The Great British Asian Invasion

The Great British Asian Invasion
Writer: Satinder Chohan

http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/O/origination/asian_invasion.html
The Asians are no longer coming. They have emphatically arrived. From their 17th century turn as domestic servants, ayahs and lascars to people of prominence in the 21st century, Asians in Britain have left an indelible influence on a sometimes unwelcoming cultural landscape.
Mosques, mandirs, gurdwaras, cornershops and curry houses dot the urban horizon. In music, the sounds of the Asian Underground have moved overground via artists such as Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, ADF and the urban Asian flava of Rishi Rich and Jay Sean. The intoxicating rhythms of bhangra have infiltrated the charts through the likes of Punjabi MC to even Missy Elliot, Jay-Z and an unlikely Britney Spears.
On television, British comedy has 'kissed the chuddies' of programmes like 'Goodness Gracious Me' and 'The Kumars At No. 42' which in turn, have introduced words like gora - white person, Angrez - English and innit - don't you think? to join the colonial exports of shampoo, bungalow, pundit and pukka in the language bank of the 'Queen's Hinglish'. The likes of EastEnders, Coronation Street and Casualty use once invisible Asian family dramas as the nation's own - all decades away from the days when rare sightings meant Asian kids screamed, 'Look Mum! There's an Asian on TV!!!!'
Bollywood continues to fill the stage with the West End smash musical 'Bombay Dreams'. On the screen Baz Luhrmann's 'Moulin Rouge to Gurinder Chadha's Jane Austen adaptation 'Bride and Prejudice' give more than a nod to Bollywood too. Home-grown films such as 'East is East' and 'Bend It Like Beckham' have scored handsomely at the box office. Monica Ali's 'Brick Lane' joined the Richard & Judy Book Club, as Banglatowns, Punjabi towns and Bradistans spring up across the nation.
On the streets, swirls of henna dot the destinal palms of style-conscious girls, their wrists clinking hopefully with glass bangles and karma beads.
On the streets, swirls of henna dot the palms of style-conscious girls, their wrists clinking hopefully with glass bangles and karma beads. Wrapped in guru swathes of cashmere or pashmina, their third-eye bindis fix a colourful gaze on interior design stores where Indian muslin wafts wispily, divans stretch elegantly and paisley-patterned cushions scatter stylish interiors. 'OM' insignias inscribe sacred spaces that are overseen by Buddha statues in meditative repose surrounded by candles and aromatic incense. Here, yoga, meditation and ayurvedic medicines alleviate the stresses and strains of the Western working day.
With increased Asian-targeted advertising, corporate globalisation has discovered the power of the 'brown pound'. In a flourishing �3.2 billion industry, chicken tikka masala is the Britain's favourite dish. On the high street, Starbucks now serves up a milky chai, McDonald's a chicken McTikka and Domino's, a home-delivered Tandoori Hot pizza. Asians like steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal regularly enter Britain's Rich List and others like Rabinder Singh - Britain's first turbaned High Court judge, Lord Waheed Ali and Parmjit Dhanda MP stride through the corridors of British power. Meanwhile Asian doctors, nurses, shopkeepers, lawyers, restaurant and factory workers continue to underpin this great multi-kulti nation. The Asians have surely arrived.
But scratch below the 'Asian Kool' and deeper layers of identity pulsate. Using fascinating archive of incoming Asian immigrants and a variously hostile and hilarious British public response, anecdotes from the likes of Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Anthony Wirral-Thompson and Norman Tebbit (!), 'The Great British Asian Invasion' simmers in a regional, religious and social hot-pot.
From the outside looking in, Asians were considered 'aliens' or 'immigrants' in 1950s and 1960s Britain. In the 1970s and 1980s, they were labelled 'Black'. In the 1990s, they were 'Asian' and by the turn of the 21st century, 'British Asians', 'Indo-Brits' and 'Indo-Saxons'. Shaking off the veneer of sameness imposed from the outside, Asians have always been aware of the mish-mash of identities that are more deeply rooted than their shared sub-continental heritage. Nationality, religion regional background, caste or social status cross with the diverse histories of each group. An innate cultural sixth sense enables Asians to tell one another meticulously apart e.g. 'he/she is a Pakistani Muslim Sindhi',an Indian Sikh Punjabi' or 'East African Hindu Gujarati' or 'Caribbean Hindu'.
Just like the Scots, English, Irish and Welsh, Northerners or Southerners, Asians find kinship, solidarity and an (un) healthy dose of prejudice between different religious, regional and social offshoots of being for example, Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, Pakistani, Bengali, Indian or Sri Lankan, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil or East African. Punjabis might be work-hard-play-hard hedonists, Gujaratis might be money-makers, East Africans savvy business people. For Asians, it's where you're at, who you are AND where you're from that counts - and sometimes what you have been through that binds you. For example the double migrant East Africans ruthlessly kicked out of Uganda and Kenya in the late 1970s, Punjabis who suffered the horrors of Partition in 1947 and Bengalis the trauma of a 1971 civil war. Fast forward to 21st century Britain and a darker reality persists around issues such as immigration, post-September 11th Islamaphobia, socio-economic deprivation and racial tensions in the inner cities of the north of England.
As mainstream British culture keeps spinning the idea that Asian culture is monolithic and Bollywood exotic, documentaries like 'The Great British Asian Invasion' suggest that in-house differences between Asians can be as stark as those between black and white. And that even in multicultural Britain, being Asian is in itself a 'multicultural' experience full of complexities and contradictions.