In Bangladesh, we were looking at people in 2 main areas - in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, now a very large city of around 15 million people, and in the city of Sylhet, which is the capital city of the area from which most British Bangladeshis originate so a lot of people have got ties back there.
We had some interviews with people in smaller towns, we tried to move out a bit, but most of our interviewees were from these two areas. And we were in fact quite interested also in people from Dhaka who had recently come to the UK, because there's a new cohort of migration from Bangladesh to the UK, often through higher education, in recent years, and this is now supplementing the older, mostly Sylheti-originating community.
A couple of photographs to give you some idea. This is a focus group gathering of young girl students in one of the universities in Dhaka, if you look carefully you can see Santi seated at the back.
Here is a group of students at Shahjalal University in Sylhet. Quite a few of our sample were university students of one kind or another or people who were in higher education - though by no means all.
In the UK, we worked in three main areas, Cardiff and South Wales, obviously; Birmingham and the Midlands - Santi's previous research project had involved quite a lot of work with Bangladeshi Muslim people in Birmingham so she was already fairly familiar with the area. So there were quite a few people from there, and quite a few of that group of people were also involved with the Hijaz Community, which you'll hear a bit more about, and people in London.
Most of the British Bangladeshis originate from Sylhet but there is also a substantial recent migration from other areas. So there is a fairly mixed population today. Here are a few pictures from the UK. This is the Hijaz Community at Nuneaton, between Birmingham and Coventry. You can see the mazar, the shrine of the Sheikh who was the founder of the community, and the father of the Sheikh who will be coming to speaking to us today.
These next two pictures are actually at the 'Blessed Summit' which is the annual shrine festival, and which is somewhere between a traditional South Asian shrine festival and a more Western-style occasion. But as you can see people are dressed in Islamic clothes - not particularly in traditional South Asian gear - and the general atmosphere is very much that of the contemporary Islamic revival.
And somewhat at the other end of the spectrum, perhaps, a scene that a few people at this meeting will be familiar with. This is a Bengali New Year celebration near Caerphilly in South Wales, and what you can see here is a play which is being performed by a group of students mostly at Dhaka and studying at Cardiff University in fact. It's a play about marriage - the girl who is at the centre is deciding which of various forms of Bangladeshi masculinity and manhood she is attracted to. In the end she decides to stay in Cardiff. So this is getting towards the more secular end of the scale. As you can see, there is a considerable range of positions and attitudes here.