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Identity Politics of South Asian Enclaves
41
In her introduction to
Imagined Londons
, Pamela Gilbert
comments on the different faces of London at different historical
times and to different people:
London: world city, global city, capital of empire. Literary
London. The East End. Jack the Ripper. The Beatles.
Beefeaters. The Tower. Village London. Merry Olde
London. The London of St. Paul’s and the Milleninum
Dome, the London of the Fire, of Dickens, of Blake. The
London of Elizabeth, of Victoria, of tourists, of Londoners.
The Londons of the Imagination. (2002: 1)
In particular, while underscoring the plurality of London, Gilbert
draws the reader’s attention to the fact that, because of its long history
as the cultural, socio-economic, and political center of Britain, London
has been depicted in literature for centuries. Nevertheless, as a literary
setting, London has appeared not only in the works of white British
writers such as Dickens and Blake, but also, more recently, in the
works by Black and Asian British writers. According to John Ball,
London can be said “to be the single most frequently used
geographical signifier and setting” in “all English-language fiction
from the postcolonial Commonwealth” (2004: 5). It can be attributed
to the fact that London is a global city and was once the capital of the
British Empire. Thus, as Fatimah Kelleher points out, “ethnic minority
groups are always heavily concentrated in the urban centres, with
nearly half of the total population in London alone” (2005: 241).
Here Kelleher appears to agree with Ball’s statement above when she
argues that, “since 1991, everyday London tales are very much
becoming stories that once belonged on the fringes of society” (2005:
241). Postcolonial and post-imperial as it is, contemporary London
has become a multicultural city where immigrants and ethnic minority
groups live with one another as well as with the host society.
In contemporary South Asian British literature, not only the
inner city of London, as exemplified more recently by Monica Ali’s
Brick Lane
(2003), but also its suburbs have been depicted in a
string of novels. Although, as Rupa Huq maintains in “Darkness on