Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity

by Pavan K. Varma

  Noon was concerned about the quality of Indian food available in the supermarkets in the UK. He felt it was insipid, badly packaged, and poorly marketed. His conviction was that food produced on the conveyor belt could still be tasty, and reflect the culinary traditions of excellence which he had grown up with. Frozen foods were not the best format, he felt, for Indian cooking. Microwaves were then just making their advent, and Noon wanted to ride on this technology to reach tasty mass-produced Indian cooking to the ordinary man. Guided by this vision he set up Noon Products in 1987, and never looked back.

  Ghulam Noon’s several factories today produce over 300,000 meals a day retailed in leading British supermarkets like Sainsbury and Waitrose. He employs 800 workers who work in two shifts from six in the morning to 9:30 at night. His annual turnover exceeds £50 million, and he has become the biggest employer in Southall where he has as many as eight factories. The bulk of his employees are Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis Sri Lankans and Somalis, and some whites, representing quite accurately the population mix of Southall. His factories have adapted meticulously to the exacting hygiene standards of the UK. To enter the factory floor I had to don an overall, put on a mask, wear a hat, take off my shoes, slip into green gumboots and wash my hands several times along the way. Prince Charles, who inaugurated the complex in June 2003, had to wash his hands six times before he could see the chicken tikkas on the conveyor belts, and is believed to have said that he had never been through such a regimen before. As I walked down from the changing room, looking like someone from outer space, my guide pointed out that the walls are covered with a micro band resin that has zero tolerance to bacteria. On the floor I saw huge vat pans—specially designed by Noon—which can process 200 kilograms of chicken or lamb at one go. In an adjoining room, which is the all-important spice department, I was introduced to a kindly middle-aged lady who supervised the preparation of forty-six different spices, each measured to a decimal. The spices are brought in from India, hand cleaned and ground to specifications, and carefully monitored to prevent variation in strength and quality. Other ingredients are sourced from all parts of the world. For instance, by 5 a.m. every morning, 25 tonnes of chicken breasts arrive from Holland. They are diced the same day, cooked and chilled by evening, and sold within twenty-four hours.

  After my visit to the production floor, and after I extricated myself from the mask and hat and overalls and gumboots and felt human again, Noon and I sat down to a relaxed lunch in his private dining room. ‘The British people have been very good to me,’ he reflects. ‘It is not that I have not seen any racism. But I have never bothered. My mother used to say: when an elephant walks dogs will bark, but the elephant does not bother. In this country, if you have fire in your belly you will succeed. You do not require to cultivate anyone but just do your work honestly. Once you leave the shores of India, you have no option but to succeed. But while I worked hard, I got more in return in Britain than I would in my own country. There is no glass ceiling here. Even if there is, I broke it when I became a board member in 1995 of the Covent Garden Market Authority, the largest flower, fruit and vegetable market in the country. I was the first Asian to do so, and remained on the board for six years, the longest-serving member. I then became the president of the London Chamber of Commerce, the first non-white to hold this post in the 126 years since its inception. How can you say then that this country is racist?’

  By now we had done good work of the excellent lamb curry and makhni dal, and were savouring the incredibly soft and succulent rasmalais, another product from the Noon commercial kitchen. ‘Indians suffer from a ghetto mentality,’ Noon said, with a vehemence that took me aback. ‘They don’t assimilate. Their only concerns are how big is your bar, how much jewellery your wife owns, what is the real size of your turnover. Or else, they only want to build temples, gurdwaras and mosques. The latest gurdwara built in Southall has cost seventeen million pounds. Is this the right use of our money? I am a Muslim, and I know that Muslims in the UK should focus on education. Education was a very dear cause to the Prophet. I want my grandchildren to point out and say: See, this school was built by my grandfather. I have no time for extremists like Hamza. He should be arrested and deported. The British are much too sharif, and needlessly afraid.’

  I met Lord Meghnad Desai and his wife Kishwar on a February night in 2005 when a sudden cold snap had seen snow in London. Kishwar, whom I’ve known for many years, is a writer and television person who until her marriage to Meghnad in 2004 had lived almost entirely in New Delhi. With two grown-up children from a previous marriage in India, she had never really thought she would be married at this stage of her life to the much older Lord Desai and make London her home. But Meghnad, who met her in New Delhi when she was working in a publishing house and editing his book on the iconic film actor Dilip Kumar, pursued her with a zeal that she could not resist. Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, Meghnad looks easy-going, but is sensitive under the skin and has a razor-sharp mind. Marriage has not reduced his unabashed and happy rotundity but—like some latter-day Desdemona—Kishwar has pruned his trademark halo of white hair. We sat over a relaxed drink in their book-lined living room decorated with flickering candles, old Hindi film songs playing in the background. Meghnad felt that the often heated debate about making immigration policies tougher was a transient phenomenon, ignited mostly by the Tories when elections were imminent. Most people in Britain, he said, had accepted the fact of ethnic minorities; their presence was no longer an issue for the inflammatory tabloids; the Hindus, like the Jews, had integrated substantially and adopted lifestyles congruent with the majority; and the presence of a confident right-wing mainstream party had diluted the raison d’être of extremist racist groups. ‘Today, both the Labour and the Tory parties are right of centre, and even the Liberal Democratic Party is increasingly centrist,’ he explained. What did he think, I asked him, about the project of multiculturalism. He answered immediately and without ambivalence. ‘Multiculturalism tends to freeze communities wherever they are, and gives disproportionate powers to community leaders,’ he said. I asked him whether a downturn in the economy would reignite dormant antipathies towards minorities. ‘Maybe fifteen or twenty years ago I would have worried but not any more, unless the economic setback is very severe, which is unlikely,’ he replied. ‘My real worry is about the Muslim bottom rung, the Bangladeshis and the Pakistanis, who are on the fringes of the economy and are swayed by religious fundamentalism.’

  Meghnad left India when he was twenty-one. ‘I felt no great emotional wrench when I did so. I was happy, and thought to myself that at last my Indian chapter is behind me. I first went to the USA, to the University of Pennsylvania, where I did my doctorate. I then taught at the University of California in Berkeley. I became American, and when after a few years I came to the London School of Economics to teach, became British as easily.’ He speaks softly, twirling his glass of red wine, stopping only to attack an olive or a crisp. ‘I did not see myself as an Indian. I married an Englishwoman. We had three children. Nor did I come across racism. We lived in Chelsea and Hampstead. No faeces were ever put by white hooligans into my letter box. I gave up my Indian passport in 1976. We owned a holiday property in France. I suddenly realized that my children would not get medical cover in France with Indian passports. I gave up my Indian citizenship immediately. In fact, even before, in 1971, I had joined the Labour Party. In 1995 when I was made a member of the House of Lords, I made it clear that I did not want to be a community leader or the spokesman for the Gujaratis. I am British. This country gave me political rights the moment I arrived. As a citizen from a Commonwealth country, I could vote, and could, theoretically, be the prime minister of the country.’ He pauses to sip his wine, and then laughingly adds: ‘If the monarchy winds up, and I am convinced it will in my lifetime, I could be President!’

  Lord Khalid Hameed, Sir Ghulam Noon, Lord Meghnad Desai—all of them successful in Britain, and happy to have Brit
ish passports, but none of them able to jettison their Indian identity. As I have argued, identity has a ‘stickiness’ and cannot be got rid of simply by wishing it away. It has a grip over you even when you genuinely believe it is dispensable or easily substituted. Sometimes it can be suppressed to suit the company one is in; its markers can be diluted, pushed into the background, when one needs to appear more British and less Indian; accent, attire, food choices and lifestyles can be acquired to mimic the mainstream; one’s own habits, customs, humour and way of life can be strategically repressed to camouflage differences. But in the end, the essence of identity is that it never really lets you forget where you come from. For all his years in the UK, Khalid Hameed remains a cultured Lucknawi and plans to spend half the year after retirement at his ancestral home in Lucknow which he continues to maintain. His home in London reflects these origins, as does the food he eats and the language he is most comfortable speaking. In fact, on a visit to India in 2008, he publicly lamented the excessive westernization of Indians in the UK at the cost of their culture and identity.3 Ghulam Noon is genuinely grateful for the opportunities the UK gave him, but that gratitude has not made him any more British than he was when he came to Heathrow three decades ago. His businesses are located primarily in Southall. All the artwork and paintings in his gracious central London home and all the art objects in the reception lobby of his main factory are from India. His philanthropic work is focussed on a village in his home state of Gujarat, where he is building a hospital. He is most comfortable speaking Gujarati or Hindi, and speaks with unmistakable nostalgia of ‘home’, which is Mumbai. Meghnad Desai may say that he never cared much for his Indian origins, but he is passionate about Hindi films and songs, has written a book on Dilip Kumar, and is writing another one with his wife on the legendary actress Nargis. Kishwar and he have bought a property in Goa, and the good Lord, while very much a member of the British Labour Party, writes a regular column in a leading Indian newspaper on politics in India. My wife and I were present when Kishwar and he were married at the Marlborough registration office in London. The ceremony was short and insipid, but we can never forget how Meghnad, after the registers were signed, pulled out a small pouch from his pocket. It contained sindoor, the vermilion powder that brides wear in India. And, in tribute to his roots, which he maintains mean very little to him, he took a pinch of the sindoor and put it in the parting of Kishwar’s hair.

  Of course, people from any part of the world have some things in common, but the elements that go to constitute their separate identities cannot be subsumed by some nondescript universalism. Cross-cultural appreciation is not the same as a successful crossover. Tagore won appreciation in the West; he won the Nobel Prize for literature; he spoke good English and, in fact, translated Gitanjali into English himself. But hardly anyone outside of academia and the Indian diaspora reads him in the UK. The essence of his poetry—its imagery and mood—is lost to the English native. This is understandable. Tagore’s first language was Bengali, and the content of his writings was rooted permanently and unmistakably in India. His poetic imagery is rich with the romance of the east wind, the hum of the ektara, the call of the flute, and with references to moinapara meadows, ripe paddy fields gently swaying in the breeze, shefali flowers, tamal groves, and the ebb and flow of the Ganga. The lips of a woman for him can only be like the lotus, and the monsoon clouds remind him of the kajal in a woman’s eyes. His life and his creative output were entirely about the spontaneity of inherited culture. Not surprisingly, he hardly wrote anything during his stay in England, although he had considerate and—especially after the Nobel Prize—many appreciative friends.

  To gloss over divides with respect to culture and identity is as naïve as to argue that they are unbridgeable in every respect. There are attributes that can be learned or accommodated, emulated or appreciated; but there are also differences which are immutable, fundamental, intrinsic and enduring, and which influence perceptions in everyday life. The dilemma of the migrant is that he has to make a choice—constantly and relentlessly—between what is his own and what is alien. He does not have the luxury of Tagore’s assurance that comes from an unquestioned rootedness. In fact, his survival often depends on questioning that assurance and interrogating its relevance, because there is an unresolved disjoint between his way of life and the imperatives of the new milieu. This entails painful choices and mutilations, but the migrant welcomes (even if resentfully) his progressive co-option, because his past is a burden that needs to be shed for success in the present.

  Subhash Chopra, a journalist who has written a book on Indo-British relations, came to see me one day in my office in London. He was a diminutive person in his early seventies, with bushy sideburns and long greying strands of hair at the back to make up for his obvious balding. He wore nondescript brown trousers and a grey checked shirt, with a button open in the fashion of the 1960s, when he had come to the UK as a young journalist, with no guarantee of a job or income. Work vouchers were easily available then, he said, but he never thought that the trickle of immigrants of his days would become the flood it became later. The creation of the Commonwealth had generated a fair amount of goodwill, and factories needed cheap labour, but Subhash’s real motivation was—believe it or not—to visit the birthplace of Shakespeare. He did this soon after arrival, but while the homage to Stratford-upon-Avon fulfilled a long-cherished desire, it did not lead to a job. The newspaper business then was fairly racist; news agents would announce quite openly that coloureds were not welcome. Finally, an interview with Sir Harold Evans got him his job. Evans had visited India. He told Subhash that Ramnath Goenka, who was the proprietor of the Indian Express, the paper for which Subhash worked before he decided to take a leap into the dark, was a swindler. This, however, could not be held against Subhash, he said, and gave him the job.

  Subhash worked as subeditor for the Redding Evening Post. In 1968, he married an Englishwoman whom he met at a leftist rally addressed by Tariq Aziz. His marriage to a white woman brought him further into the mainstream. ‘The sense of not belonging, of being an outsider, does not go away,’ he told me, ‘but once you’ve crossed the first hurdle, it becomes less. As an outsider you are under much more pressure to prove yourself. I changed jobs in quick succession. I went back to work in India for a year, and my wife came with me. But she didn’t like it there. We had a son by now, and I returned with her.’

  How far had Britain succeeded as a multicultural society, I asked Subhash. ‘I think it is not a failure,’ he said, pausing to reflect. ‘But a lot of prejudice still remains. Things are changing with the younger generation. For my son England is home. Most of his friends are English. He is married to a white girl and has children. I know that even young Gujarati girls from very conservative families visit pubs in large numbers and wear western clothes like any other English girl. The older generation is still caught in a time warp, living in a kind of cultural ghetto, with the local temple as the pivot of social life. The Pakistanis are worse, refusing to change, and leading very insular lives. The British are not beyond racism, but who are Indians to criticize them? Indians are the most racist of all. They may marry a white person, but they will never marry a black. Even in Trinidad, where they have grown up with the blacks, they will never marry a black.

  ‘Colour is a prejudice, and Indians are acutely aware of it because it is so important to them. Once Indians get to know a few white people, as friends or colleagues, it melts away quite a bit, but you can’t rule it out, can’t deny it. I think Britain is making a mistake by not following the example of France. Denominational schools need to be discouraged. Migrant communities must be encouraged to become a part of the mainstream. Many Asian migrants suffer from a self-inflicted injury by not learning the language. Elderly Punjabi and Gujarati women are specially cussed. They refuse to learn English and remain barricaded in their little worlds in Southall and Wembley. I’m glad that now those who apply for citizenship have to pass an exam in basic English.�
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  It has been over forty years since Subhash came to England for his tryst with Shakespeare. A lot has changed since. In 1982, on the street where he lives in Kenton Harrow, two-thirds of the residents were white; now, two-thirds are Gujarati. His marriage did not last too long, but he never remarried, and takes pride in his son and his grandchildren, who are effortlessly a part of British society. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of those who say they will go back never do,’ he says. But he has never given up his Indian passport. ‘I will give up mine if everyone gives up theirs. Let us all have UN passports, beyond narrow nationalities,’ he says.

  Subhash’s son, whose mother is English and who has married a white woman too, considers the UK his home. Subhash rejoices for his son, and is happy that he has found acceptability and is anchored in British society. But he remains a misfit himself. He has never gone ‘back’, but especially now that he is retired, spends several months every year in India. Like many others in his situation, he appears to spend his life in an uneasy penumbra, not fully able to belong to his adopted country and unable to return to the ‘homeland’. Subhash’s dilemma would be easily resolved if he could make a definite choice, one or the other, India or the UK, but this clarity is not available to migrants. He is condemned to live a life trying to find acceptance in the new while remembering the certainties of the old.

  I remember Talat telling me, ‘My father always wanted to be buried in India. He died a few years ago, and alas he is buried here.’ But she was proud that for her, Britain is home. ‘My sisters and I don’t have any attachment to India, a country we hardly know. For my niece, England is even more so the only home she knows. She couldn’t care less if someone does not like her native language or clothes. She can’t get enough of Bollywood. She doesn’t know the language too well, but she knows all the songs. When my sisters and I were growing up we were not interested in Indian cinema.’ And yet, behind Talat’s confident assertion lurks a desire to go back to her roots, or at least to know a little more about where she comes from. It is an urge that refuses to be obliterated. ‘When I went to India last time, I visited my relatives,’ she said. ‘My mother had discouraged me from doing so, because my partner is white and was visiting with me. She said this would be quite shocking for her conservative Indian family. But finally I persuaded her to give me their addresses and telephone numbers. I went to Sambhal and Moradabad and Aligarh and met with aunts and uncles and cousins whom I had never met before. For the first time I got a sense of an extended family. For the first time I learnt that I too have an ancestral village—Osmoli near Rampur—where my great-grandfather was born. For the first time I learnt of my mother as she was as a child. I knew her only as a mother and a wife, but now I learnt of all the pranks she was up to as a young girl. There were details about my family that came to me as a revelation. I learnt, for instance, that my dada and dadi had had a love marriage. My dadi was not a Muslim: she was a Brahmin lady from Bhopal.’