Not too long ago, British Asians used to joke that any graduates among us who weren’t working in law, finance or medicine must have bad parents.
These days - every third Tuesday of the month to be precise - members of a more creative Asian scene descend on a basement bar in London called the Notting Hill Arts Club. In among the throng of stylish, spiky-haired students you can find bhangra and hip-hop artists, disc jockeys, MCs and even a former Tory parliamentary candidate. I have bumped into brown-skinned broadcasters, publishers, playwrights, actors, stand-up comics, photographers, fellow journalists, PR people, internet entrepreneurs and, of course, people who “work in fashion”.
But the monthly club night, called Bombay Bronx, is not a networking event for arty Asians in Britain’s creative industries. The music is too loud, you see. And it is the music that everyone has come for. The records are spun by BBC Radio One disc jockey Nihal Arthanyake and the fusion of bhangra, RnB, Bollywood, UK garage and US hip-hop is a genre of its own, widely known as “desi beats”.
As well as Bombay Bronx, there are dozens of regular desi events held at nightclubs across the country. The desi beats scene has all the characteristics of other youth subcultures, but one feature is particularly important: for many young British Asians, it offers us something to wear on top of our ethnicity - giving us an alternative collective identity.
The word “desi” literally means countrymen and refers specifically to the diaspora. It is broader than terms such as Indian, Pakistani, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, and yet narrower than the term Asian or even South Asian. It acts as a self-determined alternative to the word “paki” and the enthusiasm with which it has been embraced suggests a conscious decision against appropriating the offensive word paki and trying to turn it into a positive the way black kids have done with the word “nigger”.
Last year, “desi” appeared as a noun in the Oxford Dictionary of English, having been first introduced as an adjective in 2003. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets have employed it for programming - such as the BBC’s Desi DNA show - and even an entire channel in the case of MTV Desi.
All this semantics is important because, as a result of the word’s development, desi is now closer to the term “latino” than “Hispanic”. And because it has come to refer to a loose subculture rather than a rigid ethnicity, desi beats is not exclusively Asian. Tune in to any of the above broadcasts or walk into Bombay Bronx and you will not be greeted by a sea of brown faces. When people talk about the failure of the cultural melting pot, it might be because they cannot appreciate the popular culture melting pot.
Traditional cultural forms usually associated with multiculturalism (such as folk dancing or religious headgear, for example) are by nature not particularly pliable. If you focus on them as characteristics of a multicultural society then, yes, Britain all too often seems segregated according to whether people are wearing turbans, headscarves, skullcaps, dreadlocks or adopting the shaven-headed look of a Millwall football fan. But unlike these more rigid cultural forms, the more demotic desi subculture gives kids a more porous identity. It is derivative in a positive sense that fosters social cohesion and inclusiveness - everything and everyone seems to blend together like the records being mixed up at Bombay Bronx.
This view of Britain might require some oversimplification, but it is surely a view worth entertaining given that it is conducive to both multiculturalism and social cohesion - instead of setting up a trade-off between the two. And while popular culture may not seem particularly politically empowering, it gives me and other British Asians a sense of real, constructive participation in whatever it is that constitutes Britishness.
It all looked so different nearly a decade ago, when I undertook a study of Asian youth as part of my university degree. Back then, my research had a much more pessimistic premise and conclusion. What I did not appreciate at the time, however, was that the seemingly bleak state of affairs was arguably a necessary stage in the evolution of the subculture I am championing today.
At university, I had wanted to know why brown-skinned kids back home in the west London borough of Hounslow were suddenly choosing not to integrate with white-skinned kids. Why they were discarding the British Asian youth stereotype of disciplined, academically and grammatically conscientious citizens and instead asserting their ethnicity with an aggression usually associated with black-skinned kids. This was ironic given the prejudices Asian families have typically had against black communities and so, finally, I wanted to know why Asian kids were becoming alien to their own parents and adopting cultural identities that had as much to do with US hip-hop as they did with Bollywood.
When I asked Cambridge University’s social and political sciences faculty if they’d let me hang out with my mates back in Hounslow and then submit the results as my undergraduate dissertation, I didn’t think they’d say yes. After all, I was clearly more at ease in Hounslow than I was at Cambridge and so my proposed dissertation may merely have looked like an academic solution to homesickness. Fortunately Dr Susan Benson, an anthropologist and social scientist who sadly passed away last summer, agreed to supervise my research.
Not only that, but she did so with a suggestion that developed into a core theme of the study and its evolution into my novel, Londonstani: that I submit the dissertation under the faculty’s gender relations paper rather than the race relations paper. And, as a result, my work became an exploration of how the assertion of ethnic identities is sometimes better viewed as a proxy for the reassertion of masculinity.
Of course, this standpoint was not about downplaying the relevance of what many of my friends saw as a perennial fight against racism and discrimination - it was simply about deciding that those things should not be the focus of my work.
When I approached Dr Benson, I told her I wanted to study the beef between this relatively new breed of hardcore Asian “rudeboys” and “coconuts” - a term of abuse for Asians who, despite their brown skin, are deemed to be “white” on the inside because of their assimilation into mainstream British society.
Dr Benson refined my proposal to make it more academically acceptable, replacing “my mates” with “ethnographic informants” and the word “beef” with “boundary” - in the vein of those sociologists who argued that ethnicity is best understood as the boundaries between people rather than the “cultural stuff” within them. She also saved me from myself by adding the subtitle “Assertive ethnicity, masculinity and identity” to the title I had given the dissertation (which was “Chocolate flavoured coconut milk”).
At first I was apprehensive about Dr Benson’s emphasis on gender identities, but the wisdom behind it became gradually clear when I was back in Hounslow over Christmas for the first stage of fieldwork - a combination of loosely structured, taped interviews and participant observation. For example, it was uncanny how for many Asian kids, the term “coconut” was synonymous with a stockpile of slang for effeminate or homosexual - such as sap, ponce or batty.
Nevertheless, it seemed premature to conclude that “whiteness” was being simply dismissed as effeminate because, at that time, mainstream British youth culture centred on Britpop, personified by the likes of Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Suede’s Brett Anderson. Surely the androgynous look of these skinny swaggerers was just a passing phase, convenient at the time for some Asian kids to mock but not fundamental to what was going on in the playgrounds and on the high streets?
I remember starting to be swayed one Friday night when, after spending the evening with a group of kids in a local snooker club, we all drove down to a plane-spotting site near Terminal 4 so that some of the boys could sober up before going home. No sooner had they started up with their routine homophobic and misogynist banter than one of the boys pulled me aside and became watery-eyed as he talked about the way a girl he claimed not to fancy probably didn’t think he was manly enough because he wasn’t Indian enough. The boy in question was drunk, but what he was saying was pretty sobering.
Dr Benson had told me people might confide in me this way precisely because I was a stranger - that was why it was better to cultivate “ethnographic informants” instead of hanging around with my mates. Sure, it might make me feel like an idiot when I approached potential informants, but in the long term it would be a more efficient way of gathering insights into a community I’d presumed I already knew so well. Dr Benson was vindicated again.
The conflation of questions of masculinity and race had been well documented in studies of Afro-Caribbean communities, and each time I went back to Hounslow to conduct another stage of fieldwork yet more anecdotal evidence would convince me how useful it could be to look at ethnic identities as tools or props for the bolstering of boys’ gender identities. Sometimes those were religious, such as Sikh boys’ tendency to display holy symbols on their BMW windscreens. Sometimes, the props had racial undertones, such as the loud bhangra music being blasted from those cars. And then, of course, there were those props that illustrated how ethnicity can often refer to national identities as well as religious or racial ones - such as wearing Indian cricket shirts.
All this cultural stuff was being used by brown-skinned boys as a way of helping them stand taller, speak up louder and strut their stuff with greater gusto. Add a bit of the hip-hop paraphernalia that had for long fulfilled similar functions for black kids, and you had a new model of British Asianness that was much less vulnerable to emasculation by any racism in the dominant culture.
Back then, there was only a handful of texts about the crisis of masculinity, compared with the bookcases-worth we have today. But one theory that repeatedly jumped off the pages to become central to my thinking was the idea that if a boy’s maternal role model is stronger than his paternal one, he is likely to overshoot with his own definition of what it is to be a man and develop a form of “hypermasculinity”. It sounds complicated, but basically it means that if boys don’t have adequate emotional ties with their fathers, then they will have to develop their definitions of masculinity in opposition to their mothers rather than in relation to their dads. Thus they strive to be more manly than their mothers rather than simply being as manly as their fathers. If their mothers also happen to be domineering, more demanding of respect and generally more macho, then the resulting machismo of their sons might be all the more so.
The model could easily apply to people of all races and ethnicities - from tough guys in London’s East End to disaffected youth in New York’s Bronx. But clearly I could not ignore how neatly this theory fitted the lives of the people I was studying in Hounslow. Of course, applying it involved a degree of generalisation, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason. Indian boys are renowned for being mummy’s boys; Indian dads are renowned for being emotionally detached patriarchal figures; while Indian mums are renowned for being domineering, emotionally involved patriarchal figures. Although prescriptive hypotheses like this have a tendency to prove self-fulfilling, the usefulness of this theory seemed to be confirmed during interview after interview.
If Asian “rudeboys” were thereby overshooting their masculinity and looking for cultural props with which to do so, no wonder they’d also reached out to gangsta rap music, successfully blending the elements of machismo, misogyny and homophobia in their parent’s culture with that inherent in hip-hop.
This was also apparent in their language. As well as absorbing the steady supply of new hip-hop slang for effeminacy and creating a sorry situation where you simply couldn’t swear enough, our mother tongues became a source of strength. Not only could rude boys utter abuse at other kids, they could do so in a way that only they understood. This was particularly the case with Panjabi - spelt the local way rather than the British “Punjabi”. Indeed, while they were busy pulping the English language, their Panjabi generally adhered to strict grammatical rules and respect for the nuances created by silent letters.
Of course, language is also important in its own right, with rhythmic verbal abuse often acting as surrogate fists. Indeed, it is often as if boys’ tongues take on some kind of phallic symbolism - except of course there is no magic Viagra for those who cannot cuss properly.
Another such symbol is the mobile phone. Asians have typically been early adopters of new technology but even 10 years ago top-of-the-range Nokia handsets were being brandished by schoolboys in ways that they couldn’t always do with the latest sports car, widescreen television or video game console. But the study highlighted how mobile phones represent more than just fashion accessories doubling up as high-tech penis extensions. They are also weapons that enable a new kind of technological truce between domineering Indian mothers and sons, one that somehow gives both parties more potency. Boys are able to conduct their affairs in greater privacy while mothers can exert their overbearing presence even when their sons aren’t at home.
If another expression of virility is the ability to dictate a female’s sexual relations (as illustrated by hip-hop’s abhorrent glamorisation of the professional pimp), then it was little surprise to see aggressive ethnic identities employed by both Sikh and Muslim boys in order to punish those who had relations with girls across that traditional ethnic divide. Indeed, after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, when my reporting on the recruitment of Islamic fundamentalists took me back to Hounslow, a colleague seemed bemused when some informants divulged information not about potential terrorists, but how local Muslim boys were converting or “sisterising” Sikh girls through the age-old technique of pretending to be in love with them.
However, if my dissertation offered any additional insight for that reporting assignment, viewing ethnicity as a proxy for masculinity made for gloomy conclusions - especially in the context of today’s political debates about how best to engineer a deeper allegiance to Britishness without threatening our country’s rich multiculturalism. After all, while you might be able to devise citizenship tests and oaths to create more cohesive national identities, how on earth can anyone engineer against something as innate as a boy’s desire to be manly and virile? By promoting the androgyny of Jarvis Cocker? I don’t think so.
My dissertation did, however, highlight one optimistic interpretation of what might be going on among Asian kids. Sociologist Tariq Modood had written about how voluntary segregation along ethnic lines might give minority communities the strength and self-esteem to assimilate with mainstream society later on, but on their own terms. The actions of some Asian kids might have looked unnecessarily aggressive and sometimes even ugly, but racism and discrimination were once very real threats.
Indeed, some of the infamous west London Asian gangs that predated my dissertation and filled the local press with stories of rampages on the local high street may have originally been responses to racist attacks on Asians. But by the time I started my fieldwork those gangs were more legends than reality and the threat of racism appeared more imaginary than real. Similarly, the tendency of kids to ghettoise Hounslow to make it sound like a Bronx-style hood implied another kind of imagined threat in a local economy that remains relatively healthy thanks to having Heathrow Airport on its doorstep.
As the threat of racism receded, surely these kids’ aggressive, anti-assimilation ethic would follow? Perhaps that dynamic that Modood called “assertive ethnicity” and the evolution of Asian boys from victims to predators was a necessary step in the creation of a truly British Asian subculture - allowing kids to integrate on their own terms, bringing their own brand of Britishness to the table.
And so the Asian boy as victim (represented by the word “paki”) may have given way to the aggressor (represented by the names of some gangs such as Shere Panjab, where the word “Sher” translates as lions or tigers). And, in turn, that may have led to a social equilibrium between victim and aggressor implied by “desi”.
However, at that time I saw no evidence of British Asian kids using their newly-asserted ethnicity to assimilate on their own terms. They wanted to live in a separate society and, accordingly, there was little by way of a sustainable cultural scene that was as British as it was Asian. Some form of this holy grail may have enjoyed a heyday in the late 1990s thanks to the musical genius of artists such as Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh, but the reality is they were embraced more by mainstream society than British Asian kids on the streets.
By contrast, today’s desi beats artists such as Jay Sean may sound more like black US urban acts than anything remotely Indian. But Hounslow-born Jay Sean is British, not American. And if his success here and in India means kids look up to him as a British Asian role model, then so what? The fact that today’s desi scene borrows so much from popular black culture hardly makes it less worthy or authentic. After all, Elvis did the same thing - that’s what popular culture is about.
The success of contemporary desi artists and events such as Notting Hill’s Bombay Bronx - which celebrates its second birthday next month - suggests my earlier pessimism was misplaced. Indeed, at a time when many observers have grown gloomy about the state of Britain’s multicultural project and when posses of Asian youth are often viewed as potential fanatics ripe for new race riots, I have revisited my dissertation with more optimism than when I did it in the 1990s.
If it is arguable that what is being asserted today is no longer simply an ethnic identity but a new, sustainable subculture, it is important to stress its Britishness. Not only was it born in the UK, it has been exported around the world - including back to India. Just as hip-hop culture is neither West Indian nor African, but American, so too desi beats is as quintessentially British as punk rock was in the 1970s, acid house was in the 1980s and Britpop was in the 1990s.
This view was for me crystalised not during the course of a university social sciences dissertation or my reporting on Islamic fundamentalism for the FT, but the slightly more frivolous setting of the Po Na Na nightclub in Hammersmith. It was a Thursday night in October 2003 and the club had been hosting the British Asian Music Awards ceremony, a celebration of all aspects of the then-fledgling desi subculture. I remember it well because I was late and just caught the presentation of the final award and was amazed to see it go to someone with white skin - the opposite of a coconut, if you like. Hounslow-born Markie Mark, a DJ with the Panjabi Hit Squad who earlier this year was named head of music at the BBC’s Asian Network digital radio station, had been voted for his “Commitment to the Brit-Asian scene”.
By allowing our ethnicity to give birth to a British subculture, the Asian scene that a few years earlier had seemed so insular was much less so. There are sweet ironies in the way nightclubs all over London and the Midlands regularly hold what have been described as “brown pound nights”. This is because the collectives of Asian DJs that first emerged in places such as Hounslow during the 1980s and sowed the seeds of what became the desi beats music genre, did so largely to provide local venues for Asian boys who back then simply couldn’t get past the bouncers of central London’s nightclubs.
It is worth highlighting here the unique role of the BBC as a kind of cultural glue - helping to take the subculture from the underground and making space for it within the British mainstream (but without infecting it with naffness). Nihal Arthanyake, for example, presents a Radio One show with Hounslow-born Bobby Friction. He is also a presenter on BBC2’s Desi DNA programme. BBC 1xtra, meanwhile, broadcasts a weekly Desi Beats show hosted by the Panjabi Hit Squad. And where the BBC went, so commercial radio groups such as Emap have followed with their own desi beats show on Kiss FM fronted by the Rishi Rich Project.
So while the bhangra and Bollywood remixes that Asian kids blasted out of their Beemers in the 1990s may have been intentionally inaccessible to others, Asian kids now cannot take exclusive ownership of the desi beats genre even if they want to. But the optimistic thing here is that they don’t want to.
The compatibility of the desi identity with Britishness is also evident in the realm of sports - perhaps best symbolised by the sight of Pakistani kids from the Midlands dancing around in the Union Jack to cheer on British boxing hero Amir Khan. The contrast with the infamous Tebbit cricket test (where the former government minister questioned the allegiance of British Asians who failed to support the English cricket team) could not be starker. Even when England’s cricketers have had brown skin - such as former team captain Nasser Hussain or Mark Ramprakash - British Asians have still tended to cheer for the opposing side (be it India or Pakistan).
I would argue this contrast would still exist if Khan were to take on a boxing champ developed in the Indian subcontinent. And the reason he makes for a more effective British Asian role model than the likes of Hussain or Talvin Singh lies in the fact that Khan simply oozes desi subculture. He has the right hair, the right swagger, the right speech patterns, the right clothes - and, being characteristics of “desiness” rather than “Pakistaniness”, all of these things are no less British than Hussain’s cucumber sandwiches. It will be interesting to see whether Monty Panesar, the Sikh spin bowler who recently buoyed England’s performance, can bridge the gap. In the meantime, Khan’s street credentials have been cemented by his appearance in the latest Reebok “I am what I am” advertising campaign, following in the footsteps of other urban youth culture icons such as rappers 50 Cent and Jay-Z.
But this rosy new perspective is not without qualification. The Amir Khan billboards underline the extent to which the desi beats subculture is part of the broader urban youth scene, which encompasses other music styles such as hip-hop, garage and RnB. Borrowing from these other subcultures may not matter per se, but there are real problems insofar as the urban scene does not just bolster masculinity, it frequently does so through misogyny and homophobia. Also, it is the first subculture to celebrate rather than counter conspicuous consumerism. Its golden dictum is neatly summed up by 50 Cent’s album and film title Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
While there is a genuine debate to be had about the social and economic implications of this attitude crowding out the traditional material restraint of British mainstream society, there are also repercussions for the debate about multiculturalism. Just as British Asian boys have fused the misogyny of their parents’ culture with that of hip-hop culture and thereby reinforced both, so too there is a fusion of the materialism inherent in Indian culture and urban youth culture. At best, this just accentuates the worship of flash mobile phones, bling bling jewellery and luxury cars. But at worst, it means any social cohesion achieved by the desi subculture might be undermined by the individualism unleashed by this materialism - illustrated, for example, by the rampant tax avoidance in the Indian subcontinent and the dog-eat-dog principles of hip-hop culture. Tax evasion and grey economies could evolve into symbols for another kind of anti-assimilation ethic.
However, the crowd that gathers for Notting Hill’s Bombay Bronx might argue this pessimism is misplaced too. After all, those in the creative professions generally earn a lot less money than those working in law, finance and medicine.
Gautam Malkani is an FT journalist.
His novel “Londonstani” is published by Fourth Estate.
