Helping to re-invent a confident post-imperial outlook
Monday, 10 September 2007
Maya Jaggi
WHEN Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, launched the city's three-month India Now festival by sailing a replica Taj Mahal down the Thames in July, his aim was not simply to look back on 60 years since independence but to milk future ties with a booming south Asian economy.
The UK, India's second largest trading partner, now counts the country as its third largest investor, from banks to post-production film companies while the world's biggest cinema industry shot 40 movies in London last year. With more than 200,000 Indians visiting London each year, Mr Livingstone plans to open mayoral offices in New Delhi and Mumbai in November.
Yet long before Bollywood stars cavorted on the "wobbly" Millennium bridge, India exerted a profound cultural influence in Britain from food and fashion to fiction and film. Indians "voyaged in" at least since the East India Company was formed in 1599. The author of The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), an early classic of travel writing, opened London's first Indian restaurant in 1809, the Hindoostanee Coffee House near Marble Arch.
The imperial jewel in the crown added many words to the English language, from bungalow and verandah, to juggernaut, pyjamas and shampoo. In 1892 Dadabhai Naoroji was elected Britain's first Indian MP, while London became a hotbed of agitation for the Quit India independence movement.
Since 1947 that influence has been sustained not least by the impact of migration. Persons of Indian Origin (PlOs) now form the UK's largest national minority, numbering more than 1.05m in the 2001 census, or 1.8 per cent of the population (6.0 per cent within London). While a growing number are "second generation" or their offspring - and may not make a point of difference with other south Asians - many still claim insoluble bonds with an ancestral homeland.
Alongside growing businesses and "Indian" restaurants (4,000 in London alone, though many are in fact Bangladeshi-owned), are south Asian theatre and dance companies, from Tara Arts and Tamasha to Shobana Jayasingh, and many individuals with a growing impact across the arts. The writer and actor Meera Syal, star of Gurinder Chadha's groundbreaking film Bhaji on the Beach (1994) and the hit radio and television comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, grew up in Birmingham but describes herself as a "British-born Indian".
"There was a corner of me that would be forever not England," says Ms Syal, of the partially autobiographical heroine of her novel Anita and Me (1996), adapted into a film.
The composer and multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney would agree, having developed a "palette" of influences - from Bach and flamenco to classical Indian raags and rhythms derived from kathak dance patterns. Among his recent scores are those for the London Symphony Orchestra accompaniment to a silent Indian classic based on the gambling episode of the Mahabharata, A Throw of Dice (1929), and Simon McBurney's play A Disappearing Number, opening in London this month, which explores the early 20th-century collaboration between Srinivasa Ramanujan, a pure mathematician from south India, and Cambridge don GH Hardy.
In fine art, Amrit and Rabinder Kaur Singh, Liverpudlian Sikh twin sisters, have adapted the art of Indian miniature court painting to celebrate and satirise aspects of contemporary British life, from Indian weddings and Christmas dinners, to Princess Diana, who appears simultaneously as Britannia and an eightarmed Hindu goddess seated on a white elephant.
Though the Singh twins met initial disdain from their art tutors, they point out that both Rembrandt and Joshua Reynolds were assiduous collectors of Mughal miniatures, underlining that cross-cultural inspiration is hardly new.
When Salman Rushdie won the Booker prize for Alidnight's Children (1981) which went on to win the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 for the best novel published in Britain of the past 25 years - he pushed the horizons of both Indian and British fiction. Whisky Sisodia, a character in his novel of migration The Satanic Verses (1988), stutters: "The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss-hiss-history happened overseas, so they do-do-don't know what it means."
Yet Mr Rushdie's example broke a path for varied writers to rediscover that farflung history -- from the 2006 Booker winner Kiran Desai (who spent teenage years in Britain) to novelists such as Barry Unsworth and Marina Warner, who have also excavated a colonial past.
In the mid-1980s Mr Rushdie decried as "purest bilge" what he saw as the Raj revisionism of nostalgic television adaptations of MM Kaye's saga The Far Pavillions and Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown. Yet writers and artists of Indian origin have consistently participated in a re-examination of British history that is helping to re-invent a more confidently post-imperial culture and outlook.
It is partly this vibrant cosmopolitanism -- along with a common legal framework and a manageable time zone -- that London's mayor is hoping will attract Indian investment. Yet the cultural impact of Indians and their descendants is not to be confused with the sporadic dash of colour that can sometimes pass for offically sanctioned -- and circumscribed -- "multiculturalism". Their true influence is deeper and more challenging.
...........................................
— FT Syndication Service
WHEN Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, launched the city's three-month India Now festival by sailing a replica Taj Mahal down the Thames in July, his aim was not simply to look back on 60 years since independence but to milk future ties with a booming south Asian economy.
The UK, India's second largest trading partner, now counts the country as its third largest investor, from banks to post-production film companies while the world's biggest cinema industry shot 40 movies in London last year. With more than 200,000 Indians visiting London each year, Mr Livingstone plans to open mayoral offices in New Delhi and Mumbai in November.
Yet long before Bollywood stars cavorted on the "wobbly" Millennium bridge, India exerted a profound cultural influence in Britain from food and fashion to fiction and film. Indians "voyaged in" at least since the East India Company was formed in 1599. The author of The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), an early classic of travel writing, opened London's first Indian restaurant in 1809, the Hindoostanee Coffee House near Marble Arch.
The imperial jewel in the crown added many words to the English language, from bungalow and verandah, to juggernaut, pyjamas and shampoo. In 1892 Dadabhai Naoroji was elected Britain's first Indian MP, while London became a hotbed of agitation for the Quit India independence movement.
Since 1947 that influence has been sustained not least by the impact of migration. Persons of Indian Origin (PlOs) now form the UK's largest national minority, numbering more than 1.05m in the 2001 census, or 1.8 per cent of the population (6.0 per cent within London). While a growing number are "second generation" or their offspring - and may not make a point of difference with other south Asians - many still claim insoluble bonds with an ancestral homeland.
Alongside growing businesses and "Indian" restaurants (4,000 in London alone, though many are in fact Bangladeshi-owned), are south Asian theatre and dance companies, from Tara Arts and Tamasha to Shobana Jayasingh, and many individuals with a growing impact across the arts. The writer and actor Meera Syal, star of Gurinder Chadha's groundbreaking film Bhaji on the Beach (1994) and the hit radio and television comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, grew up in Birmingham but describes herself as a "British-born Indian".
"There was a corner of me that would be forever not England," says Ms Syal, of the partially autobiographical heroine of her novel Anita and Me (1996), adapted into a film.
The composer and multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney would agree, having developed a "palette" of influences - from Bach and flamenco to classical Indian raags and rhythms derived from kathak dance patterns. Among his recent scores are those for the London Symphony Orchestra accompaniment to a silent Indian classic based on the gambling episode of the Mahabharata, A Throw of Dice (1929), and Simon McBurney's play A Disappearing Number, opening in London this month, which explores the early 20th-century collaboration between Srinivasa Ramanujan, a pure mathematician from south India, and Cambridge don GH Hardy.
In fine art, Amrit and Rabinder Kaur Singh, Liverpudlian Sikh twin sisters, have adapted the art of Indian miniature court painting to celebrate and satirise aspects of contemporary British life, from Indian weddings and Christmas dinners, to Princess Diana, who appears simultaneously as Britannia and an eightarmed Hindu goddess seated on a white elephant.
Though the Singh twins met initial disdain from their art tutors, they point out that both Rembrandt and Joshua Reynolds were assiduous collectors of Mughal miniatures, underlining that cross-cultural inspiration is hardly new.
When Salman Rushdie won the Booker prize for Alidnight's Children (1981) which went on to win the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 for the best novel published in Britain of the past 25 years - he pushed the horizons of both Indian and British fiction. Whisky Sisodia, a character in his novel of migration The Satanic Verses (1988), stutters: "The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss-hiss-history happened overseas, so they do-do-don't know what it means."
Yet Mr Rushdie's example broke a path for varied writers to rediscover that farflung history -- from the 2006 Booker winner Kiran Desai (who spent teenage years in Britain) to novelists such as Barry Unsworth and Marina Warner, who have also excavated a colonial past.
In the mid-1980s Mr Rushdie decried as "purest bilge" what he saw as the Raj revisionism of nostalgic television adaptations of MM Kaye's saga The Far Pavillions and Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown. Yet writers and artists of Indian origin have consistently participated in a re-examination of British history that is helping to re-invent a more confidently post-imperial culture and outlook.
It is partly this vibrant cosmopolitanism -- along with a common legal framework and a manageable time zone -- that London's mayor is hoping will attract Indian investment. Yet the cultural impact of Indians and their descendants is not to be confused with the sporadic dash of colour that can sometimes pass for offically sanctioned -- and circumscribed -- "multiculturalism". Their true influence is deeper and more challenging.
...........................................
— FT Syndication Service