Brown in Britain: The past is a different country RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SATURDAY, JULY 30, 2005 08:14:27 PM ]
This is now: "A few days ago, I was killing time at Westminster Tube station (near the Houses of Parliament) before my next meeting. I spoke to my assistant and watched him leave on a train; I made a call on my mobile; retraced my steps just once. Suddenly, I found myself surrounded by policemen who read me section 44 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and said they had to stop and search me. They sent for armed police before they searched my laptop." — Ramesh Kallidai, businessman and leader of the UK's Hindu Forum, London.
"Ever since 7/7, I never go out at night. I just don't feel safe anymore. I might be attacked because I'm brown." — Sam Sagoo, music shop owner and DJ, Birmingham.
"After the second attacks on London, it was my misfortune to travel into it on work. For the first time in my life — all my 30 years in Britain — I was stopped-and-searched by police no less than three times in as many days. There was no reason, I feel, other than my being a young Asian male. I suddenly started to understand what black youths must have felt like all these years." — Waris Ali, marketing executive, Edinburgh.
"My extended family — aunt and her son, who wears a turban — are travelling to India next week and they're certainly not packing any rucksacks." Rabindra Kaur, painter, Liverpool.
And that was then: "Bollywood is on the breeze, brown really is the new black" — British Punjabi actress and scriptwriter Meera Syal at ImagineAsia, the UK's first multi-venue, multimedia 'pageant' of South Asian cinema.
It may feel like an age but it wasn't that long ago, in real time, that Meera Syal was confidently colour-coding excellence in multicultural Britain. Precisely 39 months ago, she was bullishly declaring brown to be the exact shade of success. That was the time Britain's estimated 2.5 million Asians — more particularly, its 1.3 million Indians — were roller-coasting down a freeway signposted 'fast track'. Asian Rich Lists were swelling with new millionaires.
The 'brown pound', i.e. the community's disposable income, was surging to the 30-billion mark. The world was a-tapping to Bhangra beats stamped Birmingham. Bollywood was on the breeze. It was almost 'hip' to be coloured like a Starbucks selection — Americano, latte, cappuccino, mocha.
No longer. Now that three of London's original 7/7 suicide bombers are known to have been of Pakistani descent, brown is suddenly and devastatingly Britain's new black. That's black as in threatening; thuggish; terrorist. That's black as in the traditional perception of Afro-Caribbean youths in inner cities everywhere in the West.
Londoner Nilesh Shah explains the extent to which the narrative has changed. "I have a little beard and I routinely travel with a rucksack containing my lunch and a clean shirt. It's not my imagination, but I swear people on the Tube try not to sit next to me."
Ramesh Kallidai takes up the story. "My brother-in-law is a devout Hindu and often chants under his breath on the train. After the attacks, he has seen some white ladies go into the next carriage once they see him."
Clearly, post-7/7, everyone has a scary story to tell. So long as they are brown and British. After July 22, when London's Metropolitan Police blew out the brains of an innocent Brazilian man initially described as 'Asian', being brown may have actually become a life-threatening karmic cloud that hangs low like a pall over a once-vibrant community punch-drunk on success. If anything, it recalls one white young Londoner's — Alfred Hitchcock's — uncompromising fear of the police. "I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them."
That Hitchcockian fear, multiplied many times to embrace the Asian community, is why East African Indian Yasmin Alibhai-Brown now worries about her son as he travels around London. He's young, dark and uppity, she says. That is why Sam, the 60-year-old father of Bhangra's poster boy Bally Sagoo, agonises that his son doesn't wear a turban. "I feel my turban actually protects me in the sense it tells some white people I'm Indian. But Bally doesn't wear a turban." That is why blogging British Indian Bijal Shah has been trying to display a very English sense of humour by telling the world via the Web about a warning posted "by some idiot (of a transport worker)" at one London Tube station.
The subtext, of course, is the ugly truth that Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police because he looked Asian and foreign, wore a heavy coat and fatally ran for his life at the Tube station.
Crucially, that is why the British born-and-bred painter-twins Amrit and Rabindra Kaur now say it would be intensely controversial were they to repeat a previous portrait in which a sari-clad Indian woman is depicted with a trident and a Union Jack shield.
It was a bold attempt, says Rabindra, to "re-define what is British and so we portrayed an Indian woman as Britannia, thereby saying that someone could be brown and still very British."
But that was then. As Britain's arguably best-known brown 'un, Salman Rushdie, once said, "The past is a different country."