London was a fine city even in the mid-nineties. One could spot tourists from India wearing lovely western dresses. They generally conversed in English and most of them claimed to be from Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Madras, or Bangalore. This obviously meant that most people who were not from India naturally assumed that the rest of the country was still in the Middle Ages with the natives going around half-naked and hunting animals or gathering berries for their food.
I remember one cab driver attempting to strike a polite conversation with us, asked, ‘Why is everyone always from Delhi?” Aren’t there any other cities there?’
‘India is a big country, and everyone isn’t always only from Delhi,’ I replied, ‘A lot of us do fly out from Delhi though.’
There were times when we could discern a bit of curiosity in the eyes of both children and adults here. We would often smile, and it encouraged them to ask us about what Specky, my wife, wore or what the bindi was all about or the reason most Indians were able to speak English reasonably well. Those were the mid-nineties, a time when even Londoners were waking up to concepts of diversity and multi-culturalism, and the fact that even visitors and immigrants were expected to shed their reticence to display their ethnicity, fashions, and habits. If all this sounds like a cultural revolution, it has indeed been that though it has taken shape slowly over time.
Specky was then on a Commonwealth scholarship and pursuing her DPhil in mathematics at the University of York and our British neighbours seemed enamoured by her dresses just as much as they often happily told us: ‘Ah! I knew you were making some delicious Indian curry. The aroma was there even as I turned the corner.’ Specky was asked by local schools to come and talk about India and answer questions that small children might have. We knew instinctively then that if York is appreciative and receptive to Indians, London might already be on its way to make acceptance normal.
London, in comparison to York, was bigger and more baffling. Like the time when a Gujarati bus conductor in a bus that we boarded at Westminster in London, asked, ‘Kahan?’
‘Last stop,’ I said, with a smile. He gave us a bewildered look and said in a muffled voice, ‘Please get off at the next stop and take a bus going back. The areas ahead are not safe.’ We thought this was insane though we followed his advice. Our little adventure had just ended. We had no idea why that fellow wanted to dissuade us from extending our trip beyond the touristy areas, but it had something to do with the tension with the Black people and the Irish.
London in 2025 is just as fine so far as the upkeep of its monuments and the weather is concerned. Indians like me love the grey skies of this city. However, this place is now markedly more diverse and globalized. While sitting in a bus, the DLR, or the Underground, one hears a medley of many languages and… well, while one waits patiently to hear some English. It is the same in playgrounds, parks, and inside stores. The foreign-born population has since grown significantly – from about 1.8 million in 1991 (25% of the population) to over 3.6 million by 2021 (around 40%). What this means is that the nineties and its “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” rhetoric doesn’t exist anymore. It is believed that the 2012 Olympics was a major turning point when London was highlighted as a global city and there were efforts made to boost the notion of having pride in diversity. Foreign dresses, foreign languages, foreign habits, and even foreign presence is the norm now. The anti-immigrant sentiment is surely softened. We did come across some hand-sprayed graffiti on the walls near Windsor Castle that asked tourists to go back! Really? That vandal was surely in an intoxicated stupor.
Whatever rumble of grumbles one overhears these days revolve around economic pressures, housing shortages, government’s health policies, and petty crime statistics. Though, I must add here that as compared to how things are in India, the place is a heaven. Even the dissatisfied grunts one might have heard after the post-Brexit polarization have been reduced to whimpers. Some journalists and columnists here claim that the pandemic fallout after the Covid-19 phase did heighten suspicion of outsiders and East Asians did face a certain degree of scapegoating… but again, London is resilient and has bounced back to normalcy.
Foreigners are less ‘other’ today. Cultural integration gets clearer when one understands that the ‘Southall for Indians and Brixton for Afro-Caribbeans’ ethnic enclaves that were prominent in the nineties, now have ripples of intermingling getting stronger. One doesn’t often hear of incidents of hate crime against Indians and one contributory reason could be the nearly 500,000 Indians in the UK, of which many live in London. These numbers and the rise in the number of varied professionals from India has led to them no longer being marooned in stereotypic islands and addressed as ‘curries’ and ‘techies’ but stepping up to be a core part of London’s societal fabric. To add to this change is the surge in tourism from India and statistics of VisitBritain show more than 400,000 visits in 2023 alone, and likely to keep moving higher. The tourist from India has the advantage of exposure to colonial history and Bollywood that eases them seamlessly into British culture. Yes, some murmurs of Indians being loud and fond of haggling do their rounds periodically but then, isn’t any tourist anywhere the same? Look up any blog and you will know how even the British don their haggling robes when in the Middle East or even In India.
Back in the nineties, the Indian tourist had a high percent from the rich and well-to-do classes. There were students who had won scholarships and, of course, those from them who decided to stay on. Coming to present times, London’s Indian diaspora is a success story. I have read about Diwali being celebrated on Trafalgar Square and every time I step into any known grocery store like TESCO, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, or M&S, I can see stuff that was not there on the shelves of stores (that existed then) only a couple of decades earlier. My grandson’s nursery celebrates Holi, Diwali, and Eid, besides Easter, Christmas, and other days that are a part of the vintage British culture.
London weather, quite literally, is warmer. Nice and warm, some will say, and I am talking about not just grey cloudy skies but about people. Londoners, to be precise. It is still safer though to keep your raincoats ready unless you want some sudden outburst of prejudice to leave you wet and sheepish!
.
.
.
Arvind Passey
Uploaded on 03 April 2025
.
.I’m participating in BlogchatterA2Z
.
