Balti Britain by Ziauddin Sardar

Ziauddin Sardar undertakes a daunting task. He seeks to assemble the mind-boggling diversity of the British Asian experience in Balti Britain.

A review of the book on Amazon reads, “In this funny, surprising, touching, and controversial study, Ziauddin Sardar travels to the main Asian communities in the UK-among them Leicester and Birmingham, Glasgow and Bradford, Tower Hamlets and Oldham-to tell the history of Asians in Britain. From the arrival of the first Indian in 1614 through the entangled days of colonialism, to the young extremists in Walthamstow mosque in 2006.”

Sardar interweaves accounts of his own life through the book, describing his carefree childhood in Pakistan, his family’s migration to racist 1950s Britain, and his adulthood straddling two cultures. Along the way he asks a bevy of probing questions, among them “Are arranged marriages a good thing? Does the term Asian obscure more than it conveys? Do Vindaloo and Balti actually exist? How far does “the disease that is in us is of us and within us” describe Islamic terrorism? And is multiculturalism an impossible dream?”

Ziauddin Sardar is a distinguished writer, commentator and broadcaster. He has made numerous television programmes, including Battle for Islam, a 90-minute documentary for BBC2 and Dispatches for Channel 4 on Pakistan. In 2006 he was appointed a Commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission of Britain.

Commentary by Joyeeta Basu for AIM Magazne