Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain

Abstract

This paper examines the creation of alternative diasporic public spheres in Britain by South Asian settlers: one produced through the entertainment industry—commercial film and other media—that satirises the parochialism and conservatism of the South Asian immigrant generation and highlights cultural hybridity and cosmopolitanism, intergenerational conflict, family politics, inter‐ethnic or ‐racial marriages, and excesses of consumption. The other is a conflictual diasporic Muslim public sphere dominated by Muslim male community leaders, which has had to respond to international political crises such as the Rushdie affair, the Gulf War or, more recently, September 11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Seen from an indigenous British perspective, the messages emanating from these two diasporic discourses, publicised in both Western and South Asian media (cable TV and foreign newspapers in Urdu or local ones in English) are opposed, and create ambivalent stereotyped images of ‘Muslims’ and ‘Asians’. While a Pakistani transnational identity is mostly submerged beneath these other identities, it is in fact critical to understanding the conflicting pressures to which young Pakistanis, and women in particular, are subjected in Britain, and the clash between alienation and popular cultural ‘fun’ marking Muslim Pakistani internal politics. These have led to the pluralisation of the diasporic public sphere.

Keywords:

• Diaspora
• British Muslims
• Cultural Hybridity
• South Asians
• Transnationalism

Notes

Pnina Werbner is Professor of Social Anthropology at Keele University. Correspondence to: Prof. Pnina Werbner, School of Social Relations, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire. ST5 5BG. E‐mail: [email protected]

Several key collections, journal issues and articles on transnationalism have been influential in this discussion: Basch et al. (1994), Foner (1997, 2002), Guarnizo and Smith (1998), Portes et al. (1999). To these might be added Appadurai (1990), Hannerz (1996), Vertovec (2001) and Allievi and Nielsen (2003).

This paper draws on Werbner (2000, 2002a, 2004) and a talk given to the workshop on ‘Religion and Immigration in New York’ at the New School, April 2002. My views on transnationalism were also sharpened by discussions at workshops on ‘Transnationalism, Past and Present’, NIAS, Netherlands, December 2002; ‘Transnational Islam’, at Sussex University, January 2003; and the symposium on ‘Migrancy and its Futures’, University of Western Australia, June 2003. I would like to thank the various participants, and especially Ralph Grillo, Michael Herzfeld and Ghassan Hage, for their very helpful comments.

Satellite TV beamed from South Asia is avidly watched, particularly by the older migrant generation (see Gillespie 1995). On the consumption of South Asian bhangra music in the West see Gopinath (1995).

According to the Census, there are around 750,000 Pakistanis in Britain.

There are exceptions. Shaikh Zaki Badawi, an eighty‐year‐old Egyptian, is a key Muslim spokesman for moderation and an advisor of Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister. The Muslim Association of Britain has a strong Palestinian presence but many of the grassroots supporters are South Asians.

The anthropological notion of ‘segmentary systems’ marked by situational fission and fusion was first theorised by Evans‐Pritchard (1940) in his study of the Nuer of East Africa.

Meera Syal is an Asian British actress, writer, comedienne well‐known to the British public, Asian or not. She co‐wrote and starred in the award‐winning comedy, Goodness Gracious Me (in the ITV Comedy Awards) and in The Kumars at No. 42. Among her novels, Anita and Me was a runner‐up in the prestigious Betty Trask Prize awards. It has recently been made into a film. Syal has also appeared in Bombay Nights, Andrew Lloyd Webber's West End musical.

Shaw (2001) and Katharine Charsley (2003) both report extremely high rates of intercontinental (over 50 per cent) and intra‐caste marriages among young British Pakistanis. My own study of Sufi cults in Britain shows extensive almost daily communication with Pakistan (Werbner 2003). So too Kashmiri politics also involve extensive connections with Pakistan, and are extremely dominant in Britain, dividing Indians and Pakistanis (and Pakistanis among themselves) otherwise quite friendly, into often bitterly opposed camps (Ellis and Khan 1998).

Zadie Smith, a West Indian by origin, has also written satirically about immigrant London, including its South Asian inhabitants, in White Teeth, leading one South Asian to comment that Zadie Smith has said what we should have said ourselves. A 2003 film release on the shady world of asylum‐seekers and undocumented immigrants in London, Dirty Pretty Things, highlights the greed of established South Asian immigrant‐settlers employing such migrants. South Asian pop groups and singers such as Apache Indian and Asian Dub Foundation have also satirised hallowed South Asian institutions such as arranged marriages and used crossover musical genres (see Sharma et al. 1996).

On intentional versus organic hybridities see Werbner (1997, 2001). I argue that intentional hybridities are deliberately intended to shock, while organic hybridities emerge through unconscious, unreflexive cultural borrowings.