Londonstani
Gautam Malkani 4th Estate, 343pp, £12.99
ISBN 000723175X
Young Asians in Britain have reacted to years of oppression by developing an assertive – and often violent – street culture of their own. Rageh Omaar on a superb attempt to capture this conflicted identity
It is sometimes natural - if not necessarily wise - to judge a book by its title. When I was asked to review Gautam Malkani's debut novel Londonstani, my heart instinctively sank. It sounded like "Londonistan", the facile word for London's role in the development of radical Islamic politics, used by many commentators and journalists as a catch-all to mask their utter ignorance of the issue (and in fact the title of Melanie Phillips's forthcoming work on race relations in Britain). I assumed that this would be yet another book by a British Asian determined to criticise, reject and belittle everything that isn't western and to denigrate the culture of his parents' generation. Go to any bookshop and you'll find this kind of book in abundance, especially in the Islam section. But right from the outset, Londonstani turned my scepticism upside down.
The language is the first thing that hits you: a rich, vibrant and at times chaotic mixture of young Asian street patois, American gangsta rap lyrics, text-message language and Hindi and Punjabi words. Londonstani is written in exactly the way the protagonists - a group of four young friends who live in the overwhelmingly Asian communities around Hounslow in west London - speak. It is full of phrases such as "wikid fones" and "chattin bullshit", and of people complaining that youths "ain't follow'd all da rules n customs proply".
In the group's leader, Hardjit, a bigoted and often violent young Sikh, Malkani has created a compelling character. Hardjit mirrors everything that black and Asian youths have ever hated about white skinhead youths. Londonstani opens with him assaulting a white boy while his friends Ravi, Amit and Jas - who narrates the story - look on. Hardjit taunts the terrified white boy, Daniel, as blood spurts down his shirt, saying he deserves it for calling him a Paki. After the attack, when the others have gone, Daniel asks Jas why he didn't tell the others that he'd never used the word Paki, and why - though Jas had even come to his mother's funeral - he hadn't stood up for him as a friend.
The scene perfectly captures the cruelty and cowardice, as well as the sense of power and belonging, of teenage violence. Hardjit's character reflects how the experience of racial abuse and the increasing confidence of black and Asian youths in recent years have produced skinheads in brown skins. I know several people exactly like Hardjit: young Asians and Somalis obsessed with "keeping to one's own kind" and doing back to white kids what they did to us, while all the time haunted by a feeling of fear and a deep lack of confidence.
Londonstani subtly explores the contradictions and complexities of relations within Britain's black and Asian communities. The tensions it highlights are not simply between communities of different identities and faiths - as was the case with the recent riots in Birmingham between Afro-Caribbean and Asian youths - but between communities of the same faith. In Londonstani's Hounslow, there are conflicts between Somali and Asian Muslim kids (the latter look down on the former as newly arrived asylum-seekers sponging off the state). The force of prejudice within a community is explored to its tragic end through Jas's yearning for the beautiful, bright and strong Samira, who, although Asian, is a Muslim. This puts her out of bounds in the eyes of Jas's friends, especially Hardjit.
Jas, I suspect, is the most autobiographical of Malkani's characters. Too diffident for his own good in an environment where in-your-face assertiveness is a basic requirement, he is constantly teased by his laddish and homophobic friends for being a "batty boy". Filtered through Jas's voice, Malkani's observations about Britain's urban modern culture are razor-sharp. For the "pimp my ride" generation, he describes the "baddest" cars by giving them the personas of pop stars or Bollywood icons. For example, "a Lexus SC 430 is sleek and smooth, like Christina Aguilera, the curves on an Audi TT make it J-Lo while the Porsche 911 GTS got a booty like Beyoncé". Eventually, in a contemporary offshoot of cockney rhyming slang, Jas simply refers to the "Al Pacino" and the "Mary J Blige" in the driveway of Hardjit's house. Mobile phones, naturally, have an equally iconic status. Nobody just picks up their mobile, or calls someone else's: they answer their Ericsson T630 or get out their Nokia 8310. Such language, while perfectly in keeping with the world of the characters, at times feels over-stylised and self-consciously hip.
Yet this is just a distraction from some genuinely good writing, particularly in Malkani's depiction of Hounslow, an area in which I have many Somali relatives. In a quiet way, Hounslow - with its great trunk road, the A4, and the side roads that feed off it towards Heathrow - becomes a character in its own right: a constantly changing and sometimes confusing home to people from south Asia and the Horn of Africa. Malkani writes about the area with fondness, but doesn't shy away from describing how bleak and sparse it can be, and how far away from the homes people left behind in India or Bangladesh or Somalia - even though planes from those parts of the world screech overhead every three seconds.
Londonstani was not what I expected it to be. It bears little relation to the formulaic works one often comes across by Muslims, Asians and Africans, telling the stories of their emigration to Britain and their search for an identity. This is one of the most impressive things about the novel, and the most surprising. Londonstani is a book about many things, but it intends, above all, to show one thing: that being a young British Asian or African - whether you are Muslim, Hindu or Sikh - is not about having a completely westernised identity and set of aspirations. Let's hope it is the first of many works to put such a message across.
Rageh Omaar works for al-Jazeera. His book Only Half of Me: being a Muslim in Britain will be published by Viking next month
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