Marriage Material by Sathnam Sanghera
Wolverhampton is the setting of Sathnam Sanghera’s debut novel, Marriage Material, and the West Midlands city is an ideal place for this pan-generational tale about Indian immigration, cultural clashes and multicultural Britain.
Anchored in a shop on Victoria Road—known as Wog Row “owing to an experiment in mass immigration”—the story alternates between a post-war and modern day era as it follows an Indian shop-keeping family’s struggles through both personal and larger, cultural discord, weaving in Wolverhampton’s political history, the 2011 riots and the city’s decline in retail and changes to its local community.
The plot also makes reference to a literary past: Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel The Old Wives’ Tale, to be exact. Details, events and even names (the store and family share the same “Bains” surname) are “shoplifted”—and Sanghera transposes Bennett’s story into that of the Punjabi sisters Kamaljit and Surinder. The present day is narrated by the London-based graphic designer Arjan Banga, who has returned to run the shop following the death of his father. It is in this protagonist’s story that Sanghera’s own voice shines through the most—and we’re reminded of the author’s first book, a memoir of his childhood in Wolverhampton, and yet another reference to the past.
Arjan’s return to “Wolves” is an unwilling one, for he sees his London life and his engagement to his live-in girlfriend Freya—a gora (white person)—as his escape from his childhood past and the often-nonsensical Punjabi customs and rituals of his youth (in a post-school-suspension interrogation by his parents, the young Arjan discovers that “going around with white girls” is as taboo and forbidden as drugs and smoking).
However, integrating back into shop life, looking after his ill mother and reuniting with the local Indian community—including his childhood pal, the dope-smoking, Steven Seagal-loving Ranjit “Jay” Dhanda—all play havoc on Arjan’s identity. Times have changed in the decades since he’s left; during a drug-fuelled blitz trip to Birmingham with Ranjit, Arjan observes that
God, if weed has changed since I was a youth, so have Asian women in the Midlands. They were unrecognisable from the ones I recalled from my youth, who would only meet me in libraries in case they were seen with a boy.
Arjan begins to question everything, including a future union with Freya:
I used to think that Asian men who dated English girls and then went on to marry Asian women were cowards, men who didn't have the courage of their convictions, who caved under social pressure and emotional blackmail, but now I can see that they usually give in because it is impossible. Because, no matter how many books she reads, she will never really understand what it means to be Asian.
Arjan’s internal wranglings are told with authority as well as with the wit and humour that is signature to Sanghera, an award-winning journalist who has been a columnist for the Financial Times and The Times. He narrates his main character in parallel with that of the shop 50 years before, following the rebellious, younger sister Surinder who elopes and forges a life of her own outside of Indian tradition.
When Arjan—with the help of, ironically, Ranjit—goes on to uncover that Surinder is in fact his aunt, the two strands converge. Sassy, cosmopolitan and everything his mother is not, Surinder is an unexpected influence on Arjan. As she says to her nephew in a nutshell:
You fell in love with someone, got engaged, lived with her happily, your dad dies and you suddenly decide it might be better to marry a complete stranger because they just happen to be Sikh?
His aunt’s experience and independence, combined with the fierce traditionalism of her youth, leads Arjan to form a more integrated and progressive view of himself. It also leads the reader to understand what it means to be a descendent of Indian immigrants in Britain today.
Marriage Material is also an encounter with history—and the ambitions and trials of Britain’s first Indian immigrants. Just as Surinder would never return home after a failed and tragic, mixed-race elopement—pride being “the defining characteristic of her people, dearer to the average Punjabi than life itself”—we are led to empathize with the same struggles and prejudices of those that came before her. Pride is what
made Sikhs good soldiers, the thing that made them susceptible to vendettas and family disputes that rumbled on for decades; it was why her father had lived in a house with fifteen other men, surviving on baked beans, while he worked in a foundry to save up enough to set up his shop, when it would have been easier to return home.
In the following generation, Arjan too is the product of a mixed-marriage dream, this one defying the traditional Indian caste system: his father, of an untouchable caste who worked in the Bains shop, goes on to marry his mother, a Jat. It’s an inter-caste union only possible outside of India, in Britain, and one that would allow
his son or daughter [not to] have that contracting feeling in their chest when a Jat spat the world ‘Chamar’ at them. His child would grow up British. He was sure of it.
Transformation and reinterpretation is the bedrock of any immigrant novel, and here, infused with Sanghera’s satirical yet tender style that refuses to take himself too seriously, is a wonderful and original debut.