AFGHAN 

WOMEN   
IN THE DIASPORA: 
SURVIVING IDENTITY AND 
ALIENATION 
 
Deepali Gaur Singh
Abstract

This research will study the claims to and contestations of identity among the women of the
Afghan diaspora, with particular focus on those in India and Germany. What does the
concept of identity mean to these women? How do they reconcile their own sense of
identity with the stereotyped, homogenised images of Afghan women and of Afghanistan
held by their host communities? While analysing the constructions of identity and
afghaniyat or afghanness, or the absence of the same, among the women of the Afghan
diaspora, the emphasis is on how those women define their identities within the
parameters of Afghanistan, India and Germany, and how they negotiate traditional
constructs of identity given their experience of alienation and assimilation within their host
cultures and communities. This study finds that these women in the diaspora, as a gender
group, are at the margins of Afghan identity, with limited ability to play a role in defining
themselves against categories that are critical to them.

About This Paper:

This paper is the result of research conducted during the author’s NTS-Asia (Consortium of
Non-Traditional Security Studies in Asia) Research Fellowship with WISCOMP (Women in Security,
Conflict Management and Peace) in New Delhi, India in 2009. Organised by the RSIS Centre for
Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies (the Secretariat of NTS-Asia), the annual NTS-Asia
Research Fellowship allows young scholars to conduct research on non-traditional security issues
in any of the 20 member-institutes in the Consortium of NTS-Asia. Find out more about NTS-Asia at
http://www.rsis-ntsasia.org/. More information about the RSIS Centre for NTS Studies can be found
at http://www.rsis.edu.sg/nts/.

Recommended Citation:
Gaur Singh, Deepali, 2010, Afghan Women in the Diaspora: Surviving Identity and Alienation,
NTS-Asia Research Paper No. 4, Singapore: RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS)
Studies for NTS-Asia.

2
Biography

Deepali Gaur Singh is a Delhi-based academic and media practitioner. She is the author of
Drugs Production and Trafficking in Afghanistan (Pentagon Press, 2007) which focuses on the
effects of the narcotics trade on the security and stability of Afghanistan and the region. She has
an MPhil and a PhD from the Central Asian Studies Division, School of International Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where the focus of her research was Tajikistan and
Afghanistan.

Deepali is also a filmmaker and photographer. She has been actively engaged with development
organisations in rural Karnataka, Rajasthan, New Delhi and Orissa, documenting social change
and developing an archive of alternative images in different media, on issues ranging from early
childcare to primary education, health, the environment and the informal workforce. She was
part of a film project – gender and migration – while on a DAAD (German Academic Exchange
Service) scholarship at the University of Hanover (2000). She is an alumni of the Cluster for
Excellence, Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg,
Germany. She also received post-doctoral fellowships at the Cluster for Excellence, Asia and
Europe in the Global Context, University of Heidelberg from the German Research Foundation
(DFG) from November 2008 to January 2009 and from August 2009 to January 2010. She has
just completed her research, which included a film on the Afghan diaspora.

Deepali has also researched and written extensively on Afghanistan and the new Central Asian
republics as well as gender from a South Asian perspective. Her writings have been published in
Indian national dailies, the United Nations Foundation’s blog on sexual and reproductive health
and the Afghanistan-based website, Kabul Press.

Acknowledgements

This research paper would not have been possible without the generous funding of the
NTS-Asia Fellowship and the flexibility extended by the NTS-Asia Secretariat throughout the
research period. WISCOMP (Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace), my base
institution in New Delhi, was an incredible source of support as were all its staff who took
precious time out to discuss my work. Conversations with (the late) Dr Bernt Glatzer were
invaluable during the course of this study. My film project on the Afghan diaspora in Germany
funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) also facilitated research for this paper. I also
need to thank Susanne Thiel, Gudrun Sidrassi-Harth and Vorsitzende Asylarbeitskreis
Heidelberg e.V., the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),
New Delhi and all their implementing partners, members and staff of the Khalsa Diwan Welfare
Society in New Delhi, the staff at the Teen Murti Memorial Library in India and the University of
Heidelberg Library in Germany who were very forthcoming with their assistance. And above all, I
would like to express my gratitude to all my respondents – men and women, and members of
the Afghan diaspora in Germany and India – who opened their homes to me and trusted me with
their stories.

3
Ismet Özel in his poem entitled ‘Of not being a Jew’ wrote:

‘…When you reach the doorsteps of your friends

Starts your Diaspora’

I. INTRODUCTION1

For many Afghans, the first flight out of Afghanistan in the late 1970s and early 1980s (to
escape compulsory conscription and the violence of the war) took them to Iran and
Pakistan, the two neighbouring countries that opened their borders to them. These
countries became home to one of the largest groups of refugee populations worldwide as
nearly 7 million were displaced by the war following the Soviet invasion.2 Several years
later the region witnessed one of the largest return of refugees to their homeland as many
Afghans made the journey back to the homes they had abandoned at the height of the war.
More than 5 million refugees have returned to Afghanistan since 2002.3 Yet today, 30
years after the start of the Soviet war, Afghans continue to be one of the biggest displaced
populations globally.4 Many went on to make the countries they fled to their homes,
making them a widely dispersed group of people today.5

Repeated displacements create constant disruptions in the uniform meaning of home,

which impact upon the manner in which these groups define and redefine home. Through
this research paper I intend to understand what such relentless flight from home as a
consequence of conflict has meant for the women of the Afghan diaspora, what happens
when certain social groups no longer have access to spaces that are generally perceived
as ‘naturally given’, and when they construct their social identities from a plethora of other
factors, social constructions and hierarchies.6 According to Richard Jenkins, the local, the
communal, the national and the racial are to be understood as historically and contextually
specific social constructions on the basic ethnic theme, allotropes of ethnic identification,
and thus perceived as naturally given. Thus, this research will also explain how constructs
of national, ethnic and cultural identities are imagined in the context of alienation and
assimilation within host cultures and communities. For the purposes of this research,
Germany and India are the ‘host nation’ contexts for the analyses of the experiences of

1
I am greatly indebted to the conversations I had with (the late) Dr Bernt Glatzer. His advice and assistance
were invaluable to my research on the Afghan diaspora in Germany.
2
Rüdiger Schöch, “Afghan Refugees in Pakistan during the 1980s: Cold War Politics and Registration
Practice”, PDES Working Papers, Research Paper No. 157, 28 June 2008, p.3.
3
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “2010 UNHCR Country Operations Profile –
Afghanistan”, February 2010. http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e486eb6
4
Rüdiger Schöch, “Afghan Refugees in Pakistan”, 2008, p.3. For related statistics, see also United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “2008 Global Trends: Refugees, Asylum-seekers, Returnees,
Internally Displaced Persons and Stateless Persons”, 16 June 2009.
5
See Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), “Conference on Afghan Population Movements”,
Kabul, 14 February 2006.
http://www.areu.org.af/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=275&Itemid=99999999
6
Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity – Arguments and Explorations, London, 1997, p.43.

4
Afghan diaspora communities in those countries.

Often traditional societies, like that in Afghanistan, define women in relation to male
members of the household – father, husband or son.7 What happens to the women’s
identities when there is no male figure to derive identity from or when women fail to fulfil
their pre-assigned roles? Most of the women in the diaspora in Germany are educated,
knowledgeable and empowered women who have managed to draw strength from
obstacles and opportunities so as to forge their specific life stories. Those in India are a
mixed group, some of whom are educated while others barely literate. How they chose to
engage with their experiences in India is indicative of how they perceive the self and how
they engage with the complex issue of identity despite the male-dominant agenda.

This paper thus centres on gender, agency and identity. It looks at the manner in which the
women interviewed dealt with the variables they encountered (violence at home and
remotely in Afghanistan, other diasporic groups and networks, the government or groups
within the host nation) and, whenever possible, made the attempt to be agents of change
for themselves, their families and the larger community. Even when their histories differed,
they faced a common struggle against gender prejudices.

Structure and Methodology

This study is based on qualitative participatory research principally involving three months
of detailed observational study constituting interviews with individual women – leaders of
organisations, students, media professionals, homemakers, artists and lawyers. It is an
approach that incorporates oral history discourse, making it easier for these women to
share their experiences. The in-depth and extensive interviews conducted specifically for
this research paper in India and Germany between July and October 2009 in Afghan
diasporic communities were based on a theoretically informed sample that encompassed a
range of experiences among Afghan women and men in relation to their age, education,
employment status, political, social and cultural activities, socioeconomic status, marital
status, degree of religiosity, ethnicity, class and citizenship status. These respondents,
however, should not be seen as representative of a large population though their life
histories are representative of many others. Also, the use of the term ‘Afghan women’ in
the paper in no way suggests that these women are a homogenous group. The term
‘Afghan’ in the paper refers to all people from Afghanistan and not specifically Pashtuns (as
it is also sometimes used to denote).8

7
Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell, “Exploited by Whom? An Alternative Perspective on Humanitarian
Assistance to Afghan Women”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 5, 2002, p.918.
8
The term Afghan has become a matter of debate in more recent discourses as many young Afghans
(particularly in Afghanistan) believe it has been appropriated by the radical right amongst the Pashtuns.
Hence its usage is problematic unless clarified.

5
The aim of the research is to produce qualitative data that will aid towards a consciousness
of the issues facing Afghan women and men, facilitate processes of change in social and
gender relations in these societies, and alter assumptions about women’s passivity and
how women’s roles in such societies can be enhanced. It also aims to reject essentialisms
about Afghan women both inside and outside Afghanistan. All names have been changed
or only first names have been used in order to keep a uniformity of reference and to
respect the anonymity of the respondents. While research for this paper was conducted
specifically in the time period mentioned, many of the respondents were participants in
another ongoing research project prior to and beyond that period. Thus, I have also relied
on the data from the other project in some instances. In addition, some of the respondents
were part of a subsequent film project on the Afghan diaspora in Germany and I have
made use of audiovisual documentation from that project for this paper. The discussion on
the issues of gender, agency and identity in this paper are firmly situated in the knowledge
gained from my interviews with the women and men of the Afghan diaspora.

The first part of the paper deals with an introduction to the research. It looks at the various
definitions of diaspora and where the Afghan diaspora lies in relation to those definitions. It
also describes the segments of the Afghan diaspora that this research covers, namely,
those in Germany and India. In the case of India, the focus is on the Afghan Hindus and
Sikhs living there. The second part of the paper deals with violence and how it has
impacted these groups and their migration. It looks at how violence entered the personal
spaces of the home for these women, how it impacted their migration to different countries
and also how it contributed to shaping their lives and their perceptions of self. The third part
of the paper deals with other variables, such as language and attire (especially in relation
to the politics of the hijab), and the culinary habits that have shaped the identity of many of
these women. The fourth part deals with the stereotypes that these groups contend with in
their host nations and how issues of racism play out in their daily tasks and lives. The final
part concludes with the findings of the research.

Defining Diaspora

The term ‘diaspora’, derived from Greek, means a scattering (of seeds), and refers to the
scattering and resettlement of Jews outside Israel.9 Over time, it has come to refer to the
movement of any population sharing a common ethnic identity, and which was coerced into
leaving their culture. The term is thus linked with the creation of a group of refugees.10 It is
used for a permanently displaced and relocated collective irrespective of whether the
refugees do or do not ultimately settle in the new geographic location. Thus the term
diaspora, both continual and contradictory in definition, conjures ‘a remembrance of
misfortune, genocide or expulsion as a requisite feature’11 as the population so described

9
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Taylor
& Francis, 1998, p.425; see also Avtar Brah, “Thinking Through the Concept” from Cartographies of
Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
10
Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Routledge, 2008.
11
Denise Helly, Cultural Continuities and Contradictions, Paper presented at The Making of the Islamic

6
finds itself separated from its national territory while harbouring hopes, or at least a desire
– perceived or real – of returning to their homeland at some point (irrespective of whether
the homeland exists in any meaningful sense at the time).12 The English usage of the term
widened in the mid-1950s to include long-term expatriates from various countries and
regions. Most migratory movements since the 1980s have been the result of violent armed
conflicts, economic dislocation and political repression, or contact and rivalries between
countries; this is very true of the Afghan diaspora as well. Yet, the voluntary nature of some
of the resettlement cannot be completely ignored. In fact, prior to the Soviet war, many
Afghan professionals and intellectuals migrated to countries such as Germany following
their education in western institutions.

Diasporas define themselves through relationships with the homeland, international

entities, and host-country governments and societies, thereby influencing various
dynamics.13 Members of a diasporic group try to maintain their ethno-national identity, and
their contacts with their homeland and other dispersed segments of the same nation
through intricate organisations, in an attempt to protect the rights of their members and
encourage participation in the cultural, political, social, and economic spheres which are
the presumed bases for continued solidarity. Members of the Afghan diaspora have formed
several such organisations for lawyers, academics and other professionals as well as
portals that act as a bridge of communication and information between diasporic groups
and host nations. In India, the Khalsa Diwan Welfare Society is one such group. It seeks
the empowerment of the Afghan Hindus and Sikhs who have migrated to India, and runs
courses such as tailoring and computer applications for women and children.14

Diasporas highlight the global trend of creating, constructing and reconstructing identity,
not by identifying with some ancestral place, but through travelling itself. When the
diasporic subject travels, so does his or her culture. A travelling culture means a culture
that changes, develops and transforms itself according to various influences it encounters
in different places. This change is also a two-way flow: host cultures, too, do not remain
untouched by migrating groups or cultures, whether the migrants are permanent settlers or
merely in transit while they await resettlement. Diasporas change their country of arrival,
even as their own cultures are changed.15

A diasporic group, as in the case of the Afghans in different parts of the world, is often an
amalgam of a few to several journeys occurring over differing timescales and to different
(and sometimes the same) parts of the world. Young Afghans experienced their first forced

Diaspora Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, May 2004.

12
William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return”, Diaspora,Vol. 1, No.1,
Spring 1991, p.83.
13
Manuel Orozco, “Diasporas and Development: Issues and Impediments” in Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff,
Diasporas and Development: Exploring the Potential, Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc., September 2008,
p.208.
14
“Delhi’s Khalsa Diwan Welfare Society Transforming Afghan Kids’ Lives”, The Hindustan Times, 21
August 2007.
15
Bill Ashcroft et al., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, p.427.

7
displacement by virtue of the Soviet war. They moved to various countries and built their
identities on the basis of their diverse experiences of dislocation. Some returned to
Afghanistan expecting normalcy, only to have to flee from the ceaseless violence yet again.
As a consequence, for many, a substantial part of their lives had been spent in repeated
flight between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iran or other countries, as a result of the different
conflicts, starting with the Soviet war, then the civil war and the rule of the Taliban militia.
Even under the post-9/11 democratic government, many professionals continued to leave
to escape persecution from local warlords, powerful politicians and criminal gangs.

In traditional cultures and societies such as Afghanistan, almost every woman faces
displacement when marriage takes her to the matrimonial home. Marriage uproots her from
her ties to family and kin, placing her in an environment that is not only alien but often also
hostile. This new place is what she has to start calling home. Added to this already tenuous
scenario is the presence of conflict and violence in the nation which necessitates flight from
home and the constant destruction and setting up of the household. As a consequence of
this recurring displacement brought on by unrelenting conflict, what is perceived as the
uniform meaning of home – a place of safety and security – metamorphoses into
something less stable and more fragile. These violent inconsistencies in the fixed
understanding of home mean that the construction of identity thus becomes a series of
inclusions and exclusions. Such repeated exile and movement may, for some, even result
in a loss of nostalgia for a single home. According to Avtar Brah the concept of diaspora
can offer a critique of ‘discourses of fixed origins, while taking account of a homing desire
which is not the same as the desire for “homeland”’.16 Jeannette, a Berlin-based artist,
describes herself as located in three places – Kabul, Bombay and Berlin. 17 Her
experiences and responses manifest how some individuals may have multiple homes
throughout their diasporic experience, with different reasons for maintaining some form of
attachment to each. She made her journey from Afghanistan to Germany at the age of 3.
However, the Soviet invasion soon changed the circumstances of that journey. She
reconstructs the early years of her life through vignettes of her home in Afghanistan, her
family’s treacherous journey from the refugee camps of Pakistan to life in India as
asylum-seekers, and the eventual move to Germany to join her and her aunt. Today, her
lives in those three places are part of her identity, and those experiences are reflected in
her own work as an artist.18

The Afghan diaspora in Germany is the largest community of Afghans in Europe, with a
large sub-group of 22,000 living in Hamburg alone.19 As a consequence, the experiences
of particular sub-groups can vary so considerably that it might even seem futile to talk of
shared identities and experiences (just as it might seem futile to do so for the Afghan

16
For more on diasporas, see Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 1996, p.180.
17
For more on Jeanette’s views on displacement and identity, see her profile at http://www.jeanno.de/
18
Based on personal interviews in Germany, November 2009, including audiovisual documentation for a
film project.
19
Wolfram Zunzer, “Diaspora Communities and Civil Conflict Transformation”, Berghof Occasional Paper,
No.26, September 2004, p.36.

8
diaspora at the global level). For other sub-groups, the more recent migration is really the
continuation of a process begun many centuries earlier, such as in the case of the Afghan
Hindus and Sikhs who had made Afghanistan their home at different points in history, the
most recent being after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

Afghanistan, due to its location at the crossroads of routes spanning the Indian
subcontinent, Iran and Central Asia, became home to various religions, including early
Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Islam. From the 6th to the end of the 10th
century, Kabul and most of southeastern Afghanistan was ruled by a series of small Hindu
dynasties. Their influence is reflected in names such as Bagram (Bagi Ram), Shakar Dara
(Shankar Dara) and Kandahar which was Gandhara, a strategic site on the main Persian
routes to Central Asia and India.20 Thus, for the Hindus and Sikhs on the western frontiers
of Pakistan, it was natural to cross into Afghanistan for safe haven during the brutal riots
that accompanied the partition. This group, though a miniscule minority in the ethnically
diverse country, made the region their home for several centuries – against a background
of invasions, wars and trade. Their trading activities spanned Sindh, Punjab as well as
Kandahar and Kabul and onwards to Bukhara, Merv and Europe. 21 They enjoyed
considerable religious tolerance, especially under the constitution of 1964.22 Their more
recent relocation – during the internecine civil war and the rule of the Taliban militia – from
their homes in Jalalabad, Khost or Kabul, to India or Europe, was yet another stage in their
experience of displacement. The Taliban in Afghanistan had made it mandatory for the
community to wear yellow armbands, so that they are clearly demarcated from the rest of
the population.23

Multifaceted, intricate narratives like the above have forced many writers to recognise the
complex history of diasporas and to review the totalising nature of rigid categories. As there
are several factors working concurrently, a deeper cultural, historical, social and political
understanding of the contexts and sub-contexts (class, caste, religion, ethnicity, age,
language, tribal customs and beliefs, kinship ties, political affiliations) would be required, as
would an understanding of the institutions (political, social, cultural or religious) reinforcing
certain practices. Only with that depth of understanding would it be possible to form a
comprehensive rather than a singular, homogenised view of identity for these groups.

Some of the factors that might influence both the perceptions and the reception of a
diaspora, depending on the host nations they locate themselves in, include: the
complexities stemming from the rise of authoritarian religious movements both in
Afghanistan as well as within the host countries of the Afghan diaspora (which has had
severe implications for women); the weakening of the once active feminist movement in
Afghanistan and in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran; and the growing

20
Deepali Gaur Singh, Drugs Production and Trafficking in Afghanistan, Pentagon Press, 2007, pp.13–14.
21
“Hindus and Sikhs in Kabul – A Fact Sheet”, Foundation for Culture and Civil Society, 23 September
2003. http://www.afghanfccs.org/general-file/hindus-and-sikh.htm
22
Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell, “Exploited by Whom?”, 2002, p.911.
23
Sayed Salahuddin, “Afghan Hindus Divided over Taliban Yellow Badge”, Reuters, 23 May 2001.

9
resurgence of the tribal, patriarchal culture against a backdrop of the ceaseless conflict.
For instance, just a few weeks after the overthrow of the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, the
ally of western governments, prevented women from marching to the United Nations (UN)
compound to announce that ‘women were free, but it is not freedom to throw off (our)
veils’.24 This was even though freeing Afghan women had been a primary agenda of the
International Security Assistance Force-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (ISAF-NATO)
led invasion. What makes gender an equally critical variable in identity formation is that
many Afghans within the diaspora offer textured social histories that reflect the criticality of
variegated categories; they respond to issues of alienation and assimilation with regard to
identity formation on the basis of both their collective and individual histories.

II. VIOLENCE AND CONFLICT

Migration and Conflict

Conflict has been one of the primary causes of most diasporic movements and this is more
true of the Afghan diaspora than any other group globally. For the ethnic Afghans who left
their country over the last three decades in hopes of leaving behind the incessant violence,
fleeing meant leaving behind everything that had defined their lives up to that point. For
Afghan Hindus and Sikhs, the flight out of Afghanistan was due to conflict as well, to
escape military conscription during the Soviet war, and later the atrocities of the civil war
and the Taliban. However, wars and battlefields occupy the public space and hence tend to
be associated with men, with women having diminished visibility in that sphere. Homes,
which occupy the private space, are associated with women. According to Haleh Afshar,
the mythology of war is known to relegate women to the roles of wives and mothers of
heroes, confined to cradles and coffins. Through their grief and suffering, death and
martyrdom become the hallmark of their achievements in a conflict rather than any direct
role.25 As men play the role of protectors of women from the brutality of war, women are
reduced to dependent migrants; it is the male members who have power and control over
the citizenship and identity of their dependants – their wives and children. Emily Hobhouse,
the early 20th-century reformer in her controversial book The Brunt of the War and Where
It Fell points out that women and children are ‘where it fell’ when talking about the direct
consequences of war and conflict.26 In destroying homes, wars, for women, take a toll not
only on interpersonal relationships but also on associated ideas of self and identity.
However, the analytical parameters for understanding citizenship and identity, or the
dynamics of war and migration, are set by men.27 This intersection of the private and

24
“Kabul Women's March Thwarted”, BBC News Online, 27 November 2001.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1679337.stm
25
Haleh Afshar, “Women, Wars, Citizenship, Migration, and Identity: Some Illustrations from the Middle
East”, Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2, University of York, February 2007, p.238.
26
Emily Hobhouse, The Brunt of the War and Where It Fell, 1902. For statistics on Afghan women and
children as migrants, see also Nancy Hatch Dupree’s “Demographic Reporting on Afghan Refugees in
Pakistan”, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1988, pp.845–65.
27
Haleh Afshar, “Women, Wars, Citizenship”, 2007, p.237.

10
public domains has implications for women as they find themselves displaced from their
personal spaces (that is, their homes) by events in the public arena (that is, wars and
conflict) which are considered to be beyond their comprehension. It is important to
understand how this impacts their perception of the self in relation to the emotional
meaning of home, or the absence of it.

The Afghan Diaspora28

A complete generation of Afghans has witnessed only conflict by virtue of the

three-decade-old situation, watching it as it metamorphosed into various forms of violence,
from actual war to the violence of minefields and the destruction of livelihoods. The
mathematics of death tolls, the sound of mourning, the weight of grief and the uncertainty
of safety are what have come to become a near daily occurrence for many.

Many of those who left Afghanistan during the Soviet war returned in the early 1990s
expecting that the conflict had ended. The internecine civil war only brutalised them further
as the mujahideen turned against each other in their thirst for power. Women witnessed
unprecedented violence. It is these years of the civil war that really saw a complete
destruction of the lives of the Afghan women, especially in the urban centres. Many
accounts of the condition of women in Afghanistan have been quick to use the Taliban era
or the civil war prior to it as the reference point. And yet, eight years after the first American
troops entered Afghanistan to ‘smoke Osama out’ and rescue Afghan women from the
misogynistic policies of the Taliban militia, both tasks remain unachieved. For the
conservative rural-based mujahideen opposition, Kabul and other cities were perceived to
be centres of ‘sin and vice’ precisely because of the high visibility of educated,
emancipated, urban women. 29 Those suffering under Taliban rule fled Afghanistan,
returning only when the American troops took on the ‘war against terror’ after the events of
9/11.

However, even today, there are families leaving Afghanistan, though perhaps not in the
earlier flow of before. Instead, a steady trickle can be seen leaving – to escape persecution
at the hands of local politicians, warlords, criminal groups and militia.30 The Ibrahimis, who
have been living in Germany since early 2009 as asylum-seekers, left Afghanistan
because a Taliban-style local militia group threatened to kidnap their daughter if Ibrahimi,
an engineer, refused to be their accomplice in their criminal activities.31 Sadra and her
husband fled to India in 2004 to escape the local militia threatening to kill them. Their
neighbours had left in early 2009 to escape threats to their daughters, one of whom had
actually been kidnapped by a local criminal gang. They fled soon after she managed to

28
The Afghan diaspora in Germany is close to 100,000 in size. For more on the dispersion and activities of
the Afghan diaspora in Germany, see Wolfram Zunzer, “Diaspora Communities”, 2004.
29
Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell, “Exploited by Whom?”, 2002, p.913.
30
Interviewed families in Germany and India in July 2009 – January 2010 who had migrated to protect their
teenage and pre-teen daughters from local militia, who they often referred to as the Taliban.
31
Interviewed Ibrahimi and his wife and two daughters in Germany in October 2009. They had arrived two
months earlier.

11
escape.32 Threats are often directed towards the young girls of the family, and are used to
settle land disputes, debts or personal scores – sometimes in line with tribal customs, other
times in accordance with interpretations of Islamic law, but never in congruence with
women’s rights.33

The Soviet war saw most of the country’s intelligentsia leave to escape persecution from
both sides in the conflict. This was at a time when Afghan women in the cities were already
visible amongst the professionals.34 As early as 1929, Queen Suraya and her daughters
had appeared publicly without the veil, creating the space for urban Afghan women to
follow suit.35 What the war in effect did was rob the country of the resource of educated
women and professionals. Most primary and secondary schools, which relied on the
female workforce, then became acutely short of staff.

In the early 1990s, women held 70 per cent of the teaching positions, 50 per cent of
government jobs and 40 per cent of medical posts in Afghanistan.36 Khadidja, who has
been living in India with her family for the past few years, had been a high school teacher
for 20 years when her daughter was kidnapped. She left for India soon after.37 For some,
such as the early phase of Afghan migrants to countries such as Iran, migration was also
an important means of accessing education and employment.

Among the women who had migrated later as a consequence of the brutal civil war or
during the Taliban regime in the 1990s, not all were educated, professional women, and
their move had been an act of desperation. Migration for them meant experiencing new
and different forms of social stratification. Of those who were educated, they had not been
exposed to an elite western (English, French or German) education unlike the earlier wave
of migrants. For these women, migration completely de-skilled them as their education and
language skills were in Dari or Pashto, the two official languages of Afghanistan. Their
primary task on moving to the host nation became learning the local language, a necessity
to engage in even basic daily tasks. Education for the children was almost always in a
foreign language, which alienated the parents from any kind of active participation and
engagement. These women thus found themselves in an environment that thrust a sense
of inadequacy and helplessness upon them. Khadidja, for example, went from being an
independent, professional woman to a helpless dependant confined 24 hours a day to her
two rooms set in a crowded locality in New Delhi while she struggled to learn to
communicate in Hindi. What was even more frustrating for her was that she could not help

32
Interviewed both families in India in July–September 2009.
33
Amnesty International, “Afghanistan. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Fate of the Afghan Returnees”,
London: Amnesty International, 2003, p.4.
34
Elaheh Rostami-Povey, Afghan Women: Identity and Invasion, Zed Books, 2007, p.16.
35
Saba Gul Khattak, “Afghan Women: Bombed to Be Liberated?”, Middle East Report, No. 222, Middle
East Research and Information Project, Spring, 2002, p.19. For other emancipatory measures for women
under King Amanullah, also read Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell, “Exploited by Whom?”, 2002,
pp.909–30.
36
Saba Gul Khattak,“Afghan Women”, 2002, p.20.
37
Based on interviews conducted in New Delhi, India in August 2009.

12
her younger children with their education as they were attending Urdu language schools, a
tongue alien to her. Moreover, her older daughters became dropouts as they could not
cope with education in Urdu or Hindi. These were traumatic life-changing situations for a
woman who had herself been an educator; she had to watch her own daughters being
deprived of an education. This acute sense of frustration led her to attempt suicide a
couple of times. Such experiences are not uncommon amongst members of the diaspora
when they arrive in a host nation, and very often shape their lives there.

The experiences of these women are often similar even in resettlement countries such as
Germany. Where differences arise, they may be related to the position of the women in the
class structure in Afghanistan at the time of migration and education. Those educated in
Dari and/or Pashto had experiences similar to Khadidja’s and they struggled to learn
German. However, among the Afghans who had arrived in Germany during the Soviet war
30 years earlier, there were many who had been exposed to a German education in
Afghanistan. Hence, Germany was the natural choice for resettlement. This was the case
with Jeannette, who had gone to Germany before the war while her family followed later.
This segment of young girls struggled not so much with education as with being accepted
by their peers at school where they evidently stood out by virtue of their appearance.
Among them were also women for whom the change was less arduous and traumatic, like
Susanne who has an Afghan father and German mother.38

Afghan Hindus and Sikhs

The significant feature of the situation in India is the composition of the Afghan diaspora
there, which is quite different from the nature of dispersal of Afghans in other countries.
Nearly 90 per cent of Afghan refugees in India are Hindus and Sikhs, with around 9,500
under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) care. 39 As the
violence continues uninterrupted in Afghanistan, they see naturalised Indian citizenship as
the best long-term solution, and many of them work towards being socially and culturally
integrated into the Indian way of life. All the women when questioned about wanting to
return to Afghanistan completely rejected the idea. The lack of freedom and educational
opportunities, the attached insecurity and the presence of the Taliban or Taliban-like militia
groups were cited as the reasons making it no longer possible for them to return. The fact
that many Afghan Hindu and Sikh girls have married into local families in and around Delhi
and Punjab makes the possibility of return even more remote.40 This group is believed to
have numbered between 50,000 and 200,000 or 1 to 2 per cent of the Afghan population

38
Based on interviews between September 2009 and January 2010 including audiovisual documentation for
a film project.
39
Kitty McKinsey, “Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie Applauds Courage of Refugees in India”, United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 6 November 2006.
http://www.unhcr.org/454f05d62.html
40
In several cases the men – fathers and brothers – have returned to Afghanistan to rebuild their lives there.
They were often accompanied by the mothers, leaving the daughters in their matrimonial homes in their host
countries.

13
before civil war broke out in the 1980s.41 Today, there are only a handful of Hindus and
Sikhs who still live in Afghanistan (primarily in Kabul) as their homes have now become
hostile territory. Under Afghanistan’s 1964 Constitution, this group along with other
minorities enjoyed the same rights as the rest of the Afghan population, a situation which
changed when civil war broke out. Minor tensions never turned into pogroms, one of the
exceptions being in 1992 when many temples were destroyed in Afghanistan following the
demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in northern India.42 But by 1994, during Taliban rule,
nearly the entire Hindu population left. Many of these refugees joined family members in
Germany and India, some of whom had made the move earlier during the Soviet war.
There were others who joined their Indian relatives in these countries.

Case Study – Amarjeet (Afghan Sikh in India)43

Amarjeet went to visit her aunt in India in the early 1990s. What was supposed to be a
short holiday became an extended stay as the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated during
the civil war. It has been 18 years and she has not returned since. Originally belonging to
the community of Sikhs in Afghanistan, her marriage was eventually arranged to a local
Sikh family in Delhi. She says, ‘I did not have the option of turning down the proposal as I
am the oldest of five siblings – with one brother – and am also polio-afflicted’. Life for her in
her marital home was a series of adjustments, including learning to cook in what she calls
the ‘Indian Punjabi’ way which to her was far different from their own simple Afghan Sikh
fare. While communication was not that difficult, the language she spoke was different from
the Punjabi spoken at her marital home. In many ways the adjustments she made were
erosions of her own memories of Afghanistan and also her identity as an Afghan Sikh.

Widowed barely two years after her marriage and abandoned by her in-laws, she works
hard to make a life for herself and her 4-year-old son. Amarjeet’s is a life torn between two
countries, a country she calls home even today but knows she cannot return to given the
lack of security for the tiny Hindu and Sikh minority there. Her only connection to India (her
family having lived in Afghanistan for generations) was through her husband, and his death
severed that as well. And yet she prefers to live alone in India rather than return to
Afghanistan as her parents want her to do. Due to her decision, the family lives a divided
life. Her mother stays with her in India while her father carries on his small trading business
between the two countries.

Though she is from Jalalabad in Afghanistan, Amarjeet, like the rest of the Afghan Hindus
and Sikhs, is referred to as Kabuli by the local population, an identity that she appears to
have embraced. As mentioned earlier, Afghans in India are originally from different parts of

41
Exact figures are unavailable since a census has not been conducted in Afghanistan.
US Department of State, “International Religious Freedom Report, Afghanistan”, 2004.
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2004/35513.htm
42
Lavina Melwani, “Hindus Abandon Afghanistan”, Hinduism Today, 3 June 2005.
http://www.hinduismtoday.com/archives/1994/4/1994-4-02.shtml
43
Based on interviews conducted in New Delhi in July–August 2009.

14
Afghanistan. Thus, Amarjeet’s own nonchalance towards the use of the term reflects her
reluctance to delve into the life she left behind in Afghanistan. It is also reflective of the
prevalent ignorance with regard to the Afghan diaspora amongst the locals. Interestingly,
the term Kabuli is used for Afghan Hindus and Sikhs only. There is no evidence to suggest
that native Afghans are also referred to as Kabulis. This could thus also be a term used to
distinguish Afghan Hindus and Sikhs from both native Afghans in India as well as from the
local Hindu and Sikh population.

During the series of displacements that women encounter, ‘home’ could be a mud house, a
dingy rented room or house, a camp or a tent. Their experiences as diaspora groups are
shaped through shifting among multiple camps, homes and cities in search of safety and
sources of livelihood in an inhospitable, if not completely hostile, environment. Although
there are cases such as that of Amarjeet, who directly faced displacement just once, when
a holiday turned into a change of home, or Makai, who was also displaced just once when
she went to Germany from Herat in eastern Afghanistan 20 years earlier (when she was
married over the telephone to a young Afghan man settled in Germany), there are other
Afghan women who experienced displacement several times. Heelani and Zakia, amongst
others, moved from Pakistan to India and eventually to Germany.44

Since both the abandonment and the making of the home are important, the home itself
has several connotations for these women. Their understanding and representations of
home involve multiple themes that relate to both the physical as well as imagined and
intangible aspects. The abandonment of home is symbolic of leaving behind a sense of
identity, a culture, and a personal and collective history through memories or tangible
objects and materials contained in the shell of the house that make up a home. Aside from
being a reflection of the self, and of social and economic status, home represents the
space where women aspire towards happiness and security and where they enjoy familial
support. In some instances, home becomes the social and psychological space. Homira
recollects her sense of loss: ‘… when I left Afghanistan … the one thing I lost was my
childhood.’45 On the other hand, Jeannette and Susanne both have distinct memories of
their homes in Afghanistan. Susanne could even find her home through the lanes and
by-lanes of Kabul many years later. Thus, for some, home is a specific geographic location
and structure. These variables of memory and loss with regard to their sense of home
simultaneously merge and disengage with one another at multiple levels in the discourses
of these women.

For some there are constant thoughts of returning home, which often prevents them from
coming to terms with the present. And it is this denial – the reluctance to accept their move
as final – that makes them feel that the present is temporary even though it affects their
lives in a deep and permanent way. Khadidja in her frustration reflects this state of mind.

44
Based on interviews conducted in India and Germany in July 2009 – January 2010.
45
Film and other audiovisual documentation based on interviews conducted in September 2009 – January
2010. She left Afghanistan at the age of 13 with her family.

15
Sadra, another Afghan woman, and Khadidja’s neighbour, on the other hand, has learnt to
negotiate a space even within that perceived temporary life. She speaks of how she no
longer allows herself to be cheated by shopkeepers who charge her much more than the
‘locals’ for the same articles. While negotiating the public transport system, she would rile
at the autorickshaw drivers who charge her extra with ‘we are from here only’ as opposed
to being baharwaala (outsiders) or foreigners. In contrast, Seema, interviewed much earlier
in the spring of 2000, who was living in better conditions (compared to Sadra), continues to
nurture hopes of returning.46 Her anger and sense of humiliation is palpable when she
says, ‘They [the locals] look at us like we are animals’, recognising that that attitude comes
from her being different in the way she dresses and what she eats. In her narrative,
Germany is a transit destination until she is able to return to Afghanistan. Evidently, she
chooses to nurture only the happy memories despite the circumstances under which she
left.

Wars on the Home Front

Even as some women, such as Seema and Khadidja, react to the sense of alienation they
feel as they try to settle into the host countries, there is enough evidence to suggest that
the spiral of endless violence in Afghanistan has found its way into the lives of women on a
daily basis in the form of violence and abuse by male relatives. According to a report by
Human Rights Watch, regardless of a woman’s marital status, her level of education or
employment, over 87 per cent of women in Afghanistan have faced some form of abuse.47
Thus, increasingly, wars for women are fought on the home fronts. Against this background,
what are the different ideas that are contained within the concept of home for Afghan
women in the diaspora? Is home a place where life is peaceful and familiar, where one
lives with the immediate family – the husband and children – or just a series of
permutations, combinations and redefinitions of all or some of these factors? Women
counter these expectations by creating an ‘embattled identity’ according to Maria Holt.48 In
Afghanistan, when the towns were bombed, the women created their own embattled
identities and saved their children, negotiating mountains and borders and living in
abominable conditions in under-resourced camps. As a result, refugee women were often
the decision-makers, a task that normally would have been undertaken either jointly with
men, or by men alone.49 But what happens when they escape the conflict, into environs
where the conflict is of a different kind? How do you contextualise this embattled identity in
the diaspora once the conflict ends? And what happens if the home itself is a site of
conflict?

46
I met Seema in August 2000. Thus, conversations with her were devoid of the additional discourse on 11
September 2001 and the events that followed subsequently inside Afghanistan in particular.
47
Human Rights Watch, “We Have the Promises of the World. Women’s Rights in Afghanistan”, 2009, p.11.
48
Maria Holt, “The Wives and Mothers of Heroes: Evolving Identities of Palestinian Refugee Women in
Lebanon”, Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 43, No. 2, University of York, February 2007, pp.237–46.
49
Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell, “Exploited by Whom?”, p.921.

16
Case study – Morsal (Native Afghan in Germany)

In May 2008, the screams of young Morsal Obeidi reverberated in a quiet locality of
Hamburg, highlighting the conflict that many Afghan women in the diaspora contend with.50
Even as paramedics battled to save the 16-year-old, the shocking tale of the brutal
stabbing of the young girl at the hands of her 23-year-old brother unfolded. Namus or
honour was at the centre of this death in Germany of a life that had begun in war-torn
Afghanistan. Such cases of transnational ‘honour’ killings have only added another
dimension to the vulnerability of migrant women within communities where identity, religion,
culture and traditions become enmeshed to create a lethal cocktail, giving the concepts of
family honour and reputation a resurgent lease of life when the displaced find themselves
in alien and insecure environs.

Morsal was killed by her brother for leading what many called a ‘dishonourable’ life. The
friction between the family and the rebellious teenager appeared to stem from her
westernised lifestyle which, like other German girls her age, included makeup, short skirts,
cigarettes and uncovered hair. In German society her rebellion might appear to be the
rebellion of a pubescent teenager, but what would it appear as to an Afghan who had left
behind only the war in Afghanistan and nothing else?

As public discourse became polarised, much of the local media chose to represent the
case as a clash of cultures, with the teenager a martyr taking on the tribal culture of her
parents in the feminist cause, even as her ‘evil’ brother thwarted it by rejecting the more
evolved western culture and society. The problem with this oversimplified argument of
assimilation versus alienation – Morsal versus Ahmad – is that Morsal returned repeatedly
to her abusive family despite locating herself culturally and socially in Germany. That in
itself is a statement on a teen life torn between the public and personal domains, a classic
tussle between two worlds that the second generation diaspora, particularly the women,
experience.

While this case raises issues related to the failed experiment of multiculturalism in
Germany, marginalising these women further gives male members in that cultural context
legitimacy to reinforce their control over them. It is discomfiting that the more recent
discourses within western secular thought call for allowing a cultural space for minority
practices and beliefs in the context of a secular agenda, when those are the practices that
impinge on the rights and liberties of women in minority groups. Often, conventional gender
divisions as they have been understood in the West, according to Elaheh Rostami-Povey,
fail to explain the fluidity of Afghan women’s identities. Afghan women’s agency and identity,
she says, suggest a different view of gender, a greater fluidity in defining men and women
so that they are not labelled merely by gender and faith. Afghan women discuss gender in
the context of social relations, Islamic religion, culture, domination, subordination and

50
Deepali Gaur Singh, “16-year old Afghan Girl Victim of ‘Honor Killing’ in Germany”, Kabul Press,
14 May 2009. http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article3495

17
masculinity. They see gender as a process embedded in all social relations and
institutions.51

Equally worrying about cases like Morsal’s is the message it sends back to Afghanistan
where members of the Afghan diaspora in European nations are perceived as the
educated political elite who could afford to make their way to these nations as opposed to
the ones who simply crossed borders to escape violence and starvation. And yet, even for
this group, there is embedded in the tribal code the belief that a woman once married has
to be protected by the man (husband) at all costs, which also underpins the criticality of
honour.52 Zar, Zan, Zamin (gold, women, land) is what a man has to fight for and protect.53
It is possession of these ‘assets’ that underpins violence against women in traditional
structures even if they might not be physically located within those structures. With her
position within these patriarchal contexts defined through male relatives – as mother,
daughter, wife or sister – and her fertility as her biggest asset (especially the bearing of
male children) what happens to her identities when there is no male figure to derive an
identity from or if she fails to fulfil her pre-assigned role of wife and mother? How are these
women perceived within their own communities if they are abandoned, divorced or
widowed? What happens when these women are unable to bear children, particularly a
male child, given that child-bearing is believed to be one of the most important duties of a
woman in Afghan society?54

Case study – Jahan (ethnic Afghan in India)55

Jahan, who is in her nineties, has lived in India for the past 20 years, having fled the war in
Afghanistan with her husband in the 1980s. Today a widow, she lives alone in the
middle-class neighbourhood of Lajpat Nagar, New Delhi, waiting for the day she can be
with her only son in Germany. However, her diminishing hearing seems to be diminishing
her hopes. Her last request for resettlement with relatives in Canada was denied because
she could not answer most of the questions. Her age-related hearing impairment meant
she could not hear, understand or respond to the interviewer’s questions. Besides, very
few countries seem willing to take on the responsibility of a nonagenarian woman. A
two-room accommodation with her life’s belongings in an always-packed bag is what she
calls home. She converses in Dari and her understanding of the local language is quite
limited which makes communication with her neighbours or migration officials an arduous
task.

51
Elaheh Rostami-Povey, Afghan Women, 2007, pp.3–4.
52
Human Rights Watch, “Between Hope and Fear, Intimidation and Attacks against Women in Public Life in
Afghanistan”, Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper, 2004.
53
An old Afghan proverb which is believed to provide the motivation for the violence that underpins local
life.
54
Elaheh Rostami-Povey, Afghan Women, 2007, p.18.
55
Based on interviews in India in September 2009.

18
Jahan, like many other Afghan women, once belonged to the more privileged sections of
society. While in Afghanistan, as the political, social and economic elite, they enjoyed a
more sequestered and luxurious lifestyle, quite different from the lifestyles they have to
contend with as asylum-seekers and refugees. Often, these women have had to give up
modern homes and apartments in Afghan cities for poorer crowded neighbourhoods in
countries such as Iran, Pakistan or India.56 This move translates into a loss of status for
them. These women, though educated, have limited survival skills when they are thrown in
the midst of chaotic middle-class life in countries like India. Their only means of livelihood
becomes the vast informal sector where the jobs are mostly menial, something that they
are unable to cope with. Often they struggle to negotiate even daily tasks such as shopping
and cooking, and have difficulty adjusting to the new environment, its culture and its
challenges.

Jahan was already in her sixties when she arrived in India, and had to make a new start in
that country. She says she cannot join her son as his German wife is unwilling to support
her. She sees her son once a year when he comes to India to visit her. In India, she has a
distant male relative who lives with her and provides immediate support in terms of dealing
with the travails of daily life as well as her migrant status and its accompanying
complications (involving bureaucratic hurdles and status renewals among other things).
Jahan bears the financial burden of her stay through remittances from relatives settled
abroad.

The remittances which sustain many women like Jahan are a reminder of the dominant role
of community and group identity in Afghan society, to the extent that it might render
individual identity (especially in the rural areas of Afghanistan) redundant. It is on this
question of their individual identity that women come up against hurdles as they attempt to
negotiate another dimension of their understanding of the self amidst the various demands
of the community and family. That the communal identity has an enormous impact on
gender relations, even in urban areas and among the educated and middle classes – as
well as in diaspora communities in the west – is evident in the reactions to the women-led
protests in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the introduction of the Shiite personal status
law.57

Afghan women see themselves as an integral part of the family unit shaped by Afghan
tradition and culture. And yet, femininity crosses paths with war and violence. Against this
background of violence, traditional gender relations in the context of Afghan culture take on
an added complexity. Thus, for some women even as the move from a traditional
conflict-riddled home might provide a path towards equality, it can also cause a further

56
Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell, “Exploited by Whom?”, 2002, p.921; see also Nancy Hatch Dupree,
“Demographic Reporting”, 1988, pp.845–65.
57
Deepali Gaur Singh, “Afghans May Vote but Women’s Rights Remain Elusive”, RH Reality Check, 25
August 2009.
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/08/24/afghans-may-vote-but-democracy-has-not-yet-restored-wome
ns-rights

19
decline in status. Shaima, a mother of three grown-up children who made Germany her
home 30 years ago, is an example. Within a few years of her arrival in the country, she
separated from her husband and raised her children on her own. Many women who have
had to migrate without their husbands or male family members find themselves in similar
situations, as do Afghan Hindu and Sikh women whose family members return to
Afghanistan. As mentioned earlier, Afghan Hindu and Sikh women often marry into local
Indian families, while male members of their family – fathers and brothers – return to
Afghanistan. Nikhat’s entire family has gone back to Afghanistan while she lives with her
husband’s family in Delhi.58 She has intermittent contact with her family in Afghanistan and
her worries are reflected in her repeated references to the haalaat (circumstances) in
Afghanistan. She has no immediate family in India and finds companionship among fellow
Afghan Hindu and Sikh women in the tailoring class she attends. There is little space for
her to share memories of her life in Afghanistan with anyone at her marital home. The two
hours at the tailoring class every day offers her the liberty to talk about a life and identity
she has left behind. Needless to say, in the absence of any immediate kin, the
circumstances under which these women made the journey to India heightens their
vulnerability within their marital homes. So, for many, forgetting their Afghan history is the
best coping mechanism, and they even speak of their parents in Afghanistan in hushed
whispers. In one interview, Nikhat shows discomfort with talking about Afghanistan when
her sister-in-law is present in the same room.59

Leaving home has its own deep-seated psychological repercussions. When the home – the
most sacred and safest of places – can no longer guard against the outside, it becomes
symbolic of a larger insecurity, and the actual abandonment of home becomes emblematic
of that insecurity. When diasporic groups, such as the Afghans in Germany, India or
elsewhere, leave behind families and relationships, the leaving is also symbolic of the
abandoning of a larger family, their nation, their culture and their history, all of which anchor
the identity. Insecurity and uncertainty are embedded in the fact that the patriarch, here a
metaphor interchangeable between the father and the state, is absent and unable to offer
protection. Displacement thus no longer remains in the realm of changing just their country
of residence. This metaphorical reference comes up quite poignantly in a meeting with
Kunti, an Afghan Hindu who had been living in Germany for the past decade. She points
out that the only reason she still lives in Germany is because her immediate family – her
brothers and her children – is settled there. However, ‘it is not home. And yet we [Afghan
Hindus] have no place that we can call home as we are neither accepted by Afghanistan
nor India’.60

58
An Afghan Sikh woman who migrated to India by marriage, interviewed in July–September 2009.
59
Many Afghan Hindu and Sikh women marry into local Indian families with no Afghan ancestry or
linkages of their own. Against this background, and due to the circumstances of their own journey and
especially their experiences of vulnerability and exploitation as women, Afghanistan is not a context women
such as Nikhat are comfortable referring to especially in the presence of non-Afghans who do not share and
understand their experiences.
60
Kunti lives with her children in Germany close to both her brothers who are also settled in Germany.
Interviewed between September 2009 and January 2010.

20
Identity re-articulation becomes particularly traumatic when people come from a
completely different cultural context such as those who move to the West from traditional
backgrounds. The gender focus tends to become located in marriage and the family, two
intertwining aspects of the traditional home. With fertility and marriage at the core of this
personal domain, the position of women in that private space goes on to define their
visibility or otherwise in the public space. Fertility continues to remain the crux of a
woman’s role and importance in the community, and it is hardly surprising then that the
marital status of a woman also plays a significant role in her life. Arranged marriages are
inherent to the social fabric of traditional societies like Afghanistan as is the institution of
marriage itself. And often this choice, if made independently, is representative of crossing
the sacred threshold between rebellion and dishonour.

Aarzoo’s narrative raises questions related to both fertility and choice in marriage that
Afghan women have to negotiate.61 She emotionally pointed out that ‘it was out of respect
for my father that I postponed my own wedding to the man of my choice till the time that he
was ready to give his blessings. He did not give me the same respect when he chose to
remarry simply because he wanted a son’. The oldest among five siblings – all sisters – her
relationship with a German man though known to the extended family and fellow Afghans
met a roadblock when her parents objected to it. Although her father was perceived as the
more educated and less orthodox of her two parents, Aarzoo expressed her displeasure
when he married a girl half his age due to his wish for a male heir, going to the extent of
breaking ties with him. That response was also an articulation of her desire to stand by her
mother. Eventually, it was her mother who was present at her wedding.

This particular case also reflects the relatively higher tolerance for Afghan men marrying
local (German) or non-Afghan women compared to the reverse situation. Thus, it is not
very common to find Afghan women in the diaspora crossing the lines. Afghan Hindus and
Sikhs would be an exception as they marry local men, but there religion becomes the
common thread for the alliance. Also, in their case, marriage allows the women to stay on
in India as legitimate citizens even when their families return to Afghanistan. 62
Nevertheless, during this research, there is evidence of some of the women respondents in
Germany being in long-term relationships with non-Afghan men. In some cases the
relationships are known to the immediate family (parents) but not to the extended family.
Often the pressure to marry even for the women in these ‘unconventional’ relationships
(when compared to the more traditional relationships defined by Afghan culture) is from the
extended family. One of the respondents talks about how her mother has been gently
pressuring her to change the status of her current relationship to marriage ‘since everyone’
– meaning her extended family – ‘knew about it anyway’.

61
She went to Germany with her parents during the Soviet war and has been living there since. Interviewed
between September 2009 and January 2010.
62
For similar arguments on Afghan diasporas in neighbouring countries, see Elaheh Rostami-Povey,
“Afghan Refugees in Iran, Pakistan, the U.K., and the U.S. and Life after Return: A Comparative
Gender Analysis”, Iranian Studies, Vol. 40, No. 2, April 2007, pp.241–61.

21
Often community norms become an important reference point for women to negotiate their
identity. Religion, as already discussed, is deeply embedded in Afghan society, community
and family, and exists concurrently with other indicators of identity. The dominance or
subordination of religion might change with the cultural sub-contexts but it remains integral to
social life. How do women fit in given the omnipresence of religion? Religion, especially in
more recent times, has been one of the most potent tools used to constrain women’s lives
irrespective of their actual religious, social or cultural affiliations or realities.63 More often
than not, religion has been used to wrest from women the ability to make any decision that is
independent of their position in the community. For women, religion is a cultural practice, and
with the task of preserving it thrust upon them, it often also sets the tone for conflict.

Religious radicalism is predicated on the control and restriction of women’s sexuality by men
using the tools of religion. Women considered as someone’s property are restricted in their
ability to make life-changing decisions; the curbs on their sexual partners or the right to
choose whom to marry manifest themselves in a multitude of ways.64 Arranged marriages
are the most compelling means of preserving socioeconomic hierarchies, and ethnic,
religious or racial purity, thereby reinforcing traditional concepts of identity. Yet, there are
women who have constantly made their own choices, rejecting prospective grooms for a
variety of reasons, and even their parents have come to accept their decisions. In Heelani’s
case, the rejections included an alliance with her cousin.65 On the issue of marriage and
relationships, Heelani relates how her brothers had been forbidden by her parents from
bringing their girlfriends home since it was not a freedom made available to her. This was
demanded by her parents out of ‘respect for their sister’. Today, at 26 years of age, she has
negotiated, albeit with considerable struggle, arguments and fights, her choice of where to
live (she lives independent of her parents in another city). And yet she recognises that while
her parents give her this space, it is not necessarily something that her extended family
members might understand. Hence, it is a fact that continues to be concealed from the
extended family.

Zakia, on the other hand, faced opposition to her marriage to a fellow Pashtun simply
because he was a musician. In her early years in Germany she recalls being spotted having
an innocent conversation with an Arab boy by one of her brothers. That resulted in a severe
backlash at home. While her brothers brought their girlfriends home, she was chastised just
for speaking with a boy. She said, ‘I could not deal with these double standards and [the]
complete lack of trust in me,’ and completely stopped interacting with people for many years.
This shows that the pressure of social and cultural transformations and the changing gender
dynamics in the country of resettlement can result in shifting relationships among family
members.

63
For more arguments on religion and writing in the post 9/11 America context with reference to Muslim
immigrants, see Samaa Abdurraqib, “Hijab Scenes: Muslim Women, Migration, and Hijab in Immigrant
Muslim Literature”, MELUS, Vol. 31, No. 4, Arab American Literature, Winter, 2006, pp.55–70.
64
Also see Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castaneda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller,
Uprootings/Regroundings. Questions of Home and Migration, Berg, 2003.
65
Heelani came to Germany at the age of 9. Interviewed between September 2009 and January 2010.

22
Some of these narratives thus bring us to the question of whether diaspora experiences
reinforce or loosen gender subordination. Zakia makes an interesting comparison between
her two brothers, one of whom is married to a highly educated and professionally
accomplished German woman and the other to an Afghan woman. She says that the ease
with which the one with an Afghan wife makes decisions without even consulting his wife –
even on family matters – is in stark contrast to the other brother who has to consult his
(German) wife about everything. For herself she says that whenever her own family needs
her help as a daughter, they call her at the shortest of notice. Yet, when it comes to critical
family matters such as property, she is never consulted. She says, ‘This hurt me so much
that now when they call me I go at my convenience, otherwise I don’t.’ Often the home
becomes the locus for the deepest conflicted values where personal agency and
resistance clash with accommodation to previously relevant norms. Zakia expresses this
resistance when she sees the difference in treatment when it comes to critical decisions.66
The extended family sometimes imposes restrictions on the women, which some go along
with, while others resist. However, what all their narratives suggest is that even if the
families are supportive within the diasporic context, they are not free from the conflict that
comes from a clash between the demands of tradition and culture, and modernity. Often
the conflict comes down to the power of choice and decision-making.

While a woman who migrates and becomes part of the diaspora may gain autonomy due to
the distance from her husband’s relatives, it also comes at the cost of emotional support.
From a household in familiar surroundings, she is thrust into an environment where she is
alone. Makai, whose marriage, as mentioned earlier, was solemnised over the telephone in
Afghanistan, arrived in Germany alone at the tender age of 16 as a young bride, where she
met her husband for the first time. Today, 22 years later, she still has none of her kin in
Germany. All her sisters are in the United Kingdom. Her husband’s parents, brothers,
uncles, cousins, though, are all within a three-kilometre radius. In Germany, the position of
Afghan Hindu and Sikh women is even more precarious as they feel they lack acceptance
in all the various national contexts – Afghanistan, India and Germany. Makai, who left her
entire family thousands of miles away when she got married, relates the acute vulnerability
of a Hindu girl from India that she knows, one who had married into an Afghan Hindu family
in Germany. This Indian Hindu woman is, by virtue of marriage, not just located in an alien
country (Germany), but also an alien cultural sub-context (Afghan Hindu), thereby
increasing the pressures of adjustment on her. In talking about her, Makai unwittingly
references her own fragile situation as a young bride in a foreign country several years
earlier. The experience of vulnerability is one shared by many of the women in the diaspora.
Very often, women in the diaspora, because of the absence of the support of their
immediate kin, have no support systems to turn to.

66
For cultural and familial pressures on Afghan women in the diaspora in the UK and US, read Elaheh
Rostami-Povey, “Exile and Identity” in Afghan Women, 2007.

23
While adultery might be accepted grounds for divorce in one cultural context, it might not
be so in another. Aarzoo’s mother in Germany was abandoned by her father for another girl
in Afghanistan. Yet, they are separated, not divorced. Due to the fact that women migrate
as dependants of their husbands, they believe that their status in the host nation is tied to
their marital status, even though that might not be the case. Some of the respondents
relate how their parents divorced after making the difficult journey out of Afghanistan. They
explain it simply as ‘an inability to adjust with each other soon afterwards’. Separations –
like Aarzoo’s mother’s – draw attention to the centrality of marriage for a woman’s identity
as well to the complex negotiations women must undertake to overcome the continuing
stigma associated with living outside the realm of marital life. As a result, many women in
the diaspora tend to tolerate adultery and abandonment as long as it allows them to
maintain the symbolic identity of a married woman.67

When a woman’s status is derived from male members of the household, the death of a
husband often presents the ultimate test of the widow’s bargaining power within the
household. During Amarjeet’s short marriage, she was the primary care-provider for her
ailing husband. However, after his death, she was asked to leave the marital home with her
infant son. Her position as an Afghan migrant in India, whose nationality was determined
by her marriage, increased her vulnerability on his death. She put up no resistance as she
did not have any kin she could turn to for legal advice or help. Thus, the loss of the
husband for many women translates into a loss of self, irrespective of whether the
experiences of marriage were joyful or harsh. For Jahan, her experience as a widowed
migrant woman is compounded by the dispersal of her kin, as they are located across
North America and in Europe (her son lives in Germany) while she alone lives in India. So
for women like Jahan home lies, quite ironically, in the various national contexts inhabited
by her various kin as she struggles to be accepted by any one of them (and their countries
of residence). Her current location is viewed less as a home and more as a transitory
location.

However, many younger Afghan women do recognise that their lives are different from that
of their mothers. They are educated and work outside the home from an early age. Some,
especially in Germany, live by themselves like many single native German girls their age,
and they often do not live with their husband’s families if married. In India, while their lives
might not be that different from their mothers’, the sense of freedom that they experience in
terms of mobility is very different from their own early memories and experience of life. As
for the younger girls, their lives are influenced by that of teenage Indian girls, and to that
extent, they are different from young girls of their generation in Afghanistan. Thus, for all
these women, there is a strengthened personal agency in the diaspora but there is also a
renegotiation of gender relationships.

67
For more on migrant women and marriage see Rajni Palriwala and Patricia Uberoi, Marriage,Migration
and Gender,Women and Migration in Asia, Vol.5, SAGE, 2008.

24
III. DIASPORIC DIETS, DIALECTS AND DRESS CODES

The experiences of wars and calamities and the emergence of various shades of radical
Islam as well as Islamophobia have situated women both at the centre, as the public face
of Islam, and at the periphery, by demanding that they cover and hide from the public gaze
and by barring their way into the public sphere.68 Additionally, gender ideologies involving
modest dressing, veiling and the positioning of women inside the home versus at work,
become newly contested in recreated and re-energised ways. Afghan women, like other
women belonging to traditional societies, are seen as the urn-bearers of the family and
clan’s honour. Often, issues of attire and modesty become the rallying point for the fragile
and contentious issues of honour and culture. So while within the country itself – especially
during the years of conflict and after – they used the burqa quite literally as a security
blanket to protect themselves, they are quick to abandon the burqa or chador for the very
same reasons, that is, to assume an identity that allows them to dissolve in the population
more easily in host societies such as India and Germany. And it is the embracing of these
characteristics from the host culture that changes layers of their identity even as they
attempt to reclaim parts of their original identity from Afghanistan.

Modesty, Hijab and Identity69

Most of the women respondents, both in India and Germany, reflected a natural disposition
towards the prevalent dress codes in the host nation alongside a discourse on modesty
and appropriateness congruent with Afghan tradition and culture. Heelani in Germany sees
herself as the perfect daughter who is not only educated, a working professional,
economically independent but also able to slip into her Afghani dress to socialise in the
community during weddings and other family functions. These are all aspects of her
identity that she fervently guards and is proud of.

What changes is that the spaces of freedom get reversed quite often in the diasporic
context as witnessed in the Morsal Obeidi case and also with other women. In Afghanistan,
the home is the space where women have more freedom compared to the public sphere.
As a diasporic group, however, it is inside the home that women are constrained by cultural
moorings and traditional rituals and practices.70 The way Morsal dressed was believed to
be one of the many contentious issues between her and her family. Thus, often, the
freedom many of these women enjoy as working professionals is interrupted the moment
they cross the threshold of the home. The home is where they are required to fulfil their
traditional gender role within their particular cultural context and sub-context. Yet, though
their mobility and financial freedom are restrained by the demands of modesty and

68
Haleh Afshar, “Women, Wars, Citizenship”, 2007, p.237; see also Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell,
“Exploited by Whom?”, 2002, p.918.
69
The terms burqa, hijab and chador have been used interchangeably for the discourse on veiling that has
gained ground in recent years with regard to Muslim women in general and Afghan women in particular.
70
Inside their homes women enjoy a fair amount of autonomy in decision-making even under the ethnic
charters like Pashtunwali.

25
appropriateness, many of these women do not necessarily see the hijab as a constraint,
instead regarding it as a personal choice, even though they might not themselves use it.71
In fact some even refer to the controversial discourse surrounding the hijab as part of a
growing trend in the West to disempower individuals in the name of secularisation.
According to Anouar Majid, although the widely held perception that women have been
historically persecuted by all patriarchal cultures is, to a large extent, incontestably true, the
discourses of western feminism, largely shaped by gender relations in Christian capitalist
cultures, and by the exhausted paradigms of Western social thought, have hindered a
more subtle appreciation of women’s issues under Islam.72 Women in the diaspora and
women’s activists from a cultural context similar to Afghanistan base their concept of
feminism on their understanding of their historical identities, which also includes Islamic
culture. During Taliban rule, Afghan women had succeeded in subverting the diktats of
hijab as the very anonymity and protection offered by hijab allowed them mobility; the
spatial constraints placed on them led them to create an informal labour market where men
are hired to act as their relatives to escort them.73 Having recognised these possibilities,
even as men in the diaspora try to recreate the traditional spaces of the homeland inside
their homes, women renegotiate a trade-off; their freedom outside the home is offset by
cultural constraints at home, a reversal of the situation in Afghanistan.

Culinary Culture and Food Habits

For many like Seema, their way of dressing and what and how they eat are critical
indicators of ‘self’ and any change in that is a coercive wearing down of that self, which is
where anger such as that felt by Seema comes from. Closely connected with the idea of
migration is the tendency to sentimentalise the home that has been left behind, as reflected
in her reaction to this alienation. The inability to identify one single enemy makes the
experience of displacement harder. So while the circumstances of leaving Afghanistan
would have been just as traumatic, she vents her frustration over her life in Germany as
she reacts to what she experiences as alienation or ‘othering’.

The romanticising of the home they left behind is manifested through the imagery of close
family ties, through the sentimentalising of rituals and folk culture, and through food and
simple household objects. Religious and national holidays across cultures become the
sites to deify the concepts of home and family. Replication of the way of life as
remembered becomes the only connection these groups are able to maintain with their
homeland; culinary culture has an important part to play in these diasporic identifications.
Food is located both within cultural boundaries and beyond, thereby ensuring that
diasporic diets, like all aspects of diasporic identity and culture, are constantly remade,

71
For more on hijab/burqa see Maryam Qudrat Aseel, Torn Between Two Cultures, and Elaheh
Rostami-Povey,“Women in Afghanistan: Passive Victims of the borga or Active Social Participants?”,
Development in Practice, Vol. 13, No. 2/3, May 2003, pp.266–77.
72
Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, Duke University Press,
2000, p.99.
73
Haleh Afshar, “Women, Wars, Citizenship”, 2007, p.237.

26
even while some key elements endure over time. Cooking and eating become some of the
enduring habits, rituals and everyday practices which are collectively used to sustain a
shared sense of cultural identity. Food is closely linked to ideas of prestige, social place
and identity. Hence among the everyday cultural practices routinely used to maintain,
enhance or even reinvent diasporic identities, food and the rituals associated with eating
assume central importance. This is a connection which is particularly important for women
as many of them in their roles as mothers and wives derive their identities from the food
that comes out of their kitchens, a space that is completely theirs.

Added to this is the comparative portability of food traditions and habits. They tend to
endure despite multiple migrations and displacements. Migrating families carry with them
elements of the diet and eating habits, if not physically, then at least conceptually. Elements
and flavours of various destinations may be incorporated along the way. Every nation’s diet
thus bears the imprint of countless past migrations. And yet, the banality of food, its
connections to the body and its gendered linkage to women’s work in the domestic realm
have probably each contributed to the lack of attention these topics have received from
philosophers.74 Ingredients, foodstuffs or methods of preparation used in new habitats,
changed or unchanged, help map not just the movement but also the adjustment and
adaptation patterns of groups in their new environments, how they are influenced and in
turn influence cultures. Food thus becomes a method to document adaptation, substitution
and indigenisation.

Mobility and adaptability work in tandem to ensure that food habits, even if they undergo
transformation, are usually maintained among diasporic groups. Over time, this reshaping
of ingredients and cooking methods often leads to a reshaping of diasporic culinary
cultures such that the dishes sometimes bear little resemblance to the original. At other
times entire culinary cultures may be preserved. The diasporic transformation of diet is,
therefore, a two-way process. An invitation to dinner at the Alekozai household – a family of
five which moved to Germany 25 years ago – to an Indian (like myself) would involve a
table spread with German bread, an Indian-style chicken preparation, an Afghani
aubergine dish and broccoli.75 Similarly, Zakia ensured she had a dal – an Indian lentil
preparation – among an array of Afghan dishes during one visit. And it should hardly be
surprising to find mantu, an Uzbeki meat preparation, at the dinner served by Kunti, an
Afghan Hindu living in Germany, among a selection of Indian dishes served with German
bread.76 In India, Afghani bread is a staple in the lunch served daily to Afghan Hindus and
Sikhs working at the Khalsa Diwan Welfare Society.

74
Uma Narayan, “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food”, Social Identities,1995,
pp.161–2.
75
The Alekozais have lived in Germany for almost three decades. They have three adult children with the
youngest born in Germany after their migration. Interviews were conducted in September–November 2009
and earlier meetings in November 2008.
76
Mantu is a dish of steamed dumplings stuffed with minced meat. Afghan food is believed to be a fusion of
the regions that neighbour Afghanistan ; and modern Afghan cuisine is the blending of the cooking methods
of the three major ethnic groups in the country – the Pashtuns, Tajiks and Uzbeks. In addition, there is Indian
influence in the use of spices such as saffron, coriander, cardamom and black pepper.

27
Even though the Afghan diasporic fare might present a range of cuisine marking their
journeys, the one item that Afghan households – irrespective of whether they are native
Afghans, Hindus or Sikhs – never run out of at any time of the day is Afghani tea; and this
even if the omnipresent platter of dry fruits may be replaced by other local snacks and
sweets. For almost all the respondents, and especially those in Germany, ‘Afghan
hospitability’ is a critical part of their identity and what separates them from the native
residents of their host countries. Interviews, if conducted at their homes, would almost
always be backed by a formal invitation to lunch or dinner. In India, when the interviews
were conducted during Ramazan, the month of fasting for Muslims, the result was
profound apologies on the part of many of the ethnic Afghan respondents for their inability
to serve a proper Afghan meal.

In a country like India where vegetarianism is integral to the food habits of large sections of
the population, very often the diasporic groups either live in areas with culinary habits
which bear some resemblance to their own eating habits, or they may alter their own eating
patterns to fit in with the local habits. So, in Delhi, native Afghans, though fewer in number,
tend to live in areas dominated by the local Muslim populations, while Afghan Hindus and
Sikhs live in parts of Delhi which are populated by refugees who settled in India during the
partition.

Makai’s children, all of whom were born in Germany, are more comfortable with German
cuisine as opposed to Afghan food and that is what determines what is placed on the
dinner table for the better part of the week. ‘They do not like eating lamb, which is a popular
meat among Afghans,’ she says, ‘and prefer German food.’ So over the years as a
homemaker she has had to adapt her cooking style to the culinary demands of her children.
Susanne, who came to Germany from Afghanistan almost four decades ago, says, ‘My
preference for rice is clearly the part of me that is not German but Afghan.’77 Jeannette has
a collection of jars with a variety of spices from her visits to Afghanistan even though she
cannot cook herself. She says just opening these jars for a whiff of the aromatic spices and
feeling their texture remind her of the sights and smells of Afghanistan.

While speaking about the assimilation of parts of migrant cuisine into the host country’s
culinary culture, it would be erroneous to equate the popularity of a migrant dish within a
host nation, or vice versa, with the assumption of a complete assimilation, acceptance or
accommodation of that diasporic group. The lighter coloured chickpeas or garbanzo beans
popularly referred to as Kabuli chana in some parts of India are so named because they
were thought to have come from Afghanistan when first seen in the Indian subcontinent
around the 18th century; it is also referred to as Indian chickpeas in Afghan cookbooks,
another indicator of the migrations in the region and their impact on food.78

77
Susanne has a German mother and believes many of her personal habits have been determined by her life
in Germany.
78
See Helen Saberi, Afghan Food & Cookery: Noshe Djan, Hippocrene Books, 2000.

28
In Delhi, from roadside eateries to plush restaurants, the frontier cuisine Afghani Chicken is
part of the menu, yet people’s perceptions of Afghans would often betray total ignorance.
Alternatively, they invoke some stereotypical image of a Pashtun or a Talibanised imagery
of the Afghan woman.79 Some posit that this is a way of incorporating the ‘other’ into the
self but on the self’s terms.80 Thus, the adoption of diasporic cuisines by host cultures
often does little to encourage other forms of productive encounters between different
ethnic groups. According to Ghassan Hage, the availability of diasporic foodstuffs permits
a lazy ‘cosmo-multiculturalism’ in which eating foreign dishes almost substitutes for other
forms of engagement.81 The consumption of food from other cultures might for some also
be just an articulation of the ‘exotica’ value attached to it (it may have little to do with
actually enjoying the cuisine).82 While eating ethnic foods in restaurants might result only
in shallow, commodified and consumerist interaction with an ‘other’ culinary culture, it
seems preferable at least to the complete lack of acquaintance that permits the different
food of ‘others’ to appear simply as marks of their strangeness and ‘otherness’.83

Language as a Common Factor

Just as the cuisine of the Afghan diaspora reflects the journeys of these groups, so too do
the languages they have picked up along the way. The languages the Afghans speak,
according to Bernt Glatzer, reflect their journey during the course of their displacement
from Afghanistan.84 The Afghans who came to Germany prior to the Soviet invasion in
pursuit of greater economic opportunities and a better future were those who had already
been exposed to a German education through German schools set up in Afghanistan in the
1960s.85 Many of those who left at the height of the Soviet war were part of the educated
professional elite with the resources to make their way to resettlement countries such as
Germany. They were fluent in English, German or French.

Those who fled to neighbouring countries, on the other hand, had either been educated in
the Afghan languages or not at all. An estimated 97 per cent of the women fleeing to
Pakistan came from a rural background and, of that figure, around 85 per cent were
Pashtuns.86 Some of this group are fluent in Hindi and/or Urdu, which is indicative of the
time they spent in Pakistan before going to Germany.

79
For arguments on food colonialism and culinary imperialism, see Uma Narayan, “Eating Cultures”, 1995.
80
Ibid., p.165.
81
Ghassan Hage, “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food, and Migrant
Home-Building” in Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds,
eds, Home/World: Space, Community, and Marginality in Sydney's West, Annandale: Pluto, 1997.
82
Insiya Amir. “New Taste of Conflict Cuisine”, Times of India, 17 October 2010.
83
Uma Narayan, “Eating Cultures”, 1995, p.180.
84
Interview with Dr Bernt Glatzer, November 2009.
85
Mir Hekmatullah Sadat, “Modern Education in Afghanistan”, afghanmagazine.com, Aftaabzad
Publications, March 2004. http://www.afghanmagazine.com/2004_03/articles/education.shtml ; see also
“Education in Afghanistan”, Encylopeadia Iranica, Volume VIII, Fascicle 3, Mazda Publishers, 1998, pp.
237–41.
86
Sultan Barakat and Gareth Wardell, “Exploited by Whom?”, 2002, p.920.

29
In Germany, often the common language among many Afghan women is German. This is
because some are conversant only in Dari and others only in Pashto, but not both. It was
mostly the educated elite who used both languages. In India, Afghan women speak Hindi,
with Afghan Sikhs also using Punjabi which they have ‘refined’ according to the local
dialect. These Afghan Sikhs do revert to Dari or Pashto if they come across an ethnic
Afghan in Delhi, more out of nostalgia for the language than anything else. Amarjeet, for
example, fondly remembers an Afghan family she has befriended. She speaks Pashto with
them whenever she has the opportunity. Many younger Afghan Hindus and Sikhs do also
use Pashto in their conversations with each other as witnessed in India. The Indira Gandhi
International Airport which receives several flights from Kabul daily is one place Pashto can
be commonly heard spoken as much by tourists from Afghanistan as by Afghan Sikhs.

Makai, on the other hand, who comes from Herat in Afghanistan, speaks Persian and
German and very little Hindi, unlike her husband who is fluent in Hindi. While she can hold
a conversation with her sisters who have been living in the UK for the past two decades
and are part of the Afghan diaspora there, her children cannot. With German as their
primary language and given that not all in the second generation on her side of the
extended family are fluent in Persian, her children find it difficult communicating with their
kin. Such a complex linguistic heritage extends across geographical locations. Shaima’s
son who speaks Dari and German is marrying an Afghan expatriate from the Netherlands
who speaks Pashto, Dari and knows Hindi/Urdu. Homira, a young Afghan lawyer,
articulates her creativity through poems which she writes in German. In her words, ‘My
emotions are Afghan while my language is German.’

Heelani’s own experience with language is not very pleasant, as she sees a clear divide
reflected among ethnic Pashtuns over which language – Dari or Pashto – they speak. She
feels her genuine inability to speak Dari is trussed up in her Pashtun identity and she
reflects an unwillingness to speak a language which is representative of the political
identity and divide that exists between some groups of the Afghan diaspora. She uses the
argument that Pashto is the language of the majority in Afghanistan and hence every
politician and bureaucrat should speak it. Often in the Afghan diaspora, language politics
does seem to play itself out over the issue of Dari and Pashto. While it did not surface in
the interactions between the women themselves, it was discussed by some of the
respondents as an important issue. Thus, for many of these women, language is an
important connection to their country of origin even if there are few symbolic similarities
with Afghanistan in their daily lives after having lived in a host nation for many years.

For Afghan women their experiences across different cultures during the course of their
journey, or journeys, make a multiplicity of demands on them as a new group in the host
nation, as members of the nation they fled from and as women (mothers, daughters,
sisters). They play out an uncompromising juggling act in all of these categories. Often
they show evidence of rejecting the homogenisation thrust upon them either by their own
communities and families or by members of the host society, attempting instead to work out

30
what has been referred to as a transcultural identity. In his description of transculturalism
Wolfgang Welsch ‘aims for cultures with the ability to link and undergo transition whilst
avoiding the threat of homogenization or uniformization’.87 Afghan women as a group have
shown evidence of rejecting homogenisation even within diasporic groups – whether it
comes from the private spaces of community and family or the public spaces of the host
societies – and tend to derive their identities from various categories, through variation,
selection and specification.

IV. PROTOTYPES, STEREOTYPES AND RACISM

In rejecting homogenisation, these women also attempt to disprove stereotypes of

themselves, and their community, religion and country. As already mentioned, the
perceptions of social identities and the reactions to them depend on a variety of factors
including the social position of the individual within the established hierarchy. Often
diasporic groups find themselves in marginalised positions in the host nation despite
having occupied important rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in their home nations. Those
native to the host nation and hence in positions of power tend to reinforce ascriptions that
protect their prerogatives as natives.88 In reaction, those marginalised by this hierarchy
embrace attributes – sometimes stereotypical – as a defence against the hegemonic
discourses. The construction of social identities are therefore interdependent and
continual.89

It is often the second generation of the diaspora that, in particular, struggles to find their
place in the various categories of identity, sometimes successfully and at other times not so
successfully, against the background of their ethnic identity and belongingness constantly
being questioned (in the host nations). This is a fact that Makai as a mother of three
children – two of whom are daughters – recognises right away. She quite candidly tells of
her husband Khalid having sleepless nights regarding his daughters’ futures because he is
still unwilling to accept that they are as German as they are Afghan, and in fact at times
probably more the former than the latter, a fact that she understands and accepts. Makai’s
acceptance and strength are drawn from her own situation where she has made a home in
a country which is thousands of kilometres away from the place she once called home, a
place she left, alone, at a very young age. For the first generation, the confrontation is with
contesting value systems and lifestyles on the one hand, and the desire to formulate a
sense of self that integrates those differences on the other.

87
Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality – The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today”, California Sociologist, Vols
17 and 18, 1994/1995.
88
See also “Is the Boat Full? Xenophobia, Racism and Violence” in Deniz Göktürk , David Gramling and
Anton Kaes, eds, Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration, 1955–2005, University of California Press,
2007.
89
For similar discourses among the Afghan diaspora in the US, see Fariba Nawa, Out of Bounds: Afghan
Couples in the United States. A Study of Shifting Gender and Identity, San Francisco: Aftaabzad Publications,
2001.

31
With multiple belongingness, hyphenation and hybridity – a bicultural or multicultural
identity – perceived as abnormal and suspicious, the second generation diasporic groups
of Germans have very often been referred to as auslanders (foreigners) or to use
Mecheril’s term, Andere Deutsche (Other Germans). 90 Urmila Goel, who borrows
Mecheril’s term for her study on Indians in Germany, goes on to explain the dichotomy.
Mecheril defines Germans independently of citizenship or ancestry, as those who were
socialised in Germany, have lived, and will live there. By these standards, the Afghans of
the second generation should be referred to as Germans. However, that does not always
turn out to be the case. This conflict arises from the fact that their sense of belonging to
more than one national entity does not sit comfortably with mainstream views of pure,
incontestable belongingness to only one entity. 91 They sit uncomfortably between the
majority society and their parents, both of which position themselves as belonging to one
country unambiguously, and they believe they are perceived (and often are) as people of
unclear identification. Thus, they feel the need to declare a unique affiliation. It is in
situations like these that one sees the seeds of separatist tendencies or singular,
homogenised, resurgent identities. In the new contexts, both migrants and hosts construct
boundaries between those who belong and those who do not. This rejection influences the
ethnic self-definition of the second generation in several ways, depending on the particular
circumstances.

Heelani’s connection with her Afghan identity is very strong as she engages with
Afghanistan through her work, through her professional network, and in her spare time,
through social networking sites. It is an identity which is determined by her categorisation
as an Afghan Pashtun woman who has grown up in Germany. She recognises that many
aspects of her personality are drawn from Germany, where she grew up and was educated,
and does not reject them. However, it is her Afghan lineage, and her family’s academic and
political standing in Afghan society (reflecting the importance of class), that is very precious
to her. Yet, in her association with her family, you can see attempts to resolve the
contradictory aims of parental approval and personal choice. This is an issue that Morsal
appeared to have been unable to resolve, as reflected in her conflicting and troubling
escape from and return to the violence within the family, and her struggle both at home and
beyond it. The reluctance of law enforcers on several occasions to intervene in what was
perceived as a culture-specific case points to how various institutions and groups within
polities advertently or inadvertently play their role in strengthening certain stereotypes as
opposed to others.

90
Urmila Goel, “Imagining India Online: Second-Generation Indians in Germany”, pp.210–32.
http://www.urmila.de/UDG/Forschung/texte/GoelImagining.pdf
91
For similar arguments on “Americanness”, see Samaa Abdurraqib, “Hijab Scenes: Muslim Women,
Migration, and Hijab in Immigrant Muslim Literature”, MELUS, Vol. 31, No. 4, Arab American Literature,
2006, pp.55–70.

32
As a consequence, in some interactions, the perception of Afghan culture as not only
essentialist but also superior to German culture has developed. The reference to divorces
in inter-racial marriages between Afghan men and German women was a recurrent theme
whether it was the Ahmadi family or the Alekozais. However, these arguments were more
emotive – and used to discourage inter-racial marriages – than based on real facts. During
the course of this research, there were several instances of divorce among Afghan couples
who had come to Germany several decades ago just as there were instances of divorce
among inter-racial (Afghan and German) couples. These arguments also reflect the
centrality of marriage and the rejection of divorce within traditional Afghan society.

Parents when looking for spouses for their children in other Afghan diasporic groups – in the
US, Australia or Europe – end up looking for a matching symbolic belongingness to
Afghanistan and shared experiences of alienation rather than a more practical alliance of
cultural competence. So the match might be made based on their lives as foreigners in
Germany and any other country perceived as having offered similar experiences. Shaima’s
son is engaged to an Afghan girl from the Netherlands. They belong to different ethnic
groups and hence the only common factor between them is Dari. The Alekozais travelled to
Australia to look for suitable matches for their children from among the Afghan diaspora
there. They see the possibility of finding a partner in Afghanistan remote as a mismatch
would occur at the level of education itself. Their children would expect spouses with similar
education while literacy levels continue to be low in Afghanistan. Hence, the similarities are
frequently based on negative experiences rather than a positive connection with the country
of origin, Afghanistan.

In contrast, for Afghan Hindu and Sikh women, religious dissonance means that religion
becomes the site for de-linking from their past. Due to the often one-dimensional stereotyped
media representations which equate the problems in Afghanistan with the Taliban, many of
the women in the diaspora in India connect their present circumstances with the
radicalisation of Islam in Afghanistan. Hence, they find the need to distance themselves from
the radicalised Muslim Afghanistan, even though they talk fondly of their friendships and
close ties with ethnic Afghans in India and Afghanistan. Thus, for the Afghan Hindus and
Sikhs in India as well as in Germany, it is the connection with Muslim Afghanistan that has
been severed.

The preference among the diaspora is for marriages within groups and sub-groups which are
primarily Afghan, with ethnicity a secondary consideration. Religion is taken for granted and
men are seen as the natural decision-makers. Women are able to negotiate decision-making
rights only within the realms of the private space. In fact, with the Alekozais, the wife quickly
redirected the question of her son’s marriage to her husband even though the question was
posed to her, clearly relinquishing to her husband the place of decision-maker.

While none of the women recounted personal cases of overt racism, many of them show an
inclination towards maintaining a balance between their perceptions of German and Afghan
culture. For instance, one of them talks about eating with her fingers as a part of her Afghan

33
culture even if it might have been initially perceived as uncultured by her German friends.92
Some of them appear to have a circle of Afghan friends rather than German friends, which is
explained by the need to be able to share facets of their common ancestry. The older Afghan
women look for group and community solidarity while the members of the younger
generation are more experimental. Their experiences at school often shape their friendships
and companionships. Many of those who had migrated to Germany well into their teenage
years do not make many references to their school-going years. The common thread is that
that was roughly the time that their parents (and this was evident more with the first
generation) would have faced rejection or alienation by neighbours, and that had an impact
on the relationships they built during those years. However, over time, their interactions with
Germans as adults reflect their independent choices.93

In contrast, the ones who were either born in Germany or arrived there as infants find it
easier to assimilate. Yet the fact that their physical attributes still contribute to some degree
of alienation is not lost on them. Their angst is related to factors such as peers not even
knowing where Afghanistan is, or instances like when Makai’s young daughter asked her,
‘Where are children born in Afghanistan?’ Despite the diverse problems in Afghanistan, they
do not want its every association to be of a war-ravaged, poverty-ridden country. There are
others who clearly recognise discrimination when looking for part-time jobs, as the possibility
of them being picked is 5 per cent compared to a native German. The strategy that many
seem to employ in dealing with racist experiences seems to be to negate them and to locate
cultural differences as the cause, that is, to adopt a defensive approach to position
themselves as active, rather than passive, participants in this hegemonic relationship.

The case of second generation Afghan Hindus and Sikhs in Germany is particularly
interesting since they feel alienated by German society and rejected by Afghans as well, as
not many see them as ‘real’ Afghans by virtue of their religion. Under these circumstances
they are forced to align with an Indian identity, a country that they have very little physical
connection with. Kunti very clearly points to this sense of alienation when she refers to their
peculiar position as Afghan Hindus in Germany. The lack of belongingness to India or
Germany (or even Afghanistan) is felt sometimes more overtly than covertly – in everyday
interactions.94 It is felt by Sadra, an ethnic Afghan in India, who is constantly charged more
than the locals for everything. The Alekozais, Muslim Afghans in Germany, see it in the
manner in which their neighbours respond to them today, even after living in the country for
30 years.

92
Film and other audiovisual material on the Afghan diaspora in Germany, September 2009 – January 2010.
93
Jeannette makes this point when she makes the distinction between the two phases of her life. During her
school-going years she, by virtue of being the only dark-skinned, dark-haired girl in her class, and due to the
behaviour of her classmates towards her, felt like she was “an alien to them [her classmates]…” This changed
as she grew up and interacted with people from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds both at
work and outside of it. From film and other audiovisual material on the Afghan diaspora in Germany,
September 2009 – January 2010.
94
Synnøve Bendixsen and Urmila Goel, “Representing the Other – Spaces of Belongingness in an Othering
Society”, Paper presented at the 14th Nordic Migration Researchers' Conference, University of Mountains,
14 November 2007, p.5.

34
More importantly, Afghanistan is the context to which members of the Afghan diaspora find
themselves ascribed in their daily interactions. Jeannette says that she does not like being
called an ‘Afghan’ artist or an ‘Afghan woman’ artist and wants to be treated as an artist,
not as an exotic, rare species referred to more by her ethnicity and gender and less by her
work. Many from the second generation lack contact and actual experiences with the real
Afghanistan, and thus, for them, Afghanistan plays a role mostly as an imagined place.
However, they do not consciously reject the sense of belonging despite the physical
distance (and despite the fact that they may lack effectiveness in Afghanistan, especially
due to the circumstances under which they left, circumstances which also limit their
chances of return). Thus, in trying to negotiate their identities within host communities –
especially in societies such as Germany which are less culturally and socially diverse –
they try to conform to the traditional norms of univocal belongingness which they have
been socialised with, which also allows them to take refuge from the experiences of
exclusion and alienation.95 As already discussed, this is located in the belief that any one
person univocally belongs to one nation, ethnicity and culture. Thus, most people can
rarely think of anyone belonging to more than one national-ethno-cultural context.
Jeannette explains this from her own experiences of growing up. She talks about a
particular time in teenage life when all they try to do is ‘to be German’. This is a fact that
Homira supports when she says that she tried reading difficult German texts such as Faust
just to be able to fit in, to show she too is ‘cultured’.96 However, significantly, despite their
similar experiences as the ‘other’ they do not feel compelled to come together as a
homogenous Afghan group.

Sometimes, the women find themselves caught in the dominant discourse where they are
compelled to adopt identities ascribed to them by the prevailing culture. With the exception
of Susanne in Germany (one of her parents is native German) almost all the women attach
themselves to the Afghan identity even though not in totality. Amarjeet in India has
accepted the term Kabuli in her identity even though very little remains of her life from
Afghanistan. She searches for differences between Indian ways and Afghan (and her own)
ways. The particularities of their stories speak of the larger forces that drive their lives in
certain directions.

The influence of constant references to Afghan kultur (culture) on the dynamics within the
family are evident to Heelani as she recollects a conversation when her mother was
discussing the marriage of her younger brother. He promptly responded that the mother
should be worrying more about Heelani’s marriage, pointing out the presence of an
unmarried sister. Heelani is also quite clear on the point that she wants to marry an Afghan
Pashtun man but it has to be one who understands her sense of freedom.

95
Urmila Goel. “‘Half Indians’, Adopted ‘Germans’ and ‘Afghan Indians’, On Claims of Indianness”,
Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol.3, No.1, February 2008. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/TfC
96
Film on Afghan diaspora in Germany and other audiovisual material collected between September 2009
and January 2010.

35
Freedom is brought up by Afghan women very frequently, both among the respondents in
India and in Germany. Amarjeet refers to freedom in her refusal to return to Afghanistan.
So too do other Afghan Hindu and Sikh women in India and Germany. While the women in
India refer to the physical constraints women face in Afghanistan, those in Germany refer
to the sense of professional freedom they enjoy as young Afghan women in a western
society. Mojib, a young Afghan student who has been living in Germany for the past 17
years rejects the idea of returning to Afghanistan with his fianceé once they are married.
He immediately recognises the difficulties she might face in terms of restricted movement
after the life she has been used to in Europe even though he himself wants to work for and
in Afghanistan. In the case of other young Afghan couples, coaxing by the family to
translate their relationships into marriage is met with the reply that they will marry when
they feel the need for it.

Heelani lives alone, but visits her parents frequently. So does Homira. Some live with their
partners. Only when they marry will some of them be faced with the situation of having to
live with a mother-in-law who traditionally imposes authority in personal spaces, such as
having a say in how many children to have and how soon. For these women, freedom in
relation to their fertility is critical, considering that the average number of children borne by
women in Afghanistan is much higher. Those women respondents who are also mothers
have three or fewer children, not more, reflecting a major shift in fertility choices of
diasporic women, with or without careers. While each may define freedom through different
variables (such as profession, education, decision-making power, sharing of household
responsibilities, decisions in relation to marriage and fertility), freedom is important to each
of their lives, especially if that freedom is considered relative to the situation of women in
Afghanistan today. Even if they do not enjoy much freedom in their personal spaces, and
have a life that may seem not so very different from some women in Afghanistan, their
perception that they do have some degree of freedom comes from the perception that they
have choices. In Amarjeet’s case she has chosen a life in India despite pressure from her
family to return to Afghanistan, and in spite of the difficulties she faces daily as a single
woman. Thus, the changes they experience do not necessarily reflect loss but show
positive creativity and a presentation of a new independent self.

These women, whether in India or Germany, reveal a complicated interweaving of

disparate elements of identity. Sometimes identity is expressed through the ethnic. At other
times, other elements of identity come to the fore – the Afghan woman, the Afghan Sikh
woman (as opposed to the Afghan Muslim woman), the middle-class identity carried over
from Afghanistan, or the identity from the political elite of the 1980s which can rarely find
expression in Germany. As these identities jostle with one another, there is an important
renegotiation of gender relations and ideology in the immigrant context and especially in
relation to the immediate family.

The repetitive processes of migration provide both the context for identities becoming fluid
and the demand that they do so since the very process of moving ‘otherises’ and
consequently disempowers the migrants. So while some find themselves completely

36
alienated from one part of their ancestral identity, others find a reinforcement of national
understandings of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Susanne’s initial response at being a part of this
research was ‘I am not a typical diasporic Afghan’, referring to the stereotypical concepts of
the Afghan diaspora. Her references to her Afghan parentage were more nuanced and
were developed through her work and interests. For transnational migrants, the political,
economic and cultural underpinnings of citizenship have been shattered, so it has become
necessary to reconsider and create a gendered, time- and place-specific construction of
national identity and entitlements.97 In the case of women the process is more complex.
They are seen, and often see themselves, as the guardians of culture, home and hearth,
while at the same time the new exigencies of time and place demand greater engagement,
economically or politically. Thus it is important to understand the gendered specificities of
time, place and processes that shape the lives of women.

Identity in the case of diasporic women is best understood as a process rather than an
outcome as identities are constructed and altered. So even as they construct new identities,
the influence of their natal and host communities is also evident. Makai, for instance,
corrects me when she says she is a Herati unlike her husband who is a Kabuli. She also
realises that her children might carry neither Herati nor Kabuli characteristics in their
respective identities. In that sense, it places her on an equal footing with her husband. In
addition, the centrality of ‘situatedness’ – or where the women are physically located – is
reflected in how different groups come to be relationally positioned in a given context, as
Afghan women who moved to Germany reconstruct their identities in ways very different
from those who went to Iran or Pakistan or India. Some of the women who made their
journey through India feel that culturally, India comes closest to Afghanistan. Hence, they
would like to take their children there (as they cannot visit Afghanistan) so that they can get
a taste of what Afghan culture is like.

Thus, homeland, as Avtar Brah reminds us, might be imaginary rather than real, and its
existence need not be tied to any desire to actually return home.98 For many (not all) of the
women from Afghanistan, whether in India or in Germany, the return to their homeland,
though the subject of romanticised musings, is not something they see as a real possibility
either for themselves or their children. Amarjeet does not see herself returning to Jalalabad
despite the hardships of her current life, simply because of the sense of freedom she has
experienced. She says there is nothing there for her to return to which she does not
already have. If anything it would constrain her. Makai also cannot imagine returning
because her daughters, who have grown up in Germany with other diasporic groups as
well as the local German population, have no understanding of what life in Afghanistan
entails for a woman today, and she cannot thrust them into that life. Seema, on the contrary,
constantly speaks of her watan (country) and mitti (soil) and the wish to return to it at some
point.99

97
D. Tambini, “Post-national Citizenship”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2001, pp.195–217.
98
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, 1996.
99
It needs to be noted that Seema’s interview was conducted in a pre-9/11 context. It was a time that many
from Afghanistan believed the civil war would end.

37
However, many of the women interviewed have in recent years either gone to Afghanistan
for work purposes or have visited the country that was once their home. While they do not
see themselves returning to their native country, they do want to integrate it into their work
in some capacity. Jeannette’s sense of nostalgia and loss is manifested through her art.
For Heelani it is the single-minded determination to have Afghanistan reflected in her
journalistic work. Susanne has contributed to infrastructure development in a school in
Afghanistan and even volunteered there. Meiri’s anguish and longing are reflected in her
poems. Amarjeet reminisces about her friendships and the physical difference in the
lifestyles in the two places while Nikhat’s silence is a story in itself. Thus, one frequently
encounters young Afghan women in Germany using initiatives to build civil society in
Afghanistan through Western organisations where reconstruction activities become the
points for extending kinship ties and connecting, through projects, to their areas of origin.
They interface with women’s organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), or
projects that engage with issues related to Afghanistan and women there, to be able to
maintain their connection with Afghanistan.

For younger women, the expression of identity today also finds outlets on listservs, email
groups, internet chat rooms, social networking sites and discussion forums such as
Facebook where young Afghans pose questions, particularly to other Afghans in situations
similar to themselves. This is where they look for answers to their own sense of
uprootedness and bond through a common sense of both alienation and assimilation.
There are comparatively well-organised associations which foster such exchanges online,
through platforms such as Afghanic (Afghan Informatic Centre) and Afghan German
Online.100 During the course of the interviews with Heelani, she even offered to post a list
of questions on one of the social networking sites for fellow Afghans from among the
diaspora.

University campuses are popular with many young Afghans as places to network and
answer questions of belonging and to regenerate their identities. According to James
Clifford, maintaining connections with homelands and kinship networks, and with religious
and cultural traditions, may renew patriarchal structures. At the same time, diaspora
interactions may open up the demand for new roles and new spaces which many women
are able to access and appropriate.101

Engagements with various organisations have given many of these women the space to
expand the discourse around women’s rights through activities focused on women’s
education, health and well-being. Some of the respondents even raised funds locally (in
Germany) to fund projects related to education of girls in Afghanistan. Often these women
are able to build upon a common sense of power and solidarity through their shared

100
The Afghanic was set up to both educate the younger generation of Afghans in the diaspora about their
culture as well as act as a bridge between the diaspora and the host nation according to its founder Dr Yahya
Wardak. Interviewed for a film project in January 2010. http://www.afghanic.de/. For Afghan German Online,
see http://www.afghan-german.de/
101
James Clifford, “Diasporas”, Cultural Anthropology, Vol.9, No.3, August 1994, pp.313–4.

38
experiences of isolation, alienation, hostility, suffering or even daily tussles, however
diverse and complex they might be. Zakia and Heelani have little in common in terms of
age, marital status or a common Afghan language, and yet, during the interviews, they
betrayed a sense of bonding as they shared their experiences in Germany through the
years with family, peers and colleagues. Some of the Afghan Hindu and Sikh women in
India too showed a similar sense of camaraderie during their tailoring classes (or other
courses) at the Khalsa Diwan Welfare Society.102

V. CONCLUSION

Change brings amnesias … out of which springs narrative –

Benedict Anderson103

Men and women experience forced migration differently and respond to it differently, and
hence have different needs and expectations. Women have their own stories to tell – both
as victims of a particular group and as women. Women in Afghanistan in the past two
decades have been the victims of one of the most retrograde interpretations of the sharia
laws. Such interpretations have pushed them out of hospitals, clinics and universities into
the back rooms of their own homes. So clinical and brutal was the coercion, begun even
before Taliban rule, that even today they struggle to recover. The controversial Afghan
Shiite personal status law passed just before the elections in 2009 is just one example of
this pervasive mindset and of the manner in which invasive laws impact women and their
position in society.104 And yet Zakia’s own experiences in Germany show how the space in
a marriage can be moulded into a balanced workable environment for both partners. She
reveals that while she was studying, it was her husband who looked after the children,
giving her the space and time to pursue her education, a situation which would be rare in a
traditional society.

For Afghans, the timing of their migration, the circumstances under which they migrated,
the countries through which they made their journeys, where they belonged in the social
hierarchy in Afghanistan and the rung they occupied in the host nation determine the
composition of identities and their heterogeneity as a diasporic group. Thus, women’s
identities in the diaspora too have to be understood as a multi-layered construct, wherein
the relationships and positioning of each layer in its specific historical context affect and
even construct one’s identity in collectivities in the different layers.

Memory is a very critical component of identity in a diaspora. Historical memory is seen as

a collection of narratives of a shared past as they build and rebuild, block and unblock,
forget and remember as they strategically move towards a conscious identity formation

102
See Elaheh Rostami-Povey, “Afghan Refugees”, pp. 241–61.
103
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1991, p.204.
104
Deepali Gaur Singh, “New Afghan Law an Abrogation of Women’s Rights”, RH Reality Check, 17 April
2009. http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/04/16/new-afghan-law-a-dramatic-abrogation-womens-rights

39
through various issues connected to belonging and, in the case of Afghanistan, through
issues of violence. For many women, memory is also a critical coping mechanism. Thus,
through expression and at other times suppression of memory, they re-root in a series of
often meaningful displacements. Not only does that serve to preserve their social and class
identities but also their national identities and their association of their country with
something beautiful and worth returning to.

However, simultaneously, the memory of violence prevents them from bringing their
individual experience into collective history or collective consciousness. This was often
evident while speaking with Afghan Hindu and Sikh women in India. Most of them initially
denied any memory of Afghanistan, the country they left barely a decade ago as young
girls. Amarjeet explained this reluctance to talk about Afghanistan as their attempt to
dissociate themselves from that part of their life and identity. Consequently, most of them
do not see their homeland as a romantic place to return to but rather as an explanation for
their uprootedness and changing identities.

Homira remembers her return to Afghanistan in 2005, her first visit since her family fled in
the early 1990s, as traumatic. She says, ‘It is no longer the Afghanistan I had left behind’.
Zakia remembers that she was part of the volleyball team in Afghanistan, something she
could never return to. For Jeannette, the flight from Afghanistan is something that she
remembers as a childlike adventure, with her and her aunt looking for her brother in the
refugee camps of Pakistan. The initial years of settling into Germany (despite already
knowing the language) proved to be distressing. It is her sporadic visits to India with her
family and later as an adult that she cherishes. For most of these women, the return to
Afghanistan was a reminder of what they had lost when they left – a part of their life,
memories of that life and people who were part of it, their homes where they grew up,
neighbours, friends and family. For most of them, ‘Kabul is no longer the city they lived in or
left behind’ and in saying this they do not merely refer to the physical destruction of the city.
What they saw had no semblance to what they remembered of it – the ‘smell, the sound
and the way it looked – the capital of Afghanistan in the seventies … a modern city’. Again,
what they remember are the happier times and not the circumstances under which they left.
What they refer to is the hope they had at the time of leaving – of returning soon to their
homes. Hence, what they saw on their return after decades was a complete loss of that
time and those years of their lives.

Since most left with nothing, they have very few objects and photographs to even
substantiate their stories, and are wholly reliant on their individual and collective memories.
According to Zohra Saed, many Afghan exiles write from a child’s voice and preserve their
last memories of Afghanistan because it is usually their most valued concrete link to the
country.105 Leaving home is thus not a simple act of changing one’s place of residence. It
epitomises a parting of ways with a life that they had been familiar and comfortable with.

105
“Restoring Afghan Memory: An Interview with Zohra Saed”, Asia Society, 14 August 2002.

40
This is so because identity is derived from a sense of home. Therefore, when women are
forced to leave home, they feel suddenly bereft of identity. And through these struggles
with memory and loss, these women developed a sense of commitment to resistance and
to regaining agency.

Gender is grounded in the daily life, activities and social relationships of the individual, and
transnational processes transform gender relations and gender ideology. So even if men
are seen as the primary actors in identity formation through violence, women’s identities
are equally and differently impacted by it. Displacement, whether within a person’s country
or outside of it, has implications not only on physical security but also on anxieties about
the non-material aspects that form the basis of identities. The transcultural experiences of
these various women point to the fact that culture, even within the diaspora, cannot be
seen as timeless, coherent and homogenous. It transforms as these individuals confront
new pressures and negotiate and renegotiate relationships and spaces through their lived
experiences.

Traditions are invented and reinvented to reinforce religious identity or other cultural
identities as a group, and it is women who find themselves at the centre of maintaining and
practising these customs. Marriages and cultural functions are an amalgamation of what is
remembered and what is constructed from the remnants of memory. The changes in
celebrations over time are an indicator of contextual and situational adjustment and
re-adjustment. And as gender, class, religion and other categories interact, that interplay
becomes the crossroads for the re-articulation of identity.

The narratives of these various women are reflective of an intricate pattern of confrontation
and adaptation, resistance and adjustment to variegated pressures and forces in disparate
and even impossible circumstances. And it is in gendered ways that women wish to
understand and exercise their rights. This often poses difficult issues for feminists,
especially within the discourses on equality. Women may be activists, workers and parents
at the same time – as in the cases of Zakia, Amarjeet and Makai. And yet, in these differing
roles they would make very distinct demands and construct their identities accordingly.
Testimonies of these Afghan women are a revelation of how they, like women in other
patriarchal and war-torn countries, build upon a sense of agency in grappling with
problems on a daily basis. It is in a space somewhere between the orthodoxy of their own
families (though not always the case) and the antagonism of their host societies that these
Afghan women attempt to negotiate their identities. However, what also has to be
recognised, particularly in the context of Afghan women, is the collective history of their
multiple traumas and the individuality of their personal narratives. And it is somewhere in
the spaces within these multiple layers that simple solutions to complex discourses evolve,
as seen in the ways these women have managed to negotiate a voice for themselves in the
course of their daily tasks in their varied contexts.

41