Setting the Scene: Post-War Pakistani Migration and Settlement

Abstract

This chapter begins with a survey of the early post-war migration and settlement of Pakistanis in the UK. Insights from the early anthropological literature on the Pakistani population in Britain are used alongside retrospective interviews with individuals — their migration biographies — to provide an understanding of the context within which subsequent socio-political attitudes and behaviours were formed and to assess the influence of biraderi networks on these developments. The chapter illuminates the importance of kinship networks that developed from the expanding social roles of Pakistanis between migration and settlement. The migration of men, women and children are dealt with separately, highlighting the very different migration and kinship experiences based on gender and generation. The male experience of migration presented a particular set of issues focused on, though not limited to, employment and accommodation. Family reunification and the arrival of wives and children broadened the parameters of male migrant experiences in British society. There was a gradual, tacit acknowledgement by the migrants that their stay in the UK would be for longer than had previously been imagined. Yet many still had faith in an eventual — if somewhat delayed — return to Pakistan (Anwar, 1979).