Chronicle of the British Asian experience

In The National, Burhan Wazir reviews Ziauddin Sardar’s “Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience,” published by Granta Books. [via 3quarksdaily]

Anyone living in London in the late Nineties couldn’t fail to notice that the city’s British Asian population was basking in its own Britpop moment. On Brick Lane, in the city’s traditionally poor East End, new restaurants and bars opened their doors to an influx of young artists attracted to cheap rents and good transport links in the borough of Tower Hamlets. Bangladeshi teenagers in Union Jack T-shirts patrolled the area with their pet boxer dogs, the status symbols du jour of national pride. Musicians like Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation and Nitin Sawhney graduated from the ethnic press to the glossy pages of style magazines like The Face, Dazed & Confused and iD. Fans of those artists could even subscribe to a new magazine called Second Generasion – the title probably seemed clever at the time, but has aged with the same grace as Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic, a Prince album from the era. Around the same time, Eastern Eye, the BBC’s weekend magazine show, began broadcasting Bollywood news and Asian current affairs, and the cast of Goodness Gracious Me dredged all humour from every available British Asian stereotype. Even cinema audiences weren’t immune to the delights of the Asian subcontinent: both East is East and Bend it Like Beckham played to packed screens for weeks.

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