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Katy Gardner
Lives in motion: the life-course, movement
and migration in Bangladesh

Article (Accepted version)

(Refereed)

Original citation:
Gardner, Katy (2009) Lives in motion: the life-course, movement and migration in Bangladesh.
Journal of south Asian development, 4 (2). pp. 229-251. ISSN 0973-1741
DOI: 10.1177/097317410900400204

© 2009 SAGE Publications

This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/52765/

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Lives in Motion: The Life-Course, Movement and Migration in Bangladesh

October 2008
Katy Gardner
University of Sussex

As a particular genre of self help manual is apt to assert: ‘life is a journey’.

Whilst somewhat clichéd, the imagery evoked - of movement through one’s life
course over a variety of emotional or spiritual terrains - forms a useful entree to the
theme of this paper: the relationship between the embodied journeys through time that
anthropologists term ‘the life course’, and the journeys through space and place that,
according to different contexts may or may not be classified as ‘migration’.
If life is a journey, one might ask, how does migration to particular places affect our
experience of moving through life? Turn the question around and the answers
provide fertile terrain for those seeking to understand why people migrate: how does
movement through the life course affect our propensity to move? Whilst at first sight
these answers would seem to concern the vagaries of individual lives and biographies 1
and hence the micro-level of analysis, by paying attention to how gendered life
courses are shaped by culture, history and global economics, and how, in turn, these
articulate with various forms of movement and migration between different places, we
might discern the interconnectedness of all levels of analysis 2 , from the young man
leaving his village, to the social networks that assist him in moving, and finally to the
global histories and economic structures that have helped create the ‘transnational
habitus’ (Vertovec, 2004: 11) of his community, in which movement abroad is seen
not only as the only way to get on in life, but has become an expected part of his life
course, in which by travelling abroad, he finally becomes a man.
In what follows, I shall discuss the relationship between the geographical
movement of bodies and their movement through time with reference to cases drawn
from my on-going research amongst Sylheti transnational communities in Bangladesh
and the U.K. By doing this I hope to contribute to a broader discussion in migration
studies concerning the relationship between migration and time (cf. King, Thompson,
Fielding and Warnes, 2004), in which focussing on the life course has been invoked
as a means of understanding the articulation between individual biographies with
‘meso’ level formations, such as households or other social networks, which are in
turn shaped by wider conditions. As King et al comment: ‘The relevance to migration
is immediately apparent: the life course framework contextualises not only individual
and group decisions about the timing of migrations but also the formative influences
and outcomes.’ (ibid: 19). In sum, my aim is not simply to present individual life
histories, useful though such a project is (cf. Brettell, 2003: 23-45), but to indicate
how these histories arise from particular life courses, which themselves are
underscored by culture, context and, of course, gender.

The research on which the paper is based involves two villages in different
parts of Greater Sylhet: Talukpur, in Habiganj, where I conducted my doctoral
research in the late 1980s and have been regularly visiting ever since, and Jalalgaon, a

1
For d iscussion of the life h istory / biography approach to migrat ion research, see Halfacree and Boyle,
1993; Thompson, 1999, Bertaux-Wiame, 1979, Gardner, 2002
2
For discussion of the challenges of intergrating micro, meso and macro levels of analysis in migration
research, see Brettell, 2000, 2003; Massey, 1990; Kearney, 1986
village in the thriving ‘Londoni’ (ie out migration to the U.K) area of Biswanath, a
short distance from Sylhet Town, where I have been involved in recent research3 .
Whilst the work in Talukpur arises from my own ethnographic fieldwork, the research
in Biswanath was carried out by a small team of researchers from the University of
Jahangirnagar, who lived in the village for twelve months, following largely
qualitative methods, including participant observation, interviewing and a household
survey. In considering different forms of embodied movement through time and
space we shall see how whilst migration must indeed be understood in terms of global
and local political economies, we also need to appreciate how these broader
contextual factors articulate with the everyday (or ‘micro’) concerns of self hood,
gender and generation, as well as the livelihood strategies of individuals and
households. Indeed, as the Bangladeshi examples indicate, the life course cannot be
understood in isolation, for lives are not lived alone. To this extent it has to be
analysed alongside another classical anthropological concept: the household
development cycle.
Before returning to Bangladesh, I wish to consider the notion of the life course
in rather more detail. This will be followed by a brief discussion of the various types
of movement with which the paper deals.

Mapping Lives: Understanding the Life Course

By ‘life course’ I am referring to the phases of life that we move through over time;
an approach which emphasises interconnection rather than the disjuncture suggested by
‘stages’. (Arber and Evandrou, 1993) Whilst in general the physiological processes of
ageing are universal4 , the way that these processes are experienced and the meanings given
to them are understood by anthropologists as being culturally constructed. The phases of
life are therefore not necessarily fixed to pre-defined physical markers, although
physiological processes may, in some contexts, be central. For example, during my
fieldwork in Sylhet in the late 1980s the tradition of painting a girl’s hands with henna at
her first menstruation was still carried out by some families, symbolising the advent of her
womanhood as well as her marriagability. In the British context however, girls are not
legally perceived to be women until they have reached their sixteenth birthday. Here it is
the exact measurement of calendar years, rather than physiology, which is significant. The
relationship between different phases of the life course is similarly diverse. In Uganda, for
example, Karimojong men are organised into age sets, which move through life together
and are distinguished from other generations by the colour of their ornaments (Dyson
Hudson, 1966). Elsewhere, relationships between generations are more fluid, the produce
of shifting social factors. In my research amongst Bangladeshi elders (murubbi) in East
London, for example, I was told that one becomes a murubbi not when one reaches a
certain age (in rural Bangladesh birthdays are not celebrated and people generally don’t
know how old they are) but according to family position (becoming a grandparent) as well
as the knowledge and authority that a person is thought to have. The role of murubbi is
actively performed: men grow beards and wear kameez and lungis rather than the more
western clothes of younger men, and expect due deference to be shown to them (Gardner,
2002).

3
This research was funded by Dfid, as part of the Development Research Centre in Migration, Poverty
and Globalisation, run at the University of Sussex. Primary data collection was carried out by Rushida
Rawnek Khan, Abdul Mannan and Zahir Ahmed. I was the principle investigator of the project.
4
This is not always the case. See, for example, Lock’s discussion of cross cultural variation in the
menopause in Northern America and Japan (Lock, 1995)
 As the above indicates, as well as being culturally constructed, the life course is
gendered, as Sylvia Vatuk and Sarah Lamb have shown with reference to women in India.
Whilst Vatuk’s work indicates the different roles and relationships that women pass
through during their lives (Vatuk, 1987) Lamb’s work focuses upon the embodiment of
gender amongst women in West Bengal, describing how this changes over the life course
(2000). As well as gender, the life course is also structured by ethnic identity and class (c.f.
Catz and Monk, 1995; Sintonen, 1993, O’Brien, 1994). Finally, the way in which the life
course is constructed is not fixed but continually changing. In the process, narratives of
how childhood or old age ‘used to be’ are apt to become a metaphor for disquiet about the
pace or direction of such change (cf. Cohen, 2000).
Focussing upon the life course opens up important questions concerning the ways in
which gendered roles, relationships and identities change over time, as well how these
shifting roles are embodied. As the Bangladeshi examples indicate, embodied movements
through time often coincide with movement across space as well as shifting imaginings of
and relationships to different places. Indeed, the experience that one has of places and the
journeys one takes to get to them are informed by where one is situated in one’s life. As we
shall see, this can have significant implications for migrants, especially those moving
across national or continental borders; the experience of elderly migrants in their places of
settlement is an important area of enquiry (Norman, 1985; Blakemore, 1993; Boneham,
1989).
We should not, however, fall into the trap of assuming that people at certain points
in the life course necessarily think of and experience places in the same way. We should
also distinguish between the various and often contradictory images that the same person
might hold about a single place. As I describe elsewhere, whilst Bangladesh may be
idealised by some British based Bengalis as ‘good’ to age in, they also vote with their feet
by largely staying put in Britain. British health care and the reluctance of British based
children to accompany them back to Bangladesh are major factors (Gardner, 2002). In
understanding how the life course is affected by place, we must therefore pay attention both
to empirical realities: the existence of the National Health Service in the U.K, for example,
as well as to the shifting and complex terrain of ideology.
Similarly, we need to beware reductive descriptions of ‘ideal types’. As we shall see,
movement through one’s life from one expected phase to another is not necessarily
guaranteed and the life course may not go as planned; for example, in cases of divorce, or
when marriages fail to bear children. In the Bangladeshi context, these disruptions and dead
ends can directly affect peoples’ movement across space, either in propelling them into
journeys they may not otherwise have taken, or by doing the opposite and keeping them in
one place. Whilst in these cases unexpected life course events may lead to migration,
migration may itself lead to unexpected twists of the life course: elderly Bengalis in the
U.K describe how ‘growing old in a foreign land’ has meant they cannot fully enjoy the
roles of grandparent and murrubi (elder), whilst the young Sylheti men who marry British
brides may find the role of ‘husband’ or ‘father’ quite different from what is expected in
Sylhet.
In sum, it may be useful to think of the life-course as a ‘design for life’, a template
that we all, to some extent, are aware of, whether we adhere to it or not (for example, by
doing or not doing ‘what’s expected’). This ‘design for life’ is deeply influenced by
culture and history, as well as by gender, and underscores the roles and relationships we
have throughout our lives. It is also, as some of the cases described in this paper show,
continually changing.
 Movement and Migration: What’s The Difference? 5
The ethnography that follows involves a range of movements, only some of which
would conventionally be described as ‘migration’. People move through time as well as
travelling up and down the social scale. Few physically stay in one place throughout their
lives; indeed, Bangladeshi women are expected as a matter of course to move to their
husband’s home at marriage. Not all do, but the norm of patrilocality remains strong6 .
Combined with this, the inhabitants of East Bengal have always been mobile; the image of
stable and sedentary villages is largely a myth (Samadar, 1999: van Schendel, 2005; Inden,
1990). In classifying some types of movement as ‘migration’, and suggesting that such
movement is relatively new we are thus in danger of creating a false dichotomy between
the past, in which people didn’t move, and a modern age, in which ‘migration’ is a key
trope, disrupting ‘traditional’ (read ‘sedentary’) life.
Yet it would also be misleading to suggest either that rural Sylhetis are
nomadic, or that there is nothing new in the scale and type of movements taking place
in the region. As we shall see, neither is true. People living in rural Sylhet have a
strong sense of home and rootedness, exemplified by the phrase ‘desh’ (homeland).
There has also been a quantifiable shift in the scale of emigration to foreign countries
over the last generation. In my use of the term ‘migration’ I am therefore referring to
a specific type of geographical movement, which involves stepping over real or
imagined borders. For many Sylhetis the borders are national: they have travelled
overseas to join transnational communities in the U.K, the U.S, South East Asia and
the Middle East. In other instances people have moved from villages of origin in
which whilst they may be joining existing social networks in the new destination they
are perceived as being to a greater or lesser extent ‘outsiders’. In local terms they are
no longer in their desh but bidesh (in a foreign place). This latter term refers to a
sliding scale of locations, ranging from another region in Bangladesh to the other side
of the world. As we shall see, whilst for some people migration is a yearned for step
in projects of self transformation, for others it signifies crisis and disruption. In all
cases, whether migration is welcomed or not, I would suggest that there is a degree of
rupture, a sense of moving to a new land (bidesh), where even if one is joining the
other half of one’s transnational (or transregional) community, one is still, to a greater
or lesser degree, in the role of being a foreigner (bideshi) vis a vis those who think of
that place as their desh.
Let us now turn to the historical background of migration and movement in
Sylhet and Eastern Bengal, where, as we shall see, people have always been on the
move.

Migration in Sylhet : A Background

As Tasneem Siddiqui points out, migration has been a part of life for East
Bengalis for many centuries (2003). Indeed, the territory of what in the colonial
period was East Bengal, in 1947 became East Pakistan and only since the War of
Independence in 1971 has been known as Bangladesh has always been characterised
by high degrees of fluidity, both within and across its shifting political borders. From
pre-colonial times migrants from the west settled the highly fertile but often
waterlogged lands of the east, whilst other historical evidence points to movement in

5
This question was raised by Sophie Day during discussion of an earlier version of the paper presented
at Goldsmiths College, December 2006.
6
In Sylhet: the ghar zamai (literally ‘house husband’, or husband who lives with his wife’s kin) is a
figure of fun
the other direction, a continual flow of people, irrespective of national borders (Van
Schendel: 2005). These constant, cross cutting migrations are both a result of the
region’s turbulent history, and its turbulent environment, in which floods and
cyclones mean that ‘belonging’ can never be guaranteed. Ranabir Samaddar writes
movingly that the country is: ‘an insecure environment, inhabited by insecure
families.’ Such families dream constantly of escaping insecurity. As Samaddar
continues: ‘This dream has made Bangladesh a land of fast footed people, people who
would not accept the loss of their dream, who would move on to newer and newer
lands ….” (1999: 83-87)
Today, these fast footed people are moving both internally (see, for example,
Afsar, 2000; Seeley, 2005, Van Schendel, 2005) and overseas, predominantly to the
Gulf and to South East Asia (see, for example, Abrar, 2000; Siddiqui, 2003; Mahmud
1991; Gardner 1995). The scale of this movement is vast; as Siddiqui reports, from
1976- 2002 official figures show that over three million Bangladeshis migrated
overseas, mostly on short term contracts 7 . Whilst some are middle class professionals,
the vast majority migrate as wage labourers, often inhabiting the most vulnerable and
lowly paid sectors of the international labour market. Many more move illegally.
These migrants take huge risks in their attempts to access foreign remittances; many
are either caught and deported before they have a chance to earn, or are cheated by
unscrupulous brokers.
In Sylhet, international migration has a distinct character. Whilst large
numbers of men from the district have migrated to the Middle East, far more
influential has been the movement of people from particular areas to Britain. Indeed,
approximately 95% of the British Bengali population is Sylheti in origin. Sylhet’s
special relationship with Britain started in the Nineteenth Century, when men from
the district gained a reputation as 'lascars' or sailors, working on British ships which
carried goods from Calcutta to around the world. In the early part of the 20th Century,
a growing number of Sylheti lascars ‘jumped ship’ in London, where they stayed,
seeking work as peddlers or in London’s hotels and restaurants. (Chowdhury, 1993:
33) Although originally men from districts such as Noakhali and Chittagong were also
lascars, by the Twentieth Century Sylhetis dominated (ibid: 33-35). The reasons are
complex. One factor may have been the colonial system of land administration in
Sylhet, which made many householders independent owner occupiers of land (taluk
dar) rather than tenants on large estates owned by landlords (zamindars) contributing
both to an entrepreneurial spirit as well as the capital reserves required to travel to
Calcutta in search of ship work, thus giving them the numerical edge over men from
other regions 8 . Another reason may be the riverine geography of the region, which
produced a population experienced in boats and shipping. Crucially too, particular
individuals dominated the recruitment of labour, thus leading to a ‘chain’ effect
whereby men from particular villages and lineages gained employment through the
patronage of their relatives and neighbours.
Whatever the reasons, by the time that work permits were being offered by the
British government to men from the sub-continent in the 1950s, Sylhetis were well
placed to gain maximum advantage. With a small but rapidly growing network of men
already living in Britain, the chain effect continued. Such was the demand for the
‘vouchers’ that, as Chowdhury reports, an office of the British High Commission was

7
The Bangladesh government has banned women from certain categories of labour migration. They
therefore officially only make up 1% of this figure (Sidiqui, 2003)
8
Until 1947 Sylhet was part of Asaam, rather than Bengal and had a different system of land
administration.
opened in Sylhet (Chowdhury, 1993). This remains open today. Some of the older
Sylhetis living today in Britain had fathers and grandfathers who were lascars, a few
worked on the ships themselves.
The vast majority of Sylhetis first came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s
when the second phase of migration to 'Bilhati' 9 took place. Prompted by a labour
shortage after World War Two, the British authorities actively encouraged labour
migration from its previous colonies and thousands of migrants embarked for the U.K
(see Adams, 1987 and Choudhury, 1993). Arriving as young men in the post-war
period, most lived and worked in cities such as Birmingham and Oldham, finding
employment in heavy industry. Some went directly to London, working in the
garment trade as pressers or tailors. Usually living in lodging houses with other
Sylhetis this was a period of unremittingly hard work with as much money remitted
home as possible. In today’s terminology, the men were ‘transnationals’ par
excellance: they worked and lived in Britain, but returned as often as they could to
East Pakistan (which became Bangladesh in 1971) where they were still heavily
involved in social networks of kinship and village community, as well as regional and
national political activities. Some men returned more than others. Partly it depended
upon their immigration status. The men’s particular family circumstances, in
particular, whether they had a wife in Bangladesh, were also influential.
Over the 1970s and into the 1980s Britain's heavy industry was in decline and
many Sylheti men moved to London to seek employment in the garment or restaurant
trades. Crucially, a growing number started to bring their wives and children to the
United Kingdom (See Peach 1996). This shift was partly the result of changing
immigration laws, which many rightly feared would soon make primary migration to
Britain (without it involving marriage to a British citizen) impossible. It also reflected
wider changes in the areas where many Bengalis were settled, in which mosques,
shops selling halal meat and other community facilities were becoming increasingly
established. Today, the Bangladeshi population is the youngest and fastest growing in
Britain. The 2001 Census enumerated a total population of 283,063 8 of which 38%
were under sixteen. Fifty four percent Bangladeshis lived in London
(http://www.statistics.gov.uk) and nearly half of these are situated in Tower Hamlets
where they form over quarter of the resident population (in some areas within the
borough, this figure is higher). A recent Labour Force Survey (1997) estimated that
60% of male Bangladeshi employees and self employed worked in the ‘Indian’
restaurant trade 10 .

9
A local rendering of the cockney term ‘Old Blighty’.
10
www.research-live.com/index.asp x?pageid=72&webexclusiveid=8 - 25k -
Figure 1 : Map of Bangladesh
 Beani Bazaar
Biswanath

Nobiganj
Moulvi Bazaar

Figure 2: Map of Sylhet, showing Nobigang and Biswanth

Migration and Transformation : Village Research
The formation of the Bengali community in the UK is linked to dramatic
changes within the villages that originally sent men to Britain. Here, migration
overseas has led to significant shifts in local power relations. In Talukpur, the village
where I conducted my original research, households that had gained access to Britain
in the 1960s, had, by the 1980s, accumulated large amounts of land. Most of these
were middle income farmers, who already had some land and who could afford the
capital outlay of a punt on migration to the U.K. Many were related to a handful of
households which had originally supplied British ships with lascars; these founding
fathers of migration helped their brothers and cousins find work and establish
themselves once in Britain. Today, the household which I am closest to in Talukpur is
still known as ‘sareng bari’ (ships’s foreman, who in the 1940s or 50s helped recruit
village men). In contrast, those who had neither the inclination nor the wherewithal to
send members abroad were net losers. There was thus a direct correlation between
migration to Britain and the accumulation of wealth, with the gains concentrated in
particular villages which in turn were clustered in particular areas of Greater Sylhet,
such as Beani Bazar, Moulvi Bazaar, Biswanath and Nobiganj. Within Londoni
villages (ie those with a high concentration of members in Britain) gains were
concentrated in the hands of particular families. Significantly, Londoni households
were involved in intense projects of social transformation, reinventing their family
genealogies as including Muslim pir (or saints), following a purer and more orthodox
form of Islam, marrying into higher status families from further a field rather than
local cousins, and building impressive houses (Gardner, 1995).
A similar story can be told in Jalalgaon, the village in Biswanath where the
more recent research was carried out in 2005 (primarily by a team of researchers at
Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh) 11 . Here the outward effects of Londoni
migration are even more extreme than in Talukpur. Situated only a few kilometres
from Biswanath Town, with its resplendent shopping malls, fast food outlets and
multi-storied community centres, Jalalgaon is a ‘Londoni’ village par excellance.
Alongside the humble single storied houses of those who never went to the U.K, the
village is filled with the mansions of successful migrants. These may be up to three
storeys high and are invariably surrounded by high brick walls. The architectural
styles are reminiscent of the housing developments one might find in Dubai or Saudi
Arabia, or in Baridhara, a rich (some may say nouveux riche) district of Dhaka. Many
have satellite dishes and some have smoked glass windows, an embellishment that
until recent years was unseen outside of the U.S or Saudi Arabian consulates in Dhaka.
Others refer directly to the migration experience of the owners; just as one might see
stone lions guarding the gates of British homes, here stone aeroplanes adorn walls and
roofs. In another house in Jalalgaon Manchester United’s strip is painted on the
outside wall. None of this would be so remarkable were it not for the stark contrast
with the rest of rural Bangladesh, in which mud and thatch (katcha) houses are the
norm. As in Mirpur, the Pakistani region documented by Roger Ballard, many of
these houses are empty (Ballard, 2004). Others are lived in by caretakers, often poorer
relatives of the departed families. During the course of our fieldwork, ten new houses
were in the process of being built in the village. Others became temporarily occupied
by a Londoni family, who after a few months returned to the U.K.

11
This research was funded by the Development Research Centre in Migration, Poverty and
Globalisation at the University of Sussex.
 The population of the village is thus in constant flux. Whilst some households
have relocated permanently to Britain, a great many more have moved in, but these
consist of far poorer people, attracted by the economic boom caused by overseas
migration. During the fieldwork in Jalalgaon, ninety seven households that identified
themselves as ‘insiders’ were counted, their families having lived in Jalalgaon for
over two or three generations. Of these, thirty four were known locally as ‘Londonis’,
meaning that a member had migrated to the U.K. Some were permanently absent in
Britain, but others still had members living in Jalalgaon. The remaining sixty three
‘insider’ households either had no migratory experience, or had sent members to the
Middle East.
In addition to these ninety seven ‘insider’ households were a great number of
other people who had migrated into the area either permanently, or for a more
temporary period, and despite living locally were seen as outsiders. On the periphery
of the village’s baris (compounds, originating from an original household that over
the generations has divided into separate households, and therefore usually consist of
patrilineal kin) are twenty five ‘colonies’: thatch, breeze block and tin buildings,
reminiscent of urban slum housing, which at the time of our survey housed one
hundred and forty seven households, a total of seven hundred and fifty people. As
well as the population of the colonies are the temporary and permanent labourers who
live largely in the households of ‘insiders’, (some also stay in the colonies). During
the fieldwork there were one hundred and sixty nine labourers who originated from
outside the village, living in thirty three ‘insider’ households. During the harvest and
planting seasons this number is boosted by other workers who either stay temporarily
in the colonies, or are housed by their employers.
There can be little doubt that overseas migration has led to a boom in the local
economy. Indeed, a national study estimates that Bangladeshi remittances of $610
million created $351 million in goods and services and generated at least 577, 000
jobs (Arnold, 1992, cited in Vertovec, 2004: 41). As the Biswanath data shows,
Londoni migration has led to increased employment opportunities for internal
migrants, who, attracted by higher wages, move from poorer areas of the country to
villages such as Jalalgaon to work as labourers. There has been a huge boom in the
construction industry, which also has led to increased employment and demand for
goods, as well as in industries which service return migrants and their spending power:
food outlets, minibuses and taxis, mobile phone shops, and so on. This in turn is
linked to the in-migration of people from outside the village described above.
The extent to which this boom, based on insecure remittances and property
development rather than an increase in agricultural or industrial production, will last
over the next generation of British born Bengalis is questionable, (and not an issue I
have time to deal with in much detail here). What I would emphasise, however, is the
extent to which in Jalalgaon as well as Talukpur families who originated in the area
are dependent to a greater or lesser extent on maintaining transnational links with
their British based relatives. This is both in order that they can continue to receive the
support of their wealthy British relatives (usually these days in the form of one off
donations, often to help set up a business, fund further migration, or marriage, or to
help in times of crisis), and also because access to Britain and other foreign countries
is now seen as virtually the only way to get on in life. Whilst rural hierarchy was once
organised around access to land, today the inflation of land prices means that it is
generally only through access to foreign wages that one can buy such land. The new
axis around which hierarchy is now ordered is therefore that of access to place: those
who are either living in Britain, or who have close kinship links to those in Britain,
are at the top of the hierarchy, whilst those without links either to foreign countries, or
even to Sylhet – the in-migrants, are at the bottom.

From this background, let us return to the central theme of the paper: how
migration and movement articulate with the life course. In my earlier work I
considered how migration to Britain affected the experience of ageing amongst
elderly first generation Bangladeshis in East London (Gardner, 2002). In order not to
repeat myself, in what follows I will not be focussing so much upon the effects of
migration on the life-course per se, but more on the influence of the life course on
different types of geographical movement, an issue which so far has tended to be
examined in European contexts (cf. King et al, 2004; Mulder, 1993; Lundholm, 2007).
I shall start by discussing marriage, one of the most importance life course events for
the vast majority of Bangladeshis, though one which has very different implications
for men and women. In the latter part of the paper I shall turn to cases where the life
course is disrupted, either by divorce, or by unexpected and untimely death. As we
shall see, geographical movement is highly gendered in Bangladesh, articulating with
the life course in a range of different ways for men and women. Yet whilst in all of
the cases that follow, people move over their lives through a range of expected gender
roles and relationships which in turn influence movement across space, that very
movement across space can also lead to a realignment and shifting of gender roles, a
phenomenon already documented in detail by Naila Kabeer’s study of female garment
factory workers in Dhaka and London (Kabeer, 2000) 12

Marriage, Movement and Migration in Sylhet: Brides’Tales

In Bangladesh, marriage is a major marker of the life course signifying a
profound change in roles and relationships for brides and grooms. Conventionally this
is particularly the case for women, who move from being daughters to being wives
and daughter-in- laws and whose weddings mark the advent of adult womanhood.
Crucially, for the majority of women marriage involves geographical as well as social
movement, for the norm is of patrilocality means that they move to their huband’s
household. In the past in Talukpur this often involved short distances, either to baris
within the same village, or to villages a couple of miles across the fields 13 . During my
fieldwork in the 1980s, I observed several new brides being carried on their new
affines’ shoulders on a palki (covered platform, made with bamboo) to their homes in
nearby villages, a practice that today has largely died out due to the improved
accessibility of Talukpur to cars and rickshaws. Wedding ceremonies ritualise the
disruption of a daughter’s relationship to her natal home; the songs that women sing
as they paint the bride’s hands with henna the night before often revolve around
metaphors of travel, as well as death. In 1988, for example, I recorded this song,
performed by women the night before a wedding:

12
For wider discussion of the relationship between gender and migration, see, for example, Pessar and
Mahler, 2001; Silver, 2004; Brettell, 2003
13
It is customary for wives to return to their natal homes at least once a year for a visit (naori). For
those living close by, these visits may be far more frequent.
 I am going to a new country today as a bride
My father-in-law’s home is full of darkness
Riding on the bamboo casket, four men will carry me on their shoulders
In front and behind will be the bridal party
They will read the Kolima (ie confess the faith at the funeral procession)
Wife, son, daughter, sister and brother - all will become my enemy
Ah, new bride I will leave my own country
I will wear a white sari (ie funeral shroud)

Since the early 1980s marriage for some women in Sylhet has meant a more
radical departure, for if married to a Londoni, it has involved migration to Britain. As
mentioned earlier, whilst originally the wives and children of British migrants
remained in Bangladesh, from the early 1980s onwards processes of family
reunification had started to take place. This meant that by the time of my doctoral
fieldwork in 1987-88, many wives and children had ‘cases’ pending with the British
High Commission. Today all of these people are settled in Britain. For young women
whose marriages were being arranged with Londonis, their marriage meant not only
movement to their husbands’ households but, once they had been cleared by the
immigration authorities, a journey of thousands of miles to Britain. In 1987, for
example, I attended the wedding of Najma. Enacting the role of physically passive,
and grief stricken bride, Najma was carried onto a boat by her husband’s family,
where she was taken to his bari in another village. The next time I saw her was in
Bethnal Green. She has since returned to Bangladesh to visit her natal family only a
few times.
It would be mistaken to think of such marriages as either ‘forced’, or as simply
taking place as a migration strategy. From the perspective of Najma’s family in
Talukpur marriage to a successful Londoni family meant that her material comfort
and economic security was guaranteed. For her husband’s family, the marriage forged
a new link with the desh. As Katherine Charlesly’s work on Pakistani transnational
marriages indicates, (2003, 2005) brides from the desh are often preferred to British
born and bred women, for their cultural capital, their relative willingness to assume
the role of dutiful wife and daughter-in- law, and the reinforcement of links with the
homeland. It should be noted too, that the movement of brides to Britain has been
matched by a more general shift towards marriage to more physically distant partners
within Bangladesh. As my 1980s research showed, there has been a significant change
in the pattern of marriage alliances in recent decades in Talukpur. In contrast to
people who had been married for ten or more years (most of whom had married
cousins or neighbours within the immediate area) a growing proportion of marriages
arranged over the last decade were with non-related spouses whose families lived as
far afield as Sylhet Town or even Dhaka. This, I suggested, was one strategy amongst
many in the projects of upwards social mobility with which Londoni households were
engaged (Gardner, 1995).
In other cases, migration overseas has had the reverse effect. Rather than
moving to their in-laws’ home, either elsewhere in Bangladesh or in Britain, the
migration of their husbands overseas has meant that some women have physically
stayed put. In Talukpur I know of at least four women in this position. All have
husbands who have temporarily migrated to the Gulf. Rather than living with their
parents-in-law, the women opt to stay with their own parents, where they experience
greater freedom and more support than in their in-laws’ home. Rozana Rasheed cites
similar cases in Comilla, where there are several scenarios for ‘left behind’ wives,
including women living with their parents, with their parent-in-law, or sometimes
alone (Rasheed, 2008). Remittances may also play a role in decisions concerning
where to live. As Rasheed shows, wives living with their in-laws’ often lose control of
their husband’s remittances to his parents (Rasheed, 2008).
In cases where wives stay with their parents, male migration may be perceived
as preventing them from moving through the life course in what they perceive to be a
‘proper’ manner, even if they are benefiting from the support and comfort of living ‘at
home’. Women in this position tend to express feelings of frustration, of having to
spend their lives waiting for their husbands to return so that they can resume ‘normal’
roles and relationships. Marriages to migrants thus tend to evoke ambivalent emotions.
Whilst life with the in-laws may be more challenging, Shalini told me that it was part
and parcel of being a ‘good’ wife and daughter in law; she was happy to be with her
parents for the time being, especially now that she was pregnant with her second child,
but she really ought to be performing the role of a dutiful daughter-in-law in her
absent husband’s house. It is good for husbands to work in the Gulf to earn wages,
other women say, but how can they be proper wives if the men are never there? For
Santi Bibi, whose husband originally migrated to Britain in the 1960s, where he
married an English woman and had a second family, his continued absence meant that
she only had one child and could only be a ‘proper’ wife when he finally returned in
the late 1990s in order to die in the desh: he had terminal cancer.
Whilst marriage is often experienced by women as somewhat ambivalent,
hopefully bringing the blessings of a happy conjugal relationship, children, and the
sense of fulfilling one’s gendered roles of wife, mother and daughter-in- law, but also
involving separation from one’s natal kin and hence a degree of rupture, when
international migration is involved, the ambivalence is therefore heightened. Whilst
the migration of a husband to the Gulf may bring the hope of financial security and
status, it inevitably brings the long term absence of one’s husband. Meanwhile
movement to the U.K as the wife of a ‘Londoni’ may signal the fulfilment of family
dreams and aspirations concerning connection to bidesh but it also brings separation
and rupture. As we shall see, when men migrate for marriage, these contractions,
‘pay offs’ and shifts in role become even more complex.

Masculinity, Marriage and Migration to the U.K: Grooms Go West

In recent decades the profile of transnational marriages has started to change,
adding an interesting twist to the conventional relationship between gender and
movement at marriage. Whereas in Bangladesh it is normally women who move to
join their husbands’ households, and the ghar jamai (husband who lives with his
wife’s family) is a figure of fun, today an increasing number of husbands are moving
from Sylhet to Britain, to join British based wives 14 . As we shall see, the effects on
their roles and relationships are potentially enormous. Once again migration is
experienced in ambivalent terms: the power of ‘London’ as an aspiration and source
of economic security, an individual man’s desire to become a successful migrant, plus
the need to reinforce transnational family bonds, are all balanced against the potential
problems that grooms may experience in the U.K. These disadvantages include
punishing working hours, low public status, and being married to a wife who is
hugely more experienced and ‘at home’ in the U.K than oneself, with all the attendant
implications for male status and self-respect.

14
For discussion of Pakistani men joining British based women, see Charsley, 2003
 Despite these problems there is little doubt that marriage to a British woman is
desired by many young men and their households in Sylhet. Such marriages may be a
means to ensure continued transnational links with Bangladesh for households based
in Britain, as well as a route into Britain for Bangladeshi based men. Sources at the
British High Commission in Dhaka estimate that about half of the British partners
bringing Bangladeshi spouses to Britain are now women. Foreign Office figures show
that in 2005, 1530 settlement visas were granted to Bangladeshi grooms (with 330
refused), in contrast to 2133 issued to brides (with 590 refused). These figures have
remained relatively stable since 2001 15 . A 2004 Report from the Home Office
(Control of Immigration Statistics) cites a rise of 14% of husbands admitted from the
Indian sub-continent since 2003, compared to a rise of 12% of wives.
I do not have systematic data, but anecdotal evidence suggests that a
significant proportion of these marriages may involve relationships between
cousins 16 . Here, marriages between British women and their Bangladeshi cousins
consolidate links between families who, with some households having been reunited
in Britain, are now almost wholly apart. In one case for example, two sisters who
have been living in Manchester since they were small children have married the sons
of their Bangladesh based paternal uncles (sassatobiye), who they once lived with in
the same bari (but in separate households). A third woman, this time a maternal
cousin, has married the youngest brother, who has recently relocated to the UK. All
brothers live in the same neighbourhood in Manchester with their British-Bengali
wives. My impression is that the experience has been largely positive for both sides.
The British households maintain their links with the desh (homeland), marrying their
daughters to cousins whose characters are already well known to them and who, tied
closely into their kinship network, are unlikely to abscond once they have gained
British citizenship (see Charsley, 2003, for observations on Pakistani marriages).
Meanwhile the Bangladesh based households forge their own, direct links with Britain
through the settlement of their sons there. Overall, the marriages benefit both
households, solidifying kinship links between places while allowing for another
member of the gusti (patrilineage) to migrate.
In these cases, marriage – a major juncture in the life course of all
Bangladeshis – leads directly to migration to the U.K. Since both movement abroad to
earn foreign wages AND marriage are central to the construction of Sylheti
masculinity it is hardly surprising that so many young men of a certain class aspire to
have a marriage arranged with a British girl. Indeed, whilst I would not go so far as to
suggest that Sylheti youths do not become fully fledged men until they have migrated
abroad, becoming a wage earning migrant, either to the U.K or the Gulf, is central to
the construction of men as successful providers. In a case cited by Rozana Rasheed in
Comilla, for instance, a father who was experiencing difficulties with his wayward
son, sent him to the Gulf, so that he could ‘learn to be a man’ (Rasheed, 2008). As
mentioned earlier, in Sylhet people’s access to foreign places is a central signifier of
their relative social and economic status. A young man’s ability to become connected
to the U.K, (which now is almost wholly possible only through marriage) is therefore
a central way in which he can prove himself to be a cosmopolitan man of the world.
In this context we can see how the life course and kinship intersect with the global
political economy to produce a group of young men in Sylhet whose main aim in life,
for a few years at least, is to find themselves a British bride.

15
Unfortunately the FO were not able to provide data for previous years.
16
For the Pakistani case, see Shaw 2001.
 For this group of young men, their dreams of movement to the U.K are
associated with particular styles and modes of being, all of which express an
orientation towards and connection with the Londoni community in Britain. British
street fashion is followed, for example, and hair cut ‘David Beckham’ style (in 2005).
Trips to local towns may involve visiting ‘Western style’ fast food outlets (such as
‘Rahman’s Fried Chicken’), or the hiring of an immigration lawyer. Shebul is a good
example of a would-be Londoni. Aged thirty, he lives with his two brothers and his
mother and is keen to follow in the footsteps of his oldest brother, who with the help
of their British based sister-in-law married a Londoni bride and is now settled in the
U.K. Shebul is also pursuing marriage with a Londoni woman. As he told us: “If I am
able to go to London my luck will change. I will be helped a lot by my in-laws who
will be able to find me a job …. After that my next step will be to try and arrange a
marriage with my younger two brothers as soon as I arrive in London. I really don’t
think there’s any point in them staying here. They have to get to the U.K. They’ll
achieve nothing by staying here. Here there is nothing: no income, no security, no
certainty.”
Interestingly in Jalalgaon the quest for a British bride is linked to particular
employment strategies by some young men, in which setting themselves up in
business or other high status activities will, it is hoped, make them more marriageable.
In one case a shopping mall has been opened by a Londoni in the local bazaar. So far
the business has made only losses. When asked why he continued to keep it open, the
owner explained:

It’s important that our relatives have got something to do. The young generation
are working in a shop rather than doing nothing. The main reason they’ve got
involved in business is to prove to their brides that they own a posh shop. Some of
them are supported by their Londoni relatives and others have raised money by
selling land or other property. Last year about ten to twelve young men from round
here got married to London brides …”

In another case, an English medium school was opened by a group of six young
entrepreneurs in the village. Five of these have now married British women and
moved to the U.K.
Although I have not done systematic research on the experiences of grooms in
Britain, anecdotal evidence suggests that once IN Britain their lives are often very
different from their expectations. Working double shifts in a restaurant and living in a
city where he does not speak the language with a wife who, unlike him, is fully
conversant with the U.K, and, indeed is very much more highly educated, Mobed is
said by his Bangladeshi relatives to be having a difficult time. In Britain his role as a
husband and, eventually, a father, will be a significant departure from what he might
have expected in Bangladesh, structured as these roles partly are by the conditions of
life in Britain. Here we see how place affects the life course. We also see how the life
course is closely interwoven with wider household relationships which themselves
depend in part upon particular political economies and geographies. As Katherine
Charlsey has described in her work amongst Pakistani transnational families, grooms
from South Asia often find their gendered roles reversed, with their British born and
bred wives yielding a great deal more power than they would in Bangladesh, and their
roles as fathers, husbands and providers radically altered (2003, 2005). Meanwhile
for my Bangladeshi friends who have three sons in Britain, the rewards have not been
what they expected, for rather than being able to remit directly to their Bangladesh
households, the sons now have to support their wives and young children in the U.K
whilst facing a dire employment market in the North East. All the same, the family
are currently working hard to arrange a marriage between their last remaining son in
Bangladesh.

The End of the Life Course: Death

Whilst for most people marriage is an expected part of the life course, the end
of life’s journey, death, is unavoidable. For successful first generation Londonis,
death often involves a final trip back to the desh. As I recount in ‘Age, Narrative and
Migration’, a great many British based Sylhetis return to Bangladesh either to die, or
to be buried (2002). Although sending bodies overseas involves the haram (ritually
forbidden) process of embalming, the Muslim undertakers Hajji Tasleem estimate that
about 60-70% of Bengali corpses are sent to Bangladesh by their British based kin.
There, they are usually buried in family owned land close to patrilineal homesteads or
in some instances in graves close to the shrines of famous Sylheti pir (saints) which
can be acquired at some cost. Once returned to Sylhet International Airport 17 , the
bodies of deceased migrants are transported as quickly as possible to their villages.
During my visits to Talkpur I have observed the return of dead Londonis on several
occasions 18 . In the most memorable, the corpse was transported in a traditional
covered boat down the river, garlanded with flowers and accompanied by male
relatives and a cassette recorder loudly broadcasting Muslim prayers. For first
generation British Bengalis, many of whom have spent a life time moving between
places, endlessly evaluating their past, their present and their futures in terms of a
shifting and fantasised 'other' land, these journeys back to Bangladesh mark the last
physical movement of their bodies. Buried in the soil of their desh, they finally come
to rest.
For Bangladshis who do not have access to foreign countries and do not have
sufficient property to cushion them from periodic shocks and crises, the death of an
economically productive member may lead to the need to migrate as a survival
strategy. Here, we move from the context of relatively secure and wealthy Londonis,
to those whose livelihoods are highly precarious: the 31% of Bangladesh’s
population who are said to live in ‘chronic poverty’: around 25-30 million people
(Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, 2006). In these cases, the effects of an
individual reaching the end of their life course depends upon the stage their household
is at in its own development cycle. Indeed, to understand the effects of the life course
upon migration one has to understand how lives are lived within wider contexts of
household relationships, not only distinguishing between the life course of the
individual, the cycle of the family and history of the household (Laslett, 1983) but
also understanding how all are interlinked, or what Roberston terms the ‘cycle of
reproduction’ (Robertson, 1991: 195).
For households without substantial assets, survival depends upon a constant
balancing of household consumption needs and productivity. If consumption needs
suddenly outstrip the amount that members produce (for example, if the costs of a
daughter’s wedding has to be covered, or if medical costs arise) the household may no

17
The airport in Sylhet Town started to receive international flights, from Britain and the Middle East,
in 1999.
18
In all the cases I came across, the deceased was male. The most probable reason for this is
demographic: since men tend to marry younger women, their British based wives are not yet at an age
when death is common. I was told by my hosts that women may also be buried back in the desh.
longer be sustainable. The death of a member therefore only leads to household
breakdown if the balance between production and consumption is tipped out of
balance. If an ageing couple have two or three economically productive sons in a joint
household, the death of an elderly father need not lead to economic catastrophe. For
others, however, the death of a member and the lack of a sufficient economic or social
safety net in their home village can lead to the failure of the household’s livelihood
and the need to migrate. As described above, Londoni villages in areas such as
Biswanath attract many internal migrants, who cite ‘poverty’ or ‘hunger’ as the main
motivation for their movement. Whilst environmental factors (flooding, for example)
and regional seasonal shortfalls in food production are often central, so too is the
delicate balance between life course events and the household development cycle.
This may involve death or illness, as well as the expense of daughters’ weddings.
Amena’s story is a good example. Migrating into Jalalgoan from the district of
Kishorgonj, she has been living with her daughters in one of the local ‘colonies’
(bustee style dwellings) for about twelve years.

I have three daughters and two sons. In our village, we had a considerable
amount of land which my husband cultivated, as well as pulling a rickshaw. We
were getting on well. But suddenly, my husband became paralyzed, so it was
difficult for us to survive. My sons were still children, so we had to sell a lot of our
land. We had to sell even more to pay for the marriages of my three daughters.
One of my brother-in-laws lived in Biswanath. Seeing our condition, he told my
two daughters that they could come to Biswanath and find work so they can feed
their children. Later, two of my sons also came to Biswanath with their wives.
Meanwhile I remained in Kishorgonj with my sick husband, where my life was
unbearably hard. Sometimes, my daughters sent me money and I survived in that
way. After about ten years of my daughters coming to Biswanath, their father died.
After that my daughters took me to Biswanath. Since then, I’ve been living here.

Ruptured Relations: Divorce and Abandonment

As the above case indicates, for the poor in Bangladesh migration is often used
as an economic survival strategy, especially when life course events (such as death)
mean that a household’s livelihood has become unviable and its members have to
move to seek alternative livelihoods, either permanently or periodically19 . The life
histories of other in-migrants in Jalalgaon indicate not only how life course events
such as death can lead to the failure of livelihoods and hence migration to seek
alternative sources of income, but also how smooth progression over one’s life course
is far from guaranteed. For example, whilst it may be the norm that once a woman is
married her husband and his family have certain obligations towards her, in reality
things don’t always go as planned. For the poorest women, abandonment by husbands,
and subsequent remarriage, was a constant theme in their stories. The following case
illustrates the relationship between a disrupted life course and migration:

Shahena, who currently lives in Jalalgaon, told us:

19
As the Biswanath research showed, whilst sometimes prompted by household crises such as death,
rural – rural migration is a long term strategy for many Bangladeshis who move either permanently or
periodically to supplement their livelihoods, and therefore does not result solely from crisis.
 The story of why I came here is full of sorrow. During independence war in 1971,
I was about six. The Pakistani soldiers attacked our village and killed my father.
My mother was heartbroken and died the same year. I was the youngest of three
sisters and one brother. After our parents’ death we were helpless, and my older
sister had to look after us. Our house was on the river bank, where we had a little
land. My sister couldn’t look after us alone, so she was helped by one of my
maternal uncles. After a year he married my oldest sister off, followed by my other
sister and brother. I was only a child, but my uncle made me get married to a man
who was from Mymensing.

After my marriage, I stayed for one month in my in-law’s house, in Mymensing.

After that my husband took me to Sylhet to see the graveyard of Hazrat Shah Jalal.
That night he took me to Biswanath, where he said some of his brothers lived. Next
morning, he went off to find his brother and never returned. I still don’t know
whether he is dead or whether he left me. I waited for him for about two weeks. I
knew the name of my village but not how to get back there. Eventually the people
in whose house I was staying said I could carry on living there if I worked for
them. After about nine months, since my husband hadn’t returned they married me
off to someone else.

I was getting on well with the second husband, but after a while, he began to
marry other women, again and again. In ten years of our marriage, and after I’d
had a son and daughter, he married 11 times. In the end I got fed up and went to
the Union office and divorced him and married another man who is from
Kishorgonj but who lives in Biwanath. That’s how I ended up here.

In other cases, marital breakdown may have the opposite effect: rather than
moving, women stay put, both geographically and in terms of their life course. In
Rubi’s case, rumours about her sexual propriety were passed on to her husband whilst
he was working in the Gulf. At the time she was living with her parents-in-law in a
village about five miles from her natal home, but relations quickly turned sour and
after her in-laws became physically abusive she returned to her parents’ home.
Shortly afterwards her husband wrote to tell her he was taking another wife. Today,
she has no idea who spread the rumours and is still living with her parents, a single
woman without children who has been unable to move into the expected roles of wife,
mother and mother in law. As Rasheed’s research in Comilla shows, such rumour
mongering concerning the behaviour of ‘left-behind wives’ is not unusual in
communities where overseas migration is common, an outcome perhaps of the
increased insecurity of marriages separated by many thousands of miles (Rasheed,
2008).
It would be mistaken to assume that the disruption of relationships is
necessarily experienced as negative. Alpa Shah for example has shown that migration
from Jharkhand to brick fields in other areas of India can be a way of escaping
restrictive relationships in home villages. In particular, young people move in order to
enjoy love relationships with members of the opposite sex working in the kilns (Shah,
2006). Whilst I do not have comparative examples from Talukpur or Jalalgaon,
Shah’s work is an important rejoinder to public and academic discourses which
represent internal migration as resulting from poverty and hence ‘bad’ (ibid: 92). As
Shah’s ethnography also shows, the way in which the life course structures particular
relationships between people and places may not always be welcomed. Movement can
thus in some contexts be read as a form of resistance

Conclusion
As I have argued in this paper, one way that the anthropology of migration
might analyse different types of movement is through consideration of the life course,
a concept which focuses our attention on the way that lives are structured by cultural
expectations, gender, and historical contexts as well as individual choice. Since life
courses are themselves subject to change and influenced by global structures (such as
the continually shifting and deeply gendered international labour market), this
approach might help us connect the ‘micro’ level of individuals with the ‘macro’ level
of structure, a long-standing challenge to migration studies (Brettell, 2000, 2003;
Kearny, 1986). A further advantage of the life course approach is that it also connects
individuals with the ‘meso’ level of households, communities and networks, since life
courses are necessarily relational: as ‘designs for life’, they involve expected roles
and relationships to others.
As the paper has suggested, the life course articulates in complex and ever
shifting ways with place. Whilst in some instances movement is part and parcel of
one’s ‘design for life’, (for example via marriage for women, or involving migration
to the Gulf as part of becoming a successful man), in other contexts geographical
movement might lead to a radical disjuncture between how one expects the life course
to unfold and what actually happens. The elderly Bengali women who I interviewed
in London in 1996 and 1997, for example, often expressed deep disorientation and
disappointment with how their lives had turned out. They had started out their lives
with particular expectations of what would happen as they grew older, but in the
British context old age was radically different (Gardner, 2002).
In the case of Londoni villages in Sylhet, the ideal ‘design for life’ involves
migration to Britain as part of a successful life journey, especially for young men.
Whilst marriage for women has traditionally involved migration to their husband’s
homes, today young men also hope that as they reach a marriageable age, their
marriages will involve movement, not to a nearby village but to Britain. For those
who do not make it, life’s journey has few if any other desirable destinations. In this
context globalisation and the history of migration to Britain from Londoni villages in
Sylhet have altered peoples’ expectations and aspirations over the course of a
generation. At the prospect of NOT getting a tourist visa to Britain, where he hopes he
will find himself a bride, Talleh is unable to think of what else to do with his life.
Finally, when the expectations one has aren’t met, the disruption may lead to physical
movement. Divorce, illness, or the sudden death of a relative who is supposed to be
contributing to household productivity were all central causes of migration from
poorer areas of Bangladesh to Biswanath amongst our informants in Jalalgaon.
This leads me to my final point. The anthropological conceptualisation of the
life course is not about how individual lives unfold per se, but how they are expected
to unfold, a process that is usually understood as a series of phases linked to physical
age. In analysing the life course we are therefore delving into the territory of ideology,
dreams and expectations rather than established bodily facts. The only thing we can
be sure of is that we’ve been born, and some time after our birth, we will die. The rest
is up to culture, class, gender and, of course, the vastly complex and contradictory
forces of global history.
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