I remember standing outside the Southall train station on the first day of summer wearing a short denim skirt and a man shouting at me from his car and pointing to my bare legs and then at the temple in the distance.

Each time I visited, I was torn between wishing I could stay and also being relieved to return to my simpler and less complicated life in East Anglia. But as a modern young woman, I felt stifled as well. I found it so welcoming, this Indian enclave in England where the customs were familiar to me. Southall was such a fascinating place where traditions were preserved and community bonds formed an integral infrastructure of support for migrants. While Jaswal’s Southall is fictional, and in many ways very contrived, she actually found the inspiration for her novel during a stay in the place where she experienced real conflicting feelings and demands on her as a young Punjabi woman. As the main character imagines herself saying: “Some people don’t even know about this place Let’s change that.” Indeed, the novel could be seen to address Southall’s invisibility to the non-Punjabi community. Jaswal’s novels regularly feature British-Indian women and in Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, which follows the trend, there is also focus on London and the Punjabi community in Southall. Her novels have been translated into film before and Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is no exception: Ridley Scott’s production company, Scott Free Productions, and Film Four in the UK have acquired the rights to the book. NOTE: This article contains no spoilers – so you can read it and then turn to the novel.īalli Kaur Jaswal, who is of Punjabi descent, is a prize-winning and critically acclaimed novelist from Singapore.

Punjabi widows book