Black Handsworth. Kieran Connell

of women within the IWA and AYM alike was often overtly problematic. That the IWA, by the mid-1980s, was beginning to address issues such as domestic violence was the achievement of women within such organizations, who fought against what was seen to be their “distinctly masculine” cultures.⁷⁶ Historically, in the view of one activist, “if women were incorporated [into the IWA], they were incorporated as the secretaries or the food makers, rather than being represented in their own right in terms of what was best for women.” Women often found it difficult to be heard at meetings, and when they did speak often found they were being humored, while the men continued to make decisions behind the scenes without serious consultation.⁷⁷ In the 1970s this issue was so acute that it contributed to the formation of separate, breakaway women’s bodies such as the Liverpool Black Sisters and Brixton Black Women’s Group (both founded in 1973) and, by the end of that decade, the Southall Black Sisters and Birmingham Black Sisters (BBS).⁷⁸ Although these organizations had some African Caribbean members, the vast majority were South Asian women. The well-publicized industrial disputes at the Imperial Typewriters factory in Leicester in 1974 and subsequently at a film-processing plant in Grunwick, North London, had already signaled the growing visibility of radical activism among Asian women in Britain, belying the stereotypes often peddled by journalists and social scientists alike regarding the supposed passivity of South Asian women.⁷⁹ Participants in Black Sisters groups were generally younger, were often university educated, and largely came not as a result of disillusionment with conditions in the workplace but in response to the masculine cultures of groups such the AYM and the IWA, as well as the ethnocentricity of existing feminist organizations.⁸⁰

      The BBS consciously decided to avoid any contact with the state—whether monetary or otherwise—because of fears that this would jeopardize its independence. Like the IWA and the AYM, the BBS was also drawn to the political power invested in “black” following Black Power’s crossing of the Atlantic a decade earlier.⁸¹ For Surinder Guru, who was active in the BBS throughout the period, this was because of an appreciation of the shared legacies of colonialism, on the one hand, and their mutual experiences of racism in Britain on the other. “We came under the banner of ‘black,’” she recalled,

      because our responses were to white racist society, we were organising around the histories of our people. There was a commonality of experiences with racism. . . . [W]e recognised that if there was a trajectory to organise separately, with different groups for Africans, Caribbeans, Asians. . . . [W]e weren’t going to get anywhere. It was that recognition that brought us together to make us strong.⁸²

      The first BBS newsletters appeared in 1988 and were distributed only to black women. In the second issue, the newsletter encouraged contributions in languages other than English and stated that it was important for “black women of Asian and African-Caribbean descent to come together and express the sort of oppression which we as black women face in this racist, patriarchal, capitalist society.”⁸³

      What increasingly occupied the focus of the BBS, the IWA, and the AYM was the growing precariousness of black and Asian communities following the passing of the 1981 British Nationality Act, which introduced a streamlined definition of British citizenship along crudely racialized lines, and the 1988 Immigration Act, which gave the state increased powers of deportation by limiting potential avenues for appeal. Between 1986 and 1989 the number of people being deported from the United Kingdom more than doubled, to over four thousand per year.⁸⁴ It was this precariousness that increasingly took up the attention of each organization. The AYM provided regular legal advice in its newsletter, explaining the difference between deportation and removal orders and encouraging readers to organize demonstrations, meetings, and social events to increase the publicity for their campaigns. A critical strategy was to focus on individual cases as a way of demonstrating the perceived inhumanity of the state.⁸⁵ AYM drew on its professional expertise to highlight inconsistencies in the law. In the mid-1980s the group helped win an important victory in the case of Baba Bakhtaura—a Punjabi folk singer in Handsworth who was threatened with deportation for overstaying his visitor’s permit—by pointing to a legal loophole that meant that any Commonwealth citizen was able to stand as a UK electoral candidate even if his or her right to reside in Britain had been removed. The AYM’s focus on campaigning against deportation was epitomized by what would become the group’s key political slogan: “Here to stay, here to fight.”⁸⁶

      It is significant that the causes the BBS primarily focused on concerned women, particularly given that the changes to immigration laws were often experienced in highly specific ways by women—symbolized most acutely by the revelation in 1978 that prospective female immigrants from the Indian subcontinent could be subject to vaginal examinations in order to “prove” their marital status.⁸⁷ Increasingly, the BBS also mobilized on behalf of women in Britain who were the victims of domestic abuse. A key moment was the campaign the group fought on behalf of Iqbal Begum, a Kashmiri woman who in October 1981 was convicted of murdering her abusive husband. Begum’s dealings with the police had been prejudiced by the fact that she spoke little English and by the consistent failure of the police to find an interpreter who spoke in her native Mirpuri dialect. At her trial, when asked to enter a plea, Begum was reported to have responded with gulti, which in Mirpuri Punjabi translates as “I made a mistake,” but at the trial was recorded as guilty.⁸⁸ The BBS “fought a campaign for her within our own communities,” drawing attention to comparable cases involving white women in which the defendant was acquitted on the basis that she was acting in self-defense.⁸⁹ The group was eventually successful in persuading a judge to overturn Begum’s conviction on the grounds that she was not granted access to an adequate translator.⁹⁰

      Such campaigns had some impact on the outlook of male-dominated organizations. Anandi Ramamurthy has shown how both the Bradford and Manchester AYMs supported the BBS with respect to the Begum case and also took part in the concurrent Black Wages for Housework campaign. The Birmingham AYM, in contrast, was perceived as being particularly macho and often attacked the BBS on the basis that its membership was supposedly too middle class and out of touch with the experiences of black and Asian workers.⁹¹ But by the mid-1980s the Birmingham AYM was at least paying lip service to the importance of gender politics, devoting a section of its Asian Youth News to exploring the status of women both in Britain and across the Indian subcontinent to mark International Women’s Day.⁹² The campaigns by women activists to persuade larger, male-dominated organizations to recognize the specific inequalities that women faced might be seen as part of a continuum that took in the demands made by women workers at Grunwick and elsewhere for adequate trade union recognition. If the class-based attacks on the BBS from without were eminently familiar to the spectrum of feminist activities in this period, internally it was the issue of ethnicity that was rendering these activities increasingly fraught. The focus on campaigning against deportations had contributed to tensions, particularly given that unlike other organizations the BBS did have a number of African Caribbean members. As has been pointed out, although there were cases that affected Afro-Caribbeans, this was a demographic that even in the 1960s made up a minority of actual deportee cases. By the 1980s, the fact that Asian communities were most at risk of deportation—coupled with the traumatic experiences of Asian women in particular when attempting to navigate Britain’s increasingly racist and sexist immigration laws—meant that this issue resonated most clearly among the South Asian members of the BBS.⁹³ There was reportedly increasing disillusionment among the few African Caribbean members that other issues were not being taken seriously. There was a perception, Guru admitted, that the group was only about “tackling south Asian women’s issues.” Increasingly, rifts had developed within the BBS, and its few African Caribbean members left the group. Shortly afterward, the BBS folded.⁹⁴

      In 1976 an organization was established in Handsworth explicitly to provide ethnically specific services to Asian communities. In contrast to the stress Sivanandan and others would place on black unity, according to Ranjit Sondhi, one of its cofounders, the ARC was established because of a commitment to the importance of an “autonomous and physically distinct base” for Asian community activity.⁹⁵ As Anil Bhalla, who worked at the ARC during the 1980s, explained, organizations like AFFOR often lacked either language skills or cultural awareness and therefore had only