Fighting back or letting go: South Asians and their colonial past

From Shyam Bhatia

London, January 2022

Yorkshire cricketer Azeem Rafiq is more fortunate than Black British footballers who have to cope with ‘ooh, ooh, ooh’ sounds hurled at them every time they emerge from their changing rooms. 

Pakistan-born Rafiq has also had to endure his share of racist taunts, but at the comparatively young age of 30 may not understand the deeper and wider context that incorporates those monkey noises at a few football stadiums, together with other provocations experienced at some cricket clubs.

They are as revealing about how some deeply ingrained prejudices still prevail, as they are instructive about changing national attitudes of recent times.

Apologists would inevitably argue that racism has diluted and many in the white majority are less willing to tolerate questionable standards of earlier times. Certainly, Blacks and Asians today are more welcome than ever before in advertising, entertainment, the media and even front rank politics where an ethnic Indian, Rishi Sunak, is routinely touted as a possible future Prime Minister.

Rafiq, who once captained Yorkshire, has told how he came close to suicide after being repeatedly subjected to pejorative slurs as an ‘elephant washer’ and ‘Paki’. It took his Yorkshire club more than a year to acknowledge that Rafiq had been a “victim of racial harassment and bullying”. The club has since been suspended from hosting international cricket games “until it has clearly demonstrated that it can meet the standards expected”.

My birth was in an independent India, a few years after the country’s former colonial masters had been kicked out and sent back to their white homelands in Western Europe. So any knowledge of British racism in those days was drawn from stories told by my grandmother, Pooran Devi, who had two sons (one was my father) and a daughter.

Father joined the British army in 1939, rising to the rank of a Lieutenant Colonel and serving in Egypt, Iraq and Burma where his military supremo was Field Marshall Slim. Pooran Devi described Slim as a ‘good man’ – because my father said so – but she had other less flattering comments about bigotry in the army.

One of her more bleak stories was about father’s experiences in 1942 on a train from Baghdad to Basra in Iraq.

The train was about to start moving and he was not aware of travelling in a segregated carriage until a white officer entered, ignored Dad’s uniform, ordering him to leave as his bag was thrown out onto the platform. “I prefer to travel on my own” was the justification for his peremptory command.

Granny had happier recollections about Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the soon-to-be appointed viceroy, to whom father was assigned as an ADC in 1945. While Mountbatten himself was still based in Singapore as Allied Supremo, his wife was on morale boosting trip to India and father was assigned to accompany her to a function at a Calcutta Club.

Lady Mountbatten was duly welcomed upon arrival, but father was prevented from entering because “kaleh aadmi” (black men) were banned. To her eternal credit, an enraged Lady Mountbatten instantly cancelled her participation in the event by turning on her heel and taking my father out to a private lunch somewhere else in the city.

Both experiences, one in Baghdad and the other in Calcutta, were discussed within the family for years afterwards. They were also documented in two books, one by Major General Partap Narain, entitled ‘From subedar to Field Marshal, and the other by Scottish historian Trevor Royle in ‘Last days of the Raj.’ Royle tells of one other incident with Lady Mountbatten when she turned to my father and said, “Young man the only person who stands between you and independence is Winston Churchill.”

Pooran Devi summed it all up for herself by describing white British colonials in such unflattering terms as “kanjar” (goons), “moyeh” (dead men) “haram zadeh” (children of sin) and “sooer dey bachey” (sons of pigs) . She was just as suspicious of the young English boy who was my best friend at primary school in New Delhi and carried a gollywog rag doll with him everywhere he went. 

This gollywog, so my ever sensitive granny insisted, was meant to be a caricature of all Indians.

I never dared tell her about my white English teacher entrusted with looking after our class on half term school camping holidays, known as mid-term expeditions.  Back in the early 1960s the pattern was always the same. Teacher and boys would arrive at a pre- assigned camp site in the lower Himalayas, usually next to a stream or river. The balding 60+plus year old teacher, who happened to be a retired member of the prestigious Indian Civil Service (ICS), would strip buck naked, pretend to prepare for a swim, then try to lure us closer. 

While we cowered in our costumes a short distance away, doing our unsuccessful best not to look in his direction, he did what he could to lure us. “Come closer”, was his shout. “It’s not going to bite you.” None of us had the guts to question Arthur’s strange behaviour because he incorporated the power of an all-powerful teacher, reinforced by white authority. Our only revenge consisted of imbibing a Second World War British army song and humming it just beyond his earshot: ‘Arthur had only one big ball, Hitler had two but very small,Himmler was very similar and poor old Goebbels had no balls at all.’ 

By 1962 British forces had been gone from India for 15 years, yet the influence of the sahib still lingered. Many of us in our teens took it for granted that most white males were ‘chootiya chors’, or bottom stealers, instinctively preferring fellow males for a myriad of reasons. Women were a necessity forced upon them purely for the purpose of producing children.

It was no co-incidence that Arthur’s best friend and the school’s white headmaster was a bachelor. A third white teacher was also single. A fourth fourth white who came to the school to teach on a fixed contract was apparently happily married, but he did not fit the mould.  

Unbeknown to us students at the time, Arthur had the protection of other powerful friends, such as his own brother John, also ex ICS with a suspicious fondness for young brown boys. It was Arthur, however, who stayed on for longer in India, eventually becoming headmaster of a local prep school for boys aged between six and 11.

By today’s standards Pooran Devi’s standards and expectations might be summed up as ‘eccentric’, but in her time she was typical of a generation that never forgave and never forgot the racism and other humiliations indelibly linked with white colonial rule.

Some of granny’s warnings may have lurked in my sub conscious when I arrived from India at my liberal English boarding school in Berkshire in the mid 1960s. But it still took a while to absorb and understand the insulting context of key words like “wog” so freely bandied about at the school and beyond.

An obvious explanation suggested it was an abbreviation for golliwog. Fellow students laughingly translated it as “westernised oriental gentleman”, a dismissive reference to those eager-to-please blacks and South Asian males with thick colonial accents parading up and down the streets of central London, those who saved up to visit fancy shops and purchase English suits, ties and hats.

They were viewed as Britain’s equivalent of America’s ‘Uncle Toms’. “But you’re different”, white friends used to say by way of mollifying me.

Among the more forward looking of those young friends was the school’s only Jew. One day when he saw me fuming in response to a ‘wog’ taunt, he tried to make things better by commenting, “At least they don’t call you a ‘yid’. For the next half hour he then educated me in Biblical history, adding how ‘yid’ was a deliberately humiliating abbreviation for “Yiddish’, the language spoken by some jews of Eastern Europe.

During those school days in England my chief tormentor was the son of a prominent British diplomat and ex colonial administrator. 

He was the leader of the gang that spontaneously started singing Bing Crosby’s “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” every time they came across me at class room lessons and sports competitions.

Back home in Delhi one winter vacation, it was my mother who alerted me to the significance of that Bing Crosby song when I reacted in full innocence to her request about describing day-to-day school life in Reading. “Stupid boy, don’t you realise they’re taunting you”, was her annoyed comment.

The irony of those English school days in the early 1960s was how progressive our school was in every other respect. Corporal punishment for example was banned, boys were encouraged to interact with girls both on and off school grounds. We bicycled into town at random to buy our treats, so there was never any issue of ‘breaking bounds’. Our teenage role models in the UK were bands like the Beatles and the Monkees. Elvis Presley, still wildly popular in India, was out of date.

In India, where boys and girls were strictly segregated, it was totally acceptable for older prefects, perverts by the standards of then and now, to order younger boys to pull down their trousers and experience ‘six of the best’ as they were thrashed on their bare bottoms with cricket bats and hockey sticks. The more the victims squealed, the more they were beaten. Teachers looked the other way. Everyone spoke the same ‘lingo’. None had the courage to ‘sneak.’

During cold winter days in India it was routine for so-called younger ‘fags’ to warm the toilet seats for older boys. In England this was considered a barbaric custom that hadn’t been permitted in schools since the 1890s. In England effete boys were left to their own devices. In India those seen as vulnerable were branded ‘lenders’ because they were deemed willing to ‘lend’ themselves to brutish, older boys. Almost every unpleasant experience was tolerated as one of those undesirable but necessary by-products of a much admired English public school culture.

Throughout the 1960s and beyond school authorities in India justified questionable behaviour by claiming it had been tried, tested and proven in such temples of secondary education as Harrow, Eton and Winchester. 

The more a boy was challenged, physically and mentally, the better chance he had of developing into a man, or so the saying went. Such dogmas have long been discredited here, they belong to the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Sadly, they continue to prevail in an India that still aspires to a way of life and system of values that no longer exists over in the UK.

Overt racism was mercifully absent from the college rooms and lecture halls of my university years. But there were plenty of off-campus reminders, such as the ‘golly’ logo associated with Robertson’s marmalade and jams. The jam is still available although the golly logo was axed in 2008.

 As offensive was the Black and White Minstrel show projected on BBC television. Here was a hugely popular and shamelessly racist programme where white male actors wearing white gloves and black make up performed American minstrel and country songs. Years of protesting by anti racism campaigners led to the show being cancelled in 1978.

Yet face-to-face racism was a daily fact of life in 1976 Swansea where the Western Mail newspaper sent me for training as a ‘district reporter’. This was meant to be a three month stint when the newspaper paid for the first two weeks of living in a local hotel. Everything went as planned and there was no shortage of stories to report.

Problems only started when those free two weeks of hotel life ended and l tried and failed to find a room to rent. As I didn’t drive in those days, the idea was to rent a room within walking distance of our office. Plenty of rooms were available but the signs on the big windows of letting houses all read the same. “Blacks, dogs and Indians not welcome”. Some of those signs had substituted the word “dogs” for “chinks”. They read “Blacks, Chinks and Indians not welcome.”

Stupid as always, I still persisted in looking for accommodation, even trying to mix attempted personal charm with newly acquired Welsh words like “Yaki Dah” (cheers) when I was turned away, but nothing worked. During those cold Swansea mornings spent in searching for a room to rent, I remember thinking how little had changed in more than 30 years and how the rage and frustration I tasted was easily a match for my father’s Calcutta experience.

To this day the memory of those months spent in Swansea still rankles. Not many horrors endured in later years ever matched the humiliation of trying and failing to rent a room in that God-forsaken Welsh city.

My calculation at the time was that contacting headquarters in Cardiff to explain this inability to rent a room would have amounted to an admission of professional failure. The News Editor, never one to hide his feelings, would have been delighted. “Call yourself a reporter and can’t even manage to rent a room ?”

In the event I was saved from last minute embarrassment by my kindly hotel manager -white and Welsh-who heard my tale of woe and generously invited me to stay on in his hotel at the same lower rate as renting a room in the city centre.

 However Swansea was nothing compared to a different experience five years later of covering the Orange Day marches of Belfast in 1983. 

Those marches commemorate the centuries old tradition of celebrating the victory of Protestant forces against Britain’s last surviving Catholic monarch, James 2. But the Marches are also about how Protestant dominated Northern Ireland is determined to remain part of the UK.

All this and more was explained to me before flying out of London to Belfast where the office had checked me into a good quality local hotel famous for its bar and breakfasts. But nothing prepared me for what happened the following day when I arrived at my vantage point on the main road to witness what was about to start. One other reporter, a Catholic from the Dublin-based Irish Times was nearby.

March organisers seemed never to have encountered a brown face before and when I took out my pen and notebook to jot down immediate impressions, the leader of one march pointed in my direction, shouting, “grab the nigger.”

My saviour that day, to whom I remain eternally indebted, was the same fellow reporter from the Irish Times. It was he who grabbed my arm and pushed us both under the counter of a nearby local grocery as the Orange Day mob outside paced the pavement baying for my blood. 

We must have spent 20 minutes crouching there in fear until the leaders of the march got bored of trying to find us and went somewhere else.

During those times, when my annual salary was a modest £12,500, I lived with my white English girl friend, later my wife, in the London suburb of Islington. She still remembers that panic telephone call from Belfast telling her what had happened earlier that same day.

Back in the London office there was overwhelming support, albeit with one exception. As we walked up to the news desk the following morning, a previously respected colleague commented, “Bad luck about what happened in Belfast. Most of our colleagues here think you’re nothing more than a Wog, but I think you’re ok.” 

His was a lop -sided, not very pleasant observation, though not dissimilar in tone to what I experienced with another colleague, a famous columnist at the time, who invited me over to dinner at her own home in North London.

There in the presence of her husband and son, she watched like a hawk as I took up my knife and fork to tackle what was laid out in front of us. “You’ve done well for a village boy”, was her amused comment as we examined bits of shredded dry beef and lettuce she had prepared. Stale mayonnaise was an extra add on for which she was not personally responsible.

One possible benefit of those miserable times, or so my wife now tells me, was that they toughened me up for later experiences of reporting deadly foreign conflicts. To be tracked by the secret police of multiple countries in the Middle East and South Asia, to be taken hostage in Afghanistan, or survive a mine blast in Sudan, was almost as deadly as the earlier humiliations of living in racist Swansea and surviving in equally racist Belfast.

A final memorable experience as a visiting Fleet Street staffer, was reporting the Commonwealth summit from Edinburgh in 1997. A local reporter pestered me go out with him for an early evening drink in a beautifully decorated nearby pub while the summit was still in progress. He was in his 20s, born in Edinburgh, and a recent university graduate.

A reasonable assumption was that he wanted to absorb any available insights about the negotiations underway at the summit. After all, as a London-based journalist, I had easier access to briefings given by experts from the British Foreign Office. Even better, visiting Indian Prime Minister Indar Gujral was a family friend and willing to share his thoughts about all topics under discussion.

How wrong I was. To start with my host and colleague only wanted to talk about his expert knowledge of Scottish history. 

Then, when we had barely touched the first sip of the only pint that evening, he launched the question that would have surely earned him my granny’s ‘haram zada’ abuse.

Looking me straight in the face, he asked with a mix of malice and what came across as sheer contempt, “How didYou of all people, get such a great job as this?” 

The Commonwealth summit was held in October and to this day the anniversary of the meeting and my interaction with that Edinburgh-based colleague still rankles, invoking the most unchristian of all sentiments: Never forget, never forgive.

Why should these memories matter now when London at least has arguably evolved into one of the world’s most tolerant, multicultural and multi racial societies ? More foreign languages are spoken on the city’s streets– 300 at the last count – than any other capital in the world. Amnesty International was founded in London. Successive British governments have projected themselves as champions of international human rights.

One reason is to preserve bench marks from terrible times of the past as a point of reference for future generations of blacks and Asians, those who have grown up without experiencing any race discrimination, who have no idea what ‘wog’ meant and the contempt with which it was used. Like the jews who will never memories of the Holocaust fade, the aim is to make sure it never happens again.

The other objective is to recall how an Empire run by and for its white rulers encouraged an international culture of servility and obsequiousness that still lingers. It underpinned imperial rule and was one way of helping the Empire to survive. 

Today the Empire is dead, Britain has moved on and former colonies have evolved into independent states. But many who continue to doff their caps in the 22^nd century are inspired by traditions of the recent past. Victims unable to question the authority of those in charge, even if there happen to be murderers and thieves among them, can rightly blame their former colonial masters. Surely, these are reasons why former subjects and their descendants must never let go.

ends