Despite all the talk of multiculturalism, British society continues to be deeply riven by racial prejudice. Take the ugly altercation, of which a video was posted on YouTube, on a crowded London Tube a few weeks ago. A young white woman and an African-American teenager were packed close in the crush; he stepped on her toe; she protested; there was a slanging match in which all kinds of scatological, sexual and ethno-cultural profanities were bandied; she called him “smelly f*****g Nigerian”; he responded with “white princess” and “escort”— and then he let his fists fly. This is hardly an exception; most Indians in the UK report having been subjected to racially loaded comments at some point.
Clearly very little, if anything, has changed from the world that Farrukh Dhondy describes in London Calling. This is Britain in the 1970s, a time when the numbers of post-war migrants from Africa and Asia had grown large enough for white Britain not to ignore. Worse, they had become a threat since they had started clamouring for a political voice and a share of resources and economic opportunities.
The book is set right in the thick of “black power” politics – black, in this sense, referring to all non-whites and including South Asians – tracing the life and career of its protagonist, Farrukh, a young, middle-class Parsi boy from Pune who comes to Britain on a scholarship to study at Cambridge University, and gets drawn into radical politics. This part closely mirrors the known facts of Mr Dhondy’s life. He, however, does not call London Calling autobiographical, settling instead for “fictional memoir”. Perhaps reality needs to be leavened with the imagination if it is to become a gripping narrative.
Or, perhaps, the imagination needs to be based on real facts for the narrative to carry some weight. In truth, most fiction has a basis in experience and Mr Dhondy is a star of an entire pantheon of Asian-origin British writers, playwrights, actors, stand-up comedians whose best works reference their encounters with racial stereotyping and the complex relations between the white and Asian/African-American communities. Think of Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful LaundretteM), Meera Syal (The Kumars at No 42), Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), Ayub Khan-Din (East is East) — all of whom shine a self-deprecating, ironic humour on life around them and remain as sharply alert to the foibles of their own peoples as they do to the prejudices of the Other. Interestingly, it was Mr Dhondy who, as commissioning editor of Channel 4 between 1984 and 1997, was responsible for giving many of these now-stars of British TV and films a break. To get back to the novel – thrown in with the only Indians in town, a group of workers at a local typewriter factory – Farrukh and his girlfriend, Natasha, are moved when their friends are unfairly chucked out of their jobs and help to set up a union so that they can pressure the management. Later, they organise locals to end racial discrimination in a local pub. This brings them to the attention, when they move to London, of the Black Panther Movement, a group modelled on the better-known Black Panther Party in the US. The Black Panther Party and Movement in the UK (active in the sixties and seventies) are important in the history of anti-race struggles because they overturned the pacifist stance of Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement and believed in building a more aggressive political consciousness and unity among African-Americans. But Farrukh leaves the Movement when he discovers that it is becoming as unreasonable and stifling of individual freedom as the state machinery it is standing up to.
From here on, the novel traces Farrukh’s disillusionment with organised politics, and his efforts to strike a balance between his political work and his job and his writing, in which he increasingly finds success. Unlike the early bit, this second part is episodic and a little disjointed, but Mr Dhondy manages to pull through with his skippy prose and the drama with which he infuses ordinary incidents.
Most significantly, Mr Dhondy’s book becomes a study of political behaviour, of how noble-minded indignation – be it at racist discrimination, corruption or gender justice – can be, and does get, undermined and subverted when it is streamlined into organised politics. Anyone with too scrupulous ethics, or even a fine sense of aesthetics, had better not get into politics. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for all those indignant Indians who’ve been thronging India Gate of late.
LONDON CALLING
Farrukh Dhondy
Hachette
241 pages; Rs 495