Indobrit: One Year On

I can’t believe a year has passed so quickly. Yet it’s taken a lifetime to get here. Indobrit is about taking the best and the grittiest of the great sub-continent and creating a cohesive platform for all things Indo whilst simultaneously reflecting the different faces of diaspora in the mirror

of multi-cultural society. But maybe it takes so long to extract and define a sense of identity. It’s taken me 37 years to accept and incorporate my own Indian identity and place that into the larger mosaic of "me." Before that I was Indo-in-denial, I was proud of my East African heritage but I couldn’t relate to the Indo bit. Sashaying, sexy Swahili was cool; guttural, air- hammer inflected Hindi - incomprehensible! I made vague overtures to try and reclaim my Ugandan passport after Museveni came to power. But it was too complicated; the hospital where my birth records were stored was long razed by Amin and his mob.

Identity is not cast in stone; it has to be fluid and changing. We Indobrits can be Asian, British, Indian all at once or in parts, as necessary. We live here, in the West, we live, work and sleep with our Occidental partners and as such we have to adapt to another way of living and other values and cultures. Who we are cannot be wholly aligned with South Asia, we are fragmented.

The feedback we have had for Indobrit has been positive.

Support from the mainstream press has been unflinching and we have some great contributors from the daily national UK papers — Ed Simpkins, from the Telegraph who has written for us on gold and the value of Mumbai property; Hannah Booth of Design Week Magazine who looked at the décor in Indian restaurants and the difficulties facing creative second generationers, whose Mas’ would rather they become doctors, lawyers, accountants; Allan Jenkins, the editor of the Observer magazine writes on Bollywood and is a closet fan of Ash and the Big B. It was interesting over the summer to note that the Mighty Tony’s press machine reads Indobrit; we received a call from No 10 and an irritated and over-inflated press spokesperson demanded to know how we knew Cherie Blair was into magnet therapy. Of course we refused to reveal our source (the Daily Mail I think) and the Spy column in the Telegraph carried the repercussions of magnet therapy for two days, in a week when the Hutton Inquiry dominated the headlines.

The mix of smart editorial and well designed pages has been lauded by readers and by the industry. I feel privileged, with this bird’s eye vantage point as editrix/publisher to witness how the perception of being Asian and diaspora is shifting. Whereas before the typical perception of an Asian was a cornershop-wallah, we have in our midst some of the most powerful and cleverest people in the UK, in terms of

education, politics, the media and entertainment. Fashion and the creative industries are bursting ripe with talent, whether it’s Asif Kapadia’s cutting edge films or Gulam Sakina, a fashion label sold exclusively at London’s posh boutique, Browns. Nitin Sawhney and our own resident music sahib, Pathaan have made Indian mantras part of chill-out culture with their Mumbai mix of west/east. Now brown is

the new navy blue, the recognizable currency of credibility and street savvy. Asian businessmen are constantly lauded in the Queen’s lists, in dozens of award ceremonies from Birmingham to Bournemouth and finally, we are proud to assert who we are, here, today. This is it, we are here

to stay, echoes the chorus from the wings of the stage of Asian success.

I make a magazine I would pick up [to read] and mentors like Lord Paul, Sir Gulam Noon and Peter Mandleson throw some choorn into the mix and keep it fresh. Friends like Sathya Saran and Rajiv Sethi add glamour and culture and a deep appreciation of India and all the texture and colour and vibrancy of this place we no longer call home. But which still calls us.

Indobrit has morphed too, in our year long lifespan. We get letters and e-mails asking for more in-depth pieces on the issues we cover, especially the more hard-hitting. We are a bit bolder, more sexy. Check out our next cover, by fashion photographer icon, Prabuddha Dasgupta who worked a minor miracle at Neemrana in the Air issue’s fashion pages.

The response from Arifa Akbar’s interview with Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party (BNP) was a mixture of revolt and cynicism. Why were we giving this fascist-racist publicity, surely that will only extend his lifespan. I thought long and hard about that one. We live in the supposedly Elysian fields of post-Enoch Powell, rainbow-coloured Britain so how could a creature as odious as Griffin exist in this love-in fest of increasingly brown Britain? And if we don’t publish his odd mix of vitriol and quotes from the Nazi Party website, don’t we fail other Indobrits whose lives are potentially and irrevocably affected by his brand of hate politik?

In her brilliant book, Heat and Dust Ruth Prawar Jhabwala

says India changes you. She does. There’s something irrevocably sad and sweet about going "back." Although we never really came from there in this avatar. We belong and yet we can’t call it home. We identify and yet there’s so much which remains alien and incomprehensible. The poverty, the stench, the dirt, the culture clash which smacks you hard the moment you step off the plane. And yet like

the children who were led off by the Pied Piper, we shimmy off to her far flung shores to the tune of the latest Bollywood soundtrack and reach into a part of us, a deeper space perhaps inaccessible in northern climes under close skies and whitewashed landscapes lined with terraced houses.

There’s still the freaky tokenism of Greg Dyke and his cronies at Bush House who are launching a three-part series called Big Dreams on Asian success at the end of October. Can’t wait for that one — nail-biting and popcorn crunching viewer figure busting that promises to be. Dyke-ji has just been made head of the Cultural Diversity Network, a TV body that was formed in 1994 when the terrestrial channels realized they were missing out on the brown Pound as black and Asian viewers flocked to satellite and cable TV. John Sen’s two-part documentary Second Generation loosely based on King Lear in Southall and Kolkata was marketed with billboards lining the A4. Posters of this "groundbreaking" story of second generation identity fissures were stuck everywhere, particularly areas which were densely

populated by...wait for it...Asians. Full page ads were prominently placed in all the broadsheets of the comely Parminder Nagra ( Bend it like Beckham and now ER)

. This was going to be big. A weekend supplement ran an article on Second Generation Asians and Parminder got the front cover, albeit with a ghastly photograph. Yet, the programme attracted barely 1.2 million viewers, a sadly singed firework inspite of the marketing carnival.

Later this month, the Asian Music Awards will honour the best in Asian music. But when Eminem can win an EMMA, do any of these self perpetuating, self vaunting, insider ceremonies make a bit of difference? Questions of cultural apartheid and ghettoism rear their ugly heads.

There’s hope though, last night London hosted the glittery premier of Jeremy Wooding’s Bollywood Queen, starring Priya Kalidas and Ray Panthaki. In this mish- mash multicultural remix of an old theme — brown girl and white boy fall in love, daddy doesn’t approve — there are some great devices which make the film worth seeing and the playback songs and disco diwani dance sequins add to the masala-mix of magic hyper-realism and pure kitsch. It’s sweet, more so than Boom, made by Kaizad Gustad starring Gulshan Grover and the Big B, which was an attempt at cross-cultural gap bridging. It died a cinematic death in

its second week of release amongst cries of unpaid bills and kicheree. Interesting how a white guy can make a better brown film than a Mumbai-born movie mogul!