Too Asian, Not Asian Enough by Kavita Bhanot / Features / Untitled Books

"Reading Brick Lane, very soon after White Teeth, I felt some of the same discomfort; a feeling that the characters tended towards caricature, that the family, the East London setting didn’t seem true."

Too Asian, Not Asian Enough by Kavita Bhanot

Kavita Bhanot was born to a Punjabi family in Plumstead. Her anthology of short stories, from a new generation of British Asian writers, began with a question: what happens when writers are given the freedom to be writers, regardless of colour or religion; to write about what they want, how they want?

When we were ten years old, my twin sister and I went to Warrior Camp on the Isle of White. We were in the Brownies and although this was not a Brownie camp, one of the Brownie leaders, Twinkle Owl, was an organiser. She encouraged us to go, and since some of our friends from school would be there, we were also keen. It turned out to be a Christian Camp. Everyday we had Bible reading sessions, discussions about Christianity, games and quizzes, and hymn singing. We enjoyed it. I was, by then, an avid reader and seeing this, Twinkle Owl presented me with a novel that I still have today: Star of Light by Patricia St. John. The author has written several novels about children whose lives are transformed when they embrace Christianity, but this is the only one about foreign children. Set in Morocco, it is the story of a poor boy, Hamid and his blind little sister Kinza who is about to be sold to a professional beggar by their cruel step-father. Hamid escapes with his sister and is helped by an English Missionary who takes them in, tells them about Jesus and brings Christianity into their lives. Twinkle Owl must have imagined that I would be able to connect with these children since they were brown-skinned like me. And, although those children's lives were nothing like mine, the novel did leave an impression; it was the first novel I had read about characters that were not American or European. When we returned from Warrior Camp, I asked my parents if I could be confirmed.

They didn't take my request seriously and I wasn't confirmed.

It wasn't, of course, only because of the novel that I wanted to become a Christian, but the book did play a role; Twinkle Owl understood something of the power of fiction, something I have been thinking about recently. While living in India I met political activists who grew up reading Russian literature which had been translated into Hindi and other Indian languages. This was cheap and widely available in India in the seventies and eighties. Much of it was by Communist writers and showed the lives of the working classes; Gorky's Mother was a particular favourite. They also read Hindi, Urdu, Bengali writers such as Tagore, Premchand, Manto, Yashpal, writers who had been part of the struggle for independence, part of the Progressive Writers' movement. They wrote about ordinary people, about the social and political structure of their society, and were committed, through their writing, to changing this. This literature had formed the thinking and lived lives of those activists.

As I read those books I began to reflect on the formative fiction that I read in my teens and the ideologies that underpinned it. Last year I read, for the first time, Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. The heroine seemed familiar. I felt that I knew her, have been like her. She resembled, I realised, the heroines of many of the novels I had grown up reading, characters such as Anne of Green Gables, Jo from Little Women, Maggie from Mill on the Floss, Dorothea from Middlemarch, Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, the Schlegel sisters from Howards End and the female protagonists of many novels published by Virago Press.

These women were my role models. As I look back now, I can see the influence they had on me and how I wanted to live my life. They were unconventional, bold, curious, adventurous, opinionated, bookish. Often modelled on their creators, many of them became writers. I could identify at the time, with their efforts to create a different life for themselves, to push the boundaries, as women, in a limited society with low expectations of them; their interest in experiences, in developing their minds. They rejected marriage or at least questioned its inevitability. It was a certain kind of feminism, which was not about sisterhood; in fact the heroines were often contemptuous of other women; it was not about structural change, about fighting for others, but about an individual's struggle to carve a life for herself.

Perhaps it is not the books that you read, but the books that speak to you at a particular time of your life. In my early twenties, when I first started to write and was interested in writing about my own life, I was drawn towards fiction that might reflect my experiences more directly. It was around that time, in the early 2000s, that certain books connected to the 'British Asian' experience began to receive attention. One of the first of these was White Teeth. I was impressed by the energy and wit of Zadie Smith's writing. It was confident, playful, street-smart. I admired her ambition and scope, as she brought plucked stories from history while mapping out a London that we hadn't seen before in literature, in particular the inner city, culturally and racially mixed comprehensive school.

But, perhaps because I was looking for a reflection of experience, I also felt dissatisfied with White Teeth, with its optimistic khichdi version of multiculturalism, which didn't, along with the Bangladeshi family in the novel, ring true for me. Partly because of this feeling, but also because the performative, omniscient witty, summarising style of the writing stays at a distance from the characters, White Teeth didn't touch me. This distance seemed particularly problematic when it came to the Bangladeshi characters in the novel: South Asian characters in film and literature are so often comical, larger-than- life caricatures that you can't relate to. The character of Samad in White Teeth for example, has become familiar to us as a stereotype; the lovable, ridiculous, conflicted, unreasonable Asian Father figure, whose sudden bout of nostalgia in mid-life leads him to become a tyrant, enforcing 'absurd' demands upon his children. Samad, who sends one of his sons back to Bangladesh when he is ten years old so he can imbibe a more traditional culture and Islamic values, reminds us of George Khan from East is East (and both roles are played, in the film East is East and the televised version of White Teeth, by Om Puri, further blurring the characters in our minds). We see the same archetype in the figure of Anwar from Buddha of Suburbia, who beats his wife and goes on a hunger strike until his daughter agrees to marry the boy of his choice, and in the character of Chanu from Brick Lane, with his large stomach and corns on his feet that his wife has to cut since he can't reach them himself. He is constantly trying to pull back his uninterested daughters and wife into an 'irrelevant' past, talking about and idealising Bangladesh and eventually wanting to move back there with his reluctant family. Reading Brick Lane, very soon after White Teeth, I felt some of the same discomfort; a feeling that the characters tended towards caricature, that the family, the East London setting didn't seem true.

A book that was published earlier, but which I read ten years after its publication, Buddha of Suburbia, was, perhaps, the first 'British Asian' novel, at a time when British Asian did not exist as a category. It is a remarkable novel; witty, perceptive, funny. It is also touching; we see Karim trying to deal with the breakdown of his parents' marriage when his father falls in love with the colourful socialite Eva, while finding himself attracted to Eva's son Charlie. Set in the seventies, the novel is immersed in the race and class politics of the time; Karim negotiates his way between the racism he faces in school and on the street, the curiosity of the liberal arty crowd he falls into, which, in another, subtler form of racism, treats him as an exotic showpiece, and the sudden lapse into 'tradition' of his friend Jamila's family, whom he had seen as a solid dependable alternative family.

In its depiction of Jamila's family, Buddha of Suburbia portrays South Asian characters in the same way that they have been portrayed again and again in mainstream film, television and literature since then. Jamila's father Anwar's decision to get his Simone de Beauvoir reading, Billie Holiday listening, martial arts practicing, radical daughter married to the overweight, one-handed, Arthur Conan Doyle fan Changez from India, is absurd, as is the hunger strike that he goes on until she agrees to the marriage. The situation is funny and this is a comic novel; but it also conforms to what has become a familiar stereotype: Arranged Marriage and the Unattractive Bride or Groom. Think of the depiction of the girls that George Khan wants his sons to marry in East is East, and Chanu, the unpalateable groom that young Nazneen is sent to England to marry in Brick Lane. The exaggerated unattractiveness of these partners make the idea of an arranged marriage all the more nonsensical, makes the parent appear all the more ridiculous.

"But it's old fashioned, Uncle, out-of-date," Karim says to Anwar as he tries to talk him out of his hunger strike. "No-one does that kind of thing now. They just marry the person they're into, if they bother to get married at all." This is the perspective from which Buddha of Suburbia has been written, a British perspective, from which arranged marriage, South Asian cultures, traditions, religious practices are presented as old fashioned and out-of-date. The narrator declares, in the first line of the novel, that he is an Englishman, born and bred. It is the racism he faces that prevents him from being able to take this for granted, and it is perhaps because of this racism that there was a real need in the seventies and eighties, for first and second generation immigrants to assert, to prove their Englishness. Mainstream British Asian fiction, with its standard narrative about young people who want to fit into British society, to do the normal things that their white friends do, while strict parents hold them back, seems to continue this project of presenting the Englishness of a new generation rather than reflecting any attachment to South Asian origin communities.

It was in another diasporic novel, A House for Mr Biswas, that I found the first literary representation of anything like the community that I had grown up in. It reflected that world more closely than any British Asian novel I have read. The large wave of South Asian immigration took place fairly recently in Britain and the place of origin is very much present in the memory and lived practice of tightly knit immigrant communities. A House for Mr Biswas, set in Trinidad in the 1930's and 1940's, is about an Indian community that was still, at that time, very close, in time, memory and practice, to its roots in rural Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in India, although the novel charts the eventual collapse of this world. However, while the novel reveals this world faithfully, it is also critical and mocking of those communities, of extended family, of tradition, religion, ritual, all of which are represented by Biswas' in-laws, the static, petty, bullying Tulsis. In this way, the perspective of the novel is not so different from that of most British Asian novels. A House For Mr Biswas is about the tragic-comic hero's efforts to escape the rule of the backward Tulsi clan and to be an individual; to express his individuality, to embrace modern ideas, to be free and independent, to live with his nuclear family and to own his own house.

My argument, in the introduction to the anthology of British Asian fiction that I have edited, Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, is not only that we see the same stories about generation gap, about culture clash again and again, but that this story tends to be told from one perspective. This point of view assumes certain values; individualism, secularism, materialism and 'freedom', to be normative. Characters that have other world views or who are attached to their places of origin tend to be shown in a negative, comical or stereotypical light. There are other ways to view and write about the same material, and given the power and influence of fiction, it is important to give space to these. My aim as editor of this anthology was to invite stories that don't conform to those stereotypes in British Asian fiction; we encouraged writers to write about anything they liked, but also to explore their British Asianness with greater freedom and imagination. The anthology brings together, in its twenty one stories, a variety of world views.

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Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, edited by Kavita Bhanot, is published by Tindal Street Press.

Sample one of the stories: Two Pearls by Azmeena Ladha.
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Tuesday, 4 October, 2011