Marriage, Migration, Multiculturalism: Gendering ‘The Bengal Diaspora’

Transnational marriage has been at the centre of controversies around migration control and multiculturalism in Britain in the past decade, with South Asian Muslim women placed at the heart of concerns around integration, segregation and ‘parallel lives’. Such discourses perpetuate a pathologised and ahistorical account of gendered processes of migration in which subcontinental marriages are viewed as posing barriers for integration and belonging. Drawing on interviews with Bangladeshi Muslim brides, this article challenges these dominant accounts and argues, instead, for viewing marriage as a field of interaction and exchange, which is itself formed and transformed through the process of migration. Using Levitt and Glick Schiller's idea of ‘transnational social fields’, the paper explores the complex levels of interaction and (ex)change, relations of power and historical dynamics of transnational marriage amongst this community in Britain.