When people ask me where I am from, my standard reply is “Hackney”. I wasn’t actually born in Hackney, but I grew up in the borough. Hackney shaped my formative years and provides me with my childhood memories. It is home; and that’s where I am from.
This is a difficult thing for most white people to grasp. They look at me and exclaim: “Surely, you’re Asian.” However, there is no such thing as an Asian. Asia is not a race or identity: it is a continent. Even in Asia, where more than half of the world’s population lives, no one calls him or herself “Asian”. If you are not Chinese or Malaysian, then you are an Afghan or a Punjabi. Moreover, the meaning of the term changes from place to place. In the US, the Asian label is attached to Koreans, Filipinos and Chinese. In Britain, we do not use the term Asian to describe our substantial communities of Turks, Iranians or Indonesians, even though these countries are in Asia.
At best, the label “Asian” is meaningless. At worst, it is a denial of the fact that someone born and bred in Britain is actually British, full stop. Hardly surprising, then, that all those young people constantly described as “Asians” have problems finding a suitable location for their loyalties.
There are others who look at me and say: “Oh, you’re Indian.” Sixty years ago, before the emergence of Pakistan and Bangladesh, this would have been a passable description. But today “Indian” has become almost as meaningless as “Asian”, largely because the two terms have coalesced. They are lazy references to people of Indian subcontinental lineage. But for Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans and Nepalese, the label is offensive. By lumping these diverse communities in a single category, we make them invisible.
Indeed, Britain practises a special kind of racism by making people and histories indistinguishable. That “Indian restaurant” in your high street is more likely to be Pakistani and Bangladeshi, than Indian. When we talk of “Asians” as high achievers, we are primarily talking just about Indians, who, on the basis of numerous government statistics, are financially well off and achieve the top exam results of all ethnic groups, including whites.
My problem with the term “Indian” is that it has a very specific connotation in the English subconscious. India is essentially “English India”, and “Indian” a product of the Raj – someone who is bizarre but intelligent enough to have accepted our civilised ways. We saw this during the celebration of the “Jubilee” – the 50 years of India’s independence. In numerous television documentaries and newspaper articles, India was re-manufactured as a romantic, colonial fiction. In this orgy of celebration, there was no mention of Pakistan, let alone Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. This is a limited-edition, monolithic India.
And it is this colonial India that we are now recreating in Britain. The social hierarchies of the Raj are replicated here. In India, the British carefully selected upper-caste landowners, people of property and rank, as their surrogates in government. The descendants of this class form the upper crust of “Asian” Britain. These “high-achieving” Asians, regular stars of lists of the rich and powerful, came to Britain with planeloads of money. In India, the British created a new class of civil servants, English in everything but colour, both as a buffer between themselves and the masses and as interpreters of British values to Indians. Many of these “brown sahibs” converted to Christianity.
Today in Britain, we find a whole layer of middle-class Indians from this background in the media. For example, not only does the BBC’s “Asian Unit” consist almost exclusively of Indians, but the BBC has a particular penchant for Indians with Christian first names: George Alagiah, Matthew Amroliwala and Martin Bashir. The Muslims, who fought and led regular insurgencies against the British, were systematically marginalised in English India and eventually turned into an underclass. In Britain, the south Asian Muslims, coming mainly from rural backgrounds, are well established as a subordinate social class.
Colonial India provided tame exotica for English titillation. The British made sense of the immense diversity of India by representing it as quaint, queer and over the top; the same is true of how India is represented on British television today. Channel 4’s coverage of the Kumbh Mela in January presented the whole Hindu festival as a relentless freak-show of naked sadhus, fire-breathers and body-piercing exhibitionists. Its series on the Kama Sutra portrayed one of the greatest books of Indian civilisation as mucky erotica. BBC2’s Bombay Blush seems to have a special mandate to reduce the whole of India to the grotesque. We are regularly treated to debt-collecting eunuchs and lap-dancing girls in saris.
This summer, “Indian” is going to be the funkiest trend around. Apart from being bombarded by rubbish from Bollywood, we will be treated to Bombay Dreams, the new musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber, and to the Royal Opera’s Bollywood version of Turandot. A CD of The Very Best Bollywood Songs has already reached the charts. All this is uniformly Indian, uniformly Hindu.
Recreating the colonial image of India hides the true diversity of south Asian people. Little wonder, then, that many Pakistanis and Bangladeshis see “Indian” as a rather imperialistic term.
When I really want to tell people who I am, I say I am a Muslim. Their reaction is an unbelieving stare – betraying complete incomprehension. This is because, first, at a time when no one actually believes in anything, people who express a religious identity – Muslims or Catholics or Orthodox Jews – appear to be totally out of sync. Second, while “Asian” and “Indian” suggest amorphous yet containable differences, “Muslim” describes a specific and volatile difference. Muslims are not simply a brand of believers: they are rampant, dangerous and impenetrably different believers.
Like the term “Indian”, “Muslim”, too, has specific connotations in the European subconscious. The west has always seen Muslims as a function of its fears and desires. During the Crusades, Muslims presented Europe with religious, intellectual and military challenges. So they were portrayed as infidels, ignorant and bloodthirsty: the barbarians at the gate of civilisation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Muslims were portrayed as treacherous, rebellious subjects of the empire. In the Twenties and Thirties, Arabs were seen as oversexed sheikhs – portrayed on film by Rudolph Valentino – ready to whisk white women off to luxurious desert tents.
In the Fifties, after Israel was established, Arabs became bloodthirsty terrorists. In the Seventies, when Opec emerged, Muslims were capitalist ogres, about to buy and control the west. In the Eighties, after the Iranian revolution, all Muslims were hell-bent on destroying civilisation. In the Nineties, after the Rushdie affair, Muslims became the danger within. Now, they are coming here as asylum-seekers from Bosnia and Kosovo to spread their fanaticism and terror.
In certain circles, saying you are a Muslim almost amounts to a declaration of war. Among feminists, for instance, I am automatically a chauvinist who forces his wife to walk several paces behind him. At secular intellectual gatherings, I am dogmatic and irrational even before I open my mouth. For some people, my name alone suggests that I must be a supporter of military dictators and terrorists.
We Muslims are not just dangerously different – we insist on living out our difference. Put a few Muslim families together and the first thing they want is a mosque. Build a mosque, and they will be shouting prayers in the middle of the night, congregating and causing congestion day in and day out, and gridlock on Fridays. It’s only a matter of time before halal shops are everywhere. Soon, weird-looking women, covered from head to toe, and men with unruly beards, crowd the streets. It is all too much “difference” for little old England.
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