Arranged Marriages
From the collection of
From the collection of
In 1979 a government white paper proposed the withdrawal of the right to enter the UK in order to get married. At a school in West Bromwich John McLeod discovers that pupils of Asian descent are not happy with the tradition of arranged marriages, while John Mitchell talks to a couple who were threatened by family members when they married across religions. Pravin Lukka of the Confederation of Indian Organisations describes the white paper as a 'white lie'!
From local news to feature film, through home movies and TV documentaries, this collection showcases South Asian Britons in front of and behind the camera. The contribution of colonial troops is illuminated through the earliest newsreels, while hardhitting current affairs programmes highlight the struggles faced in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Public information films produced for South Asian audiences feature alongside Hindi-language films made in Britain and interviews with prominent Asian-British figures. A bold wave of British Asian filmmaking in the 1990s is represented through early works by the likes of Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia.