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Identity Politics of South Asian Enclaves
47
that there is no question of authenticity in his novel because the
novel is actually about a group of boys who pretend to be gangsters
living in a ghetto, whereas in fact they are mommy’s boys and live
in five-bedroom houses. What is at issue in the novel is thus
“inauthenticity” rather than authenticity. That is, instead of fixing
the cultural identity of desis purely in terms of race and ethnicity,
as the early forms of multicultural policies did,
Londonstani
can be
read as a literary attempt to redefine multiculturalism and to
illustrate the multifaceted nature of contemporary identity when,
through the everyday practices of the desi characters, the author
portrays how other differences such as gender, age, and class
impact the roles desis play in the ethnic enclave.
In this article, I attempt to explore the political implications of
some reviewers’ expectations that they will discover the ghettoized
nature of disaffected, urban, Asian youth in an almost
self-segregated London suburb, and to examine Malkani’s literary
strategies of irony in characterizing an earnest desi narrator, who
turns out to be a white, and in recreating a pseudo-ghetto world in
the novel. I suggest that, in so doing, the novel can be read as a
parody of the stereotyped tale of Asian immigrants growing up in
the midst of poverty and violence in the ghetto, and living in
separation from the host society. While exploring the questions of
place, identity, and ethnicity with a focus on the (in)adequacy of
(in)authenticity and multiculturalism in the novel, I further argue
that, even if, on the surface, the concentration of South Asian
immigrants in Hounslow may reflect ethnic segregation and
support the critique of the end, or failure, of multiculturalism, if
read in depth, through the portrayal of the diversity of subcultures,
the nuances of South Asian diasporic identity, and the rudeboys’
use of hybrid language in the ethnic enclave, Malkani’s novel
challenges the supposed “failure” of “multiculturalism” as a policy
based simply on ethnicity identity politics. More importantly, it
redefines multiculturalism and points out that, in contemporary
London and Britain, even in an ethnic enclave, it is evidently a