prejudices.” The writings of Sivanandan were reproduced in AYM journals, and Basi even remembered quoting him directly at AYM meetings.71
There was, however, often a schism within these organizations between an ideological commitment to a unified black platform and practical programs that focused on more ethnically specific themes. There was an ambivalence toward ethnicity in the politics of these groups. On the one hand, the appeal of Black Power corresponded with a commitment to secularism that saw many activists consciously refuse religious social codes. Yet on the other hand, both the IWA and the AYM printed much of their campaign literature in South Asian languages and used Punjabi slogans and musical instruments at demonstrations, while religious institutions inevitably continued to exert an influence through family and other ties. This ambivalence was to some extent embodied by Sivanandan himself, who cultivated ties with Black Power but in a celebrated essay simultaneously stressed the political potential of a particular community using its own traditions, cultures, and languages as a tool of opposition to British racism.72 Certainly by the late 1970s and 1980s, in its practical operations in Handsworth if not in its ideological approach, the IWA in particular had seemingly begun to function primarily as an advocate for the Indian community specifically.
These tensions are apparent in the IWA’s internal correspondence. In one 1982 memo, for example, IWA members were reprimanded for their “absolutely disgraceful” behavior in not attending a specifically inclusive conference of all “the various organisations of black people in Britain.” But the same memo also called for members to be vigilant with respect to the threat posed by the Punjabi separatist group Akali Dal in British Sikh temples, an issue that could have had little or no resonance beyond the Sikh community.73 By the 1980s such ethnically distinct themes had begun to dominate the IWA’s agenda. Thus, although the Udham Singh Welfare Centre claimed to offer welfare and legal advice on a broad range of issues relating to immigration, police harassment, housing difficulties, and passports, the latter had taken precedence because of the large number of Indian migrants who had arrived in Britain with forged papers, a situation that required bilingual negotiations with both British and Indian officials.74 The IWA was able to distinguish itself from the services offered by white groups such as AFFOR by drawing on its expertise in issues that specifically affected South Asian and particularly Indian communities, in the native language of Indian immigrants. The group spoke out against other issues of particular significance within the Asian community. It took a leading role in campaigning against domestic violence, for example, issuing a leaflet expressing its concern “about the mounting violence against women” in Asian communities. In March 1986 it organized a public meeting to discuss these issues, with the intention of drawing attention to the presence of “feudal customs” within Asian communities, which, the IWA stressed, “must not be tolerated.”75
If ethnicity was a source of incongruity, the position 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
