South Asian Women’s Activism in Manchester (Film-Screening)

Join us for a film screening that highlights South Asian women’s activism and anti-racism resistance in the 1980s. The archival film ‘Immigration Wives and Fiancé Campaign: Asian Women Speak Out!’ (1986) spotlights the Manchester-based South Asian feminist movement of the 1980s, formed in response to state immigration injustices.

Following the screening, we want to host a vital conversation with three Manchester-based South Asian feminists:

Nadia Siddiqui, Women’s Voices
Kinni Kansara
Tandrima Mazumdar, HerStory

Two speakers featured in the film participated in the Wives and Fiancés Immigration Campaign of the 80s. Our third speaker, founder of ‘Herstory,’ a Manchester-based migrant women’s group, will discuss the current struggles and challenges for migrant activism. Together, they will share experiences of struggle against state and societal racism and patriarchy, exploring their continuities, peculiarities, and travel across time and location.

Date: October 15th, 2025

Venue: The Classroom (Top Floor), Manchester Museum

Accessibility info: https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/visit-us/access/

Agenda:

14:30 to 15:30 - welcome, refreshments, opening comments and film screening

15:30 to 17:00 - discussion/Q&A

The event will highlight the oft-neglected activism of South Asian feminists in the 1980s and discuss the history of their anti-racist resistance in the UK, bridging it to contemporary struggles and solidarities. We hope to have discussions on how solidarity can be built across ethnicities, generations, and movements. This discussion is particularly urgent in the current anti-migrant political climate and the weaponisation of 'the violence against women and girls' narrative by the far right. We recognise that there is an ongoing need to mobilise against racism and examine pathways toward collective action and inter-community connection.

Author bios:

Nadia Siddiqui, Women's Voices:
I have over forty years’ experience as an activist and campaigner to end gender-based violence and immigration/state injustice, working with minoritised communities. As a feminist and anti-racist, in 1981, I was involved in ASRA, the South Asian women’s refuge in Manchester (later named Saheli) and was also a co-founder of Subah, a refuge for young Asian women. I worked at South Manchester Law Centre as the Women’s Rights Worker from the early 80s until its closure in 2014 and was a founding member of the Manchester Immigration Wives and Fiancées Campaign. I am the founder and Director of Women’s Voices CIC, established in 2013 to strengthen Black and minoritised women’s voices in their communities, and I remain dedicated to ensuring equal rights for women.

Kinarri Kansara:
Kinnari Kansara is a healthcare professional and clinical supervisor with decades of experience in counselling, trauma, domestic and sexual violence, and safeguarding. As a woman of colour, she combines professional expertise with lived experience to bring an anti-racist feminist lens to VAWG practice and activism. Her counselling and research have also explored the racialised and classed dimensions of trans-racial and transnational adoption, showing how, within a global capitalist system, children’s lives are weaponised through adoption processes that transfer them from minoritised and working-class communities to people with greater systemic power, often middle-class families and white adopters in the West. Her wider work highlights how violence against women and girls is racialised — stigmatising Black, migrant, or Muslim communities while minimising violence in majority contexts — and how such narratives are resisted by grassroots feminist movements. Drawing on extensive frontline and supervisory practice in the women’s and mental health sectors, she focuses on amplifying marginalised women’s voices and bridging dialogue between activists and academics to address race, power, and trauma.

Tandrima Mazumdar, HerStory:
Tandrima Mazumdar is a South Asian community organiser, mental health therapist, and cultural producer based in Greater Manchester. With over seven years of experience working at the intersection of migrant justice, trauma-informed care, and grassroots activism, she has led transformative projects centring the voices of South Asian women. Tandrima is the founder of HerStory Migrant Women’s Group and co-producer of Stitching Lights, a national art initiative exploring South Asian migration stories through textiles and oral history. Fluent in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu, her work bridges language, heritage, and healing to build inclusive, culturally rooted spaces for collective empowerment.

Chair bios:

Sandhya:
Sandhya is an anti-racist, feminist who has spent 30 years working in the Ending-Violence Against Women and Girls grassroots movement, primarily focusing on Black, minoritised and migrant women. Sandhya is a co-founder of Safety4Sisters Northwest, supporting migrant women survivors of gender-based abuse experiencing immigration harm and more recently, co-edited the ‘This Is We’ Migrant Women’s Writing Collection. She is currently doing her PhD at the University of Manchester, researching, documenting, and building an 'activist-archive' on the struggles of the pioneers of the South Asian refuge movement in Manchester.

Sugandha:
Sugandha is a feminist, anti-racist activist based at the University of Manchester. She is currently researching migrant women’s activist mobilisations and community work in Manchester.

This event is funded by the CoDE (Early Career Researcher Network).