Pollen Borne On The Winds

If we wise guys are right, Raksha Patel must be lost because she was born to Indian parents in Britain. This wisdom sounds such a yawn. Neither here nor there, you see. She's the in-between generation when there is no in-between ground to stand on. Lost touch with India, not accepted by white Britain, and therefore confused. A whole generation among a million people, confused, that is.

The trouble with us wise guys is that in ways we might even be right. "I feel like I am two persons," says Raksha. "One person when I'm at work, and another when I walk home through the doors." At work she's in Britain, home is India. Behind the cliches is a lived-out truth. So then we can rub our hands in satisfaction, because as always, We were right. And we were right also then that she's paying the price for growing up as a minority being in Britain. Didn't the Indians ask for it by going to Britain in the first place?

But wait a minute. It all feels quite different to Raksha. "I never thought we were a minority at all," she says. "Where I grew up near Southall, we felt we were the majority. Everyone we met was Indian, everyone at school was Indian, everywhere we went was Indian...."

Sure, there were always the statistics about the Indian minority in Britain at two per cent or whatever. But whoever grew up with a sense of the self derived from Table 4(i) (b) on page 42 of the annual population report of the Central Statistical Organisation?

Raksha felt Indian, the Britain she knew was Indian. Six months back, she got a job in an insurance company in Central London. And suddenly, white British people emerged from their distant minority status to take over her work life. And to take decisions on her future. Not easy decisions. All the records show Indians doing particularly well at school and college.

But those bright proportions seem to fall away when it comes to getting a job, or getting somewhere in it. This majority-minority business is a funny one. In felt ways, the majority of Indians in Britain are not minority at all.

"It feels funny when I go to Leeds," says Manoj from Wembley. "There are just so many white English people everywhere," he says. "You don't get to see your own people and it can get quite difficult." Indianness is not a function of nationality or even country of residence. It can come and go with just a change of address.

Raksha ran into the white British because she got an insurance job in the City. Deepa didn't. She got a job in the Leicester City Council, an office full of Indians. So where is white Britain? Gujaratis at work, Gujaratis at home, to go out with, to visit, to marry, to fight with. Indian radio stations 24 hours a day, now Indian TV channels 24 hours a day, Indian clothes, Indian food. England is around of course, and it's much nearer than from India. That can sometimes be quite nice. If you're rude and resentful, you'll call it a ghetto. If not, then just Indians being culturally themselves, and why not.

No, India has not lost Indians in Britain. Not yet by a long way. The most common observation is how Indians in Britain are so much more traditional—call that being more Indian if you like—than Indians from India. Visiting Indians from Britain are always finding Indians in India advanced and westernised, visitors from India find Indians here backward despite accents and hard currency to play with (a little). The British Indian does not take positions on an order against Narasimha Rao and Buta Singh.The British Indian is in that sense quite removed from India, but not from whatever makes up Indianness.

And please, Raksha is who she is, not some culture carrier. This whole business of being Indian or British has pretty little to do with being. If she's lost, she hasn't always felt it that way. If straddling two cultures is considered being lost, then a lot of the world is lost. Except that it's felt more often as a gain.

When Piya in south Delhi lives out a Western-Indian life, she's hip. When Raksha lives that way, she's confused. If these are losses, think how many Indians in India we lose all the time, and who are so proud to be lost the way they are. The difficulty can be just as much with those doing the perceiving as those perceived. It's a game of observation, not the business of the observed.

It isn't just Indians who see British Indians inhabiting no man's land. It gets a lot more difficult when seen from white Britain's side. "This whole business of two cultures is a problem only when it is made a problem," says Neena. "It becomes a problem when people impose their idea of you on you. I hear it when I want to do my own thing. And the white British feel so surprised. And they say the same things. So you're not like other Indians? Are your parents really open? God, you speak better English than we do."

Ravinder was on the phone talking to an estate agent about letting her house. "And this woman told me that she does not want to see some great big Asian families in my neighbourhood. She did not realise I'm Indian. When I told her, she must have been glad she was only on the phone. God, people are so dumb, it's unrealistic."

And the in-between, it can be an unexpectedly exciting place to inhabit. At 15, Ranjit listens to B21, and their Bally Jagpal, the chap who did Aa ja soneya, the chap every British Asian girl wants to marry. Bally Sagoo? That's old, man. And it's for the old. And what of the very Indian music his parents listen to? Like ghazals and things? "No, not really, but maybe I'll learn to appreciate it when I get older."

For now it's House and Garage, what the elderly call Asian Underground. He hasn't even heard of the Asian Dub Foundation or Fun-da-Mental, every outsider's idea of the world of Asian youth in Britain. But House and Garage are children to a very mixed marriage, like bhangra is, for all the difference in quality. Not like, but both siblings.

The Rakshas and the Ranjits have taken the in-between ground, and their position on that ground is a lot nearer to India than you'd expect. "If anything I am becoming more and more Indian with time," says Deepa. "When I went to university, I went out with white students and I dressed like them and I talked like them. Now I have Indian friends, I wear salwar-kameez and I eat Indian food all the time." Multiply that comment by thousands. It is a pattern all young Indians in their twenties speak of. Somewhere in the late teens and early twenties comes that flirtation with being English, being one of the white lot and their way of life.

Then comes the retreat. It's a retreat that has taken them far closer to India than to Britain. And far closer than what most Indians suspect.