My Satanic Verses: Sachin as Gibreel

[To the ecstatic British-Indian fans at the English cricket grounds, gyrating their hips to the rhythm of bhangra beats when Tendulkar hits a boundary, I want to address a simple question. The same question can be asked, for that matter, of the Pakistani fans cheering a Moin Khan sixer too.

Did your hearts heave with such emotion when the Indian and Pakistani working-class women in the West Midlands factory went on strike and, in the words of John Hutnyk and Virinder Kalra, reflected the solidarity of “trade-union activists, anti-racist organizations and other left-wing organizations”?

Does the warmth that’s supposed to bind us all in the face of the display of cricketing prowess by our beloved cricketers ever lend its strength to other voices, like the voices of those striking factory women ]

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- I am just trying to work out why this part of the article annoys me so much. I think about it and then I realise, its because a theorising Indian with little knowledge about the British Indian experience pipes up with this patronising tone and example.

OK Amitava, my grandparents worked in those sweatshops in the Midlands and my aunty was involved in trade union disputes in factories across the UK representing the Punjabi workers through translating and so on. So I have a little first hand knowledge about it.

But its just this that gets me:

“To the ecstatic British-Indian fans at the English cricket grounds, gyrating their hips to the rhythm of bhangra beats when Tendulkar hits a boundary, I want to address a simple question…. Did your hearts heave with such emotion when the Indian and Pakistani working-class women in the West Midlands factory went on strike”

- Oh give me a break. How fatuous is that? How did you get to be so self-righteous? Listen, The Indians in England have struggled to create a space for themselves in this country and when the India team come and whup the English we are going to celebrate and bhangra all night long because we are proud and so on. And time has moved on brother. The days of raising the red flag high and singing for the revolution are long gone. Its not Thatchers Britain anymore, and the Indian youth of today are confident, impudent, in control, don’t suffer racism gladly (because it will be dealt with a by a punch to the face of the offender), and don’t have time to be sentimental about the workers struggle of the 1980’s especially when it fits into “post-colonial theories” of Indian academics and their questioning of “did you cry for them??how dare you celebrate??” blah blah blah

Amitava, its superficial, we know that, but its fun, so why stress about it? De-stress about it dude, just go with the flow.

Another thing Amitava, most of the Indians in England are Sikh, and most of the people you see on the terraces of the cricket grounds supporting India are Sikh, its funny that, isn’t it?? I mean the way the Indian state has treated the victims of 1984 I would say it is a lesson for a post-colonial academic leftist academic like you to study why that is so?? Why Hindus and Sikhs in England are so united eighteen years after all that, why Brit-Sikhs are so proud of their Indian heritage. Now that is something that I would really love to read an article on, suggests to me something about the true innate composite nature of Indian culture once you take the politicians and corrosive state apparatus out of the equation, doesnt it?? Rather than sentimental, trite leftist rhetoric when it ropes in English-Indians into clever-clogs theories.

The difference between the likes of Salman Rushdie whom Amitava references so much and most of the Indians in England is simple...Rushdie has no real conception of the lived experience of 90% of the Indians in England...he is part of Amitava`s world...the bourgeouis Indian who was sent to Rugby and Oxford, and lives in a world of abstract theorising that has little to do with the real lived experience of those bhangraing Indian fans at the cricket matches...they only exist when they can be roped into said theorising... the Indians here are too super-cool for all that...those celebrating youths at Lords and the Oval were born raised and lived in England all their lives, from working class backgrounds, they are part of the fabric of England, not implants like Rushdie and that world that Amitava represents.

When those bhangraing fans travel back to India, they dont go to the middle-class salons of Delhi and Bombay but to ramshackle villages near Jallandhar and Surat where their kith and kin still reside.

Mate, we are more sussed about things than you seem to realise, and we will bhangra all we want to when Harbhajan clean bowls and Dravid hits a six because we want to.

Spend a few months in Southall, Leicester or Birmingham and you will see why.

-h-

huh?

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Excellent piece!

AA. aminai,
Please contribute to other boards.

I really enjoyed reading your article. Very nice!

I do have something to say about the central point of the article. Rhetorically, it is a good question to ask why the labor strike in the Midlands does not generate the same emotional response among expatriate South Asians as a cricket match. But we all know the answer to that. Over our two hundred year experience of submission to English culture, there were a few things that we truly absorbed to the point of incorporating them into our culture: Tea, the English language, bureaucratic style, and cricket. And of these, I would submit, tea and cricket have turned out to be of the greatest psychological significance. Sure, English is significant, but it remains confined largely to urban culture --- and in twisted ways. Tea and cricket we celebrate!

With cricket, it is partly an expression of triumph. Even now that England is a borderline third world country well on its way to colonization by immigrants, there is little in which we dominate our former white masters. Their armies are stronger, their weapons better, their people richer, their English accents more authentic..... but, by golly, there is one place where we beat them at their own game --- literally! They invented cricket. They condescended to give us test status. They beat the hell out of our teams for decades. They had their Lord`s and their Ashes and their MCC. And then, with hard work and natural talent, we went to their precious Lord`s and rubbed their noses in its sacred turf. They brought their Gooches and Gowers, their Bothams and Willises. And we brought Imran and Gavaskar. And the brave vanquished the haughty, and pride had its fall. Now we go to their little island every few years and usually visit ever-increasing humiliation on our hapless erstwhile masters. And the beauty of it is that they invented the bloody sport, that they made the rules, that they have the Etons and Harrows, Oxfords and Cambridges, and, above all, that it is so damned important to them! We cause them national trauma. How else could we do that but with cricket? It is our secret weapon, and we enjoy using it. We also enjoy using it on the surrogates of our former masters --- their co-conspirators, the Australians. The pride we take in calling Tendulkar the best batsman in the world, or in declaring Shoaib the world`s fastest bowler, derives from the unspoken assertion that we have arrived and evicted the original masters of the sanctum. Is it not sweeter to hear the superlatives from English or Australian tongues? How can a labor strike match this? Our admiration for our cricketers comes from the depths of our cultural psyche. Solidarity with striking workers is, at best, an intellectual choice.

I hope no one gets me wrong. In the scheme of things, the assertion of power by a group of South Asian workers is far more important than success at cricket. It is a sign that people like us will be a political force in Britain. And in the US, where I write these lines, people like us will soon be the intellectual elite. These things are very important, and have far-reaching implications. But they do not engender in us the emotional response of a World Cup victory. They do not release the right neurotransmitters. And that is because they are not connected so much with our past as with our future. And, as we all know, it is the past which holds sway over the heart!

Ali Minai

Amitava,
Your allusions and references, mildly interesting, ``punctured-payya`` humorous, are easy prey for criticism... in Urdu there is a phrase which goes well with your bull theme, ``aa bel mujhay maar``,or in English, ``Come bull, attack me``. Easy prey, `cause you appear overwhelmed with nostalgia, you sugar coat the immigrant experience and anti-imperialism, often with strokes that appear profoundly forced; You force connections with myths, stories, and fictions, like an angry academic who breathes the morning air a bit too heavily; and when you come out in favor of mata themes and ``female agency``, one can only smile in affection or wonder ``what the hell``.., depending on the mood. You glorify and exoticize, while probably despising glorification and exoticizations..you ponder self-righteously, when self-deprecation and humility circle you, ignored; perhaps it is a symptom of the immigrant experience which is marred by the fact that while professing our working class solidarities, however authentically, we pay for our pay-per-view screens, while worrying over hungry mouths in India, we have available to us world cuisine. American and Western consumerism and buying powers are bound to create conflict/ highlight the ironies in our dual existences. .``My Shame: ...`` perhaps, instead of ``My Satanic verses....what is one to do? Write with tremendous honesty is an option.

But then I read to the end, and I said, he actually makes a decent point. You ask a very fair question, amitava. Cricket, while not an elite sport, is an opiate, a tranquilizer, which makes us forget firings over Kashmir, and other wars, keeps most status-quos intact...and while it bonds us in patriotic fervor, where else is such fervor displayed, across board?

Which is why I like your last two paragraphs.