Culture shock on Southall Broadway: re-thinking ‘second-generation’ return through ‘geographies of Punjabiness’

Abstract

This paper explores geographies of Punjabiness within Britain in order to engage critically with the recent literature on diasporic return. I begin by drawing attention to the established geographies of Punjabi settlement in Britain, as illustrated by the Thandi coach route maps. This paper considers the significance of these inter-connected hubs of Punjabiness for the multiple identities of the ‘second generation’. I examine life history interviews with ‘second-generation’ Punjabis who grew up in provincial cities and towns off the Thandi route maps – an increasing quantity among Punjabis in Britain. I explore how they construct places like Southall Broadway and Soho Road as Punjabi and go on day trips to these places, as part of their quest for a more authentic identity in the context of their own lives. I show that these places, too, can be crucibles of diasporic nostalgia, exploration of identity and a phenomenological sense of Punjabiness, at times pleasurable and at times unsettling. I suggest that these experiences are akin to diasporic return, speaking to a wider critique about the fetishizing of national borders and the need to decouple diaspora from the idea of originary homelands.

Keywords:

• second generation
• return
• identity
• belonging
• diaspora
• geographies of Punjabiness

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to Ben Rogaly, Filippo Osella and Chand Basi, whose joint work was important to the arguments developed in this paper, as well as to Fatemeh Etemaddar, John Harriss, Niki Khan, Anjali Gera Roy, Ayaz Qureshi and the two anonymous reviewers from South Asian Diaspora.

Funding

The research on Punjabi transnationalism was funded by the European Commission Seventh Framework Research Programme under the project ‘Transnationalisation, migration and transformation: multi-level analysis of migrant transnationalism’. The research in Peterborough was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as a part of the Connected Communities Research Programme, in partnership with the Royal Society and its ‘Citizen Power Peterborough’ project.

Notes on contributor

Kaveri Qureshi is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She has research interests in the anthropology of the Pakistani and Indian Punjabi diaspora. Her research focuses on gendered life courses and family life, and she has also published on migration, transnationalism and diasporic politics.

Notes

1. There is now competition among three coach lines offering very similar routes: Thandi coaches, New Bharat coaches and New Punjab coaches. Thandi is the eldest, established in 1985.

2. ‘British Indian’ is the census category that ‘British Punjabis’ would use to describe themselves in official statistics. The majority in the ‘British Indian’ category have Punjabi heritage.

3. Some participants chose for their real-life names to be used in publications extending from the research, whilst others chose a pseudonym, and in other cases, I have given pseudonyms myself.

4. Bhatra is a caste among Sikhs. They are among the earliest Punjabi migrants to Britain, arriving in the early twentieth century to work as pedlars in seaports such as Cardiff and Bristol (Ghuman 1980).

5. Existing sociolinguistic studies of bilingualism among British Punjabis have explored the ‘mixed linguistic environments’ of British Punjabi socialization and ‘imbalanced bilingualism’ of the ‘second generation’ (Romaine 1995; Nesbitt 2000; Martin et al. 2003; Harris 2009). However, all of this research has been carried out in areas of ethnic concentration, raising questions about the extent to which linguistic proficiency might be affected by the ethnic density of the wider communities in which children grow up.

6. ‘Patois’ describes the language forms of West Indian-origin diaspora in Britain.

7. See Corrigan (1979) on young men smashing milk bottles on the pavements of Sunderland in the 1970s.

8. See Singh (2011) for a history of the Sikh camps that had developed in Britain by the early 2000s.

9. See Jacobsen (2012) on the integral role of devotional music in Sikh experience and identity.

10. Long live ‘Khalistan’, the separatist state fought for by Sikh ethno-nationalists in the 1970s–1990s.

11. ‘Paki’ is the epithet used most widely in racist name-calling against South Asians in Britain.

12. See Baumann (1995) on the ‘cousin-brother’ category as a means to transgression among youth in Southall.

13. ‘Vaisakhi’ is a spring festival celebrated across North India, with particular resonance for Sikhs, as it commemorates the birth of the Khalsa in 1699. Vaisakhi is celebrated by the practice of ‘nagarkirtan’, which is a congregational procession, bearing the Guru Granth Sahib, conducted amid devotional music.