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Identity Politics of South Asian Enclaves
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are going to teach “a lesson or two for going out with a Sikh girl an
then trying to convert her to Islam” (Malkani, 2006a: 77), Hardjit
and his rudeboy gang stop by a supermarket to run errands for
Amit’s mother, but when they arrive, they find Tariq late because
he “[h]ad 2 go 2 some supermarket wid his mum, innit, help her
carry da shopping bags” (2006a: 99). In the end, as Ruvani
Ranasinha argues, the desi rudeboys’ aggressive gang identity is
faked and performed only ironically to express their
“hyper-masculinity [. . .] in opposition to the overpowering
presence of their mothers who rule the roost” (2009: 302).
While making the rudeboys’ violence and swearing all a
performance, the novel subtly challenges and satirizes, I suggest,
white British people’s fear of Asian gangs as a consequence of
residential segregation. According to Claire Alexander, the
prevalent use of “the Asian gang” to describe Asian youth actually
follows the media’s report of “the arrival of this new ‘folk devil’ on
the urban landscape” and “in the wake of tales of bourgeoning
‘Asian’ criminality and civil unrest” (2000: xiii). The derogatory
appellation “shares with its more embracing generic counterpart
the assertions of threat, of anger, of alienation, of violence” (2000:
xiii). Moreover, in the post-9/11 context, and particularly after
London was hit by suicide bombers in July 2005, “the Asian gang”
narrative worked hand in hand with “Islamphobia” to make South
Asian British youths, especially Muslims, scapegoats for turning
London, the capital of Britain, into “Londonistan.” According to
Omar Nasiri, “Londonistan”
—
a term first coined in the mid- to
late-1990s
—
is “a title provided by French officials infuriated at the
growing presence of Islamist radicals in London and the failure of
British authorities to do anything about it” (2006: 16). Aware of
the word as “a mocking play on the names of such state sponsors
of terrorism as Afghanistan” and its suggested criticism of London
as “the major European center for the promotion, recruitment and
financing of Islamic terror and extremism,” Melanie Phillips
—
a
British-born Jewish author who was voted “the 2003’s Most