Rahila Gupta

RG: ’89, I joined SBS. And Kiranjit Ahluwalia happened in ’89. She was...somebody phoned us from Crawley Women's Aid saying that in our area, there's an Asian woman who set her husband on fire, and she's now in prison and we don't know...we're out of our depth, we don't know how to...what to do. There's children involved. The children are staying with their grandmother, which is, you know, not good, because the grandmother is the father's mother, who...she would obviously not be the best person in this. Anyway, so what can we do? And there was issues of...she was not allowing them to have access to Kiranjit, who was in prison. So we got involved in that. And then we ran a campaign. And in...for her release. And there...that whole story is really interesting. It's a really long story, but it's in the book that I co-wrote then with Kiranjit.

MP: What's the book called?

RG: It's called...well, it was called Circle of Life, but in its current republished state it's called Provoked. And so we ran this big campaign and that...and we found that there were...there was a group called Justice for Women, which is mainly a white feminist group, also running campaigns around two women who had killed their partners. And it was a perfect coming together, because it just showed that one woman that they were supporting was a middle-class white woman, youngish, and then there was an older woman, Amelia Rossiter, who was in her 70s, who stabbed her husband, I don't know, sixty, seventy times. I mean, the absolute wrath that must...I always find that really sort of amazing that she lived with him all those years, and she just blew it. So age, race, we were doing Kiranjit Ahluwalia. Kiranjit Ahluwalia, although she came from a middle-class background, was working in a factory, so there was a kind of working-class Asian. So, it was like, in terms of the political points we were trying to make, these three cases. And it was the time that women who had been abused were killing as a way...it was the ultimate escape. So it...for us, it was a very big case to take on. Like, what do we think? And what...do we support women who kill their husbands? You know, and we don't support the idea of death and killing and murder. Or I mean, it wasn't murder, it was manslaughter, because there was a provocation, there was, you know...and then we realized, well, you know, this was the ultimate escape in a kind of...when social pressure is such that you cannot leave the husband, and you don't...you're not sure if you have the economic wherewithal to look after your children. You don't know what the...whether society will support you, you know? Anyway, so we took up Kiranjit's case. And she was released three years later on a reduced charge of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. But in the process of fighting that case, we managed to get a liberalization of the meaning of provocation. This is quite important. I'll go into it in a little bit of detail, only because I think for me, it feels like it was the first time that we were fighting on an issue that impacted on Asian women, but it affected all women. It made things better for all women. And that was quite a universal impact, which I thought was a good thing. And that was that there were two grounds, without going into too many complications, where murder can be reduced to manslaughter. One was diminished responsibility, right? And one was provocation. Provocation was usually available to men and not to women, because it was...there was an expectation that there would be an immediate retaliation to an incident. So if you had been beaten, you would hit back immediately. Whereas women never felt in that position of power. They had years of history of abuse. They were afraid. They might wait till he's fallen asleep or that he's drunk. That was considered to be done in cold blood and calculated, and therefore not provocation. We managed to get the judge, as far as it was possible within the law, to open up the definition of provocation without it having to go to Parliament to change the law. And the opening of provocation was that the gap between the incident and the retaliation, the incident of violence and the retaliation is not a cooling down period, it's a boiling over period. Because years of provocation, cumulative provocation was another thing we brought in, had to be taken into account, that the woman had lived with it for ten, fifteen, whatever number of years, and this was a boiling over period. And so it should be considered manslaughter. For many technical reasons, Kiranjit didn't get out on provocation, but that liberalization affected many other women and helped them in their cases. So it was a landmark ruling. And that really brought SBS to, you know, a sort of household name, I think, in many ways. And we got lots of...a lot more women coming to us after that, because they'd heard about us and so on.

RG: The very first march, I don't know if I could say it was Britain-wide. It might have been Britain-wide. But certainly, it was the first march in Southall. And I was on that march heavily pregnant. I remember walking from one end of Southall to the other, covering it for Outright, where a woman called Krishna Sharma had been driven to suicide by the violence from her in-laws. And she...we went, and we were adopting one of the methods of the Indian women's movement which was all about shaming communities. Because shame is such a...shame and honour are the two great guiding factors which control women's behaviour, where, you know, you have to take on the entire community's honour in the way in which you dress, in the way you behave, and who you go out with and so on and so forth. So we said, okay, you know, if shame and honour is such a big thing, let's shame these people. So we stood outside the in-laws' home, the husband's home, and we said, you know, 'They call it suicide, we call it murder'. So, we...those were the sort of slogans that we chanted. There was a bit of a fracas, we...some of the women were picked up by the police. We then marched to the police station demanding their release, and then they were released. And so that was a march that included both black and white women. Because we never traded on the idea of Black nationalism or Asian-only identity. We understood and felt it was really important to make links and to have alliances and to invite white women to join our marches and our campaigns. And there was a stronger political reason as well, because the political principle was that domestic violence occurs in all communities, in all classes, in all races, in all religions. And that was a way of countering what the comrades, male comrades had been saying to us that you're exposing our underbelly to the rest of the world. For us to say, it's not just...doesn't just happen in the Asian community, it doesn't just happen in any one. So it's not...we're not saying Asian men are savages. We are saying that violence against women happens across the board. So, that was another reason that it was important to have women of all nationalities and communities coming together. So, that was one of the first big...not so big, I mean probably fifty, sixty women walking through. But it was like it had never happened, you know? You had the older women coming up and saying, 'What are you...what do you...you know, what is this all about?' We're handing out leaflets and so on. And I remember one older Asian woman saying something like, you know, 'Oh, when Asian women protest, you know, they don't just throw their bras off, they throw their knickers off as well'. I mean, she was like...I don't know whether it was something that was said positively or not. It was reported back to me, so I wasn't there to know what tone was used.

RG: I definitely do think that there is a greater sensitivity to issues of race today in a positive way than there were in the '70s and '80s when I came here. I mean, I cannot...I think we cannot and should not undermine the successes, you know, that we have made as communities in terms of, you know, achieving, progressing through society. I still sort of get surprised by, you know, some...if I'm meeting somebody high up somewhere in an organization and they turn out to be ethnic minority background, in a way that I would never even expected in a million years in the '70s and '80s, that the person I was going to meet was going to be white, you know, in terms of power, the people who hold the power. I mean, at the end of the day, because we live in cap...under capitalism, and because it is inherently unequal, there will always be people at the bottom of society, and those usually will be the newcomers to that society. And they will always be othered in terms of their race and in terms of their... it doesn't have to be about colour because now the white races are trying to become more sophisticated and talk in terms of culture. So they talk about, you know, about Muslim values or Islamic values. They're not worried about colour, they're worried about culture. And we have...we, the British, have a very progressive culture, and they, the minorities, bring with them backwardness. So to that extent, they are forced even to embrace, you know, the lesbian and gay community, which in the past, they would not have. But almost as a marker of how progressive they are. And I remember doing some research some years ago when the EDL, the English Defence League was still a going concern. And I looked at their website and the things that they said about honour killings and forced marriage, they could have taken it off the Southall Black Sisters website. They were very progressive, they were so concerned about women. But of course, at the end of the thing was their solution was, send them back. Our solution is different. And that's where you begin to know, okay, that's why they're concerned about our women. They're concerned about, you know, Asian women, because that's their way of saying, well, it doesn't...you know, it conflicts with our value systems. So this is a kind of a convoluted way of saying some steps forward and some steps back. Is the overall picture better? I mean, if you just take the 1979 National Front Southall Town Hall meeting, the police were there protecting them, not the Asian community. Today, we could say that the police are fighting the racists and not protecting them.

MP: Based on the most recent...

RG: With the most...yeah, the...these ini...so, you could call that progress. Okay. Of course, we have seen also that some of the men who were fighting back from minority communities were picked up. So, they didn't necessarily make the differentiation between defence and aggression, which is still a problem. So they were also picked up. But really, the focus has been on the aggression by the white men and women. Unfortunately, there've been women involved in that as well. So you could call that progress. But the very fact that it's happening today is like, where are we? Are we in the twenty-first century? What's going on? How is this even happening? But then of course, if you contextualize it in terms of the rise of the global right wing and so on and so forth, there are all sorts of factors that go into, you know, even a national situation. So it's very hard to answer that that definitively. Same with women. You know, you now go into a police station and there'll be a poster which says, 'Domestic violence is a crime'. In the '70s and '80s, it wasn't a crime. So, you know, that's a step forward. And as a political activist, I have to notch these successes, because otherwise my life wouldn't be worth living. Because even if they are marginal, we have to say that the things we have done were worth it, they were important, they made some progress. They made the life...every woman who came under the domestic violence destitute concessions, who could have...who was eligible for it, was a life saved. Her children's lives were saved. You know, you have to look at it like that. When you look at the global picture you might say, okay, but there was this, that...you know, this or that happened, which...yeah. So, yeah, it's a difficult question to answer.

• Asian Women Writers' Collective
• Outwrite
• Southall Black Sisters

• Ravinder Randhawa

Enslaved: The New British Slavery (London: Portobello Books, 2007)

Provoked (formerly Circle of Light) (India: Harper Collins, 2007)

Don’t Wake Me: The Ballad of Nihal Armstrong (London: Oberon Books, 2019)

Turning the Page: Writings from the Southall Black Sisters Survivors’ Group, ed. and contributor (London: Southall Black Sisters, 2019)

Planet Patriarchy, with Beatrix Campbell (London: Hurst, 2025)

Entry credit

Zareena Pundole