Asian yobs & sari haters Friday, September 15, 2006 00:10 IST
Bloody curry queen. Vindaloo. Taj Mahal..Giggling, the trio of young Brit Asians passed us by, spitting out the words that summed up India or Indians for them. We had just come out of an Italian restaurant in London's trendy Notting Hill Gate, into a balmy early September night. Clearly, the sari I wore was like a red rag to these rather gawky young men whose parents or grandparents migrated to the UK from our subcontinent. While I was amused by the strange juxtaposition of what they thought were gaalis (after all what did vindaloo, the Goan mouth-watering dish have to do with the monument to love in Agra up north?) my three very pucca English friends turned red with embarrassment. Yes, it showed up in the light being beamed down by the full moon that night. "So sorry about this," said one of them, while the other added, "you must write about multiculturalism." Multiculturalism is the loudest buzzword around here these days: the credo of peaceful co-existence that is being severely tested in nouveau Britain. The next day when I mentioned this incident to a liberal 'Gora' friend (the word Brit Asians use for the white British) he apologised, only to pause before adding: "Sometimes when I'm on the bus I find that I am in the minority." In plainspeak: what he meant is that he is the only indigenous English speaker lost amongst a babel of tongues. Outnumbered. For just a second the polite mask slipped, as it had done earlier when he was dropping us home to a friend's flat on Edgware road, a stretch just off Marble Arch and Oxford Street, the mecca of desis, that has now been colonised by Arabs. "Would you believe this is London? You could be in Beirut..." The British-born lads who stalked us briefly that night have undergone a sea change from their ancestors. The earlier arrivals tried hard to 'fit in' , eventually metamorphosing into coconuts (brown outside and white inside) and wogs (western oriental gentlemen), Indians fashioned in the image of the previous rulers with their suits and studied accents. Then came the high tide of those brought in to do jobs the British did not want to sully their hands doing, and eventually came the smart and sharp city men of the '90s who merged into an increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan London. This was the time of assimilation. The analogy was not so much a melting pot in which all that went into it lost its individuality, but a salad in which all the ingredients retained their size, shape, colour and flavour but shared the same dressing - a diaphanous tag that did the binding very gently. Today in a post 9/11, 7 /11 world, and in the aftermath of the discovery of the attempts to blow up 10 planes over the Atlantic ocean, what lies at the heart of the debate about multiculturalism that's raging here is: did it go too far? Was a state that allowed all migrants to hang on to their national identities and traditions actually encouraging acute polarisations, and even greater alienation? Where in all this was allegiance to a flag (forget the Queen) or indeed to a sense of shared nationhood? It's also a dilemma that concerns us in India: does the refusal to sing Vande Mataram equal a rejection of nationhood? These are charged and dangerous words these days; and there are no ready answers. The baseball-capped, sari-haters form part of a growing tribe of second and third generation subcontinentals who appear to be deeper-hued mirror images of the white yobs so graphically portrayed in films like Trainspotting. Dead-enders, they seem to have no future. Barely educated, they are the new nowhere people who are condescendingly called 'Innits' - illiterates who can't say isn't it. The whites look down on them, as do the well-heeled desis. Watching the Innits in Notting Hill Gate that evening and later elsewhere in East London, I could not help think of the loitering- with-not-good-intent young men who grew up in the villages that used to ripple outwards from Delhi before they were replaced by Gatsbyesque manors. In fact, the agricultural land on which these mansions are built was supposed to be for farms. These men, too, are nowhere men, half-educated and lured by the bright lights and tantalised by the dolce vita they see in the trendy boutiques and restaurants fringing Qutub Minar and the outskirts of the metropolis - the stomping ground of ersatz Manhattan-wallahs, and the jet set playground. Easy to feel sorry for them - innit? _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list Goanet@lists.goanet.org http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org