Communities, audiences, and multi-functions: British cultural politics and the showcasing of South Asian art

Abstract

The development of South Asian arts in the UK has gone from using typical colonial and ‘high culture’ showcases to using particular but still far more ‘mainstream’ formats, and has been publicly subsidised in a number of ways, including through community projects. In many respects, South Asian arts is not a ‘niche product’ any more due to the (mainly political) tension towards creating a distinctively ‘British Asian’ (or BrAsian) rather than a strictly ‘South Asian’ product. This paper draws upon two case studies of South Asian ‘cultural producers’ (Dudrah ‘Cultural Production’ 223) in Northern England to argue that showcasing South Asian art in Britain is a peculiar endeavour, the existence of which must account for multiple functions, multiple audiences and even international politics. The paper argues that recognising this fact has profound implications for the future of British Asian identities and for the negotiation between popular culture and politics.

Notes

1. A ‘mela,’ in the Indian subcontinent, is a kind of ‘fair’ and in Britain it has come to signify a multicultural summer event where people meet to indulge in ‘ethnic’ (mainly South Asian) music, foods, and shopping.

2. The fact that the definition of ‘BrAsian’ is very much still in the making is testified to by the fact that the collection A Postcolonial People where Sayyid introduces the term ‘BrAsian’ contains slightly different uses of the same concept – for example by Kaur and Terracciano, who use it to describe ‘unsuspected similarities and cross-fertilisation between Eastern and Western traditions’ (353). This paper refers mainly to Sayyid's broad definition.

3. In order to clarify the notion of ‘race-free’ British identity (as we call it later in this paper), it may be useful to refer to a couple of examples. It has been argued, for instance, that there are forms of popular culture that produce counter-hegemonic accounts of European identities as not white such as Zee TV Europe (Dudrah ‘Zee TV-Europe’ 165). By this it is meant that European identity (in this case British) is seen as an identity that has nothing to do with race and ethnicity and may even been seen in contrast to similar ethnic identities of people who live in different continents. You thus have ‘Brit Asian TV’ as well as programmes dedicated to the music of British Asians on Indian cable channels. The point of contention, however, is that a very small minority of other British groups would engage with such channels, even the UK broadcasted ‘Brit Asian TV’, not to mention the BBC Asian network which is going to be closed due to the poor results in audience numbers. This ‘race-free’ British identity can thus be considered a project rather than something that has already taken root.