Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Religion is at the core of the issue of identity. Even in the lives of those who deny its importance, it lurks at the periphery, dormant but rarely extinct. Especially among the ethnic minorities, its influence is pervasive. The mosque, the muezzin and the madrasa have acquired a new importance for Muslims after 9/11. They see their religion and its civilizational values under attack, and in the face of derogatory stereotyping of all Muslims as closet terrorists or fundamentalists, many among them are provoked to defiantly reassert their religious loyalties. One fall evening Bhikhu Parekh invited me over to the House of Lords (of which he is a member) to talk about the issue of religion and identity, a subject on which he has done a great deal of work. Parekh, diminutive, with a white beard, has an exceptionally bright mind; logical, incisive and soft spoken, he is eclectic and open to another’s point of view in the best tradition of scholarship, but by no means a pushover. He took me around the august house, showing me the gold and braid excesses of its different rooms. In one of these was a huge painting of Nelson in battle, the great admiral leading his sailors on to victory. Parekh pointed out that there was only one Negroid face in the picture; if one looked closely enough one could espy an Arab face as well, but there was no Indian to be seen which was, Parekh said, a rather grievous omission since there was almost no war that had been won by the British without Indian soldiers dying for the Empire. Another room proudly depicted the virtues with which the British would like to be identified: mercy, faith, justice and so on. Parekh’s wry comment was that these were the virtues of an imperial power, of a nation that ruled the world.

  We sat in the Peers Dining Room, chatting over a civilized cup of tea, the beautiful room buzzing with Their Lordships and their guests, a large oil painting of Saint John looking steadily at me. I talked to Parekh about the matter of religious and cultural identity in multi-ethnic western societies. Parekh felt that the French were being too abrasive in dealing with minority issues, such as the question of allowing Muslim women to wear the hijab. The British were more indulgent, he said, perhaps because they were themselves constituted of three nations. It wasn’t really colour that was the biggest issue now. Black people posed a lesser problem in the perception of the British people; there the only issue was that of colour. With Indians the problem has been that they also carry the baggage of a well-defined and ancient culture. They cannot be so easily assimilated. Margaret Thatcher, Parekh said, was clever. She was no enlightened, tolerant soul, but she appreciated the fact that Indians were entrepreneurs, with the same Victorian values of parsimony and hard work as the British. She also felt that in due course their domestic culture would be partially neutralized by education. And at least in the case of the Hindus among British Indians, despite their strong culture, they have indeed been a relatively invisible minority. Politically they are quiescent. They may have strong and different cultural traditions within their homes—though these are eroding with succeeding generations—but the only overt manifestations are their temples and the annual chanting of the Krishna Consciousness followers at Trafalgar Square. As a minority, Hindus don’t number more than about half a million. Most of them belong to middle-class homes; small families have become the norm; they don’t proselytize, and, if anything, as Parekh said, ‘we may lose a few through conversions to Christianity due to inter-religious marriages’. The Sikh British Indians, too, though not as invisible, are not insistently assertive of their identity outside of their limited private spaces.

  Essentially, the British don’t have to redefine their own identity as a result of Indian presence. Indians number only 1.2 million, which works out to less than 2 per cent of the population. But the ethnic minorities as a whole are a sizeable 7.6 per cent, and the question of how to make them an assured part of the mainstream will not go away easily. That is the real problem. Europe, Parekh argued, has no tradition of diversity. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended a century and a half of bloody religious warfare in Europe, created nation states on the basis of language, culture and religion. They aren’t comfortable with genuine diversity which involves differences of culture and faith. Islam, particularly, with its increasingly politicized and insistent search for identity and recognition, will be a cause of unease in all such nation states, and perhaps lead to a clash with conservative Christians.

  In this context it is also useful to remember that only 10 per cent of the British population has ever really supported with conviction the policy of multiculturalism. And things only get worse, given this statistic, when multiculturalism is carried too far. In a school in London with a majority of Bangladeshi students, the problem was that many children missed several days of school when they accompanied their parents on more than one visit every year to the home country. To deal with this, the educational authorities decided to open a branch of the school in Dhaka so that the children do not miss out on classes. This was perhaps excessive, Parekh smiled, for there is always the danger that the ‘principle of cultural defence’ will be taken too far.

  Usha Kiran gave me another example of multiculturalism ‘taken too far’, which is also an example of how gestures of excessive ‘accommodation’ are never a substitute for genuine understanding of and respect for cultural difference. By the mid-1980s the new policy of multiculturalism did not insist on schools only propagating the Christian faith. In Usha’s school, one assembly per week is now devoted to religious education; any religion can be invoked, the aim being to emphasize the elements universal to all religions. A Muslim father, with one boy and five girls in the school, objected to his children learning about other religions. He asked that his children be exempted from the assembly. The school agreed. His daughters come to the school in a chador. Usha asked whether they could remove their chadors during the physical education class, because she was afraid that they might trip and fall. The father wanted to know if boys would be present in the class. She said yes; after all, the school was coeducational. He refused, though the girls were not more than five or six years of age. The teachers then found a solution: the girls would wear their chadors even during physical class, but their veils would be held back with a pin. This kind of obdurateness, which would test the patience of any policy of multiculturalism, is not the preserve only of Muslims. There are Indian parents who will not learn to speak English and will demand a Punjabi-or Gujarati-speaking teacher to interpret for them. The school provides them.

  When it comes to the question of faith, the challenges can be greater, because it is often so central to identity. Hindus in Britain may not have the religious stridency of some of their Muslim friends, but the primacy of faith should never be underestimated. The Hindu temple at Neasden in London has to be seen to set at rest any doubts in this matter. Sadhu Atmaswarup Das, the mahant or head of the temple, telephoned me one day, quite unexpectedly. He wanted to meet me, and since I was keen to visit the temple myself, we agreed that Renu and I would come across the very next day. Atmaswarupa Das was a middle-aged man and spoke good English, not surprising since he was a product of one of the prestigious IITs in India and had worked for a prominent private firm before he gave it all up to join the order. He apologized that he would not be able to meet Renu, since his strict vows of celibacy prohibited him from even looking at women. He assured me, however, that all arrangements would be made to show her around the temple. His extreme celibacy did seem a bit strange to both of us; all the gods in the temple premises were depicted with their beautiful consorts—Krishna with Radha, Shiva with Parvati, Brahma with Saraswati and Vishnu with Shri. Obviously, what the gods cherished was not for Das.

  Prafulla, the aide assigned by Das to show us around the premises, was a short young man in his twenties, with his hair cropped close and an eager but nondescript face. He wore trousers and a shirt and, somewhat incongruously, a tie with the words ‘BAPS’ printed in small letters across it. BAPS stood for Bochanswami Shri Akshar Purushottam Sanstha, the name of the organization which ran the vast Swaminarayana Hindu Mission all over the world. Pra
fulla kept up a running commentary as he took as around. With six domes and nine pinnacles rising seventy feet high, the temple in shimmering marble, with intricately carved pillars and ornate ceilings, has been built to make a statement of grandeur. Prafulla told us that 2828 tonnes of Bulgarian limestone and 2000 tonnes of Italian Carrara marble were shipped to India to be carved by 1500 craftsmen and then reshipped to London. In all, 26,300 carved pieces were assembled like a giant jigsaw in three years by over a thousand volunteers. The haveli, which is the traditional annexe to temples in Gujarat, and from where we had commenced our guided tour, was built entirely in Burmese teak and British oak. The whole surface was exquisitely carved, and must be one of the finest examples of such work anywhere, including India.

  Prafulla informed us that the temple complex has entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘largest traditional Hindu mandir outside India’. He spoke with obvious pride, as if he was a part of a new movement to restore Hindu glory, and no detail—such as the fact that the 22,600-square-foot foundation, requiring 225 truckloads of cement, was laid in a single day—was too small in this historically ordained process. He had his facts all ready, and rattled them off without pause. Since the temple was built, over half a million visitors had entered its portals; 5000 devotees visit it every week; on festivals as many as 50,000 visit it in one day; over 20,000 schoolchildren marvel at it every year. Prafulla’s eyes really lit up when he took us to the museum which projects the achievements of the Hindu faith, including its contribution to mathematics, astronomy, medicine and education. It has a separate panel on Sanskrit, which is described as the mother of all languages. A great many gizmos are harnessed to project these messages, with 3-D miniature dioramas showcasing Sita and Shravana, and other ‘heroes of the Hindu faith’.

  We were at a bit of a loss to define our reactions to ‘Neasden’s Taj Mahal’, as one British newspaper called it. Obviously, the temple is architecturally impressive, although perhaps the desire for monumental grandeur is overdone. Some in the British media have described it as ‘hallucinogenic’, while others have thought that the overdose of carvings makes it look like ‘frothy milk on a cappuccino’. Quite clearly, the temple is motivated by a desire to project the Hindu faith, not so much to believers but to outsiders who need to be educated about and impressed with the glories of Hinduism. The attempt is to go back to a period when India was unsullied by foreign occupation, prior to the coming of the Muslims and the English, when Hinduism and its offshoot, Buddhism, were the reigning religions and inspired a cultural renaissance. The exhibition on Hinduism has panels depicting the breakthroughs in science that took place then: the word geometry has its origins in the word Gyaamiti, which means measuring the earth; the concept of geometry emerged in India in 1000 BC, a good 700 years before Euclid; trigonometry was discovered in India in the treatise of Surya Siddhanta, written in the fourth century AD, 600 years before similar concepts were introduced in Europe; the value of the pi was first developed in India; Pythagoras’ theorem was worked out in India as far back as the sixth century BC, and so on.

  To those who devised the exhibition, the important thing was to assert the superiority of Indian civilization, not only in the field of metaphysics or religion, but also in those ‘secular’ areas where the west had always claimed superior status. To reclaim self-worth only in the field of spirituality—which the west was perhaps willing to accept—was not enough. The pinnacles and friezes and elaborate carvings and domes were there not so much to facilitate the possibility of salvation as to give Hindus a symbol of pride, something to make their presence felt in Britain. The need for recognition was the prime motivator, and the temple brochure highlights what Prince Charles or Tony Blair or Richard Branson had to say after their visit. Significantly, and entirely in accordance with what the temple authorities would have wanted, Prince Charles speaks less about his spiritual experience and more about how the complex is an ‘exciting and noble addition to the landscape of London’, Tony Blair exults that he has ‘never seen such a magnificent work of modern architecture’, and Branson describes it as ‘one of the wonders of the world’ and how, as a result, the ‘impact of the Hindu religion has only begun to be felt in Britain’. There was, it struck me, a historical irony in all of this. When in India, the British had used architecture—the construction of New Delhi and the monumental Viceroy’s Palace—to impress and awe the natives, and now the immigrant Indians were using the very same tool—albeit on a much smaller scale—to impress the natives in England.

  The Neasden temple is a monumental metaphor, not only for the pivotal role of faith in the lives of people, but for the need—so pervasive among minorities—to be acknowledged and to acquire visibility. There is in the migrant a basic urge to assert the familiar, reflecting his own articles of faith and respect. Within his congregation or ghetto this is easily done, but outside not many opportunities present themselves, and some of them are not half as effective as the grandiose pinnacles of Neasden. In Stratford-upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born, Indians have managed to instal a bust of our very own bard—who else but Tagore! It is an incongruity and an imposition, and is seen as such. Apparently Tagore had written a—rather nondescript—poem on Shakespeare. This was fished out to be inscribed on the bust’s plinth. Tagore had himself translated it into English, but the consensus is that it does both Shakespeare and him little justice. The bust stands plainly incongruous and ignored in an unimportant garden facing a row of toilets. Many visitors apparently ask what a bust of Marx is doing in the hometown of Shakespeare!

  In spite of such ludicrous efforts, many Indians have successfully negotiated the space between their own markers of identity and the mainstream, and are happy to be considered British. But it is still a revelation to see how much of their reinvented lives as successful British citizens continue to be anchored in India or Indian sensibilities. Dr Khalid Hameed, now a member of the House of Lords, and a former CEO of the prestigious Cromwell Hospital in London, is one such success story. To hear how it all happened I met him for lunch at the Dorchester Grill, perhaps one of London’s most expensive restaurants. It was on a cold December day, and although I had to walk only a few hundred yards from my home on South Audley Street to reach the Dorchester, I was quite frozen without an overcoat. Dr Hameed arrived in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and together we walked into the Grill, where the deferential behaviour of the staff showed that he was not an infrequent guest.

  As the CEO of Cromwell Hospital, Dr Hameed was the first and only Asian to head a major British hospital. He came to England in 1968 as a young doctor for further studies. His father, Dr Abdul Hameed, was one of the leading doctors of Lucknow. Khalid was being groomed to continue the family name in medicine. ‘But I was just enjoying myself too much to think of going back,’ Khalid said. ‘I was working in a university hospital, teaching while I was learning, and did not want to go back in a hurry.’ Then he met his wife, who was British. Khalid must have been a good-looking man. Even now, when he must have crossed sixty, he is exceptionally well preserved, the receding hairline more than offset by a trim physique and trendy and expensive suits. In the 1980s his marriage ran into trouble. Three children were involved, and the divorce was long and acrimonious. Much to his father’s regret, his return to India became even more remote.

  Through all of this Khalid was doing very well professionally. He had a large house in Hampstead, some of the top firms in Britain were his clients, he drove an expensive car and was on the board of Cromwell Hospital. His big break came in 1990. Cromwell was losing money. Its debts totalled over forty million pounds, and the banks were unwilling to lend more than eight million. A crisis meeting of the board was called, and each director was asked to suggest a way out. Khalid wrote a short paper advocating a combination of financial measures and more aggressive marketing. The board nominated him to be the CEO to implement his plan. Although Khalid did not mention it on his own, the fact that the Sultan of Abu Dhabi was one of the
chief investors in the hospital might have played a role in his selection. But what really mattered was that Khalid turned Cromwell around. In a short time the hospital came into the black, and today it makes a profit. The boy from Lucknow went on to become the longest serving CEO of a major British hospital. His father is no more. Khalid has married again, this time the beauteous Ghazala, who too hails from India. London has finally become home, although he permanently maintains, he confided proudly, a full complement of staff at his home in Lucknow. ‘When I retire, I want to spend the winter months in Lucknow,’ he says with a smile.

  The Queen has conferred the CBE on Dr Hameed. The Indian government had conferred on him the Padma Shri, but he wanted it to be upgraded to a Padma Bhushan, and managed to have that done in 2008. Khalid’s new passion is to rally Muslims into a true understanding of Islam so that they can say no to the call of terrorism. He wants to encourage a greater interfaith dialogue to highlight the compassion which is the basis of all religions. I told him that he should expect a nomination to the House of Lords, and that too happened a year later.

  Sir Ghulam Noon, who set up Noon Products, the highly successful business which supplies the bulk of ready-to-microwave Indian food in the UK, was born in Mumbai some sixty years ago. His father, who died when Ghulam was only eight, owned a small mithai shop opposite the busy Crawford Market. Ghulam could have continued with the family business in a routine way but he was impatient to do more. In 1964 he opened a branch of Royal Sweets in London with partners in Southall, and set up a small factory to supply confectioneries. In the late 1970s he signed a contract with British Airways to supply ‘Asian vegetarian meals’, a sign of the growing number of people from the Indian subcontinent travelling on the carrier. But at this stage the UK was far from becoming his home. Mumbai was still ‘home’, and he spent a number of years in America trying to do business. It was only in 1983 that he moved to Britain on a more permanent basis.