From integration to isolation, the changing image
of the immigrant in British Asian cinema reflects the 9/11 watershed.
Bollywood might take a few lessons in relevance, says Amitava
Kumar
The film is East
is East. We are watching Damien O’Donnell’s 2000 recreation
of scenes of England in the early 1970s. The Khan family — half-Pakistani,
half-British, with Om Puri and Linda Bassett in the lead roles —
is visiting for the day, negotiating an arranged marriage or two, catching
a Hindi film: the usual.
En route, they have
passed the sign for Bradford, which someone has, of course, altered
to ‘Bradistan’. The family arrives at a movie theatre called
Moti Mahal. With them we watch a popular song from the classic 60s hit
Chaudhvin Ka Chand, but we are hardly moved. Why?
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IDENTITY
CRISES (CLOCKWISE FROM TOP):
a poster for Bradford Riots; stills from The Road to Guantanamo
Bay, My Son the Fanatic, East is East |
Because nostalgia
by itself doesn’t cut it any more.
And far greater
than the moist romance we’re watching on Moti Mahal’s screen
is the actual, terribly messy, funny story of that one family sitting
in the theatre.
I was born in India.
I am a non-resident Indian, and a citizen of the world created by Bollywood.
But a wonderful discovery for me has been the way in which the Hindi
film finds its irrelevance within the films made by, or about, Indians
and Pakistanis living in England.
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Neil
Biswas’ Bradford Riots has no Gurinder Chadha feel-goods.
The canvas has shrunk, there’s fear and a sense of entrapment |
In the opening minutes
of Udayan Prasad’s My Son the Fanatic (based on the short story
by Hanif Kureishi), it is not Mirpur in Pakistan but the northern industrial
towns in England that are the focus of the immigrants’ narratives.
Even if they inhabit a present in ruins, with “condom and all,
you know, hanging from the rose bushes”. Driving a visiting businessman
to his hotel, taxi-driver Parvez tells him, “This town was the
centre of the world’s textile industry. Even Ayatollah Khomeini
wore a robe made in the city. In a mill over there.” The mill
has been shut down; the men who worked there are now driving taxis.
One could almost
imagine Parvez to be nostalgic for his own England, and for a world
that had held promise, however limited, of social mixing and difference.
His son, Farid, has embraced fundamentalist Islam. His nostalgia, if
we can call it that, is of a different sort. He wants to return to “belief,
purity, belonging to the past”.
My Son the Fanatic
was released in 1998. You’d think it was about the conflict between
two generations of migrants. But if you had read a report Kureishi wrote
about Bradford more than a decade earlier in Granta, you’d have
remembered its chilling account of violent racist attacks on Asians.
Was it possible to disengage what was happening between Parvez and Farid
from everything outside?
This question would
become moot after 9/11. No recent film captures this shift better than
Neil Biswas’ Bradford Riots, broadcast last year on Channel 4.
It tells the story of a university student, Karim, played by Sacha Dhawan,
caught in the violence that erupted in several northern English towns
in 2001. The shadow of the 9/11 attacks, in particular the scapegoating
of Muslim youth, falls on the trials. The police, who had been almost
protective of the right-wing National Front, are quick to respond with
heavy-handed brutality against the rioters.
When delivering
his sentence at Karim’s trial, the white-wigged judge speaks against
the “wholly gratuitous, vicious, and prolonged violence”
of the Asians. Like the police, he is unwilling to examine the racist
assaults that had provoked the riots. In fact, he pointedly declares
about the rioting: “I’m not concerned with its origin.”
Think of Kashmir, backdrop
to countless film songs. It could do with some honesty |
The words that appear
on the screen at the film’s end underline the grim political realities
that give it urgency: “In the wake of the Bradford riots, 191
people were given custodial sentences totalling more than 510 years.
These were the harshest and most widespread sentences for public disorder
since the Second World War.”
Bradford Riots
offers no consolation: it ends with Karim writhing on the floor of Moorland
prison. This is not the feel-good multicultural fare Gurinder Chadha
dishes out in Bend It Like Beckham. Chadha’s earlier success,
Bhaji on the Beach, a powerful statement about domestic abuse in Asian
families, still had enough playfulness packed in to include comical
riffs on Bollywood songs. But by the time we come to Bradford Riots,
it seems that, at least where Muslims are concerned, the canvas has
shrunk. There is no space now for fantasies.
The lives of the
people on screen are circumscribed by punitive laws. There is more fear
and a sense of entrapment. It is as if the amount of air that was there
to breathe has become diminished.
In late 2001, three
Muslim youth from the Midlands were arrested in Afghanistan and later
transported to Guantanamo where they spent two years in illegal custody.
The Road to Guantanamo is an imaginatively recreated docudrama about
the experiences of the youth who came to be called the Tipton Three.
Handcuffed and hooded.
That’s how the US likes its enemies, even when no trial has been
held to determine how detainees are to be classified as combatants.
For the Tipton Three, the experience must have been akin to being in
someone else’s bad movie. A guard shouts at them in Guantanamo’s
Camp x-Ray, “You are now the property of the US Marine Corps.”
Another guard asks, “You praying like a Muslim? What the hell
you doing? I thought you were a Brit. What about the Queen?”
One of the detained
youth says on camera, “I thought I was in a zoo. That is what
it reminded me of.”
Over the past decade
or more, several Bollywood films have shown Indians in London nostalgic
for the mustard fields of Punjab. What can a film like Bradford Riots
teach Bollywood filmmakers? When I ask that question, I think of Kashmir,
its snow-capped mountains and lush valley, once the romantic backdrop
for countless Hindi film-songs. I’d like to see a film where a
young man, studying at the university in Srinagar, finds himself caught
in a riot after the army has shot a protestor to death. The honesty
of Bradford Riots is needed there.
Kumar
is the author of the novel Home Products
