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Here, Harrison makes two points. One is about the border
between the city and the suburb, and the other is about the
author’s marketing strategy in using “Londonstani” as the book
title. In response to such criticism as Harrison’s, Malkani maintains
that “I would never have thought that I was writing a book that
could be called Hounslowstani” (Graham, 2008a). He further
explains that it is more broadly the London metropolis, rather than
the narrow and local area of Hounslow, with which his novel is
concerned. To make such a comment is, however, not to conform
with Harrison’s and several other critics’ arbitrary dichotomy
between the urban and the suburban, but to point out the fact that
“London is just made up of loads of different suburbs” (2008a).
For Malkani, “[t]he tourist guide London, the Leicester Square,
Westminster, Piccadilly kind of area
—
that really is for tourists”
(2008a). Set in an enclave in Hounslow,
Londonstani
is illustrative
of Malkani’s point that “[r]eal Londoners are not really in Zone 1”
(2008a).
Another controversy about the title is that, in the aftermath of
the terrorist attacks on July 7, 2005, many people have assumed
that the title “Londonstani” refers to the debate about the city’s
radicalized Muslims, as reflected in Phillips’
Londonistan
. Actually
the word “Londonstani” has been used long before it was applied
to radicalized Muslims and has had a more positive meaning.
When it was used in the 1990s by some South Asian British youths
as a desi slang for “Londoners,” “Londonstani” was a self-
referential term which was meant to be “a celebration of London’s
multiculturalism rather than a criticism of it” (Malkani, 2009). As
represented in
Londonstani
, the diversity of identities and the
intercultural interaction between different communities across the
border of nation state and ethnicity demonstrate that what is
failing in contemporary London and Britain are the multicultural
policies based purely on ethnicity identity politics, rather than the
multicultural reality that people from different backgrounds live
together.