east19_A_Passage_to_India_in_London

“Welcome to Southall”, says the sign in English and Gurmukhi script at the train station entrance. The Victorian setting of Paddington gives way to an Eastern universe where the only
element of Englishness is a red Heathrow-bound bus. “Exotic” is undoubtedly the most suitable way to describe the sights you see as you go looking for the Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh
Sabha, the biggest Sikh temple outside India
A Passage to India
in London
INDIA 2
text and photographs by Massimiliano Di Pasquale
merjit arranges to meet me at
A
Carluccio’s in Ealing Broadway for
lunch.
My teenage memories of Ealing are of a
mainly working class neighbourhood with
a British and Asian population and a
sizeable Polish community.
Alongside the Indians and Pakistanis,
entire families of Polish refugees came
here in the early 1950s, fleeing a country
that had been destroyed by the Nazis and
become a Russian satellite State, and built
a Little Warsaw in the area around
Hanwell.
Twenty years later, coming out of Ealing
Broadway station, what I see around me is
an upper middle class urban district. This
superficial impression is heightened as I
walk along the high street towards the
Italian restaurant, located a few blocks
from the Underground station in front of
a brand new shopping centre.
I am surprised to see that the
neighbourhood, once dirty and
nondescript and far from safe at night, is
now bright, modern and colourful.
The shop and boutique signs and the
luxury cars parked along the street are
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A PASSAGE TO INDIA IN LONDON
indications that this residential
neighbourhood is in no way inferior to
Putney or Fulham. The houses on nearby
Hanger Hill, featuring Italian marble
porticoes and Greek columns, are not a
tribute to Anglo-Saxon extravagance and
eccentricity alone. They also bear witness
to the opulent tastes of the latest arrivals.
In Ealing, as in other boroughs of an
increasingly multi-ethnic and mixed-race
London, the spicy aromas of curries from
Southall takeaways mingle with the
sophisticated flavours of fusion cuisine in
the elegant restaurants of Ealing
Broadway.
“Ealing is a trendy spot”, Amerjit, my
Punjabi friend, tells me, plunging her fork
into a plate of fusilli with aubergines and
mozzarella cheese. “Fashionable
restaurants, shopping malls: it’ll soon be
as glamorous as Chiswick”.
“The new residents”, she continues, “are
lawyers, managers, wealthy middle-aged
women and young professionals”. A look
at the people seated in this restaurant with
its stylish electric blue decor confirms her
statement.
Like the neighbourhood, Amerjit has been
injected with glamour and a healthy dose
78
of self-confidence. My friend’s big dark
eyes are particularly lively, her speaking
tones more confident than in the past and
her words pronounced more decisively.
She tells me about her work at a
consultancy firm and her happy
relationship with a charming,
sophisticated older man. “He’s English”,
she adds after a moment’s hesitation,
blushing a little.
Her old widowed mother at home knows
nothing about her relationship, but is
firmly convinced that her daughter will
one day marry a suitable boy from their
ethnic background.
The image of Amerjit dashing along
Uxbridge Road in the direction of Southall
in her metallic blue Golf is emblematic of
the condition of many second-generation
Indians, suspended, sometimes
dramatically, between tradition and
modernity, like the heroine of Bend it like
Beckham, whose passion for football frees
her from ethnic and religious constraints.
On the District Line train going back to
Earls Court, I think about Amerjit’s dual
identity – British and Punjabi – and decide
that I, too, will go to Southall the next
day.
INDIA 2
traditional Sikh world behind to plunge
into sprawling early millennium London, a
seductive, kaleidoscopic London that
Puppy himself, in a love-hate relationship
with the city, describes as “the splendid,
faithless old whore who spawned me”.
The suburban Sikhs
Using the stylistic elements of the
“I was educated according to the
coming-of-age novel, albeit a “politically
scriptures and baptised when I was little:
incorrect” variant of it, Dhaliwal revisits
my name was chosen from the Guru
Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia:
Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. I never he describes how the way Indians relate to
cut my hair. I was a vegetarian and I was
their origins, and to the British in
told to stay away from cigarettes and
general, has changed over the past thirty
alcohol. Every Sunday I would go to the
years.
gurudwara and sit cross-legged next to my The engaging, colourful prose, which is
mother through an interminable
peppered with quotes from pop songs and
ceremony I didn’t understand. Then we
intentionally ironic, the product of a postwould all go to the langar, the free
ideological age, is occasionally reminiscent
kitchen, and eat standing up. The food was of Nick Hornby or Kureishi.
served on the kind of metal dishes they
Like Karim Amir, the protagonist of The
use in prisons”.
Buddha of Suburbia, Puppy is fascinated
Puppy, the protagonist of Tourism, the
by the metropolis and journeys through it
debut novel by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal, a
in a desperate search for strong emotions
young writer born in Greenford to firstthat can assuage the sense of mediocrity
generation Punjabi immigrants, recalls his that assails him.
childhood in Southall.
The basic historical and anthropological
He does so without nostalgia, speaking in context is the only change: while Karim
the disenchanted tones of a
experiences the great Utopian season of
thirtysomething who has left the
the 1960s and ’70s, Puppy has already
_Southall is not merely London’s Punjabi enclave: it is a
genuine microcosm of the Indian subcontinent where
Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and Christians cohabit, and has
two churches and a mosque.
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A PASSAGE TO INDIA IN LONDON
developed the dose of cynicism required
for survival in the globalized world of
2000.
Both characters conceal a surprising
ability to interpret the reality of their
time behind a hedonist temperament.
Puppy’s hilarious, albeit irreverent, quips
on the East European immigrants bring
the racial and class dialectic between
second-generation Asians and working
class British up to date in the light of a
new socio-economic variable: emigration
from the post-Soviet area, which is
represented in the novel by unskilled
Albanian or Rumanian workers and the
attractive Russian prostitute with whom
the protagonist satisfies his appetite for
sex in a flat in Warwick Way.
“Exotic” is undoubtedly the most suitable
way to describe the sights I see as I go
looking for the Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh
Sabha, the biggest Sikh temple outside
India. Men with long white beards, heads
wrapped in black or deep blue turbans,
women in pastel saris, shop windows
displaying CDs of Indian music and shops
selling musical instruments including
sitars. There are open-air stalls of fruit and
vegetables, halal butcher shops, an Islamic
bank and a cinema, the Himalaya Palace,
where the latest Bollywood films play.
Southall is not merely London’s Punjabi
enclave: it is a genuine microcosm of the
Indian subcontinent where Sikhs, Hindus,
Muslims and Christians cohabit. So it
should come as no surprise that this
suburb, located on the historic Grand
A stroll through Southall
Union Canal, which linked the capital to
“Welcome to Southall”, reads the
the entire British river system in the era
bilingual sign in English and Gurmukhi
of the Industrial Revolution, has two
script at the train station entrance.
churches and a mosque.
I left the Victorian setting of Paddington
Plus, of course, the evocative temple with
twenty minutes ago and now find myself in its golden spires, modelled on the far
an Eastern world where the only English
better known one in Amristar, which
elements in sight are a red Heathrowopened about five years ago to meet the
bound bus and a pub, the Glassy Junction,
needs of the growing local Sikh
where you can however pay in rupees.
community.
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INDIA 2
_Brick Lane is no longer merely “Banglatown”, but a tourist destination in its own right and a gathering place for
trendy youngsters who like its hip bars, ethnic restaurants and alternative art galleries
similar to the ones that Dahliwal
irreverently compares in his novel to the
ones used in prisons.
Londonstani
“The real differences in the U.K. today
An elderly gentleman kindly offers to take are not political or class-related; they are
me there in his car and explains that the
religious and racial”.
temple in front of us, also named
So says Hanif Kureishi in The Word and
Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha, is the
the Bomb, a collection of writings on the
old building, where prayers are still held.
subject of the relationship between Islam
“People come here to pray and listen to
and the West published the day after the
the guru’s preachings on weekdays and go London bomb blasts on 7 July 2005.
to the golden temple on holidays”.
Ever since the fatwa issued against
He explains some of the precepts of
Rushdie in 1989, the Anglo-Pakistani
Sikhism to me as we drive, including the
writer has been one of the most clearimportant concept of sharing food.
headed observers of the changes that have
“Food is very important to us. It has to be taken place within the Indian community
shared with others, especially the needy.
with the emergence of Islamic
When we go into the temple, you will also fundamentalism.
accept what is offered as a sign of
Books such as The Black Album and My
gratitude”.
Son the Fanatic, published in the first half
Later, after having watched large numbers of the last decade, anticipate many of the
of people at prayer and admired the
themes in current British writing.
building’s harmonious architecture, which Londonstani, a best seller by Gautam
transmits a strong sense of spirituality,
Malkani set in Southall and Hounslow, the
my companion and I, barefoot, our heads
story of a group of rudeboys addicted to
covered, share the rice pudding we are
petty theft and bullying, brings out all the
served in a metal bowl: a bowl quite
idiosyncrasies of a multi-racial model that
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A PASSAGE TO INDIA IN LONDON
appears to be losing steam following the
era of Blair’s “Cool Britannia”.
The setting Malkani describes using a
hybrid writing style that blends London
slang, rap rhythms and text messages is
the product of a complex and stratified
world. Amit, Ravi, Jas and gang leader
Hardjit are extremely realistic portraits of
the ethnic panorama that is
revolutionising London.
Huguenots, Bengalis and trendy bars
Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh of a Bengali
father and an English mother, writer
Monica Ali skilfully captures the changes
that have taken place over the past decade
in Brick Lane, the historic Bangladeshi
neighbourhood in London’s East End, in
her eponymous novel.
In the second part of this excellent novel,
which gives readers a no-holds-barred
description of the existence of Muslim
immigrants and the condition of women in
Muslim families, the writer gives us an
insight into Brick Lane as it is today through
the eyes of her protagonist, Nazneen.
It is no longer merely “Banglatown”, as I
will see for myself, but a tourist
destination in its own right and a
gathering place for trendy youngsters who
come to Brick Lane for its hip bars, ethnic
restaurants and alternative art galleries.
Dickensian London, which I have always
associated with the East End, has gone
from being a poor and rundown area to a
decidedly cool place to be as a result of
urban renewal programmes.
Even the Ten Bells Pub, where Jack the
Ripper picked the prostitutes he murdered,
has stopped selling macabre souvenirs in
dubious taste and is now a trendy DJ bar,
although it is not in the same league as the
Vibe Bar, which “Time Out” describes as one
of the most avant-garde bars in London.
A closer look reveals that the charm of
Brick Lane lies in its improbable yet
successful mix of heterogeneous styles,
colours and cultures. The buildings of the
past, restored and adapted on the basis of a
philosophy of absorbing and including
anything that works, are the true emblems
of this neighbourhood’s cultural renewal.
The Brick Lane Jamme Masjid on Fournier
Street may well be the building that best
sums up the area’s centuries-old tradition
of tolerance and civilisation. Built in 1744
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_Southall, the suburb located on the historic Grand
Union Canal, is home to the Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh
Sabha, the biggest Sikh temple outside India, built to
meet the needs of the growing local Sikh community
as a Huguenot church, it was used as a
synagogue from the early 1900s to the
mid-1970s, when it was turned into a
mosque.
As I sip a pint of lager, comfortably installed
on a sofa in the Vibe Bar and surrounded by
thirtysomethings tucking into the ritual
Sunday brunch, I am increasingly
unconvinced that British multiculturalism is
on the edge of a breakdown, as many
Cassandras, including in Italy, have recently
been prophesying.