Of Manu, Mammon And Mems

In 1961, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis made up 0.23 per cent of Britain's population. Thirty years later, their numbers had gone up to 3.04 per cent. That is, all told there were almost 1.5 million brown-skinned people living there.

To any South Asian who has merely transited through Heathrow airport, let alone lived in the UK, this comes as as no surprise. After all, the brown skins are visible the moment you land in the UK, hauling, sweeping,mopping and, as often as not, averting their gaze.

But to the white skinned natives, especially the older denizens of Britain's lower classes, this slow accretion of a brown proletariat has been hard to digest. Whence the other phenomenon that the brownskin (and, of course, the black) encounters: typically polite but pretty unmistakable British racism.

This book tries to understand how these foreigners have coped with this form of prosecution by getting a dozen social anthropologists to describe the experiences of some dominant communities. The result, overall, is interesting if not especially rivetting. But that is a risk inherent in excessive political correctness. Give me Enoch Powell anytime. Atleast, with him one always knew where one stood.

The one fact incontrovertible which emerges from these essays is the insularity of the South Asian. Be he a Gujarati or a Punjabi (from either India or Pakistan) or a Parsi or a Bengali, he remains a segregationist par excellence.

Not for him the new-fangled ideas of integration or the noble sentiments of inter-community and inter-caste socialising. India's traditional pulls and pressures of caste remain strong even within the communities of Pakistani muslims. Social status is determined as much by mammon as by Manu.

As one reads the findings of the essayists, one can't help wondering if it isn't this innate tendency towards seperation, segregation and invisible ghettoism which has made the South Asian such a successful migrant.

Trinidad, Durban, Surinam, Fiji, New Guinea, Kenya, US, Finland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, you name it, and you'll find our brothers there. Could this be because the South Asian accepts discrimination as completely natural since he is himself such a good practitioner of it?

This quiet acceptance of the local social order while not becoming a part of it was also the hallmark of the Jews in Europe. Also, they undertook businesses which the locals wouldn't or couldn't undertake (such as money lending in the medieval Europe).

The South Asian has also done the same thing. Whether it is mopping the toilets in Gatwick airport and Drummer Street coach station or running the corner tobacco shop which stays open seven days a week until midnight, the South Asian has rendered a service which the natives were either forbidden or unwilling to provide.

The result, as the essays in this volume point out, has been considerable economic success. The second generation South Asian in the UK is, on average, richer than this white counterpart of the previous generation.

How do these people view home? Indeed, for how many of them does the sub-continent still remain home ? This volume doesn't quite get to grips with this issue, perhaps because out of the 1.5 million South Asians in Britain, more than half were born there. For them, home is not a village in a district in Jullunder or Sylhet or Lahore but Bradford, Manchester and, as they like to call Birmingham, Brmmm. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are as foreign to them as Britain was foreign to their parents.

There is, however, one esoteric question which the book should have asked but doesn't. This question relates, in a way, to the mirror-image of the problems faced by European immigrants to South Asia in the 18th century.

The men came alone and needed the usual diversions which only the opposite sex could provide. Thence grew the Eurasian community (which was quite distinct from the Anglo-Indians which was the term used to describe English people who lived in India).

No such thing happened in Britain, partly because family pressure soon led to the arrival of South Asian wives in the UK. This, as much as the South Asian inferiority complex, resulted in pure brown communities, at least for the first generation immigrant. What the second generation will do will be watched with great interest by all South Asians.