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79 In this chapter, I explore the lives of Bengalis/Bangladeshis in Britain, one of the largest Muslim ethnic groups in Britain today.1 As we will see, the British Bangladeshi experience is powerfully shaped by a history of deep-seated exclusion from mainstream British society along with limited opportunities for socioeconomic advancement. In responding to these conditions, British Bangladeshis have relied on a strategy of community transnationalism, one that is focused on the maintenance of kinship networks and ongoing connections with the local community of origin in Bangladesh. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this strategy has come to face many challenges, from increasingly stringent British immigration laws to the growing involvements of younger-generation British Bangladeshis in British Muslim community forms. The Early Days: Lascars and Postwar Sojourners Sylhet is a region in the northeast of Bangladesh that borders the Indian states of Meghalaya on the north, Tripura on the south, and Assam on the east. During the era of British rule, Sylhet was a regional colonial outpost, especially valued for the production of tea, an industry that continues to be important in Sylhet today. Although colonial investments in the region were generally minimal, in the early 1900s the Assam-Bengal Railway was extended into Sylhet in order to bring it into the British Indian network of commercial and administrative centers. The British also administratively incorporated Sylhet into the province of Assam (part of present-day India). However, during the time of the partition of British India in 1947, Sylhet separated from Assam and joined with East Pakistan, in accordance with the results of a popular referendum. With this move, the political fate of Sylhet became decisively tied to that of the larger region of what was then known as East Bengal. British Bangladeshis changing transnational social worlds chapter 5  The history of the Bangladeshi diaspora in Britain begins during the British colonial era. In the nineteenth century, young men from Sylhet found work as lascars or sailors on British ships that carried out goods from the region.2 Some of them left their ships in London and other British seaports, where they took up work as peddlers, or as cooks and cleaners in restaurants and hotels. Among them were those who became permanent settlers in Britain, in some cases marrying local British women. Others returned home to Sylhet, armed with stories of life in bilat.3 In either case, the experiences of these pioneering seamen laid the foundation of a culture of migration in the region with enduring social networks between Sylhet and Britain that would eventually, over time, facilitate further migration flows. No less important a part of the lascar legacy was the development in Sylhet of a migration vision—an understanding of international migration as both a possibility and opportunity. That is, as these men returned home to their villages in Sylhet carrying stories of their travels, they also ignited the imagination and curiosity of those around them about the wonders of life abroad. It was, however, not until the Second World War that an active SylhetBritain migration circuit actually began to take shape. Faced with labor shortages after the war, the British government put forward the 1948 Nationality Act, which allowed the unrestricted entry into the country for the citizens of its former colonies. As South Asians began to flow into Britain under the provisions of this act, for Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan, the ability to take full advantage of this opening was constrained by the discriminatory policies of the Pakistani government, which sought to restrict the movement of Bengalis abroad by denying passports to them (Adams 1987). But even if many fewer in number than the Indian and West Pakistani migrants of this time, several thousand Bengalis entered Britain during the post–World War II period. There were two thousand Bangladeshis in Britain in 1951, a number that rose to six thousand in 1961 (see table 2.1). The majority of the migrants of this period were young men with relatively low levels of education, from the small towns and villages of Sylhet, in fact most often from the same areas, such as Beanibazar, Jagannathpur, and Maulvi Bazaar, that had dominated the lascar movements of the past (Choudhury 1993). In Britain, many found employment in heavy industry, in the factories of Birmingham and Oldham, while others took up jobs as pressers and tailors in the garment trades of London. This postwar period of Bengali migration is often...

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