Womanhood Implies Travel: Punjabi Marriage Migration Between India and Britain

There are long-standing assumptions in migration theory about the scales of mobility that matter, privileging long-distance or cross-border over short-distance or internal migration, as well as tendencies to identify migration with the properly economic. Challenging these assumptions, feminist scholars have argued that they efface significant forms of gendered mobility. This chapter focuses directly on women’s experiences of marriage-related mobilities. Moreover, we treat international and internal migration within the same frame. The context is the half-million strong population of Punjabi Sikhs in Britain, the largest ethno-religious community among the 1.4 million Indians living in the country. Punjabi Sikhs contribute one of the largest streams of cross-border spousal migrant settlement into Britain, although the prevailing pattern for Punjabi Sikhs is for marriages to take place between two people born and raised in Britain, and far less is known about such internal marriage migration. Here, drawing from the ‘translocalism’ tradition, which focuses on connections sustained across locales irrespective of whether these cross national borders, we explore the parallels and differences in women’s marriage-related international and internal migration, and consider what it is about migration that matters to the people who engage in it.