Little Indias and Pakistans in England: Spaces of big nostalgia

Call them melting pots, poster towns of multiculturalism or plain ghettos, several areas in England have turned into Little India, Little Pakistan and Little Bangladesh

Britain’s tourism authorities released a ‘Bollywood map’ some time ago to help tourists from the Indian sub-continent find their way through locations where films such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham were shot. There is no similar map of culturally potent diaspora enclaves, but at least three bus operators — Thandi Express, New Bharat and New Punjab — can help create one. Their fleets daily cater to the demand for cheap travel and easier connectivity with desi music on the move. Their routes are an anthropologist’s delight, identifying exact locations where millions from the sub-continent have settled and live their lives in all the nostalgic colours and aromas of their homeland, connecting places such as Southall, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Slough, Luton, Leicester, Coventry, Kent and east London. You don’t have to go all the way to the Victoria Coach Station in central London to board a bus to Bradford — just hop on to a Thandi coach near home in Southall.

The bus routes tap on nostalgia and sustain relationships across families, clans, business and cultures that reflect the patterns of migration over the decades. Some places or streets they connect have acquired sobriquets such as Little India or Little Pakistan due to the ethos established by early migrants, even if their population now includes a wider pool of migrants beyond the sub-continent. The diaspora communities are overwhelmingly based in England, but are also spread across the United Kingdom, with most first-generation migrants settled in industrial towns, where they worked. Over the decades, many moved elsewhere, as prosperity grew and perceptions changed. Researchers have noted that for subsequent generations of such migrants who grow up in predominantly white towns, visits to places such as Southall in west London and Leicester in the east Midlands can be a culture shock. Nostalgia plays out at various levels in the diaspora and there are degrees: strong among the first-generation migrants — growing ever stronger through social media, sub-continental television channels and the Internet — but less strong in their descendants.

Southall today is not exactly Little India. It is also home to tens of thousands of people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere, but retains an Indian/south Asian ethos; Bradford is linked with Pakistan, but is also home to many whose origins are in India, Bangladesh, China and elsewhere. Similar is the case with Tower Hamlets and Brick Lane in east London, widely linked with Bangladesh. Figures from the Office for National Statistics reflect the scale of sub-continental migration, based on 2011 Census figures and 2020 country-of-birth figures of residents: the Indian ethnic group comprised 1,412,958 (847,000 of them born in India); Pakistani 1,124,511 (519,000 born in Pakistan); Bangladeshi 447,201 (251,000 born in Bangladesh) — migrating in waves over the decades for reasons such as employment, education, matrimony, family reunions and expulsions from east Africa. The Indian and Pakistani communities are now widely assessed to number over 1.5 million each.

The largest groups in the Indian community are linked to Punjab and Gujarat, while Mirpuris — mostly those displaced by the construction of the Mangla Dam in 1966 and their descendants — comprise the majority of the Pakistani community, and Sylhetis dominate the Bangladeshi community. Many first-generation migrants who improved their lot over the years have moved out of their settlements to leafy, prosperous areas, with newer migrants (called ‘freshies’ or ‘faujis’) taking their place in the older enclaves. Two such spaces that stand out in the trajectory of south Asian migration are Southall and Leicester, where besides celebrating everyday life the desi way, there is also some uneasiness between older, settled migrants and new ones, even if they belong to the same country or culture. For some, perceptions of the earlier settlements have changed over time, comparing them in pejorative terms to ghettos: Rohit, an Oxford-educated son of an Indian-origin doctor-couple in Leicester, says: “I tell my white friends I am from Nottingham, not Leicester.”

Lively, diverse Southall

Located close to Heathrow airport, where many migrants found work over the decades, Southall could not be more Indian or south Asian: cars speed along busy streets with bhangra music blaring; shops selling saris, jewellery, plastic and other goods along the arterial Broadway and South Road in scenes resembling Ajmal Khan Road of Karol Bagh more than a British high street; people gulping down paani puris, and tucking into samosas and jalebis cooked openly by the roadside; no one is far from a gurdwara, mosque or temple; and the ever-smiling local MP Virendra Sharma (Labour) walking along the streets, being stopped and greeted by almost everyone in Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu.

Near the Southall train station and Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha is the iconic Glassy Junction, reputed to be the first desi pub in Britain, where you could enjoy a pint or more and pay in Indian rupees. Set up in 1994, it figured in some Indian films and closed in 2012, replaced by a south Indian restaurant chain, but the ‘Glassy Junction’ sign remains atop the building. Such is the unique un-British environs of Southall that the Ealing council tries to market it as a tourist destination.

Says writer-journalist Sanjay Suri, author of Brideless in Wembley: “It’s as pitiable as it would be predictable that Southall should become a metaphor for ghetto very much more among Indians than others. A mark of success among the elegantly arrived Indian is to get to say you’ve never been to Southall. A pity because so much of the ease of the successful British Indian was prepared in Southall, by Southall — or ‘Sathal’ as its originally English natives pronounced it in a then correct way. Punjabis spotted the two words as spelt, how could they not, and spoke them in sequence that native Brits have since learnt. For the early migrants of the 1950s, this was not just a place in Britain; it gave them and all who followed a place in Britain far beyond Southall. This was the first post of the first migrant. This is the flagship of Indian migration to Britain. That historical energy buzzes on into the present.”

As early migrants faced racism and worse, it was in Southall that some of the first anti-racism struggles were waged and led to legislation. The Indian Workers Association campaigned against discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s on behalf of all migrants. Things came to a head when teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar was killed by racists in 1976 and teacher Blair Peach was killed during an anti-racism demonstration in 1979, prompting sustained campaigns by activists such as Suresh Grover and groups such as Southall Black Sisters. Says Shobha Das, anti-racism campaigner: “Southall has a long history of active anti-racism and mobilisation. My engagement with Southall is more recent, when I volunteered for the Southall Black Sisters. There, one senses the old political charge of the place, working side by side with activists who stand up for the rights of British minorities. Leaders like Grover and Pragna Patel, who heads the Southall Black Sisters, have spearheaded the emergence of an Asian anti-racist movement. They have not only managed the difficult task of mobilising communities to demand fairness and equality, but have also been heavily involved in improving and using equalities legislation to make British anti-racism stronger and more impactful.”

Sub-continental festivals, cricket celebrations and politics often spill out on to Southall streets, while local officials grapple with a range of crime and social challenges, including domestic violence, illegal renting, forced marriages, immigration offences, drugs, and lately issues related to the Covid pandemic. But, as Suri adds, ghettos can be reassuring places; they are your world that migrated over, which makes them a comfortable place to occupy: “The allegedly successful Southaller has stepped into the tackily moneyed Gerards Cross and other such places, but Southall’s earthy charm endures. This is where the British Indian is not fake. If they have an attitude about Southall as they do, Southall doesn’t care, it probably doesn’t notice.”

(Prasun is a journalist based in London.)