Asian Britain: A Photographic History by Susheila Nasta
Great empires tend to find themselves colonized by those they think they are colonizing. Here is the Roman poet Juvenal complaining of Rome in John Dryden’s translation of his Third Satire:
Nor Greeks alone, but Syrians here abound;
Obscene Orontes, diving under ground,
Conveys his wealth to Tiber’s hungry shores,
And fattens Italy with foreign whores:
Hither their crooked harps and customs come;
All find receipt in hospitable Rome.
No doubt these Greeks and Syrians had similarly jaundiced views of the Romans they met during their immigration to the imperial capital, but we have none of their voices to tell us so, nor to tell us of the lives they lived and the contributions they made to the Empire. In this respect, the British have been more fortunate, for Susheila Nasta has been chronicling the lives of immigrants to their islands for the last thirty years. In Asian Britain, she has now produced a photographic record of South Asians who have settled in the chilly climes of the British Isles over the last three centuries.
To those of us who live in the Far East, Nasta’s use of the word “Asian” common in British parlance to mean only South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, etc.), is an anomaly. For the British, it is convenient shorthand. The generic term “South Asians” has now been shortened to the ‘Asians’ the British use today, and this book is about them alone.
Nasta has an appropriately multi-cultural background for the production of this collage. She grew up in India, Britain, Holland and Germany and is now a British academic with a chair in modern literature at the Open University. Her field is cultural difference and diversity, and her primary interest is colonial and postcolonial literatures, especially Caribbean, African, South Asian and Black-British. In 1984 she founded the literary magazine, Wasafiri: The Magazine of International Contemporary Writing, and in 2012 she edited India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858-1950, a series of essays which trace the Indo-British connection on British soil.
Her new book, Asian Britain: A Photographic History is much in keeping with her earlier work, over three hundred pages of beautifully reproduced, often rare, illustrations with an accompanying explanatory text, introduced by BBC correspondent Razia Iqbal. The book reads continuously, in a chronological order that dispenses with chapter divisions, but there is a good index, so using the volume for reference is not affected by this. There is much here for both the student of British colonial and social history and for the general reader; the book doubles neatly as a source book for the former and an attractive coffee table book for the latter.
The historical record that Nasta illustrates is longer than most of us realise. Her book contains fascinating portraits of Indians who settled in Britain from the 18th Century onwards, whether as families or servants of returning British nabobs, as sailors—lascars—on British ships, or as enterprising individuals, such as Sake Dean Mahomed, who opened “Mahomed’s Vapour Baths” in Brighton in 1821 and became King George IV’s “shampooing surgeon”.
It is the early days which surprise most. Hollywood made a film about Queen Empress Victoria’s Scottish manservant John Brown, but did not do so about her Indian munshi (clerk), Abdul Karim, who had an equivalent influence on her and whom the liberal-minded monarch wished to honour with a knighthood. She was only prevented from doing so by the less egalitarian Prince of Wales. And who now has heard of Britain’s first Indian Member of Parliament, the Parsi Dadabhai Naoroji, “the Grand Old Man” who sat for the Liberal Party in the Finsbury seat for two years from 1892? Who now knows of the second, Mancherjhee Bhownagree, who was elected for, of all things, the Conservative Party in the seat of Bethnal Green in 1895? You will find their stories and rather extraordinary photographs here.
The more recent history which the book reveals also holds many surprises. Few non-specialists will remember that the hugely powerful Indian Congress politician V. K. Krishna Menon, who ultimately became India’s Minister of Defence, started his political career in the British Labour Party and was for thirteen years a Councillor for St. Pancras in London. Very few will now recall that the beautiful and glamorous British film actress Merle Oberon, who starred in a series of British and Hollywood films from the Thirties to the Fifties, was of Eurasian/Ceylonese parentage.
Nasta rightly reminds us of the huge contribution that India made to the war effort in both the 1st and 2nd World Wars, sending abroad 1.4 million Indian troops in the former, 2.5 million in the latter, many of whom came to Britain. Her book has photographs of Indians, men and women, in all branches of Britain’s wartime services, fighter pilots during the Battle of Britain, merchant seamen in the ships which sailed in hazardous convoys in the North Atlantic, Special Operations Executive agents working and dying with the resistance in France. South Asians form part of Britain’s forces to this day; the book contains a photograph taken outside Buckingham Palace in 2012 of the turbaned Sikh Guardsman, Jatenderpal Singh Bhullar, and of course there is an entire Brigade of Gurkhas still serving the Queen.
Nasta’s rather relentless emphasis on the discrimination that faced many Indian immigrants, especially after large-scale immigration opened up from the Subcontinent, then from East Africa, in the 1960s and 1970s, may strike some readers as repetitive, but, as E. M. Forster responded when criticized for being too pro-Indian in his A Passage to India, the author is being partial as he (or she in this case) is evening up what has hitherto been a vastly unbalanced situation.
There is no doubt that the attitudes, and sometimes the physical reactions, faced by many South Asians when they first settled in the country were dire. Nor is there doubt that prejudices have worsened in the case of Muslims because of events on the world stage since 9/11. The policies of governments of every political shade have been confused and reactive. Nasta is right to focus our attention on this.
She does not, though, allow herself much warmth in her celebration of the place that Asians have carved in the Britain of the 21st Century. Her book is full of photographs of men and women who are now household names: test cricketers Mark Ramprakash and Monty Panesar; Olympic silver medallist boxer Amir Khan; rights activist barrister Shami Chakrabarti; writers Vikram Seth and Kamila Shamsie; comedians Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Kulvinder Ghir and Nina Wadia; journalist Sarfraz Mansoor; actor Ben Kingsley; actress and cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey; broadcaster George Alagiah; peers Lord Indarjit Singh and Lord Meghnad Desai; judge Mota Singh QC; MPs Sadiq Khan, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz; Minister Sayeeda Warsi.
So normal has this become that today it is scarcely worthy of note. Yet Nasta is wary of triumphalism; one feels she has seen too much, known too much, to be as confident as many of Britain’s younger generations seem to be, that race is no longer the defining issue that it once was.
No doubt problems of race and culture remain in Britain, and the worst of these will continue to possess the potential for conflict for some years, particularly outside the mixing pot that London has become.
Yet the gradual assimilation that this book shows has already taken place is an achievement of which the country may be quietly proud. Recognition of that fact can only do us good. It is something Susheila Nasta shows us, albeit a little despite herself, in this timely new account.