptly puts it, “as a result of exclusionary colonial laws exacerbated by ideological commitments transmitted by sectarian group elites, few would risk stepping out of their sectarian group or commercial circle” (1996, p. 25). Ismaili women’s lives remained insular; the upholders of this community insularity were able, no doubt, to put to use the few instances of the consequences suffered by women like Khairoon’s mother to deter other women from stepping out of the ascribed boundaries that had been designated by ancestral patriarchal traditions.

Changing Conditions Affecting the Lives of Ismaili Women and Girls

There were, however, changing conditions internal to the Ismaili community, as well as external changes within the East African society at large, that penetrated the lives of the Ismailis as a whole, and the lives of Ismaili women in particular, especially from the mid-1950s into the 1960s. These changes would have a significant impact on their lives, and the internal and external conditions disrupted discourses of the older cultural traditions, while introducing conflicting expectations in the lives of the Ismaili women and girls.

149 Internal conditions.

Change in the economic conditions of the East African Khoja Ismaili community, the consolidation of the Imam’s position and his modernizing projects, which were backed by a complex system of Ismaili membership rules, and an institutional infrastructure all affected the status of Ismaili women and girls. These communal developments led to a change in the discourses that had perpetuated the practices of the old patriarchal traditions and had held sway in the lives of the female members of the Ismaili community, including the women in this study. The Ismaili community organizations had grown exponentially from the early jamatkhana type of organization, which “probably resembled [that of] other Asian communal groups, who also after immigrating, had tended to cluster into groups around temples and mosques” (Nanji, 1977, p. 127; also see Morris, 1968; Steinberg, 2011). At the turn of the nineteenth century in East Africa, the jamat (community) affairs were customarily arbitrated by a committee of five Punjebhai (headmen) that had been appointed by Aga Khan III during his first visit to East Africa in 1899 (Hirji, 2011). However, by 1905, the authority of Aga Khan III was further challenged over ownership of the community property and the money collected in dues, which led the Ismaili Imam to consolidate his sole authority and control over the Ismaili communal property using the British legal system; a more complex Ismaili organization was already beginning to take shape.

More formal consolidation of the Khoja Shia Imami Ismaili community through membership rulebooks appeared starting in 1905 (Hirji, 2011; Nanji, 1977). Subsequently, the 1946 edition bore the word ‘constitution’ for the first time as a part of its title, and the 1954 edition then replaced all former editions during the lifetime of Aga Khan III. The Ismaili Constitution, published in Gujarati and English, was meant to be read by the public at large (including British officials), and the rules were read to Ismaili audiences frequently in the jamatkhanas to consolidate the authority of the Imam. Through edicts or decrees (known as firmans) from the Aga Khan, the Ismailis were advised to consider this publication as both a constitutional and an authoritative (Hirji, 2011) document of membership rules that bound together all Ismailis the world over. Meanwhile, the Supreme Council, an institution consisting of Ismaili office-bearers selected by Aga Khan III, was put in place as a local extension of the Imam’s authority to function as an arbitrator in matters of any disagreement over opinion or interpretation of the

150 membership rules. The 1962 edition of the Constitution, which emerged under the auspices of Aga Khan IV, bore the title The Constitution of the Shia Imami Ismailis in Africa and reflected the growth of the Ismaili community from its “settlement process … to a settled, coherent and self-confident group” (Hirji, 2011, p. 147).

Simultaneous to the development of the Ismaili Constitution was the development of a system of councils under its provision, which contributed to a growing institutionalization of the Ismaili community and turned it into a corporate group by the late-1950s. The sudden appreciable growth in numbers of Ismailis in East Africa by 1924 (the same time period two of the five Grandmother participants in my study were born) and the movement of Ismailis into the hinterland led Aga Khan III to develop community administrations through councils for each of the East African territories of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. The development of a complex system of administration of the Ismailis from 1924 to 1954 received encouragement from the colonial administration in East Africa, since it facilitated the colonial policy of ‘indirect rule’ (Nanji, 1977). The administration of the Ismaili community was organized for each of the three territories under supreme councils that were assisted by local provincial councils in secular tasks, whose members were appointed for short terms by the Imam himself. Azim Nanji maintains that the legality of the Imam’s authority was established through this organization so that “the Imams could more easily extrt [sic] their initiative in creating change and transforming their followers” (1974, p. 128).

Aga Khan III’s modernizing project to foster Western education in his community was put into effect through an appointed minister of Education in each territory who oversaw education of Ismaili children in Ismaili schools. Above all, this was the Federal council made up of members of various territorial councils, with the Imam at the apex, overseeing their work (Morris, 1968; Nanji, 1977). In the 1962 Ismaili Constitution, an Executive Council for Africa was added to handle the distribution of community funds, while tribunals were created in each of the councils to deal with disputes of marriage, divorce applications, inheritance, breach of the Constitution and other community matters (Hirji, 2011). A health portfolio was also created to oversee the establishment of health institutions that promoted Western perspectives in medical science in Ismaili-built outpatient health, dental, pre/post-natal clinics, maternity homes, and hospitals. By the time of the 1962 Constitution, although the appointed gender ratio in the councils was still

151 predominantly male and the highest positions were still occupied by the wealthier businessmen, more professionals began to be appointed in certain council positions. At the same time, the value of voluntarism in the Ismaili community gained more prominence, engaging all Ismailis to play a role in the system of governance and to feel a part of the Ismaili ‘whole’, thus safe- guarding the hegemony of the governing institutions (Nanji, 1974). It was partly through these Ismaili councils that upheld the Ismaili Constitution and through the sole authority of the Imam that both Aga Khan III and Aga Khan IV were able to implement their modernizing policies for the Ismaili community through reforms that affected the status of Ismaili women, including the participants of this study.

At the same time as the Ismaili polity was taking shape, Aga Khan III mobilized the Ismaili councils to put into effect the modernization of the Ismailis by ameliorating the education of the Ismaili community in trade/commerce, through practices of investments and property ownership in East Africa. The economic standing attained by the Ismaili community by 1960 could be attributed to the decision made by Aga Khan III to use the monies offered to him by the Ismaili community during the anniversary celebrations of his Silver (1935), Diamond (1946), and Platinum (1954-1955) Jubilees as Imam for building institutions that furthered his economic and modernizing policies for the Ismaili community in East Africa. For example, in 1935 (when the Grandmothers in my study were between the ages of one and eleven years old), with the Jubilee money gifted to him by the Ismaili community, Aga Khan III promoted the formation of the Jubilee Insurance Company for the Ismailis in East Africa. As demonstrated by Kassamali Paroo’s notes, quoted below, the Ismaili community was at its lowest economic condition at this time:

In my opinion, the period between the years 1922 to 1937, was at its ebb for the Ismailis [sic] economic conditions in whole of East Africa. This can be judged by the fact that in 1937, the Community had great deal of difficulty in collecting £25,000 to start the Jubilee Insurance Company. (1970, p. 3)

By contrast, Paroo’s notes substantiate the growth in the economic status of the Ismaili community by 1945 (when the Grandmothers in my study were between the ages of eleven and twenty-two), which underscores that during the Aga Khan’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the

152 “£1 million required to establish the Diamond Jubilee Investment Trust Limited was oversubscribed” (Paroo, 1970, p. 3). This investment trust company made loans available for the less wealthy members of the Ismaili community through its connections with smaller local corporations. Subsequent to its formation in East Africa, this company enabled “many Ismailis … [to] become property owners … [and] home owners” by the 1960s (Paroo, 1970, p. 3). Similarly, the Aga Khan re-gifted the monies presented to him to celebrate his Platinum Jubilee anniversary as Imam (1954-1955) to form a building society that further aided more Ismaili community members to purchase their own dwelling houses by 1960. As educed by Morris (1967), the formation of these financial companies contributed to both economic and commercial education of the Ismailis while providing the less wealthy members of the community with capital, protecting the profits they had made during the war. Grandmothers Noorbhegum, Khairoon, Sakina and Fatma each related stories of how their families had managed to purchase homes in the 1960s as a result of such loans, and Fatma and Noorbhegum related how their families had been able to access loans to develop their small businesses. The Ismaili institutional infrastructure that Aga Khan III had established played a vital role in the implementation of his policies of modernization of the Ismaili community in East Africa. Aga Khan III also utilized other ways of bringing the Ismaili community into modernity: he made attempts to move them towards Westernization and away from their inherited ‘Indian’ legacies. The reasons for modernization of the Ismaili community by moving them away from practices based on their Khoja Ismaili patriarchal traditions, which were transported from the Indian subcontinent, is justified by Aga Khan III himself thus and worth quoting at length:

So far as their way of life is concerned, I have tried to vary the advice which I have given to my followers in accordance with the country or state in which they live. Thus in British colony of East Africa I strongly urge them to make English their first language, to found their family and domestic lives along English lines and in general to adopt British and European customs – except in the matter of alcohol and slavery to tobacco. I am convinced that living as they must in a multiracial society, the kind of social life and its organization which gives them the greatest opportunities to develop their personalities and is the most practically useful is the one they ought to follow …. In Africa, however, my followers faced a much more acute problem. They arrived there with Asiatic habits and an Asiatic pattern of existence, but they encountered a society in process of development which is, if

153 anything, European-African. To have retained an Asiatic outlook in matters of language, habits and clothing would have been for them a complication and socially a dead weight of archaism in the Africa of the future. (1954, p. 37)

The policy of Aga Khan III to move the Ismailis away from their “Asiatic outlook” is defined by Asani as a project of “de-Indianization” constructed to “de-emphasize elements of his followers’ Indian or Asiatic background” with a goal of “playing down Asiatic and Hindu cultural traits in Khojah religious and secular life” (Asani, 2001, p. 163) to help them assimilate into “the Africa of the future” (Aga Khan III, 1954, p. 37). To direct the community into modernity, both the third and fourth Aga Khans also utilized the medium of firmans, which Steinberg defines as a “spoken (or sometimes written) directive, decree, pronouncement, or edict of the Aga Khan that provided guidance and advice for followers” (2011, p. 104). To ensure that the all Ismailis got the message in the firmans, these edicts of the Imam were (and still are) repeatedly read out in jamatkhanas wherever Ismailis lived with regularity. Bovin identifies firmans as “par excellence instrument de la modernisation” (as quoted in Steinberg, 2011, p. 104) – the key instrument of modernization used by the Ismaili Imams. Adatia and King maintain that while attempting to modernize his followers, Aga Khan III “had great deal of difficulty leading the traditionalists forward out of some of the cultural habits they had brought with them from India to Africa” and he warned them in firmans, again and again, that “the devil comes in many ways” and “they should be careful not to lapse into the paths of a way of life from which Pir Sadruddin had led them out” before the fifteenth century A.D. (1969, p. 183). In particular, to implement his modernizing project, Aga Khan III made use of firmans to encourage the East African Ismaili community to follow his policies regarding change to the status of Ismaili women. These policies aimed at women’s reform, besides displaying a liberal face of Islam to the West, played a vital role in ‘de-Indianizing’ the Ismaili community, albeit very slowly, which led to dramatic changes in the location of subsequent generations of Ismaili women. These changes were reflected in the oral life accounts of all three generations of women in this study.

External conditions.

The changes in the external conditions in Uganda in 1962 would also affect Ismaili women, including the participants in this study. All three East African territories under British ‘protection’ gained their independence in the early 1960s: Tanganyika became a sovereign state

154 in 1961; Uganda gained its independence in October 1962; and Kenya became independent in 1963. However, there were changes in the political activities in the East African territories from the latter half of 1950s, building as the territories prepared for these events. The nationalistic fervor that surged through Uganda was the harbinger of the newer ‘realities’ that would follow for Indians, including Ismailis, as racial segregation practices were being rapidly dismantled. At the same time, Aga Khan IV’s firmans not only reinforced those of his predecessor Imam, emphasizing the need to be faithful to the country of adoption, but they also encouraged Ismailis to obtain citizenship in the newly independent Ugandan nation after 1962:

As true Ismailis you must remember that you will always have two principle obligations. The first and paramount of these is your religious obligation to Islam and to your Imam. Your second obligation is a secular one. You must always be loyal to the country of your adoption and to whatever Government is responsible for your security and well-being. This is the advice which my beloved grandfather gave to you. I believe it is as wise today as it was when he was alive. It constitutes the surest guarantee by which you can maintain your faith and your civic identity. (Aga Khan IV, as quoted by Nanji, 1974, p. 134)

Nanji maintains that Ismailis had already set themselves apart from other Indians in East Africa during the pre-independence days, and that the “preparation for the transition from the colonial to the Independence era was also made in the public speeches of the Imam, identifying Ismaili aspirations with those of the nation” besides “openly commanding followers to obtain national citizenship” (1974, p. 135). Still, independence brought with it immense changes; Indians (including Ismailis) no longer received protected monopoly in the commercial sector and were in fact being replaced in trading positions by a growing new indigenous African middle class. The Ismaili community, whose economic progress had been achieved through trade, could no longer count on their sons to carry on in their fathers’ businesses as before. Additionally, though Indians realized that they were politically powerless to counter this change in status, they were equally aware of a growing need for professionals in a young nation. Mindful of the precarious position of his followers whom he had advised to make Uganda their home, and cognizant of the potential need of skilled professions in a newly independent nation, Aga Khan IV forcefully reiterated the firmans of his grandfather regarding the importance of education for both boys and girls:

155 Wherever you go, wherever you may be on earth, if you are well-educated, it is an asset which you have to yourself and no one can take it away from you … this is true for our jamat in India, it is true for our jamat in Africa … it is true for our jamats all over the world … that once you have a professional degree, whether you be a woman or a man, this is a very great asset all through your lives. (Aga Khan IV, as quoted in Keshavjee, 2010, p. 114)

Social mobility through formal education, which had eluded women like those in the Grandmothers’ Group of my study, was being made available to the next generation of girls. Aga Khan IV set about reorganizing Ismaili institutions and building an infrastructure that would make formal education possible for the Ismailis, including girls and women, as Keshavjee describes:

In the early 1960s … Aga Khan IV, had begun to expand the community’s social welfare institutions – he built hospitals and coeducational schools in the East African Territories which were brought on par with the existing private colonial schools for the children of the community. These coeducational schools had academic curricula and extracurricular activities, which were on par with world-class education which enabled its students to compete for entrance into Ivy League universities upon completion. At the same time, the Aga Khan instituted support programmes within the community by establishing scholarships for high school graduates so that they could compete for positions in institutions of higher learning in Europe, and North America. He also streamlined his Education Boards to reflect the needs of the changing times, ensured that girls were given equal opportunity in receiving scholarships, and consistently reiterated in his farmans to the community, year after year, the importance of education for their sons and daughters. (2010, p. 113)

The secondary schools that were built for Ismailis in the 1960s did not help the five oldest women in my study; however, these women were actively engaged in encouraging their daughters to pursue high school educations, and even to think of higher education beyond that, as decreed by their Imam, so that their self-sufficiency – unlike their mothers’ – would not be curtailed by financial dependency on their fathers and husbands. The life narratives of the

156 women in the Grandmothers’ Group, whose ages ranged from 27 to 40 years in 1962, indicated that these women were also affected by the changes that had been occurring in East Africa since the late 1950s, as well as by the firmans reiterated by Aga Khan IV regarding both citizenship issues and the importance of formal education for girls. Four out of the five Grandmothers in my research project confessed that by the late 1950s or early 1960s they desired more formal training for themselves in trades and skills to be able to be more financially secure in their new nation. Noorbhegum in particular revealed how, once her children were attending school full- time, she repeatedly begged her husband to “allow” her to get certification in courses such as dress-making or hair-dressing so she could supplement the family income. “But my husband wouldn’t hear of it,” Noorbhegum repeated several times in her narratives. She added, “There was such a growing need for those kinds of skills in Kampala in 1960s … and we really needed the extra money to just survive.” She attributed her husband’s reluctance to comply with her requests to the traditional patriarchal mores that identified income earning as a man’s domain. Similarly, Khairoon, who used to sew from home to supplement her husband’s income, and who later also tutored Ismaili primary school students in mathematics from her home, bemoaned the fact that she was not allowed to be officially trained in some profession or trade:

I didn’t have much say in my home. Never. I used to watch other women. Like when Gulbanu my friend [ten years her junior] got married, her husband sent her away to England immediately to be trained as a hair-dresser … for a whole year. Understand? She did well after. I got married at a very young age, so I could have done something or other. I could have been trained to do something professionally. I was a natural … I was quite smart … That way [my husband] was very orthodox. Understand?

As demonstrated by Khairoon in the account above, even though she supplemented her husband’s income, she was not “allowed” – by what she called an “orthodox” husband – to be officially trained in any field that would increase her mobility to step outside of the home to become more independent. From other stories that Khairoon shared, it became evident that her husband’s reluctance to educate his wife further was based partly on his fear on being perceived by Ismailis as being unable to provide for his family and partially on his fear that Khairoon might get notions of ‘independence’, which would loosen his control over her wife, which he felt he maintained by keeping her dependent on him. On the other hand, Zuleikha’s wish to receive

157 some kind formal skills training rose from a responsibility she felt towards her children. As she relates below, Zuleikha claimed she needed a job to be able to feed, clothe, and educate her growing brood of five children, since her husband’s salary, which was controlled by his father, did not suffice their needs:

And he would give me hell if I didn’t have sex with him. We couldn’t afford condoms. And then I had another child … I didn’t want so many children, you know. But now I had them. I had become very conscious of the lack of money at that time, you know. I didn’t want extra money, but I wanted us to be able to feed … the children. I ran over the credit we were allowed at the food store, you know. And my father … used to send me clothes. For my children too, you know. Also food at times, you know. I couldn’t expect him to do all this … now I am married, you know. I had to earn money … just to feed my children.

This excerpt from Zuleikha’s accounts reveal that her marital relationship, based on traditional patriarchal mores, meant that her body was not her own; succumbing to her husband’s demands had led to more children than they could afford. Her need to get some educational training arose from her need to be able to provide basic necessities for her children.

Likewise, Sakina expressed a wish to educate herself to earn money to send her children to the best private (White) schools in Kampala. Unable to find a job owing to lack of formal training, Sakina set up a small sewing business from her home during the 1960s. None of the Ismaili women in my study expressed the need for further training for their own personal gain; such notions seemed unthinkable, as dictated by traditional patriarchal discourses. Only Fatma expressed no wish to be formally trained; she hinted that her husband and his brothers were partners in the ‘family’ business that did pretty well. Consequently, women in the family were discouraged from working outside and were encouraged to remain engaged in the domestic sphere of the home instead. All five women, however, were unanimous in articulating the importance of formal education for their daughters so that they would achieve financial independence. There was no doubt that the firmans repeated by Aga Khan IV on the importance of education, the changing external conditions in East Africa, and the women’s own experiences of social restrictions and financial dependency introduced new expectations into the lives of four of the five women in the Grandmothers’ Generation in my study.

158 Although the stories of these women clearly reflected some changes in their lives and in the lives of their female children as a result of the modernizing strategies of their Imams and the changing external conditions in East Africa, their accounts also disclosed the tenacious hold of the patriarchal legacies on their lives. This condition of Ismaili women is corroborated by Ali S. Asani (2008; also see Kassam, 2011). He maintains, as shown below, that the changes in the location of women through the Imams’ gender reform in personal law had not met with total success:

This is not to suggest that the policies of Aga Khans III and VI were completely successful in their objectives and that discrimination against women in the Ismaili community has been eliminated…the reforms initiated by the imams have not been entirely successful in attaining their goals and that there have been certain constraints in their effectiveness. (Asani, 2008, p. 291)

As evident from Asani’s research, the attitudes of the Ismailis stemming from their deeply embedded patriarchal customs still minimized the success of the Imams’ gender reforms to change the status of Ismaili women, such as those in the Grandmothers’ Group in this study.

Some research studies of Ismaili women in East Africa and Canada (e.g., Keshavjee, 2005; Calderini, 2011; and Mamodaly and Fakirani, 2012) have verified how the mobility of Ismaili women in East Africa was aided by the modernizing imperatives of Aga Khan III and IV. However, no study so far has delved into the simultaneous role played by a local form of education in the lives of these Ismaili women. The life narratives of the women in my study reveal that a more ‘informally taught’ local education, transferred between women and used by them, had epistemological value in their daily lives. The women’s oral accounts demonstrate that these women learned by observing and hearing stories about how the older women in their respective families employed tactics in their daily lives to gain respite from the traditions and restrictions of a deeply rooted patriarchal culture. The women in this study all claimed that these local knowledges allowed them to work from within the imposed cultural boundaries they faced and taught them how to cross gender boundaries at times to resist the stronghold of patriarchy in their lives, allowing them to survive. Their stories reveal that while these women remained immersed in the life of domesticity, the modernizing initiatives of their Imams exposed them to

159 imagined possibilities: they yearned for some release from the restrictions of the old patriarchal traditions that still dogged their daily lives and which still held them within gender-ascribed boundaries.

The stories from in the Grandmothers’ Group in my study thus revealed that the five women sought ways to use tactics of ‘everyday resistance’ (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013), which they had observed in the practices of the older women, to subvert – to varying degrees – the restrictions imposed on them by patriarchy and White hegemony in East Africa and Uganda. These tactics allowed them to open up the possibility, even in small ways, of gaining some autonomy in their daily lives. In making use of such locally transferred knowledges, these women demonstrated the use of a local form of agency. The following chapter locates the women of two different generations – those in the Grandmothers’ Group and those in the Mothers’ Group – on the East African landscape. By situating these women in this landscape, within the larger Indian diaspora more broadly and within the Khoja Ismaili diaspora in particular, Chapter Five traces their history during the colonial period and during the decade they spent in the independent nation of Uganda, identifying the forces that resulted in the expulsion of these Ismailis, including the ten women in this study.

160 Chapter Five: Locating the Indian East African Ismailis in Uganda

In keeping with the concept of diaspora (Brah, 1996), this chapter historicizes the landscape of the participants in my study. Of the fifteen women in this study, ten were born and/or raised in East Africa and were forced out of Uganda by Idi Amin’s 1972 expulsion decree. This chapter explains the presence of the women in my study in East Africa through their location within the larger Indian Ismaili community, the manner in which they were inserted into the East African landscape, and the events leading up to their expulsion from Uganda. This chapter is divided into two sections. Section One a) exposes Britain’s imperialist project that created the national identity of the trading class in Uganda as ‘Asian’; b) identifies the reasons Indians (including Ismailis) were willing to immigrate to East Africa; c) demonstrates the reasons behind Britain’s policies of ‘Africanization’ and its withdrawal of support for the Indian (including Ismaili) traders; and d) identifies cultural ideological differences that led to growing rifts between the indigenous Africans and the Ugandan Indians, as the protectorate headed towards independence from colonial Britain. Section Two identifies the position of Ugandan Ismailis in the Uganda Protectorate and in the Uganda independent nation, and traces the events leading up to the eviction of the Ugandan Indians in 1972.

Section One: The Imperialist Project in Uganda

During the sixty-eight years of colonial rule in Uganda, the British utilized systemic and strategic ways to develop an elaborate organizational structure to keep Uganda reliant on Britain and other imperialist nations (Mamdani, 1975, 1983), a structure which lasted beyond Uganda’s independence from Britain in 1962. This structure would affect the location of the diaspora Indians, including the diaspora Ismailis, in a newly formed Uganda after the British colonials physically left. Not only did Britain become the main channel through which goods were exported from Uganda to serve the metropolitan centre, but it also became the principal supplier of vital goods and services to Uganda. Britain supplied Uganda with technologies, aid and investment moneys, cultivating an entire discourse of socio-political structures that secured Uganda’s political and economic practices and benefitted British imperialism and its imperial network (Mamdani, 1983). This had a tremendous impact on the occupants of Uganda – both its indigenous Africans and its diaspora ‘others’. In 1903, Britain declared a protectorate over

161 Uganda (Morris, 1968) and officially proclaimed that Uganda was to be developed primarily as an African country (Morris, 1968) – meaning the indigenous people’s rights were to be protected – however, history proves this did not occur. For example, cotton crops were introduced in Uganda in 1903 to fill the glut experienced by the Manchester textile industry as a result of the American civil war, as were coffee crops in 1938 to alleviate Britain’s dependence on the South American countries that were dominated by the United States (Mamdani, 1983). Although the Ugandan peasants’ labour was used to produce these commodities – cotton and coffee – and these commodities were transformed into quality transportable material in local processing plants, they were transported away from Uganda, to England, where they were turned into finished products that were then flooded back into the colonies to profit the British metropolis.

Foreign trade, which was vital to colonial Uganda, was controlled by British export-import firms and was serviced by the British Barclays, National and Standard Banks (Mamdani, 1983). In addition to depositing reserve funds with their own headquarters in England, these locally established banks were responsible for overseeing the deposit of gold into the Bank of England worth the value of every shilling of legal tender that was issued in Uganda by the local East African Currency Board. As a result, local investment, which would have transformed Uganda from being an underdeveloped economy, suffered as the balances in these banks grew. Even as late as in 1952 (ten years before Uganda became an independent nation), balances in these British banks totaled as much as 22 per cent of Uganda’s total exports for that entire year (Mamdani, 1983), barring any possibility of Uganda funding a major project without incurring heavy reliance on foreign investments. From the end of the nineteenth century, once Britain established structures to exercise its political control over Uganda, the attention of the imperial power was focused on creating ways to “turn the country [Uganda] into a reservoir of cheap raw materials for British industry, and consequently, a market for its finished goods” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 6). In this imperialist scheme, diaspora Asian traders, including Khoja Ismailis, played a vital role, which I demonstrate later in this chapter.

The British presence in Uganda began with the Anglo-German Agreement of 1890, which was signed five years following the Congo Basin Treaties – an agreement made between thirteen European countries and the United States of America that concluded the Imperialist ‘Scramble for Africa’. Through this treaty, Britain solidified its hold over Uganda by commissioning the

162 Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) to oversee trade and administration of Uganda though a royal charter (Mamdani, 1983). In 1893, concerned that the IBEAC could no longer safeguard British interests in Uganda, Britain declared a protectorate over Uganda. In fact, the colonial plan to exercise control over the indigenous populous in ways that would benefit British interests in Uganda was put in place from the time East Africa was curved into European territories through arbitrary territorial demarcations at the Berlin Conference. As Mamdani astutely observes, these “demarcations reflected the balance of power between European imperialist countries, not the historical processes within the continent” (1983, p. 9 [my emphasis]), which had the effect of sundering apart tribes that had previously formed larger historical collectivities while bringing into one territory different peoples who did not formally share any close historical contact. This setup provided imperial Britain with strategic ‘divide- and-rule’ political opportunity to pit regions, rulers, nationalities, religions, and races against one another “to ensure the unity of the rulers and the division of the ruled” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 9).

By 1903, the heterogeneous collection of the inhabitants of Uganda that comprised the different African kingdoms, several stateless tribes, diaspora Indian traders, and European settlers were governed by a group of British civil servants whose top officials were appointed in the distant colonial office in London. In parts of Uganda where social and political inequality existed before their arrival, the British administrators propped up indigenous rulers they could control while creating in other parts, like the north and east, a buffering socio-economic class that was elevated slightly above the majority, whom they could use as their agents through British policies of ‘indirect rule’ (Mamdani, 1983). Thus, by cementing this north/south split, the British tactically organized economic life to solidify their control over Uganda. Capitalizing on pre-existing differences within the protectorate, the British designated (commodity) cash-crop production to the southern areas (Buganda, Busoga and Ankole districts), while excluding the north (West Nile, Acholi and Lango districts) and the west (Kigezi district) and reserving these regions mainly for their labour in factories and on plantations, as well as for enlisting soldiers and policemen (Mamdani, 1983). The identities of the diverse peoples occupying the same territorial space thus took on a ‘naturalized’ discourse, so that “a soldier must be a northerner, a civil servant a southerner and a merchant an Asian” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 10). Brah maintains that the “ways a group comes to be ‘situated’ through a wide variety of discourses, economic processes, state policies and institutional practices is critical to its future” (1996, p. 182), just as this

163 manipulated colonial system proved for various groups in Uganda. How did these diaspora Indians (including the diaspora Khoja Ismaili) come to be situated as ‘merchants’ in the imperialist scheme?

To benefit their own interests, the British administrators in Uganda engineered a discourse of naturalized differences that were supposedly characteristic of the different peoples who shared the geographical space. To neutralize the potential militancy of the pre-colonial Buganda chiefs, and to guarantee the raw materials they needed to feed metropolitan industry, the British administrators turned these chiefs into a class of landed gentry by parceling out land to them between 1900 and 1928. As a result, these chiefs reaped economic and political benefits over their tenants from whom they demanded rent and a tribute on the crops. It was in the interest of these land-owning chiefs to support British rule in Uganda, knowing that their claims to land were safe as long as the British were in power. Simultaneously, the colonial administrators created a class of tenant/peasant farmers who would work the land that was owned by the chiefs to produce the cotton and coffee cash crops required to run the manufacturing plants in the metropolitan centre. However, for their colonial project to work, the British needed a third class as well – traders. The British needed a middle ‘buffer’ group – one that was well below (in political and social) status to the colonial state but a little above the status of the indigenous Africans – who would purchase the peasants’ cash crops, process the crops for export to the colonial metropolis, import the manufactured goods from Britain, and sell these goods back to the indigenous population of Uganda. For such an imperialist project to work, the colonial state chose a class of traders from ‘outside’ of Uganda, an ‘alien’ community who had little if any ties to the country historically but who proved to be pliable enough to cater to colonial needs while remaining aloof from the indigenous Africans. This, they reasoned, would prevent any political alliance between the two groups that could threaten British hegemony.

For the following reasons, diaspora Indians, including Ismailis, proved to be the best fit for the role of traders in this British scheme – that is, until the 1950s, when the British reversed this policy to suit the changing British needs and interests in that time period and instead favoured indigenous African traders (Mamdani, 1975, 1983; see also Morris, 1968). First, barred from owning land through colonial law in Uganda, Indian traders focused mainly on commerce. Since Indians were merchants and not manufacturers in an underdeveloped Ugandan economy, they

164 could not compete with the British metropolis by entering into the manufacturing market locally. Second, the Indians came with a history of trading experience in East Africa, which could be used for imperial ends; they were already established merchants in the Indian Ocean trade, and their expertise had been harnessed by the Arabs and the British previously. In addition, diaspora Indians had already been established as a useful British ‘ally’ since the nineteenth century when the British had been able to countermand the power of the Omani Arab stronghold in Zanzibar and the coastal towns through their support of the Indian trading presence. Third, most historians argue that the choice to encourage Indian merchants over indigenous African ones was not a racial decision as much as a preference for traders who participated in the export-import trade as well as the local internal trade. For example, even as early as in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the Indian merchants were already trading in British manufactured products, bringing British iron and British cloth to East Africa from India. The diaspora Indian traders’ infiltration into the hinterland of East Africa extended the reach of Britain’s manufactured goods. Stephanie Jones contends that working “towards the ultimate goal of generating an outlet for British manufactured goods,” the colonial administrators recognized that “the Indian merchants in whose hands rested the entire economy of the area had to be made to serve the interests of British imperialism” (2007, p. 18). Linking these practices to the lives of my participants, Grandmother Zuleikha offered that her grandfather, father and uncles all imported British china crockery (mainly cups and saucers) to entice their regular customers to purchase British tea during hard times. Nurjhan, from the Mothers’ Group in my study, related how the store her grandfather built in East Africa had gained in reputation, much as the other Indian stores had in the ‘Indian area’ in an East African town, as a result of the British cloth and lingerie he sold in his store, which was imported to East Africa by Indian wholesalers. Likewise, Grandmother Khairoon disclosed how her husband closed down their store in Kampala when the government of Uganda illegalized the importation of British manufactured ‘brand name’ goods (like the Ladybird brand) in the late 1960s.

Finally, an Indian trading settler, like an Ismaili who immigrated to East Africa with his family, did so to escape adverse conditions such as poverty in his country of origin. Consequently, he was committed to putting down roots in Uganda, “penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go or in which no white man could earn a living” (Winston Churchill, as quoted by Jones, 2007, p. 18). In short, as Mamdani so succinctly

165 explicates below, the British policy was set up to serve its own interests when it opened up doors to Indian migration to Uganda:

The thrust of the policy was simple: keep the African out of the market place and in the agricultural economy, and thus away from such activity (eg. commerce) which would give him the reason, the skill, the vision and the opportunity to organize the colonial masses; at the same time, allocate the trading function, through administrative measures, to an alien community that could easily be segregated from the masses and be rendered politically safe. The commercial bourgeoisie in the colony was for political reasons to be an alien class. (1975, p. 31)

As Zarina Patel also points out, “imperialism historically has pushed for emigration in the interest of its own expansion and stability for its markets” (1997, p. 57); thus, it was for these reasons that Britain initially chose diaspora Indians to be the traders in British appropriated territories and encouraged Indian immigration to East Africa before 1948. However, the diaspora Indians mostly from Cutch, Kathiawar and Gujarat (among whom were the Khoja Ismailis) who came to put roots down in East Africa are not to be confused with the mostly Punjabi-Indian contractual workers who came to build the famous Uganda railway at the end of the nineteenth century. Of the approximately 31,983 Indian ‘coolies’ contracted to build the Uganda railway at the tail end of the nineteenth, only 6,274 remained in East Africa at its completion (Makokha, 2006; Patel, 1997; Morris, 1968) to become market gardeners, farmers, carpenters, stonemasons and petty traders (Jones, 2007). The question then is to understand why the Indians (and in particular, the Indian Ismailis) wanted to emigrate from India to East Africa in the first place.

Indians (including Ismailis) come to East Africa.

Although there is historical evidence that the diaspora Indian traders had arrived on the East African coast long before the 1800s, Indians – including Khoja Ismailis – migrated in large numbers as ‘passenger Indians’ (those that paid for their own sea passage) from the mid-1800s to the early-1900s from Gajarati ports in British-colonized India in order to escape poverty and improve their economic status (Patel, 1997). By 1901, colonial rule in India had led to the collapse of its own industries (like textiles), which consequently drove millions of Indians to turn to agriculture, increasing the pressure on land that was already aggravated by the rise in the

166 Indian population (Petal, 1997). With food and water shortages in Gujarat, vicious famines and epidemics (Steinberg, 2011), and heavy British land tax with which the Indian peasantry could not cope (Petal, 1997), Indians who could either scrounge up enough money to pay their own fares to leave India or persuade family members and/or established Indian acquaintances in Africa to pay for their passages left India for Africa. There was another crucial reason propelling (Khoja) Shia Imami Ismailis in India to head out to East Africa as well: the firmans of Aga Khan III stimulated them to seek business opportunities in East Africa and put down roots in the new country. Azim Nanji, an Ismaili researcher, recounts how the edicts of the Imam boosted the movement of Ismailis to East Africa from the middle of the nineteenth century:

Adverse conditions in India, coupled with the advice of the Imam, encouraged the Ismailis to seek newer pastures … In 1876 a British official, Sir Bartle Frere, wrote that there were more than 700 Ismaili families in Zanzibar, and they were being continually augmented by immigrants from India … An official, writing from Zanzibar in 1860 noted that every vessel arriving from India at the East African coast contained many Ismbaili [sic] immigrants … by the end of the century [1900s] an Ismaili trader, Allidina Visram, had extended his influence and commercial services far into the interior, along with the penetration of the railway line from the coast. Before long he had built a trading empire with more than thirty branches, which came to be staffed and run by fellow Ismaili immigrants or relatives. (1977, p. 127)

Nanji advances another reason that facilitated the immigration of Ismailis to East Africa: they could count on help from their co-religionists, like Allidina Visram, who had established themselves in the trading sector and needed people from the Ismaili community to work in their growing businesses (see also Paroo, 1990). As this was happening, Imam Aga Khan III, who had close links to British and European aristocracy and the colonial state in India, and whose grandfather (Aga Khan I) had made it possible for Ismailis to practise Ismailism openly in India for the first time, was also actively advocating for Ismaili emigration to East Africa to participate in trade and business.

167 In their study, Adatia and King investigate the extensive breath of the firmans of Aga Khan III, highlighting, among others, the Imam’s firmans that emphasized the importance of diaspora Ismailis participating in the business sector of East Africa:

Besides caring for the general welfare of his people, the Aga Khan freely gave advice on personal, career, and business matters … They must avoid the mistake of getting out of business and taking up professions and clerical work (II 440 ff.). Even if they became B.A.s and L.L.B.s, they should not neglect commerce and agriculture. Business was their mainstay: a young man should not take over his family business or a legacy without experience of other well-run businesses (II 80). Young men should travel and learn other ways of doing things, for instance, market possibilities, and they should keep the community informed. He saw the evils of young men getting into dead-end jobs, and he preferred to see them set up in business even if initially it meant much less money and security. (1969, p. 188-189)

The Imam Aga Khan III’s practices during his fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of his ascension to the Ismaili Imamate, in 1935 and 1946 respectively, further reinforced that business was the backbone of the formation of the diaspora Ismaili community in East Africa. There, when he donated the funds presented to him as gifts from his followers to establish a Jubilee Insurance Company and a finance company to educate the diaspora Ismailis in East Africa about running businesses, he made funds available to them at low interest rates in order to further encourage business ventures (Morris, 1968; see also Asani, 2001 and Nanji, 1974).

All of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group in my study cited poverty in addition to the firmans of Sultan Muhammed Shah (or Aga Khan III) as the reason for the emigration of their grandparents and/or parents to East Africa from India (see Chapter Four for details). The majority of the Ismailis, however, did not immigrate to East Africa as independent traders but as cheap commercial labour for relatives who had already established themselves in small retail businesses in East Africa. As these diaspora commercial assistants saved enough money to set up their own small dukas (small retail shops) in the hinterland, they too aided the immigration of more Ismaili Indians to East Africa by sending for their relatives and acquaintances to help run their small trading ventures. Initially, these Ismailis formed the petty Indian trading class, which

168 organized itself in relationship to the colonial masters (Mamdani, 1983). By 1954, there were thirty-two different trading castes in Uganda, 80 percent of whom were Ismailis, Lohanas and the trading communities. Mamdani (1983) distinguishes these petty traders (the petit bourgeoisie) from the Indian commercial capitalists (the commercial bourgeoisie), who entered the Ugandan wholesale trade and the processing industry at the invitation and protection of Britain from the time of World War I. The Indian commercial capitalists had, by 1938, established complete hegemony over the wholesale trade and processing (for example, ginning) industry, aided by colonial laws that restricted petty Indian and indigenous African traders through prohibitive license fees and purchasing boundaries, thus facilitating the bulk of the profits for the big Indian capitalists who established monopoly over the export-import trade. Mamdani further contends that while the “legend of the hardworking Indian entrepreneur … contains the element of truth when we consider the small traders,” it “was a myth so far as the commercial bourgeoisie was concerned” (1983, p. 33). The latter was a “non-national,” apolitical class that “shared no common cultural heritage with the masses” and actually expressed “its social distance from the masses … in its intense racial consciousness” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 33). Unlike the small Ismaili traders who had visions of putting down roots in East Africa, this capitalist commercial bourgeoisie harbored no such political long-term plans for a future in Uganda. Instead, it actually built up its monopoly base as a result of “a fruit that fell in its lap, a gift from the colonial state” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 33). The small diaspora Indians depended on the external commercial class that was ‘colonially created’ to serve imperialist interests to access their trading goods, which would produce contradiction with the indigenous African traders in the future.

Indigenous Africans enter the trading sector.

The indigenous African rich peasants and traders, part of the African petit bourgeoisie (that included African civil servants also), arrived late on the commercial scene since the pre-World War II policies of the colonial administrators encouraged diaspora Indians into trade while directing indigenous Africans to work on the land. Also, by the time the indigenous Africans entered the commercial field, the Indian trading community in the protectorate had consolidated into an externally controlled, complex and hierarchal structure that favoured “the dominance of the whole-saler over the retailer and of the large over the small retailer” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 34),

169 with small retailers selling to other small retailers and with everyone working through a credit system of promissory notes. Mamdani describes the location of the indigenous small retailers, who occupied the lowest rung in this structure, which set the stage for the malcontent of indigenous Africans in the trading sector and their intense dislike for the Indian traders:

[The African retailers] …who had no relations with a bank, neither an account, nor a loan arrangement; they on the other hand, signed a debit note to the supplying Indian retailer, remaining in constant debt to him, a debt that materially cemented over the long run the relation of supplier-buyer between the two. The prices the African trader sold at were governed by those of the Indian trader; if the former were to make any profit, he had to charge higher than the latter, his supplier. Within the confines of the market place, the African traders had little prospect of advancing. The only way out of this predicament was political action. (1983, p. 34)

The indigenous African retailers had recourse to political action in the future, an option not available to small diaspora Indian retailers in the colonially structured protectorate society. However, this political action by indigenous African traders was delayed, since the indigenous traders and the rich indigenous peasants forming the incipient middleclass had no common ideological or political affiliation with each other to mobilize any political movements earlier in the colonial history in Uganda. These two indigenous groups did share one thing in common, however; they shared a common negative perception of the Indian trader, who was both locked into the hegemonic hierarchal trading structure and complicit in the colonial scheme that excluded the participation of indigenous Africans from the trading sector, to the obvious advantage of the diaspora Indian. It is, therefore, easy to understand why the indigenous African traders perceived the small Indian traders with whom they came into daily contact as the ones who were blocking their path to economic success. Like the indigenous traders, the rich indigenous peasants were not unaware of the colonial policies that were engineered to keep them politically impotent – policies that favoured the large Indian commercial interests in an underdeveloped economy in which agricultural production was dominated by commercial capital in order to further British interests. At the same time, the rich peasants obviously understood this much through their daily first-hand encounters with the Indians: they sold their produce to the Indian ginners (who processed the crop for the colonial masters) but also bought consumer

170 products from the Indian traders (which included British manufactured goods). For the indigenous Africans, both traders and rich peasants, there was a ‘visibly’ different trading class that stood in their path to economic advancement in a country that ‘belonged’ to them. This deep discontent translated into a racial conflict, and it is easy to understand why, when the businesses of some of the indigenous Africans failed, the Indian retailers were often blamed, further deteriorating the relationship between the Indians and the indigenous Africans.

In his research, Morris compares the location of these maligned second and third generation diaspora Indian (including Ismaili) small retailers in Uganda:

The Africans’ first introduction to a monetary economy had been made first by the Arabs but it had been the Indians who had carried out the main task of its development. It was they who had undertaken the risks of pioneering and its real dangers to life and money. When much later the Africans entered the field and encountered some similar risks, those which inevitably accompany small-scale businesses in an underdeveloped economy, their frequent failures were all too readily attributed to the entrenched position of the Indians. It was invariably forgotten that the Indians had experienced comparable difficulties half a century earlier, and that their safeguards then had been the established trade on the coast and not official agencies and services. (1968, p. 144)

Many of the women in my study spoke about the failures of businesses of their families and of other Ismaili families in East Africa at various times. Grandmother Fatma related how when the small business that her father shared with his brothers failed, her father drove transport trucks until he had saved enough money to set up a small retail business much later on. Mother Nurjhan recounted how her grandfather, in the late 1940s, lost the small cotton ginning business he had purchased after years of accumulating savings from a small retail business in Uganda as a result of British regulations that penalized small Indian ginners in favour of large Indian commercial capitalists. Nurjhan’s grandfather, like other Ismailis, worked alongside the (other diaspora Indians such as) Lohanas and the Patidars to make his way into light industry; these groups formed a coalition of successful merchants and businessmen whose accumulated savings went into buying small processing plants for coffee, grain, and timber, large shops for motor repairs, light engineering and joinery, and grain and seed mills (Morris, 1968, p. 141). By 1952, almost

171 90 per cent of the cotton ginneries that were Indian-owned had been purchased with the savings gathered through small stores in the small towns in the interior of East Africa by second and third generation descendants of the Indian immigrants. Most Indians in Uganda were small-scale retailers; however, the Indian community as a whole was conspicuously more well-off than most Africans, especially in the concentrated Ugandan towns and settlements, and they were therefore a potential source of envy and dislike for the indigenous Africans, who worked long hours as domestic servants in their homes, without job security, only to return to their shanties at the end of each day with little hope of the kind of life they saw the Indians enjoy.

Already by the end of World War I, indigenous African anti-colonial movements were afoot in the protectorate, voicing demands for equal opportunities with colonialists and their ‘agents’. Their demands came from three different sources: First were the indigenous peasants who had been forced by colonial policies to produce cash crops for export to monopolies abroad and who encountered prices that were fixed by the colonial administrations and their monopoly- engineered local associations. These were the peasants whose sweat was used to improve Britain’s international economic reputation and to keep the colonial agents in the protectorate in wealth for imperialist projects. This had the effect of uniting the peasants, mainly through co- operative movements against monopoly exploitation, and by 1961 there were 1,643 indigenous co-operative societies with 252,378 members (Mamdani, 1983). Second, the indigenous working class was created through the production of commodity market for the British metropolis. The growth of commodity production also saw the development of a system of roads and railways that connected the main areas of commodity production to towns where these commodities were prepared and stored for export, giving rise to production facilities such as cotton ginneries, coffee processing plants, and tobacco factories. This created the indigenous African working class that “grew up in the truck deports, railyards, factories and godowns, quarries and mines, the municipal works and plantations” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 11). Though small, this group played a central role in the anti-colonial struggles as it gathered political strength becoming united on common concerns, learning to organize itself into unions so that there were 47 trade unions with 39,862 members by 1961. Last, the development of the commercial economy created a third class from whose ranks came the indigenous African intelligentsia, who would form political affiliations that would be the basis for future political parties that were more formally organized to fight colonialism. The members of this indigenous middle class were connected socially and

172 economically through their status; this class was made up of small property owners, rich peasants, independent craftsmen, retail traders, clerks, clergymen, interpretators, teachers and technicians (Mamdani, 1983, p. 11). They were connected by a common grief against colonial policies that favoured the export-import and wholesale traders, big property owners through trade and crop-buying licenses, and colonial agents upholding racial practices (Mamdani, 1983, p. 12). Political agitation by these groups was already shaking the grip of colonial control over the protectorate during the 1930s and the 1940s in waves of nationalist movements that were also portents for the future of diaspora Indians, including Ismailis, in Uganda.

‘Africanization’ and dislodging the Indian trader.

In the face of nationalist movements by native African groups, it is hardly surprising that Britain’s colonial policy changed direction in Uganda following World War II; just prior to that, during the war years, the colonial government had reorganized the marketing boards to reap vast surpluses, which were then usurped by Britain to aid its war effort (Mamdani, 1979). However, in 1945, with the introduction of the Dundas Reforms, the colonial government began a process of ‘Africanization’ in response to the growth of national movements by the indigenous Africans who were agitating anti-colonial sentiments across the country.

This about-face policy of the protectorate colonial administrators dislodged the privileged position of the diaspora Indians and was a signal of their future predicament in an independent Ugandan nation. Aware of the precarious position of the Ismailis, it was during this time that the Ismaili Imam, Aga Khan III, began a process of Westernization of the Ismaili community in East Africa, urging them to educate themselves and to acquire the modern skills that would soon be needed in an independent Uganda and, at the same time, encouraging them to assimilate with the local Africans. During this time, indigenous Africans and Europeans alike were expressing beliefs that Indian communities in the protectorate, of which the Ismailis were a part, had a deeply entrenched hold on the protectorate’s economy (Morris, 1968). Consequently, the colonial administrative policy took a turn from the previous times to swing in favour of supporting and advising indigenous African traders to take over trading from their Indian counterparts. Further, at the end of World War II, the majority of the 60,000 soldiers who returned to Uganda from war services abroad went into trade, increasing the number of Africans in the commercial sector (Mamdani, 1979; Morris, 1968). As a result, between 1952 and 1955,

173 changes were taking place in the commercial arena in Uganda that would affect its diaspora Indians, including the Ismaili community. In 1955, the Department of Commerce reported that the vast majority of the traders in Uganda were of indigenous African origin – indigenous African shopkeepers had caught up with their Indian counterparts with regards to technical skills, as a result of the concentrated help, advice, and promotion they had been receiving from the colonial administrators at the expense of the further development of the Indians (Oonk, 2015). Strengthened by this, the unconcealed hostility of the indigenous traders towards the Indian traders surfaced, particularly in rural districts through acts of pillaging and destruction of Indian property; clearly the indigenous Africans felt they had just cause for this demonstration of discontent and, once again, these acts were predictive indicators for all Indians of their fate in the future (Morris, 1968). In 1952, only 4,809 of the 16,908 licensed traders in Uganda were Indian (including Ismailis) while the rest were indigenous African; however, non-African traders (mostly Indian, including Ismailis) were still conducting three times more business than the African traders, according to reports from the Department of Commerce (Morris, 1968).

Ideological differences: Indigenous Africans and Ugandan Indians.

The location of the indigenous African trader vis-à-vis the Indian trader in a colonially controlled Uganda was not the only reason why indigenous Africans resisted the diaspora Indians; they began to articulate another allegation in the 1950s. Kahyana, an indigenous East African, articulated this grievance in a discussion paper at the CODESRIA Conference in Senegal in 2003. He enumerated three reasons for the resentment the indigenous Africans felt towards the Indian traders. Of the three, he rated the Indians’ “racial and social exclusiveness” as the very first obstacle, with the other two reasons being the Indians’ exploitation and domination of the Africans and their identification and collaboration with the British colonials in Uganda (Kahyana, 2003).

Kahyana’s discussion reiterates the view of a good number of indigenous Africans regarding the diaspora Indians’ identification with colonial Britain and their complicity in the exploitation of the autochthonous peoples of East Africa. However, his very first reason – citing Indian exclusivity, “social (and sexual),” as one of the root causes of disharmony between the two races – is oft-repeated as a reason for racial conflict. This concern over Indian social exclusivity has been articulated by other indigenous African writers like Charles Ponnuthurai Sarvan, who

174 identifies the failure to identify with the cultural mores of the indigenous Africans as one of two main accusations leveled at Indians: “The frank approach to sex in Africa shocked Asians with their repressions, female seclusion, emphasis on virginity before marriage, abhorrence of conception outside marriage, and monogamy” (1985, p. 102).

In addition to colonial segregation policies, the cultural ideological differences between most diaspora Indians and indigenous Africans further prevented social interaction and intermarriage in Uganda. The lack of social interactions, for many indigenous Africans, was translated to mean that the Indians lacked commitment to the country as true ‘Africans’. My study on the two generations of Ismaili women who lived in East Africa – those in the Grandmothers’ Group and the Mothers’ Group – reveals that none of these women even remotely considered marriage to an indigenous African while they lived in Uganda. Then again, none of them considered marriage outside of the Ismaili community to other Indians either. Along similar lines, from his research of Indians in Uganda, Morris draws the conclusion that few Indians thought it inappropriate to live in a Ugandan society “permanently divided into exclusive communities having restricted relations with one another” (1968, p. 172), though he is simultaneously quick to point out that, on the throes of taking the helm politically from their colonial masters, educated indigenous Africans were not willing to accept such views. Racial exclusivity practiced by the Ismailis in Uganda prior to their eviction proved to be just another nail in the coffin of misunderstood relations between indigenous Africans and Indian East Africans – relations which had already been aggravated through the perception by the former of the latter as exploiters of indigenous Africans in the trading sector. In the Uganda of late-1940s and early-1950s, the locations of both indigenous Africans and diaspora Indians were changing rapidly as the indigenous Ugandans’ position gained more political clout under changed colonial policies.

The British imperialist master plan: Creating new allies.

The political clout of the middleclass was already making waves for the East African diaspora Indian traders when the indigenous African traders, having consolidated into a political coalition called the Uganda National Movement (UNM), organized two boycotts in 1954 and in 1959 against purchasing goods from Indian shops. The goal of the UNM mass rally, as articulated by its leadership, was thus: “From now on, ten minutes to six, all trade is put into the hands of

175 Africans. From this hour, no African shall enter a non-African [read ‘Indian’] shop” (as quoted in Mamdani, 1975, p. 39).

The rally cry spoke to all indigenous Ugandans, regardless of their status, social group, or political affiliations; this edict had national support because in “confronting the Asian petit- bourgeoisie, the African trader was highlighting the most visible link in the chain of exploitation in the colony,” and clearly, “the Indian trader was the visible intermediary between metropolitan capital and the direct producers” (Mamdani, 1975, p. 39). Only four months into the boycott, in early 1960, the Indian Merchants’ Chamber reported the closure of almost half of the Indian stores in the rural Buganda province (Mamdani, 1975). Already, Indian retailers in Uganda were experiencing the distressing effects of the rise in political power of the Ugandan indigenous masses.

Around the 1940s, the colonial government had already begun their imperialist master plan that would feed their interests even after Uganda became an independent nation, which would further impact the relationship between the diaspora Indians, including Ismailis, and the indigenous Africans. From this time, the colonial rulers orchestrated an entire process of reforms designed to contain alliances between various indigenous groups that were gathering in militant strength to challenge colonial control over the protectorate. Colonial administrators mobilized regulations and programmes to prevent alliances between groups of peasants and workers and between co- operatives and trade unions from which militant nationalism had, in the recent past, drawn its backing. Under the guise of a drive to train the indigenous population for ‘responsible nationalism’, colonial administrators set about to depoliticize and fragment all mass organizations. They used a series of regulations and restrains to divide and diffuse the co- operative movement; a British ‘advisor’ was placed in each co-operative to train its members to work in isolation from other co-operatives, while the members of each co-operative were purposefully cultivated to form a middleclass bureaucracy that would run these organizations as profit-making businesses rather than as organizations of workers and peasants. Trade Unions, the political vehicle of the working class, were made powerless; the political affiliations between different unions were made illegal and the use of union funds to mount political grievances was also illegalized.

176 At the same time, colonial British bureaucratic advisors were placed in each union to lead the unions away from political action; instead, these advisors cultivated a bourgeois union bureaucracy to defuse the power of the unions (Mamdani, 1983). Realizing that “the sleeping giant, the working people, had begun to stir, and a militant tendency had already surfaced within the petty bourgeoisie” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 19), the colonial state abandoned its former allies, which it had used as ‘buffers’ – the landlord chiefs they had previously propped up to do their bidding and the diaspora Indians whom they had pushed into the trading sector to prevent the indigenous traders from acquiring political strength. Instead, the colonial administrators exposed these groups as ‘exploiters’ and mobilized “a comprehensive economic and political reform of the colonial system,” ostensibly to encourage “responsible’ leadership” of indigenous Africans in preparation of Uganda’s independence (Mamdani, 1983, p. 19). By extending the power base of the upper echelons of the indigenous petty bourgeoisie – now their new allies – the colonial rulers cultivated their tendency to compromise with the colonials in ways that would serve British interests. A whole new ‘Africanization’ programme was engineered by the colonial rulers, one that was displacing the privileged position of diaspora Indians in the protectorate, and one that would set the tone of what was to follow for all Indians once Uganda became an independent nation. Mamdani describes the actions taken by the colonial rulers as a result of their redirected ‘Africanization’ policy:

Cotton ginneries and coffee factories were bought by the government from British and Asian comprador companies and transferred to the now depoliticized co-operatives. The system of racial discrimination, originally designed to block the advancement of the African middle class, was suddenly dismantled. Transport policy was changed to allow small African bus operators into business, a new land bank was set up to give loans to rich peasants who wanted to go into trade, traders were officially encouraged to form organizations to advance faster. An ‘Africanization’ programme was introduced in the civil service to upgrade and promote local civil servants. Political reforms designed to incorporate the upper petty bourgeoisie into the colonial political system followed. (1983, p. 19)

This ‘reform’ was colonially engineered to prepare new allies – an indigenous African bureaucracy – for the administration of an independent Uganda, an ‘independent’ nation which

177 would continue to serve British interests. However, a more crucial but less obvious ruse for this colonial ‘reform’ was to “push the national question into the political background while bringing the nationality question into the foreground” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 20 [my emphasis]), since the national question would expose the real exploiters – the imperialists – and unite the people against them. The discourse of nationality had been planted and germinated by the colonial state from the time it declared a protectorate over Uganda. This discourse had been facilitated to take root among the peoples of Uganda throughout colonial rule: “the army was ‘northern’, the civil servant was ‘southern’, and the trade was ‘Asian’” (Mamdani, 1975). As Uganda headed towards independence, this parochial discourse led to issues articulated along national, religious, and racial lines, which pointed to the diaspora Indians of Uganda as the exploiters – ‘the enemy’ within that had blocked the advance of the indigenous African people – and took away from the national focus that could expose the imperialist perpetrators. Although Kahyana points to the complicity of the diaspora Indians practising colonially engineered racial exclusivity and exploiting the indigenous Africans, he simultaneously shows an understanding of this nationality/national discourse through his exposure of the workings of the colonial administrators as they made use of the diaspora Indians and their descendants in East Africa, turning them into scapegoats to ward off blame from themselves:

In this three-tiered racial structure, the British used the Asians to serve the empire’s interests by acting as middlemen between the white colonizers and the black Africans. By becoming the individuals who put colonial exploitative policies into effect, they invariably came to take the blame for an exploitative colonial system while the real authors of the system, operating often invisibly behind the buffer, remained relatively free from black

African hatred. (2003, p. 4)

Kahyana argues that using this strategy, the British shut down any potential political collusion between indigenous Africans and Indians by framing the Indians as merciless exploiters who did not see East Africa as their home and were only interested in making and taking the wealth out of East Africa. Similarly, Justus Kizito Makokha (2006) exposes the crucial reason behind the creation of two ‘others’ – the indigenous African and the diaspora Indian – by British colonials in East Africa. By keeping these two ‘others’ in a constant state of tension with one another, the colonials diverted critical focus away from themselves:

178 [British colonials] created a monadic, homogenous White self and a Janus-like ‘two-faced’ Asian African/indigenous African Other. Then, at different moments and when it suited their needs, the British empowered one face of this ambivalent Other, offered it authority over the other Other thus distracting/allaying critical attention from itself as the colonial Self observing the reign of one Other over another Other. (Makokha, 2006, p. 84)

Makokha goes on to add that the colonials gave the Indian ‘other’ the upper hand to begin with, which was “not only transitional but translation” in significance for the location of the Indian East African. When the ‘White Self’ gave complete authority to the indigenous other, the result was “the translation of Othering of the Brown Other into what Shiva Naipaul has called ‘the eternal other’ in the post-colonial power equation” (Makokha, 2006, p. 84). This ‘eternal other’ – the Indian Ugandan – was seen as an alien whose ‘nationality’ had been marked by his ‘trading’ location as an exploiter. However, this ‘nationality’ question that surfaced as a result of the British-orchestrated reforms would undermine the possibility of any future for Indians, including Ismailis, in Uganda. Under colonial rule, what ‘nationality’ (other than ‘trader’) was ascribed to the diaspora Indian who had lived in Uganda over several generations? Where were the Indians located politically within the system of government in Uganda? How did that affect their future in Uganda?

The location of Ismailis among other Indians in pre-independent Uganda.

The Indians in Uganda never came to form a single political group or party, nor did they collaborate with the indigenous Africans to challenge colonial rule. The diaspora Indians in Uganda were not a homogenous group – although they were often perceived as such by the indigenous Africans and the Europeans – but they were divided by religious differences (Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, mainly) and further sub-divided by caste and sect within the main religious groups (Morris, 1957, 1968). These divisions were considered to be so important among different Indian communities that “among Indians, for example, it was more important in most contexts to be a Shia Imami Ismaili, a , a Sikh, a Goan or a member of some other caste or section than to be an Indian, a Hindu or a Muslim” (Morris, 1968, p. 105). These divisions, especially between Muslims and Hindus, were further augmented in 1947 by the partition of India (Morris, 1968). Additionally, since marriage across Indian caste and sectarian boundaries

179 as well as between different castes and sects was so rare, the various Indian communities found no need for uniting politically (Morris, 1968). Reasons for their union were further prevented in the larger society of colonial Uganda; although restricted politically by the colonial administrators, the Indians as a whole were uninhibited by other external pressures in colonial Uganda until the late 1940s, which gave them no cause to unite as one political group. It is therefore unsurprising that although different caste and sectarian, non-political Indian associations existed, only two associations served the entire Indian community of Uganda – the Central Council of Indian Associations (embracing the Indian Association of Kampala) and the Indian Merchants’ Chamber (Morris, 1968). This was welcomed by the colonial government, who sought ways of dealing with all Indians using its policy of indirect rule. Furthermore, neither of these associations was fully supported by all Indians nor wholly successful. How did the Ismaili community feature in these all-Indian organizations in pre-independent Uganda?

Although several non-political all-Indian associations existed, Ismailis in Uganda directed their focus on the members of their own community for several reasons (Morris, 1968). First, the two all-Indian associations were both managed by the same men who represented the interests of commercial capitalists, mostly since their leaders were either representatives of firms from India or local big capitalists. While the Ismailis felt that the leadership did not represent their interests, nor did they put their members in leadership positions, these ‘upper class’ representatives disapproved of the emergence of the Ismailis as an independent community, and they insisted on maintaining their exclusivity to negotiate with the colonial administrators on behalf of the whole Indian community (Morris, 1968). Ismailis, by and large, did not see any benefits for their community from these all-Indian associations. They viewed the commercial capitalist leaders of these associations as using their positions for furthering their own careers as public figures to benefit from close ties with the colonial administration who invited them on the Legislative Council in an advisory capacity (Morris, 1968). Second, the recent Shia Imami Ismaili history of secessions from the community and challenges over Ismaili property (see Chapter Four) from the time of Aga Khan I to the time of Aga Khan III had made Aga Khan III and the whole Ismaili community weary over the question of cross-community relations, which might have interfered with the internal affairs of the Ismaili community or the authority of the Imam. This precipitated the Imam’s need to maintain the separateness of the Ismaili community from the other Indian communities through the development of Ismaili administrative councils, whose leadership was

180 assigned authority by the Imam to deal with the colonial governments in matters solely pertaining to Ismailis; these councils were functioning fully by 1926 (Nanji, 1974). For example, then, when the colonial administrators asked the Indian community in Uganda to set up a central trust for each of the Hindu and the Muslim communities, through which properties belonging to all Hindu and all Muslim communities would be administered by one overseeing board, the Ismailis refused, since their jamatkhanas, schools, sports clubs, clinics and hostels were legally registered through courts in India and East Africa as the absolute property of the Imam (Morris, 1968). Likewise, in 1927, when the colonial government set up the Advisory Council for Indian Education to hold school property, to oversee the private schools that relied on government grants, and to review grants and applications for new schools, the Ismailis once again refused to comply with the request: they wanted instead to deliver the kind of modern education encouraged by Aga Khan III for his community (Morris, 1968). Third, the organization of the Ismaili community through the different systems of councils, the Ismaili Constitution, and the growing wealth of the community made it difficult to sink their interests into the larger Indian organization (Morris, 1968). However, all of this did not prevent different Indian communities from mingling with each other, as pointed out by Brah below:

Religious linguistic, regional and caste differences, although retaining their importance in matters of marriage, did not form barriers to social mixing. For example, at the time of Diwali, the Hindu festival, Sikhs and Muslims alike would take part in the non-religious aspects of the celebrations, such as fireworks displays. Similarly, the sports tournaments, organized by the mosques or the gurdwaras as part of the events to celebrate Eid and the Gurpurbs respectively, would include participants from various Asian communities … and over a period of time, the lifestyles and the attitudes of the diverse Asian groups settled in Africa developed common features. (1996, p. 31)

Indian communities interacted with each other in daily life and often lived in mixed community neighbourhoods. In fact, “there was this sense in which ‘cultural difference’ continued to be constructed in terms of the regional differentiations prevailing in South Asia: Panjabi, Gujarati, and so on” (Brah, 1996, p. 32); however, “Religion was construed less as a signifier of ‘culture’ than one of ‘belief’” so that “this distinction marked an intersubjective space for non- antagonistic identification among different South Asian groups” (Brah, 1996, p. 32). What

181 appeared to be missing a form of political affiliation amongst the different Indian communities in the face of the colonial government? What then was the official location of the Indians, including Ismailis, in the colonial government’s administrative apparatus?

Section Two: The Legal Status of Diaspora Indians in Uganda from the Mid-1940s and the Dilemma of Citizenship

This section traces the events leading up to the expulsion of the Ugandan Indians, including the Ismailis, from Uganda in 1972. It demonstrates how the legal national status of the Ugandan Indians was complicated, both within the Protectorate and when Uganda became an independent nation. In spite of the shaky years of the Milton Obote regime, the women in my study claim Uganda as their home. I identify several factors that brought down the one-party Obote government and brought in Idi Amin, who subsequently established military dictatorship in Uganda in 1971. I then conclude with Amin’s eviction of all Ugandan Indians, including Ismailis, from Uganda in 1972.

The Colonial Office in London ruled over the Uganda Protectorate in 1903 through a core of civil servants – a governor and his senior officials – who were recruited in London; although a cadre of diaspora Indians and indigenous Africans were employed in the lower echelons of the civil service as junior clerks, the rest of the inhabitants of Uganda had no part in the ruling of the country (Mamdani, 1983; Morris, 1968). This included the kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, Busoga and Ankole, where the colonial administrators strategically maintained the most malleable of the former rulers as agents to facilitate the work of the officially appointed British Provincial and District Commissioners (Mamdani, 1983; Morris, 1968). In 1920, Executive and Legislative councils were created by the colonial administrators, which were merely consultative bodies that held no official powers and were formed as a result of demands by European farmers and businessmen for some input into the decisions made by the colonial government. These Executive and Legislative Councils, which first met in 1921, were each composed of a governor, four British senior civil servants, and two nominated European members. One Indian member was invited to attend the first meeting of the Legislative Council; however, none attended, since the Indians felt they were not receiving representation that was equal to the Europeans. Much later though, and up until 1955, a few Indians who were considered “Westernized businessmen, most of whom were engaged in the cotton or coffee trade” (Morris, 1968, p. 38) were nominated

182 on these councils, but only in the advisory capacity. Ironically, although the British claimed to protect Uganda for the indigenous Africans, they did not nominate or appoint any indigenous Africans, even in an advisory capacity, on these councils for another twenty years (Morris, 1968). As a result of the swing in colonial policies towards ‘Africanization’, which occurred after 1945, indigenous Africans were appointed to the Legislative Council. What did this change mean for the East African Indians, including Ismailis, who had been in East Africa and Uganda for over two generations? What was their legal status in Uganda? How were they represented in the colonial governing structure in a pre-independent Uganda?

The status of Indians (including Ismailis) in the Uganda protectorate.

From the 1920s to the mid-1950s, the Uganda Protectorate was ruled by a governor with the assistance of an executive council, appointed by him, and a Legislative council that gave advice on the laws, which were eventually decreed by the governor himself. Up until 1955, only two of the seventeen members of the Executive Council were Indian, and only nine of the fifty-six members of the Legislative Council were Indian, meaning “the Indians could state a point of view at their meetings but no more” (Morris, 1968, p. 157). Morris contends that although neither Indians nor indigenous Africans had any actual policy-making powers, the Indians rarely protested because they had learned to influence government policies pertaining to their interests unofficially, through making acquaintance of their leaders, with government officials, or through their long service on commerce, tender or labour advisory bodies to which they had been appointed. This allowed the small traders to continue with their trading activities in relative calm and quiet; however, it was a short-term measure and became a perilous location as the end of colonial rule drew closer. The Ismailis’ position in Uganda was looking tenuous at best, although during colonial rule the Ismailis had demonstrated commitment to settle in Uganda. Under Aga Khan III’s directions, the Ismailis had invested into an intricate system of community governance throughout East Africa to oversee the Westernization and modernization policies of their Imam; they had committed to purchasing their own domiciles after 1954-1955 by mobilizing a co-operative building society, and they had built schools, clinics, hospitals, and sports’ clubs that were open to indigenous Africans starting from the early 1950s.

Still, their legal ‘nationality’ status in the Uganda protectorate was complicated and difficult to comprehend. They may have been born in East Africa, and in particular, in Uganda, and dressed

183 in Western attire, but their ancestors had arrived from the Indian subcontinent, some at the invitation of the British. Also, their ostensible growing wealth and standard of living, when compared to the indigenous Africans, identified them as ‘exploiters’ and as colonial agents, while their practices of racial and communal exclusivity, particularly in everyday social interactions with the indigenous Africans, made them ‘foreigners’ in the eyes of the indigenous populations. During colonial rule, it was impossible for the Ismailis (like other Indians) to become citizens of the protectorate, since such a legal status did not exist. Further, in a ‘Protected State’, legal rights of nationality, rights of residence, and rights to employment were separate issues (Morris, 1968). Residential rights in the protectorate were afforded according to the following conditions, as outlined by Morris: “1. Birth within the Protectorate. 2. De facto permanent residence. 3. Lawful and permanent residence with the Protectorate during five out of eight years preceding an application for registration as a permanent resident” (Morris, 1968, p. 154). These rules were open to additional complications and ambiguity as a result of different interpretations.

The partition of India and the subsequent British Nationality Act of 1948 made matters even worse for the legal status of diaspora Indian Ugandans and their descendants. In order to clarify the location of British Commonwealth citizens, the 1948 Nationality Act made certain concessions for British colonies such as Kenya; however, Uganda had not been a ‘colony’, and the diaspora Indians in Uganda could not claim the same rights to British subjecthood as their Kenyan counterparts. As Gijsbert Oonk (2015) trenchantly points out, the “British subjects had full rights throughout British territory, whereas the status of British protected persons was at times unclear” (p. 73). In Uganda, for the Indians to claim British ‘protected’ status, they were required to register in Kampala after obtaining certified proof from the High Commissions of either India or Pakistan that substantiated they were either Indian or Pakistani nationals living overseas. Before the Partition, India had often kept a watchful eye on overseas Indian labourers and on the business interests of the diaspora Indians in East Africa. However, after India’s independence from colonial Britain, Indian ideology changed under Nehru’s direction, which would take the position that “if India wanted to make a stand against imperialism, it could only do so by not being imperialistic itself” (Oonk, 2015, p. 71). Therefore, he “advised the Indians overseas to integrate and warned them not to expect any help from India” (Oonk, 2015, p. 71).

184 Consequently, very few Indians in Uganda were able to obtain the certification necessary for registration in Uganda as British protected persons, while even some of those who were born in Uganda could not obtain residential status since their parents were born on the Indian subcontinent but their legal status could not be verified without these same certificates. Oonk notes that “Indian and Pakistani passports were hardly obtained, except in a few cases where elderly family members chose to retire to one of those countries” (2014, p. 73) and among those there were hardly any Ismailis who chose that option, which ended in 1955. While a few Ismailis were able to obtain status as ‘British Protected Persons’, many more were not, and were instead hoping to become citizens of the state that was yet to be formed, as encouraged by both of their Imams. Aga Khan III had urged them to integrate with local Africans, to acquire Western education and to follow modern ways of dress and language (Oonk, 2015), moving away from their Indian roots. So it was within this frame of the dilemma of defining their legal status that many Indians, including Ismailis, faced Ugandan independence in 1962. Would Uganda accept them as citizens of a new nation? The question was understandably complicated by the indigenous Africans’ historical perceptions pertaining to the commitment, loyalty and integration of the Ugandan Indians within the newly forming nation.

The location of Indians (including Ismailis) in the independent Uganda nation state.

The location of Indians, and of Ismailis in particular for this study, in the Uganda of the late- 1950s cannot be understood in isolation from the location of the indigenous African middle classes that were in the process of forming and which would assume power in the new nation in 1962. During the mid-1950s, 80 per cent of the 5,819 Indian holders of trading licenses in Uganda came from three of the most organized communities: the Ismailis, the Lohanas and the Patidars (Mamdani, 1975). However, by the time of independence, the hold of the large Indian capitalists over the export-import trade, the processing industry, and wholesale trade had not been dislodged. One of the chief causes for this was that Uganda was, in fact, divided during independence by two ideologically different ruling middle classes that represented two different states – the first being Buganda and the second being non-Buganda (read: the rest of Uganda) – that were preoccupied by their internal factionalism. This factionalism, created by the colonially constructed nationality discourse, had to be resolved before the ‘Indian issue’ could be

185 addressed. The colonial rulers, through their Africanization reforms, had also succeeded in demilitarizing the working class while grooming a rising petty middleclass from which three political parties had emerged just prior to Uganda’s independence. Their ideological differences ranged from “moderate nationalism [Uganda People’s Congress], to outright collaboration with imperialism [the Democratic Party, and Kabaka Yekka]” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 22). At the brink of independence, Uganda was already established as a future neo-colony by the imperialists, as described by Mamdani’s description below:

None of these parties questioned Uganda’s continued integration into the imperialist system; they only wanted internal reforms. Their differences were in the degrees of reform advocated by each party. But without exception, they all called for ‘a favourable climate for foreign investment’ combined with ‘the advancement of Africans’, mostly in trade and education. Secondly, none of these parties raised any questions about the character of the state they were about to inherit. All agreed with the provisions of the Independence constitution that the new Uganda would inherit the colonial state machinery, with simply a change of personnel … It mattered little that these state institutions [such as the police force and the army] had been devised over half a century ago to keep the people in line. On the contrary, the new leadership was now ready to direct the same institutions against the people among whom they had stood until recently. (1983, p. 22)

Although technically the British had left Uganda at the time of independence in 1962, their imperialist projects were still alive and well in the new nation, or, in Mamdani’s words, “While colonialism was no more, imperialism remained” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 43). Meanwhile, what was the location of the Ismailis at this historical juncture in Uganda on the brink of independence? Marc Van Grondelle (2009) provides some insights about how the Ismaili Imam of the time, Shah Karim al-Husayni, or Aga Khan IV, could have arrived at the decision to advise his Ismaili community to not pull out of Uganda before 1962, but rather to acquire citizenship in the newly independent nation. In his examination of the British colonial records from official archives, Van Grondelle presents letters exchanged between Aga Khan IV and the Commonwealth Relations office in 1960 that demonstrate the advice the Aga Khan sought and received from Britain in order to gauge the future for the Ismaili community in an independent Ugandan nation. In particular, these exchanges show that the Aga Khan expressed his concern regarding rumours

186 pertaining to Uganda opening up to communist influences that might jeopardize the future of his community – a community whom he was still advising to invest in the country in spite of the recent trade boycotts against all Indians. Van Grondelle (2009) summarizes the British response to the Aga Khan as “unhelpful and somewhat nebulous” (p. 96), which concludes with a general assurance that the government of the United Kingdom would do everything “to ensure adequate protection of all persons, of whatever race or creed, who had made their homes in Protectorate” (p. 97). Van Grondelle concludes from further archived exchanges that the British authorities provided the Aga Khan with “friendly, hopeful statements” in response to his questions regarding “the deteriorating situation of Ismailis (and indeed all Asians) in Uganda in 1960” (2009, p. 97), while offering very little useful advice on the future of the Ismaili community in Uganda.

It is likely that the Imam read this ‘advice’ in a positive light, given that he directed his community to “be loyal to the country of [their] adoption and to what-ever Government is responsible for [their] safety and well-being” (Nanji, 1977, p. 134), emphasizing their civic duties as citizens of a newly-emerging Uganda nation state. Almost of all the Ismailis opted to stay in Uganda, and a majority applied for citizenship of the newly independent Uganda. Oonk draws on other researchers to point out that Indian families in Uganda employed ‘strategic management’ in the way that dealt with this citizenship issue in the newly formed state. He maintains that while his research did not show a conscious planning on the part of his Indian respondents, it showed they opted for a mixed family approach to citizenship, so that while women and children applied for the status of British protected persons, the working males acquired Ugandan citizenship, since this satisfied the prerequisite for obtaining trading licenses in the new nation state. This approach showed some logic, since Oonk also points out that the position of Indian traders had changed for the worse in the 1960s; while the government promoted the businesses of the indigenous Africans, it did so “at the expense of the development of those of the South Asians” (Oonk, 2015, p. 75). Indian Ugandan citizens found it difficult to obtain trade licenses and permits for new ventures and get access to government loans (Oonk, 2015). Out of the total population of 74,308 Indians in Uganda in 1969, Oonk puts 35,000 as British protected persons passport holders, 8,890 as Indian citizens, 253 as Pakistani citizens, 1,768 as Kenyan citizens, and 26,657 as Ugandan citizens (Oonk, 2015). Many of the latter were Ismailis.

187 Of the two generations of women in my study who were born in East Africa, eight out of the ten women were citizens of Uganda; the other two held the legal status of British protected persons. All five women participants from the Grandmothers’ Group claimed that Uganda had been their home, and all the while they were in East Africa, they felt they belonged there. Khairoon reminisced, “No, I felt no ties with India or Pakistan. Kampala was my home, although some of my husband’s family lived in Pakistan. But I was born in East Africa. It was my home then.” Noorbhegum, Zuleikha, Sakina and Fatma expressed similar sentiments about Uganda, although most of the women added, looking back, they had felt at the time that life was becoming less stable and less secure or safe from the mid-1960s onward. Nurjhan from the Mothers’ Group echoed the older women’s memories about the instability and the physical insecurity towards the latter half of the 1960s and elucidates through an example that gives substance to their fears:

Then, there were those Kondos, you know. They were black Africans with guns who could follow you home in their cars … and attack you and rob your home. Some people were even shot by them.

She went on to describe how one such Kondo car had chased her and her family when they were returning home from an excursion to the local drive-in:

You know, the drive-in started late … once it got dark. On our way back home, we were chased by this car. My father drove faster. Our entire family was in the car. My mother, my sister, my brothers. We were petrified. Finally, when he turned a corner, my father saw an… an I think it was a dark driveway with bush on either side. And he quickly drove into that and switched the car off. He turned off the lights. He told us all to duck and be quiet. The Kondo car sped by. After a while it doubled back, driving slowly. Finally it left because they could not see us.

Nurjhan related how, even after all these years, she has not managed to forget the fright she felt that night, and she added that living in Uganda was getting dangerous towards the end of the 1960s. Mamdani (1983) defines kondoism as acts of armed robbery that existed in Uganda and which were used by Idi Amin later to justify giving unlimited power to officers of the Ugandan army and prison officers. Kondoism was used to rationalize the creation of an intelligence- gathering unit called the Public Safety Unit, which was given powers to search and arrest anyone

188 suspected of these acts of robbery (Mamdani, 1983). Many Ugandans believed that the people in the Public Safety Unit themselves participated in acts of Kondoism. Sakina’s daughter, Shirin, from the Mothers’ Group, relates a story about how in 1969, her uncle and aunt were attacked by one such group in army uniform while they were returning from a dinner with friends:

They were beaten up so badly. Those men had guns. My uncle and aunt realized they were lucky to have escaped. But they were badly hurt. They made up their minds there and then to move out of Uganda. My aunty worked for an American airline in Kampala. So they got tickets to Toronto in 1970. They didn’t like Toronto and went to Vancouver. They liked Vancouver and settled there at the end of 1970. It was not safe for us in Uganda.

Salim Ahmed, a third-generation Ismaili Ugandan, told a story to the Vancouver Sun that resembles the experience of Shirin’s uncle and aunt, proving that incidents perpetrated by soldiers and special units on Indian citizens were not that uncommon. Ahmed recounts one day when he and his wife were pulled over by the army and ordered to lie prostrate on the ground while the solders searched their car (quoted in Carman, 2012). Despite such incidents, whether personally experienced or experienced by family and friends, none of women in either the Grandmothers’ or Mothers’ Groups themselves expressed a wish to leave Uganda; they all expressed the hope that such incidents would be eradicated once the newly independent country matured. Mother Farida narrated how “Africa was my home. It was home to me… I was born there. That is where I felt I belonged.” Similarly, Mother Shirin claimed, “Home for me is a tangible place. It was East Africa – Uganda at one point. It was my home.” Khatoon, also from the Mothers’ Group, lamented how she was loathe having to leave Uganda:

I was so young then… about 12 or 13, I think. I loved Uganda. I loved Kampala. It was my home. I had a cat that I loved so much. It broke my heart when I had to go to the police station and hand it over to them before I left. I cried and cried. Kampala was my home. I didn’t want to leave.

Mother Zareena, who was fifteen at the time of the expulsion, echoed Khatoon’s trauma at having to part with her dogs that she surrendered at the police station before she left Uganda:

189 I was devastated. Kampala was my home. …I wondered if I would ever see my home again. I belonged there. My grandmother had taught me names of flowers and plants… I was familiar with them. They meant ‘home’.

Similarly, Farida lamented the fine water colour landscapes of Kampala she had painted as a young adult that she had to relinquish when she left: “I never dreamed I would have to give up those kinds of things. They meant ‘home’. Kampala was home.” All of these women, without exception, referred to the firmans of their Imams, which had urged them to obtain citizenship of Uganda and be loyal citizens of the country. However, Morris maintains that in spite of the reforms implemented by the Aga Khan and the leaders of the Ismaili community to enable them to “live in an perhaps encourage the growth of a new nation,” it was “very unlikely that any Indian ever thought the Indian community would hold a dominant position in it” (1968, p. 173). As events turned out, Ismailis were forced to leave Uganda along with other Indians – citizens or non-citizens alike – within a decade of Uganda’s independence. The rumblings precipitating in the thunderous announcement made by Idi Amin to signal their departure were also being reflected in the political unrest in Uganda at the end of the 1960s.

Factors leading to the 1970 coup in Uganda: The 1969 crisis and the role of the Indian commercialists.

An economic and political crisis of 1969 unleashed a chain of events that played a crucial role in the future of the Indians in Uganda. This was a time when the Ugandan government was seeking ways to deal with economic challenges that had resulted from the imperial practices of neocolonialism that had taken root while dealing with political issues that had arisen as a result of the political factions between the Buganda and the non-Buganda states since independence. Neocolonialism moved into Uganda with the departure of the Colonial government in 1962; before the British colonials moved out of Uganda, they invited the World Bank to help chart Uganda’s future development through an economic plan in 1960. Three main recommendations were made by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which had backed the independent Ugandan government into an economic disaster by 1969. As summarized by Mamdani (1983), the World Bank team advised the newly formed state to increase its commodity output for the purpose of exporting raw materials that were needed for imperialist industries. Second, Uganda was advised to depend on foreign and private financing to implement

190 its economic development plan. And last, the team recommended the government facilitate the advancement of local capitalists. As a result, at the start of Uganda’s implementation of this development plan, it “relied, up to 52 per cent, on raw-material export earnings, and 48 per cent on imperialist finance” (Mamdani, 1983, p. 23-24). For example, as a consequence of this plan, the British banks (with America as minor share-holder at this time) still controlled over three- quarters of all commercial deposits in Uganda, just as they had done prior to independence. Using their control over local savings, these banks directed funds towards economic activities that would benefit their imperialist needs. In fact, Mamdani argues, the Indian expulsion demonstrated how deeply the imperial interests had invested in the businesses of the small and big Indian retailers in the capital city of Uganda:

In October 1972, when Asian businesses started closing down en masse, one could walk down main streets of Kampala and see signs as “Property of Barclays Band D.C.O. or “Property of Standard Bank” on locked-up enterprises. Inevitable connections of finance, usually hidden away in small print, in the text of the contract, were now advertised for all to see. (1975, p. 57)

Nothing had changed; Britain (with America as a minor partner this time) was still Uganda’s chief trading partner. Likewise, the recommendation to depend on foreign loans bound Uganda to an agreement with the countries that provided Uganda with aid. For example, the aid Uganda received from Britain in mid-1966 meant that Uganda had to agree to spend 60 per cent of the money it was lent to buy British products (Mamdani, 1975). Similarly, in exchange for loans from the for a project involving a cotton spinning mill, Uganda was not just expected to start paying the interest a year before the completion of the project but it also had to agree to send half of the processed product to the Soviet Union and repay the rest of the loan through the export of any commodity that the Soviet Union required (Mamdani, 1975). Ostensibly, the World Bank team was helping to promote Africanization when they recommended boosting the development of local capitalists; however, this was a ruse for the establishment of the local petty middleclass as imperial ‘agents’ who would serve foreign exploiters, as the Indian big commercial capitalists had done previously. In following this economic development plan, by 1969, Uganda faced economic crisis, even though Uganda was exporting more than it had done before; coffee production had doubled, and cotton production

191 had multiplied by 50 per cent. Declining world prices of coffee and cotton in 1969 translated into declining foreign exchange earnings from the exports of those products (Mamdani, 1975). Simultaneously, foreign monopolies in Uganda took more money out of the country than they brought in. This meant that in 1969, 133.3 million shillings entered Uganda as aid, but in 1970, 294.6 million shillings left Uganda, since foreign exchange did not apply to foreign monopolies whose agents could send money through sabotaging practices such as over/under invoicing of transactions (Mamdani, 1975). The Indians in Uganda has also been experiencing a change in their location in the economy, and the effects of the hardships of the state influenced their wealth and prosperity.

The Obote government took steps to address these economic and political situations in Uganda that would later affect the future of the Uganda Indians, including Ismailis. It is little wonder that the indigenous masses organized a series of strikes to show their dissatisfaction with the rise in prices and diminishing incomes; as a response to these actions, the Obote government banned the rights of the working class to strike (Mamdani, 1975). Furthermore, to combat the political factionalism, the Obote government declared a one-party constitution in Uganda in 1966, which brought an end to the federal power of the Buganda state through the use of armed forces in 1967 (Mamdani, 1975). To consolidate his power, Obote cleansed his party of all the progressive intelligentsia who had connections to the working classes (Mamdani, 1975). Prior to this ‘cleansing’, the government party was comprised of two fractions – the governing bureaucracy and a middleclass group of small property-owning peasants and traders. Unable to unclasp the hold of the imperialists over the economy of Uganda, after declaring a one-party state, the governing bureaucracy then tackled two elements within its commercial sector: it took direct control over the co-operatives, and it replaced the Indian commercial capitalists with its own agents, which allowed them to take over the export-import trade through the creation of supervising state-controlled economic bodies known as para-statals. The ensuing results were two-fold: the position of the indigenous co-operatives was reduced, by law, to serving the wholesaler (who was an agent of the governing bureaucracy), while the commercial capitalists (Indian wholesalers) were to be replaced by the agents of the governing bureaucracy.

To protect their own economic bases, both the co-operatives and the Indian capitalists responded in their own ways, causing political havoc among the urban workers and the working peasants as

192 the prices of basic food items suddenly soared (Mamdani, 1975). Indian wholesalers bought basic commodities from the governments’ agents and hoarded the food; once market scarcity of these items had reached its peak, they sold it at marked up prices. Consequently, prices of basic commodities rose sharply so the co-operatives refused to buy them on behalf of the government agents. This led to a drop in prices offered to the growers for their crops by the government agents. Mamdani (1975) attributes the cause of the 1969 crisis to the indigenous middleclass in the co-operatives and to the Indian capitalists, as well as to the imperialists whose strong penetration of the Uganda economy had led to an imbalance in its economy. A failed assassination attempt on Obote’s life led the governing bureaucracy to respond through economic measures. The government instituted a national banking system and a national currency to regulate foreign exchange, and they followed this up by nationalizing multinational corporations. In effect, the nationalizations were merely the governing bureaucracy’s ploy to partner with multinational corporations that would benefit the governing bureaucracy through patronage of different directorships (and personal monetary gain) while appeasing the Ugandan masses with ostensible moves towards alleged ‘Africanization’ (Mamdani, 1975).

In addition to these changes, Indian Asian capitalists were reappointed to act as wholesale agents over the export-import trade, as were the large Indian Asian millers, and the governing bureaucracy expelled the Kenyan workers that made up almost ten per cent of the urban labour force to appease urban discontent. As Mamdani points out, within the government, “private enrichment through the public sector … took the form of corruption, not profit” and “briberies rivaled salaries as important sources of income for individual bureaucrats” (1975, p. 51). This resulted in growing antagonism between the indigenous African rich peasants, traders and the middle class in the co-operatives, and Obote’s bureaucratic state. At this time, the members of the small Indian traders and retailers were also voicing their growing discontent, since they had, since independence, applied for but been unable to obtain Ugandan citizenship, which impeded their right to trading licenses. Mamdani maintains that “by 1967, according to the Minister of Internal Affairs, there were 10,527 Asians who had applied for Ugandan citizenship but had not yet been granted” (1975, p. 52). Small trader non-citizens were required to show the possession of 80,000 Ugandan shillings (from which Indian capitalists were exempt), which resulted in the steady retreat of small Indian traders from Uganda by 1969 (Mamdani, 1975). For Obote and the bureaucratic state, this had political implications; the withdrawal of the small Indian traders

193 meant growth in the numbers – and therefore in the political significance – of the indigenous trading middleclass became a political threat to the Obote government. This led Obote to publicly declare in December of 1970 that he was planning to grant citizenship to 30,000 Ugandan Indians Asians (Mamdani, 1975). This declaration did nothing to curb the resentment the indigenous African middleclass held towards the Obote government; instead, they sought alliances with certain officers like Idi Amin in the Ugandan army, who also had reasons to be discontent with the governing bureaucracy.

Idi Amin comes to power: The fate of the Ugandan Indians.

Mamdani stipulates that the coup d’état that deposed the Obote government was orchestrated by an alliance between foreign imperialism and local middleclass nationalism with little or no input from the general indigenous masses:

Direct British-Israeli sponsorship of the Amin coup was something the imperialist media bothered little to deny in the first year of the regime. But later, as the vicious nature of the regime became apparent, the imperialist media adopted a holier-than-thou attitude, parading Amin as some sort of anthropological oddity, and his regime as a home-grown African affair. (1983, p. 31-32)

Mamdani maintains that the coup of 1971 was well received locally in Uganda by the urban traders and teachers, the Buganda petty middleclass, the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry on behalf of all African traders, and other leaders of the Ugandan petty bourgeoisie. All of them believed the coup signaled the beginning of democracy – an end to the one-party political system – which would grant the people the fruits of independence that had been denied to them thus far. Seven months into the establishment of the Amin government, popular demands arose from city council workers, plantation workers, Kampala taxi-drivers, transport workers, Jinja garment workers and the Kilembe miners in the form of strikes, and Amin’s military government decreed laws to stifle the strikers and suspended all political activities for a couple of years (Mamdani, 1975). At the same time, soldiers and prison officers, who had been authorized with special powers by Amin, searched for and eliminated the alleged leaders of Amin’s opposition.

194 Although the small property owning indigenous African middleclass had been the internal instigators of the coup, Amin assumed military dictatorship so that the “army became the supreme organ of the state” and the cabinet was soon replaced mainly by army officers (Mamdani, 1975, p. 42). Immediately following the coup, Amin also conducted an intensive and wide recruitment initiative for soldiers, and the army was enlarged by some 10,000 new recruits, mostly mercenaries whose survival depended on the continuance of Amin’s rule (p. 55). Once this recruitment was completed, Amin purged the army of alleged factions by murdering thousands of soldiers and setting up special intelligence units, ostensibly to curb kondoism but in reality used by the army officers to exterminate anyone who allegedly opposed Amin. Zareena from the Mothers’ Group in my study related how Amin established a concentration camp opposite their flat. She was a daily witness to naked and disfigured corpses of supposedly disloyal indigenous people who had been tortured by Amin’s soldiers and then tied to the chain- link fences as a warning to his adversaries. “It was a most terrifying time for them. There was no law. Amin’s army and special forces did what they pleased,” she recalled. It is estimated that 100,000-300,000 mostly indigenous Africans were tortured and killed by Amin’s ‘security’ forces between 1971 and 1978.

Once the coercive machinery of the state was firmly established, Amin turned to the issue of the big Indian capitalists and the small Indian traders. Many of Ugandan Indians, much like Mother Zareena’s family, watched horrified as Amin pushed aside the television news anchorman on August 7, 1972, to announce that – inspired by a dream – he was ordering all Ugandans with Indian ancestry to leave the country within ninety days. This act showed that the discourse of ‘nationality’ that had been planted and nurtured by the colonial state from the time Uganda was re-formed as a British protectorate had taken root in the minds of Ugandans. Most of the indigenous masses saw Ugandan Indians as ‘traders’ and alien exploiters who were the main obstacles in their economic progress and the chief causes of Uganda’s economic crisis. Amin had invoked the “narratives of ‘the nation’” so that “a group settled ‘in’ a place is not necessarily ‘of’ it” (Brah, 1996, p. 3), therefore making them expendable, citizens or not. Jameela Siddiqi (2002), a Ugandan novelist, describes Idi Amin as simply “a catalyst who finally caused the time-bomb to explode, a time-bomb that was initially planted by the British and then, in many ways nurtured by the Asians themselves” (n.p.). She attributes the expulsion to Amin’s naivety and mental

195 instability. Mamdani, on the other hand, demonstrates that the thinking behind Amin’s dithering over which Asians to expel from Uganda demonstrated his shrewd and calculated reasoning:

In the first few days after the announcement, Amin vacillated between expelling all Asians or just Asian commercial capital. Publicly, this was reflected in his indecision over whether to exempt professionals or not. Another issue resolved in practice was a legal one. An expulsion confined to non-citizens would leave the bulk if big Asian capital untouched; furthermore, it may also leave this section of Asian bourgeoisie in control of the material assets of the entire class once the process came to a conclusion! (1975, p. 56)

The Indian commercial communities in Uganda were dependent on British financing; they facilitated the export-import economy of Uganda that was supported by British banks, as a 1968 report of a study found that “approximately 80% of the total commercial bank assets in Uganda were controlled” by three British banks – Barclays Bank D.C.O., the National Bank and the Standard Bank (Mamdani, 1975, p. 57). This, however, did not help the Ugandan Indians; some of the citizen Indians, when asked to queue to confirm the legal validity of their Ugandan citizenship, found their passports and certificates torn, one after another. Eventually, all Indians were expelled – citizens and non-citizens alike.

On August 5, 1972, Amin delivered a speech giving Indians in Uganda ninety days to leave the country. Of the women in my study who were in Uganda at this time, eight out of ten had their Ugandan citizenship revoked by the official Ugandan authorities. In other words, together with other members of their respective families, they were made stateless. Gijsbert Oonk (2015) puts the official count of the Indian population of Uganda in 1969 to 74,308, of which 35,000 were British passport holders (mostly Protected Persons, not British Subjects), 8,890 were citizens of Indian, 253 were citizens of Pakistan, 1,768 were Kenyan citizens, and 26,657 were Uganda citizens. Tara Carman (2012) of the Vancouver Sun describes the fate of the two communities – Ismaili and Goan Ugandans – who “had largely opted to become Ugandan rather than hold onto British citizenship when Uganda became independent were particularly affected” (n.p.). She adds that “their lack of British passports made them largely ineligible to go to the U.K.” (Carman, 2012, n.p.).

196 Those Indians who still held British Protected Persons’ or British Subjects passports were in no better situations, since the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968, in its attempt to stem non- White immigration, had removed the right of entry to all British passport holders unless they had at least one parent or grandparent who was born in Britain (Brah, 1996). This Act, followed by the 1971 Immigration Act, made it even more difficult for racialized people to enter Britain; they could not enter Britain unless they possessed a work permit for a particular job with an identified employer (Brah, 1996). The British government of the time attempted to get Amin to rescind and/or postpone the expulsion edict (G. Dirks, 1977), to no avail. All of the women in my study expressed extreme anxiety and utter loss upon hearing Amin’s edict regarding the Indian expulsion from Uganda, a detailed discussion of which is not within the scope of this study. However, the expulsion order meant that traumatic as the experience of the Indians was during the ninety days prior to leaving Uganda, when they did leave, they left with no more than a few British pounds and the clothes on their backs (Oonk, 2015). My participants’ stories relate how their trauma was exacerbated by searches by military personnel at checkpoints on the interminable ride to the airport in Entebbe and strip searches at the airport. The departing Indian Ugandans were even deprived of their wristwatches and wedding rings, plus any other jewelry and money in their possession before their departure. It would be an understatement to say that the Ugandan Indians, including Ismailis, left Uganda under traumatic conditions. This trauma, however, had started in the lives of the Ugandan Ismailis in the time of the colonial reforms in the 1950s, and culminated with their expulsion from the country without any of the assets they had built up over generations. Below, Grandmother Noorbhegum recounts how the eviction of the Ismailis was announced in less than a year after her husband’s sudden death in Uganda:

It was a shocking time for me and my three children, you see. I thought, where will I go? What will I do? Where will the money come to keep us? You see. We were also worried about our safety … after the expulsion was announced. We were not allowed to take any furniture or clothes … even money. We were worried that the (black) Africans would not wait for us to leave, you see. There was nothing to stop them from moving in … our homes. It was a very difficult time, you see.

197 Her daughter, Nurjhan, from the Mothers’ Group, relates how the domestics that worked for her in-laws in Kampala had already started to take the latter’s personal items like shoes, clothing, and cooking utensils out of their home before they left:

My father-in-law found all his shoes and slippers had disappeared on the day he was leaving the country. He said, ‘I don’t care about the other things, but how can I go to the airport bare-foot? I am diabetic. I can’t get cuts on my feet!’

In the following excerpt, Khairoon recalls how she was in London with her husband for their son’s graduation when Amin’s edict was announced:

We were stuck, understand? I had just had my house repainted and had new curtains made after years of saving. We had sold a small flat we owned to leave money in the bank … to prove to the government we were coming back, understand. Then all this happened. And we couldn’t go back. We had brought nothing with us. Understand? My youngest daughter was still in Kampala. She was doing important school exams, understand? She was with my husband’s brother and his wife … in Kampala.

The eviction order had caused the sundering apart of some families. Other narratives from my study disclose how people did not feel safe in their own homes or on the streets. In her stories of the pre-eviction days, Sakina relates how she and her family lived across the street from Amin’s abode, where soldiers with guns hung around daily; below, she describes how she and her family lived in perpetual fear for just ‘being Indian’:

We always heard guns going off … day and night … army cars … we were scared to leave the house … also to be in the house. Even after we got our papers to go to Canada. After days of line-ups. And Canadian planes coming for us, they were not allowed to-to land … at Entebbe. The planes would land in Nairobi. We didn’t know if we’d make it out Uganda … alive. It was like Amin was disappointed. That other countries had agreed to take us Asians. As if he wanted to make us suffer. We lived on the edge … day and night.

This sense of living “on the edge,” all the while making themselves as ‘inconspicuous’ as possible, was described by all of the women in my study who were in Uganda after Amin announced the expulsion of Ugandan Indians; they all feared for their physical safety. The fact

198 that educated indigenous Africans as well as the urban working class welcomed Amin’s decision to evict all Ugandan Indians is also evident in Jameela Siddiqui’s expulsion stories regarding her experience as an Indian Ugandan student attending Makerere University in Kampala in 1972:

As a young (and fairly naïve) student at Makerere University in 1972, judging by the reaction of my peers to the Expulsion order, it seemed to me that the vast majority of educated, and reasonable-minded Black Ugandans were actually very supportive of Amin’s decision. Although many had suffered the effects of Amin’s brutal regime (relatives gone missing, believed killed) they still seemed to think that the Asians were somehow to blame for the political and economic mess that was now Uganda. Every night, in the undergraduates’ Common Room, when the countdown for Asians to get out was updated at the end of the evening news, cheers went up from the Black girls. (2002, n.p.)

These ‘cheers’ were from Siddiqui’s indigenous peers with whom she attended classes at the university and shared meals in the mess hall at least three times daily; now they were cheering at her fate. The life narratives of Siddiqui show how “the same geographical and psychic space comes to articulate different ‘histories’ and how ‘home’ can simultaneously be a place of safety and of terror” (Brah, 1996, p.180). Below, Mamdani provides more complex insights into the location of the diaspora Indians in Uganda and maintains that the indigenous Africans made no distinctions between a first generation diaspora Indian and their third generation descendants – “both are known as Bahindi” (from India):

To be a Muhindi is to be a permanent visitor. It is to be known by your ancestral origin, not by your present, nor by the future you hope to build. It is to be identified as a visitor. To be a permanent visitor is, however, to be permanently insecure and permanently irresponsible. If the Asian minority is daily plagued by this insecurity, the majority is forever conscious of the Asians as irresponsible to society. (2013, p. 6)

Amin’s edict did not differentiate between generations of Indians who had already been living in Uganda, and once pronounced, the edict made all Indians afraid for their physical safety. If living in the country once the pronouncement was made was nerve-racking, leaving it was also a harrowing experience, as reported by all of the participants of my study who were in Uganda at the time. Zareena from the Mothers’ Group admits that she was utterly dejected at leaving

199 Uganda, until from their flat, she witnessed a man being shot by Amin’s soldiers. Just getting to the airport to board planes to foreign destinations was an ordeal that was recounted by many of the participants in my study. Contrary to Michael Molloy’s statement that Uganda Indians travelling to the airport were neither stopped at military checkpoints nor harassed in any way because they were escorted by Canadian officials (see Migration and Ethnic Relations, 2012), the women in my study described the ride as highly nerve-racking. Below, Noorbhegum from the Grandmothers’ Group describes the traumatizing the trip from Kampala to the airport:

I told my children to start praying… quietly. We weren’t sure we would even get to the airport safely, you see. There were so many stops … on the way. Soldiers stopped us and checked our small bags … handbags. They took things they wanted. Then the search at the airport, you see. I don’t think we stopped praying till we were in the air, you see. We cried and laughed. But we were also so afraid. What will happen in a new country, you see.

Shirin, from the Mothers’ Group, also recounted how the airport was flooded by Amin’s soldiers carrying guns, intimidating people who were already distraught and rattled. She related how when her two year-old brother ran towards the soldiers, they pointed their weapons at him: “For a moment I thought, they’re going to shoot my brother! I was petrified. My Dad ran and picked him up. We were scared to death!” Similarly, Zareena’s narrative disclosed how she witnessed the shooting of an Indian man at the airport and felt sick to her stomach. The women in my study also described the intimidation that was used by officials who carried out body searches; again Grandmother Noorbhegum recalled how the Black female official threw photos of her daughter from her handbag on the floor saying, “You won’t need them where you’re going!”

It was under these circumstances and in this particular historical context that the Ismailis in 1972, including the participants in my study, left Uganda, a place they had called home. For East African Indian Ismailis, this was a different journey than the one undertaken by their ancestors from the Indian subcontinent, who had migrated to East Africa in response to the edicts of their Imam, Aga Khan III in a ‘religiously facilitated’ diaspora. Michael Molloy provides the final tally of the Ugandan Indians, most of them Ismailis, who left Uganda for Canada under the auspicious Canadian UGX operation; he calculates that in sixty days, by November 8, 1972, 6,175 Canadian visas were granted (also see Dirks, 1977) and 4,351 passengers and 69 babies

200 were transported to Canada in 31 flights (Migration and Ethnic Relations, 2012). Their numbers were augmented by the move of another 2,000 Indian Ugandans to Canada the following year (Migration and Ethnic Relations, 2012).

Conclusion: Stepping into the Canadian Landscape – Naturalizing Whiteness and Othering Brownness

The Ugandan Ismaili stepped into a Canadian landscape that had already been formed by its history of legislated immigration practices, which relationally positioned different diaspora cultural groups within its borders in relation to one another in order “to include them or exclude them from constructions of the ‘nation’ and the body politic … as juridical, political, and psychic subjects” (Brah, 1996, p. 183). The stories of the women in my study reveal their relational positioning compared to other diaspora groups, as differentiated by their colour, physiognomy, religion, culture, and language in the contested ‘Diaspora Space’ of Canada. This heterotopia is occupied by immigrants as well as by the descendants of White settlers who felt ‘entitled’ to the space, revealing the operations of power that go into the “processes in and through which the collective Canadian ‘we’ is constituted” (Brah, 1996, p. 184-185). This understanding is exemplified by Sherene Razack’s explication of the “mythologies or national stories about a nation’s origins and history” (2002, p. 2). She explains that these mythologies “enable citizens to think of themselves as part of a community, defining who belongs and who does not belong to the nation” (Razack, 2002, p. 2). In turn, this reveals not only how the same geographical space can have different meanings for different groups of people, according to who is empowered and disempowered in Canada, but it also speaks to the economic, political, cultural and psychic ramifications these relational differentiations have on the diaspora communities in a place they call ‘home’, as was confirmed in the oral accounts of the women in this study.

Brah astutely references how this issue of being able to claim a place as ‘home’ is connected contextually to the experiences generated by the politics of dis/location; it “is intrinsically linked with the way in which processes of inclusion or exclusion operate and are subjectively experienced under given circumstances. It is centrally about our political struggles over the social regulation of ‘belonging’” (1996, p. 192 [my emphasis]). As I have shown in this chapter, for at least sixty years (if not more) prior to their expulsion from Uganda, the diaspora Ismailis and their descendants lived in a political and economic East African colour-coded society where

201 the White (British) race was naturalized as the privileged class. Paradoxically, it was after this White race left Uganda that Ugandan Indians were expelled from the country, over which the indigenous Africans had received, at least officially, power of self-governance. Similarly, when the Ugandan Ismailis arrived in Canada, the situation was strangely reminiscent of their location in East Africa; they were received in a nation in which (British) Whiteness had once again already been established in a position of normalcy and privilege.

By the time the Ugandan Ismailis stepped into the North American landscape in 1972, Canada had already established itself as a ‘White’ settler nation, where, without being named, Whiteness, as a historical construct of racialization, was equated with civilization. Consequentially, this had the effect of naturalizing the power of White identity over its Brown and Black others in the discourse of common sense (Jiwani, 2006). Defining White settler society in Canada as “one established by Europeans on non-European soil” (2002, p. 1), Razack demonstrates how such a society takes on a racial hierarchical structure as it develops, giving primacy to the story that White settlers are those who are most ‘entitled’ to the land on account of their ‘civilizing’ practices:

In the national mythologies of such societies, it is believed that the white people came first and that it is they who principally developed the land; Aboriginal peoples are presumed to be mostly dead or assimilated. European settlers thus become the original inhabitants and the group most entitled to the fruits of the citizenship. (2002, pp. 1-2 [my emphasis])

Razack points out that in such “an official national story of European enterprise” (2002, p. 3), the labour of Chinese people to construct the railway or the labour of Sikhs to develop the lumber industry are suppressed and are thus rendered invisible. However, the Canadian national story according to Razack does not cease here; it continues to expose the rest of the White settler project. Having clinched their primary claim to Canada through a national mythology that renounces acts of “conquest, genocide, slavery, and the exploitation of the labour of peoples of colour” (Razack, 2002, p. 2), the White settlers then turn to the construction of “the … people of colour … as late arrivals, coming to the shores of North America long after much of the development has occurred” (Razack, 2002, p. 3). Like Razack, Daniel Coleman (2006) argues, “by representing himself as already indigenous the [White] settler claims priority over newer

202 immigrants and, by representing himself as already civilized, he claims superiority to Aboriginals and other non-whites [read ‘immigrants’]” (p. 16). For new immigrants such as the Indian-Ismaili East African women in my study, understandings of the official symbolic narrative of Canada’s history unfold as one of a Loyalist settlement that planted its roots in a country that was “once a wilderness – wild, uncultivated, largely empty – until the Europeans arrived and carved out a society” (Coleman, 2006, p. 28). Further articulated by Coleman, at least for the oldest generation of women in my study, the lives of these early settlers were reminiscent of what they had seen or heard about regarding hardships suffered by their diaspora Indian ancestors in East Africa:

They fought overwhelming odds of nature – harsh weather, wild animals, fecund and chaotic vegetation – and won a cultivated, orderly society. They battled not only loneliness, alienation, and factionalism among themselves but also the abandonment and disregard of their European homelands as they built a new home in the New World (2006, pp. 28-29).

This official history tells the story of how Canada was settled peacefully by White entrepreneurs, denying the presence of indigenous Aboriginals on the land, from whom they wrenched the territory through violence, suppression and displacement (Coleman, 2006; Razack, 2002), whitewashing them from the canvas of Canadian history as minor pentimento spectres beneath the central story of the European settlers as the bearers of civilization. As Sunera Thobani maintains, “In the case of Canada, the historical exaltation of the national [White] subject has ennobled this subject’s humanity and sanctioned the elevation of its rights over and above that of the Aboriginal and the immigrant” (2007, p. 7).

The following chapter focuses on the women in the Grandmothers’ Group, and in particular on their experiences on the East African terrain prior to their expulsion from Uganda in 1972. This chapter is a study on the local forms of agency practised by these women in the oldest generation of participants as they learn, use, and transmit local lessons in their daily lives.

203 Chapter Six: Grandmothers: Learning From Older Women

Figure 6: Grandmother Participants.

This chapter focuses on the women in the Grandmothers’ Group (Figure 6) – Zuleikha, Khairoon, Fatma, Noorbhegum, and Sakina – who provide the point of departure for this study. Through the Grandmothers’ stories, this chapter demonstrates the capacity of these Ismaili women to be learners, makers, users, and transmitters of local knowledges. The positions they have taken up have assisted them in gaining some autonomy in their daily lives in an East African geographical diaspora space from the late-1920s to 1972. As their oral life accounts reveal, the women from the oldest generation in this study consciously or unconsciously absorbed local lessons by observing the practices of the older women in their respective families, reproducing them in diverse and changed ways to suit their own purposes. In particular, the women’s life narratives demonstrate how they utilized the locally learned lessons to several ends: to gain respect and acquire respectability; to keep their dignity; to carry out their responsibilities; and to acquire voice, self-sufficiency, and financial independence in their daily lives. Some of the Grandmothers justified their use of these passed-on tactics, inherited from the older women in their families, through a partially and, at times, wholly conscious theorizing of local ideologies that are particular to their histories. Accordingly, through the analysis of the ways in which the women utilize their locally learned education, this chapter explores the local form of agency practised by the women in the Grandmothers’ Group. This local agency, as their stories disclose, is reflected not through dramatic or heroic gestures, but rather in small, often (but not always) hidden ways and imbricated into the fabric of their normal social existence (Vinthagen and and Johansson, 2013).

204 This chapter is organized into two sections. In Section One, the women identify older role models who provided them with local lessons that taught them survival skills in their daily lives. Through selected excerpts from the women’s narratives, I demonstrate how the women in the Grandmothers’ Group learn not to yield to victimhood but instead to use tactics that sustain their dignity and teach them how to acquire some relief for themselves in daily living by working mostly within gender boundaries. The women’s stories reveal that these local passed-on lessons are far from simple: the women in the Grandmothers’ Group recounted they sometimes ingested more overt resistance tactics, learned what not to do, and discovered how to use tactics of both compliance and subversion of traditional gender boundaries when necessary. In Section Two, I include stories revealing daily practices to demonstrate how the five oldest women in my project have made use of local inherited knowledges. I do this to explore the effects of the use of these passed-on resistance tactics on the lives of these women as ‘agents’.

Section One: Identifying the Teachers of Local Knowledges

Zuleikha, Khairoon, Fatma, Noorbhegum, and Sakina provided the baseline for this study, which explores the ways Ismaili women use local cultural passed-on knowledges to help them gain some autonomy in their day-to-day lives. All five women identified older women (as opposed to men) as having played an important role in providing them with informal knowledges that educated them about resistance tactics (at times substantiated with local ideologies) to navigate gender boundaries, however temporarily, which were delineated by patriarchal cultural mores. Their stories divulged that the local lessons they inherited helped them not surrender to victimhood and allowed them to keep their dignity and gain some reprieve in their daily lives. Their oral stories revealed that they had watched their elders maneuver labyrinths of external hardships and paucity of resources, combined with patriarchal expectations that constricted their daily lives, resulting often in their premature aging, early onslaught of illnesses, and even untimely death.

Zuleikha.

In her accounts, Zuleikha, identified her fuiba (aunt) as the ‘mother’ figure who had most influenced her life:

205 My mother died when I was about 10-12 something, you know. Before that she was ill – very ill. But we had a fuiba. And she was very kind to us, you know. She would take me everywhere with her. She was like my mother, you know. I was influenced by her … I think more than anyone else. She had a huge impact on my life, you know. That sort of … rubs off on you, you know … somehow.

Zuleikha revealed how her fuiba influenced her through the way she led her daily life, using tactics to resist succumbing totally to cultural patriarchy. Zuleikha described how Fuiba did not surrender her life in helpless resignation when her husband died prematurely of Blackwater fever sometime during the late 1930s. According to Zuleikha’s narratives, Fuiba faced her widowhood by becoming fully engaged in life through various voluntary activities within the Ismaili community. Zuleikha described how she perceived her aunt’s participation in community volunteer activities as a tactic to avoid being completely confined to the home as a widow. In other words, Zuleikha’s life narratives disclosed how she absorbed Fuiba’s tactical use of this community avenue as an opportunity to gain community sanction to be able to work outside of the home. Diplomatically harnessing (male) support from her brother, Fuiba started to play a very active volunteer role in the Ismaili community by helping to establish a nursery school, followed by a dispensary (health clinic) for Ismaili children. Zuleikha reflected,

She was so clever, you know. She started a volunteer Ismaili … thing. She started a nursery school … with my father’s help. And then a dispensary, you know, like a health clinic for Ismaili children. As a volunteer. She would talk to the teachers at the nursery … to the doctors, and nurses.

Zuleikha observed how her aunt, having first stepped into the outside volunteer world, where she interacted with formally educated professionals and built her respectability through her community charitable deeds, then launched into the business world. In her story below, Zuleikha observes how Fuiba tactfully appropriated male sanction to start her own business and remain engaged in life:

She ran the café at my father’s cinema, you know. She would consult my father and just do things. Twice a day she would – if it was a matinée or an evening show, she would be there to sell her stuff, you know. So Fuiba was a businesswoman in that sense … very much. I

206 remember that, you know. She used to paint like dollies and things. People would come and buy. She never stopped, you know. She always did something. I think that’s what I saw her as– as– I learned … from her.

Zuleikha portrayed Fuiba as an independent woman who was continually involved with life. Zuleikha saw her as being constantly in motion: “She never stopped … She always did something.” Zuleikha appeared to internalize the resistance tactics Fuiba practised that helped her avoid being circumscribed by gender restrictions which kept some other Ismaili widows locked into a domestic world. In her account above, Zuleikha demonstrates how she saw her aunt slowly insinuate herself into the outside working world as a ‘businesswoman’ who was constantly seeking approval from her brother – a male – to ward off potential community criticism of her venture into a world that was culturally reserved for males. Zuleikha learned mundane resistance tactics by watching her Fuiba, a fact that was evident in Zuleikha’s half- articulated “I think I saw her as– as– [a role model?] I learned … from her.” For Zuleikha, Fuiba exemplified the potential for women to be economically independent, something that Zuleikha adapted later on in life. Fuiba’s lessons were influential for Zuleikha, which is revealed in the following narrative:

She was an independent woman … financially. Although her husband was dead, you know. Later, I used to think about that. After she died. Suddenly, it would come to me … you know, like in the background. What she used to do, you know. ‘Fuiba would do this … she would do that’. Things like that came back. I wonder how I got that?

This narrative provides an example of the way local knowledges are transmitted through women to subsequent generations. Zuleikha expressed her own wonderment at absorbing lessons from Fuiba through observation. On the other hand, Zuleikha’s accounts also revealed that this informal learning process was far from simple: although Zuleikha did not identify her stepmother as someone who had imparted any informal lessons of ‘import’, Zuleikha’s accounts demonstrated how she had also unconsciously assimilated some of the more overt tactics used by her stepmother in attempts to resist gender oppression in the home:

My stepmother was also mouthy … she used to get ill, you know. I used to say in my mind – my father used to get so angry and slap her – and so, I said ‘I’ll never be like her … I’ll

207 be like my own mother’, you know. She was such a gentle person. But it didn’t work with me. I became worse than my stepmother. Mouthy. But I also became very strong, you know.

Although Zuleikha did not identify her stepmother as someone whose practices she had admired and emulated, Zuleikha’s actions later on in life supported the fact that she had nonetheless unconsciously absorbed the tactics she had observed her stepmother deploying – those of unconcealed rebelliousness. In fact, Zuleikha demonstrated the potency of the transmission of such informal learning when she proclaimed that “I said, ‘I’ll never be like her … I became worse than my stepmother.” She claimed she became ‘mouthy’, ingesting the practices of her stepmother and using them in service of resistance later on in her life. At the same time, however, Zuleikha emphasized quite unequivocally that in spite of the negative repercussions of using this learned tactic of open resistance to cross gender boundaries, her use of it later in her life made her stronger.

Khairoon.

Similarly, Khairoon’s stories, which differed radically from Zuleikha’s, demonstrated that local lessons were far from straightforward in that they simultaneously taught women what to do and what not to do to be able to survive. Khairoon’s autobiographical accounts showed this particular aspect, through lessons she learned from observing her older female siblings who taught her the most about navigating cultural restrictions. These are learned tactics that she claimed she employed throughout her own daily life, as expressed below:

I never knew what my mother looked like … I was told she died when I was not yet two. We lived with Kakah [Uncle] and Kakih [Aunt]. But my sisters brought me up, understand? Yes, they were all older. My two older sisters were more like my mothers. They protected me. We had to do as we were told, understand? I watched them … I saw them being beaten by Kakih. Often. One sister was caught taking a love note … from a boy. She was slapped at every chance by Kakih … when she thought my sister was slow at doing housework. My other sisters also got beaten a lot … by Kakih. Yes, I observed all that. Understand? But we couldn’t tell Kakah … we were orphans … girls.

208 Khairoon’s excerpt above touches on several different issues, but the one pertinent to this discussion is that, as she watched her sisters being meted out physical abuse, she learned what not to do to be spared from their fate. Khairoon’s daughter Khatoon (from the Mothers’ Group in this study), who had obviously heard the same stories from Khairoon and from her aunts, describes below how her mother watched her sisters and learned from their practices what to do to escape the physical abuse that her sisters endured:

Mum has told us stories about her childhood. It was hard, very hard for them. For all sisters. The aunt was very strict. Mum saw how badly her sisters were treated. Like having hot chili power stuffed in their mouths, getting slapped around … things like that. So, I think she figured out early what to do. She learned from her sisters, she became smart. She made sure she excelled in housework, sewing, cooking, you know, doing things women did. She also worked hard in school. That’s how she ended up in her uncle’s good books. She escaped the beating her sisters got.

Khatoon’s account complemented her mother’s narrative: Khairoon learned that her compliance and competency in the domestic work and her ability to excel in school would allow her to escape what her sisters could not. Khairoon related how Kakah, spurred on by Aga Khan III’s firmans on formal education, wanted all his nieces to do well at school; however, burdened with household chores and helping out with the store, Khairoon’s sisters were unable to concentrate on their education. Khairoon’s oral accounts revealed how being the youngest, and being protected by her older sisters, Khairoon was been able to please Kakah by becoming a good student at school – a fact which was communicated to Kakah and the whole of the small Ismaili community by her teachers. In addition, Khairoon related how she learned, by watching her sisters’ practices, to insinuate herself into close physical proximity to her uncle and out of the way of her aunt:

I would often do my homework in a small corner in the store where Kakah would be serving Ismailis. They would always ask what I was doing. I think Kakah liked that, understand? He was on the Ismaili Council in our town. He used to like hearing our praises … from the community. Understand?

209 The excerpt above demonstrates how Khairoon had already begun to apply the local lessons she learned from her sisters. She was not just making herself ‘safe’ by doing her homework in the store, but she was also gaining approbation from her uncle for earning him respectability and more business from his Ismaili customers, who were patronizing his store out of respect for his local leadership by following the Imam’s firmans regarding the formal schooling for girls. Khairoon’s narratives also exhibit how she learned to grasp some joy in her personal life by watching the practices of her older sisters. As she explains below, Khairoon learned from them how to utilize the safe space of their local jamatkhana to participate in gender-separated community activities to seize some personal respite from restrictions placed on the social activities of girls and women:

Sometimes the women and girls would gather after prayers during Khusyali [high holy day] in the jamatkhana and sing Gujarati folk songs and do the raas-garba [Gujarati folk dance]. Understand? Sometimes, after evening prayers the women and girls would make their way to the Takhree [small hill] where someone had built a small shelter. My sisters always took me. This was one way … I learned from my sisters … we could relax. Have fun. Even Kakih couldn’t stop us because it was a community event, and she participated too.

Khairoon’s voice lightened as she described these events, substantiating how such local knowledges served girls like Khairoon for learning ways to acquire some joy in their otherwise more restricted social lives. She had been taught through her sisters’ practices to utilize the liminal spaces endorsed by the Ismaili community where an Ismaili girl or woman, restricted by gender mores, could find some relief from gender boundaries that pervaded their daily lives and not suffer loss of reputation or suffer backlash at home.

Fatma.

A recurring theme in these women’s stories was that passed-on lessons were key in teaching girls/women how to maintain their good reputation. Fatma, in particular, clarified the vital importance of such lessons and their durable quality. Fatma, the least forthcoming of all the participants in the Grandmothers’ Group, was mindful of her reputation at the time of her interviews. She claimed she was taught by her mother that what happened within the private

210 realm of the family should remain there to preserve their good reputation. At the beginning of her interview, Fatma explicitly informed me that there were family secrets she could never divulge, because “they [the people involved in preserving family secrets] are still living and will recognize who they are if I speak about them.” Regardless, she unhesitatedly identified her mother as the person who exerted the most influence on her life, talking mostly in generalities of what she learned from her mother’s practices:

[My mother] taught me to cook. She taught me to sew. She taught me all that. You know, when a mother cooks, we all join her in cooking … and all those kinds of things. To dress well. To sew well. I used to watch my mother … she did a lot for the extended family. She used to take care of them. She was an excellent cook. All this … she taught me. She gave me.

Fatma itemized the traditionally gendered skills that were passed on by her mother in the domestic domain, which would purportedly help her survive in her married life. She juxtaposed this with another practice taught by her mother – “to dress well.” This act was initiated by her mother’s influence, and it defied the traditional notion of modesty through dress that was imposed on girls and women. These passed-on lessons substantiate the transmission of local knowledges by older women and demonstrate ways to practise a local form of everyday resistance. The women in my study often discussed the simultaneous acts of accommodation and quiet resistance, since “‘accommodation’ and ‘resistance’ are not mutually exclusive concepts” but spaces within which the restricted person “moves back and forth with parts of her/his activity, body or time” (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013, p. 25).

Expanding these themes, Fatma identified her sister as someone who taught her what not to do by setting examples through her practices in their childhood. All Fatma would reveal was that her sister was more outspoken while Fatma was more like her mother, quiet and obedient. Fatma’s daughter, Farida, from the Mothers’ Group, was also more reticent in her family stories but revealed that her aunt was more ‘social’ and ‘outgoing’ than was accepted in her day. By contrast, Farida described her mother, Fatma, as being more subdued and submissive. This meant that Farida’s maternal uncles respected and favoured her mother over her aunt. Rather than presenting herself as the more respected daughter in the family though, Fatma displayed another

211 aspect of ‘everyday resistance’ in a culture that encouraged gendered acts of modesty and discouraged women from voicing self-praise, showing how well Fatma had internalized the passed-on lessons from her mother. Instead of describing herself directly as dai – an epithet of praise applied to a girl/woman who displayed attributes of her culturally designated gender role through daily practices with quiet submission – Fatma chose to demonstrate the practices of her sister as a foil to contrast her own practices. She claimed she had inherited these practices from her mother, who was dai:

My mother was not social. She was very dai. Very quiet. Not talkative. And honest. She was just absorbed in the housework all the time. She would not participate in any dhekha- dhekhee [envious gossip] or anything like that. My sister was not like that. I must have watched my mother … and listened and learned. So I became more like her.

In this way, by drawing a contrast to her sister, Fatma presented herself indirectly as ‘not like her sister’ and more like her mother, and therefore, as dai, or as the ‘good’ woman who displays qualities designated by her gender role – e.g., honesty, quiet diligence, lacking envious volubility – thereby demonstrating an act of quiet resistance. Overall, as Fatma identified the women who taught her informal lessons in life, she displayed a kind of agency through resistance that could not be seen as “pure opposition to the order it opposes,” but as one that “both works within that order and displays its own contradictions” (Loomba, 2005, p. 198) as befits the notion of ‘everyday resistance’.

Noorbhegum.

Much like Fatma, Noorbhegum’s stories indicated that she learned tactics of compliance and accommodation and practised patient quietude in her life to get what she wanted. Her life stories identified her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law, in addition to her own mother, as women who had the most impact in her life. Much like Fatma, Noorbhegum credited her mother as having taught her the expected gendered skills of the domestic realm and tactics of compliance and accommodation that earned her respectability in her married life; these, once again, contributed to her survival:

212 My mother taught me to cook, clean, and take care of children, you see. I learned cooking and cleaning from her. Then, I had two younger brothers before I married, so you see, I learned from my mother how to take care of them. Since my father was a Kambarya [appointed leader] of the main jamatkhana, he and my mother had to be in jamatkhana everyday, so I had to take care of my brothers, you see. No, mostly, I learned sewing at school. I learned to do things quietly. Do as I was told.

Noorbhegum’s narratives disclosed that these transferred skills came in useful when she married in her late teens and moved to another town, away from her parents; however, she claimed that she had initially found married life difficult because she came from a relatively small family and married into a very large family:

After I got married, I moved into a very large family. We lived with my father and mother- in-law, my older brother-in-law and his wife and two children, and my husband’s two sisters, who were not yet married, you see. Also, there were always three or four of my husband’s cousins, or nephews and nieces who were either studying in our town or were being trained in my father-in-law’s retail business, who lived with us. Then there were house guests. Some stayed with us for two, three months! There were always at least fifteen, twenty and sometimes more people in the house, you see. They all had to be fed three to four times daily. That took a lot of our time, you see.

In the episode below, Noorbhegum recounts how she felt so intimidated that she had to learn to deal with this situation in her life fast, and the local lessons imparted by her sister-in-law, hard as they were, helped her to survive and maintain her father’s good name:

To survive, I had to learn quickly, you see. My older sister-in-law taught me many things. She taught me about the customs of the house, and how to take shortcuts to avoid being told off. She told me off often when I was not fast enough, you see. She would take things out of my hands and do them herself quickly … to get things done fast. Sometimes I felt embarrassed … or just hurt. I couldn’t say anything; I was younger. But I learned practical things from her too, you see. How to do things that would have otherwise got me into trouble many times. Little things. To survive. Like what to do if you put too much salt in the food. It was important back then, you see. Some women got beaten up for things like

213 that. My mother-in-law was a very strict woman in those days. I was very scared of displeasing her. But my sister-in-law was outwardly obedient … then she did things her own way too. Sometimes she disobeyed silently. I watched her: she did things her own way, like, not like openly, but she did things she wanted to do.

Noorbhegum continually demonstrated how, for many women who married early, training through local lessons imparted by older women continued well into their married lives. Noorbhegum related how she learned from her sister-in-law to be ostensibly compliant and uncomplainingly accommodative to survive in a very large and busy family:

We ate in different sittings, you see. There were so many people in the household. The women ate last, you see. Often all the best food was gone by then. So sometimes when we had a lot of guests, while we were cooking, my sister-in-law would quietly feed us: like, she would spread sugar and pan-fried bananas on freshly made chapatis [unleavened bread]. So we ate quickly and quietly. But no one had to know about it, you see. But it taught me how to cope daily … to survive … to look after myself even in a small way.

Through her life stories, Noorbhegum explained why these local lessons were so important for her then; they helped to avoid open confrontations as well as to prevent the build-up of hidden resentments. According to her, those were important practical life lessons that allowed her to take care of herself, maintain her dignity, and win the respect of the family.

Many of Noorbhegum’s narratives also focused on local lessons she learned by watching the practices of her mother-in-law, which likewise helped her maintain her dignity and self-respect. Noorbhegum’s life stories show that women learn from older women whom they may also fear and hold in awe. Noorbhegum’s stories depict a very strong and strict mother-in-law who did not brook disobedience well; still, Noorbhegum demonstrated that the lessons she learned, of ostensible compliance and patience, paid off over the years. These enabled her to earn the respect and affection of her mother-in-law, with whom she shared residence for some twenty-odd years. Particular lessons that Noorbhegum maintained she learned by observing the practices of her mother-in-law involved facing hardships without caving in to self-pity or victimhood and leaning instead on her religious faith. This is captured below in one excerpt from Noorbhegum’s life accounts:

214 [My mother-in-law] resisted the hardships of life by relying on the Ismaili faith but also in the Hindu beliefs, like reincarnation. She continued to read religious books daily. She had lost all her money, which her sons had persuaded her to lend them for expanding their business. The business failed after many years. She lost all her money. She even had to move towns with us so my husband could start all over again, you see. But I never heard her complain. Or break down or blame anyone. Or pity herself. She felt it was a waste of time, you see. Instead, she leaned on her faith; she had faith in the Imam. She always said that if you believed strongly … had faith, everything would work out. I saw her say her prayers, attend jamatkhana every day. I learned that from her. I saw how it helped her to survive … with dignity.

The lessons Noorbhegum learned from her mother-in-law, as identified in her stories, centred on tactics to overcome adversities and maintain her dignity by relying on her religious faith. Through these lessons, Noorbhegum claimed her mother-in-law taught her a kind of ‘practical’ self-sufficiency: she relied on spiritual strength through prayers, she did not give in to self-pity or grief or blame, and she was able to maintain her self-respect.

Noorbhegum learned from her mother-in-law how to collude with other women, through small gestures, in order to resist forms of patriarchal gender restrictions, and how to live life practically to protect herself and her family:

Women would come to seek her help, you see. Not just friends. Women who knew of my mother-in-law’s honest reputation. Sometimes she would hide their jewelry and savings for them. They didn’t want their husbands or mothers-in-law to know. They would tell her their grievances … she would listen. She would advise them if they asked, but never disclose their secrets. I watched all this, you see. Even when she was dying, she still continued to teach me. She would tell me, ‘we all have to go sometime’, you see. She even gave practical advice like ‘Remember to lock the house before you leave for the funeral’, because in our neighbourhood, a house was robbed when the family forgot to lock their front door before they left for the funeral of a relative.

Noorbhegum’s accounts demonstrate that the lessons she learned from her mother-in-law ranged from the importance of support between women to the strength one gained from one’s belief in

215 god. These practices also represent a local form of feminism and a local version of agency that is practised by the older women and transmitted to women like Noorbhegum. The legacy of tactics that Noorbhegum inherited from the two women she identified in her married life was enacted in neither boldly dramatic nor visibly heroic practices. On the contrary, Noorbhegum’s narratives demonstrate how both women – her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law, mostly through their daily practices – had taught her tactics of survival, dignity, and self-sufficiency, and the importance of small acts of support. These women worked mostly within the boundaries of their gendered cultural roles, using only small shifts in routine practices, and they became local feminists and agents. These elements were echoed in Sakina’s narratives.

Sakina.

Throughout her narratives, Sakina identified her paternal grandmother and her mother-in-law as the two women who taught her the most invaluable practical lessons. They did this through routine practices that taught Sakina how to undermine restrictions that circumscribed women’s daily lives. Sakina’s stories emphasize how these women were able to work from within the boundaries of the culture but did not hesitate to subvert certain hegemonic traditions to get what they wanted. Not only do Sakina’s stories more directly address the characteristics of the local informal teaching/learning processes themselves, but her narratives also identify the tactics of ‘everyday resistance’ that she recognized in the practices of the women – those that imparted certain practical local lessons reflecting larger issues of life. As gleaned from Sakina’s narratives, the older women in her life underscored for her particular lessons about respect, self- sufficiency, autonomy, and dignity through informal lessons on organizational skills, while they also demonstrated, in Sakina’s words, “a different way of control.” Sakina emphasized one central story about her learning, which she returned to repeatedly through her narrations. This story highlighted the actions of her paternal grandmother, from which Sakina gleaned a local ideology that she saw as guiding the daily practices of both her grandmother and her mother-in- law and allowing them to maintain their ‘powerful’ status within the family hierarchy. The following story was reiterated by Sakina many times during the interview and in later conversations:

My grandmother was very busy with one after the other son. And then the daughter– the sons got married and my grandfather, was a– he was very fond of women. He was a

216 womanizer … a big womanizer. My grandmother knew. He used to go away months sometimes to live with this other woman. And my grandmother was so busy with one daughter-in-law giving birth … then another. Son-in-law has lost his job. No money in the house when Grandfather was away. So many things.

According to the rest of Sakina’s story, which was told in great detail, when her grandmother told her husband that he was needed in the house, he revealed that he could not live without his mistress. In great detail, Sakina explained the reason her grandmother needed her husband’s physical presence in the home: As the male head of the household, her grandfather’s presence lent strength to her grandmother’s position as his wife in a hierarchically-structured household, which was based on the cultural traditions. Out of respect for the established status quo, other members of the family (like her five sons, their wives and children, her daughter and son-in-law, their children, and her widowed sister-in-law), who all shared the same space of the house, obeyed the grandmother’s wishes, as was accorded by her position when validated by her husband’s physical presence. The grandfather’s absence from the home, however, opened up the possibility of anarchy in the household as a result of acts of disobedience from the family members who were lower down on the hierarchal family pyramid.

According to Sakina, she watched her grandmother subvert the traditional conventions and persuade her husband to invite his Hindu mistress to move in with them. Sakina explained that her grandmother actually accompanied him to invite the mistress, reassuring her that the she would be treated with respect in her house. However, things eventually came to a head, which, according to Sakina, taught her that her grandmother’s actions were anything but submissive. One day, observing the repetition of a religious ritual that Sakina’s grandmother carried out routinely, the mistress reported to Sakina’s grandfather that his wife was casting evil spells on him to separate them. Angered, Sakina’s grandfather insisted his wife ask his mistress for forgiveness; however, her grandmother resolved that altercation resolutely when she was able to talk to her husband’s mistress alone, addressing her in the following manner:

‘You are actually less worthy than the dust at my feet. But because I cannot handle this household without my husband’s presence in this home, I have invited you here also. If I had wanted, I could have had you killed. In an instant. I have five sons who would kill you

217 and dispose of your body. Or they would beat you up so badly that it could take you years to heal. I have treated you with respect. I fast and pray to bring good fortune to my family. Be warned. Be very careful of what you say and do’.

Sakina concluded, “And my grandmother ruled! Pract-i-cally ruled! She could control her husband, but in a different way.”

In her narratives, Sakina conceded that she understood how bringing a husband’s mistress into their home was far from an ideal solution to her grandmother’s problem. However, Sakina maintained that given the cultural circumstances, her grandmother had few options. What Sakina claimed to learn from this was that her grandmother had chosen somehow to preserve her own position in the hierarchal organization in the household so as to uphold order in her family. Sakina also demonstrated that her grandmother was able to change tactics of resistance when her position in the established hierarchy was threatened after she had made compromises. Her grandmother openly confronted the mistress privately to prevent her from carrying out further acts of insurgency that would dislodge Sakina’s grandmother from her location in the household. When pushed, she even resorted to blackmail, a language she felt assured that the mistress would understand. Sakina’s accounts disclosed that for her, her grandmother’s actions in that story had taught her to tackle problems in her life through engaged tactics, as opposed to avoidance, based on “finding a middle ground” and “taking a different route,” even though the solutions might be far from perfect.

In a similar vein, Sakina explained how she learned lessons from watching her mother-in-law’s practices of both complying with traditional gender mores and subverting traditional norms to maintain her autonomy and respect in a family structural hierarchy. In one such narrative, quoted below, Sakina describes how her mother-in-law used the tactics in the domestic realm through food to achieve her end:

I saw Ma never fed Bapuji [father-in-law] cold food. It didn’t matter that they were opposites as in east and west. Though they lived together, they did not share much. But she always made sure her husband always got nice, warm, fresh food. Whether she liked him or not or whether they agreed or not. She just did it.

218 Sakina was careful to explain that she understood how this may not have been the most ideal tactic but that it taught Sakina how to keep divorce at bay, and it allowed her mother-in-law to maintain her position within the household while contributing to some sort of harmony in their home. At the same time, Sakina pointed out that she also observed her mother-in-law mess with the Indian hierarchal family structure to sustain her position of power as the wife of the oldest brother:

Ma was in a hierarchy. She was the wife of the oldest brother. In those days, Ma was in a position of power … with her sister-in-laws. Although they did not all live in the same place-house, all younger sister-in-laws had to obey. If Ma wanted to remind them that she was in charge … you know, as the eldest sister-in-law, she would feed them, although it should be the other way around because of her position. So, she would say, ‘Hey, Khatija. Where have you been hiding? How come you don’t come to see me?’ She could have blamed them for their failing. But no. She would fondly scold them for not visiting her. Everybody gathered at Ma’s place … every week.

From this practice, Sakina claimed, she learned that although her mother-in-law knew that the younger sisters-in-law were supposed to defer to her and cook for her, she refused to interpret their negligence as a slight to her position; instead, she deliberately went against the grain of traditional hierarchy to affectionately chide them, allowing them to keep their dignity, which made them respect her, deepening their commitment to her and solidifying her mother-in-law’s position by turning her home into the main hub of family gatherings.

Sakina repeatedly returned to her mother-in-law’s lessons regarding the use of food as a tactic to keep her dignity and respect while strengthening familial bonds. Underscoring the importance of this lesson for her, Sakina said,

You know my brother-in-law and sister-in-law used to have many dinner parties at their home, but my sister-in-law couldn’t cook. So they would ask Ma and me to cook. Do you know, my mother-in-law never started before I got there? She would ask me what we should do. She was a better cook and more organized than me, and my elder. But she showed me respect. Keep my dignity. So many things I know about her childhood, other things. She would tell me while we cooked. How many things I learned in the kitchen.

219 How to show and keep respect. I learned how to be so organized from her. Everything was tidy and clean before the guests arrived.

Through these practices, Sakina claimed, she not only learned lessons of respect and dignity, but she was also privy to confidences and family recipes, and she was taught to see the space of the kitchen – a domain traditionally allocated to women in the Indian Ismaili traditions of the that time – as a positive space of educative exchanges between women. In addition, she was able to improve what she claimed was her weakness, organizational skills, which helped her survive in her daily life.

Lessons regarding women’s knowledges of food and its various uses were highlighted in Sakina’s accounts as playing a key role in learning respect, self-sufficiency, and organizational skills, all of which contributed to her survival in many areas and taught her how to maintain her dignity. Sakina attributed her grandmother’s knowledge of the use of certain foods – herbs, spices, oils, dried fruit and seeds – to cure illnesses and physical ailments as having influenced her wellbeing and that of her family throughout her life:

My grandmother practised medicine in her own way. She knew so many natural cures. She would say to me, ‘Read what they say about the healing value of turmeric.’ She knew so many natural cures that even some doctors would come to speak to her. Many [Black] Africans came also. And men. They all spoke to her with great respect. She was always willing to give out stuff to help cure illnesses. She looked after her own health. She used those herbs and spices. She never used pills. She lived to be a healthy ninety-five.

Sakina demonstrated an awareness of how her grandmother’s knowledge of local healing methods through food allowed her to cross both gender and race boundaries while still gaining her respect and helping her monitor her own health throughout her long life. At the same time, Sakina’s narratives also revealed that she did not view either her grandmother or her mother-in- law as heroines, despite the valuable local lessons they imparted to her. She said,

With their follies, I also saw something good. At that time, I don’t think I knew that in my heart I was also admiring them. See, I saw their drawbacks. And when we weigh drawbacks with the thing, either it balanced out, or one or other. We never questioned that.

220 Sakina’s explanation demonstrates her inability to articulate the complexity with which she viewed her rolemodels. Although she found it difficult to articulate exactly how their ‘drawbacks’ were ‘balanced out’ by what they taught her, one thing was clear: she did not see these women as faultless heroines; rather, she saw the positives in them as well as the idiosyncrasies. As her account below indicates, Sakina seemed to understand that had these older mentors not used the particular tactics they did to impart their local lessons to her, she might have ended up ignoring the lessons that proved so useful throughout her life:

I think they modeled their expectations. In the way they lived … their lives. Every day. As I did things with them, I guess I must have been observing them. Learning. If they told me what to do, I don’t think I would have listened. They gave by example. What I am trying to tell you is … when I say I observed them, it is very true. I have hit the nail on the head! At that time, I did not know. But I was observing them. I did not say anything. But I was observing them.

The quotation above demonstrates how Sakina perceived these local and informal teaching/learning processes. She described the tactics the older women in her family used to transmit the local knowledges in a way that made it possible for her to absorb the lessons instead of ignoring them. Her narratives explain how her family members taught her by example; they showed her through their tactics that they were able to both work from within the boundaries of the patriarchal traditions of their culture and manipulate those boundaries by bending some of the traditions to be able to get what they wanted.

In Section One of this chapter, I presented excerpts of oral life stories from Zuleikha, Khairoon, Fatma, Noorbhegum and Sakina in which these women identified the older women who taught them survival skills through everyday resistance tactics; these tactics helped the older ‘teachers’ survive in their daily lives. As observed by the women in the Grandmothers’ Group, the local lessons received from older women, such as their mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters and grandmothers, were far from straightforward: the Grandmothers learned what to do but also what not to do, and they learned to work mostly within cultural gender boundaries, manipulating those boundaries at times to suit their purposes. Although through their life stories, the women from the Grandmothers’ Group demonstrated that they did not regard the older women as heroines,

221 they did not see their practices as weaknesses either; instead, they saw them as lessons that taught the women of the Grandmothers’ Group in this study to gain respect and attain respectability, to maintain their dignity, to fulfill their responsibilities, to obtain voice, and to become self-reliant within ascribed gender roles. Often the actions of the older women were guided by a local wisdom, demonstrating ‘everyday’ resistance tactics and highlighting a form of local agency. Section Two of this chapter shows how the women in the Grandmothers’ Group made use of these inherited legacies of resistance while they were in East Africa, prior to their expulsion in 1972.

Section Two: Using Local Knowledges in the East African Context

In the previous section, the five women of the Grandmothers’ Group – Zuleikha, Khairoon, Fatma, Noorbhegum and Sakina – identified the older women from whom they learned lessons of survival through the use of everyday resistance tactics. Through their life narratives, the women recounted how these tactics allowed their role models to maintain respect, carry out their responsibilities with dignity, achieve self-sufficiency and gain some joy in their daily lives. In this section, I demonstrate how the five women adapted those local lessons in their own lives in order to survive in East Africa before their eviction from Uganda in 1972. In so doing, I show how the Grandmothers have enacted practices that reflect a particular brand of local agency.

In this section, I discuss the women’s use of local lessons as they exist along a resistance continuum. On one end of the spectrum, Zuleikha’s stories display practices that combine working within the cultural boundaries using restrained resistance tactics with tactics of more open resistance to cross cultural gender boundaries. At the opposite end of the resistance spectrum, Fatma’s, Noorbhegum’s and Sakina’s respective accounts depict their use of tactics of quiet accommodation and compliance, which they had previously observed in the practices of the older women in their respective families. In the middle of this resistance continuum, Khairoon’s narratives reveal how her acts of discreet everyday resistance yielded more effective results than those in which she sometimes had given way to more open defiance. The narratives of all five women reveal that none of them perceived the use of locally learned tactics in their respective daily lives as providing them with ideal solutions or quick fixes; at best, the resistance tactics turned out to be survival skills that enabled them to keep their self-respect and become self- reliant. Nevertheless, through their modified and personalized use of the inherited legacy of local

222 knowledges, these five women demonstrated that they practised a range of resistance tactics that displayed their agentic capacity to be local knowledge makers.

Working inside-outside gender boundaries.

In her interviews, Zuleikha revealed the mobility she craved from patriarchal gender boundaries in her life in particular areas. Her narratives speak to her search for ways to support her children and the need to maintain her dignity and self-respect. Her needs were reflected through several issues that surfaced repeatedly in her stories and which spoke to significant constraints in her life: she needed a) more control over her own body from sexual demands and physical abuse from her husband; b) more financial independence to carry out her parental responsibilities and to support a life independent from her in-laws for her own wellbeing; and c) formal educational training to provide her with job security and some autonomy in her life. Her life narratives show that in her attempts to realize these ends, Zuleikha made use of the local knowledges she had inherited from her aunt and from her stepmother. Zuleikha’s stories repeatedly reveal how she felt her body had become the property of her husband upon her marriage, which also led to her a loss of self-respect. She recounted this in the following excerpt:

I mean, I was pregnant with my first child. That’s when I got my first slap, you know. He was touching my body. And I put out my hand like this. His specs fell … a screw fell out. And he gave me such a slap! I was so disappointed, you know. I just cried and cried. And, you know, the first thing that came in my mind? ‘I’m no better than my stepmother!’ After that he began hitting me … lots of times. The same thing happened again and again, you know. He used to kick me too. Often, you know [coughs]. When I complained to his mother, she said, ‘Tuh kaiku sunti nehee toh?’ [‘Then why don’t you listen to him?’].

Zuleikha returned to this theme of physical abuse and sexual demands by her husband several times, offering specific examples. Each time, she emphasized the physical and emotional pain she suffered so that she felt not only disappointed in her own life but also degraded and disrespected, a notion she expressed by comparing herself to her stepmother. Her attempts to change this situation from within the cultural boundaries by quietly appealing to her mother-in- law to intervene and get her husband to desist from his abusive practices had the reverse effect: she seemed not only unwilling to speak to her son, but she seemed to condone his abusive

223 treatment by placing the onus on Zuleikha for bringing on such a reaction from him through her willful disobedience. As well, Zuleikha recounted feeling helpless against his forceful sexual demands, which resulted in her unwanted pregnancies and growing number of children whom they could ill-afford to feed and clothe because of a lack of money:

We didn’t have much money for condoms at first, you know. But after, every time I tried something, nothing worked. And I had become very conscious of [the lack of] money. Because I don’t want extra money but I wanted, you know, to feed and clothe my children. And he always wanted to spend money on himself, you know, on something extra, like a new pair of glasses or something.

Zuleikha revealed that when she was unable to find ways to curtail her husband’s sexual demands, she worked from within the gender boundaries to persuade her husband to ask his father for a well-deserved raise in salary. When this plan elicited the same response from her husband, “I can’t ask him. He says we can’t afford it!”, Zuleikha disclosed that she grew more desperate as their grocery bills mounted until their credit status was compromised. With no other options, without asking her husband’s permission first, Zuleikha found herself a job. She explained,

I had no choice. After my third child was born, I found work for the first time. We didn’t have enough money. We owed so much money for the groceries. No money to pay. You know, I remembered how Fuiba had supported herself after her husband died. But [my husband] was so mad, he broke down a door! He didn’t want his wife to work. But he could not earn enough. What was worse … when I was earning a thousand shillings, he still earned only three hundred, you know. He would always say, “I’m the boss! I’m the boss!”

As Zuleikha’s story demonstrates, passed-on lessons from Fuiba spurred Zuleikha to become bolder by seeking paid work outside of the home. This radical move of finding employment meant they could pay their grocery bills; however, by stepping outside of the home, Zuleikha had disrupted her ascribed gender role. As her anecdote reveals, this tactic and the gap in the earning power between Zuleikha and her husband put further strains on her marital relationship and led to more physical abuse, which increased until her employment was terminated by another

224 pregnancy. Zuleikha disclosed that it was after she had given birth to her fifth child that she grew even more resolute and obtained a surgical procedure to prevent more pregnancies. She asked herself what her Fuiba would have done in this situation, as demonstrated below:

I felt I had to do something, you know. I remembered sometimes Fuiba took drastic action. You know, when her husband was ill with Blackwater fever, his mother would boil her gold jewelry and ask Fuiba to get him to drink that water. You know. To drink that water. Fuiba would toss the water out, saying ‘I’m not gonna ask him to drink that!’ It was her responsibility to look after her ill husband that made her do that.

In the account above, Zuleikha reveals that she felt desperately hemmed in by her situation: as she searched for ways out, she recalled the lessons Fuiba had taught her through her more audacious actions. In her explanation below, Zuleikha demonstrates how lessons from her aunt’s practices led her to take a more radical route:

Looking back, I know now why I decided to get my nursery teacher diploma. I had a stupid husband and five children. Who’s gonna look after them? I wanted to run away from my husband. How can I run away when I have five kids, you know? They were my– although I didn’t want five kids, they were there. And they were very loving and they were my responsibility.

As made evident in Zuleikha’s account, she even considered the option of leaving her husband, but remembering lessons of responsibility from Fuiba, she recanted; she claimed that her sense of responsibility towards her children prevented her from taking that route.

Zuleikha related how when an opportunity presented itself, she utilized it, much like her aunt had done. She complied with a request from the Aga Khan Education Board to fill in temporarily for a kindergarten schoolteacher who was on maternity leave. Since it was a temporary favour for the Ismaili community, Zuleikha felt convinced her husband could not object. Having established her respectability through her favour to the Ismaili community, Zuleikha revealed how her anger, fueled by the lack of money to carry out her responsibilities and the behaviour of a domineering mother-in-law, prompted her to take measures to attain the kind of financial independence Zuleikha had previously observed her aunt achieve:

225 By this time, I was angry. Angry at my life. Angry at my husband. Angry at my mother-in- law, you know. Angry because we have no money. I met a nursery teacher while I was there. I asked her, ‘Can I get my [daycare] qualifications?’ She told me how she got hers, you know. Through a correspondence course. Suddenly, I thought, ‘I want to do this, you know’. I was scared stiff though. I remembered Fuiba had worked at a nursery school. Still, I was scared stiff, you know.

In the excerpt above, Zuleikha reveals that her decision to attain her daycare certification through a correspondence course was not easy: she was “scared stiff.” In the excerpt below, Zuleikha’s daughter, Zareena, reveals how her mother’s need for financial independence was fanned by her paternal grandmother’s (that is, Zuleikha’s mother-in-law’s) dominating demands:

I think my mother, from the time she married, was expected to cook, clean and be silent. My grandmother was a very demanding and dominating woman. She was from the old traditional Indian family where women had power as mothers-in-law. And she ruled the roost seriously. My mother was discriminated against by her from the start. My mother was humiliated by her all the time. And my mother wanted to move out of her in-laws’ house. So I think her drive to become financially independent came from, ‘I hate this woman. I don’t want to be controlled by her.’ So she followed this life of education, work and business … to get away.

As evident through both Zuleikha’s and Zareena’s stories, Zuleikha’s anger drove her to adopt a plan through which she could insinuate herself into the working world, much like her aunt had done, through the Ismaili community channel. Zuleikha’s stories also reveal that although she felt very fearful, she recognized an advantage: the need for kindergarten and daycare teachers was on the rise because Aga Khan IV was not only advocating formal education for Ismaili children, but he was also building an infrastructure of Aga Khan Schools that required trained teachers in East Africa to support his formal education policies. Once again, the action taken by Zuleikha displayed the powerful effect that local lessons from the older role models had on the lives of women like Zuleikha. Zuleikha recalled her aunt’s voluntary role in setting up a nursery school and how her aunt had underscored the importance of acquiring formal educational training:

226 My Fuiba put me in everything. I used to whine, ‘Why you want to put me in this [class]?’ In a way, you know, I was, scared of her. ‘You’ll have to learn everything’, she told me. And she’d join me in typing class … First Aid…

Zuleikha’s accounts reveal that she while she pursued her daycare credentials through a correspondence course – a feat which she claimed was one of the most challenging of her life – she simultaneously babysat Ismaili children on the side to raise some money. Zuleikha related how, influenced by Fuiba’s advocacy for formal education, she used the Ismaili community conduit to ward off her husband’s objections by persuading the Aga Khan Education Board to finance her trip to England to take her final course exams in the early 1960s.

Zuleikha testified that this formal training and the trip to Europe changed the course of her life by giving her self-esteem and making her self-sufficient. As Zuleikha’s accounts demonstrate, emboldened by her formal educational training, her trip to Europe, and her newly-acquired earning potential, she applied more direct tactics that she inherited from her aunt to solidify her position: she claimed she had become “Strong. Stronger” and confident enough to ask the Aga Khan Education Board for the administrative position of headmistress at the nursery school where she had worked as a teacher for a few years. Her story, however, unfolded to show that when the Aga Khan Education Board gave the position to a “White woman” instead, Zuleikha drew on lessons from Fuiba and bided her time until she was ready to take more overt actions.

Zuleikha revealed that remembering Fuiba’s venture into the business world, she conceived the idea to launch into her own daycare business, convinced that her wish for promotions in her field would not be supported by the dominating male institutional leadership in Ismaili community institutions. Instead, Zuleikha revealed that she remembered how Fuiba’s attitude of continuous engagement had helped her cross restrictions of gender boundaries to enter the business sphere, because “she never stopped … She always did something. She worked. She was a businesswoman.” Zuleikha’s forays into the daycare business were far from easy, as demonstrated by her narratives. She started small by renting her father-in-law’s garage and converting it into a small nursery school for twelve students, including the children of some of the cabinet ministers and other wealthy indigenous parents; however, she ran into problems with her in-laws almost immediately. The response to Zuleikha’s business venture from the Ismaili

227 educational institutional leaders was to “shake their heads and say, ‘she’ll come back to us in no time’.” Likewise, Zuleikha recounted that her husband’s responses to the challenges she encountered included “gloating,” saying, “You always want to do something else! You always want to do something … now they have fixed you!” These responses made Zuleikha more determined than ever to succeed, as Fuiba had done. Zareena, Zuleikha’s daughter, corroborated Zuleikha’s stories regarding the lack of support from her husband:

I never saw my father support my mother. He said he was proud of her. But that was talk. Her engagement in the business was taking away his power, he felt. His power as the main breadwinner. Sometimes he offered legal advice. But if she tried something that didn’t work – and that happened often – he’d be, ‘I told you so!’ So it was more of the I-told-you- so story rather than ‘Try this or that’. No, I never saw him doing any of that.

Strangely enough, the negative responses of Zuleikha’s husband to the onslaught of challenges she encountered – “You always want to do something” – were oddly reminiscent of Zuleikha’s positive spin on Fuiba’s attitude to challenges she encountered in her business endeavors – “She never stopped … She always did something.” Harnessing help from close friends, Zuleikha stubbornly persisted in spite of numerous challenges, and by 1970 she had managed to set up two daycare centres, totaling 280 students and employing six teachers plus other helpers:

I had 280 children and money galore! I used to hide the money … always, you know. I used it to send my children to places. I paid for our rent and food, you know. Now my kids could … I had a car and could pick them up in time from school. I bought a sewing machine, you know. The girls learned to sew.

Even with these successes, Zuleikha’s life was far from a heroic odyssey; her accounts reflected the constant ups and downs of struggle with various challenges in her business and her home life. Along with some financial gains came other obstacles, stemming from the patriarchal norms to which she was constantly exposed. She was not free to spend the money she made; she was accountable to her husband even in matters of purchasing items with ‘her’ money, some of which she claimed to hide from him, displaying her more covert practices of resistance. Her daughter Zareena recounted how “she often hid some money somewhere … she was always looking out

228 for our future,” testifying to the fact that Zuleikha’s actions displayed her brand of a local covert agency.

Zuleikha herself provided concrete examples to show how her failure to use more compliance and ‘hidden’ resistance often resulted in dire physical ramifications. In one of her narratives, Zuleikha recounted how once during a trip with her children to visit some relatives, she purchased a tent for a camping trip that she planned with her children. Her husband’s reaction was to attack her physically for making a purchase without asking him first, as Zuleikha describes below:

When I came home, he gave me such a beating. The children were in the room … or I don’t know anymore. But they knew what was going on, you know.

Zuleikha demonstrated how she was able to modify her tactics from lessons learned from the above incident when she purchased a sewing machine (with the money she earned) in order to enable her daughters to sew their own clothes. She described that her husband’s reaction when he saw the purchase was to insist that she return the machine as soon as possible:

‘I don’t want that machine here! You got to take it back!’ I know he would have slapped me if I said I am going to keep it, you know. I kept quiet. But I told Raman who lived in the apartment upstairs. He was the director of a large well-known company. And he told me to keep the sewing machine. ‘Leave him to me’, Raman said.

Through her story, Zuleikha demonstrated that she had learned not to defy her husband openly; instead, Zuleikha employed the local lesson she had been taught to enlist the help of a male friend who was in a position of power to speak for her. Zuleikha explained that Raman shamed her husband into accepting his wife’s purchase of the sewing machine. This modified tactic was not dissimilar to the one used by Fuiba when she worked to obtain the sanction of the Ismaili community and own her brother’s support before venturing out in the field of business to avoid trouble.

These tactics were not always successful, however. Zuleikha’s daughter, Zareena, revealed how her mother’s ventures to cross gender boundaries in a culturally patriarchal community by

229 seeking financial autonomy sometimes resulted in her ostracism from men and women of the Ismaili community in East Africa:

I did see my mother being ostracized by Ismaili women. I saw that some women were more interested in, you know, things like looking after their looks and serving their husbands … so I think, my mother was a bit of a threat. So they didn’t include her in their social gatherings. And the Ismaili men, well, they felt she was too ‘masculine’ in the kinds of things she could do. They teased her a lot. I think they felt threatened by her too.

Zareena’s narrative of her mother’s ostracism is not dissimilar to stories of other women who are located in patriarchal systems. For example, Yvonne Bobb-Smith, a Caribbean Canadian woman who returned to Trinidad and Tobago in the late 1960s, describes her position as a chief Medical Librarian as one that “fell outside the construction of a Caribbean female identity,” although her “high motivation stemmed from examples of resistance, which [she] had internalized from observing assertive Caribbean women” (2003, p. 52). Consequently, she describes how she was excluded “from certain social circles” and experienced “loss of friendships” because of her professional position, which was viewed as assertive behaviour that was unbefitting a Caribbean woman “by many Caribbean men and some women alike” (Bobb-Smith, 2003, p. 52). In keeping with Zareena’s observation above, Zuleikha’s narratives confirm that her path to financial independence was a “mixed blessing”; these stories emphasize the limitations her endeavours created since they did not fit the expectations for an Ismaili woman in the Uganda of the 1960s.

Overall, Zuleikha maintained that although she gained the respect of the Ismailis on the Education Board, including a few of her friends, and was able to honour her responsibilities towards her children, her relationship with her abusive husband was further strained and eventually took a toll on her health. Her stories, however, also identified several benefits. One theme Zuleikha returned to repeatedly in her narratives was the strong influence of her aunt, whose practices Zuleikha had observed in her youth. Of the five women in the oldest generation in my study, Zuleikha’s tactics of resistance that were employed to achieve financial security and gain self-respect were, on the whole, more consciously articulated as local knowledges she had learned from her aunt’s practices, and to some extent from her stepmother’s as well. In comparison to practices that were more consciously identified by Zuleikha as exemplifying the

230 modified use of locally learned tactics from older women to achieve specific goals, the practices of locally learned everyday resistance practices of Fatma, Noorbhegum and Sakina reflected little if any conscious intent; they shared some polythetic characteristics but placed different emphasis on diverse practices.

Working within gender boundaries.

Fatma’s, Noorbhegum’s, Sakina’s and Khairoon’s respective life narratives reveal the women’s use of daily practices of locally-learned resistance tactics displaying a particular form of agency through which they “often simultaneously promote[ed] power-laden discourses” as “the bearers of hierarchies and stereotypes as well as of change” (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013, p. 14). Through their daily practices, these women exemplified models of resistance learned from the older women in their respective families that took the form of “the silent, mundane and ordinary acts that are normalized” (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013, pp. 9-10). This meant that even they themselves did not necessarily perceive these practices to be ones of ‘resistance’ since they did not openly challenge rules of traditions and customs, leaving the “dominant in command of the public stage” (James C. Scott, as quoted by Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013, p. 7). As substantiated by their respective life stories, these four women used compliance and obedience as learned accommodation techniques of resistance from older women to work within cultural boundaries in order to become self-sufficient, gain some respite, carry out their responsibilities, maintain self-respect, and, on the whole, survive in their daily lives. Of the four women, Sakina’s and Khairoon’s narratives reflected more conscious intention in this endeavor, while those of Fatma and Noorbhegum reflected a less conscious engagement.

Fatma’s stories reveal that she placed emphasis on gaining respect and achieving trust and respectability by remaining fully committed to serving her husband and his family, in line with the cultural norms. This was a lesson she claimed to have learned from observing the practices of her mother. In the excerpt below, Fatma describes how she worked unobtrusively and with compliance – tactics she had also learned from her mother – when she shared a small dwelling with her husband, his brothers, their wives and children, and his parents:

I worked quietly and without complaint. I took care of my in-laws as my mother had done. We had to cook whatever we were told; my mother-in-law was an invalid but supervised

231 everything. I learned to make food that tasted like hers because my father-in-law was very hot-tempered and would tell us off. I never did anything without consulting my mother-in- law. There were five brothers. So we were five sisters-in-law. Three married brothers lived together. Two unmarried brothers lived with us also. We had to get along … do everything together. It was tough. I tried to keep good relationships. I learned from watching my mother.

Fatma testified that the younger women’s voices did not carry much weight, even in the day to day running of a very busy household, and that Fatma had learned from her mother never to discuss in-law family matters with anyone. Instead, she was to work with quiet diligence, without indulging in dhekha-dhekhee (envious gossip) or interfering in the lives of the other brothers-in-law and their children. Fatma conceded that although “It was tough” and “My sisters- in-law often criticized me for a lot of things. Like wearing nice clothes that my mother stitched for me,” she survived her daily life by practising quiet obedience without any criticisms or complaints, just as her mother had taught her. Fatma’s narratives also extended the definition of compliance to include practices of non-interference – tactics she claimed to have learned from her mother:

My mother never interfered in the affairs of my in-laws or my husband. She never criticized my in-laws. She never gave me advice that would make trouble between members of my husband’s family. Now my daughter is married, I never interfere with my daughter’s life. I never tell the son-in-law, this is missing. Or do this; don’t do that. No. From her [my mother] I also learned not to meddle in the family’s businesses. We, women, were supposed to stay home. We had no say in the family business … We don’t offer any advice. That we feel this or you should do that. Or we want to work in the business. Only what the father- and mother-in-law want happens.

Fatma’s examples of practices of compliance raised the question of whether or not in her case, learned obedience was simply a passive acceptance of her gendered lot that was reinforced through a hierarchically-structured patriarchal household, or if it was a learned tactic of everyday resistance that yielded small but sure gains. In her account below, Farida, Fatma’s daughter, offered her perspective on this issue as she related how she had observed her mother and other

232 Ismaili female peers of her mother make themselves ‘invisible’ through their ostensible submissiveness within their families in East Africa:

Coming to North America, I realized how invisible our women made themselves in East Africa. They kept to– they had their own roles. Distinct roles. They were expected to be, you know, mothers … housekeepers. Like my Grandma. My mother played more or less the same way– role. And they lived in extended families. In my mother’s case, my father was in business with his brothers. And the women were not any part of that.

She continued,

I think … my mum was more quietly accepting. Yes. She would be quiet and accepting. And she seemed to take a passive position with my dad. That’s true. Did– couldn’t say anything. I don’t think she knew how to argue. And argue you down, you know. The words are important, how she said what she said. And either you know how to say it or you don’t. But I never felt she was giving in. I never felt she, you know, didn’t get her way. I didn’t see that. I saw her get a say in a lot of things. But in a different way. Not by raising her voice or by arguing. In fact, she had a huge say in some matters. I never saw her as somebody who just gave in to my father.

Farida’s description of her mother as “quietly accepting” and as “quiet and accepting” corroborated Fatma’s own perception of herself as a dai (‘good’) woman who was discreet and obedient. However, Farida’s description of her mother’s behaviour as being “quietly accepting” in her interactions with her father portrayed her mother as practicing a learned tactic to achieve what she could not have achieved through open arguments, since such discourse was unavailable to her in her culturally ascribed gender location. By Farida’s account, Fatma appeared to practise quiet resistance from within the gender boundaries of the Indian-Ismaili culture of her time through her “quietly accepting” tactics to get her say “in a different way.” In fact, in Fatma’s own account below, she reveals how her quiet and dutiful practices over the years resulted in small gains as she won the respect and trust of her in-laws:

When the business my husband was running in T______was doing well, my father-in-law decided we should build a house. So he came to supervise the construction. He told me ‘I

233 want you to choose all the colours of the paints inside the house … for the rooms. And the furniture’. I was so surprised: it was different then; the women in the family never had a say before.

In this narrative, Fatma acknowledges that her practices – based on her mother’s lessons that taught her compliance, duty to family, and non-interference in family ‘politics’ – gradually won her the respect and trust of her husband and in-laws. Whether or not Fatma had conscious knowledge of her practices as tactics that allowed her to work within boundaries is less important in the type of everyday resistance that Fatma practised (see Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013). Practising a local form of ‘agency’ enabled her to participate in matters that had not been the prerogative of women in her family before: she was offered the choice of decorating her own house.

Like Fatma, Noorbhegum made clear that her use of learned practices of obedience and accommodation in her in-laws’ home showed little clearly defined conscious intent. Quoting Weitz, Vinthagen and Johansson (2013) assert that practices of everyday resistance have to “move away from the focus on consciousness and intention, and instead, try to assess the nature of the act itself” (p. 20). They add that the “actors’ intent might be to survive, solve a practical problem, fulfill immediate needs, follow a desire, or gain status among peers, take a pause, or something else” (pp. 20-21), and that the focus on intent might “risk excluding not-yet political awareness, or differently motivated resistance” (p. 21). In her story below, Noorbhegum demonstrates that the practices she learned from her mother, which helped her in her daily life, were augmented by newer lessons in the small acts of resistance she learned from her sister-in- law:

From my sister-in-law, I learned to work fast and efficiently. I had to, you see. If I wanted to survive. So many people to feed and look after, you see. My children to take care of. My jethanie [sister-in-law] also taught me to make the food according to family custom. That was very important at that time, you see. So I was not criticized or ridiculed.

Noorbhegum’s accounts provide evidence that these learned practices protected her dignity in her husband’s home, as made apparent by her statement “So I was not criticized or ridiculed.” However, the rest of Noorbhegum’s story reveals that when her sister-in-law and her brother-in-

234 law moved out of their shared home, leaving Noorbhegum to deal with the household headed by an intimidating matriarch, she used the lessons learned from her mother and sister-in-law in order to survive:

My mother-in-law was a very strong woman; I was scared of her, you see. I would consult her on everything. Like I what I was supposed to cook. Even when my first baby was born, she slept in a cot in my mother-in-law’s room – that was the custom in the family, you see. When the baby woke up several times in the night, I had to run from one room to the other. It was hard, you see. Things like that. I just kept quiet and followed the family customs, you see. To survive.

Noorbhegum’s narratives recount other such instances in which she was dogged by the local family customs in her daily life, living in a traditional Ismaili household with a strong mother-in- law. Noorbhegum divulged that passed-on lessons proved useful because even her husband had no power over his mother’s decisions in the small everyday matters:

Once, I needed a new passport, you see. My husband said, ‘Come to the shop after lunch. I’ll take you to the studio’. After lunch, when I finished all my work, I asked my mother- in-law if I could go, and she refused. She didn’t give any reason. Just said no, you can’t go, you see. I did as I was told. I didn’t go. I didn’t ask questions. So when he came home, my husband was angry with me, you see. ‘Why didn’t you come as I told you?’ When I told him, he couldn’t say anything to his mother either. I learned it was best to do as I was told and go about my duties quietly.

Noorbhegum’s example above demonstrates how, in a hierarchically-structured household where her mother-in-law’s power trounced her husband’s, she used the only tactics of resistance available to her, and she learned from her mother to comply in order to survive even though it meant she was simultaneously disobeying the wishes of her husband. Noorbhegum’s stories about her earlier married life demonstrate her awareness of the power of the culturally established rules against which she had very little recourse: she had to learn to survive using passed-on lessons to guide her practices. Like Fatma, Noorbhegum spoke about the inaccessibility of help from her parents once she was married:

235 You see, [Ismaili] women during that time could not run home to their parents. We had been taught that once we were married, we had to take care of ourselves. No matter how serious the situation, you see.

This underscores the fact that Noorbhegum was responsible for looking after the situations of adversity in her married life using locally learned techniques and without causing ripples. The hold of traditional norms by which some Ismaili women’s lives were circumscribed in East Africa in the 1950s is demonstrated by the extreme example Noorbhegum provides below, where she had to go along with traditional practices that cost her baby’s life and almost her own:

It was in 1950. I was five months pregnant, you see. And my stomach hurt so much. My mother-in-law told me to rest in bed, and left for jamatkhana. Everyone left for jamatkhana except for my husband’s sister. I think she felt sorry for me. I was having contractions, you see. But I couldn’t go into hospital without permission from my mother- in-law. Then I started to bleed a lot. My husband was scared. He went to jamatkhana to ask his mother’s permission to take me to hospital. But she said to wait until she came home after prayers. There was nothing to be done, you see. Just wait. I had the miscarriage at home. I could have died. I lost a boy … at five-months. I only made it to the hospital in time. I could have died.

Noorbhegum’s accounts show that even in extremely dire circumstances, her mother-in-law had the upper hand. Noorbhegum complied obediently to her mother-in-law’s wishes as she had learned to do from her mother; however, when prompted, Noorbhegum admitted that her older sister-in-law (wife of her husband’s brother) would not have had to wait for permission if she had suffered Noorbhegum’s fate – she could have chosen otherwise based on the strength of her husband’s position in the solid chain of command in the family hierarchy. Consequently, Noorbhegum lost her child, and she almost lost her life too. Noorbhegum further related how her chances of recuperating from her miscarriage once she returned home from the hospital depended on the decisions made by her mother-in-law as well:

When I had been in hospital for about two days, my mother-in-law asked for my discharge because my youngest child refused [to] be fed by anyone else. She was not yet two, you see. The doctor refused and released me after a week on the condition that I rest in bed for

236 a month. He warned my brother-in-law that if anything happened to me, he would take the family to court.

Noorbhegum’s narratives reveal how her mother-in-law had little choice but to comply with the doctor’s orders; however, Noorbhegum’s life changed little. Her stories demonstrate that although Noorbhegum continued to use practices of compliance and quiet submission as survival tactics, she carried out other forms of learned acts of everyday resistance from lessons passed on from her mother-in-law as well. Noorbhegum learned to turn to Ismaili religious and social services to gain respite from restrictions in her domestic life, as she relates below:

I put my trust in the Imam. I saw how it helped my mother-in-law, you see. She feared nothing. She would walk to and from the jamatkhana twice a day, every day. Also, I observed how my mother-in-law made friends by participating in the voluntary activities of the jamatkhana. There was a cleaning committee … to clean inside jamatkhana, and I joined. We met friends there, you see. My mother-in-law had fewer objections to my leaving the house to do that.

Noorbhegum credited her mother-in-law with passing on to her the lessons that taught her how to acquire some respite in life by cultivating faith in the Imam. Also, Noorbhegum’s accounts indicated how she practised quiet resistance tactics that were taught to her by her mother and sister-in-law. She followed in their footsteps to join the jamatkhana cleaning committee as a volunteer, which allowed her to both serve the Imam and form nurturing relationships with other women to whom she could then turn to for advice and help. This displayed a form of everyday resistance that worked from within the restrictions imposed on some Ismaili women. Keshavjee shows how this voluntary service, rendered by Ismaili women well into the 1970s, helped women like Noorbhegum to leave their homes without penalty and find reinforcement through social bonds with other women like themselves:

Some of these women also committed their time to cleaning the jamatkhana every morning after the morning service … [They] managed …to keep the jamatkhana clean and ready for its daily schedule and routines … While these were their acts of service to the community, sacrifice and charity, they were also occasions to build strong bonds among

237 women who needed each other’s assistance, guidance, friendship and camaraderie. (2004, pp. 218-219)

Noorbhegum’s stories spoke about this camaraderie with other women, which she enjoyed as a result of her jamatkhana activities, as one that gave her some social relief in her day-to-day life and taught her how to become self-sufficient. Noorbhegum also revealed that this tactic did nothing to lessen her commitment to continue to simultaneously utilize tactics of compliance and obedience in her home, which gradually ingratiated her in her mother-in-law’s eyes, although that may not have been Noorbhegum’s conscious intent. This is evident in the following excerpt from Noorbhegum’s narratives:

When I was going through other problems, my mother-in-law was kind to me, you see. I realized how much she had taught me … by the life she had led. She had taught me to become self-sufficient. She spoke highly of me to everyone, you see. She even told her daughters off if they criticized me. I felt respected. And towards the last few years of her life, I became her confidant. She trusted me with everything, you see. I think she genuinely learned to care about me. When she was dying, although her daughters were around, she would ask me to read her some firmans, to recite prayers and ginans with her every day. I think she showed me respect and trust. It was clear to everyone, you see.

Noorbhegum’s stories reveal that she prized the respect and the trust she had been accorded by her mother-in-law, with whom she had lived for some twenty-six years. In her life narratives, Noorbhegum identifies lessons in compliance and quiet obedience that she inherited from her mother and lessons in survival techniques she learned from her sister-in-law as invaluable knowledges that helped her maintain dignity and gain self-sufficiency in her life. As the life stories of both Fatma and Noorbhegum disclose, although these types of mundane resistance techniques sometimes reinforced the hierarchal structures of power that constrained their lives, the locally learned tactics also allowed them to get some relief along the way and allowed them to survive.

Sakina’s and Khairoon’s respective stories reflect contrasting experiences, where they were more conscious of their intent to carry out certain learned practices. Both of these women were able to identify the lessons they learned from their older role models and were also able to articulate

238 how they adapted what they had learned into practices that helped them gain dignity, respect, and trustworthiness and achieve some autonomy in their daily lives. The stories of Sakina and Khairoon reveal the kinds of small resistance practices they employed in their daily lives to negotiate the restrictions they faced. In addition, Sakina’s stories reveal the particular locally learned resistance tactics she employed to negotiate marital conflicts in the lives of her children.

In telling her stories, Sakina placed emphasis on the informal lessons that were passed on to her by her paternal grandmother and mother-in-law about coping with daily life; she learned these things through the way these women lived their lives. Sakina aphorized these lessons into local ideologies, such as “finding a middle ground” and “taking an alternate route” to guide her daily life, especially in navigating the restrictions that were placed on her own life and her children’s lives by a dominating husband. Sakina emphasized the usefulness of the resistance tactics that both her paternal grandmother and mother-in-law employed to navigate restrictions that were structured along a vertical hierarchy in their households. Sakina’s daughter, Shirin, described her mother as a compliant wife, mother and daughter-in-law once she married her father in Uganda in 1951, although her mother was smart enough to have pursued a more independent and self- sufficient life through formal education:

As in that generation, she [Sakina] was expected to follow the Indian tradition. She was supposed to be not only a good wife, but a good daughter-in-law, a good mother, a good neighbour. So many expectations. And Mummy tried to fulfill them. She was capable of more formal schooling. But once she married, she became totally focused on her married life. That was the tradition. And she followed it.

Sakina’ stories verify that she had not only enjoyed her formal secondary schooling but that she had also excelled at it. Once married, Sakina claimed that she donned the mantle of the traditionally designated roles of wife, mother and daughter-in-law, as was expected of her. Her accounts, like the one below, repeatedly returned to her observations that the ways in which her mother-in-law used organizational skills and food as tactics to run a smooth household also allowed her to keep her husband relatively content in an ill suited arranged marriage:

My mother-in-law was very organized and ran a very smooth household. If you went to their house, my mother-in-law and grandmother would have finished cooking on a charcoal

239 brazier, have bathed, dressed, and would look rested and welcoming. I saw Ma never fed Bapuji cold food. It didn’t matter that they were opposites as in east and west. But she always made sure her husband always got nice, warm, fresh food. Whether she liked him or not or whether they agreed or not. She just did it. So I did that too. I am still doing it.

Sakina’s stories confirm that she had adopted the tactics she observed her mother-in-law use in her daily life to ‘control’ a husband with whom she had little in common at a time, since divorce was not a favourable option for these Ismaili women. As well, the excerpt below from Sakina’s granddaughter Salima reveals how Sakina had internalized and utilized lessons she learned from her mother-in-law to deal with her own overbearing husband:

[My grandparents] have a very rocky marriage. Always, I’m told. It’s got worse. Grandpa is a very loving man to us, but I see him fighting all the time. He has always been domineering. He is hot-tempered and his temper is made worse by his alcoholism. Theirs is a very ill suited marriage. He tries to dominate Grandma and his children. He is so much older than my grandma. But she works behind the scenes to get things done and keep the peace, making him feel he is powerful. Her job is to keep him from making irrational decisions while letting him think he is in charge. One would think she is the downtrodden one but she isn’t. I think she is quite fearless in a way.

In the above account, Salima describes the technique she has observed her grandmother employ to manoeuver her dysfunctional marital life. Although Salima observed her grandmother use a less direct technique – one that made her grandfather feel he was “in charge,” Salima did not perceive her grandmother as a victim. To the contrary, Salima saw Sakina as “quite fearless” and certainly not as “downtrodden.” Sakina describes such everyday resistance tactics she adopted from observing her mother-in-law’s and grandmother’s practices as “staying a few steps ahead, like the queens on a chess-board but looking [vulnerable], like baby chicks.” In a specific example, Sakina explained how she yielded to her husband’s demands that she never set foot in her mother’s bar/restaurant in Uganda, yet she was simultaneously able to persuade her husband to allow her to establish a sewing business from her home through which she was able to pay for the education of her children in what she considered to be the best private (White) schools in Uganda. Sakina’s narratives convey that she preferred the use of modified versions of the

240 everyday resistance tactics she inherited from her mother-in-law and grandmother as coping techniques to navigate her marriage in small ways rather than employ more direct and open confrontations that would have only exacerbated her situation. Sakina returned to her grandmother’s marital story several times to reiterate the potency of the lesson she learned from her grandmother’s resistance tactics:

See, if my grandmother did nothing, she would have chaos in the house. Also, if she said to him: ‘Why are you going with another woman?’ or ‘Leave this other woman’, do you think he would have listened? He’d not have. He was a man in those days. She knew she would drive him away. So instead she said, ‘bring your mistress here. To live with us’. She needed him in the home as the ‘head’ of the family to keep her children in line. So she controlled the situation. And him. But in a different way.

In a way, the resistance tactic that was employed by Sakina’s grandmother is reminiscent of the everyday resistance tactic Fatma employed to have her voice heard. Open confrontations worked less effectively in these contexts where women lacked the discourse to make themselves heard in a patriarchal culture. Instead, Sakina claimed that she learned from her Grandmother’s use of resistance to ‘control the situation’ but ‘in a different way’.

Sakina’s life stories also show that she practiced non-interference as a resistance technique, which she learned from the practices of her mother-in-law, and which prevented further strain on her marital relationship. Sakina demonstrated that she did not try to convince her husband to practise the Ismaili faith and attend jamatkhana, much as she would have liked him to. Instead, Sakina quietly followed her own faith:

Let him wear his King’s crown and believe there is no God. I do my own thing. Sometimes mukhi sahib [an officially appointed leader in jamatkhana] will ask why he is not attending. Ma always let Bapuji do his own thing … you know, he likes to tinker on his musical instruments … he spent hours and hours tinkering. She did her own thing.

Sakina’s practices differed from Fatma’s learned non-interference tactics with regard to the lives of her married children. Sakina’s stories exhibit how she adapted passed-on lessons from her mother-in-law and grandmother to orchestrate marital harmony in her children’s lives. For

241 instance, in the following excerpt, Sakina describes how when her daughters run to her home because of small spousal disagreements, she takes an active role in helping them reconcile their differences:

I make my daughters comfortable … listen to their problems … their stories. Feed them. I cook something nice and call up my son-in-laws. I tell him come home … I have made nice dinner. Eat and take your wife back home. I never criticize my son-in-law or take sides with my daughter. In fact, I’ll tell son-in-law, ‘Leave her to me. I’ll sort her out’. It all works out in the end. Divorce is not the answer. So my son-in-laws always feel I will be fair. They say, ‘I knew your mother would understand. And send you right back home’.

Whereas Fatma practises a complete ‘hands off’ tactic in the life of her daughter – something she learned from her mother – Sakina’s accounts reflect she takes a more direct role in the marital lives of her daughters, as result of the lessons of everyday resistance tactics she learned from observing the practices of her grandmother and mother-in-law. Sakina also applied a variation of the learned tactics of non-interference with a conscious intent, in her case, of not taking sides or assigning blame to anyone but instead using the technique of feeding her daughters and their spouses to resolve the bumps in their lives.

Much like Sakina’s accounts, Khairoon’s narratives also demonstrate a degree of conscious intent in her use of locally learned everyday resistance tactics. These tactics allow her to carry out her responsibilities, gain some autonomy and maintain a positive self-image. Khairoon’s practices, adapted from knowledges that were passed on to her by her sisters, emphasized the use of compliance to work from within the ascribed gender roles extant in her Indian-Ismaili family and community in East Africa. In her accounts, Khairoon identified her need to achieve some autonomy in the domestic, social, and financial spheres in her daily life for which she adapted her legacy of inherited lessons – tactics that worked from a foundation of gained trust and respect from her husband, her husbands’ family and friends, and the Ismaili community. Khairoon also, however, acknowledged that the use of such tactics necessitated making compromises in her daily life with her husband and making the most of small gains that afforded her some choices in her personal life. Her life stories provide a few examples of difficult everyday situations where her practices of compliance and obedience did not necessarily yield her much freedom in her

242 daily life; however, they helped to build her reputation as a respectable and trustworthy wife and community member over the course of a couple of decades. Khairoon exhibited that although she worked at two or three other jobs in addition to taking care of the daily domestic chores, she had no voice in matters of the daily running of the household:

I would come home at four. Then I tutored students in math. I also used to sew. Understand? People would come for sari blouses and things like that. No, no, I couldn’t keep any of the money. I had to turn that over to [my husband]. In those days, it was a struggle even with two people earning, understand?

Continuing, Khairoon described the restrictions that circumscribed her daily life, where practicing her own volition could cost her physical retribution:

I had to do as I was told. Let’s say he gave me a hundred shillings for food for the month. He would accompany me to the market every week. We would spend twenty or twenty- five shillings each week. So I would have to budget. I took out some pocket money. Very little, understand. So any personal items or clothes the children needed came out of that. But if we ran out of market money four or five days before the end of the month, he would get angry, ‘Where did it all go? What did you do with all that money? How did this happen?’ Understand? If I needed some ingredients to cook muthiya [a meat and vegetable entree] like three coconuts, but if they were expensive, he’d say, ‘Don’t buy them’. I would think, ‘Well, I’ll buy two instead of three’ and I would buy them. When we got home, he would be angry, ‘Why did you buy them? I told you not to!’ And he would slap me. Understand? I had no say in anything; I had to do as he said.

In spite of earning money herself through various endeavours, Khairoon, much like Zuleikha, could not keep money for herself or even choose how the food money was spent. She could not use her own initiative to make even simple decisions over what supplies to buy, even though she was responsible for the cooking. She was given the budget for the purchase of food items but was also closely supervised in those purchases by her husband. Still, if there was a shortfall before the end of the month, she took the blame for it and paid for it often with physical penalties. Khairoon summed it up with “I had to do as he said,” demonstrating that she neither had the choice to question him or to make any suggestions. Similarly, as Khairoon demonstrates

243 below, she had no input into the décor of her home; she had to ask her husband’s permission for everything:

I had no control over anything. Even simple things. The sofas had big stains and they were worn out. There were holes in some spots. I asked if we could buy new furniture. He said, ‘No. We can’t afford it’. So, I asked if I could make new covers. Understand? He said nothing. So I went and bought some fabric, and said I would make the covers myself. He was so angry, ‘Why did you do that without my permission? You didn’t ask me!’ Understand? I was given some tablemats, but I could not lay them out on the table without permission. He would plunk this large table in the middle of the room … he was tutoring some students in math. That Jenabai [a friend] would say, ‘people are talking about how Khairoon has put a large table right in the middle of the room!’ I wanted to say, ‘None of you really know what’s going on’. But I wouldn’t say anything. I was never free in my home to do as I liked.

Khairoon continued to explain how any attempt to step out of the imposed boundaries resulted in repercussions reminiscent of her childhood experiences:

I saw my sisters beaten up so often … So when you are suppressed like that … I would not be able to tell him anything. Sometimes when something slipped out, he would beat me. Understand? I would cry and then try to forget about it.

Khairoon’s life accounts were peppered with such examples of the tight control her husband exercised over domestic matters and over their daily lives in general. Khairoon maintained that she had little choice even over trivial matters; all she could do was comply with her husband’s decisions, having learned these lessons from the observation of her sisters’ abuse in her childhood home. In addition to her lack of freedom in her daily life, Khairoon spoke about how she struggled with the particular expectations she faced in their social life:

We would have so many guests at home. His friends would come to visit. Sometimes they stayed for a couple of months! Sometimes, four or five cars would arrive in the middle of the night from Bukoba or elsewhere. So I would have to give up my bed and sleep on the floor on a blanket. Understand? They always brought a list of clothes they wanted sewn. So

244 after work, I would come home and cook, then take them shopping. Then after dinner, I would begin to sew… until two … three in the morning. But he [my husband] never said, ‘Khairi will get very tired. I can’t expect her to do all that’. In that way, he never took care of me. Understand?

Khairoon’s story identifies her husband’s expectations of her role as his wife; she was expected to submissively cater to the wishes of his friends without complaints, for which her husband obviously received the credit. It occurred to her that her husband had not taken good care of her; he had been more intent on pleasing his friends. Likewise, in the many narratives in which Khairoon described their regular social life, she indicated her displeasure and disgust over her husband’s choice of friends – older men with whom she had little in common and who tried relentlessly to compromise her integrity by making indecent covert and overt sexual overtures to her:

[My husband] was always looking for older friends. Their children were my age! I would have to go along. I would get tired. Bored. They just ate and drank … most of them were twenty years older. But I had no choice. I was so much younger than their wives. Often the men would make indecent proposals to me when my husband was out of earshot. The wives could see that, understand? Their wives could also see I was not encouraging their husbands. But I was trying to keep out of their way. They tried, but I kept my respectful distance. Some of the women didn’t like me much but they all trusted me. Respected me. No, my husband never stopped [the men]. That’s what I’m saying. Why wouldn’t he tell his friends anything? But then he also trusted me. That’s true too, isn’t it?

Khairoon admitted that because of her husband, she compliantly socialized with an older group of men and women with whom she had very few things in common. Khairoon presumed that since the wives of the men could clearly see their respective husbands’ indecent behaviour towards Khairoon, her husband could not have been totally oblivious of the behaviour of either. In fact, Khairoon herself admitted she could not understand why her husband did nothing to curb the offensive behaviour of his friends, but then she interpreted his intervention as unnecessary since he trusted her implicitly. As a result, Khairoon took on the onus of protecting herself and did not blame her husband in spite of her original bewildered response, “That’s what I’m saying.

245 Why wouldn’t he tell his friends anything?” Through other such narratives, Khairoon revealed that her husband coveted the friendship of these older men because of their wealth and the respect accorded to them as Ismaili community leaders; so, instead, Khairoon developed resistance techniques to protect herself from these men’s lewd advances and learned to become self-sufficient in the process.

Nevertheless, Khairoon substantiated how these resistance practices – learned tactics of compliant behaviour and compromises in her domestic life – benefitted her in different ways. Lessons passed on by observing her sisters in the past taught Khairoon to seek some relief through social practices that were sanctioned by the Ismaili community:

I never missed going to jamatkhana. After [my husband] got involved with playing cards one or two times a week, I joined the Aga Khan Sports Club. To play badminton. Understand? I would get a ride from someone or other. He would often tell me off when I returned home. ‘Which 40-year old woman plays badminton? Tell me. What woman?’

Khairoon’s life stories reveal that through connections she made in jamatkhana, she was able to pursue an activity she found personally gratifying – badminton. Similar to Farida’s story, which related how her compliant mother was able to use different tactics to get her own way, Khatoon, Khairoon’s daughter, explains below how Khairoon’s dutiful compliance in the home did not keep her from pursuing some of her own personal interests:

Badminton in Mum’s case was very much ‘I want to do this’. Because for a woman her age, I’m not sure that this was done at that time in the Ismaili community. Women were mostly homebound. If they left their homes later in the late 1960s, it was for afternoon tea get-togethers with other female friends and for a few ‘stolen’ hours only.

Khatoon’s narrative above demonstrates how Khairoon was still able to navigate her husband’s close control over her life to pursue an activity she desired. Having learned her lesson, Khairoon made use of opportunities as they presented themselves and bent them to her will using the resistance tactics she inherited from her sisters. As Khairoon related, she seized the opportunity presented by her husband’s preoccupation with card playing to pursue her own interests through activities he could not outrightly forbid. Through these activities, Khairoon created her own

246 social circle with younger Ismaili friends among whom she gained respectability and trust and among whom she played a leadership role, all of which provided her with personal satisfaction she could not obtain in her domestic life. She recounted,

When I began to play [badminton], slowly I made good friends, understand? Do you know there were no Ismaili women my age who played? Only Mrs. Zahvar and I. But then younger women joined in. Then also some younger Ismaili men. They all called me Mrs. Kanji. Showed me such respect. And our badminton group grew huge. The young Ismaili women were allowed out only if I was going too. They were girls from really respectable Ismaili families. That way I was really respected. And trusted. We produced some Gujarati plays for our community. When my husband saw how well I was respected in the community, he allowed to me to participate.

Khairoon displayed through her accounts how she modified the everyday resistance tactics she had learned from her sisters, staying within the respectable boundaries of the Ismaili community while still carving out a social life for herself. The loss of dignity she continued to experience in the shared social activities with her husband’s older group of friends was compensated by the respect and trust she was shown by her own social group. The importance of this was made apparent by the number of times Khairoon reiterated how respected and trusted she was by her own friends and by the respectable families in the Ismaili community. Khairoon’s life stories also reveal how her respectable reputation within the Ismaili community opened up other opportunities that were denied to her in her home life: she was designated a leader in the organization of social entertainment activities during the Ismaili high holy days two or three times a year by the Ismaili institutional leaders of the community, as she expounds below:

The Ismaili Organization Committee would call me. Then I would call the musicians and the singers. Then I would select the raas-garba dancers. Usually from my social circle. Understand? We would arrange the steps to the music. The community leaders trusted me with the responsibility of getting the dances ready for Khusyali. Ismailis let their daughters participate because of my good reputation.

Khairoon displayed how her resourcefulness in using passed-on knowledges to establish a trustworthy and respectable reputation in the Ismaili community allowed her a degree of

247 autonomy that she lacked in her domestic life. As she described her role in the organization of entertainment to celebrate religious holidays and/or the visits of the Imam in East Africa, Khairoon clearly experienced amazement at her own accomplishments:

Today as I am thinking of all – I organized three hours of community programmes. I have a picture with Hazar Imam [Aga Khan IV]. He is extending his hand to me. You know, they used to select one group to perform for him at a special reception. We always got selected. I was trusted with the dress code for the performance … the blouses not too short. With sleeves. I did all that!

Khairoon’s practices, based on lessons she had acquired from her sisters to work from within the community boundaries, gained her a respectable status in the Ismaili community, and she was simultaneously able to pursue activities that gained her personal satisfaction and some autonomy in her daily life. Since her husband was also accorded community recognition for her pursuits – as his wife – he did not prevent her from continuing in those pursuits.

Khairoon shared how she was emboldened by her autonomy and sought ways to achieve some financial independence, through creatively clandestine but honest everyday resistance tactics:

I would sell old clothes – mine and the children’s – and … shoes the children outgrew. Whatever money I got, I hid. But if he happened to see the money among my things in the cupboard, he would demand, ‘Where did it come from? Have you been hiding money?’ He would not like it. Understand?

Her husband’s reaction perhaps spoke to his reluctance to allow her any financial independence, a theme that was repeated in the stories of the other women in the study. The women in the Daughters’ Group claimed it was a strategy used by their fathers to keep their mothers totally dependent on them. Khairoon’s creative practices, however, which were adapted from passed-on lessons, allowed her to gain some independence and helped her make small gains in her daily life. Seeking to become more mobile by learning to drive yet having no financial means to do so, Khairoon exhibited resourcefulness in the way she adapted the local lessons she had learned in order to overcome this obstacle, as she demonstrated through the following narrative:

248 My husband took driving lessons. But I would learn from relatives who visited us. My sister’s son would teach me. Then another sister’s son. Other relatives. I knew he [my husband] would not object to relatives. Understand? Then just before the test, I persuaded my husband to give me some driving practice. Few hours. Then I took the test. Although I didn’t have money, I got my driving license. After that, I drove most of the time in the traffic anyway. He was a nervous driver.

Khairoon’s accounts relay how she got around her lack of personal finances to achieve her goals, by working from within expected gender boundaries. She enlisted the help of her relatives to escape censure from her husband and, at the same time, avoided being seen as a financial burden while she gained a skill. Khairoon claimed that she had succeeded in achieving some autonomy in her daily life by adapting lessons she had been taught by her sisters during her childhood:

Do you think I would have succeeded if I had been openly defiant? See what happened to my sisters? They were not disobedient, but still they suffered. Their examples taught me … I could do things I did because my husband couldn’t object. I did what I could. Understand?

In her stories, Khairoon returned repeatedly to the topic of how she was only able to achieve some autonomy in her life by using mundane resistance techniques that were fashioned to gain her husband’s sanction. Much like Sakina, Khairoon demonstrated that she had learned from locally transmitted teachings that resistant acts that were openly defiant would have gotten her nowhere. In her narratives, she accredited her sisters with showing her that tactics of compliance and obedience would enable her to get spousal endorsement, which would in turn enable her to make small gains in her life, as shown in her statement “I did what I could.” Equally, Khairoon’s life stories emphasized that total autonomy was not possible in her life and that life had not been a ‘happily ever after’ story. She continued to make compromises and to adapt lessons she had learned early in her life to gain whatever few choices she could, right up until she left Uganda in early 1970s. The following excerpt from Khairoon’s narratives displays how she sometimes paid for achieving some autonomy in having to compromise over much larger issues in life:

A couple of years before we were evicted from Uganda, [my husband] received a call from my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law told my husband that my mother was ill … dying

249 and to see her daughters. So my sisters went. But my husband wouldn’t let me go. He said I had never known my mother … and now suddenly, what will people say? So I never made it to see her. Ma said, ‘Before I die, I want to see Khari’s face’. Only I couldn’t go. Only I didn’t go. A relative I later met in London told me. She told me my mother kept crying, ‘I can’t go yet. Khairi’s not here yet. I’m waiting to see her before I go’ and ‘Khairi hasn’t come … Khairi didn’t come!’ So I never got to see my mother’s face.

According to this particular account, in order to gain some respite in her daily life, Khairoon had to sacrifice seeing her mother and respecting her dying wishes. As Khairoon attested, although all of her sisters were able to comply with the wishes of their mother, Khairoon was unable to do so because her husband was more concerned about his own reputation in the Ismaili community and refused her request. Khairoon’s life accounts, along with those of the other women in the Grandmothers’ Group, demonstrated that although the local lessons transmitted to them by the older women in their respective lives did not allow them total autonomy, or, in Khairoon’s case, even the ability to be able to see her mother face for the last time before her death, they at least taught them ways to loosen some patriarchal restraints and cope with daily living while maintaining their dignity.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I drew on selections of the Grandmothers’ life narratives to explore the particular forms of local agency demonstrated by Zuleikha, Khairoon, Fatma, Noorbhegum and Sakina through their capacity to be makers, users, and transmitters of local gendered knowledges. In the first section, I highlighted the older role models from whom the Grandmothers inherited local strategies of survival. The excerpted life narratives reveal how the Grandmothers learned to work mostly within the ascribed cultural gender boundaries to help them maintain their dignity, carry out their responsibilities, and gain some autonomy in their daily lives. In Section Two, I traced how the women in the Grandmothers’ Group adapted and/or modified the generationally transmitted lessons to navigate the cultural boundaries that circumscribed their lives. Through their life stories, I interpreted the women’s use of locally inherited knowledges along a continuum of everyday resistance tactics (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013): At one end of the spectrum, Zuleikha demonstrated her combined use of mostly covert but some overt resistance practices; on the other end of the spectrum, Fatma, Noorbhegum and Sakina worked within the

250 cultural gender boundaries and utilized practices of compliant and obedient resistance; and in the middle, Khairoon demonstrated that although she worked quietly, mostly within the gender boundaries, she occasionally resorted to more overt tactics. As evident in their stories, these women made use of normalized, ordinary and seemingly accommodating practices, which they had learned from observing the actions of the older women and which were “difficult to distinguish from coping, survival-technique and compliance” (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013, p. 11).

Notably, not all of the women practiced these local resistance strategies with a conscious intent; therefore, their practices (with the exception of Zuleikha’s practices, in some instances) could easily be misinterpreted as submissiveness or docility. However, when examined closely, the women’s practices were neither passive nor totally submissive: their narratives uncovered an agency that mobilized local passed-on knowledges to operate mostly below the radar of the prevalent dominant discourses of culture, demonstrating that where there is power, there is a possibility for resistance. Walkowitz encapsulates this interpretation succinctly:

Foucault’s insight that no one is outside of power has important implications for expressions from the margins. Just because women are excluded from centres of cultural production, they are not left free to invent their texts, as some feminist critics have suggested. They are not ‘innocent’ just because they are often on cultural sidelines. They draw on the cultural resources available to them in a different direction – yet they are basically bounded by certain parameters … They are makers as well as users of culture, subjected to the same social and ideological constraints, yet forcefully resisting those same constraints. (1989, p. 30)

In the following chapter, I focus on the resistance practices that have been enacted by the five women of the Mothers’ Group. Using their oral life narratives, I demonstrate how, much like their mothers or others from the Grandmothers’ Group, the women from the second generation in my study identify role models who have contributed local lessons that help them navigate gender and race boundaries on two different geographical terrains, across different time periods.

251 Chapter Seven: “I take care of myself”: Gaining Independence Through Struggle in Canada

Figure 7: Mother participants.

In this chapter, I follow the stories of Khatoon, Nurjhan, Zareena, Farida, and Shirin – the middle generation of participants in my study – who form the Mothers’ Group. Figure 7, above, reiterates the connection between these women in relation to their mothers – the women from the Grandmothers’ Group – who were featured in the previous chapter. The larger Indian Ismaili diaspora within which these women are located has re-formed itself in Canada through its previous diasporic history in East Africa. Drawing on the oral life narratives provided by the women of the Mothers’ Group, I demonstrate how these factors have shaped the five Ismaili women as particular diasporic subjects.

This chapter begins with a short introduction, followed by two main sections. The introduction demonstrates how the identities of the women from the Mothers’ Group have been shaped by their particular histories in two different geographical spaces: East Africa and Canada. Their life stories show that their two Imams’ modernizing and westernizing initiatives notwithstanding, the women in the Mothers’ Group encountered an intense cultural patriarchy in their daily lives in East Africa. Although these women arrived in Canada with more formal education than their mothers did, they had to negotiate a White settler society with its systemic organization of racial hierarchies. In Section One, I draw out aspects of the women’s life stories that identify the older women in their respective families who contributed to their local education and the use of everyday resistance practices. Much like the generationally transmitted knowledges that were

252 explored in the previous chapter, the lessons learned by the Mothers’ Group were guided by a local wisdom, which helped them to survive as Brown women diasporans. In Section Two, the Mothers reveal through their life narratives how they have utilized the everyday resistance tactics they inherited from the older women in their families to cross hegemonic boundaries of gender within their own culture, as well as those of race and gender within the larger dominant White society. Together, the two sections display what these women’s local agency looks like when based on a particular ideology, and they illuminate how that agency helps them to negotiate their locations as outsiders both within their own culture and within the larger Canadian nation.

Historicizing the Landscape: The Politics of Location

The oral narratives from the Mothers’ Group reveal two main sources that subjected the women to tensions and restricted their mobility in their two respective homes – Uganda and Canada. Each of the women’s lives was constructed by a politics of location in a heterotopic diaspora space that ‘outsidered’ them through social, cultural, and psychic boundaries: the women disclosed how they had to learn to negotiate these boundaries from their position as racialized and gendered subjects in two different geographical locations. In Uganda, as a part of the Indian community, they generally occupied a socio-economic tier above the Black Africans (and below the men in their community), but below the White colonials, and they were, from time to time, portrayed by White imperialists and Black politicians alike as being ‘not of Africa’ (Mamdani, 1983; Mamdani 2013; Makokha, 2011; Kassam-Remtulla, 1999). In Canada, they found themselves in a colour-based hierarchy where whiteness, once again, occupied the top echelon in the nation, while the rest of the racialized immigrants, including the refugee Ismaili community, were differentially located vis-à-vis one another according to variously nuanced and shifting criteria. These Ismaili women’s lives were being shaped by the encounter between the patriarchal traditions within their own Ismaili community and the Westernization and ‘de-Indianization’ policies of the third and fourth Aga Khans (Asani, 2001; Aga Khan III, 1954), but they were also being shaped by newer influences in the Canadian landscape. Whereas in East Africa, the Ismail women formed part of a privileged economic minority compared to the indigenous Black African majority, in Canada, these women comprised a miniscule ‘minority’ racialized group among other minority communities. In East Africa, these Ismaili women’s daily social/religious interactions were focused mostly within their own community and, to some extent, within the

253 larger Indian East African community. By contrast, upon their arrival in Canada, the Ismaili women and girls entered the world of work and/or attended schools with other Canadians and became exposed to more Western influences. These newer influences led these women to question their ascribed cultural gender roles and to look for ways to negotiate racial and gender boundaries that seemed to circumscribe their daily lives.

Through their life stories, the women in the Mothers’ Group related how different their lives were from those of their mothers prior to their arrival in Canada; although their lives as girls and young women in Uganda were still subjected to patriarchal cultural gender norms, they had, on the whole, enjoyed an economically better lifestyle than their respective mothers had in their youths. By the 1960s, conditions for East African Ismaili women were changing as a result of the modernization and ‘Muslimization’ policies of the two Imams who implemented these policies through the Ismaili Constitution (Asani, 2001; Nanji, 1974; Hirji, 2011). The firmans of the two Imams were further supported by the development of the Ismaili institutional offices of the Imamate in East Africa. Although divorces instigated by women and remarriages for widows were still not very common, polygamy had disappeared by the beginning of 1960s and child marriages (before the age of sixteen) were extremely rare, allowing girls to continue longer with higher formal education. Access to formal education for both boys and girls was made more possible through the increased availability of Aga Khan Primary and Secondary Schools, where English became the medium of instruction from the 1950s and mixed-gender classes were introduced in these schools in some places in the 1960s, offering equal access to scholarships for both Ismaili boys and girls to pursue post-secondary education. ‘Short’ frocks for women and girls were introduced in the 1950s through the Imam’s edicts, and at the same time, the third Aga Khan’s firmans encouraged freer participation between male and female members of the Ismaili community; this led to increased participation of women in social, religious and professional activities.

By 1937, the very first Ismaili woman had already been appointed to the Aga Khan Supreme Council for East Africa, and a 1962 photo of the Council for Africa shows three women members in attendance (Janmohamed, 2011). By this time, women shared the same prayer hall with men, where both men and women led daily prayers for the congregation. Additionally, the women in the Mothers’ Group relayed how they generally had a better command of the English

254 language than their mothers did, and they described how they had grown up wearing western dress, without the experience of having to cover their heads during their childhoods as their mothers had done in their youths. The stories of the five participants in the Mothers’ Group reveal that, in addition to participating in community and religious practices, all of them were expected to acquire post-secondary education. In fact, even Nurjhan, the oldest participant from this group, had completed her undergraduate degree at a local British-style university in East Africa, and Farida’s undergraduate degree programme in the sciences at another local university was interrupted by her marriage. Both Shirin’s and Zareena’s high school educations were interrupted by Amin’s expulsion edict, as was Khatoon’s middle school education.

Although the women in the Mothers’ Group had access to more formal schooling than their mothers had before them, their stories reveal that each of them received different treatment from their male siblings, and they were still being guided to fulfill a gendered set of expectations that was determined by patriarchal cultural family norms. Below, Nurjhan, the oldest child in her family, recalls how the preference of boys over girls played out in her family:

No one actually said it … in actual words most of the time, but it was quite clear that boys were preferred, you know, over girls in our family. Also, girls had to be watched all the time so that they wouldn’t lose their ‘purity’. You know, not shame the family name. I think the pressure was on my mother to produce not only children but male children. So we were two girls for a while. Until my brother arrived. And then we noticed the difference.

In this quote, Nurjhan highlights not only the tradition in her family of policing female children to maintain the good name of the family but also the importance that was placed on the traditional agnatic kinship system, in which sons were prized over daughters because family membership was traced through male descent. This tradition was echoed in different ways in the stories of all of the other women in the middle generation. Similar strains of preferential treatment of boys in their respective families recurred in the life narratives of the other women in this group. In fact, Nurjhan’s last sentence, “And then we noticed the difference,” hinted at the differential treatment that was accorded to children as determined by their gender; she and her sister perceived a shift after their brother was born, although nobody in the family “said it in actual words.” Zareena spoke to this issue through a story in which her maternal grandfather

255 explained how, according to traditional cultural values, women fade from membership in their fathers’ families upon being married:

I remember my grandfather telling me a story. He was talking about the men in the Zemani family. Once a woman married … they are no longer part of the family in which they are born. So I asked him, ‘am I not a Zemani? And my daughter … is she not a Zemani?’ He said ‘No, you’re not, and neither is your daughter!’ So that was a painful discovery. Women became strangers to their families. Disowned. Passed on like chattel from father to husband.

In this telling, Zareena demonstrated her anguish at learning how daughters, upon marriage, do not just get passed on to other men but also experience the pain of family members officially severing ties with them. Shirin went beyond the family cultural conventions to point out how her family was accorded their social status by the Ismaili community along the lines of traditional patriarchal norms in Uganda, underscoring the social ranking her uncle enjoyed compared to her father before her brother was born:

Shabu Uncle and Sheru Aunty had a son while we were three daughters. All of that in that time were big issues. Big Issues! They were big issues in society … where you were placed. Our family was less well regarded. There was no son. At least not at that time.

Much like Nurjhan, Shirin felt that the social standing of a family was based at least partially on the presence of male children in it. Shirin observed that, according to the cultural traditions of the East African Ismaili community, more respect was accorded to her uncle because he had a son whereas her father did not. Disparities in treatment between male and female children did not bode well for the girls. In the following excerpt, Farida disparages the differential treatment she received growing up as a daughter:

My Dad treated me different from my brothers. He would take my two brothers to play tennis. And he wouldn’t take me. It would affect me so much. And I would tell him, ‘Why can’t I do that?’ But it was always that I was a girl. I was expected to be different … do different things. And they never let me stay home alone. They always felt insecure leaving

256 a daughter by herself. I [was] treated very differently from my brothers. Absolutely differently. I often felt so sad. About unfair double standards.

Farida lamented the fact that there were things she wanted to learn but she was excluded from them simply because of her gender. Saddened by the memory, Farida labeled this differential gender treatment “unfair double standards.” Shirin’s narratives corroborate that such traditions of observing gender boundaries were still being practised in Uganda well until the departure of the Ismailis from Uganda in the early 1970s. Shirin related how in 1969, her father’s decision to hold onto their British Protected Persons status disqualified her from continuing her secondary schooling, since the Obote government unilaterally decreed that even fee-paying non-citizen residents could not pursue secondary education in Uganda past the age of fifteen. Shirin’s story reveals that although her uncle and aunt offered her a place in their home in England to enable her to continue with her secondary education, her father declined his brother’s offer, sending Shirin to India instead to board with a friend whom he had not spoken to for twenty years: “My father felt that studying in England would put Western ideas of freedom into my head but education in India would keep me grounded in our culture and teach me to behave properly like a girl,” Shirin elaborated. As a result, Shirin described, she spent a harrowingly painful month in a tenement building sharing the two rooms that were occupied by her fathers’ friend, his wife and their son before she was able to move out to an equally desolate home for widows and spinsters to continue with her secondary schooling in India. She recalled,

I arrive in India and there are thousands of people at the airport. I had never travelled alone before. And I’m thinking, ‘Who’s here to pick me up?’ And my eye catches this greasy- looking man with a greasy-looking son with black specs. And I’m thinking, ‘God, please don’t let it be them’, and I scan the crowds again … desperately. And it was them! So they hire a rick-shaw to take me home. It is a chawl. A very, very poor area. There was this stray dog with hundreds of flies lying across the second stoop. I thought it was dead. I stepped on the stoop above it. There were two small rooms, the front room where the men slept and the back room where the women slept but which doubled up as a kitchen and where you could wash yourself. That was it! The squatting toilet was in an outhouse. Shared with other tenants. They wanted me to move in with them so that they could use the money my Dad sent. Quickly, I said, ‘No. No’. But I had to stay there a whole month!

257 Shirin disclosed how she spent a really tough year in a place she found highly uncomfortable and distressing: she revealed the desolation she felt when she moved into the college residence and found it to also be unpleasantly old. She stayed in India because that was the decision that was made by the family patriarch, and she, a daughter, had to abide by it for the year. Shirin claimed that had she been a boy, her father would not have hesitated to send her to his brother in England.

These childhood stories from the diaspora Ismaili women in the Mothers’ Group revealed the contradictions they experienced in Uganda: their Imams wanted them to study and work side-by- side with men, but the traditions in their respective families meant that these women were expected to abide by different gender-specific cultural role expectations. Conflicted, these young women looked to the older women in their families: they observed that the older women deployed a variety of tactics to work within and/or outside of cultural boundaries to ease the tensions they experienced in their gender. The life narratives of the women in the Mothers’ Group demonstrate that the expulsion of the Ismailis from Uganda and their subsequent arrival in Canada brought about a change in their location, beyond simply a geographic one. Although small Ismaili jamatkhana institutions existed in some large Canadian cities like Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver (Meghji, 2014) before the arrival of the expelled Ugandan Ismailis, the Ismaili institutional networks were not yet intricately developed in Canada in 1972. This meant that, unlike in East Africa, there were no community schools or hospitals or complexly developed Aga Khan Councils in Canada to direct the Ismaili community participation into community- based institutions. As well, as the stories of the women made clear, most Ismailis from Uganda arrived with little to no money, nor any assets, which meant that all able-bodied, healthy members of the Ismaili families, including the women, were required to seek work. This brought Ismaili women out of their previous gender-designated isolation and into the sphere of larger Canadian society. According to the narratives of the Mothers, Ismaili children, male and female, attended regular Canadian schools (as opposed to Ismaili community schools), which likewise brought them out of the Ismaili community sequestration and into contact with larger Canadian society.

The Ismaili women in this study maintained that, having crossed a physical border into Canada, they had to learn to navigate cultural borders as well: they learned the racial and gender

258 boundaries of the larger White dominant society, which was/is preoccupied with maintaining its White demographics and norms, in addition to learning to negotiate boundaries of cultural patriarchy within their own families and community. Skin colour/race, which had structured the economic classes in Ugandan society, suddenly assumed a more heightened significance when added to gender in the lives of these Ismaili immigrant women. The Mothers spoke to how they were rendered more visible by their minority in numbers as Canada’s ‘others’, and the women explained they thus had to seek ways to deal with the differential racial treatment that was meted out to them in the larger Canadian society while also navigating the differential gender treatment caused by patriarchal norms within their own culture. This combination of factors prolonged their dis/re/orientation distress. This was exemplified in such recurring themes in the women’s narratives as shouldering the ‘double-burden’ of work at home and work outside the home, racial and gender barriers in the workplace, and balancing motherhood with careers as these women attempted to meet their day-to-day financial needs, become self-sufficient, and retain their self- esteem.

These key issues peppered their rhetorical performances during the interviews as they defended their perceptions, upheld their positions, settled scores, disagreed with the perceptions of others, and communicated cultural information, all the while extemporizing projected futures for themselves (see Smith and Watson, 2001). As Clifford points out, “diasporic experiences are always gendered,” and therefore, “[re]taining focus on specific histories of displacement and dwelling keeps the ambivalent politics of diaspora in view” since “women’s experiences are particularly revealing” (1994, p. 313). The women in the Mothers’ Group related how they faced new discontinuities in their respective lives and made attempts to reorient themselves in Canada; simultaneously, they scrutinized the practices of their respective older women role models for lessons to guide their daily lives. These women narrated how they witnessed their mothers, mothers-in-law, grandmothers, and aunts employ mundanely ordinary acts based on a local wisdom that helped them survive with dignity as women in their respective families and as Brown women immigrants in the larger Canadian society. The women in the Mothers’ Group attempted to gain some autonomy for themselves in their daily lives, through modifying, amending, and utilizing the lessons they observed from the women of older generations. In so doing, these women have also displayed a local form of agency that is tinged at times with a local form of politicized feminist consciousness.

259 Section One: Identifying the Teachers of Local Knowledges

The women from the Mothers’ Group – Khatoon, Nurjhan, Zareena, Farida and Shirin – each identified several women from their families who they had observed and from whom they learned life lessons: Nurjhan identified her mother, her paternal grandmother and an aunt by marriage; Zareena focused mainly on her mother, and occasionally, on her paternal grandmother; Farida identified her mother initially but then leaned more towards her mother-in-law as her primary ‘teacher’; and Shirin included her mother and her great-grandmother in those who had taught her life lessons. Shirin primarily identified her grandmothers as women who taught her lessons that she has since adapted and utilized again and again in her daily life. The women in the Mothers’ Group identified the following areas in which they applied the lessons they learned from their respective older role models, which allowed them to ease tensions in their daily lives and in their experiences as immigrant women: negotiating cultural patriarchal gender norms; navigating gender and racism in Canada; selecting mates and negotiating marriage partnerships; balancing child-rearing with work; and making career choices. In so doing, the women demonstrated the ways they sought to gain financial security, self-sufficiency, and self-respect in their daily lives.

Learning from women: Coming out of the comfort zone.

The relationship between diaspora experience and women’s identities is apparent through the narratives of all of the participants in the Mothers’ Group. Shirin captures the general view that is shared by the other women of this generation as she attributes the survival of her immigrant family to the improvisatory practices of her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother in the following narrative:

I think what has happened is when you look back, the whole migration from India to Africa, and Africa to Canada … my mother, my grandmothers and even my great- grandmother have had to adjust to a new country. And so they had to dig deeper and come up stronger, you know, to make the family survive. And they did not do it once. We did it twice. So the women have come out stronger each time. If they were still in India, they may have still done the same things over and over again. At least for some time. Women stayed in their roles and men stayed in their roles. But life experiences when the women

260 were forced to move for ‘good’ kinda changed them. Having to move to two continents, they really had to come out of their comfort zone. To be wife, mother … to make the family succeed. That’s what they did. So we watch and learn. Just grow from there. So, I think that immigration has actually been as much a benefit as not.

In this excerpt, Shirin effectively contrasts her personal view regarding the change in both women’s practices and identities that results from learning through diaspora experiences with the practices and identities of women that result from staying put in the country of ‘origin’. For Shirin, the two immigration journeys that were experienced by Ismaili women from the Indian diaspora necessitated more rapid/different changes to women’s traditional roles and practices because of their sheer need to adapt in new environments, allowing them to continue as “wife, mother” and “to make the family succeed.”

Shirin also contrasted the experiences of these diaspora women to those of women who remained on the Indian subcontinent, for whom practices based on traditional roles may well continue unchecked for a longer period in the absence of the need for change. She did, however, perceptively add that even for those who stayed on the Indian subcontinent, change would eventually be inevitable due to newer influences and shifting needs. Shirin accredited her mother, grandmothers and even great-grandmother with the acquisition of certain experiential knowledges, which she attributed to the fact that “they were forced to move … for ‘good’, not just to visit some relatives” but “to move to two continents” so that they not only “had to dig deeper and come up stronger, you know, to make the family survive” but they also “had to come out of their comfort zone.” Obliquely, Shirin referred to the ways that such informal lessons were passed on to her by older women in her family and were utilized by her own generation when she added, “So we watch and learn. Just grow from there.” Shirin clearly signaled immigration as a more complex phenomenon for women, one that offered both benefits and obstacles. As James Clifford has pointed out, for women, “new roles and demands, new political spaces, are opened by diaspora interactions” (1994, p. 314). He continues, “diaspora women are caught between patriarchies, ambiguous pasts, and futures” so that they “connect and disconnect, forget and remember, in complex and strategic ways” (Clifford, 1994, p. 314).

261 As their stories unfolded, it became clear that the women in the Mothers’ Group do not consider their role models simply as heroes; rather, they often expressed seeing them as perpetuating gender-based practices that they attempted to avoid repeating in their own lives. The women also, however, demonstrated a conscious awareness of how their grand/mothers’ practices allowed them to generally fare better in the resettlement process than their husbands did. Most of the Mothers described how their mothers were able to survive using tactics of improvisation and pragmatism while their fathers succumbed to depression, illness, and even death upon their arrival in a new country.

Zareena’s stories in particular spoke to how she was influenced by her mother’s pragmatic and resourceful practices, which she attributed to the dire need to feed, clothe and educate her children in Uganda. In the following excerpt, Zareena appears to learn that although her mother’s actions were fraught with risks, they also contributed to her resiliency:

She took risks when she went into business. It was not easy for her. She was forced into it because my father could never make enough money. For food, clothes, to send us to good schools. And so she stepped out of her traditional role. In Uganda. She struggled to get her qualifications. She built up two nursery schools. But she faced many obstacles. One of them was my father. I think he felt threatened, like her engagement in business was taking his power away. And whenever she stood her ground … or spoke out she suffered. Or take some action without asking him first. He would abuse her with his language. And beat her up. We watched. But she didn’t give up. She grew stronger.

Zareena described how she grew up knowing that her mother’s decision to “to step out of the comfort zone” by becoming an entrepreneur came at a price. She observed her mother suffer both mental and physical abuse from a husband who “felt threatened” because of his patriarchal notion that the man should be the breadwinner: he felt his wife had usurped his power. At the same time, Zareena demonstrated that although speaking out and “standing her ground” caused her mother to face physical and psychological repercussions from her husband, she learned that Zuleikha grew “stronger” in the process. This strength motivated her mother to surmount other psychological hurdles by acquiring financial independence, as shown by Zareena below:

262 My [paternal] grandmother humiliated my mother all the time. All the time. She expected my mother to do as she said. To cook, clean. Live quietly with the in-laws. My grandmother would use us kids to hurt my mother. She would be kind and loving to us to get us to side with her. Against my mother. And my mother just wanted to move out of that house. I think she was very angry. Her drive to be financially independent came from that anger. That drove her to find ways to make money. To get away. I observed my mother using her anger as a force to get away from my grandmother.

In this account, Zareena explains why her mother crossed patriarchal boundaries to step outside of the domestic realm and seek financial independence: Zuleikha wished to escape a mother-in- law who was described by Zareena as controlling and manipulative. In observing her mother’s strategy of dealing with her mother-in-law, Zareena learned lessons about the constructive use of anger and the power of financial independence for women. However, Zareena points out that she also learned how such attempts for women to gain financial independence “came at a great price.” As Zareena’s stories demonstrate, informal lessons from her mother about the power of financial independence and the productive use of anger continued to inform Zareena in Canada:

Even before we left [Uganda], my mother was angry enough to find a way to take some of her hard-earned money to Canada. She did not give up. We watched as she bought two round-the-world, open airline tickets for each of us. She was resourceful. But then when we arrived in Toronto, she was told her British day-care certificate was not recognized. But it was in Vancouver. So, she found a way to persuade my father to move to Vancouver. In Vancouver, she was able to find work after volunteering at a daycare. She found ways – she was practical, resourceful.

Zareena demonstrated the lessons she received through her mother’s practices regarding pragmatism, resiliency, and creativity before and upon their arrival in Canada. She observed how her mother, by “planning ahead,” found a creative way of taking some of her money to Canada: Zuleikha used her money to purchase airline tickets in Uganda that could be converted into cash upon their arrival in Canada. Adamant to find a job in her own field, Zuleikha further persuaded her husband to move to Vancouver, and she persevered until she found a job in her field. In the

263 following excerpt, Zareena exposes the contrasting attitudes of her parents to resettlement in a new county:

We watched how our parents faced living in Canada. The biggest challenge for my mother in Canada was, I think, my father. He became depressed. And even more abusive. He used to beat her before, but it got much worse in Canada. He felt he was not able to get a job he wanted. Put food on the table. And my father came from a family who thought they were ‘special’. Above other Ismailis. He saw my mother as having more ‘power’: I think she became a kind of threat … to his manhood. He refused to even help around the house. I watched my mother show stubbornness. And she showed us the results of hard work. She started at the very bottom. Volunteering at first. Then got a job in day-care. She cashed in the airline tickets. She bought a large house with a large yard. She was planning to start her own day-care. Which she did eventually. We lived in that house for many years. She was proof of how hard work paid off.

Juxtaposing the different behaviours of her father and her mother as they faced their dis/re/location in Canada, Zareena identified local lessons she inherited from her mother in the process. She observed how while her father, unable to get the kind of job he desired, refused “to take just any job” and saw Zuleikha as a “kind of threat” to his manhood, resorted to greater abusive treatment of his wife. By contrast, Zareena observed her mother strategize to ensure her financial independence by starting “at the very bottom” to be able to start her own daycare business again. Through her accounts, Zareena revealed how she inherited lessons from her mother about using anger constructively, of finding resourceful ways of meeting challenges, and of the vital importance of gaining financial independence.

Zareena’s stories nevertheless demonstrated that she did not view her mother as a heroic exemplar, in spite of all the lessons she passed on to her daughter. In fact, Zareena recounted how she actually believed that strong women like her paternal grandmother and her mother failed their female children in some ways:

One of the things that really makes me angry is the failure of strong women like my mum … my grandmother to teach their male children how to actually understand the challenges women face daily. You know, as women. And to become the agents of change. Instead,

264 they created men who were the men, although they were under the care of women. Male children like my brothers, they became the men just like their grandfathers and their fathers. That I think is the failure of these women. To me, that betrayal!

Zareena’s frustration and anger at the actions of the older women in her family is captured at the end of the excerpt as sheer “betrayal.” Zareena elaborated on how her older role models – the “strong women” – not only failed in the task of communicating to their male children the challenges women experience, but they actually became the perpetrators of cultural patriarchy. She saw these older women’s location as ‘mothers’ as a potentially powerful position, which they failed to utilize “as agents of change” in working to dislodge the culturally privileged position of men. Instead, these older women taught their sons to become “the men just like their grandfathers and their fathers,” perpetuating the tradition of cultural male privilege in the family. Zareena provided a substantial example of how Zuleikha perpetuated this privileged position of valuing her sons over her daughters in the family, and Zareena learned what she herself should not do:

Now that she is older and talking about wills and estates, she talks to the boys first. Acts on their advice … She’s showing them [her sons] they have more power! By her actions. That’s what she is teaching them and us girls.

Through this example, Zareena criticized the uncharacteristic turnaround of some of her mother’s recent practices. According to Zareena, this particular newer practice contradicts her mother’s former role-modeling of ways to resist and/or overcome cultural patriarchy.

Learning to negotiate ways around cultural patriarchal norms to achieve self-worth appeared to be one of the main themes in Farida’s life-narratives as well. In her stories, she shared her dilemma over balancing her practices as ascribed by the culturally assigned gender roles with practices that would offer her financial independence, for example, through a career that was based on her personal interests and passions. Farida, who admitted that she grew up watching her mother play an outwardly submissive role in her relationship with her father, observed that women like her mother have made themselves ‘invisible’ by complying with the gender roles ascribed to them in their culturally traditional families in East Africa:

265 Coming to North America, I realized how invisible our [Ismaili] women made themselves in East Africa. They kept to their own roles as such. Distinct roles. Very different. From the men. They were expected to be, you know, mothers … housekeepers. Like my Grandma. My mother played more or less the same role. And they lived in extended families. In my mother’s case, my father was in business with his brothers. And women could not take any part in that. They could only watch. I don’t think they felt much self- esteem in their lives. These Indian women. Coming from India and growing up in East Africa. You know, husband the bread-earner and women buried in housework, the children. When you look back even my mother or anybody – the women never felt worthwhile in that way.

As Farida looked back to the life she observed her mother lead in East Africa, she described a sharp division between the work of men and of women. Farida, like Shirin, maintained that the conventional cultural roles that were ascribed to women, who were seen as a ‘collectivity’, meant they existed mainly to carry out essential functions in the domestic realm as “mothers … housekeepers.” It is apparent from her account that Farida perceived her mother as lacking in self-worth, and she attributed this lack of self-worth to her mother’s inability to participate in issues relating to the larger world outside of her domestic duties in the home. Farida seemed to imply that women like her mother could only be ‘watchers’ “from the sidelines” as the men participated in the more gratifying work outside the home. In other words, Farida maintained that the women like her mother in East Africa felt a lack of self-worth because they considered housework and the raising of children – the work of women in the home – as being less fulfilling than the work done by men outside of the home.

Farida identified her immigration to North America as providing her with both the cultural contrast and the discourse to be able to articulate how the different locations of Ismaili men and women provide reasons for the women’s lack of self-worth. In her own stories, Fatma, Farida’s mother, echoed Farida’s point of view. At the very beginning of her interview, Fatma volunteered that she did not have much of value to contribute to this study since she lacked formal education and had not participated in a job or career outside of her home. However, as the interview progressed, and contrary to her earlier words, Fatma demonstrated that she held definitive views about the larger world outside the home. Likewise, in the story that follows,

266 Farida describes how she learned from observing her mother that those women who worked from within the boundaries of women’s traditionally assigned roles still managed to get what they wanted:

Like these women in East Africa, I observed how my mother– like, she didn’t raise her voice. Or argue. Openly, you know. I don’t think that was possible. I don’t think she even knew how to-to argue … But I never saw her as giving in … as such. She had a lot of say in some things. But differently. Differently. But financially, she was completely dependent on my dad. He wanted it that way. Financial independence is so important. For self-worth.

Several times in her narratives, Farida returned to how she observed her mother work from within the traditionally assigned gender boundaries to get what she wanted. Farida explained that the language of ‘argument’ was unavailable to her mother, who was outwardly compliant but “had a lot of say in some things,” which she managed to achieve “differently.” The fact that Farida repeatedly brought up the point that her mother was financially still dependent on her father perhaps explains why, according to Farida, women like her mother (and also she herself) felt less self-worth doing household tasks that had no financial benefits. By observing her mother’s financial dependence on her father, Farida appears to have learned that self-esteem is, at least partially, achieved through financial independence, which is, in turn, achieved by work outside the home.

The issue of Ismaili women being held in culturally traditional roles is more complex and often confusing in the way my participants expressed themselves outwardly. This is contrasted with the effects of the lessons they impart to subsequent generations through their practices of working within cultural gender boundaries. Farida captured this complexity as she discussed her aunt, her father’s sister-in-law:

I lived with an uncle and aunt for a full year. Until I was fourteen. And my uncles are very strong men. But I saw how my aunt was quietly insistent about the education of her daughter. My cousin. She played a huge role … huge part in that. In the way she nurtured her kids. She made sure … she was stronger when I think of it. Even though she seemed quiet, she was smarter, you know. Than the men. She got what she wanted. Knew how. So these women who were not formally educated, they were smart, wise, powerful.

267 Farida’s account demonstrates the lesson in women’s resistance that was imparted to her through her aunt’s everyday practices. According to Farida, although her aunt was not very formally educated herself, she was able to work quietly within cultural conventions to get “what she wanted.” With this realization, Farida appears to contradict herself: she learned that her aunt – a housewife – was wise and that her tactics were “smarter,” making her aunt “stronger” and more “powerful” than the men in her family. It is highly possible that Farida internalized the strength needed for her aunt to push for formal education for her daughter so that the latter could achieve the financial independence that her aunt could not.

Like the other women in the Mothers’ Group, Shirin was focused on learning ways to negotiate boundaries of cultural patriarchal norms from her older role models. She identified her maternal grandmother – naanima – as an exemplar from whom Shirin learned to “step out of her comfort zone” as a way of navigating patriarchy in her own life. Shirin described her naanima as the youngest daughter-in-law in her paternal grandfather’s large family, which meant she was positioned on the very bottom rung of the hierarchically organized traditional family ladder. Shirin recounted,

Naanima was married very young. Fourteen. She came from a poor family. She had lost her mother to some terrible illness when she was very young. From what I used to hear, there was not much regard for her in the family. But she pushed for her daughters’ education. Education of daughters was not such a high priority at that time. She persuaded my grandfather after they moved from India to Africa to stay in Kampala. Instead of joining his brothers in a small village. There were more schooling opportunities for her daughters in Kampala. Naanima was instrumental in that. So my mum was able to attend secondary school in Kampala until she turned sixteen. Until she married.

In this account, Shirin describes stories she had heard that her maternal grandmother was not highly respected by her in-laws, but how, when the family immigrated to East Africa, she was “instrumental” in ensuring that her daughters received formal schooling for as long as possible. As Shirin’s accounts reveal, life for her maternal grandmother turned out to be more challenging in Kampala than if her husband had acquiesced to join the family business in a village. However, living in a larger town came with its own challenges for her grandparents. Lack of available jobs

268 meant that husbands and wives lived apart in different towns over periods of time, and they took on jobs that were both challenging and considered to be ‘disrespectable’. Shirin demonstrates these difficulties in the following excerpt, which is worth quoting at length:

It was difficult for my grandfather to get and keep jobs in Kampala. They opened a hotel with a bar … by the railway station. It wasn’t doing too well. The area was sketchy. It had an African and low-income Indian clientele. My grandfather had to take a job in another town as a bookkeeper. So Naanima started to manage the hotel and the bar. And to this day, I remember it was considered like what is a woman doing running a bar? There were so many negative … connotations. Women in Kampala were not considered as smart as men. Didn’t count as much as men. I think women were like a man’s property. Then on top of that Naanima running a hotel with a bar? She had gone out of her comfort zone. As a woman. She was subjected to a lot of criticism. I was old enough to remember my paternal grandfather’s family didn’t approve. The Ismaili community didn’t approve. But she really did well. She would make samosas at home and sell them in the hotel’s cash bar. My father disapproved. He wouldn’t allow us to visit. We would go to her house, and the servant would go fetch her. She would come always with samosas and cokes for us. And in those days, it was such a treat! In Naanima’s house there was always fun stuff for us. She was always very loving … caring … but very strong. She did the household role just as well as working outside. For a woman … now I realize … what it must be for her at that time? With all that talk about her? But she held her head high. And did well. And she was able to stay within the family code of respectability. You know maintain relationships. Invite people to her home. How did she do that? It was amazing. We saw it as seamless. Probably it wasn’t seamless. We saw it as totally seamless.

Shirin observed how her grandparents had to face challenges as they were settling in Kampala in the mid 1940s so that their children could pursue formal education. In particular, Shirin marveled at the way her maternal grandmother crossed traditional gender boundaries and moved “out of her comfort zone” in order to help with their financial difficulties, taking over the running of their hotel (with a cash bar) in a part of town that catered to low-income clients and making a success of the business in spite of patriarchal cultural taboos. Shirin’s grandmother not only conveyed lessons to the young Shirin through her capacity to face the disapproval and criticism

269 of her family and the Ismaili community with grace and dignity, but she also demonstrated that she could simultaneously fulfill the traditional social obligations for women that were expected of her. Shirin recounted that, contrary to how difficult it must have been, her grandmother made the transition from business to home and social responsibilities with such composure, she made them seem smooth and effortless.

Becoming independent: “I can take care of myself”; “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Shirin continued to identify lessons from Naanima’s practices in Canada: she maintained that her grandmother passed on a local wisdom that emphasized self-sufficiency and family responsibility through practices that demonstrated hard work. Below, Shirin maintains she adapted and used these lessons in her daily life as an adult:

You know when she came to Canada, Naanima was already sixty. I wonder at how flexible and strong she has been. She started doing laundry for a seniors’ home. In Uganda, she had three servants to help her with her housework. My Dadima [great-grandmother] arrived in Canada when she was in her nineties … Then she got really sick. Naanima took care of her, washed her sheets, cleaned her, fed her. Until she died. She did all that while she was also working outside in an Indian restaurant as a cook. When my grandfather died she refused to move in with anyone. But now I process all of that. I see how she lived. When I was nineteen … twenty, and impressionable. Watching her. But I realize that I have been processing what I observed her doing. How she lived her life. What I can use in mine.

In this excerpt, Shirin describes how her grandmother, undeterred by age, was able to maintain her independence in Canada through hard work and fulfill her obligations towards an elderly, incapacitated mother-in-law in her home until the latter passed away – all lessons she passed on to Shirin.

Farida, on the other hand, threw a different spin on receiving local lessons about family support. Although she acknowledged the strength of women who appear to follow the conventional roles assigned to them, Farida also displayed some ambivalence towards the value of some of the local lessons that were passed on to her by her mother:

270 I was only a naïve twenty-one when I got married. Never had any ‘boyfriends’ before. But Fareed proposed a year later. When I was getting married, my mum said, ‘You cannot turn to us … anymore’. I was only twenty-one. And she said, ‘You cannot turn to us anymore. Once you’re married, you have to make things work by yourself. You’re on your own. This family – us, your dad and I are not your family as such. We are no longer your family’. Can you imagine? It has played a big impact on me. I was very close to my mum and dad. But suddenly I can’t turn to my parents any more. Not for anything. So, I had to detach myself. Fully. And suddenly. That was huge! It was the biggest change in my life. Detaching from my family. I had to fight my own battles. I felt so alone.

The abrupt severing of the umbilical cord that tied her to her parents – as required by her family’s patriarchal cultural conventions for daughters upon their marriage – surfaced like a choral lament in Farida’s narratives, highlighting the devastating impact it had on her. Farida described that, according to the conventions of her family, a girl was considered to be only a ‘temporary’ sojourner in her parents’ home; once married, her husband’s home became her permanent abode. In their respective accounts, Farida, Fatma, Zuleikha, Khatoon, and Noorbhegum all described how after they were married, they were instructed by their parents to live according to the expectations of their respective husbands and their families, without expecting any further help from their parents. Consequently, Farida admitted that painful as it was, she had to learn to “detach” herself from her parents, much as her mother had done before her.

In her accounts, Farida also spoke to how she learned later that such conventional practices made women like her mother stronger; it made them self-sufficient. This was revealed by Farida in the following account:

I think my mother had taken a kind of passive role when my dad was alive. But then my dad started having health issues. Before that my mum was very dependent on my dad. Because my dad always wanted it that way. You know how men are. They don’t want their wives to be independent. As such. But I watched her get into the ‘driving’ position. When I was leaving for New York, and I left my car for my mum, asking her to learn to drive. She wasn’t young at the time. But the car gave her incentive. To learn. She failed the test many

271 many times. But she finally got her license. My Dad got very ill, but she was able to get around. She drove to jamatkhana, to the shopping centre, to her hairdresser and the doctor, the dentist. Not on highways. But what I saw was she was not helpless. After all the years of living with my dad, she could take care of herself. Rely on herself.

All of the women in the Mothers’ Group observed how their respective mothers grew more self- sufficient in Canada, at the same time as their husbands yielded to depression, illnesses, and/or death within a few years of leaving Uganda. The Mothers’ accounts revealed that they learned that their own mothers, who had previously submitted to submissive roles as required by their gendered location within their families, grew more sturdy and self-sufficient when their male counterparts could no longer support them. Farida observed that Fatma, who had previously been totally dependent upon her husband, because he “always wanted it that way,” did not fall to pieces or resort to self-pity as a result of a drastic change in her circumstances when her husband fell ill. Rather, Farida portrayed Fatma not as a hapless backseat ‘passenger’ in the car but as someone who gets “into the ‘driving’ position” both literally and figuratively – Farida employed this metaphor of ‘driving a car’ to describe her mother’s proactive stance to her change in situation. Farida further claimed that through this agentic action, Fatma taught Farida that she was able to take control over her life in spite of the changed circumstances in a new country, even when “she wasn’t young at that time.” Farida’s story reveals that in spite of failing the driving test repeatedly, Fatma persevered until she succeeded in obtaining her driver’s license, which passed on invaluable lessons to Farida of how her mother’s ‘detachment’ from her parents bred a resiliency and self-reliance in her that pushed her to take care of herself.

Fatma herself exhibited this strength when she shared the narrative below, wherein she shows the pride she felt in her self-reliance and the lessons she is passing on to her daughter:

I take care of myself. My husband was in partnership with his brothers, so I receive my monthly cheque. In the beginning I used to drive myself. Now I’m older, my doctor said ‘why don’t you use the Handy-DART?’ It is available for me. And I also use a taxi to get around. To the dentist, hairdresser, to jamatkhana, even to go shopping. I never ask my son or daughter-in-law or grandchildren. Look, this is my house. I own it. Do you see any mess or dirt? I do have a cleaning woman. But she said to me, ‘You don’t need your house

272 cleaned every week’. So she comes every three weeks. But I clean it myself every day. I have a gardener who comes every week. My Canadian neighbours are very generous; they will clear the path if it snows. See, my mother did all her housework, cooked, took care of her extended family. I learned to do all this from her. And my daughter, who watches me, learns like I did from my mother. By watching us, our children learn.

In this excerpt, Fatma displays self-worth through the pride in her voice as she displays her self- sufficiency, which is revealed in her statement, “I take care of myself.” She describes how she is still able to maintain her mobility outside of the home, even though she no longer drives. Fatma is able to maintain her independence in her daily life in spite of her age because of the supportive relationships she has been able to cultivate with her neighbours and because she is both financially stable and physically healthy enough at this stage in her life to do so. Fatma relayed that she is still able to cook and clean, emphasizing the value of the local lessons that were passed on to her by her mother – lessons she brought to a new place of settlement and which help her to maintain her daily standard of living in a house she now owns. She also confirmed in this excerpt that role modeling is a powerful way of transmitting these types of local lessons, and she is consciously passing practices that allow her to feel self-esteem on to her daughter, Farida.

Farida confirmed the value of the local lessons that have been passed on by her mother. In her narratives, she maintained that she has learned the value of following one’s passions and desires to acquire self-worth from her mother. In the following narrative, Farida claims she has learned this important lesson by watching Fatma’s practices from the time they lived in a small town in Uganda; these are practices that Farida has attempted to emulate in her own life in Canada.

I remember when we lived in T______for about ten years. My mother seemed so happy and so relaxed there. She was able to help my father in the supermarket for a few hours each day. We had no family there. Our Punjabi women neighbours became her best friends. My mother socialized with these women. Anyway, these women came from big business families. They had lived in England. They were educated and very clever. They read a lot. My mother would get together with them for afternoon tea. They taught my mother how to embroider, to smoke dresses, to make cakes and other things. They exchanged recipes. See, here my mother had a hobby. She was able to do something that

273 interested her. She followed her passion. And I saw how happy that made her. Things changed when we moved. She was surrounded by the family again. She was not free to do as she liked. I saw how happy she had been before. That has become an important lesson in my life. To follow your passion.

As recounted by Farida, Fatma was more content and comfortable when she was able to pursue her own personal interests in a small town in Uganda. Farida observed that her mother did not restrict herself to duties within the domestic realm alone; rather, Fatma was able to step outside of the home to help in the store for a few hours as well as enjoy the freedom to pursue her own hobby with friends. Farida watched her mother participate in shared leisure activities in the company of other women who were described by Farida as ‘smart’, well-read, educated, exposed to influences outside East Africa, and accomplished in skills arising out of their own personal interests. From these observations, Farida maintained, she learned that when her mother “had a hobby,” did something that was of interest to her, and followed “her passion,” she appeared to be most content. Obviously, this lesson impacted Farida strongly, as is evident from the number of times she returned to the topic of how she was deprived of experiencing self-worth because of her inability to achieve financial independence through a career that reflected her own interests.

Farida pointed out, however, that she has been taught to explore other avenues of achieving this self-worth by her mother-in-law, who has transmitted lessons through a local wisdom both by example and by storytelling:

When I married, I was still maturing. I couldn’t cook. When I married, I interrupted my studies, and Fareed promised I could go back to university. I wanted to be independent. You know, financially. I wanted to follow a career of my passion. But as soon as we landed in Canada, our funds from Uganda stopped. I supported him by getting a job while he tried to open his own business. He couldn’t get a job. Then I became pregnant. He travelled on business, so I became a full-time mother. I couldn’t follow my passion. I lost my self-esteem. But my mother-in-law helped me. She taught me to cook. I was struggling with that. I could feed my child. I couldn’t turn to my mother. But my mother-in-law was warm to me. She made me feel special. She told me stories. Taught me through stories of her life.

274 Through this personal account, Farida demonstrates how early in her marriage, her husband’s inability to get a job in Canada and the loss of family funds from Uganda interrupted her plans to become financially independent by pursuing formal education and a career of “passion.” However, she disclosed that when she was in a position to follow her passion, her pregnancy waylaid her educational plans again; while her husband traveled, she stayed at home to bring up her child. She further related how she was rescued by her mother-in-law at a time when she was going through a depressed period in her life: while her own mother appeared to push Farida out of the nest, her mother-in-law appeared to draw her in by dispensing warmth and lessons of stories from her own life. In the following excerpt, Farida credits her mother-in-law with teaching her practical skills to survive, reflecting a local wisdom:

My mother-in-law was very warm towards me. She was very diplomatic. I watched my mother-in-law give unconditional love to her children. My mother’s relationship is not that unconditional as such. My mother-in-law kept the family together: we all met once a week. All children felt her warmth. My father-in-law suffered from depression in Canada. So she kept the family together. He died soon after. But she kept the family together. She had a huge impact on my life!

Farida acknowledged the lessons her mother-in-law imparted through the way she conducted her own life, despite the untimely death of her husband in a new place of settlement. Farida maintained that from her mother-in-law, she received lessons about the importance of diplomacy in relationships and about the crucial role a wife and mother has in keeping the family together by providing them with unconditional love. Farida also learned lessons from her mother-in-law about how the critical role of a woman in her location as a wife and mother could contribute to her own self-worth. Farida maintained she learned that contrary to her belief that self-esteem could only be gained through a career of passion and financial independence, her mother-in- law’s practices and stories taught her to see how women could also achieve self-worth through their roles as wives and mothers. Ensuring the survival of their families in a new place of settlement through the calculated use of diplomacy and unconditional love could also provide feelings of self-worth.

275 Such lessons were similarly featured in Khatoon’s life narratives. Khatoon demonstrated the survival skills lessons she had learned when settling in a new country by comparing the tactics of her adoptive parents:

It was more traumatic for Dad than Mum. It seemed that way. But it must have been traumatic for Mum too. But Dad suffered a lot; he complained a lot. He missed Kampala. He had a top position at work in Kampala. His friends all went to Vancouver. He couldn’t go to Canada; he had a British passport. Also, he couldn’t find a job in his field. He met with a lot of discrimination. He took it very hard. But it wasn’t easy for Mum either. She was a librarian in Kampala. In England, she had to work at a factory. Sewing clothes. I never heard her complain. She just dealt with it. She was in a near-fatal accident eight months after we arrived in England. Split her skull open. Hit by a car. But she dealt with that too. She has this tendency not to dwell on things.

Khatoon discussed the contrasting reactions she observed in her father and mother during their expulsion from Uganda and subsequent resettlement in England. According to her account, Khatoon was aware that both of her parents faced a radical change in their social and financial status during these moves, and she reported how each one handled this sudden drastic change in their lives differently. She observed how her father reacted to their distressing situation by complaining and suffering visibly because he had been unable to detach himself emotionally from Kampala, his friends, and his previous work. By contrast, Khatoon observed her mother deal with the drastic change in their social standing and the radical shift in their standard of living by just getting on with life, although Khatoon acknowledged that “it couldn’t have been easy for Mum either.” Khatoon watched her mother not only adjust to a factory job but also survive a “near-fatal accident” a few months after her arrival in England; Khatoon explained that her mother survived because she “doesn’t dwell on things … she just dealt with it.”

Khatoon also described how she learned lessons on survival through observing her mother cope not only with the depression, terminal illness and death of her father, but also with her widowed status, all within three years of arrival in England. In the following excerpt, Khatoon describes learning how her widowed immigrant mother took full charge of her life with apparent pragmatism:

276 I watched her face life in a strange place. Alone. For the first time. I watched her. You know, Dad had done all the banking, paying the mortgage. She didn’t even know how to write a cheque! Dad held all the power. Even her jewelry was under his name in the bank. But she learned to do it. None of us children were with her. I’m now a student in Canada. One sister is in the North. Another in India. But Mum dealt with whatever came up. She did not dwell on things. She did not fall apart. No drama or hysterics or collapsing. No self-pity. That’s what I remember. How she had handled things. That affected my life. My choice of career. It affected how I dealt with my own accident. The kind of mother I turned out to be.

In this excerpt, Khatoon speaks directly to the transmission of local knowledges from her mother, lessons in survival in a new place of settlement after the loss of home and husband. Khatoon described how she learned local lessons by observing her mother carry out new responsibilities, continue her life without crumbling, and refrain from succumbing to self-pity. Khatoon showed the potency of such lessons: “That’s what I remember. How she handled things. That affected my life.”

Nurjhan likewise attributed her survival in diaspora space to passed-on lessons from women in her family: she credited her paternal grandmother as well as her mother and aunt (by marriage) with conveying lessons that have aided her in her daily life. In the narrative below, Nurjhan shows how her grandmother taught her through her own practices to face life’s adversities with pragmatism, without recriminations and without yielding to victimhood in her gender:

My grandmother lived with us. For many years. She always seemed to underplay the seriousness of things … as if things were not as bad as we thought … at least that, you know, things were not as grim. I kind of realized that as I observed her over time. The immediate effect was to calm us down. If she was not worried, we were not worried. She was our barometer. This was the case when one of us was ill or one of the pets was lost or hurt or with bigger issues. Like the time when my father and uncle lost their business in Kenya. Everything we owned was repossessed. It was a huge catastrophe in our lives. My grandmother seemed unruffled; I’m not sure that she felt calm, but she showed calm. She had lost all the money she had been persuaded to invest in the business. She had reason not

277 to feel calm. But instead of giving in to despair or complaining or blaming … she advised my father to accept a job offered to him. And she told us we’re going to be just fine.

In this story, Nurjhan demonstrates how she ingested the pragmatic practices of her grandmother in her daily life, where her grandmother’s actions became a gauge for the reactions of younger generation to both the small and big adversities in life. Specifically, in her narrative, Nurjhan elaborated on her grandmother’s practices through an example of a memorable lesson on pragmatism; whether or not her grandmother felt troubled by a stressful event, she appeared to Nurjhan to be self-possessed and unperturbed without surrendering to criticisms or recriminations or victimhood. The end result was that by observing her practices, Nurjhan and her family learned to take life’s buffets in their stride.

Similarly, Nurjhan learned lessons through her mother, Noorbhegum, about working within gender boundaries with pragmatism, but from a wholly different perspective. Below, Nurjhan maintains she learned lessons on survival in diaspora space from observing her mother cope with her life before and after the death of Nurjhan’s father:

Mum showed her pragmatism through her stoicism. It was tinged with a hint of optimism. I watched her live in a household where my grandmother ‘ruled’. And she and my grandmother lived together for twenty-eight years. She had to put up with a lot. She was always busy with housework and cooking and feeding the extended family. My dad’s sisters and their children were constantly visiting. Some of my dad’s cousins, nephews and nieces stayed with us for years. My aunts were demanding and highly critical. My dad deferred to his mother and he didn’t tell his sisters anything. Perhaps he subconsciously even enjoyed the praises heaped on him for marrying such a compliant woman. I saw my mother work diligently, quietly, patiently within her cultural role, but always with optimism. Sometimes I used to get annoyed, impatient at her obedience. I thought it was weakness. But later I understood how she was acting like that because there was no other option for her. Even the thought of divorce or separation was … unthinkable!

In the excerpt above, Nurjhan describes her mother’s pragmatism through a “stoic tenacity” to play her role as the dutiful daughter-in-law within cultural boundaries since there were no other options available to her in the traditional family environment. Nurjhan observed her mother

278 continue to serve quietly and patiently in a busy household that was frequented by unappreciative and critical in-laws, and in a household that was headed by a matriarch who wielded the ultimate decision-making power. At the same time, Nurjhan’s account shows her awareness that not only was Noorbhegum’s husband unable to support or protect her, but he was also “subconsciously” complicit in his wife’s subjugation since her compliance seemed to enhance his personal image in his family. Nurjhan admits that as a young girl, she had been critical of her mother’s accommodating practices. However, as she matured, Nurjhan acquired a deeper understanding of the reasons behind her mother’s conformity and learned to see her as practising pragmatism, hopeful that “things would … eventually work out.” Furthermore, Nurjhan observed how her mother’s tenacious practicality helped her to deal with more drastic changes later in her life as she faced her husband’s sudden death and the events that followed. In her story below, Nurjhan points out how her mother’s pragmatic and calm demeanor, along with her practices of working within gender and racial boundaries, played a big role in helping her wind up her husband’s business affairs and to move to England when she had to leave Uganda in 1972:

Hard as my father’s sudden death was for my mother, she worked with level-headedness and expediency to sell his business and pay off all his debts using her allies’ help and support. She was able to do things she had never done before. Then she had to deal with the expulsion, and move to England, find a place to live and to make things work. My brothers were young. I watched her. But she did not let anything get her down or waste time on regrets. She moved on. She learned to use the elaborate public transport system. Expertly. Became an Avon Lady. She had a knack for making friends in the Ismaili community at jamatkhana and in the neighbourhood. There was a lot of racial discrimination in England, but she quickly built up a huge clientele. She not only survived. She did more. She was able to make a new life for herself. For her children. That’s what I saw … that’s what I took from that.

Nurjhan demonstrated how she observed her mother wind up her affairs after her husband’s death and deal with Amin’s expulsion edict – all unexpected challenges in her life – by resourcefully harnessing aid from friends and allies. Nurjhan’s descriptions of how she has seen her mother, Noorbhegum, cope with drastic and unexpected changes in her life are uncannily reminiscent of Khatoon’s description of her mother, Khairoon. Both Nurjhan and Khatoon

279 claimed they have learned lessons from their mothers about facing life with pragmatism and resourcefulness. Both of these women have also described their respective mothers as facing challenges with “sober levelheadedness” and optimistic stoicism, creatively utilizing the support systems that were available to them while simultaneously learning new skills to become self- sufficient in a new place of settlement. While Khatoon observed her mother take on a factory job and gain some financial independence, Nurjhan watched Noorbhegum sell Avon beauty products to Ismaili community members and to her neighbours to supplement her financial needs and to fulfill her parental responsibilities. Nurjhan’s account demonstrates that she perceives her mother’s practices not just as survival tactics but also as engaged actions to “make a new life for herself. And her children” – practices which, Nurjhan claimed, have transmitted lessons to her about how it is possible to overcome obstacles in life by working within cultural boundaries of gender and race with tenacity, optimism, and patience.

In her accounts, Nurjhan identifies her mother as passing on lessons on pragmatism, perseverance and hope through her practices, but she also recognizes her aunt and her grandmother as two other women who have taught her life’s lessons. They have passed on these knowledges both through their observable practices as well as through their storytelling. Nurjhan’s aunt, the wife of her father’s older brother, with whom Nurjhan claims to have spent a good many of her childhood years, appears frequently in her life accounts. Nurjhan described her as “one of the most open-minded women I knew” who worked within cultural boundaries, and she elaborated on her aunt’s capabilities:

My aunt was not formally educated beyond reading and writing in Gujarati. With perhaps a smattering of English. She was a smart woman though. And very open-minded. Flexible. Astute. Her own mother was like that. And when my sister wanted to marry a man who was not an Ismaili, she turned to my aunt. This was not an acceptable thing in our family … marrying outside the community. Especially for a woman. But my aunt convinced the family. My aunt’s actions showed us women could make things happen … if they dared to step outside of the traditional box yet work within the system.

In this narrative, Nurjhan demonstrates that qualities like open-mindedness, fairness and flexibility, which she observed in her aunt, are not necessarily traits attributed only to formally

280 educated women. To the contrary, Nurjhan attributes these traits in her aunt to passed-on knowledges from her aunt’s mother. Through specific examples, Nurjhan demonstrated how her aunt transmitted lessons to Nurjhan and her sister that taught them women who “dare to step outside the traditional box” but still work astutely and resolutely within cultural boundaries can “make things happen.” These lessons in resistance that were taught by Nurjhan’s aunt are very different from the lessons that were taught by Nurjhan’s mother.

The last person Nurjhan identified as teaching her life lessons was her grandmother. She explained the nature of those lessons, which were, again, different from those taught by the other women in her family:

My grandmother was rather a complex character. She could change from a disagreeably abrasive character to a sagacious healer who worked her magic on our sprained ankles or muscle spasms or belly and back aches to restore harmony to our bodies or to fix the broken wings of pigeons that she rescued from the mouths of our cats. I always saw her as fearless and fearsome … much like the women and men in the stories she told us nightly from the time I was only a few years old. The topics covered literature, family stories, morals, gender issues, fighting for justice. She was an avid reader. I always mixed the exploits of the Pandavas of Indrapastha and the Kauravas of Hastinapur with the deeds of my ancestors who tilled the earth, gathered dung from their animals for fire, sold their wares and protected their villages from pillaging dacoits in Gujarat. When I was young, I actually believed she knew Sita and Rama personally … and that the fiery polyandrous Draupadi was a plucky relative. I lauded Krishna each time my grandmother told the story about the way he protected Draupadi’s virtue as if she was my distant aunt. And when Abraham unsheathed his weapon in preparation for the sacrifice of his son in my grandmother’s nightly stories, I shuddered with fear … and fretted because I thought these were ‘her people’. How she must feel for them. Mythical figures rubbed shoulders with ancestral protagonists in my imagination. And I don’t even know when I first began to tell them apart. She has left a lasting impression … with her stories teaching us about faith, how to face the vagaries of life, participate in acts of social justice. I never thought I was actually learning stuff! It was unconscious learning.

281 Nurjhan’s portrait of her grandmother comes alive in her description of her grandmother’s practices and demonstrates the effects storytelling had on Nurjhan. In her account, Nurjhan portrays her grandmother’s flaws through the metaphor of her chameleon personality, but at the same time, she acknowledges that she receives doses of lessons from her grandmother – unconsciously – about fearlessness, “faith, vagaries of life, social justice.” These lessons were taught through literature and family history during the nightly routine activity of storytelling, attesting to the fact that local knowledges transmitted by women are not only restricted to teaching women their prescribed roles within patriarchal traditions but they are also used to advocate for acts of social justice. Nurjhan’s acknowledgment of the personal and emotional identification she felt with the protagonists in her grandmother’s stories shows that her grandmother’s storytelling techniques have had enduring impacts in transmitting local knowledges to Nurjhan. Nurjhan even expressed her profound engagement in the stories, claiming she experienced them each time they were told by her grandmother. In fact, Nurjhan acknowledged that even today she feels twinges of a lasting familial attachment to the characters that were featured in her grandmother’s stories. What is of special significance in Nurjhan’s narrative is her acknowledgement that methods of teaching local lessons through storytelling were potent because she was unaware that she was “actually learning stuff.” As Nurjhan’s narratives prove, she identifies the practices of the women from at least two generations for teaching her lessons that she applied to her own life to work within and outside of subjugating boundaries in her daily practices.

Much like Nurjhan, Shirin identified women from different generations as her mentors. Specifically, she identified learning lessons from three generations of women: her paternal great- grandmother, her maternal and paternal grandmothers, and her mother. Shirin’s life narratives, including the one below, show an acute awareness of local lessons she acquired from women who occupied changing roles in different geographical spaces during different time periods:

You know, I look at my heritage. The generation of my great-grandmother, my grandmothers and my mother … the way they were brought up. They lived in a society in India, where they couldn’t be ‘individuals’. They were a part of the group of women in the home. Whether they were cooking or tending to children. They had no privacy at all … like they lived in joint-families. The husband slept somewhere; the wife slept somewhere

282 else with children. In Africa, they became a little more … individual. They were more distinct but even then, women still had no privacy. My Dadima [great-grandmother] always had the door to her room open in Uganda. People could pop in and out … no privacy. Now in Canada, you could tell them more apart … you know more individually. Looking at Dadima and Naanima [maternal grandmother] … and Ma, my father’s mum, and then my mum. ’Cause you look at the women who’ve gone before her … and my mum comes into vision. And as I look at her now not only as my mother, but as a woman in her own right, what she’s done, what she has inherited and achieved … it just blows my mind.

In this anecdote, Shirin describes the location of the women who have influenced her life in the different landscapes they have occupied through a kind of a historical movie camera. Through her lens, she presents her female mentors first as an indistinguishable nebulous group who all followed the same traditional role in India and then as women who are pried apart and took on individual identities as they appeared to gain sharper definition through their diaspora experiences. Shirin’s mental view of the knowledges passed down among three generations of women appears to allow her to see what she considers are “mind-blowing” achievements by her mother, not only as her parent, but also as an individual woman “in her own right” – an actor on a generational historical landscape whom Shirin is observing through her intergenerational eye. Below, Shirin describes how she observed Sakina deal with the range of daily challenges she faced in Canada, whose effects impacted Shirin’s own life as well:

When we came to Canada, we had about 150 Canadian dollars. Mummy found a job at a fabric store for minimum wage. Her job was not secure. They told her to do different things. Must have been challenging. In Kampala, she ran her own sewing business from home once we were older. She employed two or three helpers with her sewing. But when we came to Canada, my brother was only two and a half. We spoke to him in Guajarati. We left him with a baby-sitter in our own building, but she didn’t understand when he asked to go to the bathroom. Then she hit him when he wet his pants. It broke Mummy’s heart when she found out. Mum would take a bus at the end of the day to fetch my brother ... in the wind and cold … wait for another bus to go home, carrying him and his bag, her bag. When she got home, she had to cook. There were huge, huge challenges! Because you know we weren’t moving cities … or moving a station in life. We moved continents. It was

283 a whole new way of life. It was weather. It was people … how things were done. Sometimes when it got really cold, Mummy and I were waiting for a bus, we would joke, ‘Let’s just go to the airport. Back to Kampala’. But [I] never heard Mummy say, ‘I can’t stand this! Life was so cushy at home’. Took it in her stride. And that first winter Papa got really ill and lost fifteen pounds with the flu. Mummy had to take charge.

Shirin compared Sakina’s life in Kampala with her new life in Canada, where she watched her mother work outside of the home for a minimum wage and be shunted between different departments of the fabric store. Shirin emphasized how, by contrast, Sakina ran her own business in Kampala and had help with sewing the clothes she had supplied to local stores. In addition, Shirin dwelled on the enormity of their move to Canada through her observation of the issues her mother had to content with as a result: Sakina had to deal with child-care problems, adjust to the winter weather and sporadic public transport system in Vancouver, and go from the job she held outside the home to her second job of housework and cooking inside the home. If that was not enough to contend with, Sakina had to shoulder additional responsibilities as a result of her husband’s ill health. In spite of the challenges involved in “moving continents” and adjusting to a completely different lifestyle, Shirin observed that her mother “took it in her stride,” much like Khairoon had in Khatoon’s stories and Noorbhegum had in Nurjhan’s. Instead of decrying their forced move out of Uganda, Sakina, in fact, appeared to communicate to her children about their move to Canada with more optimism, as was made evident in the following excerpt from Sakina’s narrative:

And I ask them. And there in Uganda, what people did? It was not safe outside. What people did? People went to each other’s houses and drink. No cultural things. Amin did us a favour. Now can do other things. You can go play bridge, go do yoga, go to khane [short for jamatkhana]. If you want to learn, there’s opportunity. If you want to work … in the evening, it is your time … not just go drinking and spend time with small talk.

In this excerpt, Sakina appears to point out how Canada has much more to offer them than Uganda did just prior to their expulsion in 1972 in an attempt to mitigate the harshness of the expulsion experience for her children. However, Shirin’s accounts reveal that she is aware that her mother’s life, both in East Africa and in Canada, has been subjugated by the demands of a

284 domineering and alcoholic husband. Shirin observed how her mother was proactive in order to make a better life for them in Canada, much like she did for them in East Africa. Shirin saw her mother work fulltime, augment her skills in English, accounting, and business through evening classes that enabled her to get a better job since her husband was unable to cope with the drastic changes in their lives. This process is captured in Shirin’s account below:

Once my mother got more secure in her job at the fabric store, she took an hour off work to do accounting courses, in English … and went to classes in the weekends. She faced more challenges. Mummy had to become the breadwinner. Papa was struggling. He got a job in the toy department of a store. Then with Electrolux. Then as a bookkeeper. But he was struggling. Mum showed us how she could come out of her comfort zone when it was necessary. To do stuff she had never done before. When things got tough. She managed to get a job as a bookkeeper in a financial institution. I guess, I learned, ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’!

Shirin disclosed that by observing how her mother dealt with new challenges in her life, she learned that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Shirin described how she watched her mother take courses after work and on the weekends to be able to acquire a more secure job with more pay since she had to “step out of her comfort zone” to take on the role of the principle bread-earner in the family.

“Be stubborn for survival”: Navigating racism.

Shirin identified her mother as having taught her how to deal with racist practices, and the lessons Shirin learned by observing her mother’s practices were further elaborated upon by Sakina’s own description of how the job she obtained as a bookkeeper came with its own set of problems. In the story recounted below, Sakina demonstrates how she had little choice but to face the challenges, and how being “stubborn for survival” kept her from giving up:

When we got to Canada, Shirin was nineteen, Seema was fifteen, Sara was thirteen, and Suleiman was two and a half. The move affected us a lot. My husband got a job for $2.50 an hour, I got a job at $1.75, and Shirin got a job at $1.50. So I went for classes every day for an hour or two. Also on weekends. After a year, I got job in a [financial institution]. I

285 put Suleiman with babysitter but he couldn’t speak English. And the babysitters used to hit him. I had to swallow the bitter pill. Then Suleiman was sick all the time. He had never lived with so many kids at babysitter. He had fever all the time. So one day, Shirin would stay home, one day, Salima, one day Sara, one day I. Sometimes I would have to stay with him for a few days. But if we don’t go to work where will come the money for rent and grocery? I tell you – if anyone wants to tell me to do that again … I don’t think I could. And the manager was always on my case. She was always so angry with me because Suleiman was ill and I would take time off. She was thinking, “You dare to come back after five days? Walk back in?” She used to think, “This fool is bound to quit; she can’t cope.” But I refused to give up. I was stubborn for survival.

Sakina’s narratives disclose in detail the lessons that Shirin referenced learning from watching her mother deal with racist practices that were compounded by problems of assuming responsibility for her young family and a husband who was unable to work. Below, Sakina relates how her new bookkeeping job, acquired after a year of evening and weekend courses, proved highly taxing, but she had little option but to persevere:

There was this bookkeeping machine. I had no idea how to operate it. And I was a Brown person! And a silly na- small … tiny Ugandan. There were a couple of girls who were very rude to me. If I made mistakes, the machine would show ‘999’ in red. And I would be stuck. Then I would have to tell the supervisor. She would be angry. Show me quickly. Yes, yes, they were all White women. Not all White women are like that, but this one had a bad attitude. Then I would be having a pile of thing to post the day’s transaction cards. She would show me so fast … I would write down one quickly, and then miss out. But slowly, I got hold of it. And I became so fast that nobody could beat me. And I was made the sales supervisor!

Although Sakina was reluctant in her accounts to directly name practices of racism she encountered in her place of employment, her words exposed those practices. Sakina related how some (read ‘White’) women were “very rude” to her and how her White supervisor and the women who were responsible for her training showed little compassion or patience for the errors she made as she learned new tasks at work. Instead, Sakina articulated the systemic practices of

286 racism in her place of employment through a different lens: she explained that it took her a long time to learn to do her job adequately because of the colour of her (brown) skin, her small stature, and her location as a woman from Uganda, a third world nation compared to the progressive West. Sakina nevertheless appeared to be jubilant when conveying that, in the end, her “stubbornness for survival” paid off and over time she managed to execute her tasks so proficiently “that nobody could beat [her],” landing her in the position of a sales supervisor. In her stories, Shirin repeated the importance of the lessons of hard work for survival and success that Sakina demonstrated through her actions. In the following excerpt, Shirin relates the lessons she learned as she observed her mother strive to succeed in the larger Canadian society:

[My mother’s] attitude and persistence once she went out of her comfort zone to work taught me what I could never really learn at school. I learned by her example. To work hard. To not give up. To do things with your heart. She took courses … I saw her mature. She got promoted … but there were always challenges. At that time, I remember how minority women were held back, and how it worked against her.

In this account, Shirin reveals the potency of local lessons that all of the women from the Mothers’ Group expressed in their respective accounts. Shirin maintained that she learned by observing her mother mature through persistent hard work and genuine commitment, in spite of the fact that “minority women were held back” generally in Canada at that time. Shirin also confirmed, however, that she learned that hard work and commitment by “minority women” like her mother was no guarantee that discriminatory practices resulting from racial prejudice in the workplace would cease. This reality is captured in narratives of both women, but is relayed in more detail by Sakina:

So I had this promotion and I had ten–eleven tellers behind me. An assistant. Every April and December the bank put out new interest rate. They paid, uh, $1,500 overtime to a supervisor each time to that. I told the manager they don’t have to do that. I will stay one hour extra on Thursday, and on Friday, I and my assistant came early to finish the job. And I did it! Manager bought four bottles of champagne. Who can drink all that? That made the other supervisor very … frustrated. Because she thought this Indian doing that … and she was there for five years. Before me. So I was talking on the phone to Shirin. She was in

287 hospital and she fainted while she was talking to me. I dashed to the hospital. I had the supervisor’s key on my arm under a sweater. I was so worried, I left with key. And when I came to bank on Monday, things had changed! She [the other supervisor] got me by the neck! She told the manager I had run away with the keys, that I am not responsible. She dug up other things … she got me. By the jugular. Yes, she was a White lady. I left that job.

In the account above, Sakina relates how her genuine attempts to save the bank money resulted in raising the ire of a senior (White) supervisor at the bank. Though she does not directly accuse her White supervisor of racist practices, it is evident in the words Sakina uses that she is aware that the attempt to discredit her was a result of racist attitudes. Sakina tried to minimize the racial overtones of the incident by describing the White supervisor as being “frustrated” and by acknowledging that her own failure to turn in the master key amongst her anxiety over her daughter’s sudden collapse cost her her job. Shirin noted this downplaying, and she identified the lesson she extrapolated from watching her mother’s responses to this racist incident:

[My mother] met such challenges because she was Brown and because she was a woman. But she never made a big deal about it. You know, because children listen and hold a lot of that inside them. It was never dinnertime conversation at our house. So I learned never to use it as a crutch. Because I think you can. You can say, ‘Oh look, poor me!’ I think she recognized that there is gender imbalance, there is colour imbalance … and so many indignities that go on because of that. You’re going to be a woman; you’re going to be Brown. I give her credit for that. She went head on. She worked twice, even three times harder. It was not a fair dismissal and they recanted later, but the stacks were against her: She was Brown, she was a woman …

Although Shirin admits in her account that the colour of her mother’s skin and her gender played a part in her dismissal from the bank, an act which Shirin perceives as being discriminatory and unjust, the focus of Shirin’s story remained on the lessons her mother imparted to her children about the way to deal with both racial and gender inequities in Canada. While Shrin acknowledged that her mother downplayed the obvious discriminatory practices that led to her unfair dismissal from the bank, she maintained that her mother, Sakina, deliberately avoided

288 family discussions of discriminatory practices in Canada with her children because she did not want them either to see themselves as victims or use these racist practices as obstacles from getting on with life. Shirin explained that what she took away from observing her mother’s actions is that since she herself cannot change her colour/race or her gender any more than her mother could, she must learn not to allow discriminatory practices based on these differences to dictate her life; instead, Shirin claimed, she was taught to work “twice, even three times harder” to compensate for her colour and gender in order to succeed in Canada.

Shirin further explained that the proof of the success of this tactic was reinforced for her by Sakina’s actions subsequent to her job loss:

Mummy left her last job, she took a part-time job with a trust company. She was part-time, but she worked hard like she was full-time. She knew the customers well. She knew the other employees well. She listened. Gave good advice. They trusted her. They knew her to be a deeply religious Ismaili. They respected her. The Chinese girls and women employees would often ask her to pray for them if they had, you know, boyfriend problems or someone is sick in the family. I remember how the Chinese girls would talk to her in slang … because they thought she was one of them. She was nominated for the most prestigious Diamond Award by her manager. Yes, she was Chinese too. It was at the Simpson Theatre. Mummy was treated to pomp and ceremony. They recognized her hard work. That was a good lesson. If you do your best, work hard, do it with feeling … if you are true to yourself, you’ll do just fine. I learned that it isn’t because you want some bonus points or you’re trying to win more friends. She feels it. This kinda thing then seeps into you somehow as you watch.

In this narrative, Shirin asserts that her mother, Sakina, is responsible for providing Shirin with practical lessons on dealing with issues of racial and gender inequities in the Canadian workplace. Shirin’s description of her mother’s success at her second place of employment reflects a kind of ‘professional intimacy’ that Sakina established with her customers and her peers. Shirin observed how Sakina did not sacrifice her principles but rather put her ‘heart’ into her job, giving full-time effort to a part-time job, showing respect to her customers by listening to their needs and offering them sound advice as well as treating her fellow employees with

289 almost ‘familial’ relationship while playing a comforting role in their personal lives. Shirin maintained that by observing how her mother crossed racial and cultural boundaries to get accepted by the Chinese-Canadian employees as “one of them,” she learned that principled hard work and application with genuine commitment results in satisfaction and success at work. She added that watching her mother get rewarded for her practices at work with the most prestigious award was a “good lesson for her”; it provided her with substantial proof that actions based on her mother’s local wisdom could result in success in everyday living.

What Shirin did not address in her stories is how much of her mother’s success in her second place of employment might have been made possible because the employees were representatives of another ‘minority’ group (of Chinese descent), and because they were operating under a Chinese-Canadian manager who was responsible for Sakina’s selection as a worthy recipient of the company’s one and only prestigious Award. To project the ‘creolization’ of diaspora space, Avtar Brah not only contends that border crossings between subordinate groups “do not occur only across the dominant/dominated dichotomy” but also that “there is traffic within cultural formations of subordinated groups” (1996, pp. 209-210). Brah maintains, “these new political and cultural formations continually challenge the minoritising and peripheralising impulses of the cultures of dominance” (1996, p. 210). Taking Brah’s theory into consideration, I question whether or not Sakina’s commitment, her respect and care for her customers and fellow employees in workplace that was occupied mostly by White employees and White managers would have resulted in the same positive acceptance and recognition of Sakina’s performance. Substantial proof, as offered by both Sakina and Shirin, regarding Sakina’s exemplary performance and her subsequent treatment in her former workplace, seem to show otherwise. Neither Shirin nor Sakina addressed the different ways in which power operates in a workplace where the majority of its employees and supervisors/managers come from ‘minority’ cultural heritages. In her story, Shirin revealed that what she inferred from her mother’s practices is the lesson that if she works twice or three times harder and if she remembers to “do your best, work hard, do it with feeling … be true to yourself, you’ll do just fine” – an explanation of an individualistic narrative that is frequently deployed by immigrant women to repair racist harm.

290 Although it is clear from the narratives of the women in the Mothers’ Group that most of them did not regard their respective older role models as flawless heroines, it was equally apparent that they saw them practising a kind of ‘agency’ that was reflected through their resistance acts based on a local ideology. All of the women in the Mothers’ Group demonstrated, through their stories, that they learned lessons from older women in their respective families that they could not have learned through formal schooling; however, they each brought different emphasis and different weight to bear on what they had learned, how they had been taught these lessons, and how those informal lessons affected their respective lives. Additionally, all of the Mothers also spoke to observing some of their respective mothers and grandmothers work from within the gender boundaries of cultural patriarchy to attempt to gain self-sufficiency, financial independence and self-respect.

As discussed above, Zareena revealed that while she learned from her mother, Zuleikha, that crossing gender boundaries ascribed by patriarchal cultural traditions could result in consequences of physical and psychological abuse, she also observed that in crossing those boundaries, Zuleikha was able to grow in resilience and resourcefulness, using her anger constructively to achieve financial autonomy. Similarly, in her accounts, Farida maintained that she learned through her mother’s practices that although some cultural gender conventions appeared harsh, they allowed women to become self-reliant and self-sufficient. Although Farida claimed she had not been able to gain self-worth by following a career she desired, she was able to regain some self-respect through lessons from her mother-in-law that taught her the value of her role as wife and mother to become the lynchpin that kept the family together. Khatoon asserted that the lessons Khairoon imparted through her role-modeling about taking a pragmatic attitude towards the adversities of life impacted Khatoon’s practices as an adult enormously. Nurjhan’s accounts demonstrated that she learned that her mother, Noorbhegum – whom she observed working from within cultural gender boundaries with stoic tenacity (which Nurjhan sometimes mistook for passivity) – was able to take control of her own life and take full responsibility for her own life and the lives of her children when faced with sudden and dire changes in her circumstances. Nurjhan further maintained that she learned from her aunt to assert herself from within gender boundaries, and she learned from her grandmother the strength of storytelling as a method of teaching life skills and of stimulating the pursuit of social justice in small ways. Finally, Shirin iterated that she learned lessons from her mother and maternal

291 grandmother, who each worked from within cultural gender boundaries, when they were able to “step out of their comfort zones” to deal with and survive the dramatically changed and harsh circumstances in new places of settlement. Although none of the Mothers saw their older role models as flawless heroines, they revealed an appreciation for how they learned everyday resistance practices from the older women in their families and applied them in their own lives to negotiate boundaries of race and gender in diaspora space.

Section Two: Deploying Local Knowledges in the Canadian Context

Oral life narratives from Zareena, Farida, Khatoon, Nurjhan and Shirin showed that women from the Mothers’ Group were often caught in multiple and contradictory subject positions upon their arrival in Canada: while they were expected to adhere to their traditional gendered roles within their respective families, they also aspired to new personal and educational goals that were stimulated by their Western education and the newer influences they encountered in Canada. Consequently, as they searched for ways to negotiate newer boundaries in their attempts to relocate ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in Canada, the women looked to the practices of their older role models for guidance. The oral life narratives from the participants from the middle generation of my project demonstrate how each woman adapted, modified and made use of the local lessons they received from their mothers and grandmothers to navigate borders of cultural patriarchy, negotiate the boundaries of race and gender in the larger Canadian society, and acquire some autonomy in their lives. Much like the women of the Grandmothers’ Group, the Mothers demonstrated a particular form of agency that can be seen in their everyday acts of resistance and which is based on an inherited local ideology. These elements were evident as the women spoke to the following key issues: selecting marriage partners; negotiating marriage partnerships; adjusting to motherhood; balancing education and careers with childcare; traversing race and gender in the workplace; and seeking ways to achieve self-worth through career and financial independence.

Zareena: “You see, you can’t be me today in my profession or as a mother without having the mother I have.”

One recurring theme that surfaced in Zareena’s life stories was the local lessons Zareena learned from her mother, Zuleikha, about how to negotiate women’s location in marital partnerships. As

292 Zareena examined her mother’s attempts to replace her father as the principle bread-earner in their family, she conceded that the abusive consequences her mother suffered made Zuleikha stronger. Still, Zareena maintained that she learned from her mother to take a different route to navigate patriarchy in her marriage, as she revealed in the following narrative:

Ismaili women that are married to wealthy men and keep their mouths shut, control their agenda and are far more powerful than my mother. They act passive. From the outside. I know how I wasn’t living their lives. But there are other ways of getting what you want. My mother appropriated a ‘space’ that was seen as ‘male’ space. And she got beaten up for [taking] that space. Or let’s say, my mum had to ‘wear the pants’, and she ended up just ‘wearing the pants’. So I think I’ve learned something there. From my mother. She taught me something very important.

As a result of the local lessons Zareena learned from her mother’s practices, she saw the actions of women in marital relationships in her community culture as being more complicated than they appeared on the surface. Zareena admitted that she learned that other Ismaili women, who appeared to “keep their mouths shut” and “act passive” seemed to “control their agenda” and become “far more powerful than [her] mother.” Watching her mother’s practices, in contrast to those of the other Ismaili women, Zareena learned that there may well have been other ways of “getting what you want” without appropriating what she called the “male space.” In the following excerpt, Zareena reveals how she modified and applied the lessons she learned from her mother to suit her own marriage:

I try to lead my life a little differently from my mother’s. In many ways I am just as overt, but in a softer way. I try to use my ‘feminine side’ … I have learned that ‘agency’ is not always open battle. Often people will say to me, “Ho Zareena, your husband made so much money.” But I made a lot of money too and in a shorter amount of time. I have also learned that being seen as a super strong woman … too overtly … frightens men a lot. For example, my husband … I tried not to over-power him. In public space. But if he wanted a speech written, I would write it. Or I would be helping him negotiate his deals behind the scenes. Or give him advice on important things. I steered him towards community leadership. But from the outside, you would have seen a nice supportive wife. So I think

293 we learn to play those roles by watching our mothers. I think my mum didn’t play that role very well. This fierce ‘I’m gonna fight you’ attitude. You can still be strong. Have power.

In this account, Zareena revealed that her mother’s dynamic with her husband taught Zareena to use a more gentle approach in her own marriage, although she claimed to be engaged very actively and directly in her husband’s life to ensure their financial success and social stature. Contrary to the ‘male part’ her mother took on in her marriage, Zareena claimed she prefers to play the ‘female card’, appealing to her husband’s male ego because she learned through observation that the “fierce ‘I’m gonna fight you’ attitude” or “being seen as a super strong woman … too overtly” can have detrimental consequences. Instead, Zareena confessed, she has chosen not to contradict people who credit her husband as the sole creator of their financial wealth and she, Zareena, as someone who is fortunate to be able to enjoy it. Zareena similarly asserted that she has learned to downplay her role in public as a result of the lessons that were passed on from her mother. Zareena explained that she sees herself as engaging in a kind of covert agency through which she is able to accomplish more harmony in her marriage partnership while still accomplishing her goals.

In addition, Zareena attributed her own resilient response to adverse circumstances in her daily life to lessons she learned directly from her mother, Zuleikha, in the way the latter modeled ways to use anger constructively. As she does in the narrative below, Zareena repeatedly described incidents in which she observed her mother channel her anger into hard work in order to realize financial independence:

So, I guess I watched how out of anger, she grew more resourceful, more hardy. She was so angry with her mother-in-law … with my father. It was like she used the bricks they threw at her to build a life for herself. I understood … learned how she made use of her anger positively and became more resilient. Financially independent.

Zareena continued to describe how her own use of this local lesson about using anger constructively took on critical significance at a time when she felt enraged and distressed upon discovering that her husband had contracted HIV/AIDS through a tainted blood transfusion:

294 I survived the stress of that traumatic time in large part by observing my mother’s practices from the past. My mum is resilient … That’s a big word really. And I think she has managed through her actions to pass that resiliency down. To me. I found AIDS to be a kind of battleground. It needed a whole new set of tools. Ones my mother gave me. It’s out of anger that you sometimes get resilience. I learned that from my mother. She always said, ‘look around, be aware; work hard; do your best; make sure your family is fed; and bring some joy in your life’. We’d made a lot of money. So, I told him, let’s spend it in any way he wanted. I told him I would support him to do that. So we travelled. Went through a part of his bucket list. Until he became too ill and blind to travel.

Zareena spoke directly to how her mother’s resiliency was passed down to her: Zareena’s observation of her mother’s practices taught Zareena to make positive use of her anger. When Zareena defined resiliency as a “big word really,” she appeared to be alluding to the depth of meaning the word held for her as she used it to describe how its transference provided her with the “tools” she needs to do battle with her husband’s illness. Zareena maintained that by turning anger on its head, she found resourceful ways to make her husband’s final days more bearable for them both.

In other stories, Zareena described the final days of her husband’s fight against HIV/AIDS as an unbearably traumatic time in her life that left her a widow at age thirty-four when her daughter was only five years old. To make matters worse, her dead husband’s Eastern European family accused Zareena of infecting her husband with HIV/AIDS because of her East African heritage, and they severed all ties with her and her daughter. At the same time, Zareena related, the Catholic Church denied her husband a traditional ritualistic burial because he had died of HIV/AIDS, even though he had been a practising Catholic. Zareena accredited her mother’s role modeling of how to use anger constructively with helping Zareena to find resourceful ways to solve her predicament at this difficult time in her life. Zareena was able to provide her husband the Catholic funeral rites he had requested by using the First Nations’ Catholic Church resources, cremating and storing her husband’s ashes until their daughter was old enough to select a resting place for her father’s ashes. Zareena disclosed how, even at her wit’s end, she was able to deal with her own bereftness by modifying and using the tactics she had learned from her mother:

295 I put my energies like my mum into different things. Like when we get kicked out of Uganda, my mum spends her time packing and planning and buying round-the-globe airline tickets, and you know, like strategizing and being … proactive. Looking for opportunities even in such disastrous times … as a way of coping with our situation. Being resilient.

In her narratives, Zareena revealed how she saw connections between the actions she took and those of her mother; Zareena demonstrated how having observed her mother, she learned to play a proactive role in finding solutions to the devastating circumstances in her own life. Zareena explained how she faced the tragedy of her husband’s death by turning her attention to mothering her daughter and getting involved in activities in the larger Canadian society over the next twenty years. She openly advocated for public awareness and HIV/AIDS education by talking to the press and by working with HIV/AIDS agencies; she started a new ticketing company; she presided over the Ratepayers Association in her neighbourhood and headed the Environmental Task Force for her city; she sat as a member on the childcare committee in her municipality and on a foundation that focused on youth and pluralism; and she ran for mayor in her own municipality.

Zareena related that once her daughter was old enough to attend university, she joined an international development organization that promoted education and opportunities of social enterprise for the less fortunate in the world. Through her life narratives, Zareena demonstrated that she had internalized lessons from her mother that she later utilized to promote fairness and justice in both her professional and personal life. Her accounts demonstrated that, like her mother, Zareena was not hesitant to speak out and advocate for social justice: she challenged the White male directors of her organization for failing to employ more racialized women in executive positions, and she appeared equally forthright in challenging her mother for perpetuating cultural patriarchal traditions by making her sons the sole executors of Zuleikha’s estate. Proclaiming “You see, you can’t be me today in my profession or as a mother without having the mother I have,” Zareena maintained that her mother “is always with me in my work when I travel to different parts of Africa … to work with those with– with less opportunities … less resources, and in the way I mother my daughter.” Though Zareena claimed that her life is

296 “by no means perfect,” she credited her self-confidence to the effect of the lessons she learned from watching her mother in action.

Farida: “I think mothers lead us to where we are. My mother has led me to where I am. My kids will also take from me whatever I do.”

Similar to Zareena’s experiences, Farida recounted her search for ways of achieving a sense of self-worth by following lessons she had learned from her mother and her mother-in-law. Farida’s accounts showed that she was continually seeking to explain her lack of self-worth; her stories returned constantly to express her belief that she would feel more ‘worthy’ if she had followed her desire to be financially independent through a career of her choice instead of being a full- time, stay-at-home mother and housewife. In her search for self-worth, Farida thought back to her mother’s practices and the stories that were told by her mother-in-law as valued contributions towards new insights into self-worthiness. She maintained that she came to the realization that the everyday hard labour of raising children and keeping the family together, often overlooked as easy and/or less demanding work, was in fact critical work contributed by racialized immigrant women that allowed their families to survive in a new place of settlement. In her accounts, Farida maintained that immigrating to North America made her consciously aware of how women like her mother and grandmother succumbed to patriarchal gender norms that secluded them to the domestic sphere and kept them financially dependent on their men. From this, she drew the conclusion that the financial dependency of these older women, augmented by the lack of acknowledgement of their labour in the home, contributed to their low self-image. Farida claimed that these women “never felt important. You know, self-worth. They felt– oh, you know, ‘We’ve never done any job that has led us [to] … anything important’.” From this, she concluded, “I think that’s how they measure their worth.” It was apparent that Farida included herself in this ‘theory’, and her stories hopped between observations about women in general and personal interpretations about herself:

They worked very hard. Doing women’s work. But never felt any self-esteem. They perhaps compare themselves to career women. Isn’t it how we measure ourselves? If they, you know, [had] been teachers or lawyers, they would have felt special. And I think that is the biggest need in my life. Knowing I am respected. I am ‘special’.

297 Farida generalized about how “women’s work” was difficult yet failed to provide the women in her family, or herself, with feelings of worth or ‘specialness’. She also demonstrated her belief that self-respect for women was achievable through career and their ability to work outside of the home:

I worked for three years initially. I could have got a loan to go back to university. But my husband was struggling initially. He was having a really tough time. So I got a job. And I was having the best time! Even though we only had a small apartment, we had a great life. I loved that time of my life. I had a good job. The company was good to me. I was earning money to keep us both. As such, I had a very different relationship with him than when I stopped working. It was different in the sense that they don’t look at you and think you are wasting time. It’s very, very, very much true. When you are raising children, it’s a huge job. But it is not looked as an important job.

As made apparent in the excerpt above, Farida drew a connection between her ability to work outside the home with her feelings of self-worth. She recounted how her capacity to earn money during her initial three years in Canada made her feel good about herself to the extent that she remembered that period as one when she “was having the best time,” although she and her husband were not financially well-off. By contrast, in describing how her relationship with her husband changed as soon as she stopped working, Farida implied that she was seen as “wasting time,” though she considered child-raising to be a “huge job.” Farida’s depth of conviction in her belief that respect was accorded generally to women based on their ability to earn money was amplified by the emphasis in her statement: “It’s very, very, very much true.” She further articulates this belief in the following account, where she credits her mother for teaching her the importance of following one’s desires to achieve a positive self-image:

Women in my father’s family were not supposed to work or interfere in any way in the family business. Whereas in T______my mother because my dad was running the business alone, she took an active interest in the business. She would go and help in the shop. She took a more active role there. And she did entertain women friends and followed her interests. And I saw how happy she was. Confident. How good she felt. Following her passion. It is important to follow your passion. I wanted to follow my passion. It was my

298 dream to become a pharmacist. To have a career in pharmacy. That was my passion. To become financially independent.

In the account above, Farida appears to be demonstrating the way she learned by watching her mother, Fatma. By making connections between Fatma’s capacity to be able to follow her ‘passion’ – that is, by becoming more directly engaged in the family business (outside the home) and pursuing a hobby – and her apparent contentment and confidence, Farida maintained she learned how positive self-image was connected to the freedom to be able to step outside of the home to follow personal desires. Farida maintained that this lesson guided her to follow her desire to become financially independent through a career in pharmacology, though she was eventually prevented from doing so by life circumstances.

Farida likewise related how the task of bringing up her children fell mainly on her shoulders, as was dictated by her traditionally ascribed gender role. As the excerpt below demonstrates, Farida divulged how her self-image was affected when her desire to attain financial autonomy through a career of her choice was put on the backburner to make room for the expansion of her husband’s business horizon:

You know, settling into Canada, getting organized when Farene was a baby, it was not easy. I didn’t have much help. Where to leave your child. And my husband expanded [his business] into the U.S. and so he was back and forth a few days each week. I really wanted to go to university, but I couldn’t figure out how. I was never happy staying at home completely. So I would do correspondence classes. I was not happy. And I think women are the worst. They make you feel worse than your husbands do! So the women would ask me what I did and I said, ‘I’m busier than ever! I sometimes don’t even have time for lunch’. They would say, ‘what are you doing?’ and ‘what do you do all day?’ The women made me feel even worse. In the sense that I was not really contributing. And I was working my tail off! It made me feel so bad about myself. Now, if I was making money, they would look at me differently.

Farida’s story spoke to her feelings of frustration as a result of the dis/re/locations she experienced in a new place of settlement – frustrations that were also reflected in stories of other participants in my study. Farida’s experience of feeling low self-esteem was made quite clear in

299 her statement “It made me feel so bad about myself.” She identified the factors that contributed to the sense of low self-image she felt when she was a full-time stay-at-home mother: she was unable to pursue her passion of attending university; she felt alone and unsupported in her parental role; and she was emotionally affected by the critical comments from women on-lookers who made Farida feel that she was wasting her time at home without doing anything productive. Farida’s statement that women “make you feel worse than your husbands do!” indicates that her husband too was critical of her. Her narrative makes it clear that Farida believed respect was meted out and experienced according to her financial autonomy and not by her child-rearing contributions; she stated directly that if she had been earning money, she would have been made to feel more worthy.

Furthermore, Farida’s narratives also underscore that when she was in a position to pursue higher educational training, she submitted to her husband’s decision regarding a career choice rather than following her own volition. According to Farida’s account, the decision to comply with her husband’s recommendation was partially based on lessons she had learned by observing how her mother, Fatma, deferred to her husband’s wishes (as a ‘good’ wife should):

Yes outwardly my mother would give in to my father. He wanted it that way. His way was the right way. That’s what I grew up watching. So, I have always had a personality that I would give in. I would unless it was a very, very important subject for me. That’s me. Even today. …but when we immigrated to the U.S. my husband said, ‘Why don’t you work?’ I could go back to university. I wanted to go into nutrition. It had become my passion then. But it would take many, many years. My husband said, ‘Why don’t you try computer science instead?’ So I went into computer science instead. I worked for ten years in that field. But it was totally something I couldn’t keep up with … all the changes. It wasn’t my passion. That affected my self-esteem. And that’s what I regret. So I tell my daughters, ‘Do what you are passionate about. You will feel good about yourself. Find your passion! Don’t do something you think may be better for you.’

Farida explained that, when the opportunity presented itself for her to be able to obtain higher education, she allowed herself to be persuaded by her husband to study computer science instead of following the field of her own interest. She compared her own acquiescence to what she had

300 learned from her mother, whom she observed complying “outwardly” with her father’s wishes. Although Farida acknowledged that this training did provide her with the opportunity to work outside the home for ten years, she also expressed her remorse at not having followed the career of she had originally desired. As a result of the lack of interest in the field of computer science, Farida explicated how she did not manage to keep up with changes in the field and experienced a lack of esteem in the process. Obviously recognizing the potency of locally-learned lessons, Farida maintained that she actively teaches her daughters to follow careers of their interest, rather than pursuing those that may seem good for them, in order to be able to sustain a positive self-image.

Farida also divulged that she learned lessons on mothering, maintaining her marriage, and becoming the central figure in holding her family together, both from her mother and her mother- in-law – lessons she claimed she amended to suit her own life. According to Farida, these lessons proved to be invaluable, since they simultaneously helped her to experience a positive self-image most of the time. In her oral narratives, Farida highlighted a particular lesson that was passed on by her mother at the time of Farida’s marriage, and which Farida, in turn, passed on to her own daughters, albeit in its modified way. Below, Farida recounts this particular lesson:

And my mum said, ‘You cannot turn to us … anymore!’ And I think that has played a huge impact on me … today. So, I’ve had to fully detach myself. To be my own self. I can’t run to my parents for anything. And I didn’t. Never went to them. I went through my life on my own. Not once did I go to them for anything. I’ve had to fight my own battles! You know, my ups and downs … and what I’ve gone through emotionally. I could not discuss with anybody. What you are going through in your personal life. I was detached. But now when I think it made me a very strong person in the end. I had to rely on myself.

Farida explained how she was expected to uphold certain cultural expectations that were articulated by her mother, and once married, how she had to become self-sufficient, facing problems in daily life without asking for help from her parents. In her stories, Farida admitted that, hard as it was at first to accept this convention that required the severing of supportive ties with her parents, it provided her with the strength to become self-reliant and “be [her] own self.” In her account below, Farida expounds on the value of such a passed-on lesson, which was also

301 observed by her mother, Fatma, in her life, through her observation of how this self-reliance served Fatma well when her husband became incapacitated and died shortly after:

My mum had to follow the same rule when she married. It was the rule in her family also. She had to detach from her mother when she married. It made her strong. In the end. She took control of her life. When my dad was ill. When he passed away. Soon after they came to Canada.

In this excerpt, Farida addresses how the observation of this gendered cultural norm – which all of the women in the Grandmothers’ Group claimed they too had to observe – enabled Fatma to become self-sufficient a few years after she immigrated to Canada with her husband. Similarly, Farida claimed to pass on this lesson of self-sufficiency to her daughters, as demonstrated in the following narrative:

I believe you have to give them the tools and let them go. I have to do that. I believe in that so much. And when it’s time, to let them go. Marriage alters the relationships. But I never told her, ‘Now that you are married, I’m not going to be around for you’. If they are stuck, they will always call me, ‘What do you think? What should I do now?’ They will ask me. Anything I’ve done in my life is playing and is going to play a big part in their lives. I think mothers lead us to where we are. My mother has led me to where I am. My kids will also take from me whatever I do. I’ve learnt is that the tools are what I have but I think each person uses the tools differently to become their own person.

With this narrative, Farida offered a glimpse of her mothering ideology, which she maintained she inherited from her mother but adapted to suit her own perceptions about her own role as a mother. Although Farida confirmed her belief in providing her daughters with the tools and then letting them go, and though she admitted that once her daughter married their relationship changed, Farida also proclaimed that she did not sever ties with her married daughter as Fatma had done with her. Instead, Farida maintained, her daughter continued to consult Farida when necessary, which brings into question exactly what Farida meant by “letting them go.” In this narrative, Farida also raised the issue of how local lessons inadvertently get passed on to the next generation of women from their female predecessors. Therefore, Farida underscored her ideology (which was reiterated by other women in this study) regarding a locally passed on

302 cultural legacy: It is critical for a mother to be aware of her own practices, since her daughters are observing and learning from her actions. Finally, Farida spoke to the nature of the passed-on local knowledges: she saw them as neither static nor uniform. In fact, Farida identified the changing quality and the versatility of these local lessons, claiming that each woman made use of “the tools” in her own way to “become her own person.”

In addition to crediting her mother for providing her with tools to navigate daily living, Farida also identified her mother-in-law as someone who passed on a range of local skills to Farida. Farida’s life narratives identified a range of skills, from cooking to the use of diplomacy and unconditional love, to maintain healthy family relationships that enabled family members to not only survive but also to do well in diaspora space. As made evident in her account below, Farida accorded the highest acclaim to her mother-in-law for providing her with the most practical life- lessons through role modeling as well as through her talks and stories:

[My mother-in-law] has influenced me more than anybody else. Of all two mothers I have talked about, I think she has been the most important. So okay, I am detaching from my family ... when I got married. I feel I am on my own. I was only twenty-one. But mother- in-law treated me as a daughter, and I didn’t feel alone anymore. I didn’t know how to cook. I was struggling in that respect. She taught me all my cooking. All that is from her. I was able to feed my family.

Farida maintained that when she felt alone as an immature twenty-one-year-old married woman, her mother-in-law took her under her wing and taught her life’s practical skills, which allowed her to assume responsibility for her family. Additionally, through her accounts, Farida demonstrates how her mother-in-law taught her to use diplomacy in language and actions to enhance relationships.

By contrast, Farida explains below how she had been more used to saying “whatever came in [her] mind” in her parental home before her marriage:

[My mother-in-law] is so smart … so diplomatic. I often thought if she had the opportunities, she could have been a prime minister of a country! She could use words that made you see the other side. She taught me how important words were. The words we use,

303 you know. I would say whatever came in my mind, you know. When you are raising kids, things that are important to you aren’t always be important to the other person [husband]. There’s always a conflict in the home. So if there are issues that matter to me, I will be stubborn and I won’t give in. She tried to show me where you draw a line with different people. Where the right line is. And it has to be different with everyone. The relationship you have with your husband is different than the relationship you have with your children. And how you draw the line and practise it. I never would have a relationship or work at my marriage as I did, you know?

It was manifest through her account that Farida admired her mother-in-law’s diplomatic prowess, which also contributed to Farida’s more calculated use of words when communicating with different members of her family. It was also apparent from the local lessons she was taught by her mother-in-law that Farida learned to work from within gender boundaries by recognizing “where to draw a line” and “where the right line is.” Farida’s accounts hinted at how the conflicts between Farida and her husband over the raising of their children could have led to their break- up had it not been for the lessons in “diplomacy” she learned from her mother-in-law. Farida made it clear that she learned from her mother-in-law that it was up to her, as a woman, to make appropriate use of words and actions to sustain healthy marital relations. Farida’s narratives also demonstrate that Farida learned from her mother-in-law that the self-worth she had originally sought through her ‘independence’ (career) could be attained through her ‘relational’ role to the family. Farida claimed that her mother-in-law, through her stories and role modeling, taught Farida that her central role as the family nurturer who dispensed unconditional love would gain her the love and respect of family members, thereby providing her with self-worth. This is captured in Farida’s narrative below:

She has so many stories. Of her life. She has told me more stories than anybody. She was educated in a Catholic school. She was able to recite ginans and firmans in jamatkhana when she was young. Not all girls were allowed to do that at her time. She wanted to go for more education. But her parents said no. Because at that time, girls were supposed to get married. She said, ‘I cried and cried for that … I really wanted to study’. But she got married in a very traditional family. She got so suppressed in the household. The kind where all women are allowed to do is disappear into the kitchen and cook. Make food for a

304 very, very large family. She was not even allowed to recite the firmans or ginans in jamatkhana.

Farida’s accounts detail the life stories that her mother-in-law shared with Farida to show her how her expectations, much like Farida’s, for pursuing formal education were cut short by her circumstances and pushed her into the domestic world upon her marriage, even cutting short her leadership participation in the religious sphere. Farida’s narratives further considered how her mother-in-law’s domestic role of providing unconditional love and using diplomacy secured for her the position of a nurturing linchpin, through which the family remained united and proceeded to thrive in the new place of settlement, which, in turn, gained her devotion and respect from her family. This is demonstrated in the following excerpt:

All I see when I’m around her is warmth. Love for her children. She is so diplomatic. Words she will use. She does not want to hurt anyone. You see a mother who has such unconditional love for her children. It’s very rare. Now I am closer to my mother-in-law. To my other family. My mother-in-law is the person that has kept us together. Her children all call her every day. I don’t call my mother every day. I know I felt cheated when I couldn’t study more. Couldn’t, you know, follow my passion. Still do. Sometimes. But my mother-in-law taught me. See, there was always a very big division in my home. My husband is a total workaholic. Never home. He travels and then comes home. So I have become the person to run the house. To be with the children. I’ve learned a lot from her.

Farida’s accounts reveal that although she still regretted – from time to time – her inability to pursue financial autonomy through a career, she has learned to work within gender boundaries and become “the person to … run the house” and “be with the girls.” Such narratives from Farida provide an understanding of the variety of ways women make use of such passed-on knowledges. For example, Farida admitted that she mothered her daughters using lessons she learned from both of the mother figures in her life: she was neither able to use the level of diplomacy with her children like her mother-in-law nor shut the door to discussions of problems in the lives of her married daughters like her own mother. Instead, Farida confirmed that she combined these lessons from both ‘mothers’, being “more direct with her girls than my mother- in-law is with us” but using the unconditional love with her daughters that she had seen her

305 mother-in-law dispense to all her children. Farida’s other stories revealed that she continues to work within gender boundaries to follow her passion by taking up hobbies, much like her mother did, claiming, “I have used lessons from both [mothers]. But I change them to give my daughters what they need. But also to give me what I want to try to feel good about myself.”

Khatoon: “Mum gave me those building blocks … I watched and absorbed. These are not things one learns at school … This is internal learning … more than a conscious learning even.”

Similar to Farida, Khatoon identified learning lessons of working within her traditional gender role as a loving nurturer to ensure the survival of her family in diaspora space. Khatoon’s life narratives confirm that local lessons from her mother, Khairoon, affected the way Khatoon organized her home life and business enterprise. In particular, Khatoon’s life stories underscore lessons she inherited from her mother regarding the use of pragmatism, hard but smart work, and small acts of resistance that help to work within cultural and racial boundaries. In particular, Khatoon attributed the ways in which she faced adversities in her professional and personal lives to lessons from her mother’s role-modeling:

Mum taught me what strength was. I mean real strength. You know, the kind I use in daily situations. She never felt I can’t do this, or I’m tired, or I can’t face this. So obviously that’s where this came from. That came from role-modeling. And growing up, it’s what I saw. Mum didn’t react with drama to the expulsion or to her accident, or, you know. She didn’t overreact and she was fine. She just dealt with things. So you assume if something hits you, you don’t just sit there and think, ‘Ok, how am I...?” You just automatically deal with it. Like she did. You don’t even think of it as strength. But it is.

In this narrative, Khatoon directly addresses the crucial role of Khairoon’s role-modeling for transmitting lessons of “strength” to Khatoon; she relates how her mother’s reactions to difficulties allowed Khatoon to “automatically” take a proactive attitude in dealing with the hardships of daily living, instead of allowing difficult situations to get the best of her. Through her narratives, Khatoon highlights the importance of lessons that were passed on through her mother’s stories regarding the importance of working hard and working astutely. Khatoon related how she was repeatedly told stories about Khairoon’s childhood in her kakah’s (uncle’s)

306 home, where she learned by watching her sisters to excel in domestic skills as well as at school to avoid her kakih’s (aunt’s) wrath. Khatoon recalled the lessons her mother imparted to her through her story: since Khairoon could not control her aunt’s actions, she learned to control her own actions by excelling in her duties at home and at school. Khatoon claimed she first used these lessons from her mother by modifying them to suit her circumstances in England in 1972, when she had to navigate racist practices that she encountered at school at the age of thirteen:

It was tough. Being Brown in England in those days. We were in South-East London. You had to watch out for these bunch of White boys. You couldn’t come home past ten o’clock. To them, we were all ‘Pakis’. Colour mattered. I couldn’t get into a grammar school because I was not White. I attended a good comprehensive school, but I was the only Brown girl at my school. So, September the school starts. There is a lot of prejudice. I start school … and the White kids are nasty … they’d steal my coat, or … I’d come home crying every day. And Mum told me those stories of her childhood. She was smart. She worked hard and became the best student. Her uncle was so proud of hearing her praises. It helped my mum; she became his favourite. So, I hung in there. I worked hard at my schoolwork. And the minute they found out that I was smart – smarter than they were – the teachers favoured me. It stopped me from feeling sorry for myself. Slowly, I made friends. Joined clubs.

Khatoon’s account reveals that the lesson in Khairoon’s story made an impact on her daughter. Khatoon displayed how local lessons from previous generations of women were modified and used by the women in my study in different situations. Khatoon demonstrated that having internalized the local lesson passed on by her mother, she then modified it to apply it in a different setting, where it helped her to overcome discriminatory racist practices in her school. Khatoon saw certain similarities between the two situations: Her mother had no direct control over her aunt’s actions; however, she was smart enough to realize that she did possess the ability to become a good student and win the approbation of her uncle, which would protect her from her aunt’s ill-treatment. Likewise, Khatoon had no control over practices of racism in her school, where “colour mattered,” but she was able to extrapolate from her mother’s story a way out of her own predicament without becoming a ‘victim’.

307 Khatoon also addressed the transmission of such local lessons of everyday resistance tactics by comparing them to lessons in formal schooling, as she demonstrated in the following narrative:

I think Mum gave me those building blocks from her day-to-day actions and I somehow watched and absorbed. These are not things one learns at school. Not at all. This is an internal learning … more than a conscious learning even. Unfortunately, schools can’t teach that. It has to come early, through stories, through observing and doing things with somebody close … who you love and trust.

Through her description of this process, Khatoon shed light on the transmission of such local knowledges, the nature of local knowledges, and the role of the transmitters as ‘agents’ – all issues that surfaced repeatedly in the stories of most of the women in this study. First, Khatoon pointed out how such local lessons “come early” through stories and daily observation of “somebody close.” Second, Khatoon described such local lessons as “more than a conscious learning” that was “internal,” perhaps to underscore that not only were the lessons being absorbed on a less conscious level but also that these local knowledges were absorbed ‘deeply’ in the way of local resistance tactics. In describing the type of locally transmitted learning that is acquired from someone “whom you love and trust,” Khatoon perhaps also identified Khairoon as an ‘agent’ who passed on beneficial local knowledges that could not be obtained from more formal methods of schooling. The depth of such knowledge was demonstrated once again by Khatoon, who confirmed that such inherited everyday resistance tactics are used to negotiate boundaries of race/colour and gender in Canada. In the following narrative, Khatoon provides three instances that exemplify this point:

When I was in C______College in Toronto, except for me and a Black guy, everybody else in my class was White. So, there was this girl, Dorothy. She would come and have lunch with me and Liz but she would not talk to me. Finally, Liz told me that ‘she’s from the prairies and doesn’t know what to do with your colour’. Well, I just put it down to her ignorance. I was a smart student in my class, and my teachers and other students recognized that … I had no problems from them. Then eight months out of school, I bought a very busy practice from a French Canadian woman in an artsy area occupied by young ’n’ up-coming lawyers, movie stars … So I was treating this White guy. I’d seen

308 him a couple of times already. He says to me, ‘You’re brave. You know. To open a practice in this area’. I asked him why. He says, ‘Because being coloured and all’. I was stunned. I thought that’s what other clients probably think. And I had no idea. So, I said, ‘I’m very good at what I do! That’s what matters.’ And he agreed, ‘You are very good at what you do’. I guess that’s why he kept coming back. Also when I was attending a c______conference. It was full of mostly White men … they were running it. They were really full of themselves, these men … and I felt they treated me … differently. It hit me that it was because I was a woman. And it was also … my colour. I was being ignored. So, I refused to be put down. I continued to ask questions … you know, to offer comments. And when they realized I knew my stuff … what I was talking about. They came round.

As Khatoon demonstrated how she dealt with the prejudice she sometimes encountered in her profession in Canada, she simultaneously divulged how she modified and utilized the lessons she had learned from her mother. Functioning from within the boundaries that are defined by gender and race, she worked hard to be recognized as the smartest student in her class, she made sure she was very good at her occupation, and she refused to be silenced – she spoke up to demonstrate to people that she was well-informed in her field. In effect, Khatoon’s strategies of dealing with practices of discrimination in Canada in her race and gender reflected her use of knowledges that had been passed on from her mother, which resembled practices of everyday resistance tactics. In fact, Khatoon confirmed that even in her practices as a “tough” businesswoman, she made use of lessons she learned from her mother in order to deal with gender bias:

I’m a strong businesswoman … my gender doesn’t bother me. Working with banks … in managing the day-to-day problems. Even with the building. I ‘constructed’ this place from ground up. I deal with the workers, the builders, the electricians, the plumbers. But because I’m a woman, I’ll get attitude. But I prove to them I know what I’m talking about. Just like I did at school. Point out what’s wrong. Then when they know I know my stuff, I get more respect. The other day we had an issue of water spewing out of a tank. It was caused by another guy who came in to fix something else. But he refused to believe me, so I had the tank brought down. Sure enough, there is a drill-hole in it. But you see, they’ll argue with you, because if you’re a guy, they’ll speak to him even if he has less knowledge than I

309 have. But I saw to the construction, and I make sure I know my building well. I know the plumbing, I know the electrical … So I make sure they know that I know. Often, I have to prove it to them before they’ll believe me.

Khatoon’s example in this excerpt reveals how she modified and utilized the local tactics passed on to her by her mother, even in the day-to-day management of the business, to fight racism or other discriminatory practices, using her smarts to maintain an intimate knowledge of the building that houses her business and assertively standing up to the tradespeople who refuse to take her seriously because she is a woman. The technique that Khatoon applied in the example above is not unlike the one she used in England as a young teenager, which was captured by Khatoon as, “just like I did at school.” She acknowledged, however, that her race and gender meant that she had to work harder and smarter to get more respect, so she learned to “just deal with it,” just as she had watched Khairoon do in dealing with obstacles in her life.

Nurjhan: “Stepping out of the conventional box was most uncomfortable at first. But it worked somewhat.”

Through her narratives, Nurjhan demonstrates how she applied the pragmatism she learned from her paternal grandmother and her mother in her personal life, and even more so in her professional life. In her accounts, Nurjhan identifies the calmness that had been modeled by her grandmother as informing Nurjhan’s reaction to and eventual acceptance of the loss of her home in Uganda, as well as informing the expediency with which she arrived at a solution to the situation that she and her husband found themselves in England in 1972:

My grandmother seemed like a pillar of strength for the family at times of hardship. She probably wasn’t as calm inside. But on the outside, it seemed as she thought things were not as bad as they seemed to us. She looked so calm. It kind of transfers into you somehow. Just by watching. You know, there are times when I see myself keeping cool. Finding a way instead of just fretting … complaining. Okay. See, my husband and I were in England … he had started his post-graduate studies. I was hoping to do a teaching specialty. But our funds stopped when Amin expelled the Ugandan Asians. My immediate reaction was panic. Then I remembered my grandmother. She would be calm. She’d think of finding a way. A practical solution. I thought about it. It was important my husband finish his degree

310 for us to stand on our feet. I looked for a job. I had to take a bus and a train to get to work. It took me an hour and twenty minutes to get to work. But it was not impossible.

In the excerpt above, Nurjhan demonstrates how lessons from her grandmother were passed on to her: she explicates how her observation of her grandmother’s practices, which were based on her pragmatic local philosophy to transcending difficulties in life, translated into lessons which got transferred to Nurjhan almost imperceptibly. To demonstrate this transmission of knowledge, Nurjhan provided a substantive example of a time when she applied the lesson she had learned about weathering the sudden and drastic changes in life circumstances with composure, by searching for an expedient solution to her family’s dilemma. Nurjhan admitted that although the solution was far from perfect, it would allow her husband to complete his education and allow her family a more secure future. Nurjhan also made direct links to her grandmother’s lessons as she described other actions she took to find solutions to challenges she and her husband encountered as they attempted to reorient themselves to their changed financial and social status as a result of the loss of their home in Uganda. Some of these examples highlighted the number of times Nurjhan appealed to her grandmother’s lessons to accommodate further moves from England to first the West coast and then the East coast of Canada. Such local lessons regarding pragmatism – hard work, stoicism, tenacity, and diplomacy – were reflected in the life accounts of other women in this study as well, and these tactics appeared to provide the women with some control over challenges that may otherwise have engulfed them.

Nurjhan acknowledged that her mother and her aunt taught her ways to navigate the racial boundaries she faced in her personal and professional life in Canada as a ‘minority’ Brown woman. Nurjhan described how her location as a “Brown woman teacher” at a high school in Ontario, whose student and teacher population remained solely White for the first eight years of her teaching, caused her to look for resistance tactics that would support her in overcoming discriminatory practices she experienced in her day-to-day professional life:

I felt ‘watched’ all the time. I remember, during the first four months of being hired, a White male student wrote racist remarks about me on an assignment he submitted to me. The vice-principal refused to deal with the matter. But I carried on working twice, three times harder than my colleagues. I had no other recourse. See, from my mother, I learned

311 tenacity. She persisted. She worked hard, blocking out criticisms … always optimistic that things would work out. Perhaps I was naïve. But her pragmatism … when you have no other options, she worked harder with hope. It made her stronger. I worked harder and became respected for my expertise, my classroom management skills. The students, parents, many colleagues began to respect me. But it was brutal. Don’t quite know how I survived. I had young children. Good daycare and after school daycare programmes were few and not up to scratch. I was often frustrated when the children fell ill. I had no help. But I used what I learned from observing my mother and my aunt. My aunt had shown me how to be more organized. My mother showed me what she could do with patience. Weekends had to be organized well: I planned my lessons, did my marking, cooked and froze food for the entire week, did my food shopping and laundry.

In this narrative, Nurjhan demonstrates how lessons from her mother and aunt helped her survive the first decade after her arrival in Canada. While Nurjhan acknowledges her good fortune for acquiring a teaching position at a time when teaching jobs “were scarce” and particularly for “a Brown woman” in her specialty in Canada, she also points out how being a Brown woman surrounded solely by White faces in her school had its own trials. Although she did not mention her grandmother’s influence in this excerpt, it is possible that Nurjhan also applied her grandmother’s lessons on pragmatism to remain composed in spite of the lack of support from the administration for flagrant racism she encountered from at least one student. It is evident that the incident affected her deeply, shown by her remark, “I have never forgotten the face and name of that vice-principal.”

Nurjhan revealed she had been skeptical that the lessons of optimism and patient persistence that were role-modeled by her mother would benefit Nurjhan in her situation. At the same time, she demonstrated how since she was out of options and under the close surveillance, much as her mother had been under the scrutiny of critical relatives, Nurjhan chose to follow the local lessons that were imparted by her mother, who she had observed deriving benefit from her practices of hard work and a positively patient outlook. Nurjhan maintained that, in time, the practices based on her mother’s lessons did pay off; she gained the respect of the students, her colleagues and even the parents. However, Nurjhan confessed that in order to put in hard work at school meant she had to work even harder to organize her home life, particularly on the weekends. For the

312 inheritance of this organizational ability, Nurjhan identified her aunt as her guide. Although Nurjhan’s life stories described her busy weekends and weekdays packed with chores, her children’s activities, her schoolwork, and serving on after-school committee work, she credited her survival and achievements to the use of lessons that had been passed on to her by her mother and her aunt.

Nurjhan’s life narratives display how the practices of all the three women – her grandmother, her aunt, and her mother – continued to inform her professional journey in the educational field as the composition of the student body in her school began to change to include more students ‘of colour’ in the mid-1980s. In particular, Nurjhan described how an experience with a Black student led her to examine her options for upward mobility in the educational field by utilizing different combinations of resistance tactics she had learned from the women in her life. Nurjhan described how the arrival of a Black student with a speech impediment in her grade nine English class caused her to reexamine her options of dealing with systemic racism in the secondary school system for herself and for her students. The details of the situation, as described by Nurjhan, unfolded in the following way: Although the student population in her school was gradually changing to include more students ‘of colour’, the staff and curriculum did not alter to reflect this change. When Nurjhan set the usual assignment of short oral student presentations on complementary novels, she realized Wendell’s unique predicament, since he had “a stutter.” Hence, Nurjhan confessed, she sought ways to get Wendell to buy into this activity while keeping his self-esteem intact. In the following excerpt, quoted at length, Nurjhan describes how the local knowledges that were passed on by her grandmother “kicked in” to help Nurjhan out of her predicament:

I think somehow the lessons on equity, on fairness from my grandmother’s stories … her actions must have kicked in. From a distance, I had seen students make fun of Wendell. Wendell didn’t seem to have friends. His teachers constantly complained about his lack of interest in schoolwork. His constant skipping. So, for the oral assignment, I made different plans with Wendell. I was helped by the fact that he had selected to read a short novel on how the main character breaks the rules by choosing to perform a kind of street dance … the kind that was popular at the time. Also, I had observed Wendell practising some dance moves at the edge of the school field during lunchtime. During Wendell’s presentation, I

313 informed the class, that Wendell would show us some of the dance moves from his book. Wendell’s presentation was a resounding success. It stretched for a full forty-five minutes, during which time Wendell was bombarded with questions about the dancing, some of which he even managed to answer without a stutter. Wendell demonstrated more moves as the requests from the impressed students mounted. Of course, Wendell hardly spoke about his book. But, I observed how this proved to be a sort of turning point for Wendell. He began to turn up for extra help. He made friends at school. With his new friends, he even performed at the Christmas school assembly accompanied by the school band. The gist of this story is I felt rumblings of unease when I observed the racism Wendell endured at school. I think the stories of my grandmother on fairness, on justice, surfaced. Made me realize the system was not fair … not to all students.

In the passage above, Nurjhan demonstrates how her own experiences in her particular location in race and gender, as well as the lessons on fairness and justice gleaned from the repertoire of her grandmother’s stories and her grandmother’s practices, took on a deeper significance as Nurjhan became aware of how the needs of the school were changing based on the changes in the student body. It is obvious from Nurjhan’s account that the treatment meted out to Wendell did not sit well with her, and it compelled her to search for different tactics to hook Wendell’s interest and involvement in school that would enable the White students to get beyond the colour of Wendell’s skin and his speech impediment and see his strengths. Further, Nurjhan’s actions revealed that the lessons she extrapolated from her grandmother’s stories guided her to work within the racial boundaries of the school, making small and undetectable changes to her own classroom practices to accommodate her students’ needs. Nurjhan’s subsequent narratives proved how, as she observed the lessons she used from role models result in positive outcomes, Nurjhan stepped up her efforts to get into a position of responsibility from which she could bring about changes in the education system to empower teachers like herself to help students like Wendell. Nurjhan revealed that in spite of acquiring additional education qualifications and serving on numerous after school programmes, her attempts to gain promotions by working within the boundaries were blocked because of her colour and gender:

I could clearly see I was passed over for promotions by White people. I could see how much my colour and my gender mattered. You know, my department head, teachers in the

314 school, my principal would tell me ‘We don’t see you as different. We don’t see your colour. We see you as one of us’. They thought they were complimenting me. Actually, I felt insulted. I knew I wasn’t White. I didn’t want to be White. Had I been White, I would’ve been promoted long ago. That’s how they were placating me … controlling me. So I watched and learned to play the game like some of the characters in my grandmother’s stories. I continued like my mother to work hard and hoped things would work. Fifteen years later, I got picked along with a few other teachers to receive training to train teachers in best practices. This training led to a job at the board level to train teachers from various schools. I worked harder than before. It was difficult. My colour was always an issue. I think it would have been easier for me if I was facilitating multiculturalism issues. The position most White people think fits a person of colour. But a Brown woman … teaching other White teachers about teaching…

In the above account, Nurjhan maintains she felt manipulated by her colleagues and administrators: although they claimed to regard her as ‘one of them’, Nurjhan felt her race and gender kept her from promotions. As with other narratives, Nurjhan admitted she both embraced her mother’s practicality, continuing to work hard and updating her qualifications, and at the same time, adopted the actions of some of the characters in her grandmother’s stories to “play the [political] game” and bide her time. Her position at the board level exposed her abilities to the superintendents and school principals and provided her with a more extensive view of the education system; however, even in her board position as a trainer, Nurjhan was constantly exposed to yet more racist barriers and open hostility by some school principals, which compelled her to take a more open and radical course of action by “stepping out of the traditional box,” as she had observed her aunt do in the past. This is demonstrated in the following account:

During that first year especially, I put up with snubs and open hostility. I put up with indirect insults from school principals. Once, when we were visiting a school officially to introduce ourselves at a staff meeting, one elementary school principal introduced all other trainers to her staff except me. She pointedly just left me out. Of course everyone noticed. And I felt so humiliated. I remember another school principal I went to meet by appointment to arrange for the training of teachers. I sat outside his office, waiting to see him. He stormed into the outer office – there must have been four secretaries and several

315 staff members … students. Within earshot of all, he storms into the outer office, ‘If another black face shows up in this office, show them out. Out!’ and stormed right back into his office, slamming the door behind him. Some people looked down, others looked at me. I thought have I worked so long, so hard for this? I decided to change tactics. To try something else. To break out of the conventional box. I had seen my aunt do it. You know that’s where the lessons from our role models come in. I had learned from my mother allies were important. What did I have to lose?

Nurjhan’s accounts demonstrate how, through her experiences, she was being politicized in her particular environment: she provided graphic examples that explained how this political awareness came about through the inequitable treatment and through unprofessional and publicly humiliating experiences from ‘professionals’ with whom she worked on a daily basis. As disclosed by Nurjhan in the previous excerpt, she acceded that her use of pragmatism and hard work that were passed on from her mother’s practices did enable Nurjhan to obtain a position at the school board level; however, Nurjhan later appeared to question whether those tactics still served her interests.

Having learned from her mother the importance of securing allies, Nurjhan resolved to switch to tactics she had observed her aunt use by “breaking out of the conventional box” and teaming up with a White facilitator at the board to create teacher-training programmes on equity issues, focusing on race/colour, gender, homophobia, and disability, and using the teaching strategies favoured by the school board. Nurjhan described how this programme was favourably received, mostly because it provided the teachers with the ready-made lessons for use in their classrooms that used teaching strategies promoted by the school board. Therefore, Nurjhan demonstrated how a combination of the covert practices used by her mother and the more overt practices used by her aunt, both carried out within existing hierarchical structural boundaries, enabled her to deliver a programme on equity issues and got her the strategic promotions into positions of responsibility at the school level that allowed her to effect curricular changes. Still, these newer tactics did not work smoothly or expeditiously, as shown in the narrative below:

Stepping out of the conventional box was most uncomfortable at first. But it worked somewhat. I continued to work hard and did not give up when twice I was passed over by

316 White applicants for promotions. I felt I had to get into the position of power to make a difference. Not many principals supported me. But there were enough. Do you know what one highly venerated White principal told me during a debriefing when I didn’t make the vice principal’s short-list one year? That woman were supposed to take care of the home and children … that’s what his wife did. That’s the advice he gave me. He made it sound as if I was wasting my time and missing my true vocation. As if I should stop trying. But you know, those lessons from my grandmother, through her stories where the protagonists went against all odds … came back loud and clear. Of perseverance … of brave women who didn’t always succeed or succeed fully but who reminded me often of my aunt and grandmother.

Nurjhan’s accounts confirmed her use of pragmatism, perseverance, and more radical techniques to work within boundaries of race and gender that were learned from the local lessons imparted to her by her mother, her grandmother and her aunt. These tactics allowed her to get into a position from which she attempted to promote equity in some schools in her district. As made evident in her stories, Nurjhan learned that she was caught in a ‘vicious circle’ of power regimes, so that after ‘towing the official line’ for fifteen years, Nurjhan attempted to break out of more conventional practices and made use of allies to accomplish her goals. Nurjhan’s accounts focused mostly on her experiences in her professional life in Canada, and they revealed that her professional journey was fraught with many obstacles as a result of her colour, gender, and position as an immigrant. Nurjhan admitted that although she was unable to counter all of the obstacles she encountered with ideal solutions, and though it took an inordinate length of time to reach a position from which she could make a difference, she clearly identified her mother, her grandmother and her aunt for showing her, through their practices and stories, lessons of navigating boundaries of race and gender.

Shirin: “I am not going from one man’s house to another man’s house. I have to find out who I am.”

While Nurjhan’s oral narratives accentuated the practices of racism – intensified, in her case, by gender – that she experienced in her professional journey in Canada, Shirin’s narratives highlighted her attempts to navigate borders of cultural patriarchy, which compelled her to mobilize lessons she learned from three generations of women – her mother, her grandmothers

317 (particularly her maternal grandmother), and her great-grandmother. Shirin provided some background information regarding the cultural expectations that were upheld by her traditionalist father, which dictated her behaviour in Uganda as a gendered member of the Indian Ismaili community. In the following excerpt, her words uncover the contradictions she experienced in her gendered cultural identity, since her father’s expectations of her role differed radically from the perspectives Shirin had been exposed to in her elementary school prior to puberty:

Papa is a very, very strong, domineering personality. My mother put me in what she thought were superior White schools in Uganda. This is something I have battled with for years. Questioned. You know, I see this all the time in Canada. The immigrants come from India or Pakistan or Afghanistan. They come for a better life for themselves. They want the economic benefits. But everything else they want to remain the same. That’s idiotic male thinking! This ‘we-want-to-make-more-money, live in a better house, but you, women, you stay exactly the same way you were back home!’ That makes me shake my head. And the clash Papa and I had when we came to Canada stemmed from that. I thought, ‘you educated me in White schools until I was thirteen. Then I came to a mixed Aga Khan Secondary School’. Papa was very, very strict. He made it clear that he didn’t approve of girls talking to guys. So I just shut down … although we went to a mixed high school. When I was sixteen, we took a senior school trip to Western Uganda. So all the other girls were connecting with the guys, but I remained like barricaded. I talked to guys in a group and got to know Salim. I thought, ‘guys are not so bad’. But as soon as we returned home, I thought, ‘Oh-oh, I’m in the real world now’, and Salim says, ‘You stopped talking to me’. I wouldn’t talk to him. Or even look at him. It was just, ‘Oh my god, I shouldn’t be talking to a guy!’ It was a little weird! And I was scared. Papa was very strict.

In this excerpt, Shirin articulates the conundrum that had preoccupied her for a long time by exposing the contradictions she experienced throughout her childhood as a result of the expectations of a “strong, domineering” father. Shirin attempted to demonstrate her own difficult location by drawing a parallel between the expectations of her own father with those of male immigrants to Canada from other Eastern countries who crave the material benefits of the Western world yet expect their women to remain unchanged. Shirin explains how she conformed to her father’s wishes and did not communicate with boys until, as a senior student on a school

318 trip in Uganda, she met a fellow student, Salim, which led her to question her father’s gender policing.

In the ensuing account, Shirin demonstrates how certain events that occurred within a few months of her family’s arrival in Canada led Shirin to further question her father’s expectations of her as a woman:

Salim found my address. He was at a university in England. We both felt something for each other after we met on the trip. I started to work plus go to school. Salim kept writing from that first winter and we reconnected. You know, I was close to Mummy. I know when Mummy and Papa wanted to marry, Mummy told Granny. No going behind backs. I told Papa and Mummy that this relationship with Salim may get serious, and I would like to keep in touch with him. There was a big pushback from Papa. Mummy wasn’t saying much. Papa never wanted me to go to the West. But now we were in the West. I don’t know what he was thinking. I’m sure he wanted me to get married … eventually. How else are you going to get married? Like, an arranged marriage? I don’t think so! So what was he thinking? I told Papa when you clamp down on me, you have to leave me some room to breathe. I told them I didn’t hide anything. Papa said, ‘Well then get married’. I told him, ‘I can’t get married. I need to know him first’. Papa said, ‘Then ask him to come study here’. That was so ludicrous … I tried to avoid conflict. During the expulsion, I was like Papa’s son. I would stand in line at the embassy to check our dates for departure. Papa would be at work. When we came to Canada, I got a job … the first day. I did all of that. I was his ‘first-hand’ man at the Canadian Embassy. I was the same Shirin who was smart enough and reliable enough to look after the family, to pitch in with Papa! This started my beef with Papa.

Through this particular narrative, Shirin demonstrates how, when she reconnected with Salim through an exchange of letters, she attempted to avoid conflict by working within the imposed gender boundaries, much like her mother had done before her. However, as is evident in the story, Shirin’s effort to be open with her father about writing to Salim backfired, causing her to question her father’s expectations more consciously since she felt he did not offer her the same trust he would a son in spite of her recent contributions as a responsible member of the family.

319 Shirin described how her relationship with her father deteriorated further still as the result of an incident when Shirin stayed out a little past midnight with Salim and his family for a New Year’s celebration: “there was a huge big fight” when she returned home. Subsequently, Shirin related how, being close to a mental and emotional breakdown as a result of being “totally shut out” by her father, she changed her tactics. In the account that follows, Shirin expresses how she was compelled to cross the gender boundaries imposed by her father when her attempts to move within the cultural boundaries failed to work – an action, which she claimed, was influenced by observing the practices of both her grandmothers and her mother:

I was so burnt out. Salim was saying, ‘Come to England. Do some work here’. And I really struggled thinking about that. I’m thinking, ‘I’m not going from one man’s house to another man’s house. I have to find out who I am. Also, I need to know Salim better’. But I struggled. I struggled to make up my mind, and I thought of women in my own family. See, my mother went ‘out of her comfort zone’ when she went to work outside the home. When she became the main bread-earner. She felt uncomfortable but she did it. In spite of challenges. I thought of my Granny: she defied rules for women. She ran a bar … ran a business. She was criticized by my father’s family. By the Ismaili community. And Ma. My father bullied her. Shabu Uncle bullied her. Bapa bullied her. But she survived. These are strong women. In their own ways. I struggled and thought of what they did. Without telling my parents, I got a working visa for England. I saved enough to keep me for a year. I struggled before I told Papa ‘I want to take a year off and go to England’. His response: ‘Don’t come back!’ I said, ‘OK, I won’t come back!’ So he wrote to his mother in England, and threatened her – he would break relations with her if she let me into their home. I was so tired. I told Papa when somebody calls me ‘Shirin’, I have to be able to turn around. I don’t know who I am any more. I need to know who ‘Shirin’ is. But I don’t think he understood. I struggled… to do what I was doing. I told Papa my conscience is a greater taskmaster than you watching me will ever be! But just think, Granny came to see me off at the airport! She said, ‘He’s an Ismaili boy. Of course you want to get to know him’. She understood. Also, I had written to tell Ma I would be coming to England … the date. So when I landed, I went to see her to let her know, I didn’t want to get her into trouble. I was going to the YWCA. She pulled in my suitcase and she said, ‘Your father’s

320 crazy. This is your home. I am your Ma!’ That’s what the women in my family are like. So, I guess I have learned from them.

In this narrative, Shirin draws a direct connection between the actions she took and the practices of her mother and her two grandmothers: she traced her growing feminist consciousness to the actions she observed in the older women of her family. She displayed a conscious understanding of how she was modifying and using resistance practices that she learned from the older role models – this was evident from the manner in which Shirin identified the kind of local knowledge each woman had imparted to her through their practices.

Shirin credited her mother for showing her how “to step out of her comfort zone” by taking on the role of the principal provider for her family and moving into a field of work that was totally out of her level of comfort. Shirin recognized her maternal grandmother for showing her to cross patriarchal boundaries with dignity by running a hotel and bar business as a woman, surviving the discriminatory fallout she had to endure from the family and the Ismaili community in Uganda. Further, Shirin acknowledged learning lessons of survival from her paternal grandmother, who was bullied all her life by her husband and her two sons. However, Shirin also confirmed that crossing patriarchal boundaries overtly for a woman was neither an easy nor a painless decision – which was thereby implied to be true also for her role models – by the number of times she repeated how she “struggled” as she prepared to “step out of her comfort zone” to take a year off and go to England. At the same time, Shirin justified her actions to demonstrate that her decision was far from frivolous: she required the space to get to know who she was, and to get to know Salim, which underscored that she intended to be self-sufficient with the money she had saved, since she did not wish to “go from one man’s house to another man’s house.” Shirin also revealed in her account that her belief in the lessons of strength that had been imparted by her two grandmothers was justified. While her maternal grandmother demonstrated her overt support for Shirin’s decision by going to see her off at the airport and condoning her action, her paternal grandmother chose to ignore her son’s threat to cut off relations with her by offering Shirin a home in England.

In her subsequent narratives, Shirin revealed that she had walked down the same path her mother had when she took on a job doing “stuff that she wasn’t sure of” but enjoying some autonomy in

321 her life. Shirin provided specific examples in her accounts of how she had used local educational lessons from the women in her life to not only select her marriage partner but also to guide her in her marital relationship and her motherhood:

You know, I chose a very different kind of husband from my mother. I came from a male- dominated household. I learned to choose a different kind of partner from watching my mother. Salim and I were friends first. I wanted a more equal partnership. But our first year was tough; I was like, ‘Don’t you bully me!’ But then Salim included me in decisions, whether I was working or not. I decided not to have kids for seven years. I didn’t want to be the woman at home while he was going skiing and doing fun things. I wanted to do them too. Mummy had children when she was very young. When I thought Salim was ready, then we had kids. And with my girls, I do a lot of things Mummy did. I didn’t want to give up motherhood and work. I enjoyed it. I think if it was forced on me, I am quite a rebel. Like Mummy does yoga for years but her interests are so unintrusive. She never asked for ‘my time’ or ‘for me’. When you look at Mummy and Granny, they followed their interests without intruding on anybody else’s time or inconveniencing anyone. So I grew up learning that. To this day, I find it difficult to say, ‘I’m gone’ to my children. But I’m also the disciplinarian in our home. I organize what the kids are doing … activities and school. Salim is more like a ‘buddy’ to them. He became the provider. So I could be at home with the kids when they were young.

In the excerpt above, Shirin divulges that by extrapolating lessons from her mother’s life, she was able to choose the practices she wished to emulate in her own life. She confessed that she chose a husband who provided her with a different kind of marital relationship from that of her mother. Admitting that the first year of her marriage was tough, Shirin maintained that she has been able to have a more equitable partnership with her husband by ensuring that she married an even-tempered man who is closer to her age and with whom she was “friends first” – her husband consequently included her in all of the decision-making, making her relationship very different from that of her parents. Shirin also credited her mother with teaching her the disadvantages of early motherhood: Shirin chose to wait for seven years before having children to ensure that she was able to share the “fun things” with her husband, while also ensuring that Salim matured enough to take on parental responsibilities. Shirin contended that she learned

322 from both her mother and maternal grandmother how to follow her interests while accommodating motherhood. Unlike the family in which she grew up, where her father was the disciplinarian, Shirin had claimed that role for herself in her own family, supported as a full-time stay-at-home mother by a husband who assumed the financial responsibilities. Finally, Shirin indicated that she had given conscious thought to her role as the transmitter of lessons to her own female children: her decision to take on a job outside of the home was based on a desire to teach her girls how a woman can balance life as a homemaker with work outside the home. Shirin summarized the vital role that local lessons from her role models played in her daily life:

When I tell my mother she is doing too much for the family, she says that’s what keeps her going. That’s what kept Dadima going. That’s what kept my naanima going. What I have been watching I wonder at how adjustable they’ve been. To all the circumstances in their lives. How did these women do it? I draw on what they have done. How they behave in their daily lives … every day. And although granny is not alive … there’ll be times when I remember … what she used to do. School education doesn’t teach you how to live life. Yes, in your profession, for sure. But in living everyday … relationships … how you act with your husband, how you bring up your children. What you’re supposed to do. I ask, ‘What would Granny do? What did Mummy do? Ma?’ I use them as landmarks. All the time. Consciously and unconsciously. All the time. Like, these women make sure the members of the family are together. That they’ve got relationships with the family at large. You know. They’re not isolated … they’ve not done weird things.

In this account, Shirin speaks to the kind of local knowledges that get passed on – local knowledges along cultural lines that are often tempered by the changes that affect the daily lives of immigrant women in diaspora space. By describing the value of the lessons imparted by the women in her life, Shirin identified her mother, grandmothers, and her great-grandmother as ‘local’ agents whom she regarded as “landmarks” who taught her “how to live life” and who, through their role-modeling of everyday resistance tactics, delivered a certain kind of informal local education that she was able to use consciously and intuitively “all the time” in her daily life as a diasporic woman.

323 Conclusion

Zareena, Farida, Khatoon, Nurjhan and Shirin from the Mothers’ Group in my study attribute their survival in Canada to the local lessons that were transmitted from the older women in their lives. Even as the Mothers describe their respective mothers’, mothers-in-law’s, grandmothers’ and aunts’ strengths in glowing terms, and even as they value their respective role models’ resilience and resourcefulness, they are able to maintain a distance from them, regarding the older women’s conformity to patriarchy critically. Although some of the Mothers do begin to demonstrate a feminist consciousness and show signs of becoming politicized, this consciousness is neither revolutionary nor dramatic, though it enables the women’s survival in diaspora space.

The life stories of the women in the Mothers’ Group demonstrate that they each deploy an individualist narrative that is built on a local ideology or wisdom that teaches them that the individual can defeat forces of patriarchy and White supremacy, to some degree, through practices of hard work, persistence, stoicism, pragmatism, diplomacy, resourcefulness, loyalty, and optimism. The women’s accounts further disclose that informally transmitted local wisdom, which is conveyed through stories and practices, teaches them that although some conventions may appear to be harsh, they nonetheless enable women to become resourceful and self-reliant. This individualist narrative is specifically gendered: the women in the middle generation relate stories about fathers who could not cope, fell ill, became depressed and/or died, while their mothers, mothers-in-law, grandmothers and aunts confronted the new conditions of immigration and settlement with fortitude and an ability to achieve a sense of self. In expressing this individualist narrative, the women exhibit a local form of agency that reflects tactics of everyday resistance that are carried out through small and often undetectable acts that keep patriarchy and racist practices in place even as they resist them. Ultimately, these tactics allow the women to resist, and to repair racist harm, enabling them to keep their dignity for their survival and the survival of their families in diaspora space.

324 Chapter Eight: Survival Lessons in the Diaspora

Figure 8: Daughter participants.

The women from the Daughters’ Group – Karima, Nasrin, Zarah, Farene, and Salima (represented in Figure 8) – whose interviews form the basis of this concluding chapter, are women whose mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives were profoundly shaped by the trauma of their expulsion from Uganda. As Mona Oikawa (2012) found with her own study of mothers and daughters of the Japanese Canadian internment, such histories shape memory and becoming. When the women in the Mothers’ and Grandmothers’ Groups came to Canada as refugees, they came with a determination to survive. This, alongside their own community’s practices of survival (and, notably, the edicts of the Aga Khan IV), shapes how they navigated their new life in Canada, passing important survival lessons on to their daughters.

Feminists have long explored the oppositional knowledge that is passed on to girls and women of oppressed communities, considering how everyday resistance and oppositional acts are born of a local wisdom and an oppositional consciousness. Race and gender are crucial axes along which such oppositional knowledge is crafted. In this chapter, I show how women teach their daughters to survive, and I present – through the eyes of the daughters – how these lessons are learned. Women learn to navigate the patriarchal constraints in their lives and their outsider status in the nation through practices of everyday resistance. It is this everyday resistance that gives us the full meaning of their agency. This chapter contains three sections, followed by the conclusion of this study. Section One shows how the women of my study inherited histories of being precarious in Canada. In Canada, these women apply themselves to the survival of their

325 community, transcending traditional gender roles and also working within them at the same time. Section Two demonstrates how the women develop a notion of home that is not tied to place but instead to relationships and values. They teach their daughters this notion of home. The daughters learn to rely on community. Section Three explains how the women display a local form of agency through covert and overt resistance practices, which are based on a particular gendered ideology in the home and the nation. The daughters describe the notion of agency transmitted to them through their mothers’ practices and how they utilize agency to navigate cultural patriarchy and White hegemony. Out of these sections, I offer some final reflections and conclude my study.

Section One: Outsiders to the Nation

The life narratives of the women from the Grandmothers’ and Mothers’ Groups in my study reveal that a complicated understanding of race shaped their lives through journeys to not one, but two different landscapes, in two different time periods. This contributed to their specific experiences as ‘outsiders’. As part of the Indian Khoja Ismaili community in Uganda, they were isolated into an economic (middle) class, located above the Black Africans and below the White Europeans. Consequently, they were simultaneously aware of being perceived as being in the country but not of it (Bannerji, 1997, p. 25; Brah, 1996, p. 191). As the stories of the women in my study show, upon their arrival in Canada, they were once again conscious of their ‘outsiderness’ as Brown refugees. Through their location in a colour-coded hierarchy that held whiteness at the top, they found that through the “organization of social communities in ‘race’ and ethnic terms, the state constantly creat[ed] ‘Canadians’ and ‘others’” (Bannerji, 1997, p. 30).

Life accounts of the women (particularly in the Mothers’ Group) in my study also show how the modernization and de-Indianization policies of Aga Khan III, which were reinforced by Aga Khan IV, influenced their experiences. As gendered members of the Khoja East African community before their arrival in Canada, they were already engaged in negotiating their gendered ‘outsider’ location within patriarchal cultural boundaries. By using everyday resistance tactics that were learned from their mothers (the Grandmothers’ group in my study), they learned to accommodate their shifting gender roles. The women’s stories disclose how the trauma of expulsion – the use of national identity politics to label a community as outsiders and eject them from Uganda, coupled with the subsequent rhetoric of rescue of Ugandan Ismailis by Canada –

326 both accentuated the experience of the outsider status of the women in my study and encouraged their resistance practices that were guided by local experiential-based ideologies in Canada. The creation of ‘outsiders’ within national boundaries and the infliction of suffering on those perceived as outsiders is not new to the history of Canada, where some six thousand Ugandan Khoja Ismailis found refuge in 1972 as the largest wave of racialized immigrants in the history of Canada up to that point in time.

In an example that has certain parallels to the expulsion of the Ismailis from Uganda, Japanese- Canadian Mona Oikawa shows how the Canadian government mobilized national identity politics to further its racist traditions during the Second World War, resulting in the “uprooting, confinement, dispossession, deportation and dispersal” of Japanese-Canadians (2012, p. 5). Oikawa suggests that besides blatant racism, the drive to incarcerate its Japanese-Canadian population was made by the Canadian government for economic gains: through their policies, the Canadian government was able to justify the appropriation of Japanese-Canadians’ “flourishing farms, fishing boats and other commercial ventures” (2012, p. 5). In her work, Oikawa successfully demonstrates how the trauma and the memories of trauma, with its subsequent sufferings, has long-term adverse effects for these racialized ‘outsiders’ that stretch beyond the lives of its immediate victims and into the lives of the future generations.

Although the trauma suffered by the Japanese-Canadians in Canada is distinguished contextually by different circumstances, space, and time from the trauma suffered by the Ugandan Indians, they have some things in common. In the case of the diaspora women in my study and their families, Idi Amin mobilized racial national politics to dispossess Ugandan Indians of their properties and win popularity for himself and for the economic and political gain of the Ugandan government. Ugandan Indians, branded as ‘outsiders’, were not only dispossessed of their businesses, properties and personal possessions but also expelled from the place they had known as ‘home’. As disclosed in numerous stories told by the expelled Ugandan Khoja Ismailis, the cause of their trauma could be traced not only to their fears of being rendered penniless and stateless ‘overnight’, but also to their fears for their immediate ability to survive economically and politically as refugees in a new Western country where they, once again, became ‘outsiders’ who were marked by their colour and race. In other words, their experiences hearkened back to the national politics of location based on the old ‘colour’ issue they had encountered in East

327 Africa, but in a new guise. As revealed in their accounts, the local ideologies promulgated by the women reflect these fears regarding the instability of their status as perpetual ‘outsiders’ in a White hegemonic society. Diaspora experiences at the intersections of race/culture, colour, class, religion, and nation made them feel vulnerable. If they had been identified as ‘outsiders’ in Uganda and expelled ‘overnight’ based on their colour/race, what was the guarantee that they could not be expelled yet again from this new ‘home’ of Canada?

The accounts of the women in my study reveal that their understanding of their outsider status was further complicated by feelings of relief, of being grateful to Canada; they saw Canada as rescuing them at a time when they and their families felt unwanted, homeless, dispossessed, and physically and psychologically vulnerable. Therefore, the local ideologies of the gendered refugee-outsiders integrated this aspect of being indebted to Canada for allowing them into the country, as is evident through their more covert gender resistance practices. Below, Grandmother Sakina describes an emotional outburst of gratitude she had for Canada accepting her and her family as refugees. She demonstrates an appreciation that fed into her local ideology and practices for the next forty-odd years, which she passed on to her daughters and granddaughters, as made evident by their stories:

It was hard to come with hundred and fifty dollars in draft not cash … get to Montreal and … they [the Canadian receiving organization] did a crash-course in Indian cooking. Gave us free food. And when I asked for milk for my son. I burst into tears. Because why do you take so much care of us when we are refugees? We are thrown out. Why do you care? We got settled because of their kind generosity.

In her account, Sakina discloses her emotional relief at being able to land safely with her family in Canada, where she feels they are kindly received; her words divulge her disbelief at the discovery that she and her family are considered worthy enough to be cared for by White Canadians. Although Sakina’s subsequent experiences, reflected in her other stories from the next forty years in Canada, demonstrate that she is perceived and treated as an ‘outsider’ who is defined by her colour/race and gender, her practices that are guided by her local philosophy nevertheless show her negotiating this outsider location with covert resistance tactics that are tinged with deference towards the White Canadian society. In Himani Bannerji’s words, “No

328 third-world immigrant is left in doubt that he/she is in Canada on public and official sufferance and is to be grateful for being allowed into the country” (2000, p. 552).

The women’s early responses to Canada were also reinforced by the advice from Aga Khan IV, the religious leader of the Ismailis. For example, the uncle of Aga Khan IV (and his unofficial representative) Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, who was then also the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees, set the standard of expectations for them during his visit to the newly settling Canadian refugee Ismaili jamat in 1975; he asked these Ismailis to become exemplary representatives of the Ismaili community in Canada. Reminding the Ismailis that they were privileged to be allowed into Canada, and that their primary loyalty was to Canada, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan advised them to uphold their reputations by living frugally and within their means, and to avoid overspending to maintain ostensibly affluent and materialistic lifestyles. Cautioning the Ismailis to learn from their past mistakes, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan also instructed them to become more outward-looking and participate in the democratic processes of the country, educating their children to follow diverse career-paths instead of just grooming them for participation in family businesses (Simerg, 2012). Such advice was oft repeated in the subsequent firmans of Aga Khan IV himself, as was revealed in numerous stories of the women in my study. The life narratives of the women in the Grandmothers and Mothers’ Groups disclose the practice and teaching of a local philosophy that closely resembled this advice.

At the same time, the narratives of the women in the Grandmothers’ and Mothers’ Groups also disclose how there were also downsides to the women’s efforts to balance the recent emotional and economic trauma they and their families had suffered through the creation of a stable home life. These women, who had to work outside of the home for their families to survive, were also expected – according to their cultural gendered role – to carry the full load of the work inside the home, thus increasing their burden in the new place of settlement. In her story, Mother Shirin reflects on how her own mother, Sakina, was expected to do both housework and work outside of the home in Canada, much like her and her sisters. In her account below, Shirin reveals this double-duty that her mother shouldered within the patriarchal cultural constraints:

Sometimes, it would be so cold … she [her mother, Sakina] would carry my tired brother, his bag, her bag … wait for the bus. Then come home and cook, do laundry. My father did

329 not help with the housework. It wasn’t his ‘job’. My mother was lucky. She had three girls. We were all supposed to help with the cooking. And cleaning. After school or work or both. My mother wanted us to know that nothing had changed. We were going to be alright. She still cooked every day. Made chapatis. Everything had to remain the same.

In this narrative, Shirin reveals how her mother, Sakina, from the Grandmothers’ Group, endeavoured to replicate the stability of the comfortable home life her family enjoyed in the Ugandan pre-expulsion days. Thus, throughout the 1980s, Sakina drove herself and her daughters to work harder to recreate their previous life, one for which they had had help in Uganda. In other words, Shirin provides insight into how women like her mother take it upon themselves to compensate for the trauma of their recent loss and for their ‘outsider’ location in the larger Canadian society, by recreating ‘home’ inside their respective abodes to make family members feel ‘at home’ in a foreign place. Nineteen-year-old Shirin was expected to sacrifice her formal education to be able to return from work and school at the end of the day to begin her work inside the home. By contrast, Shirin’s account reveals that her father’s work was done once he returned from his job outside the home. This story is representive of all the women refugees in my study, who shared similar stories describing their respective mothers’ practices by all of the women in the Mothers’ and Daughters’ Groups. The effects of the practice of cultural patriarchy, which had followed the women participants in my study to Canada, obviously also contributed to the formation of their local gendered ideologies. These ideologies emphasized the central responsibility of the women to work harder and with patience, tact and resourcefulness to make the family feel stable in the new place of settlement, and these were the local philosophies upon which they acted and passed on to their daughters.

If Shirin and Salima’s stories covers aspects of patriarchal traditions practised in their family in Canada from the mid to the end of 1980s, Nasrin’s account below attests to how such patriarchal gendered traditions continued more or less intact in her family until at least the end of the twentieth century:

My mom worked as a full-time teacher and raised two kids. She did a lot of the household chores and cooking that I would say is traditionally given to women versus men. I saw my dad help out sometimes with the laundry or the vaccuming. But my mom did all of the

330 cooking and certainly folded the laundry. She made our lunches and spent a lot of time with us. I think she did a lot of juggling, which I suspect a lot of the women of her generation did between careers and homelife and of having these expectations from male partners … this kind of notion of the women of my mother’s generation who were becoming more career-bound but were also expected to do a lot of the ‘at-home’ work.

Nasrin describes the location of her mother (and other women in her mother’s generation) in the 1990s, at least eighteen years after the Ismailis immigrated to Canada; she demonstrates how gender expectations for these diaspora women had not changed much. As Nasrin points out in her story, Nurjhan, as an ‘outsider’ in her ‘new’ gendered location in her culture, that is of stepping outside of the cultural tradition of women as full-time homemakers, has to straddle both worlds – the income-earning world outside the home and the home-making world inside the home – with equal responsibility. According to the stories of their daughters, as ‘cultural outsiders’, grandmothers and mothers like Sakina, Shirin, Nurjhan, Zuleikha, Zareena, Farida, Khairoon and Khatoon were stepping outside of the boundaries of their traditional cultural roles in a new diaspora space. At the same time, the work inside the home of cooking, housework, and rearing children still remained their primary responsibility. As their accounts disclose, the women of the first two generations in my study are in a unique position to understand the diasporic outsider condition in order to navigate its boundaries. The necessity of survival in diaspora space as outsiders plus the implementation of the liberal social gendered policies (including formal education) of the two Ismaili Imams provide the women of the first two generations in my study with an ‘outsider-within’ consciousness (Collins, 1998; 2009) to which their men were less privy.

Patricia Hill Collins’ (2009) work reflects a similar perspective that is available to African- American women whose occupation in domestic work has allowed these Black women outsiders to get an insider perspective in the homes of White elites, creating for them conditions for a distinctly Black and female form of outsider-within knowledge. Similarly, as the women in my project stepped outside of the home, in either or both of the two geographic locations, to enter the outside world of work, they became exposed to the differential treatment meted out to diasporic outsiders (including men) through their intersectional locations in the larger East African and Canadian societies ‘colonized’ by White norms. As well, these women show they

331 are informed by their ‘insider’ cultural location in the home as traditional homemakers and child- rearers in diaspora space. These women’s stories show that they have lived in households structured along varying and shifting degrees of patriarchal hierarchies. However, their accounts also demonstrate how their expected ‘insider’ duties and responsibilities in the home have contributed to their understanding of the critical role women play in the day to day survival of their families and themselves in places of settlement as outsiders. These experiences led the older women to fashion a local ideology that guided their lives, which they passed on to the successive generations of women to teach them to navigate their outsider location in order to create home in diaspora space.

The life accounts of the women in my study, as anchored in their own temporal, geographical and cultural environments, disclose the following three major contributing factors that led to the formation of local ideologies that help them navigate their outsider location: 1) traumatic experiences as ‘outsiders’ in Uganda, particularly since the 1950s, culminating in sudden expulsion from Uganda, juxtaposed with their acceptance by Canada as immigrants; 2) new expectations in Canada of women of a particular ‘minority’ cultural community that arrived with some insider knowledge of ‘European’ norms; and 3) awareness of an ‘outsider’ location as a small, racialized and gendered refugee community within the context of the larger White Canadian society. Consequently, the stories of these women uncover the teaching of certain ‘diaspora ideologies’ based on local ‘theories’ of survival through the practice of acts of everyday resistance along a spectrum from covert to overt tactics on the new terrain. As the life accounts reveal, these local ideologies and everyday resistance practices promote in the successive generations of women an awareness of their outsider location and provide them with resourceful ways to negotiate boundaries in their intersectional locations – of gender and religion within their own patriarchal culture, and of gender, race/colour, class, and religion within the larger White dominant Canadian society – in order to survive and even thrive in their daily lives.

The women’s life narratives disclose that these local diaspora ideologies are transmitted through daily practices of the women of each preceding generation to the next. According to their general characteristics, I categorize this local wisdom into the following four groups: Being Mindful; Practising Diaspora Ethics; Acquiring Life Habits; and Attaining Self-Sufficiency. According to the women’s life stories, each of these categories promotes particular ways of ‘living and being’

332 that assist the women to navigate patriarchal and racial borders in diaspora space. These ideologies, combined with the women’s practices, offer local lessons of referred to as subjugated knowledges in this study: these are informal knowledges neither formally organized nor academically articulated but which are used by these particular gendered diaspora ‘outsiders’ to guide their practices in their everyday lives. Also, I perceive these subjugated knowledges as ‘knowledges of the subordinate’, ignored or absent in the discourses of the dominant, denied as knowledge but often represented by dominant discourses as ‘passive’ practices of immigrant Brown women in places of settlement. From the life narratives of the women in my study, I extrapolate the following more detailed principles embedded within this local wisdom used and passed on to direct the daily life practices of the women in my study as outsiders:

 Being Mindful emphasizes continuous engagement in life while being constantly aware and alert, and embracing ways to bring some joy to daily living.  Practising Diaspora Ethics underscores the development of particular attitudes towards practices in daily life, specifically those that reflect hard work and perseverance, adaptability and patience, responsibility, diplomacy/loyalty, resourcefulness and optimism (hope).  Pursuing Diaspora Life Habits highlights the significance of applying pragmatism in daily living that discourages attachment to particular geographic spaces but encourages making investments in people, especially in the family and community; discouraging attachment to material things and to the past (including nostalgia); using one’s advantages to one’s benefits; living within one’s means; and harnessing community assistance and supporting those in need.  Attaining Self-Sufficiency encourages the refusal of perceiving the self as a victim of social/cultural/political circumstances and emphasizes the pursuit of financial independence through (excelling in) formal education and through the choice of a career for which one feels passion.

The women’s narratives disclose that the practices they use to create home and belonging by navigating their outsiderness in diaspora space are based on these aspects of local wisdom. While the principles behind Being Mindful and Practising Diaspora Ethics appear to advocate local practices based on the understanding “You’ll always be women. And you’ll always be Brown,”

333 the principles guiding Diaspora Life Habits and Attaining Self-Sufficiency appear to encourage practices that promote a “stubbornness for survival.” The stories of the women in my study reveal that the practices founded on this local wisdom come from an understanding that although they and their men folk both face institutional and social practices of discrimination in diaspora space as radicalized outsiders, the women face gender as adding an extra layer to intensify their outsider experiences. Exemplifying this, Zarah demonstrates her understanding of how race and gender contribute to Zareena’s limited success in the business sector; her story echoes similar stories told by other women in the study:

My mum has this joke about her colour … her race. Her gender in Canada. She says, ‘now if I was a white male in my fifties, I would have been recognized as the best of the best!’ Canadian society is ‘closed’ and covertly discriminatory. They appear to be open to all cultures that make up Canada. But they are two-faced. Neo-colonialist.

The lesson that Zarah draws from her mother’s comment is that her race and gender (and even age) matter in a White Canada that appears to provide equal opportunities for all Canadians but in reality keeps out women, especially from ‘minority groups’, through subtle systemic differential “neo-colonial” tactics. In addition, the stories of the women of the first two generations also reveal how they are ‘outsidered’ additionally by a cultural patriarchy that places differential expectations on women compared to men in the family. It is clear from the stories of the women of the first two generations that although the edits of the Ismaili Imams about educating girls and women had met considerable success, the hold of cultural patriarchy in the lives of Ismaili women had not slackened much. Salima from the Daughters’ Group illustrates this through the following anecdote, where she describes expectations that her mother, Shirin, faced in her gender at a young age when she emigrated from Uganda with her family in 1972:

When she was nineteen, there was the exodus out of Uganda … she landed here and she was the first one to find a job – at 3 dollars an hour at Woolworth’s. But no one in her family ever gave her credit. She held the family together for a few years. She was taken for granted. If she was a son, for the same things she did, her father would have said, ‘Oh goodness, look at you! You got a job the day after we landed in Canada’. But she was a

334 woman. So it was like, ‘good… you’re expected to help with that and with other things. You know, being a woman, you can never do enough.

In this anecdote, Salima, from the youngest generation in the study, describes how in her gendered location, her mother’s efforts to support her family financially in a new country were considered ‘normal’ for a woman and quite unworthy of special recognition, despite her young age. By contrasting how a son would have received a more laudatory response for doing what her mother did, Salima emphasizes the role of cultural patriarchy in subordinating women such as her mother within the family of 1970s Canada. Such stories demonstrate how gender positioned these particular women outside of full membership of family while being Brown and being women placed them outside of the full membership in the nation. The local gendered wisdom that was being communicated through practices by women of the preceding generations appeared to teach the women of the successive generations to remain engaged with life but remain mindful, and to create ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ in diaspora space through loyalty, diplomacy and assuming responsibility for family and the community. At the same time, this local wisdom was also pushing the women to step outside of these social spaces of family and local community and into the space of the nation to become financially independent by attaining formal education and by pursuing careers outside the home. How then is the notion of these particular women’s ‘agency’, as connected to this passed-down local wisdom, to be understood? Although only four of the fifteen women were able to define the concept of ‘agency’ in some manner, their stories revealed that these women did practise a form of agency through their practices of local forms of everyday resistance.

The women’s life narratives also demonstrate that women’s resistance practices based on local wisdom are not static but do indeed change to reflect the women’s needs. They are additionally based on changing conditions over time and in different geographical locations. For instance, on the East African landscape, marriage partners for four out of five grandmother participants were selected by their parents, while Grandmother Zuleikha had to await her father’s approval to be able to marry the man of her choice. Because of cultural patriarchal norms, all of these older women in my study had either no or minimum social (including chaperoned) contact with their respective future husbands before they were married. By contrast, all of the women in the Mothers’ Group were free to choose the men they married, and they engaged in a period of

335 unchaperoned courtship before they committed to marriage. As well, all participants in the middle generational group gave accounts of how they were encouraged to acquire more formal education than their mothers. Four of the five women in the Mothers’ Group had acquired at least one degree from a Western-type and/or a Western university, which they claimed helped them acquire varying degrees of financial independence in comparison to their mothers, who had not completed a high school education.

The agentic practices of these women were altered to reflect the changing cultural, political, and economic circumstances; this was addressed more directly in the narratives of Nurjhan, Zareena and Shirin from the Mother’s Group, and Nasrin, Zarah and Salima from the Daughters’ Group. These women described their mothers as the “transitional generations” (in Nasrin’s words) or as “turning-points” (in Salima’s words) to demonstrate some of the pivotal changes the women made through more conscious and overt practices of resistance against cultural patriarchy and/or racial boundaries. This is exemplified below by Salima from the Daughters’ Group, who described her mother, Shirin, as the “turning point” between generations because of the vital steps Shirin took to ensure an equitable marital partnership that was very different from her own mother, Sakina’s:

You just have to look at the relationship that my grandmother’s had with her husband, and me with my husband. It’s only happened in three generations. It’s not that much time. It’s the expectations that my grandmother had in her relationship. To stay at home. Be with the kids. Be quiet. It is so different from the equitable partnership that me and my husband have. I don’t think we would have had that unless my mum who literally is the turning- point between my grandmother’s relationship and my relationship … had the courage to say, ‘No, I’m not standing for this. No, I’m not standing to be dominated by someone else’, and ‘I need to take the risk of choosing someone who will see eye to eye. Always respect me. Even through I’m a woman.’ I grew up watching both these women – my grandmother and my mother – in their relationships. And I learned from that for my own relationship.

Salima’s account is a reflection of how some women in my study described the process of generational change in practices that impacted their lives. Salima demonstrates how her mother, Shirin, became a “turning point” as a result of the pivotal action she took to select a particular

336 kind of marriage partner, thereby crossing gender boundaries to subvert the cultural patriarchal norms practised in her family. According to Salima, by stepping out of her comfort zone through a decisive and consciously risky action, her mother forged an equitable marital partnership for herself. In so doing, Shirin provides the sharp contrast to Sakina’s subordinate location in her marriage, passing on local knowledges that affect the choice Salima learns to make later on in her life. In this way, Salima also demonstrates how gendered agentic practices that are based on local wisdom alter generationally to suit changing circumstances and the needs of individual women over time in different diaspora locations.

As Nasrin compared changes in her practices learned from such passed-on knowledges through her mother and grandmother, she made the following observation, which is echoed by other women in both the Mothers’ and the Daughters’ Groups: “We might differ on generational stuff. Like in traditional roles for women … all three of us might have different ideas on that … so we may do things differently.” These women’s narratives demonstrated a dialogic relationship between action and thought that informed their practices, so that “changes in thinking may be accompanied by changed actions and that altered experiences may in turn stimulate a changed consciousness” (Collins, 2009, pp. 33-34). However, Nasrin goes on to emphasize, “our values are the same. We all value family. We all try and take responsibility … we all try to work hard and be optimistic … support each other.” Nasrin demonstrates, as do Farene and Salima through their respective narratives, how the Diaspora Ethics and Life Habits upon which the older women had based their ‘agentic’ practices still continued, at least at that moment in time, to guide the practices of the women of different generations.

Section Two: Home and Community

Through an emphasis on Being Mindful, Practising Diaspora Ethics and Acquiring Life Habits, older women taught that ‘home’ for these particular diasporans and their descendants is multi- faceted, grounded in multiple physical locations and multiple identities, yet paradoxically transcending all physical locations and material possessions. The women of all generations in my study showed how they learned that ‘home’ was ‘portable’, located in the safety and love of family members and in the stability of the Ismaili community under the guidance of their current Imam.

337 The narratives of the women in my study demonstrated that the older women transmitted local knowledges through daily practices that consciously or unconsciously advocated the use of local gendered philosophies of vigilance, attitudes, habits and self-sufficiency. These local knowledges taught the succeeding generations of women how to function as outsiders within the context of the patriarchal culture in their families and within the context of White supremacy in the larger Canadian society to fulfill a ‘homing’ desire (Brah, 1996) and create ‘belonging’ in diaspora space. In so doing, they displayed a kind of local agency through passed-on local wisdom.

My research findings show how the knowledges that are informally transmitted between generations of the women in my project emphasize the critical role diaspora women play in learning to differentiate between “staking a claim to a place” and “feeling at home in a place” (Brah, 1996, p. 193), which aids in the survival of their families in diaspora space. These local lessons taught the women of the succeeding generations how to live as outsiders within the paradox of claiming a geographical place as ‘home’ yet avoiding deep emotional attachment to any particular geographical place and/or material possessions. To teach the younger women to live with this enigma, the local lessons of the older women focused the women’s attention towards Being Mindful, Practising Diaspora Ethics and Acquiring Life Habits to achieve self- sufficiency that could potentially make them feel at home in any geographical location. The following excerpt from Farene’s accounts succinctly represents similar stories told by all the women from the Daughters’ Group regarding such passed-on lessons from their respective older women role models:

I think my grandmothers and mother are sort of resilient personalities. Patient. Optimistic, even. They didn’t talk too much about their homes in East Africa. Instead of looking back at the life they led, they were forward-looking. They learned to adapt to a different life- style. When I went to Uganda and saw their homes, I was shocked. I’d no idea their lifestyle was so grand. My mother … her attitude not to be too attached to a place … or to material things. You never know what’s going to happen. They had such comfortable lifestyles … big businesses. One day it was all gone! They had to start all over. That has definitely impacted. On me. I never really saw them as tied to a particular place. They never really dwell on Africa. It was their home then. This is their home now. When they

338 came here they didn’t fold up. They didn’t cry about the past. They remained involved with life in this new country. My mother and my grandmother showed such strong work ethics. Conservative spending, not getting too attached to items. These were passed on to me. It has impacted the way I am today. Who I have become.

Farene’s anecdote highlights the crucial lessons that have been passed on from the mothers and grandmothers to the youngest generation of women in my study: the unpredictability of home as a physical place for diaspora outsiders underscores the folly of forming too close an attachment to physical spaces and material belongings. Like Farene, the women from the Daughters’ Group demonstrated a learned consciousness from their grandmothers’ and mothers’ practices regarding the potential instability of the diasporic location in any place of settlement. Much like Farene in the account above, the Daughters in the study claimed to put more value on learning to cultivate Diaspora Ethics like frugality, patience, resiliency, engagement with life and optimism that had been modeled by the older women in their respective families. Nasrin summed it up as: “My mother’s and grandmother’s expulsion stories have become a part of my story … how they lost everything but their tenacity and hard work allowed them to survive.” According to these women, the practices of local Diaspora Ethics and Diaspora Life Habits proved beneficial to the survival of their mothers and grandmothers, in their positions as diaspora outsiders in their geographical homes. Like Farene, these women from the Daughters’ Group revealed that this informal teaching, fully integrated into the daily lives of mothers and grandmothers, impacted powerfully on the identities of the youngest generation of women. As a result, their stories reflected similar sentiments to those articulated by Farene, that although Canada is currently her home, “I don’t feel tied to any particular place. I can still pack and move to another country tomorrow if necessary. Because of what I’ve learned. That you can’t be tied to a place.”

In contrast, the stories that these women presented about their respective fathers and grandfathers exemplified the way women of the last two generations have indeed internalized, albeit in varying degrees, the passed-on lessons regarding the transience of a geographical home. The stories offered by four of the five participants from the youngest generation demonstrated their understandings of how the inability of their grandfathers to detach from the loss of their physical homes, possessions and lifestyles in Uganda, amplified by racist experiences in the new place of settlement, caused the men to succumb to illnesses and/or death, or to aberrant social behaviour.

339 Karima and Farene each related how their respective grandfathers succumbed to illness and death within three years of leaving Uganda, stories which were confirmed in greater detail by their respective mothers. Karima’s mother, Khatoon, related a similar story, in which she contrasted her father’s reaction to the eviction from Uganda with her mother’s. Khatoon contrasted how her “Mum just got on with it … she doesn’t dwell on things,” while her “Dad suffered … a lot” because he “missed Kampala a lot” and “died of cancer three years later.” On the other hand, both Salima and Zarah from the Daughters’ Group – corroborated by their respective mothers’ stories – observed how their grandfathers grew more abusive towards their respective spouses as a result of being unable to sever their deep emotional ties to their lifestyles in Uganda. Likewise, in her account, Zarah observed how her grandfather’s abusive treatment of her grandmother, Zuleikha, worsened, and how in spite of that, Zuleikha persevered through hard work, resourcefulness and an optimistic attitude, which allowed her to establish a business and take on the financial responsibility for her young family in Canada. Consequently, both Zarah and Salima claimed they learned that a deep attachment to a physical geographic place as ‘home’ for diasporans could be detrimental, if not downright dangerous. These narratives of the women in my study showed how local lessons reflecting local creeds were transmitted by the diaspora women of the older generations to teach the younger women the paradox of living as racialized ‘immigrants’; they need to both create ‘home’ in diasporic space and resist deep attachments to physical geographical locations and material possessions.

If these local lessons conveyed that ‘home’ was neither a physical place nor the sum of material belongings for these gendered ‘outsiders’, my findings also clearly confirmed that these informal lessons did not advocate an anchorless existence. On the contrary, the narratives of all the women in my project revealed that they did consider Canada their home; they did lay claim to this geographical space as ‘home’. In fact, the stories revealed that the women sought different ways to be Canadian “and something else” (Clifford, 1994, p. 308). Their notion of ‘home’ in a more safe, stable and steady sense of ‘feeling at home’, that is, a ‘home’ which contributed to their identities, was identified by the older women as being rooted in their respective families and in the Ismaili community as well as in the larger Canadian society. In other words my study concluded that ‘home’ for this particular diaspora community of East African Khoja Ismaili women was located within the family and the community in any place and/or in many different geographical places where their family members had migrated. From the Mothers’ Group,

340 Zareena, like Khatoon, portrayed ‘home’ as a “place of safety among my siblings, my mother and close friends.” Shirin identified “Canada as my home for now,” but continued, “it is all those things I have learnt from my mother, my grandmothers, even my great-grandmother. It’s what makes me, me at this moment.” Nurjhan, also from the Mothers’ Group, recognized ‘home’ as comprising “my children, my husband, my mother, my siblings.” Likewise, both Khatoon and Farida from the Mothers’ Group described ‘home’ respectively as “family who gives me the unconditional love … mum, dad, my brother, my daughter” and as “family from whom I get unconditional acceptance and warmth.” Overall, ‘home’ for these women resided in family with whom they felt safe, by whom they were accepted unreservedly and/or from whom they inherited knowledge that affected their identities. Farida, from the Mothers’ Group, demonstrated how this “[h]ome can only have meaning once one experiences a level of displacement from it” (Davies, 1999, p. 113), as her oral narratives returned again and again to the time of her marriage when her parents, according to the patriarchal norms in her parental home, cut ties with her. Farida described her ‘homeless’ state as being unbearable, until she established a family bond with her mother-in-law over time. Through their stories, these women outsiders in diaspora space identified ‘home’ as family and a place of love and safety rather than as purely a physical location; this reality was learned through passed-on lessons from the older women of their respective families.

Their stories additionally indicate that the women of the Daughters’ Group drew lessons of ‘home and belonging’ from a subject position that was different from that of their grandmothers and mothers. As particular ‘born-in-Canada’ Brown women, their consciousness appeared to be informed by their exposure to their more diverse lives in Canada as well as by the passed-on knowledges of their older gendered role models. Their accounts showed that they “lay claim to the localities in which they lived as ‘home’” and that “however much they may be constructed as ‘outsiders’, they contested these psychological and geographical spaces from the position of ‘insiders’” (Brah, 1996, p. 194). Simultaneously, these young women lay claim to a difference that signified the specificity of the historical experience of being ‘South Asian’ and/or ‘Brown’ and/or ‘Ismaili’ and/or ‘Indian East African’. These various identities were mobilized under different contexts and for different purposes, but members of the Daughters’ Group spoke through Canadian identities, exposing the complexity, contradictions, ambiguity, and difficulty

341 associated with the term ‘identity’ (Brah, 1996). Nasrin elaborated on this point, as shown below:

Sometimes even though I identify as Canadian, I also identify as a ‘brown’ South Asian woman or a woman with ancestry that traces back to India. Or as a woman with family Ismaili cultural history that traces back to East Africa. Sometimes I will identify with all those different identities as well as identifying as Canadian all at the same time.

These Canadian-born ‘insiders-outsiders’ revealed that they have a similar but complicated view of family as ‘home’, which is passed-on from the older women and is the inheritance of such diasporic outsiders. Karima, Salima, Zahra, Nasrin and Farene, all from the Daughters’ Group, each identify family as ‘home’ and connect home with images of safety, comfort, and love, and with memories of mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents, partners, relatives and friends that engender in them a sense of belonging. In particular, both Zarah and Nasrin articulate a more extended understanding of the concept. For Zarah, “Home is not a one-word answer. It’s more complicated. If home is a place, it would be many places. All those places where the family members live.” Similarly, in the anecdote quoted below, Nasrin expands on the notion of home that is shared by Zarah:

Sure, Toronto is ‘home’ for me. Canada is home for me. It is a home-base. Home can be part geographic but not in a simple sense. Home is where my parents, sister and partner live. But it is also all those places I feel entitled to call ‘home’ because my cousins, and aunts and uncles, my grandma, and close friends live there. From my mother and grandmother, I have learned it’s hard to disentangle people from place when I think of ‘home’.

In the extract above, Nasrin maintains that she feels a sense of belonging to a physical place because being with different members of the family is being ‘home’ – she expresses a notion of ‘home’ that intertwines places with people. In other words, both Zarah and Nasrin claim to have learned from their respective female role models that family bonds vicariously transformed multiple geographical locations into ‘home’, and also that no physical place could become ‘home’ without the people who made it so in the first place.

342 In addition to learning that ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ for women resided in their families, the women also demonstrated that they have learned that ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ was also lodged in the Ismaili community, to varying degrees and in different ways. Although none of the women in this study used the word ‘home’ to describe the Ismaili community in diaspora space, their stories revealed that the Ismaili collective provided women in Canada with a sense of ‘belonging’ to an extended ‘spiritual-cultural-social family’, much as it did in East Africa. It was evident that this communal family provided the women with a sanctuary within the refuge they had found in the Canadian nation. It is likely, from my participants’ accounts, that for the Ismaili diaspora community, the religio-social bonding of the East African Ismaili Khoja community strategized by the previous Imam, Sultan Mohammed Shah (Aga Khan III), and the expansion of the social services and networks of Ismaili community institutions by his successor Imam, Shah Karim al-Husseini (Aga Khan IV), have played a critical role in creating a religious and social community ‘home’ for the Ugandan Khoja Ismailis.

The women’s stories revealed that they believed their current Imam, Aga Khan IV, was responsible for their safe departure from Uganda and their arrival into their new home in Canada, and that he continued, through his spiritual leadership, to provide them with regular guidance in material and spiritual matters. Most noticeably, the narratives of the women in my study disclosed an understanding that unlike the physical home they lost in East Africa, the community ‘home’ was portable so that in Canada it offered them stability and familiarity through the continuity of the same daily religious rituals, ceremonies in jamatkhanas and communal social services they enjoyed in their previous ‘home’. The stories of the women from the first two generations in particular demonstrated that amidst the trauma of expulsion and loss, this community home had provided them with a safe daily meeting place for common religious and social activities with other Brown Ismaili outsiders with whom they identified through a shared past and from whom they continued to receive validation. These lessons appeared to teach each generation of women that while ‘home’ as a physical place with material belongings could be transient for women ‘outsiders’, the community home was both more enduring and transferable, so that it could transform any geographical place into ‘home’. These passed-on lessons appeared to teach women of the last two generations in my study how to utilize their understanding of ‘home and belonging’ to negotiate their outsiderness in diaspora space in their location at the intersections of race/colour, gender, class, age and religion.

343 Stories made evident that women in the Grandmothers’ Group made use of the relatively stable space of the Ismaili community ‘home’ discreetly to gain self-sufficiency and provide support for community members. Their ‘under the radar’ subtle tactics in this space displayed for the younger generations of women the use of a kind of covert cultural women’s agency that utilized the policies and contributed to the services of the Ismaili community organization in order to create ‘home’ in diaspora space. First, at least six of the women in my study repeatedly identified their use of the ‘religious’ or spiritual aspect of their community ‘home’ to achieve this. Through narratives of their practices, these women demonstrated the use of their spiritual faith in their ‘living’ Imam to help them cope with difficulties that they and their families encountered in diaspora space. Second, the women of the Mothers’ Group and some of those in the Grandmothers’ Group gave lessons on how to use the social/institutional aspects of the Ismaili collective to help women acquire some autonomy in diaspora space. Last, all of the women from the Grandmothers’ and Mothers’ Groups taught the younger women to utilize the Imam’s firmans on formally educating boys as well girls, to encourage their daughters to gain financial independence through formal education and careers. In these ways, my research underscores how the women in my study display their use of a non-dramatic type of local, everyday agency to cross some traditional gender boundaries by seeking support from and by supporting the Ismaili community in Canada.

The narratives of some of the older Ismaili women in my study demonstrated how their unwavering faith in the divinity of the Imam and in his spiritual prowess to grant their daily prayers encouraged them to faithfully practise the tenets of Ismailism and observe the daily religious rituals. Four out of the five grandmothers attributed their strength and resiliency in coping with their hardships to the Imam’s spiritual ability to answer their prayers. They instilled in the younger women faith to rely on their Imam to help them cope with difficulties in daily life. In her account, Nasrin postulated that her grandmother’s resolute observance of the daily rituals of religious practices, juxtaposed with stories of adversities that Noorbhegum’s unwavering belief in her Imam’s divine power, contributed to her and her family’s survival in diaspora space. She explains, “That’s how she was able to cope. Move continents. Without a man by her side. It made her persevere. Optimistic. She was wholly supported by her faith in her Imam. He would never let her suffer.” Such stories were echoed by Farene, Khairoon, Sakina, Zuleikha, and Noorbhegum, and emphasized how the women’s staunch faith in their Imam reinforced their

344 resolve to be tenacious while shouldering the responsibility for their families in a strange new country, often with little or no support from their male counterparts. Granddaughters Nasrin, Karima and Salima also maintain they learned that such faith practised by their respective grandmothers bequeathed the older women with such palpable strength that, in Nasrin’s words, they “contradict the stereotypes of passive Indian women helpless without their men.”

As their accounts verify, these women made daily attendance of jamatkhana and full participation in the routine religious rituals a priority in their lives, transmitting such knowledges to the successive generations of women in their families. Below, Khatoon, from the Mothers’ Group, attempts to rationalize such practices of religious devotion that had been embraced by at least five women in my study:

Attending jamatkhana has become an almost dogmatic ritual for Mum since we left Uganda. Suddenly she expects us to follow all the rituals on a daily basis. But her belief in the Imam made a huge difference … to help her cope with all the problems. She had to deal with becoming penniless. Working in a factory. Dealing with her near-fatal accident less than a year after Uganda. Dad’s depression and cancer … and death. She took on all the responsibilities normally handled by Dad. She had to earn. She had to learn to pay bills, keep accounts, deal with the mortgage. These were things she’d never done in her life … These were handled solely by Dad. She coped … survived because of her belief in her Imam. She has no doubt when she prays for help, he will sustain her.

Khatoon stipulated that her mother’s faith in the Imam contributed to her strength to cope with a formidable list of hardships. Khatoon explained how this faith was expressed through Khairoon’s participation in the daily prayers and other religious rituals with a zeal that she imposed on her daughter and granddaughter. Of special significance in Khatoon’s story – also common in the narratives of all of the women who call on the help of the Imam daily – was that they informed the younger women how the older women were enabled to handle the daily life functions that had been traditionally withheld from them as a result of their cultural gendered location. In her own narrative, Khairoon observed that her husband made major and minor decisions in their lives until his death; her participation in such matters was limited by her gendered location. Khairoon’s stories were not dissimilar to those related by Noorbhegum and Sakina, especially

345 the part when Khairoon confessed that before her husband passed away she didn’t even know how to write a cheque. In fact, Khairoon demonstrated through her narratives that when her husband passed away, much to her chagrin, she “discovered I didn’t even have signing privileges for my own jewelry stored in the bank. Everything was strictly under control of my husband.” In their accounts, Sakina, Noorbhegum, and Khairoon affirmed that their ability to do all the things previously controlled by their men folk could only be attributed to the spiritual strength gained from their faith in the Imam’s power to grant them their prayers. Khairoon asked rhetorically, “I took control of my life. If I didn’t have mowla’s help, how could I do it?” and added, “He helps me. I am independent because of him.”

Similarly, Shirin from the Mothers’ Group claimed she learned from her mother that “if you don’t have that faith component, you’re missing a very big part of life … because you can’t just go by the material and the physical. It’s not enough. You need spiritual balance too.” As their stories conveyed, these women taught the younger women to look beyond the physical manifestation of the Imam to his spiritual power to help them achieve their ends. Sakina, Noorbhegum, Zuleikha and Shirin revealed similar views, to varying degrees, regarding their spiritual dependence on the Imam for guidance to escape imposed gender limitations discreetly. As their stories revealed, the younger women maintained that their respective mothers’ and grandmothers’ practices schooled them in such covert ways to endure hardships and gain the confidence to quietly assume responsibilities in order to bring stability to their own and their respective families’ lives in diaspora space. My research demonstrated that many women (including the ones mentioned above) remained engaged also in the social aspect of this community ‘home’ by contributing their services quietly and consistently and accessing those same services imaginatively to benefit themselves and their families. These were the lessons they appeared to pass on to the younger women in my study.

The social and institutional spheres of the Ismaili collective have grown exponentially to cover multifarious amenities, complex institutional structures, private development agencies, and transnational alliances with non-Ismaili organizations (Ruthven, 2011), from the arrival of the Ugandan Ismailis to Canada in 1972 onwards. However, only those aspects that are reflected in the narratives of the participants in this study have been considered here. In particular, the accounts of the women in my study demonstrated how they learned to access and contribute to

346 the social services unobtrusively within the Ismaili community ‘home’ in Canada in the following ways: they learned a) to conduct business that benefited their financial autonomy; b) to acquire cultural currency, self-esteem and self-sufficiency through voluntary work; c) to encourage their daughters to seek the ‘New Voluntarism’ opportunities through the expanding agencies of the Ismaili collective that would help further their careers; and d) to encourage daughters to strategically utilize the edicts of the Imams to gain access to formal education and to pursue careers to become financially self-sufficient. My study demonstrates how the social aspect of the Ismaili collective has been maintained at the very basic level through community gatherings for prayers at jamatkhanas on a regular basis.

Of course, these women’s stories revealed that not all Ismailis attended jamatkhana daily, but when they did, they were exposed to a well-established social routine, as articulated in Nasrin’s account below:

Though [Ismailism is] a religion, there is a cultural and social side to it … Gathering at jamatkhana for prayers has a huge social element. Before daily prayers begin but especially after, everyone’s socializing and catching up with the latest gossip. Little kids are running around … all the teens are chilling out together.

Nasrin’s account describes the social rituals in the daily gathering of Ismailis, which provided opportunities for women like her grandmother, Noorbhegum – a daily attendee of jamatkhana – to carry out business transactions discreetly. Nasrin explained how she learned that her grandmother, Noorbhegum, a widow, navigated the communal social space productively to conduct her business and maintain her financial independence: “She delivered Avon products to her Ismaili clients who formed the majority of her client base. She used social time in jamatkhana to earn an income after her eviction from Uganda. She was resourceful.” Likewise, Grandmother Khairoon, also a widow, related an almost identical story in which she creatively harnessed the opportunities provided by the community social space to maintain her financial independence in Canada, passing on such lessons to the women in her family. In her accounts, Khairoon shows how she “take[s] orders for sewing and food” from Ismailis, turning her traditionally ascribed gender skills in this social space to her advantage to become financially self-sufficient. Her granddaughter, Karima, clarified that such lessons get passed on. Karima

347 narrated how her mother, Khatoon, had also learned to skillfully and almost imperceptibly optimize on the same social space of jamatkhana to maintain her business-cum-social relationships with gendered community members, who formed the major base of clients in her business enterprise. Karima acknowledged that her mother was able to sustain the intimacy of contact with her clients outside of her business premises in an acceptable social setting, thus benefitting her business. In this way, my study verified how some of the women in my study modeled quiet and discreet use of the social space of the communal home to maintain their financial autonomy.

As their life narratives substantiate, women passed on ways of gaining self-esteem and self- sufficiency through participation in voluntary community services in different capacities. Ismaili researcher Azim Nanji maintains that “the last two Imams have succeeded in identifying and relating the needs of individual followers to wider needs in the interest of the community” so that “the idea of service to the community is thus emphasized as a value” (1974, p. 132). Nasrin put it another way: she learned that women who served the community on a small and seemingly ordinary basis gained “cultural currency” within the community, which assisted them in different ways. Nasrin explained how she learned by observing her grandmother, Noorbhegum, that Ismaili women acquired emotional satisfaction for “doing good work”; therefore, through the regular and reliable support they provided, they felt a sense of purpose and a natural kinship to the Ismaili collective in diaspora space. As these women’s stories demonstrated, most of these voluntary practices were clearly done quietly and routinely by some of my women participants as seva (service) that enabled them and their children to also profit from accessing services that were available to them through similar voluntary practices offered by other Ismailis.

Khairoon, Noorbhegum and Sakina’s narratives showed that they benefitted from the support and camaraderie of other Ismaili women volunteers in the Safai Committee responsible for tidying and preparing the jamatkhana for daily prayer services. The younger women’s stories revealed that, through their regular voluntary practices in this space, the older women in their respective families benefitted from the shared advice and friendship of other women volunteers, which also contributed to their independence. This ‘constructive’ social aspect of the community ‘home’ for these women was reflected in the accounts of granddaughters like Zarah, who maintained that “If you were to plop my grandmother where there were no Ismailis, then I think

348 that the challenges would have been greater.” Like other women from the Daughters’ Group, Zarah learned to appreciate the significance of the social space of the community home to give and receive benefits through community voluntary services for women like Zuleikha, Khairoon, Noorbhegum, Sakina, Shirin, and Zareena. Of her mother, Zareena, who used to drive a busload of senior Ismailis to and from jamatkhana daily, Zarah said, “I have learned it gives her a sense of belonging to the community… a sense of purpose, doing something small but worthwhile since my dad died.” In this way, Zarah articulated how passed-on knowledges taught her the benefits of such ordinary acts of voluntarism within the social home of the community for diaspora women seeking a sense of ‘belonging’, self-esteem and self-sufficiency.

Narratives of the women in the youngest generation in my study – in particular, Salima, Nasrin, Karima, and Zarah – acknowledged how their respective mothers’ and grandmothers’ voluntary practices had rubbed off on them. They gravitated towards the newer opportunities of voluntary services or ‘New Voluntarism’ in their social community home made available through the Time and Knowledge Nazrana (TKN). The Ismailimail website describes the TKN endeavour as a gift that was offered to the “Imam of the Time … as a gesture of love and homage” to commemorate his Golden Jubilee as Imam of the Ismaili community in 2008. This nazrana, or ‘gift’, is described below by the Imam himself in his address to the joint session of the Canadian Parliament in February 2014:

[Voluntarism is] a cherished principle in the Shia Ismaili culture: the importance of contributing one’s individual energies on a voluntary basis to improving the lives of others. This is not a matter of philanthropy, but rather of self-fulfillment – ‘enlightened self- fulfillment’. During my Golden Jubilee – and this is important – Ismailis from around the world volunteered their gifts, not of wealth, but most notably of time and knowledge, in support of our work. We established a Time and Knowledge framework, a structured process for engaging an immense pool of expertise involving tens of thousands of volunteers. Many of them travelled to developing countries as part of this outpouring of service, one third of those were Canadians. (AM, 2014, n.p.)

Khatoon from the Mothers’ Group internalized the Imam’s philosophy of voluntarism for the sake of ‘self-fulfillment’ as something that “allows you to think about others not to your

349 detriment but because it makes you feel good about yourself.” What I have called ‘New Voluntarism’, as described above by the Imam, was welcomed by Ismailis for whom voluntary leadership opportunities in community institutions have been traditionally reserved for its most wealthy members and their male kin (Walji, 1974). As identified in their life accounts, the women in the Daughters’ Group learned through the voluntary tradition passed on by their mothers and grandmothers that their participation through the TKN endeavour would provide them with leadership opportunities and invaluable work experience in global settings, contributing to their personal and professional growth while opening up for them lucrative career prospects in the future. For example, for Zarah, the learned voluntarism in the social space of the communal home through TKN provided a position in her career field in an African country. Zarah expressed the hope, which was shared by Karima, that this experience would add to her formal education and help her acquire “her dream job” with the Aga Khan Development Network, “a cluster of institutions … that constitute one of the world’s largest private development agencies, which now operates in more than 30 countries … with 58,000 full-time and part-time employees” (Ruthven, 2011, p. 189). In this way, the women of the Daughters’ Group divulged that the practices of their older women family members taught them how the larger social, non-religious aspect of their community home opened up ways of crossing gender boundaries covertly through voluntary practices to acquire leadership opportunities, gain personal and professional growth, and access career opportunities within the global agencies under the auspices of Ismaili community institutions.

Most importantly, the narratives of the Daughters in my study demonstrated how they have been encouraged by the older women to utilize the community space, through the edits of the Imams, to further their formal education and pursue financial independence through the pursuit of careers. In this way, these women acknowledged the informal lessons they received from their grand/mothers to use covert resistance strategies to navigate cultural gender boundaries through religiously-sanctioned policies. Based on accessible firmans, as early as in 1915, long before any of the grandmother participants in my study were even born, the narrative of formal education for Ismaili girls was beginning to be shaped by the firmans of Aga Khan III and was supported by his social policies (Kassam, 2011). According to the firman quoted by Kassam, Aga Khan III was even encouraging more overt resistance practices, asking the Ismaili girls to insist that their fathers permit them to acquire formal education so that they could take charge of their own lives

350 (Kassam, 2011). Between 1937-1945, by the time all the grandmothers in my study had been born (the oldest one being twenty-three and the youngest being ten in 1945), Aga Khan III, according to Kassam, was instructing an all-male Ismaili Education Board to facilitate the entrance of Ismaili women into professions that would make them financially independent, advising those families with “limited financial resources to educate the female child first” (Kassam, 2011, p. 259). Consequently, the narratives of the younger women in my study demonstrated how they were taught to make strategic use of these firmans in the community ‘home’ by their mothers and grandmothers in order to be able to excel in formal education endeavours and pursue careers, to become financially independent women. Zarah articulated how “the women in my family talk a lot about if you ever have to make a choice to educate a boy or a girl in your family, educate the girl first. That was the Imam’s firman.” Of the fifteen women in my study, narratives of twelve women repeatedly referred to this recurring firman of the third and fourth Aga Khan. Therefore, it came as little surprise to hear women like Karima referring to formal education as “part of being an Ismaili” and Salima identifying formal education as “a responsibility of every Ismaili as directed by the Imam.” All women claimed they learned from their mothers to use the firmans of the Imams to reach their full educational potential as a way to achieve their financial independence, which is demonstrated in the excerpt below from Salim’s narratives:

My mum valued education a lot. I used to be a fitness instructor. As a personal trainer, I told my Mum. I asked her, ‘why can’t I do this for the rest of my life?’ Like ‘why do I have to do something else … like become a physiotherapist, or a doctor?’ She said, ‘you know, like Hazar Imam – his idea that you need to do things to the best of your ability … leave no stone unturned. No matter where you are your education will help you. That’s why I went on. B’cause if I hadn’t been influenced by my mum, I think I’d still be this fitness instructor. Perhaps even been satisfied. But never been able to stretch myself to the full extent of my abilities.

Similar sentiments were reflected in stories from other women in the Mothers’ and the Daughters’ Groups. The majority of the women in my study described how their respective mothers cited the oft-repeated firmans about educating girls to teach them to pursue formal higher education to their fullest potential. While the older women taught the younger women that

351 a physical ‘home’ was impermanent, as revealed in Farene’s earlier anecdote, they simultaneously imparted the message that ‘education’ was portable “so that no matter where you are, education will help you” turn a place into ‘home’ through financial self-sufficiency. In this way, these women demonstrated how such locally transmitted lessons about using such covert resistance practices affected the daily lives of the women of the younger generations. Teaching daughters that financial independence allowed women to “get a voice” and “be heard” by their men was a shared theme in Nasrin, Salima, Zarah and Farene’s narratives. These women from the Daughters’ Group revealed how their respective mothers modeled the importance of working hard to do both – ‘women’s work’ of home-making and child-rearing and work outside the home through a ‘career of passion’. Farene’s narrative below reflects how she learned this lesson from her mother:

My mother took more of a homemaker role. She has struggled with that. She needed something more. So she says, ‘I don’t have that independence in the family … because I didn’t follow a career … of passion.’ That has influenced me. My mum feels if I am financially independent and following my passion outside the home, I will get more respect inside the home. As a woman. A bigger voice in the family. Be heard. Gain self-esteem … She also says, ‘this is not all about you’. I can’t tell my daughter, you know, follow your passion, persevere … choose a career. Become independent. So I ask ‘what is it I want to do in my already busy life?’ So, I won’t be involved in all their [children’s] extra- curricular activities. It doesn’t matter. It is better that they see someone who is happy pursuing her career.

In her account, Farene demonstrates the powerful influence of local gendered passed-on knowledges – local knowledges that teach women about covert ways of navigating cultural patriarchy that have been gained through the experiential realities of older diaspora women. The lesson that Farene learned was that attempting to achieve gender equity within her family came at some cost. On the one hand, Farene admitted learning that ‘following her passion’ would be an added burden on her already busy home life. On the other hand, both the financial and personal independence Farene hoped she may gain from following ‘a career of passion’ could (at least according to her mother) give her more equity in her family and self-respect as a woman. As her account revealed, as ‘agents’, mothers like Farida also teach their daughters that women cannot

352 enjoy an all-out victory through such covert actions. However, similar accounts from Nasrin, Zarah and Salima pointed out that such passed-on local lessons emphasized their responsibility to role-model the importance of attaining financial autonomy to their daughters by doing.

In a moving episode, Salima described how her mother, in an effort to model the importance of careers to her daughters, began to teach basic sciences at a community college. Her life narratives exhibited that what Salima observed was Shirin’s tenacity to “pick herself up and review the text in the evenings, early hours of the morning and during her lunch breaks” and return to her chosen field of work resolutely. This led Salima to conclude, “I remember being so inspired by that later on, painful as it was to see at that time. Because she taught me how important it was to work outside, fighting for what you want, and becoming self-sufficient.” Much like Nasrin, Zarah, and Karima, the lessons that both Farene and Salima described learning from their respective mothers was that for women who also assumed major responsibilities for their children and the home, pursuing a career was very hard work, but it was a necessary ‘burden’ not just for their own gain but also to role-model its significance to the succeeding generations of women. As the women’s stories divulged, on the whole, local lessons imparted through the practices of the older women appeared to teach the younger women in my study to find practical, imaginative and quiet, small ways of utilizing the Ismaili communal space to gain and reinforce self-confidence, acquire purpose and solidarity, gain financial independence, and to role model ‘emancipatory’ practices to the succeeding generations.

Section Three: Women’s Agency – Navigating Patriarchy through Covert Practices

Narratives describing the use of covert tactics by the older women in my study exposed practices of a local agency. Such local lessons taught the women of the succeeding generations how to work within the cultural gender expectations in the family/community ‘home’ using routine tactics that were unnoticeable and indistinguishable from their regular socio-cultural practices (Vinthagen and Johansson, 2013; 2014). Although these practices sometimes strengthened existing patriarchal structures, they simultaneously allowed women to survive and even carry out their own agendas in small but meaningful ways. Engaging in practices based on the local passed-on ideologies that encouraged the women to “use the advantages they have” and to “use community support and support the community,” the older women conveyed lessons reflecting

353 an ‘individual’ narrative. This ‘individual’ narrative taught the younger women never to relinquish hope but work hard, remain engaged with patience and diplomacy and utilize their taken-for-granted mundane skills to work ‘under the radar’ (to borrow a phrase from Shirin) or within cultural patriarchal boundaries to achieve a stable ‘home’ for their families and gain some autonomy for themselves.

Life narratives in my study make evident the following specific areas in which the gendered participants of this particular small Brown minority community teach the younger generations to acquire some autonomy while creating a stable ‘home’ in diaspora space for themselves and their families: a) resourcefully converting skills that are traditionally ascribed to women into covert practices that help them navigate gender role restrictions; b) appropriating the traditionally male- controlled functions in the family creatively and without detection; and c) making small but ‘wise’ choices that help women gain mobility from patriarchal restrictions in their daily lives.

Through participant narratives, my study has uncovered the creative ways in which these gendered outsiders make particular use of the seemingly mundane mediums of cultural food and the kitchen to help them in this endeavour. For example, Grandmother Sakina explains how her house in Canada only becomes ‘home’ for her family once she has infused it with the aromas of familiar cultural cooking. Canadian-born granddaughters Nasrin and Karima both claim that certain foods that their respective grandmothers and mothers cook made them feel at ‘home’. Additionally, four out of five granddaughters maintain that their grandmothers and mothers showed them how to make ‘diplomatic’ use of food to keep members of their extended families united and stable through regular weekly or monthly gatherings at their homes. Narratives of Granddaughters Salima, Zarah, Karima and Nasrin demonstrate how, while learning to cook from their grandmothers and mothers, they simultaneously learned that the kitchen was more than a space for food preparation. Their narratives transform the kitchen into a safe haven, a place to bond through exchanges of confidences, family histories and secrets, and coveted family food recipes. They claim to learn that this space infuses women with a special kind of ‘power’ – a lesson all the granddaughters maintain they could not have acquired through formal schooling. Salima describes food and cooking “not only as a bonding activity but as a language I share with her grandmother.”

354 Granddaughters Nasrin and Salima go further to assert that their grandmothers have shown them that food infuses women with power to discreetly subvert patriarchal cultural norms. Nasrin’s account elucidates how in the past, her grandmother, in collaboration with her sisters-in-law, transgressed the patriarchal rule that men in their family must be fed first: “The women just helped themselves quietly, like in a pact, to some of the food they prepared in the kitchen before serving it to the men.” Salima’s story below, on the other hand, portrays how women creatively learn to convert cooking into a mystical activity that provides them with the self-confidence to subvert limits imposed by cultural patriarchy:

My grandmother was expected to be a more traditional wife. She had to follow traditional roles like cooking for the family. But yet she had to assert herself within those roles, and sometimes even cross the line in order to get her way. Or prevent herself from being totally dominated. Cooking was a fundamental activity in her life; she used her spice-box magically. She could whip up any food with it. It makes her … even with my grandfather … fearless!

Much like the other women in my study, Salima demonstrates her understanding of how women like her grandmother, who were expected to play traditional gender roles, demonstrated to the younger women in their families effective ways of using gender-designated skills to their advantage. Thus, women in the Daughters’ Group learned how their mentors have circumvented patriarchal boundaries in order to further their own agendas subtly, though they can become ‘fearless’ to “even cross [patriarchal] lines” more overtly. Similarly, their accounts indicate that the older women model imaginative ways in which food could be utilized to create an equitable space. One such use is demonstrated in Granddaughter Nasrin’s account:

Eating the food my mother prepared created a special space. Growing up, my sister and I watched our parents debate about religion, work, philosophy, politics … and food was at the centre of it. This was role-modeling. Gave me comfort to see both my parents debate with equal passion at the dinner-table. It was one way of learning to see my parents as equals … my mother did not defer to my father. I saw the opposite to that. I saw my parents as equal partners. And that was connected to food. An activity seen essentially as woman’s.

355 Nasrin learns from her mother, Nurjhan, how to cleverly convert meal times into a metaphorical ‘equitable space’. From this, Nasrin claims she learned that food preparation, a mundane activity supposedly so integrated into women’s daily lives that it is perceived as ‘women’s work’, is transformed by Nurjhan during its partaking, to create for herself, albeit for a while, an equitable location with her male partner. As a result, as a member of the family, Nasrin feels comforted by this ‘home’. Other stories, in this case exemplified by accounts from Granddaughter participants Salima and Zarah, describe how observing their respective grandmothers’ practices taught them that women can, with ingenuity, tact, patience and hard work, take charge, indiscernibly, and make major decisions for their families – all the while permitting the men to think they are still in charge. An example from Salima’s account proves the case in point:

My grandmother’s job is to prevent my grandfather from making irrational decisions. She takes care of the finances. And as my grandmother takes charge, she does it in such an interesting way because how do you exert power over someone who thinks he is all- powerful? She works behind the scenes to get what she wants done, all the while making my grandfather feel he is the dominant all-powerful male.

Other similar anecdotes of women in my study showed how granddaughters like Salima learned local lessons about the way women like Sakina, her grandmother, worked covertly to take control over responsibilities traditionally withheld from women by men. In so doing, Sakina also displayed the characteristics of a local agency through everyday resistance whereby she ostensibly continued to preserve patriarchy within the household yet managed to discreetly guard the financial stability of her family. Similar accounts were reiterated in the life stories of other participants in this study; they showed how the older women taught them subtle ways to take control over practices traditionally controlled by men to provide a stable home for the family and gain some autonomy for themselves. For example, acknowledging Zuleikha as the real “glue of the family,” Granddaughter Zarah articulated “this ‘joke’” her family shared about how “my grandfather thinks he runs the family, but in reality my grandmother does.” In her narrative, Zarah divulged her appreciation for the profound reach of Zuleikha’s hidden ‘power’ over her husband, which was maintained through a local agency reflecting furtive practices of everyday resistance. Zarah’s perceptive understanding of this characteristic of a local ‘agency’ – hidden but replete with women’s power – was clearly demonstrated when she concluded a particular

356 story with, “from the outside everyone would think that my grandfather runs the show but only because my grandmother allows this to happen.”

In describing both their grandmothers and mothers, all of the women from the Daughters’ Group succinctly summed up the characteristics of these older women’s agency. Farene maintained that these older women created a stable home for their families by orchestrating a quiet but deceptively simple kind of everyday agency that creatively functioned ‘under the radar’ of detection. Farene maintained she learned that this type of ‘agency’ was so totally integrated into the daily social lives of her mother and grandmothers that they “appeared ‘passive’ in some areas to get what they really wanted in others … they did little things … quietly. It was never major drama.”

Through their stories, the women from the Daughters’ Group in my study also acknowledged that they learned lessons reflecting proactive tactics, which were role-modeled by the older women in their families. In their narratives, Salima and Karima maintained that they learned from their respective mothers to be more discerning in their choice of marriage partners. While Salima chose a marriage partner who “loves you a little more and will take the extra step to fight for you … as my dad does for my mum,” Karima asserts she selected her future husband based on her mother’s wisdom that “we share the same values with people from India.” Similarly, Farene claimed that, from watching her mother, she acquired lessons that taught her to work hard at being a good mother and to acquire formal education to gain a ‘voice’ in her family. On the other hand, Zarah maintained her mother taught her that to gain “a voice among men,” she needed to adopt a different conversational style when communicating with her uncles. Zarah described such a style as focusing “on things I’ve done that are successful …the ‘I’ stories because my uncles talk about what they have achieved.” Zarah clarified that this was a deliberate everyday tactic learned from her mother when she added that when making really important decisions, like those related to her schooling and career, she always consulted the women in her family who practised a more collaborative style of decision-making rather than “just telling me what to do.” As these accounts of the youngest women in the study indicate, local agency seen in the light of such stories teaches the younger generation of women to utilize mundane tactics to negotiate patriarchy unobtrusively and creatively in their daily lives to achieve some autonomy.

357 Covert resistance practices in the nation home.

The stories of the youngest generation of women in the study confirmed that lessons from the older women in their families heightened their awareness that ‘outsiders’ could be born inside as well as outside of the national territory (Bannerji, 2000). Nasrin from the Daughters’ Group identified ‘gender’ as “an extra layer of oppression on top of race and culture that alienates” her mother, Nurjhan, in the White Canadian nation – a claim which was reflected in the stories of other younger women regarding the experiences of their mothers and/or grandmothers. The Daughters’ accounts elucidated how these Brown women lived as outsiders within the paradox of “both belonging and non-belonging simultaneously,” which delimits their membership in the nation through labels such as ‘immigrant women’, ‘women of colour’, and ‘visible minority women’, so that only “Europeanness as ‘whiteness’ thus translates into ‘Canada’” (Bannerji, 1997, p. 24-25). There was little doubt that all of the women in my study were aware of their subordinate location in a White Canada. This was evident directly and/or indirectly through their stories, although not all the women in the study readily and openly admitted to this subordinate ascribed location, and at times, even denied it. In their narratives, some women reported seeing others as victims of racism, but not themselves. The success of the Canadian state to organize its relations of ruling through ‘ethnicizing’ race was amply evident in narratives of the women, in particular Khatoon and Shirin from the Mothers’ Group.

Khatoon’s accounts revealed how well this state-organized discourse had infiltrated her psyche when she proclaimed that she had never experienced racism because “I don’t allow the experience.” She added, “If you have a certain mentality, you bring it out. But if you’re confident and capable and talk to people the same way no matter who they are, it just doesn’t come out. It never has.” This view demonstrated how well the state discourse of ‘multi-culturalism’ had these women convinced that they, even as Brown women, had the power to prevent racial oppressions in their lives; however, the experiences described in their narratives unequivocally belied that particular notion. In fact, their narratives illustrated how well they had internalized the passed-on local lessons about the way to think about racist experiences. For example, although Shirin conceded to having observed how “being minority women” had worked against her mother and herself in the workplace, she commended her mother for refusing to see herself, and for refusing to encourage her children to see themselves, as victims of racism. Shirin described how her

358 mother, Sakina, did this by refusing to substantialize personally experienced unjust racist practices through open family discussions. According to Shirin, Sakina believed that the mere repeated articulation of such conversations would make them more real and insurmountable in the minds of her children, who would then be rendered psychologically handicapped by them. Instead, Shirin maintained that her mother focused on providing lessons that reflected an individualist narrative that indirectly taught Shirin and her siblings that “you’ll always be ‘Brown’” and “you’ll always be women,” so “be stubborn for survival” by working “ten, twenty, thirty percent harder” to succeed.

As their oral life accounts underscored, younger women utilize all advantages they possess by ‘slipping under the radar’, using covert resistance practices to circumvent and even cross race and gender boundaries in a nation space, which is dominated by White supremacy. As Zareena from the Mothers’ Group observed, she learned from her mother that racialized women’s ‘agency’ did not have to be openly confrontational all the time; it could work quietly but resourcefully from within imposed White boundaries. The women’s accounts demonstrated that older women passed on lessons of using small but creative ways to claim the Canadian national space as ‘home’ in the following ways: They creatively carried out their agendas utilizing a) cultural food, b) their employment positions, obtained through formal education, and c) support from other outsiders like themselves in their daily lives in the larger Canadian nation.

All of the women in my study maintained that they learned the advantage that cultural food and women’s skills in its preparation offered in helping them create ‘home’ in diaspora space. For example, Zarah from the Daughters’ Group described her mother’s utter sense of alienation in a North American town “because she couldn’t find ingredients to make a simple curry” after she was forced to leave Uganda. By contrast, Nasrin demonstrated her understanding of how her mother’s ability to cook the foods they were accustomed to in East Africa contributed towards making her and the family feel at home in Canada. Nasrin maintained that from her mother’s practices she learned that “to displaced families, food they are used to means ‘home’.” As well, Noorbhegum, Khairoon, Sakina, and Zuleikha each taught the younger women how to use cultural food, ‘exoticized’ by Western discourses, to cross racial boundaries in diaspora space. According to Zarah, her grandmother, Zuleikha, created ‘home’ for herself in a residential dwelling for seniors through food “because she loves to cook our food and shares it with the

359 other senior non-Ismailis who are now her friends.” Like Zarah, Salima revealed how she was taught by her grandmother to use creative practices such as food to cross “White and male” boundaries. Salima described the way Sakina resourcefully utilized food to establish a deeper rapport with her doctor and dentist – both White males – through food from the time they first set foot in Canada. “She does something very small. Like once every year, she delivers a platter of samosas to them,” Salima elucidated. Like the other granddaughters, Salima maintained she was taught that “food is an international language” and her grandmother “uses it to navigate racial lines creatively.”

As the women’s oral narratives confirmed, older women also conveyed lessons to the younger women about using formal education to their advantage in subtle ways in their daily lives to promote equity. The accounts of these younger women demonstrated how they learn, by observing their mothers, to utilize their positions of responsibility in their jobs to promote race and gender equity in small but effective ways. In her account, Zarah maintained that her mother, Zareena, used her ‘advantages’ – her education and her lighter complexion – to get promoted to a position where “she was able to employ interns … Canadian women with heritages from Nigeria, Thailand, Ceylon, and such places.” Zareena herself confirmed that this was a deliberate covert strategy to employ racialized women who would otherwise be excluded by racial and gender restrictions: she expounded, “My education and my light skin and eyes opened some doors for me. Because I look more white. More like them. And once I’m in that door, I work quietly to let in other women who have been kept out.” Zareena attributed this learning to her mother’s use of her lighter skin and eyes to cross boundaries of race and gender covertly in Uganda.

As this study reveals, such positions were also used covertly and creatively by women like Zareena and Nurjhan from the Mothers’ group as platforms to tell personalized stories of their daily life experiences as immigrants in an attempt to dissipate the dominant White public’s stereotypical notions regarding all Brown women. Their daughters’ life stories demonstrated that in so doing, their mothers taught the younger generation how to use these covert tactics. For example, Zarah explained how she observed her mother, Zareena, use the space of the presentations she delivered for the organizations she worked for to narrate stories about how she came to Canada and who she was as an Ismaili-Muslim woman. Zarah explained, “In this indirect way, she draws in her audience tactfully to show that not all Muslim women are the

360 same. And Muslim women are different from the way they are stereotypically portrayed by the media.” A similar example is provided through Nasrin’s anecdote, below, as she reflected on the learning obtained from her mother, Nurjhan’s, use of her education, job position, and story- telling to practise everyday resistance covertly:

Women like my mother could not always resist openly, being Brown women in Canada. Often, they were lucky to get jobs in their chosen careers. But that does not mean they did not do anything to makes changes. It was hard for my mother to be a teacher of English in a country dominated by Whites and males. But she made small changes. She told stories about her experiences. She persuaded the White male head of her department to introduce authors into the curriculum who were not White. Who were not necessarily writing from a White Western perspective.

As elucidated by the accounts above, Nurjhan and Zareena conveyed lessons to their daughters about ways in which everyday resistance practices could be particularized to suit the needs of the gendered outsiders of a small Brown immigrant community in Canada. What the women’s accounts revealed about this particular kind of agency (and the lessons taught through it to the successive generations) was that when/if these women were not in a position to make bold, dramatic and openly defiant resistance moves against White and male hegemony, they did not just resign themselves to doing nothing. Instead, as both Nasrin’s and Zarah’s narratives illustrated, these Brown women demonstrated the practise of a particular kind of agency to resist their outsiderness – one which was practised daily, in less obvious, small scale and relatively safe ways to protect their positions of employment from which they could continue to affect change in small, but creative and hidden ways.

The narratives of the women revealed how the practice of this particular kind of agency by these particular Ismaili women in Canada schooled the women of the successive generations to use the support of the community of other ‘others’ within the larger Canadian society to navigate boundaries of race and gender to turn Canada into ‘home’. This practice was clearly learned in the crucible of British colonial rule in East Africa, in which the colonial administration had attempted to keep the Indian and indigenous groups isolated economically through their divide and rule policies. Although these colonial policies fueled ethnic and racial antagonisms across

361 groups, the policies could not, at the same time, prevent the more personal interactions between these groups as they rubbed shoulders in their daily lives. Similarly, in Canada, as the women’s stories demonstrated, there was such “traffic within cultural formations of the subordinated groups, and that these journeys are not always mediated through the dominant culture” (Brah, 1996, p. 209). This made it possible for the different and differently subordinated outsiders to connect in small but effective ways in order to by-pass White restrictive boundaries and to help them process their ‘belongingness’. Vinthagen and Johansson have asserted that “avoiding or escaping power relations” thus can also be a form of everyday resistance, since such acts “makes the exercise of power on that specific individual or group (temporarily) impossible” (2013, p. 24).

The stories of women from the Daughters’ Group revealed the lessons of such practices of everyday resistance by the older women in their respective families. The Daughters’ narratives revealed how their mothers and grandmothers practised a local form of agency by interacting with other ‘minoritized outsiders’ (read non-White women) like themselves in their daily lives. For example, Zarah revealed that her mother and grandmother “gravitate towards other ‘quote/unquote’ immigrant communities,” naming examples of Chinese and Japanese restaurants, ‘mani-pedi’ spas, and small stores they frequent. Zarah further described how her grandmother often “exchanges stories” with the people she met in those places, “asking them how and when they came to Canada and telling them her stories of emigration. She feels comfortable interacting with people like herself.” Likewise, through her stories, Salima illustrates how her mother and grandmother lean towards other racialized groups in Canada and how they “will give them – even strangers – stories of where they’re from. Like you know, I’m from such-and-such place. They take the liberty to divulge that information.” Below, Daughter Nasrin elaborates upon her learning the reason behind this common exchange of the ‘where-are- you-from-stories’ between people of racialized communities. She maintains that, in Canada, there are two different groups of people ask her that question:

White people ask me that question. They are saying ‘You are not White. You’re different from me. You are not Canadian. So where are you from?’ But those who are not White also ask me that question. They trade stories. I think they are looking to establish

362 camaraderie. Commonality. Validate their identities. We … our families may have come here from somewhere else. But now we’re all Canadians.

Similar stories from all of the participants in the Daughters’ Group demonstrate their understanding of a level of comfort their mothers and grandmothers felt while making connections with racialized ‘others’ in their daily lives. Contrary to the one-way dialogue of ‘where are you from?’ with White Canadians, who seemed to demand an explanation for their presence in Canada, these diaspora women “trade stories” with other outsiders in the larger Canadian community, validating for one another their ‘Canadian’ identities – although they came “here from somewhere else … now we’re all Canadians.” Through such exchanges, the women in the Daughters’ Group were taught ways to utilize support from people of other racialized Canadian communities, thereby practising a more covert type of everyday resistance. For instance, Khatoon’s accounts, validated by her daughter Karima, from the Daughters’ Group, showed how Khatoon found more success in a business that catered mostly to women from racialized communities in Canada. Shirin and Sakina likewise illustrated how, after being unjustifiably fired from an institution supervised by White managers and catering to White clients, Sakina was highly successful in her second place of employment in a similar institution that was managed by Chinese-Canadian managers and which catered to clients from a ‘mixed’ racial base. Shirin and Salima’s stories underscored that not only was Sakina well-respected by her clients and fellow-employees in her second place of employment, but she was deemed to be such a valuable asset that she was awarded the highest meritorious formal recognition for her services. These women attributed Sakina’s success to her being placed in an institution that was managed by other Canadian ‘others’, which they maintained taught them about harnessing support from other racialized communities.

In a similar event, according to the accounts of both Zareena and her daughter Zarah, when a European Catholic church in a Canadian city refused to provide the last burial rites for her East European husband after he died of HIV/AIDS complications, Zareena appealed to and found support from a First Nations community Catholic church. Zareena elaborated, when “my husband’s East European family turned against me … [and] said I had given him the disease because of my East African background, I found a First Nations community who stepped in to help me.” What the younger women in my study claimed they learned through these and other

363 similar events was that, while gender and race/colour created boundaries for Brown women, support from different ‘others’ in the larger community provided creative ways of by-passing White hegemonic boundaries. Through such practices of displaying a local everyday agency, the older women in my study demonstrated to the successive generations of women the value of ‘slipping under the radar’ to find ways around race and gender boundaries to fashion ‘home and belonging’ in diaspora space.

James C. Scott compares the potency of such an ‘everyday’ kind of agency that is demonstrated by the women in my study through their actions that “rarely made headlines,” (1985, p. 49) to a metaphorical barrier reef. Scott claims that the agglomeration of such practical but quiet, small and informal acts carried out “willy-nilly” by resisters like those of “millions of anthozoan polyps,” can create a barrier reef upon which the dominant force may run aground and often deflect attention away from such resistance tactics to the wreck itself (1985, p. 49). Despite such advantages provided by the more restrained and less obvious type of everyday agency practised by the older women in my study, at least four of the five women from the Daughters’ Group also learned that in the long run, such practices of covert agency proved to be detrimental to the physical and psychological health of its practitioners. The following excerpt from Salima about her grandmother sums up similar stories by other women of the Daughters’ Group:

Because my grandmother had to practise her agency in such subtle acts … it comes with a degree of anxiety. And that anxiety translates into stress. It’s like my grandmother is almost vibrating with stress and worries. I think that’s led to her cardiac condition in some ways. She has sacrificed her health as a result of her hidden agency.

Agency for these gendered outsiders, located at the intersections of race/colour, gender, and religion, came at a price. As Collins asserts, “oppression is not simply understood in the mind – it is felt in the body in myriad ways” (2009, p. 293). Women of the Grandmothers’ generation, in Shirin’s words, “pushed themselves a lot to work behind the scenes [so that] it took a toll on their lives.” As the women’s narratives disclose, many of these women passed on lessons of practices that demonstrate the use of both covert and overt forms of resistance simultaneously in order to negotiate patriarchal gender boundaries in the social space of the family and boundaries of gender and race/colour in the larger space of the Canadian nation.

364 Overt resistance in the space of the family home.

Based on the narratives of women in my study, I have defined the overt form of agency as acts that do one of two things: ones which require women to step out of the ‘comfort’ of the roles ascribed by cultural gender norms, and/or ones that may qualify as being openly defiant. Younger women in my study learned that overt resistance practices of the older women often resulted from several failed attempts at the more covert acts of resistance. My study also revealed that the successive generations of women learned that overt resistance practices were often accompanied by profound pain and intense internal struggles; they often did not work neatly and completely, but were made possible when women adhered closely to the goals of Practising Mindfulness, Diaspora Ethics, Diaspora Life Habits and Attaining Self-Sufficiency that were taught by the local forms of wisdom.

Stories of the younger women revealed that Grandmothers Noorbhegum, Khairoon, Zuleikha, Fatma and Sakina “stepped out of their comfort zones” to assume responsibilities that ranged from earning money to support their families to taking care of the day to day matters that were previously under the purview of their men. Farida identified her mother, Fatma, as teaching her to use such covert forms of resistance when Fatma “stepped out of her comfort zone” and learned to drive in Canada. This act was not necessarily considered ‘rebellious’; however, as was revealed by the stories of both women, it was an open transgression of both a psychological as well as a physical cultural barrier for Fatma. Fatma demonstrated her engagement in an activity that was denied to her as a woman for more than forty years by a husband who did not want her to be independent, according to Farida. As Farida illustrated in her narratives, small as this act might appear, once her father took ill, her mother faced the challenge of allowing herself to “take the driver’s seat,” enduring failure “many many times before acquiring a driving license.” Fatma herself showed that this act represented more than just learning to drive when she proclaimed with pride that it taught her to be confident enough to be independent and self-sufficient, so that “even today when I do not drive any more, I am independent. I will take a taxi or a Handy- DART to all my appointments and outings instead of depending on my children.”

Similarly, Daughter Salima explained how she observed that by “stepping out of her comfort zone” to work in a financial institution, her grandmother, Sakina, gained self-esteem and became more independent in Canada: “I may have portrayed my grandmother as a down-trodden woman.

365 But coming to Canada changed her. She ‘stepped out of her comfort zone’ to work in [financial institutions] while raising four children.” Salima qualified this act as “challenging and highly painful at times, but it made her confident and independent.” The Daughters’ narratives confirmed that by engaging in practices that were traditionally denied to them according to patriarchal cultural norms, the older women taught their female children how to practise small acts of resistance while also transmitting the gnomic lesson that such challenges were surmountable when tempered with the sedulous observation of their local wisdom. From such lessons from her mother, Farida picked up the lesson of ‘stepping out of her comfort zone’ to “follow her passion” and attend art school later on in life, though patriarchal restrictions had prevented her from pursuing a career of her choice in her younger days.

By contrast, practices of women like Shirin and Khatoon from the Mothers’ Group and Zuleikha from the Grandmothers’ Group represented the more recognizably overt acts of resistance, which they passed on to the women of the younger generations. Shirin related how she (much like Farida) put up with the differential gender treatment in her parental home until she came to Canada, where close to a physical and nervous breakdown, she defied her father and left her parental home to visit her boyfriend in Europe. As their narratives revealed, both Shirin and her granddaughter Salima attributed this clear act of defiance to the accumulation of failures of the more covert tactics to counter the unreasonable restrictive gender-role expectations from a domineering father. Being denied the freedom to see or even write to her boyfriend, being exhausted by pressures of schoolwork, and working both inside and outside of the home during a time when she felt totally unappreciated by her family, Shirin described how she finally left home at the age of twenty, openly rebelling against her father demands:

I realize how this gender thing gnaws at you. I was the same smart Shirin Papa trusted to line up for immigration for hours and hours over days and days. I was the same Shirin who pitched in by getting a job on the first day we arrived in Canada. But he couldn’t trust me. It was totally a gender thing … I said when somebody calls out to me, ‘Shirin’, I have to be able to turn around. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I needed to know who ‘Shirin’ is. But I don’t think my father understood. I really struggled a lot before I left. It was painful. I was so afraid. But it was a good thing. It was my renaissance.

366 In the rest of her account, Shirin concluded that her blatantly rebellious action, as excruciatingly painful and frightening as it was at the time, did result in her choice of a more equitable marriage partner, though it took years for her to regain some self-esteem and a positive self-image, which she had lost in her male-dominated parental home. Salima, Shirin’s daughter, described the way this openly-defiant action came about from passed-on local lessons: “During her adolescence, my mum says she was observing my grandmother struggle ‘to be herself’, to escape being totally dominated by my grandfather. Mum became more defiant like, ‘OK, I see how a marital relationship might work’.” In her accounts, Salima acknowledged that when more covert tactics failed to work for her, Shirin “learned a very constructive lesson in that she chose a bold course of action finally that enabled her to select her own partner around that learning.” In the detailed versions of their narratives, both Shirin and Salima drew conclusions from actions based on such passed-on knowledges that were also reflected in the accounts of other women in this study.

These other accounts showed that although such overt practices were often accompanied by intense internal pain and struggle for the resisters, they occurred nevertheless when the resisters were unsuccessful at negotiating gender boundaries discreetly. More overt confrontations that resulted, especially from marital disharmony accrued from excessive control by the men in the family, were shared by other women in the study. For example, Nurjhan explained that although her mother was young when her father died, Noorbhegum refused to marry again, maintaining that she “did not want to spend the rest of my life catering to the demands of another man.” Nurjhan perceived her mother’s decision as overt resistance, which was portrayed through “a conscious ‘action’ of refusing to marry,” as was explicitly articulated by Noorbhegum. In contrast, Farida from the Mothers’ Group talked guardedly about her own considerations of separating from a husband whose treatment had impacted negatively on her self-esteem and her health. Farida hinted that passed-on lessons from her mother would have emboldened her to “step out of her comfort zone” if her children had not openly indicated that they “would have problems with that course of action.” Whether or not Farida might still implement such an overt act encouraged by her mother’s overt actions was unclear; however, in Khatoon’s case, her daughter Karima intimated that the lesson she learned through her mother’s open actions to combat patriarchal restrictions through divorce proved beneficial for her mother and for her father. Khatoon herself asserted that stepping out of her traditional gender role and building up her own business “has taken a toll on my personal life as a woman because at the end of the day,

367 a woman pays the price.” Zuleikha from the Grandmothers’ Group demonstrated that such bold overt lessons to end patriarchal hegemony were not restricted to just the younger women in my study. She admitted that after several failed attempts to separate from an abusive husband, she finally succeeded at a much advanced age. Granddaughter Zarah reflected that women’s overt measures to ‘step out of their comfort zones’ did not always work neatly and completely:

My grandmother moved out of their common house. Finally. She left him a few times and then always went back … Finally, a little bit under the guise that she was ill, she moved out. But she has wanted to do that for a long, long time.

Zarah’s observation shows that, for women like Zuleikha, ‘stepping out of their comfort zone’ to commit to such an overt act as separating from a husband was neither an easy nor a one-time effort, despite the challenges they faced in their daily lives by remaining in the marriage. This was confirmed by Zuleikha’s own accounts; she admitted that even after a separation of a year and a half, what kept her committed to her decision (in spite of her husband’s insistence that she return home) were the nightmares about the physical and sexual abuse she endured from her husband over the course of sixty years. “I want my girls to learn that it is not right to take that kind of abuse,” Zareena confessed. Stories from women like Zuleikha, Noorbhegum, Fatma, Khatoon, Farida and Shirin demonstrated an agency that is particular to women negotiating cultural hegemonic norms from a particular ‘minority’ diasporic community. These forms of overt resistance practices, combatting cultural patriarchal boundaries, involved breaking out of the ‘comfort’ of ingrained gender practices to openly express and/or explicitly carry out varying acts, big and small, repeated or not, which were unsanctioned and/or vilified by patriarchal cultural norms. As these women’s accounts demonstrated, these overt acts often resulted from failed attempts at more covert resistance actions to navigate patriarchal bounds as well as from examples role modeled by the older women in their families. And as the phrase ‘coming out of their comfort zones’ suggests, these women learned that overt resistance practices were often accompanied by profound doubts and painful internal painful that might in time be assuaged by steadfast adherence to the ethics of a passed-on local wisdom.

The life stories shared in this study showed how the women made use of various overt tactics to navigate White hegemony in their location as Brown women outsiders within the larger

368 Canadian nation. In the process, they transmitted vital lessons to younger generations of women. Through their stories, the women from the Daughters’ Group divulged their understanding of this particular agency practised by their respective older female role models as they combined cultural gender skills with language skills and positions of responsibility that were acquired through formal education in order to openly challenge institutionalized sexism and racism in the nation. Demonstrating how they developed more political awareness of their outsider location in the nation through their experiences, these Canadian-born women assessed the epistemological value of informal lessons they learned from their mothers’ more overt resistance actions. The Daughters articulated learning that this local form of agency was far from ‘heroic’ and was reflected through multiple facets; it was complicated by a local wisdom that appeared, at times, to send contradictory messages so that although it enabled the older women to challenge systemic inequities, it also exacted a heavy price from them. However, the women in the Daughters’ Group identified a common lesson they learned through their observation of the effects of the overt resistance practices of the older women: their ‘agency’ lay in the persistence to carry out the struggle itself, through the small daily acts of resistance that were maintained through strategic positions and which were acquired through formal education.

Breaking the silence: Overt resistance in the nation home.

The narratives of the Ismaili women in this study expose the changeable overt tactics they utilized (often combining them with more covert tactics) to ‘break the silence’ on oppressions that resulted from their intersecting locations in the Canadian nation home. The women’s oral life accounts simultaneously reveal that the informal lessons they taught the younger generations of women reflected that this form of agency may not have been either dramatic nor heroic but required them to step outside of their levels of comfort. Their narratives emphasized the lesson that overt acts taken to negotiate White hegemonic boundaries that kept them outside of full membership in the nation might vary in degrees of success. The older women modeled overt resistance practices through the way they a) utilized various media resources; b) spoke out whenever they experienced discriminatory practices in their daily lives; and c) made use of their positions of responsibility in their jobs and utilized the discourse of the West (acquired through formal education) to their advantage. In so doing, the women underscored for younger generations the vital significance of employing the local passed-on wisdom that taught them to

369 be mindful, to pursue Diaspora Ethics and Diaspora Life Habits and to focus on achieving self- sufficiency.

Some of these Brown women utilized their skill in food preparation overtly (in Zarah’s words) “to educate” the Canadian public about themselves. To this end, Grandmother Zuleikha, assisted by her daughters, wrote and published an ‘Indian’ cookbook. Salima from the Daughters’ Group organized a series of generational cooking shows televised by local and national networks, featuring her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and herself, that showed how immigrant women adapt traditional cultural recipes subtly to suit different environments. The narratives of Granddaughters Salima and Zarah revealed that they learned how these ventures were more than mere exotic exhibitions of the culinary skills of generations of diaspora Brown women. Salima explained, “None of these women had appeared in public before. But they had stories to tell. Stories about themselves as immigrant women. In Canada. The producers of the shows brought out those stories in the cooking shows that many watched.” To this, Shirin, Salima’s mother, added, “It was my grandmother’s vision that we tell our stories through this project to show who we are.” Zarah’s justification for her grandmother’s cookbook – “a women’s project,” supported by her aunt and mother – was not dissimilar to the reasons provided by Salima for their publicly overt act. Zarah explained that she learned that spending time to exact the recipes and then write a cookbook was a very difficult task for her aging grandmother. However, Zuleikha herself maintained that the endeavour was worth the effort; besides leaving a cultural legacy for her own children, the book told a diaspora story of Brown immigrants, through narratives and pictures of her children, grandchildren, family and friends. “After all,” Zuleikha asserted, “food is more than just something you eat. It not only brings together family, but also the Canadian community. It shows them we are not so different from the Canadians.” She provided an example of how “some Canadians [read ‘White’] told me only yesterday, they have decided to try out my recipes. One woman said she is so fascinated that she is reading my book from page one to the end.”

These women in my study – although going out of their comfort levels in this capacity was a tough act – taught the younger women to use their cultural skills to tell their stories openly in order to make themselves “more real to people” (to use Zarah’s words) and to “show their sophistication and ability to adapt to different environments” (in Salima’s words). Zareena demonstrates that women from the Mothers’ Group in my study were also learning to use the

370 media to speak out more openly about their subordinate locations. In the story below, she justifies her actions of speaking to a prominent Canadian newspaper after the death of her husband:

When my husband passed away from AIDS, I spoke to the press openly. Although my mother didn’t approve. I had to challenge the thinking of ignorant White Canadians like my East European in-laws who blamed me [for] his death. They accused me of giving him the disease because of my East African heritage. This was nonsense, of course. But a lot of Whites actually believe this.

In her account, Zareena maintained that her mother feared that if people from the small Ismaili community found out her husband had died of HIV/AIDS, no one would want to marry her. However, Zareena explained that her decision to speak out in public was based on her commitment to raise public awareness in order to help eradicate the disease and to dissipate the misconceptions held by the White Canadians about racialized immigrant women. As this study reveals, these particular older diaspora Brown women were teaching the women of the successive generations in their families that they need to step outside their levels of comfort in different ways to utilize the local media in order to break down barriers for racialized women in the nation.

Stories of the women in my study also spoke to the ways women stepped out of their levels of comfort to overtly challenge racist practices in stores, in work places, and in other social sites in the space of the nation. Granddaughters Nasrin’s and Zarah’s accounts described how their mothers and/or grandmothers modeled overt resistance practices by directly challenging White people who seemed to subject them to unjust differential treatment in their daily lives. Zarah’s anecdote below exemplifies this point:

My grandmother and my mother will speak out if they feel they are not getting equal treatment. I think it’s having to deal with this kind of unfair treatment all their life as ‘minority’ women. They don’t accept it. They will speak out. Sometimes my mum will say, ‘Hey, that’s not fair what you just said’ or ‘it’s not right the way you treated me’. She has learned that from her mum. My grandmother will speak out if she came into a store first

371 but a White Canadian is served before her. Sometimes, I will say, ‘maybe that saleswoman is just having a bad day’. But they will not tolerate it.

Zarah’s anecdote aptly exemplifies similar lessons conveyed in stories told by Nasrin and Karima; they describe how their mothers and/or grandmothers openly challenge what they consider to be unfair practices. Similarly, Khatoon from the Mothers’ Group asserted that she learned from observing her mother, Khairoon, not to yield to unfair practices: her stories spoke to how she refused to be bullied by bank officials about her business transactions and White tradesmen who questioned her knowledge about repairs in her place of business. “I literally designed the inside,” she claimed of her place of business. She continued, “So I know the place inside out. But because I’m Brown and a woman, I’ll some get ‘attitude’ from the electrician or some other tradesman. They don’t like it if I point out their mistakes or make suggestions.” Khatoon explained how she had a male minor business partner for a short while, and although “he knew nothing about plumbing, the plumber preferred to talk to him. And then he would come ask me because he didn’t know much about the plumbing in the place … like I did.” She also pointed out how, in spite of speaking out repeatedly, it has taken her a long time to gain respect from White and male tradespeople because of her gender and race. By using overt resistance practices in their daily lives to challenge practices of White male oppression, women like Khatoon have, in turn, transferred lessons to their daughters about ways of practising more overt resistance. Given this pattern, it was hardly surprising that women like Nasrin from the Daughters’ Group declared that she saw her mother, Nurjhan, “as being a more overt agent” who “will not just accept racist and sexist practices” but one who “will say something right out if it’s not right.” These women conveyed an understanding that “breaking silence represents less a discovery of these unequal power relations than a breaking through into the public arena of what oppressed groups have long expressed in private” so that “publicly articulating rage typically constitutes less a revelation about oppression than a discovery of voice” (Collins, 1998, p. 50).

These kinds of overt practices, however, often proved detrimental to the images of immigrant Brown women, which was revealed by the stories of Zuleikha, Zareena, Khatoon, Nurjhan, Zarah and Nasrin. Daughter Nasrin’s sentiments, shared by other women in the study, were that “women like my mum and other women of colour who call people out on unjust practices often suffer adverse effects of being dismissed as ‘angry Brown women’.” These Daughters’ accounts

372 reflected their understanding that this was a pejorative label that was often used by White Canadians to justify their dismissal of Brown women who overtly challenged oppressions based on race/colour and gender. Indeed, the stories of many women across all three generations in my study displayed an understanding that such derogatory labels describing their mothers often seeped into the social space of the family/community where they were viewed, according to cultural patriarchal norms, as being ‘masculine’ or ‘not feminine enough’ to be valued as ‘women’. In spite of this disadvantage, the older women in the Daughters’ Group still appeared to favour the overt resistance acts of their mothers and/or grandmothers, especially if those practices were also supported through formal educational training of these agents.

All of the women in this study maintained that they received lessons from older women role models about the vital significance of acquiring formal education to help them achieve financial independence. More importantly, the Canadian-born women’s narratives pointed out that they learned that formal education provided their mothers and themselves with the tools of Western discourse and the necessary qualifications to obtain positions of responsibility in their chosen career fields. This provided a foundation from which to conduct more overt resistance practices to challenge their subordination in the nation space. The accounts of all the women disclosed (though not all of them openly conceded to it) that they were aware of positions of privilege from which they were barred as a result of their race/colour and gender. In her account below, Nasrin proclaims that she became aware of her outsider location in the nation at a very young age:

I think I realized when I was in grades 6 … 7, I was never seen like one of the normal kids … the normal kids were White. I don’t think I could be accepted as a more popular kid … I was the Brown kid. When little kids had crushes on one another, you know in primary school, no one felt that way about me …I always felt that was because I was Brown. I wasn’t even one of the girls … I was the Brown girl. I still felt that way in high school. I felt like I didn’t count basically. I don’t remember wishing I was a different colour. Maybe I wished I fit in a little better, but I don’t remember wishing that I was a different colour or gender.

This defining moment, through her daily experiences at school, ‘taught’ Nasrin that her brownness made her ‘not normal’ because normalcy was equated with being White, and in her

373 case, being a White girl. What was more, her visible brown skin made her ‘invisible’ and put her outside of what counts or matters, precluding her from certain things that were available only to White insiders who existed side-by-side with her in her everyday world. Nasrin’s story was not unique; Daughter Salima echoed Nasrin’s sentiments that almost all of the gender role models projected by the media and idolized by her cohorts before and during her teenage years were White. Salima expressed the wish that she “had been told more often that I was beautiful, because as any teenager, I had this insecurity … being Brown and a woman was a lot to deal with.”

It was hardly surprising then that the narratives of these women also exhibited an appreciation for the implications of a local passed-on wisdom from their older role models, which emphasized the pursuit of formal education and a career if they wished to “fit in a little better” and/or struggle against their location as Brown women outsiders.

This appreciation, which was expressed by all of the women in the last generation, was captured in Zarah’s account: she divulged that she “totally gets” the lessons her mother and grandmother convey about not “being lazy … about setting educational goals … being engaged … about working hard to excel at whatever I choose to do.” Two of the youngest women in my study, Zarah and Nasrin, underscored that they understood the link between overt resistance acts of Brown women and formal education by observing their respective mothers. Nasrin described her mother’s occupation as an English teacher in an all White school board for the first ten years after her arrival in Canada in the 1970s. “However,” she said, “when the student population changed to reflect more racialized students, the school board made no effort to employ ‘minority culture’ teachers.” Nasrin used this account to justify her mother’s change in tactics to a more overt form of resistance after years of unsuccessful attempts to employ more subtle tactics. In the following anecdote, Nasrin portrays her understanding of the role that formal education played in enabling her mother, Nurjhan, to acquire a position from which she can challenge systemic inequities in the education system more openly as a Brown woman.

Because my mum saw that the students who were not White were disadvantaged, she became determined to get into a position of responsibility. She found allies. She pursued more formal education … got promoted. Then she was in a position of more power. She

374 provided anti-oppression training for teachers. For students. You know, advocated more openly for equity. Education provided my mum with confidence and the language to think critically, to question things, and to do something about it openly because she had the tools through the language of formal education. That’s what I take from this.

Nasrin identified the lesson she learned from her mother’s actions by pointing to formal education (and allies) as the means for racialized women like her mother to not only secure a position of responsibility, but also to acquire the ‘language’ and means to overtly challenge institutionalized racism and sexism in a Canadian educational system which disadvantages racialized students and staff alike. Black Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe asserts, “English is something you spend your lifetime acquiring, so it would be foolish not to use it … it is actually a very powerful weapon” (Interview, 2000). Achebe continues to say that the neo/post/colonized use it not because “you have it anyway; [but because] it is something which you can actively claim to use as an effective weapon, as a counterargument to colonization” (Interview, 2000). Similarly, both Zarah and Zareena attributed Zareena’s ‘ability’ to practise overt forms of resistance to challenge racist and sexist practices in her workplace to her formal education. Zareena maintained, “When it comes to formal education, I have studied hard. So I have been able to get into leadership positions” from where “I have pushed the boundaries – in small ways … challenged racism and sexism for myself … for women like me … who are not White.” In the account below, Zareena demonstrates a kind of overt agency practised through explicit acts that are characteristic of women like Zuleikha, Zareena, Zarah, Nurjhan and Nasrin in my project, who have all acquired strategic positions through formal education:

I speak out. The organization I work for is supposed to benefit those people with less opportunity … mostly non-Whites … in countries outside Canada. Yet the four people hired to lead the organization are White and male. So when I point that out, two of them didn’t know how to respond. I said, ‘Are you telling me you can’t see that you occupy a position of power, and the person next to you, also in a position of power, is just like you – male and White?’ So I ask them, ‘Where are the men and women who are not White? Why are they not represented in the leadership?’ Also at conferences I will ask, ‘So these top jobs in the company. Who are you going to hire?’ They say, ‘internationals’. So, I tell them, ‘Sounds like White and male to me!

375 Zareena, whose formal education enabled her to occupy positions of leadership in several NGOs, demonstrated an overt form of agency by openly challenging institutional racism and sexism explicitly in ‘language’ that her male and White employers could comprehend.

Although Brown women like Zareena, are seen by their daughters as “you-don’t-want-to-mess- with-me” women and as ones whose “action-oriented agency” succeeded “in opening jobs in the organization for more ‘minority women’,” they are also perceived by their daughters as women who exacted a heavy price for their overt tactics. Zarah, for example, responded to her mother’s overt acts of resistance ambivalently; she described how Zareena had often been threatened or asked to resign from jobs for speaking out. At the same time, she pointed out how she learned to appreciate her mother’s resiliency and sense of perseverance, claiming that “although she can rub people the wrong way at times, this has not affected my mum’s behaviour,” adding, “she simply changes the NGOs she works for … for one that is most likely to pay more attention to the voices of ‘minority women’.” Likewise, Nasrin explained how she learned, from observing her mother, Nurjhan, that challenging systemic racism and sexism in the workplace is “exhausting” because one has to “do the work and be the work.” Despite perceiving the adverse effects such overt practices have had on her mother, Nasrin drew the following conclusions:

It kept her from promotions. It wasn’t glamorous work. But after a few years, she took on anti-oppression work more openly. The lesson I got from that was that if something’s not fair because of colour or gender or sexuality … even though it’s going to be hard, impossible even, you need to do it anyway. At the end of the day, someone has to do it, so why not you?

Nasrin’s earlier anecdote relating to her school experiences, juxtaposed with both Nasrin’s account above and Zarah’s account regarding her mother’s overt resistance acts, demonstrates that women like Nasrin and Zarah (and perhaps Salima too) have been engaged in critically gauging the value of such overt acts of resistance in which their respective mothers and grandmothers participated to challenge their outsider location in the nation. Women like Zarah and Nasrin appeared to be learning that the teachings of a local wisdom could, at times, be antithetical: being diplomatic and patient, as the local wisdom suggests, was helpful, but attaining self-sufficiency through formal education and refusing to see oneself as a victim was

376 important too. Nasrin’s last account appears to reflect the lesson that whatever the consequences, the struggle involved in the act of resistance itself had meaning for these women, and was, in some ways, still necessary for these diaspora outsiders whose lived reality in the nation offered them, at least during that particular time, fewer options.

As a whole, the women’s life stories uncovered a particular kind of ‘agency’ practised by the Canadian women of the East African Khoja Ismaili community through covert and overt resistance practices, which they employed in the social spaces of the home and the nation. Such practices reveal how oppression and resistance are intricately entangled; not only does the form of each shape the others, but also their relationship “is far more complex than a simple model of permanent oppressions and perpetual victims” (Collins, 2009, p. 292). The resistance practices of the women in my study expose how they used and passed on a local wisdom, which inhibited them in some ways but also enabled them to destabilize and even subvert boundaries that located them and their descendents outside of the social spaces of family and nation in their location in their gender and race.

Conclusion: Building on Stories Told. Where to Now?

This study concludes by suggesting ways of extending this research for future investigations. I identify some gaps that may lead to more balance in the themes explored in this study. I emphasize the importance of stories to such projects, especially stories that remain missing from official records or those that are awaiting re/interpretations that may shed more light on particular forms of agency, contextualized by specific histories and told from the experiential realities, of groups and individuals who have been spoken about but have as yet to speak for themselves in academic research projects.

This study concurs with Bahri and Vesudeva’s observation that “All but ignored between 1930 and 1965, the South Asians in the United States and Canada are starting to write and research their own social and historical role in North America’s cultural mosaic” (1993, p. 5). Bahri and Vesudeva justify the ‘South Asian’ focus of their anthology by pointing to the dearth of works on/by South Asians, compared to works on/by African Americans and other Asians, in spite of the South Asians’ increasing presence in the United States and Canada. Within this group, the research on ‘South Asian’ women, especially those women outside the academy, has yet to

377 surface through their own stories. Chinua Achebe calls this a “balance of stories” and describes it as one “where every people will be able to contribute to a definition of themselves, where we are not victims of other people’s accounts” (Interview, 2000). My study is one attempt to create a space for such stories, including my own, to emerge, tracing passed-on lessons across three generations of fifteen East African Khoja Ismaili twice (and some even thrice) immigrant women.

The purpose of foregrounding the life stories of the women in my study is neither to search for a real past by inserting missing experiences into prevailing wisdom nor to excavate what really happened in the past (Steedman, 1986). Rather, I re-interprete these particular women’s stories using available social theories of racialized immigrant women to provide perspectives other than that those that have been offered by dominant discourses. These stories show how these particular women’s practices, contrary to dominant perceptions, reveal their continual engagement in a form of local agency to create home in diaspora space. In this study, stories of women, through a three-generational framework, demonstrate how older women negotiate their outsider location within patriarchal and imperialist systems, concomitantly transmitting ways of dealing with this outsider location to subsequent generations of women. These lessons allow younger generations to engage in local forms of covert and overt resistance practices to better their experiences in diaspora space. The ‘generational’ women’s storying focus I have employed is thus not only an essential component, but also one that allows fifteen women between the ages of eighteen and ninety to display their particular notion of agency through the generational transference of local subjugated knowledges.

Conversely, the picture of the Daughters’ Group – the born-in-Canada women – remains incomplete in this study. Their voices are mainly utilized to shed further light on their grandmothers’ and mothers’ practices, in order to show how these women have learned to become mobile in the diaspora space despite their race/colour and gender. As Collins reminds us, though the relationship between women’s resistance practices and guiding local philosophies are intricately linked, “as social conditions change, these ties must be rethought” (2009, p. xii). Besides other differences between this last group and their respective mothers and grandmothers, stories of four out of five women in this last group show that they are overwhelmed by expectations of doing both – the child-rearing and the excelling in their careers. Recognizing the

378 crucial roles both of transmitting local educative knowledges through motherhood and of role- modeling the acquisition of formal education, these women in Daughters’ Group express a deep concern over being able to do both. Salima captures the this concern when she says, “you are still expected to get married and raise kids, and pursue excellence in higher education … but at some point it can all collapse because you can only do so much. In a way, society doesn’t expect any less of you now because you are a woman.” How do these women cope with such demands in their lives? How has this impacted on the knowledges they will pass on to the next generation of women in this particular community that will ensure them autonomy and self-sufficiency?

On the whole, this study has been focused mainly on intersectionality in terms of the interplay of race/colour and gender in the lives of these Ismaili women; however, stories of the youngest generation of women in my study reflect, for instance, issues of sexuality that need to be followed up in future studies. For example, as Nasrin narrates her ‘coming-out’ story as a “queer woman of colour,” she identifies the lacunae in this study that has not included ‘sexuality’ to provide a fuller treatment of intersectionality of Canadian Ismaili women. Nasrin explains how she authored a coming out story that was used in classroom at a Canadian university, and that story was subsequently studied by a Brown gay student whom she met professionally and mentored a few years later. That student informed her of the impact her story had made on his life. Of this experience, Nasrin concludes, “there is something about telling your story. You don’t know who’s going to take it up. But it’s our responsibility to tell our stories.” This point was reiterated by the majority of the women in my study. The stories of this generation of Canadian-born Khoja Ismaili women with East-African Indian heritages have long been waiting ‘in the wings’; these women wish to add to the voices of their mothers and grandmothers whose legacy of a local passed-on education has helped the younger women map out their lives. To shed further light on the efficacy of contextualized local agency in particular women’s lives, we need to heed Achebe’s call for a “balance of stories” whereby “those that have been written about” get to “participate in the making of the stories” (Fetters, 2013, n.p.). As Achebe muses, “until the lions have their historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” (Fetters, 2013, n.p.).

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390 Appendix A: General Information of Study

My name is Nazira Mawji, and I am a Ph. D. student at the University of Toronto, Ontario Institute of Studies in Education.

I am doing research on Canadian Ismaili women who are of the Indian – East African origins. My research focuses on the stories of experiences of the Canadian Ismaili women of the Indian-East African-Canadian background to investigate these two main issues:  First, through the stories of experiences of three generations of Ismaili women from the same family, I plan to investigate how these women - during their journeys from India, to East Africa (Uganda), to Canada - have come to understand who they are and who they have become in their positions in their own families/community, and in relation to their locations in East Africa and Canada.  Second, I want to investigate through the stories of experiences of generational groups of three women from the same family how being ‘Brown’ (or East Indian, Asian East African, South Asian, etc.), being women, and being located in certain socio-economic (class) positions, they have discovered ways of living life/doing things in ways which were passed down to them by their mothers and grandmothers (and not through official schooling) that have given them a certain amount of freedom. How have these ‘passed-on practices’ have helped them to deal with issues of control and power in their own families, in their cultural communities, and in the wider communities in the countries in which they have lived, including Canada.

In other words, my focus is to try and discover, through stories, what kinds of things the Ismaili women learned from their mothers and grandmothers (not through ‘official’ education) that have helped them become who they were and are, and to cope with their day-to-day lives in India, in East Africa, and in Canada; how this ‘knowledge’ was/is passed on to them; and how they continue(d) to pass on this knowledge to the next generation, if indeed they still do so.

In particular, I am looking for a total of 6 – 7 groups. Each group is made up of three women (a triad): a ‘grandmother’, a ‘mother’, and the ‘daughter’ triad. Each group  consists of three women from the same family: a ‘grandmother’, a ‘mother’ (who could be related to the ‘grandmother’ by birth or through marriage – her daughter of daughter- in-law), and a ‘daughter’  the ‘grandmother’ participant must be eighty years of age or older. She was either born in India, and immigrated to East Africa; or she was born in East Africa although her ancestors can be traced back to Indian origins. She migrated to Canada in/after 1970s  the ‘mother’ participant must be born/lived in East Africa until her arrival in Canada  the ‘daughter’ participant must be 21 years of age or older. She was either born in East Africa/migrated to Canada with her family, or was born in Canada after 1970

391 All three women participants in each group  will be Canadian citizens;  will understand that they will be interviewed separately, and none of the information from any participant will be shared with the other members within the same group or with the members of any other groups. Although direct quotations from their interviews will be used, utmost confidentiality will be maintained, and no real names will be used in the research process or findings to protect identities;  may take part in the research only if all three women in each family group willingly volunteer to participate;  will understand that there is no financial remuneration, and their participation in the research is strictly on a voluntary basis – with a chance to tell their stories.

392 Appendix B: Summary of Study for Participants

Raced and Gendered Subjectivities in the Diasporas: Exploring the Role of Generationally Transferred Local ‘Subjugated’ Knowledges in the Education of the Canadian Women of Asian East African Heritage

Who I am and what the research study is about

My name is Nazira Mawji and I am a Ph. D. student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, in the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Program. I am conducting a study on Canadian Ismaili women from the Indian-East African-Canadian background. I am a Canadian Ismaili woman who believes that Canadian women of Indian-Asian East African heritage are absent from official historical records: their voices have not been heard and their stories of experiences have not been told. My research is an attempt to provide a site from which these women may tell their stories from India, from East Africa, and from Canada, stories about their roles within their families, the larger community, and under different political locations – stories that show how these women have engaged in practices based on passed-on ‘knowledges’ (from women of the older generations within their families) as an ‘educative’ tool to not just cope with their lives, but to have some ‘say’, and enjoy some autonomy in their lives.

What is involved in this study?

Canadian Ismaili women may participate in this study in family groups of three, or triad. Each triad (or family group) is made up of three women from the same family: a ‘grandmother’ (80 years or older), a ‘mother’ (who could be either a daughter or daughter-in-law of the first woman), and a ‘daughter’ (who is over 21 years of age). All three women must be Canadian Ismailis from the Indian East African heritage, and the first two women must either be born in East Africa or have lived there until their migration to Canada after 1970.

This research is based on stories of experiences. As a participant from a triad, you will be asked questions about your background history, (including your family genealogy, your family migratory history, your socio-economic background in different locations, etc.) about your formal education, your customs and traditions, travel, etc. In particular there will be questions asking for stories that show the kinds of informal educative influences on you from other women in your family; the effects of their influences on your life, on their/your positions and roles within the family and the larger communities; and your role in passing on the informal educative knowledges leading to practices that proved valuable to the next generation of women. You will be requested to commit to one interview of about three hours at a place of convenience for you, with a possibility of some follow-up informal conversation time, if necessary or requested by you if you feel your stories have not been fully told.

393 You will have the opportunity to discuss this study and have all questions answered to your satisfaction. Please note that the participation in this study is fully voluntary. There is no compensation except the opportunity to tell your stories. You can refuse to participate, or refuse to answer any question at any point in the interview. You can withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. If you wish to withdraw, all information collected during the interview/conversations will be destroyed immediately, and no be used in the research study. If you should choose to withdraw then the other two members in your family triad will have to withdraw from the study too.

In order to effectively understand and accurately represent your stories, I will be audio taping the interview, and the subsequent informal conversation should it take place.. However, you have the option of choosing not to be audio taped, in which case I will take notes during the interview. If you do choose to be audio taped, each tape will be transcribed very shortly after the interview for content analysis and then destroyed.

Although this study involves three women from the same family, interviews with each family member will be conducted separately, and kept confidential from other members of the triad, and from the members of the other triad. All data that identifies you personally, such as your name and contact information, will be removed from all transcripts, as will names and information regarding any third parties mentioned in your stories. All transcripts of the taped material will be stored in a password protected external hard drive in my home until I have completed writing my dissertation after which all transcripts of the data will be destroyed. During the analysis phase of my research, I will encrypt all data that is temporarily stored on a portable USB memory device or on my laptop. Your name will not be disclosed to anyone.

I may use some direct quotations or paraphrased information from some parts of your interview in my research findings and final dissertation. Should you be uncomfortable about being identified by any family/community member(s), or suspect some adverse consequences that may result if you should be recognized, you have several options that I have built into this study for your protection. I will maintain your anonymity and the confidentiality of your information by using pseudonyms of your choice at every stage of the research. I will also use pseudonyms for any third parties that you mention in your interviews. You may withdraw from the study at any stage without penalty, upon which time all data gathered from your interviews (tapes, transcripts, and notes) will be immediately destroyed and not be included in the study. Your real name will not appear on any documents other than the consent form. This form will be locked up in a drawer in a locked room to which only I have access.

If you wish, you will be given the opportunity to review the transcript and a summary of the research findings (in English only) so that you may inform me if there are parts of the transcript/research findings that would lead to the knowledge of your identity, or to information that may cause you to suffer consequences as a result. I will exclude these parts upon your request.

394 What are the risks and benefits?

In the short term, by participating in this study you may personally benefit from the opportunity to tell your stories to someone who shares a similar community, diasporic, and the neo/post/colonial history with you, someone who is interested in having your voices heard through your stories, and, who is recording your experiences in the East African – Canadian diasporas in order to fill the gap in the historical landscape. In the longer term, by participating in this study, your stories may affect social and educational change in Canada. By contributing to differential and different knowledges mobilized by different Canadian women (other than white), and in this case those whose identities are affected by the intensifying effects of race (in particular, ‘Brown’), gender, class and age, to ‘matter’, may cause certain knowledges as yet unacknowledged to surface, be validated, and used to open up further research possibilities for Canada’s many gendered ‘others’ that not only inform the wider Canadian community, but may also lead to effect change for true inclusivity.

There are no foreseeable physical, social or legal risks in participating in this study. However, you may feel some psychological/emotional discomfort during the interview process in speaking about events that have led to your immigration to Canada, about the challenges you have faced in your gender and class positions/roles in your family/community, and of race, gender and class positions in your neo/post/colonial locations in East Africa and Canada. To mitigate these, I will employ all means to ensure that the interview is conducted to suit your comfort level, and be prepared to pause or stop the interview at any point that you indicate without any penalty to you.

Compensation and Costs

There is no direct compensation offered to the participants of this study. There are no costs to participating in this study: I shall travel to the participants and transport them (locally) to places convenient/selected by them for the interviews.

Publications and Summary of Results

I will offer you a summary of the research findings (electronic and/or hard copy). I will invite you to any small group /community social gatherings (excluding scholarly conferences/presentations) where the findings of the research will be discussed. You will not be identified and your participation in the project will remain anonymous at all/any such gatherings. Finally, I plan to submit my findings to scholarly journals and present them at scholarly conferences.

Contacts

Dr. Sherene Razack, a senior faculty member in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE, is overseeing this study and can be contacted at any point if you have questions/comments. As well, you can contact the Office of Research Ethics at ______

395 or telephone 416 946 3273 at any time with questions about your rights as a participant in this study.

If you have any questions/concerns about the study of want an update on its status, please contact:

Nazira Mawji or Dr. Sherene Razack, SESE, OISE PH 05-58 Marine Parade Dr. 252 Bloor Street West Toronto, ON M8V 4G1 Toronto, On M5S 1V6 ______

Sincerely, Nazira Mawji

396 Appendix C: Consent Form

Consent:

I understand the information presented about this study. I have had the opportunity to discuss this study, and my questions have been answered to my satisfaction. I consent to take part in this study. I understand a) that my participation in the study includes 1 interview lasting 3 hours followed by one-two subsequent interviews/conversations on the telephone as required; b) that I can refuse to answer any question during the interviews, and may withdraw from the study at any time without penalty; c) that I may only participate if all three members in my family triad agree to participate; d) that only pseudonyms will be used in this study; and d) my participation is voluntary, and I expect no remuneration. I have willingly signed this consent form to be able to participate in this study.

______

Participant’s Name (PRINT) Participant’s Signature Date of Interview

I voluntarily consent to being audio-taped for the interviews for this study.

YES:______NO:______(Please check one)

______Participant’s Name Participant’s Signature Date

I would like to receive all transcripts of my interviews.

YES: ______NO:______(Please check one)

______Participant’s Name Participant’s Signature Date

397 Appendix D: Question Guide for Semi-Structured, Conversational Style Interviews

1. Questions on migration history from Indian subcontinent to East Africa Prompts: Places of birth of great-grandmothers/grandfathers; grandparents, and other family members; Reasons for migration to East Africa; Who migrated, when, how, why, and under what circumstances; How were they received in East Africa?; What was their occupation in East Africa?; Circumstances of settlement; Relations with indigenous Africans; Relations with colonial administrators; Economic status; Relations with Ismaili community. 2. Questions on histories in East Africa: Mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law

Prompts on family background: Migration and movement within East Africa; family occupation; family’s socio-economic standing; political involvement; relations within Ismaili community, indigenous people, colonial administrators, other communities. Prompts on personal history: Birthplace; siblings; formal education; marital status; occupation before/after marriage; movements within East Africa. 3. Questions on Mother’s Location and role a) in her birth family, b) in her husband’s family, and c) in the community Prompts: What were expectations of your mother within her parents’ home? Were they the same for all of her siblings? How was she regarded in her husband’s home? (a ‘good’ daughter/in-law? A rebel? The major income-earner? Full-time mother?); What criteria were emphasized for women in her family? For men? For girls? For boys? How was she regarded in the family? In what ways was she seen to contribute in the family? Was she expected to attend school? To work outside of the home? To have a career? Why/why not? Who selected her marriage partner? How old was she when she married? What were the expectations of her once she married? As a wife, as a mother, as a daughter-in-law, as a mother-in-law? What was her role in the Ismaili community? Within the larger society? What relationships did she have with people outside the Ismaili community? With the indigenous Africans? 4. How did the migration and settlement in Canada affect the female members in your family? Your a) mother? b) grandmother? c) mother-in-law? Prompts: Did your family arrive in Canada directly from Uganda? What reaction did your mother/grandmother/mother-in-law have to the expulsion? What role did she play in the settlement process? Was it the same as the male members of the family? How was it the same? Different? How has her role changed since her arrival in Canada? Is she a full-time mother? How is she perceived in Canada in the family? In the Ismaili community? In the larger society? How have her actions affected your family? You? What is her status as an immigrant? What role does she play in your family? In the Ismaili community? In the

398 larger society? Have you been influenced in any way by her actions? Behaviour? What did she do that you would not do? How has she influenced your life? 4b. Based on your observations, or through stories you have heard from members of the family, describe specific ‘challenges’ that were faced/are still being faced by your a) mother, b) grandmother, c) mother-in-law) in Canada? Prompts: In the family; In the Ismaili community; Outside the home (job, occupation, etc.); Health-wise. How were these challenges the same/different from the male members of the family? How did her education/lack of contribute to her challenges? How did she resolve those challenges? What kinds of resources/support/help did she seek? Did she receive help from other women (mother, grandmother, siblings, fictional heroines, allies, community members, etc.)? Did her actions affect/influence you in any way? Affect any other members of the family? Affect members of the community? Do you see a ‘pattern’ or ‘method’ in the way she attempts to resolve the challenges? What do you think she has learned from those challenges? What do you think you have learned from her actions? Have you applied anything you have learned from watching her actions in your own life? Why/why not? How? 5. In what ways has your a) mother’s, b) grandmother’s, and/or c) mother-in-law’s daily life practices influenced your life? Prompts: What do you think you have learned by watching her/talking to her? How has this affected your life? Who you are/have become/are becoming? Is there anything you have learned not to do by watching her? How have you influenced her life? With what results? 6. Questions on the participant’s own history Prompts on family background: Birthplace of parents; siblings of parents; formal education of parents; family’s social/economic status; family’s role/involvement in the Ismaili community; family’s role/involvement with the larger community; father’s/mother’s occupation. Prompts on personal background: Birthplace; siblings;, formal education; marital status; occupation before/after marriage; number of children; migratory history; involvement in community. 6b. Describe your location and role(s) as a member of your a) birth family, and b) your family by marriage Prompts: Same in Uganda and Canada? Same as the male members? How were/are expectations the same or different for you as for other members of the family? Have the expectations changed from what was expected of your mother and grandmother(s) in their families? How/why? How are you perceived (a rebel? wife and mother? the main income-earner?)? How have the expectations changed now that you are married? In what ways do you feel valued as a member of your family? How has your socio-economic status changed since your marriage? In what way(s) do you see

399 yourself responsible for this change? How have you been influenced by your mother and/or grandmother in the way you live your daily life? What do you do that is very similar? Different? Would/do you teach your children to do the things you learned from your mother/grandmother/mother-in-law? Do you see your children practise the things they see you doing? 6c. Describe your location and role(s) as a member of the Ismaili community (in East Africa and in Canada) Prompts: How were/are your roles as a woman influenced as a member of the Ismaili community? How have you felt about that? Do you see yourself as ‘Ismaili’? How has being an Ismaili affected you in East Africa? Canada? Have you given or received support from the Ismaili community? How do you see the role of the Ismaili community in your life? 6d. Describe your location and role(s) as a member of the larger (East African and Canadian) community. Prompts: How did you see yourself ‘located’ in East Africa? Uganda? What kinds of daily interactions did you have with the indigenous Africans? With the ‘whites’? With other Indians? How did they relate to you? Did you ever consider marrying outside your community? How do you feel you are perceived in Canada? With whom do you interact with comfort in Canada? How is being in Canada different from being in Uganda? How has immigration to Canada affected your role and expectations? Have you ever been treated differently because of your gender and colour? Do you see yourself as an immigrant? As a Canadian? How often have you been asked, “Where do you come from?”?. Who normally asks those questions in Canada? What is your response? What is the questioner’s reaction to your response? 7. In what ways is your life similar to/different from that of your a) mother (in-law), and/or b) grandmother(s)? Prompts: What do you do in your daily life that is the similar to and/or different from her? How have her actions/practices/beliefs influenced your life? What challenges do you face in Canada that are similar to/different from hers? 7b. How has your life been influenced by the lives of the women in your family? Prompts: How has your relationship with your mother/grandmother(s)/mother-in-law impacted on your life? Is there anything you feel you have learned directly or unconsciously from the women in your family that helps/hinders you in your daily life? How have influences from the women in your life affected who you are today? Has your opinion of your mother or grandmother changed in any way? Have you learned anything from the women in your family that is valuable and could not be learned at school? How would you describe your relationship with your mother (in-law), and/or your grandmother(s)? Do you identify with any of the women in your family? Has the generational gap proved of value or been an obstacle to the relationships between women? Can you pick at least something you have learned from any woman in your

400 family that you helps you in your daily life that you hope to teach your children? How have you influenced the lives of the women in your family? 8. How much do you think your self-worth is determined by the colour of your skin? In what ways has your brown colour (including the shade of ‘brownness’) affected your self- image? Prompts: How much of how you are valued as a woman depends on the colour of your skin and the shades of your brown colour? To whom do such differences matter? Has it ever affected your self-worth? How do the women in your family react to the colour of their skins? What messages do they pass on to you? 8b. Some people have argued that brown/Indian women have been stereotyped as being ‘passive’ and ‘submissive’ and dependent upon their men. What actions have you observed in the lives of the women in your family that contradict or support this view? 8c. How do your own actions contradict this view? Are your actions in any way learned from the women in your family? 8d. What does the term ‘agency’ mean to you? If I defined the term to mean ‘actions people take to prevent being dominated by others’, do you see any of the women in your family as ‘agents’ of their own lives? Have their actions in any way influenced the way you act in your life in Canada? 9. Aga Khan III has pushed for formal education of Ismaili girls. How has this translated in the lives of your grandmother(s) and mother? In your own life? 9b. Have any women in your family been able to be economically independent as a result of the Aga Khan’s policies to push education for Ismaili women? Why/why not? 10. Where/what is ‘home’ for you? What determines where you ‘belong’? Is ‘home’ a geographical location or does it mean something else for you?

11. How would you describe who you are today based on your gender, race/colour? 11b. If I was writing a description of you, what three characteristics would you want me to emphasize about you? 11c. How much of those are inherited from your mother(in-law)? Grandmother(s)? Someone else? How much of this would your daughter recognize as being passed on from your mother? Grandmothers? 11d. If you were to write a letter expressing the valuable lessons you have inherited from you’re a) mother, and b) from your grandmother, what lessons would you identify? What would say to them about how these lessons help you in your daily life?

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Appendix E: Description of Participants in This Study

For this study, fifteen Ismaili women-participants comprise three generational triads: each grandmother, mother, and daughter triad is made up of three generations of women from the same family. At the time of the interviews, except for one woman, all of the women lived between two major cities, on the East and West coasts of Canada. The exception in this case had moved from Canada to America. Within the five triads, all of the first and second generation women had been born in East Africa, except for one woman, who was born in India and arrived in East Africa with her family when she was 11 years old. All five women in the youngest generation were born in Canada. Owing to the generational aspect of this study, the women’s ages ranged from 18 to 88 years at the time of the interviews; however, all of these women were in sound health and participated in this study with equal commitment and enthusiasm. The women of the first two generations arrived in Canada with varying levels of formal education: while all of the women in the oldest generation could read, write and speak in Gujarati, Cutchi, and/or Hindi, and could read and write in English, they spoke English with varying levels of fluency and comfort. When they arrived in Canada, all of the women in the middle generation were between 13 to 24 years of age. Although most of them had their schooling interrupted because of their sudden expulsion from Uganda in 1972, they all spoke English very comfortably.

One of the dilemmas that surfaced early in this study was a logistical one: to find a way to distinguish the women of different generations and the women of the different triads. This distinction is important since this study seeks to identify the different forms of local agency these women demonstrate through the particular kinds of local educative knowledges they transmit to the successive generations of women to teach them to survive and thrive in diaspora space. Hence, for this purpose, the oldest generation of women is often referred to as the ‘Grandmothers’ Group’, the women from the middle generation are collected under the ‘Mothers’ Group’, and the youngest generation of the triads is named the ‘Daughters’ Group’. Similarly, each generational triad of women from the same family is made distinguishable through pseudonyms that begin with the same letter. The following brief profiles of the women

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in my study are arranged in their respective triads; as mentioned before, some peripheral details have been changed to ensure the anonymity of the participants.

The descriptions of the fifteen women are arranged according to family triads of three women, starting with the grandmothers, followed by the mothers and concluding with the daughters (Section One). This arrangement is reproduced in the visual at the end of this appendix (Section Two).

Section One: Descriptions of Participants

Triad 1: Khairoon, Khatoon, and Karima

The Grandmothers’ Group: Khairoon.

At the time of the interview, Khairoon was 88 years old and lived a semi-retired life in a house she owned in a Canadian city, working from the home “to keep myself busy and to pay my expenses.” She was born in a small town in what was then Tanganyika (later, Tanzania), and she lost both her parents before she was two years old. Her three slightly older sisters brought her up in her uncle’s household, and she had completed all the grades (primary) offered by the local Ismaili school, before her marriage was arranged at age sixteen by her uncle. She lived in several different towns in East Africa to accommodate her husband’s search for better jobs, and she worked at the small local community schools teaching mathematics and Gujarati to supplement her husband’s income. She settled in Kampala with her husband and four children and continued to work outside the home, later helping her husband run the small retail store he owned. She claimed to be a sports enthusiast, playing badminton weekly, and she participated in the social activities organized to celebrate Ismaili religious festivals. When Idi Amin deported the Indians from Uganda in 1972, she and her husband were travelling and were stranded in a European city, where they settled. Khairoon continued to work and live in the European city even after the death of her husband, and she immigrated to Canada 16 years later to settle in the same city as her daughters. There, she purchased a home and worked out of it to be able to continue living independently. Her daughter Khatoon is the youngest of her four children.

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The Mothers’ Group: Khatoon.

Khatoon was 47 years old at the time I interviewed her. She was born in Uganda, and she was in Kampala living with relatives to prepare for her provincial primary school exams while her parents were travelling in Europe when Amin declared that Asians in Uganda had three months to leave. One of her siblings was able to enter Uganda and escort Khatoon to her parents in Europe. Khatoon attended three years of high school in the new place of settlement with her parents, and three years later, when her father died of a terminal illness, she was sent to Canada to finish her schooling and attend university. Although a serious accident prolonged her schooling, she finished her secondary schooling in Canada. During this time, she made trips to Europe to see her mother every year, and she met a young man, also an Ismaili, whom she married. They settled in Canada and worked part time while they continued with more university education. Their academic training resulted in good job prospects for both Khatoon and her husband in Canada, so after she opened up her own chiropractor practice, she had a child, Karima, and also helped her mother move to Canada. After a few more years, Khatoon and a friend partnered to open a business enterprise catering to cosmetic and health needs of women. Currently, Khatoon is divorced from her husband but claims that the business in partnership with her friend has grown substantially and keeps her very busy.

The Daughters’ Group: Karima.

Karima was 18 years old at the time of the interview. She was attending a Canadian university but was making plans to attend a European university to follow a career that her mother had suggested would be good for her. She attended private kindergarten, elementary and secondary schools in Canada, and she had travelled extensively first with her parents, and then later, after the divorce of her parents, with her mother. Of all the places she travelled to, she said she liked India best. Karima claimed she had spent a lot of her very young childhood in the company of her grandmother, who had taught her to cook, something her mother did not like to do as much. In spite of her parents’ divorce, she maintains she has a good relationship with both of her parents.

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Triad 2: Noorbhegum, Nurjhan, and Nasrin

The Grandmothers’ Group: Noorbhegum.

Noorbhegum was 87 years old at the time I interviewed her. She was born in the former Tanganyika, the oldest of four children and the only female child in the family. Her father owned a small retail business and the property in which they and his brothers lived. He was a respected member of the community who served two terms as a religious leader at the local jamatkhana. Noorbhegum led a sheltered life and attended the local Ismaili community school, but before she could complete the last class offered, she was pulled out of school to attend to her young siblings because her parents were engaged in their religious obligations in the community. Her parents arranged her marriage to a man in Kenya when she was nineteen, after which she lived in a large extended family household where she had very little clout. She catered to the needs of the extended family as well as those of her four children. When the family businesses in a town in Kenya failed, she moved with her husband, her mother-in-law and her children to Kampala, Uganda. Her husband passed away a few months before the expulsion of the Indians from Uganda in 1972. Subsequently, Noorbhegum moved to England with her young family. There, she was supported by her older son, who had given up higher education to pursue a job in order to support the displaced family. Noorbhegum also supplemented their income through a part- time job worked from the home. She attributes the social and moral support from the Ismaili religious community for her wellbeing. Within a few years, Noorbhegum’s son was able to purchase a home for them. After her oldest daughter, Nurjhan, moved to Canada, Noorbhegum was able to obtain immigration status in Canada and spend a few months every year with her daughter.

The Mothers’ Group: Nurjhan.

At the time of the interview, Nurjhan was 64 years old. She was born in a town in Kenya when her father’s family businesses were doing well. She grew up in her father’s extended family home for the first 10 years of her life, during which time she attended the Aga Khan Kindergarten and Primary School in the Kenyan town. The failure of the family businesses and the loss of their properties propelled the family, including Nurjhan, her parents, her two siblings

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and her paternal grandmother, to move to Kampala. Here, she attended the Aga Khan Secondary School at a time when the Ismaili community institutions were providing world-class education under the directions and policies of Aga Khan IV. This was also the time when Uganda was preparing to become an independent nation. Having completed her secondary education, Nurjhan entered the local university in Kampala in an undergraduate Arts programme with the intention of pursuing a career in teaching: Nurjhan and her female contemporaries were the leading edge generation that was benefitting from the edicts of the third Aga Khan to educate girls. After completing her degree, Nurjhan taught in an Aga Khan School for a year before she married the man of her choice, who had also obtained an engineering degree abroad and returned to Uganda. Soon after her marriage, Nurjhan left with her husband for England, where her husband pursued a post-graduate degree while she attended university for a teaching diploma. Meanwhile, Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Indians brought a change in Nurjhan and her husband’s life: the political climate in England was changing owing to the vitriolic rhetoric of the local politicians who were using the influx of Ugandan immigrants to buttress their political ambitions. The change in the local attitudes and the difficulty of obtaining jobs brought Nurjhan and her husband to Canada.

In Canada, Nurjhan took up a profession in the education field while her husband obtained an engineering position, and later opened a business of his own. They were able to purchase a home and raise two children. Nurjhan served in various positions as an educator in Canadian schools: she was a department head, a coordinator in a school board, and an administrator at a school until her retirement. At the time of this interview, Nurjhan and her two children were all pursuing post-graduate degrees.

The Daughters’ Group: Nasrin.

Nasrin was pursuing a medical degree in America at the time of her interview; she was 33 years old. She was born in a Canadian city on the East coast and grew up in a suburban neighbourhood, accessing a French immersion education through the neighbourhood elementary and high schools. In her childhood years, she travelled with her family, and later on she traveled on her own to many different parts of the world, something she still continues to do today. Her mother’s passion for promoting race and gender equity fuelled Nasrin very early to join groups like the Planned Parenthood and to run sandwich runs for local shelters. She obtained an

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undergraduate degree in science from a Canadian university, and then went on to pursue post- graduate work in science at a university in England before embarking on a career in medicine. Nasrin remembers the time she came out to her family as a lesbian as one of the most liberating moments of her life. Her hiking interests have taken her to climb Kilimanjaro and walk the Machu Pichu trail, while her health interests have encouraged her to volunteer time in Soweto on women’s health issues and in Honduras for a term to provide health care to local people. Currently, Nasrin shares her life with her girlfriend and practises medicine in a city on the East coast of Canada.

Triad 3: Fatma, Farida, and Farene

The Grandmothers’ Group: Fatma.

Fatma spent her time between Kenya and Uganda before she immigrated to Canada. She was 84 at the time of her interview. She was born into a family in East Africa where squabbles between different business partnerships caused her father to spend long periods of time away from home driving transport trucks through mud-drenched tracks in East Africa that left Fatma, her siblings and their mother very worried. Fatma’s memories of her childhood centre anxiety for her father: she saw her mother supplement their family income by taking in sewing from members of the Ismaili community. At the same time, Fatma remembers her mother serving the extended family and the needy in the community in the small town in Uganda where Fatma was born. Fatma recalls that by the time her marriage was arranged to a man in Kenya, her father was just beginning to re-establish himself in a small business in Central Africa.

Fatma recalls her married life as being even harder and more poverty-stricken than it had been in the town where she grew up: the family sold fruit in way-side stalls on major routes for cars and trucks. In such times of hardship, she recollects her father and mother sending her clothes for herself and her children. She recalls living with her mother and father-in-law, her husband’s brothers, their wives and children in a small extended family home for decades before the family became more solid economically through their combined efforts and were able to own a farm, a small grocery store and later gas-stations in East Africa. Fatma reveals that just when the families – her father and brothers and her husband and his brothers – were becoming economically stronger, they were expelled from Uganda in 1972, losing everything they had

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owned. They had to begin all over again in Canada. Fatma and her family are economically more stable in Canada because her husband and his brothers had invested in a business in Canada a few years prior to the expulsion. Although Fatma’s husband passed away a few years after they arrived in Canada, her husband’s shares in their expanding businesses were honoured by the family, and she is able to live a highly comfortable life. Fatma became more independent after her husband took ill, and she even learned to drive a car to get around in the Canadian city on her own.

The Mothers’ Group: Farida.

When I interviewed Farida, she was 62 years old. She was born in a small town in Kenya, East Africa. However, she grew up in another small town in Uganda, where her father looked after the small grocery store that was owned by him and his brothers. She remembers this place as being the happiest she had seen her mother: her mother was freed from having to put up with the extended family and Fatma was able to spend leisure time with Punjabi women friends who were educated, warm, and accomplished in cooking and the sewing arts. Farida moved to Kampala with her family after they had sold their growing businesses and invested in businesses in Kampala, which allowed them to lead a comfortable life. She remembers always being treated differently from her brothers because she was a girl. Farida attended a university in Kenya, where she was pursuing a degree in science: she was hoping to become a pharmacist. However, her education was interrupted when she met a Ugandan Ismaili man who courted her and asked her to marry him, promising her that she could continue with her university education in Canada. She remembers how naïve she was when she married in 1971 and left for Canada, where her husband had settled before their marriage.

The eviction of Indians from Uganda meant that Farida was unable to pursue her university education: the money that her husband’s family was sending them while her husband tried to find a job stopped. Farida did some courses in typing and accounts and took on a job to support her husband, who again promised her that she could go back to school once the business he had started took off. In the meantime, Farida became pregnant and her husband’s business flourished and expanded into America, so he spent a large amount of time away from home, and she was

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left to bring up her child on her own. Farida found support from her mother-in-law, who convinced her to turn her attention to keeping her family together.

When her husband’s business was thriving, Farida went back to university but was convinced by her husband to do a degree in computer science instead of what she wanted to pursue. She worked with a company for several years before they moved to America, where she had her second child. Today, her husband’s businesses are thriving and Farida tries to pursue her own interest in sculpturing but finds it hard to sustain because she is required to travel with her husband.

The Daughters’ Group: Farene.

Farene lives in Canada and was 38 at the time of the interview. She was married, with two children, and was a full-time mother and housewife. She was born in Canada, and she remembers spending alone time with her mother (attention which she rather enjoyed) while her father was absent from home on business trips. She attended private schools and had just started to attend a small private university in America, but she chose to interrupt her university education to marry and settle down. She oversaw her children’s extra-curricular activities and spent time teaching them to clean up after themselves and to cook, although Farene and her husband are wealthy enough to afford full-time staff to take care of baby-sitting and the cleaning of their home. Although Farene has Ismaili friends, she is not keen to attend jamatkhana since she believes that it has come to represent a place to show one’s wealth in Canada rather than existing as a spiritual place of worship. Although Farene herself claims to find more affinity with the Hindu faith (and believes in of the human soul), she wants her children to be able to attend organized Ismaili religious classes to get moral values and religious education that she and her sister missed because of their father’s disenchantment with Ismaili leadership.

Farene’s husband and her mother have been advising Farene to either join her husband in his business or to attend university and obtain some formal qualifications that will place her in good stead in times of trouble. At the time of the interview, Farene was considering going back to university for a fine arts degree because she wanted to model for her children the importance of formal (higher) education.

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Triad 4: Zuleikha, Zareena, and Zarah

The Grandmothers’ Group: Zuleikha.

Zuleikha had been separated from her husband for one year, after 65 years of marriage, when I interviewed her at age 83. She has five children (who were all born in East Africa), three of whom live in the same city in Canada as Zuleikha. She arrived with her family to Canada as a part of the Asian exodus out of Uganda in 1972. Zuleikha was born in a different part of Africa but moved to East Africa at age 16, when she persuaded her father to allow her to marry the man of her choice in the late 1940s, something that was unusual for Ismaili women to do during that time. When she was unable to feed her growing family in Uganda, Zuleikha found jobs to support her family.

In the late 1950s, Zuleikha acquired a diploma in early childhood education through a correspondence course; she earned money by baby-sitting to pay the course fees. On an Ismaili bursary, she travelled to England to take the course exams. With her newly acquired qualifications, Zuleikha started her own day care in Uganda, which grew into three lucrative schools just prior to her immigration to Canada. Before she left Uganda in 1972, she purchased round-the-world airline tickets for all members of her family, which she cashed once in Canada to purchase a house for her family. Later, she ran a daycare out of her home in Canada. Although she is retired now, she was the main breadwinner for her family in Canada.

The Mothers’ Group: Zareena.

Zareena was working in an administrative capacity for an international development agency in a Canadian city when I interviewed her. She was 55 years old. Zareena was born in Uganda and attended private White schools in Uganda prior to her departure from Uganda at age 13. Her family home was located right opposite an area controlled by Idi Amin’s special forces, and Zareena claims she and her siblings were privy to daily viewings of mutilated corpses tied to the fences around the property. Sensing the danger to their children, Zareena’s parents used their American contacts in Uganda to send her and her sister away to different American cities just prior to the Asian expulsion from Uganda. Just before she turned 18 years old, Zareena drove herself to Canada and joined her family.

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Zareena attended a Canadian university and worked for the Ministry of Parks and Recreation before working in a voluntary capacity in an African country. Later, she worked in an African country for an NGO before she was hired by an international development organization. She married a non-Ismaili Canadian, and they had one child before her husband passed away from a terminal illness. The husband’s family has broken all ties with her and blames her for her husband’s illness and death. Zareena was the main agent in the family in getting her mother, Zuleikha, out of the abusive family home and into a very safe and pleasant abode.

The Daughters’ Group: Zarah.

Zarah was 19 at the time of the interview. She was born in Canada; she is a child of a ‘mixed’ marriage. Her father died when she was 5 years old. She has very close ties with her maternal grandmother, Zuleikha, who has filled in the gap left by her late father and her father’s family who have ‘disowned’ her. All this has contributed to Zarah’s troubled childhood.

Zarah acquired an undergraduate degree in anthropology from a Canadian university, after which she worked for an NGO in an African country for one year. She resigned from this position because of the racist attitudes and practices of the Canadian directors hired by the NGO. However, Zarah’s explanation for her resignation in an official report resulted in the firing of the directors by the NGO. A week after her interview with me, Zarah was on her way to volunteer for an international charitable organization to work for a year in the same African country.

Triad 5: Sakina, Shirin, and Salima

The Grandmothers’ Group: Sakina.

At the time of her interview, Sakina was 78 years old. She was born in a small town in India and arrived in Uganda from Bombay at the end of the Second World War, at age 11. Her mother wanted her two daughters to receive formal education, so she persuaded her husband to settle in Kampala (where secondary schooling was available) instead of joining his brother in his small retail business in a small town. Sakina claims that consequently her family lived in poverty for much of Sakina’s childhood, since jobs were scarce and often her father had to travel far to work. Sakina is the oldest of four children, and one of her brothers died in a house-accident as a toddler in Uganda. Sakina completed a couple of years of high school before choosing marriage to her

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more-than-decade-older first cousin.

Before and after her marriage, Sakina was very close to her mother-in-law (also her aunt) and her grandmother. She is one of the women I met who thanks Amin for getting her and her family out of Uganda and into Canada; she feels Canada offers more opportunities and more freedom in general and for women in particular. She found work as soon as she arrived in Canada, and in spite of interminable baby-sitting problems, she went to school in the evenings to learn accounting and bookkeeping. She was able to find herself employment in a financial institution in the suburbs, but she lost her job as a result of racist attitudes. However, she persevered to find employment in another financial institution where she received the most prestigious employee award before retirement. She attended school as a mature student in Canada and submitted some articles, which were published in a local community newspaper. Her plans for further higher education were interrupted by poor health. Sakina claims she has led a good, but at times hard, life with a highly demanding, conventional, and alcoholic husband.

The Mothers’ Group: Shirin.

Shirin is the oldest of her three siblings, all of whom were born in Uganda. She attended private White elementary schools in Uganda and then the Aga Khan Secondary School. Because her father kept his British Protected Person status, during the Obote regime, Shirin was unable to access secondary school education at the A Levels. Refusing the offer from his brother to send Shirin to England (where the brother lived), Shirin’s conservative father sent her to strangers in India (where she had never been) to continue with her secondary education. She remembers the year as one of the most miserable times of her life. However, when Obote was ousted by Amin, Shirin was able to resume her schooling in Uganda for a short while before the Asian expulsion in 1972; she was unable to complete her A Levels.

Shirin and her family were able to come to Canada because her uncle and aunt had established themselves, having immigrated earlier. Shirin found employment at Woolworth’s, the day after her arrival in Canada, in order to support her family. Shirin completed her high school education in Canada while working part-time to contribute to the family income. She put herself through two years of university in a science undergraduate programme, but found it tough having to study, work part-time and contribute to the domestic work expected of her in her gender. At the

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same time, her father forbade her from communicating with an Ismaili male classmate with whom she has reconnected but who is attending university in Britain. Exhausted and nearing a nervous breakdown, Shirin went against the wishes of her father, and travelled to England to get to know her boyfriend. In this she is fully supported by both her paternal and maternal grandmothers. Shirin claims that observing her mother’s location in her marital partnership informed Shirin’s own choice of partner: she did not want to be in a marital partnership where her voice was inconsequential.

Shirin found work to support herself in England while she visited her boyfriend. At the end of the year, when her boyfriend has also almost finished his university education, Shirin returned to Canada and made up with her father, found her boyfriend a job in his field, and married him. Shirin found a job at a financial institution while her husband got his Canadian immigration status. When she had her first child, Shirin chose to be a full-time mother and housewife, supported by her husband who had started his own business. After both her children started high school, Shirin went back to school, acquired a teaching diploma and found employment in a community college, training pharmacy assistants. Independently, she created a curriculum for training pharmacy assistants at a community college level and set up her own business to sell the curriculum to other teaching institutions and train their teaching staff in her Canadian province.

Shirin also played a leadership role in her local jamatkhana. At the time I interviewed her, she had retired from her business at age 60, because of family health issues and because her husband was expanding his business.

The Daughters’ Group: Salima.

Salima was born and grew up in Canada; she is the younger of two children. At the time of the interview, Salima was 28 years old, and she was completing her specialty in medicine after having married her Ismaili boyfriend the year before. Salima describes herself as more of a free spirit compared to her older sibling. She portrays her mother as the person who took charge of their lives, so that although she set boundaries for their behaviour, she also communicated high expectations and provided her children with unconditional loving and practical support. By contrast, Salima describes her father as her ‘friend’. She shows great admiration for her maternal

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grandmother, claiming that she has learned to cook from her and, in the process, established a deep bond with her.

She claims to be affected by the expulsion and immigration stories of her parents and grandparents and their settlement hardships; as a result, both she and her sister work hard to not disappoint them. Salima explained that she faced less prejudice in high school, medical school, and in general in Canada because of her light complexion and light-coloured eyes, but also because she fit the White perceptions about “Brown Indian people” – she was expected to be smart and hard-working academically. When she decided to go into chiropractic school (to be with her boyfriend), even though she was simultaneously admitted to medicine at a Canadian university close her home, her mother was disappointed, but let her go. Salima returned home and to medicine a few months later because she realized that her mother had been right, and Salima felt no interest for chiropractic education.

Section Two: Visual Representation of Participants

Figure 9: Visual representation of participant triads.