Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  We have discussed how the British Empire subverted and distorted the culture and identity of its subjects. But now that so many of its former subjects have arrived in the island to roost, it is valid to ask how their presence will modify the assumptions about British culture and identity. The political scientist Kymbica argued that immigrants must waive their right to assert their culture since they have voluntarily left their country of origin. This, of course, would be the ideal solution for societies like Britain which, as a consequence of Empire, have been forced, almost against their will, to become multicultural. But the truth is that ancient and complex cultures like India’s give to all their legatees an identity that cannot be left behind like unclaimed baggage at the immigration counter. However much the ‘mother culture’ may have been distorted or diluted, it still gives to a people—by the very weight of its antiquity and specificity—a unique identity that sticks like some primeval glue, and advertises itself through a range of manifestations: colour, language, religion, habits, ritual, behaviour, memory, dress, cuisine and custom. Even if immigrants want to erase it in their adopted country, they cannot; and even if the majority original population has learnt the virtues of tolerance and is therefore not hostile, it will always be conscious of the difference that this cultural identity creates.

  Subcultural diversities, which are about difference within a shared culture, are, as Bhikhu Parekh argues, normal in any society and much easier to deal with. But ‘perspectival diversity’, which is about the difference between separate cultures, cannot be benignly accommodated by the enlightened indulgence of liberal thinkers, or eliminated by the rhetoric and violence of right-wing fanatics. The British project of ‘multiculturalism’ is well intentioned and laudable, especially when contrasted with the far less flexible approach of other former colonial powers like France, which champions the notion of a homogenized state reflecting primarily the values of the dominant mainstream. But the proponents of multiculturalism, and those engaged in a post-multicultural debate, must understand one basic truth: differences in culture and identity, especially where colour and religion are involved, cannot be erased; and attempts to underplay them, as has become fashionable in a globalizing world, will lead to wrong solutions. While a composite and tolerant society is certainly a desirable goal, it would be wishful thinking to believe that such a society can eradicate cultural differences or make them invisible and irrelevant.

  The history of post-Second World War immigration into Britain brings this out with abundant clarity. In 1948 Britain offered free entry to all its ‘imperial’ subjects, but a year later Birmingham could count only a hundred Indians among its residents. In the next ten years the number of Indians and Pakistanis in all of the UK did not much exceed 50,000. Even this small, dispersed alien presence was enough to create violent antibodies. Many of the early immigrants from India were Sikhs—hard-working men and women fulfilling at low wages the demand for semi-skilled labour in a Britain rebuilding itself after the war. However, their most common experience was of social exclusion: they were considered ‘unhygienic’ and unacceptably strange, their beards and turbans attracting the greatest attention. (The notion of a stranger being unclean is not uncommon in the collision of cultures. The British, when they first arrived in India, and for years afterwards, were called mleccha, or unclean, by Indians, especially upper-caste Hindus.) As the number of coloured immigrants grew, the British government sought to revise its earlier imperial generosity. The Commonwealth Immigration Act of July 1962 was devised to put a lid on this unwanted influx. Ironically, apprehending such a measure, the three preceding years saw a flood of immigrants, almost doubling the size of the Indian community in Britain.

  The early immigrants were largely docile, and their lower social standing and income levels were very obvious. On arrival at Heathrow, one could see that Indians, mostly women, were part of the sweep-and-swab staff; a great many of the porters were coloured or Asian; and a fair majority of taxi and bus drivers were from the Indian subcontinent. Everywhere, almost everyone doing manual labour was non-white and a migrant. To a visitor from India this was even more visible because of the lower-class tag attached to such work back home. The primary aim of the new migrants was to find a livelihood, a job of any description or a business however small. At least back then, most of them had left India because of economic compulsions; it was an adventurous, brave leap into uncertain waters. Given the penurious circumstances in which they arrived, they did not want to aggressively emphasize their difference. If left alone, they would have liked to become invisible, attract as little notice as possible, be excessively accommodating, even contrite, and avoid giving offence. But there was nothing they could do about the difference in colour, religion and language. At the general level, the reaction of the British people was hostile, not to their presence per se, for there was need for cheap labour, but to the difference that they and other coloured immigrants embodied. Keep Britain White was the slogan of the early anti-black riots. Organized gangs of white hoodlums would routinely attack black neighbourhoods in the early 1960s—petrol bombs were a common gift for homes in Nottingham, where most of the immigrants from the Caribbean lived—and the black prime minister of Jamaica was roughed up in the streets of London. In the 1964 elections, the openly racist sneer was: If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Labour. Rental notices would openly say that the coloured were not welcome; a coloured person in a traditional English pub was asking for trouble; and there was open discrimination on the basis of colour in job recruitment.

  The purpose in excavating the worst period in the history of race relations in Britain is to try to understand why such a reaction took place. Every society is hostile to a foreign presence within it that does not appear to be ‘assimilable’. That hostility can be moderated, even sublimated, but the differences of culture and identity that provoked it, cannot. Certainly, racial discrimination is not a monopoly of the British; Indians themselves are notorious for their colour consciousness, and in their case it is even more ridiculous since they are coloured themselves. And it is necessary to remember that the leadership in Britain—or at least some segments of it—did try to stem the generally hostile public reaction to the growing number of the ‘foreign’ among them. The 1966 Race Relations Act was passed with the specific aim of managing such differences since it was no longer possible to believe that they did not exist or that they would simply melt away with time. But in spite of such efforts, the consequence of Empire showed no signs of diminishing. In 1968, Jomo Kenyatta, who wanted Kenya for black Africans only, gave marching orders to Asian Kenyans, the majority of them being of Indian origin. The deportees invoked their British passports and landed as refugees at Heathrow. Three years later, Idi Amin got the same idea in Uganda; thousands of Asian Ugandans were expelled, and like their Kenyan counterparts, they came to Britain. It must go to the enduring credit of civil society in Britain that, appalled by the insane atrocities of Idi Amin and the plight of the refugees, a national fund-raising campaign was launched for their welfare and rehabilitation. But it is equally true that British official policy towards immigrants was decisively biased by the fact of colour. The Act of 1 March 1968 declared that ‘full citizenship was available only to those with a parent or grandparent born, adopted or naturalized in the UK’. As the historian Robert Winder points out, 99 out of 100 times this legislation would favour only whites.1 There were, in any case, no qualifying restrictions for white immigrants from the white Commonwealth—Australia, New Zealand and Canada. White Rhodesians, too, though tainted by the vice of apartheid, found a warm welcome in the mother country. Even impoverished Czech and Hungarian immigrants, or those from Cyprus, had easier access essentially because they were white and Christian.

  That such a biased policy could be pursued in the UK where liberal opinion has a verifiable record of influence, is a pointer to the stubborn, enduring nature of the markers of culture and identity. Colour will not wash away; religious loyalties are not easily swapped;
value systems, acquired by a process of osmosis, cannot be discarded like a soiled costume; language, with all the subtleties of meaning embedded in its usage, cannot be easily jettisoned. Together these constitute a core that sets people apart in perpetuity. How then do ethnic minorities negotiate their own cultural space and notion of identity while coping with the pressure to become like the majority? Does their salvation lie in becoming ‘boutique’ cultures, little islands of difference in a sea of conformity, surviving on the benevolence of multiculturalist policy planners? And is this benevolence misguided; is aggressive assertion the only answer?

  What is lost and what is gained in the transaction between numerically unequal ethnicities is not easy to compute, especially since there is no one way to define loss and gain. One thing is certain, though—that people react adversely when what they hold dear is undervalued and what they consider undesirable has societal approval. Even if we accept that bridges can be built across cultures, we must also recognize that cultures are often obstinately opaque to the outsider. Given this, we need to reassess to what extent people can change, and if they can, how much of that change is desirable. What are the defensive reactions and comfort zones individuals resort to when they see their culture and identity under threat? What are the hidden traumas, the subterranean psychological stresses that result from this interplay between cultures, and how do they manifest themselves when they surface? And finally, even when much is willingly or otherwise discarded, does what remains prove that minorities—especially those whose psyche has been shaped by ancient and established cultures—can indeed reinvent themselves as fully as they think they can, or as much as the majority would want them to? These are not easy questions. But it is worth looking for answers in the personal experience of individuals—by observing their behaviour, listening to their narratives, being sensitive to their pain and bewilderment and joys—and relying essentially on what has been called the ‘thick description’, which fleshes out the manner in which people react and respond, and behave and conduct themselves in everyday life.

  Prem Chaddha and his brother Pran came to London in May 1962, just before the expiry of the June deadline for visa-free entry for Indians. They had no place to stay, and almost no money—even if they’d had the means to rent an apartment, it would have been tough; several landlords specified in their advertisements that ‘coloureds’ were ‘not eligible’. One of their relatives worked in the Indian High Commission and he gave them temporary shelter in his tiny basement quarters in Bayswater. Finding a job was not easy. Many establishments openly declared ‘whites only’ policy. Their social life was restricted, too, since it was not uncommon to see notices outside pubs and similar establishments saying that non-whites were not welcome. Prem and Pran hadn’t quite expected that they’d have a tough time in Britain. They came from a background that would have been considered relatively privileged in India at the time. But in London this was of little consequence. They realized, with some surprise, that to most people their only identity was that they were coloured people from a poor country which the British had ruled for centuries, and that they were looking for work in an economy still recovering from post-war depression.

  In such a hostile environment, Indians supported Indians. The community was far from being as wealthy as it is today. Most Indians worked in menial jobs, or as underpaid semi-skilled labour; very few had made a breakthrough in business, and even the more educated considered themselves lucky if they found jobs at the lowest rungs of the government. But in spite of such straitened means their doors were mostly open to new arrivals from India. It was the ‘homing pigeon’ instinct, an explicit bonding based on culture and kinship. Many new migrants found initial shelter in the gurdwara at Shepherd’s Bush. The gurdwara, the first in the country and in Europe, gave free food and, whenever possible, makeshift shelter. It became a symbol not only of religious belief, but of community solidarity.

  Shepherd’s Bush is five minutes from Southall. When the immigrants wanted to buy their own houses, they could not move east because the property prices were too high. They could only move west in the direction of Southall, which soon became the first Indian ghetto in London. Southall is a living example of how people from a different cultural space create incrementally, imperceptibly but unmistakably a physical and social environment that reflects that difference. When I last visited it in the summer of 2005, some fifty years after the first Indian immigrants made it their home, this basic truth was vibrantly visible. Mounds of fresh vegetables, reminiscent of the traditional mandi in Indian towns, spilled out of grocery shops piled with goods imported from India. The vegetables were those that are popular in India; the shops were dominated by Indian brands—including some that made no commercial sense because similar products made locally would probably be cheaper and just as good. Yet they were imported into the UK because they represented a continuum, a familiarity that recalled India: Afghan Snow cream, Isabgol, Cinthol talcum powder, incense packets, Lipton tea and traditional spices. The garment shops had mannequins draped in saris and salwar-kameezes. Restaurants advertised every variety of Indian food; some proudly proclaimed that they were ‘100 per cent vegetarian’ while tandoori and Bangladeshi ‘balti’ outlets did brisk business next door. Meat shops selling the favourite South Asian meat, mutton, dotted the main avenue, and many of them, in deference to Islamic and Sikh religious sentiments, made it a point to announce that they only stocked ‘halal’ meat. Certain culinary combinations would be completely inexplicable to anybody outside the Indian context, such as an eatery that proudly offered ‘vegetarian and halal pizzas’.

  I had lunch at the ‘Chaat House’, which was celebrating its thirtieth anniversary; a banner informed clients that when it opened in 1974 it was ‘the first restaurant in the United Kingdom to introduce chaat to the western hemisphere’, and that its existence was known not only all over the globe but also to Bollywood stars! (Such fame notwithstanding, the owner was—in consonance with another facet of the Indian ethos—quite willing to accept money without giving a bill, and such practices, I later learnt, are among the attractions of shopping at Southall.) Outside, the sound of people speaking in Punjabi and Gujarati, and of Hindi film songs, was ubiquitous, as was, by London standards, the unacceptable filth, and noticeably, and embarrassingly, a familiar whiff of urine. Standard London features such as telephone booths were, if one cared to notice, different: none of them had photographs and telephone numbers of hookers, so common everywhere else in London, because of the conservative values brought in—and preserved—from India. A Hindu temple, a mosque and a gurdwara were noticeable features of the landscape. One traditional English pub, the Three Horses, looking completely incongruous in the midst of all this, seemed to have stood its ground but was in obvious neglect. For the rest, this part of London, with its ethnic majority of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi people, and a more recent fringe of black migrants of African origin, could have been a town in India, with Hindus and Muslims living in familiar juxtaposition, without any signs of tension, because here they were both collectively the ‘other’, conjoined by their common roots in the country of their forefathers.

  Indians have settled in large numbers elsewhere in the UK, but Southall remains an eloquent metaphor to illustrate how ethnic minorities tend to congregate, and then, within that shared physical space, to preserve and perpetuate the certainties of their own culture. Bangladeshis in Brick Lane, Arabs around Edgeware Road and the Chinese in Chinatown near Soho—to cite only some prominent examples—have sought to do the same. The paradox, however, is that when in the midst of the majority community these very minorities often try to erase their cultural markers. Within themselves they are happy to be themselves; but outside the reassurance of people like us, they are conscious of the need to conform, to be more like them, to hide the difference so as not to appear incongruous or visibly different. In November 2004 Talat Ahmed, a student doing her doctorate at SOAS, came to see me. Of short build, slender and dark, sh
e was wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt, her black hair massed untidily on her forehead, very much like other youngsters in London. Her parents had migrated to the UK from India in the late 1950s, and she spoke to me of how initially the fact of their difference was a cause of great embarrassment for her. ‘When my sisters and I were growing up in the sixties, we wanted to distance ourselves from everything that our parents stood for,’ she said. ‘We didn’t want to eat curry every day; we didn’t want to wear salwar-kameez; we didn’t want to speak Urdu or Hindi. I remember that when my mother came to pick us up from school we’d be embarrassed if she spoke in Hindustani. There were not so many children from South Asia in schools then. I think we were only five or six children who were not white. We were acutely self-conscious; we wanted to blend with the rest, to gloss over our difference.’ Talat spoke without anger or bitterness, only recalling with clinical clarity what she felt in that phase of her life. ‘Once my mother persuaded me to wear a salwar-kameez to school,’ she remembered. ‘It was a hot day and I can never forget that my teacher, who had never seen such a dress, actually came up to me and asked me if I would like to take off my trousers. I never wore a salwar-kameez again until I was in my thirties.’

  A similar incident is mentioned by Bhikhu Parekh in his book Rethinking Multiculturalism published at the turn of the millennium. ‘A couple of years ago when I was travelling by train in Britain,’ writes Parekh, ‘I was sitting opposite an elderly Pakistani couple and next to their adolescent daughter. When the crowded train pulled out of the station, the parents began to talk in Urdu. The girl felt restless and nervous and started making strange signals to them. As they carried on their conversation for a few more minutes, she angrily leaned over the table and asked them to shut up. When the confused mother asked why, the girl shot back, “Just as you do not expose your private parts in public, you do not speak in that language in public.”’ The emphatic reaction took Parekh aback, but he could understand what prompted it. ‘Though no one presumably had told her so’, the girl knew, Parekh reasoned, ‘that the public realm belonged to whites, that only their language, customs, values, bodily gestures and ways of talking were legitimate in it and that minority ethnic and cultural identities must remain confined to the private realm’. Early Jewish immigrants to Europe and the USA also felt ‘deeply embarrassed if their parents spoke Yiddish in public, wore traditional dress or performed their religious and other ceremonies in public’.2