In the latest episode of "Call The Midwife", Sister Julienne tries to help a Family in turmoil. A successful business owner and Pakistani immigrant named Mumtaz Gani (Balvinder Sopal) is surprised to learn that on a visit to Pakistan for his father's funeral, her husband Saddiq (Simon Rivers) was pressured by their families into taking Mumtaz's fifteen-year-old cousin Parveen (Aasiya Shah) as his second wife.
Parveen arrives in Poplar nine months pregnant, and Mumtaz, who cannot have children, struggles to accept the new situation. Saddiq pleads with Mumtaz to believe that it is her he loves, but it is understandably difficult for her to open her heart to Parveen and her baby.
Parveen also feels that she was forced into this situation – forced to lie with a man twice her age (as Mumtaz points out), forced to intrude into a loving marriage, and forced into motherhood.
At first, Parveen even refuses to feed her baby, but as she reconciles somewhat with Mumtaz, she begins to accept her new role as a mother. The episode entirely ignores the prejudice and intolerance immigrants face because of their cultural differences, which I found unsettling. The ending is a hopeful one, but still, there are three things I wish one of the show's caring nurses had said.
1) 'You don't have to stay with the man you were forced to marry at fifteen'
I understand that the desire to respect a culture quite different from ours made the authors of this episode tread carefully around the issues of polygamy and teenage brides.
I also understand that family pressure, cultural norms, and societal taboos made Parveen, the fifteen-year-old mother, feel that she had to stay with her new husband, even though she makes it clear that the marriage is not what she wanted.
But one of the outspoken, English, 1960s nurses in the cast should have asked Parveen, just once, if she wanted to stay in a marriage not recognized by English law.
Remember, these nurses did not grow up in the age of political correctness, and they have had a responsibility to Parveen, their primary client, that surpasses their responsibility to the family as a whole. We have seen in other episodes that there were places at that time for young, single mothers in need of help, and it shocked me that Parveen was not once informed of this option.
We are all products of our own culture. I'm sure Parveen would've said "no" – and I respect her choice -- but she should have been asked.
2) 'If you do stay, they should send you to school'
Parveen is fifteen -- a child herself, as her cousin and co-wife Mumtaz acknowledges. What will her future be like? Will she spend her life cooking, cleaning, and caring for the children of a man she did not choose, who loves his first wife? A wife treated like a maid in her cousin's house?
The show makes it somewhat clear that Saddiq doesn't intend to sleep with her again now that she has provided him with a child, but wouldn't our educated, independent British nurses think that Parveen deserves more out of life?
True, only around 65 percent of American citizens graduated high school at that time (I'm not sure about the British statistic), but considering the backgrounds of the nurses, one of them should have mentioned it.
3) A culturally insensitive remark
Why should "Call the Midwife" portray its nurses as products of their time, unable to completely escape the prejudices of the society in which they live? Because to deny the prejudice and incomprehension that immigrant families of all kinds face in their new home countries is to deny a basic truth of the immigrant experience.
Even today, immigrants face intolerance wherever they go. They also face confusion, well-intentioned misunderstanding, and blameless ignorance from even the kindest of native citizens.
We may wish the forward-thinking, compassionate nurses and nuns of "Call the Midwife" to be completely unbiased, but the truth is they would not have completely understood the cultural pressures that led to the Gani family's situation.
We are all formed by the culture we grow up in (whether we accept or reject it), and a few encounters with an immigrant family is not enough to make any of us fully understand that culture. So, someone should have made a culturally insensitive remark, to demonstrate the difficulties that a nontraditional immigrant family would face – and then someone should have corrected the speaker, to reinforce the values of tolerance that the show is trying to promote. A simple exchange like that would have made the Ganis' full predicament – and the gritty setting of the show – more real and nuanced.
