Who are you calling Asian?

Britain's 'Asian community' is a fiction that suits politicians. Now the fault lines are showing, says SUNIL KHILNANI.

LAST weekend, I flew from Goa to London. As I had expected, the charter flight was heaving with rather large, not very rich, and painfully pink British folk; but many seats were also filled by Goan families, returning to Britain after the Easter break. I could hear their conversations: well-fed mothers wishing they had been able to stay longer with their families and to enjoy the mangoes and cashews ripening in gardens full of childhood memories; their svelte teenaged children, on the other hand, fidgeting to get back to Britain, to escape the lousy Goan chewing gum and to make it to the U.S. Garage night planned for Saturday.

For these youngsters, born and brought up in Britain, India means a classy holiday destination with which to impress their school friends, not a teary return to their motherland. More and more, parents who left the Indian subcontinent for Britain are discovering that even within their own families, they can no longer assume that they all "belong" to one "community".

The early waves of immigration from the Indian subcontinent fetched up here beginning in 1962, sometime after those from the Caribbean had started to arrive. They came first from the Punjab, and from East and West Pakistan; then from East Africa (mainly Gujaratis), from Bangladesh, and later still came the Tamils, fleeing war in Sri Lanka. To begin with, they gravitated not towards London but to provincial industrial centres - Birmingham, Leicester, Leeds, Bradford. They kept themselves to themselves, buckled down to working, earning and saving: stiff parents - stiff with over-work and with the fear of living in unwelcoming neighbourhoods - they brought up their families with unbending discipline.

But in the last decade or so, we have seen a generation breaking away from parental obedience, and the invention for the first time of "Asian youth": casting off their image of swots in anoraks with greasy hair, young Asians have moved fast to try to catch up with their cool Black British counterparts. In music, fashion and fiction, in television and in food, they are eking out new ways to capitalise on their backgrounds; their parents came here to make a timid living, but they, more aggressive and impatient, want to be successful - and also to be noticed. Some take inspiration from Black American culture; some look East to an India as fantastic as the rural idyll many of their parents dream of - an India of Bollywood and fashion shows, beauty queens and music videos; and some are seduced by superficial, but potent, religious sentiments: discovering Hindu, Sikh and Muslim dimensions to their selves. There is a flipside to this - the many more who do not succeed, and are left to emulate drug and gang culture.

The divisions with the Asian community, however, are not merely generational. They extend along many lines - linguistic, regional, religious. But rarely have they been meaningfully registered here. The reasons for this lie in Britain's historical relation with - and perceptions of - the Indian subcontinent.

Only recently have these internal divisions, always there, caught the eye of the media. During the events in Bradford, there were reports of young Muslims attacking the shop of a Hindu shopkeeper who was a supporter of the Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - evidence of how events in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - nuclear explosions, wars, cricket matches - can resonate to dangerous effect here in Britain. And, in Oldham - a stamping ground of the British Nationalist Party - a White old age pensioner was beaten up by an gang of young Asians.

In recent years, Britain has been much less susceptible to racist politics than elsewhere in Europe. Across the continent, from Paris to Vienna, parties of the far Right have succeeded in raising significant public support. That has not happened in Britain. Gesturally too, there have been positive things to report here. It is striking, for instance, that those two weighty symbols of Englishness - the captaincy of the England cricket team and the Mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge - are currently held by men born, respectively, in Madras and Shantiniketan, West Bengal (Nasser Hussain and Amartya Sen).

One should not, though, over-exaggerate the merely anecdotal into a story of easy progress. Racist attitudes and practices seep right through British society, and are there to be activated. This applies not only to its White population. People from the Indian subcontinent often harbour racist feelings towards one another and as well as towards those originally from Africa and the Caribbean, and stereotypes exist among all communities - sometimes jokey, these can be coaxed to nasty ends.

British perceptions of the Indian subcontinent have always been confused: especially about the principles of its internal division - its many castes, religions and languages - and how its overall integration was achieved. As migrants from there came to settle here, these confusions were replicated and compounded, and they came to pervade both how the host society perceived these communities and how governments have tried to administer them.

As a term, "Asian" is a euphemistic shorthand used to describe those who came from the partitioned India the British helped to make and leave behind in 1947: it names those whose origins lie in what was once India (and Ceylon), was then divided into India and Pakistan, and is today India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It tries to impart a post-imperial unity to peoples and societies that are internal, highly differentiated, and between whom an often intense rivalry has grown in the aftermath of Partition.

In fact, just as it is hard to identify a monolithic Black British community, so too the picture of a singular "British Asian community" is a misleading fiction: a fiction that has been propagated and bought into by both politicians and multiculturalists. In this respect, the term "Asian" makes about as much sense and has as much utility as a social description as does "Aryan", "Teuton" or "Magyar".

The use of such terminology has obscured the fine grain, and has forced together diverse groups into a seemingly single community, British Asians, with supposedly similar interests. It served well the purposes of politicians as well as of those in charge of making cultural policy to see "Asians" as a single group - which they then could claim to represent and on whose behalf they could speak. The issue, as viewed through the eyes of the host community, went through several mutations - from initially seeking "integration" and "assimilation", the task then became to secure "racial harmony", and most recently we have all been enjoined to subscribe to "multiculturalism". But what or who exactly were the subjects of these policies? And what did they themselves think about the matter?

It is the sense of not being adequately recognised by such broad descriptions and policies that has put new life into the language of race and (as it is often now referred to) ethnicity - that, and the workings of electoral democracy. Now, we find that groups - particularly those once clumped together as "Asian" - are actively taking up this language and redefining it for their own purposes. They are choosing to describe themselves as Kashmiri, Pathan, Punjabi, Tamil, Gujarati, Bengali, as well as in terms of religious categories; Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Jain. They are doing this because they are discovering that such self-naming can allow them to press for attention and claims of their own. The workings of electoral democracy have also encouraged the formation of groups, which politicians have to cultivate and bargain with.

It needs to be remembered, of course, that such more particular categories of ethnic and racial description are as much inventions as the term "Asian" - they do not possess any more substantial or primordial reality. They form a set of available descriptions that can be activated at politically opportune moments. They can also be encouraged by the State's often stumbling efforts to know its people, to statistically enumerate its population. Thus, something similar is happening at the moment with Britain's White population: recent census asked people (at least in Scotland) to identify themselves as "Scottish", "Irish", "Other British" or of "Other White Background". White, it seems, no longer comes in just plain Vanilla.

Many of those who came from the Indian subcontinent arrived with quite loose and fluid senses of themselves - emigrants often tend to be relatively marginal to the cultural mainstreams of their societies, and more open to outside influences. But, as with so many groups, once transported to a strange location, their selfhood hardened and took a more defined shape - being a Sikh, Muslim or Hindu - and being seen to be one, somehow now mattered more when living abroad in the midst of another society. In their homeland, they were obsessed with the country to which they wished to emigrate; once there, they often thought of nothing else but the homeland they had left behind.

Race and debates around it are becoming something of a touchstone for those trying to set out a new picture of Britain, one which moves it beyond class: which sees British society not as vertically stacked up, but as horizontally scattered, making for an even, planed-down "multicultural society". Whether it can actually do this is a very open question. But the current debate could be beneficial, not least because it draws attention to the deeply political dimension of the business of how we describe each other, and how we describe ourselves.

It can compel us to ask: how do the inhabitants of these isles today think about the ways they differ from one another, and what importance do they attach to such differences?

It ought to force introspection on the matter of race, among us all. It is all too easy to point fingers: "You, you are racist; me, I just happen to be picky about my friends (and employees)".

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