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Conquering Britain!
By Brishti Bandyopadhyay; Illustrated by Shiju George
November 25, 2000: A few weeks ago, we wrote about Indian-born Roshan Doug, who has been selected as the poet-laureate for the city of Birmingham in Britain. Close on the heels of that news comes another: Birmingham councillors will be giving an Indian name to a few suburbs in the city.
Birmingham's Apna Town
Apna Town (our town) will be the new name for Sparbrook, a group of suburbs in Birmingham city. So this Christmas, if you drive past the Midlands (160 km north of London) you can see the Apna Town signage in English, Hindi, Gurmukhi and Urdu. A report on this, written by 'India Abroad News Service', appeared in the 'Asian Age'.
Birmingham has a sizeable Indian population and they are a fairly successful community in this city. A good number of them live in Sparbrook ward, and the reason why it is locally called the 'Balti Belt'. Know why? Indian restaurants in Britain serve gravy items in a Balti or pail. And these meals are obviously popular items for the British palate.
Some of the Birmingham Indians have contributed money towards revamping the suburbs of Sparbrook. Recently, when the proposal for renaming the area came about, these residents suggested that it be called Apna Town. The name was then placed before the local Regeneration Board (that looks after the city's civic issues), which approved it.
The move does not please everyone though. "These plans are taking the Britishness out of Birmingham", says Councillor Peter Douglas Osborn, who belongs to the Conservative Party in Britain. "Apna Town doesn't give the impression of a multi-cultural society. It simply gives the impression of a cultural group coming over from the Indian sub-continent and planting itself there", he added.
The Conservatives are critical of Britain's Labour government's move to welcome skilled migrants from Asian countries to supplement the British work force.
Others say it is insulting to the heritage of the city.
Unity in Diversity
Actually the move is part of a larger effort by British authorities to build Britain into a multi-cultural society whose diversity is reflected in British institutions, and cultural and social mores.
Britain today has a large number of people who are not British by origin but are citizens nevertheless. These people arrived in Britain from various countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and the West Indies, all former colonies of Britain. In fact Britain's cultural diversity finds its origins in its imperial history when Britain ruled a large part of the world.
Britain's Past
To atone for its policy of colonialism (political and economic control by one country over a dependent country), Britain in the 1960s followed an immigration policy that encouraged people from its former colonies, like India and the West Indies, to migrate to it permanently. Many did and are today doing relatively well for themselves.
But critics against the British immigration policy (the policy that deals with making a person not native to a particular nation a permanent citizen of that nation) argued that the influx of migrants in Britain would result in the migrants outnumbering those originally from Britain. So the Immigration Act of 1971 toughened the existing laws by erecting barriers against the easy migration policies of the previous era.
However, the policy of closing the doors to migrants backfired. Britain has now embarked on what the reputed British paper 'Financial Times' describes as the biggest revision of immigration rules in 30 years.
