A Postcolonial people: South Asians in Britain

Excerpt

The people of South Asian origin constitute slightly below 5% of the total population of Britain or circa 2.5 million people. One may encounter them in all walks of British life including business (e.g. Lakshmi Mital), entertainment (e.g. Ben Kingsley), literature (e.g. Hanif Kureishi), music (e.g. Panjabi MC), sport (e.g. Amir Khan), and politics (e.g. Shahid Malik). An early attempt to comprehensively account for different dimensions of the South Asian experience in Britain has been undertaken by Roger Ballard. In 1994 he edited a collection of essays entitled ‘Desh Pardesh’ (in Urdu - home far from home) in which he and various other authors (anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists) sought to present a comprehensive picture of the quality and character of the self-created worlds of South Asian settlers and their British-born offspring. The volume A Postcolonial people: South Asians in Britain is an extremely important step forward in the same direction. Published more than a decade after Desh Pardesh, the book edited by Nasreen Ali, Virinder S. Kalra and Siddiq Hasan Sayyid sets itself an ambitious goal to map out the heterodox impact of British Asians on the United Kingdom. It not only successfully attains this goal but does more than that – it challenges the established ways of viewing British Asians and accounting for their experience in the country. …