quentin letts is disturbed by this immigrant’s view of the British Asian experience |
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One of the characters in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, the 1970s BBC comedy set in wartime India, was a genial bearer called Rangi Ram. This caricature of a Sikh (played by a blacked-up Michael Bates) would draw himself to his full height, give a wobble of his turban and say, "We British..."
The surprise in Ziauddin Sardar's new book, Balti Britain, is that he does not seize on It Ain't Half Hot, Mum and accuse the programme's makers, dear old David Croft and Jimmy Perry, of being agents of Enoch. Mr Sardar is one of those ocean-going sociology bores who makes it his business to sniff out racism in every crevice.
We will no doubt be hearing an awful lot of Sardar in the coming weeks. His book doesn't deserve to be much more than a thick doorstop but such are the sheeplike ways of the chat-show media it will no doubt be hailed as an 'authoritative analysis' and used |
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to defend the multiculturalism which has brought us to the mess of British-born terrorists planting bombs on London Underground trains.
A sometime research gofer at London Weekend Television, Sardar was born in Pakistan in 1951 and educated in London after his family moved here a few years later. He wears his knowledge heavy on his fashionable sleeve, to the extent of writing an "acclaimed intellectual autobiography" (to quote his publisher, Granta). "Intellectual autobiography"? An onanistic term. He skates over the reasons his father and uncle were so keen to leave Pakistan. Throughout the book there is a flavour of 'Pakistan good, Britain bad'. It's like a bad Hollywood film: every time the action shifts to Pakistan you feel you can hear an orchestra playing uplifting airs; every time he mentions Britain the tune changes to something downbeat.
His uncle fled for America and we never hear another word of his fate. Pity. Comparison of the American and British immigrant experiences would have been interesting. How come the US achieves such patriotic
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