Asians and the Arts

Published: 15/04/2008

Asians and the Arts.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

What Good Are The Arts? -title of a book by the brilliant and iconoclastic John Carey, whose lectures captivated me long ago when I was struggling to adapt to the peculiarly musky atmosphere of Oxford. Grandiloquent claims that the arts fill a god shaped hole, rouse rapture, set down ultimate moral templates are, writes the erudite Professor, untested assumptions or exaggerations: ‘The notion of artworks as sacred implies that their value is absolute and universal… Value, it seems evident, is not intrinsic in objects, but attributed to them by whoever is doing the valuing.’

Pragmatic relatives have been asking me Carey’s key question for decades. Ever since I disappointed them all back in Kampala, Uganda, when I decided that I would not be a doctor or lawyer and instead would devote myself to literature. How they tutted and fretted: ‘What stupidity is this? Will you eat novels?’ ‘Girl given such a huge brain. Foolhardy choice.’ ‘Come into my business, you will be manageress earning so much, will give you shares also.’ I ignored their protestations, never got shares in Uncle’s hugely profitable auto parts company. British Asians today still don’t get the arts, and don’t want to either. Got much better things to do.

They push their young people into real jobs that bring in big bucks or at least good brides from families with big bucks. A painter, novelist, playwright, performer, actor, cannot be admitted into respectable or wealthy dynasties unless, of course, there is evidence of ostentatious stardom.

Carey is right to puncture the hubris of high art custodians, but quite wrong to dismiss the ecstatic effect of a painting, dance or music, the plunge into profundity – almost like that kick in the stomach when a car drives down a hill fast- brought about by a poem or play. For me, growing up in a fragile, fractured household, the arts touched and exalted, took me out of time and place, enabled me to shape the confusion around me made by family, community, politics and God.

My generation of East African Asians were taught to appreciate Rembrandt, Monet, Moghul miniatures and the Pre-Raphaelites ( though not Picasso or Matisse- too wayward); we devoured novels and tuned into obscure Indian classical music and Tagore. At the flourishing National Theatre in Kampala we saw and sometimes acted in plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, many more. The best Crucible I have ever seen was on that stage with my own English teacher, Joyce Mann, playing a proud and truthful Elizabeth.

My peers, the class of 68, these days seek out Bombay Dreams, Sound of Music and Shilpa Shetty extravaganzas, the more expensive the better for status. They became creatures of clan and community, governed by manners and petty rules. They wilfully jettisoned art and found respectability. They made their families proud.

Many British Asians have accumulated untold lucre, while others are reaching the tops of educational and professional ladders. They are driven by both immigrant ambition and revenge. They tried to keep us down, and we showed the goras, whities, didn’t we just? The Jewish Diaspora felt the same sense of victory over circumstance and rejection. But that is where the comparison ends. Jewish migrants had to prioritise financial and professional security but they always understood the centrality of the arts. The soul had to be nourished as much as the body; the eye and ears yearned for pleasures beyond the price tag.

Perhaps Asian migrants yearned for but simply couldn’t reach for those pleasures. Even though families kept up familial contact, the scythe of history cut them off from the aesthetics of their ancient homelands, the imbibed, inherited and continuously revitalised appreciation of music, colour, dance, pictures and ancient folk theatre traditions. The pressures of settlement- racism, poverty, anxiety- drained the desire for beautiful distractions. It was all work and deferred gratification. Some did try to keep alive the melodies and images of the old countries. ( Remember, in the early years they couldn’t even see Hindi movies in this country) They gathered in homes or cold school halls to sing ghazals and qawalis, musical poetry about loss and love and faith. Old classical instruments – harmoniums, tablas, sitars- were heard, not too loud in case the neighbours complained. They were nostalgic, melancholic soirees which led only backwards, echoed aimlessly, a lament, as the life of the imagination passed away.

Utterly focussed on making good, Asians became adamantly philistine and the richer they get the more determined they seem to want to keep it that way. My auto-mart uncle puts it well: ‘My dear if I watch the trees and flowers when I am driving because they are pretty, I will soon lose my way.’ Alina Mirza, an Indie film expert despairs:’ Some businesses do support arts events, but nothing controversial. And if they can advertise their products. They want to be patrons to show off their saris and jewels at openings. To them it is another Mercedes’. Her husband, Suhayl Saadi, the Scots-Pakistani novelist agrees:’ In general, the Asian bourgeoisie are inclined towards kitsch or profit- nothing is important unless it is making pots of money. There is an anti-intellectualism even among those who have excellent degrees. It will take another generation perhaps to move to a consciousness that traverses beyond money.’’

Jatinder Verma, founder of Tara Arts, the reputable British Asian theatre company observes some stirrings of interest, but thus far it is only superficial: ’ ‘Over the last two decades people have become more comfortable and a small number from this emerging middle class are coming in, but too few are passionate ITALS about the theatre or dance. There is no understanding that the arts have intrinsic value, that they tell us who we are as a society, our relationships. We have not looked to critiquing ourselves, what our place is in this country, this world. We are not yet in love with ideas.’

My folk are also risk averse. They will not expose themselves to art that might awaken intense responses and show up awkward truths.
Globalisation unsettles them further. As the culture theorist Arjun Appadurai writes:
’ Because of the disjunctive and unstable interplay of commerce, media, national politics and consumer fantasies, ethnicity, once the genie contained in the bottle of some kind of locality ( however large) has now become a global force, forever slipping through the cracks between states and borders.’ The borderless world makes some migrant communities retreat into themselves, exert intolerable control over their own.

Remember the shame and scandal over Behzti, by the young Sikh woman, Gurpeet Kaur Bhatti? She wrote a play about child sexual abuse by a religious leader. Volatile Sikh protestors spooked the Birmingham Rep which withdrew the production. Bhatti later explained, over-explained:’ It was a sincere piece of work in which I wanted to explore how human frailties lead people into a prison of hypocrisy…theatre is not a cosy place, designed to make us feel good about ourselves.’ The pity, the pity of it all. Such successful migrants still so closed off.

In India, Pakistan and Bangladesh use the power of art to change the world. Just take Free Outgoing by Anupama Chandrasekhar, an Indian dramatist who was nurtured by the Royal Court. Her play deals with consensual teenage sex in a school in South India, and ugly social hypocrisy. The frontiers of acceptability are being pushed right back as artists interrogate traditional values. That renaissance has yet to happen here.

Sure Asians flocked to Rafta Rafta at the National. The script was sharp and observant, the acting superb, but yet a part of me regretted that the playwright, Ayub Khan Din, who gave us the vivid and subversive play, East is East, was making a concession to Asian populism that will serve him and the National’s ethnic audit very well, but does not push audiences off the comfort zone. It is the story, arguably the only story of British Asian life endlessly repeated in different settings and mediums- the wedding, marriage and extended families.

Bold artists, who break out of these claustrophobic themes would speak and play to empty spaces were it not for white enthusiasts. British Asians largely ignore their work. Compare this, to say, the thousands of British Jews who flocked to see Mike Leigh’s Two Thousand Years. They came along for great lines and characters like the rest, but also to see their stories refracted and reflected through the eyes of an unflinching writer.

Asian crowds can be drawn to such work, under false pretences, says Sudha Buchar, the co-founder of the theatre company Tamasha which roots itself in Asian entertainment conventions and then upends expectations- clever deception, for a greater good. Their Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and funeral, and Strictly Dandia played to full houses says Buchar: ‘We are the Mike Leighs of our world – if our own communities get us, that is tremendous recognition, a tremendous step. Posses of Asian women came in to see our stuff, parents now see us as role models, ’ These audiences now appreciate more edgy work like The Trouble With Asian Men based entirely on real testimonies. Getting sponsorship is getting easier for specific productions, but is still a struggle. Wealthy Asians are frightfully mean when it comes to the arts.

At the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently I noted the galleries named after benefactors who went to the US as refugees and made their fortunes. Honouring beauty thus, they immortalize the triumph of the stubbornly determined immigrant. How many British galleries are named after generous Asian donors? Arab money gave us the gorgeous Islamic arts gallery in the V&A and occasionally some reputable Indian artists or old objects tempt Asian investors to buy for all the wrong reasons. The Mittals throw lavish parties and buy football clubs; the Hinduchas happily gave to the catastrophic Dome for smiley pics with the Blairs, but neither appears to care for the arts. Sir Gulam Noon, a Muslim, is a rare Asian millionaire who often backs exhibitions and theatre productions of excellence. He is also an enthusiastic collector of paintings :’ I have loved art for many years- my neighbour was M.A Hussain, India’s most revered painter. I have never sold a single painting. Muslims in particular have no idea any more of our great old artistic traditions. They are indoctrinated by these ignorant Imams. It is so sad, so unfortunate’.

The fear factor cannot be underestimated. To people who live by Austenian codes, the artistic hinterlands are bedlam, indecent, chaotic. These days British Muslim parents ask teachers to keep their kids from art classes, drama, fiction and poetry. On the big screen and small, some of our best have again have offended more Asians than excited them. My Beautiful Laundrette (‘Dirty bloody film, we don’t have homosexuals’), Bhaji on the Beach ( ‘One of our girls having a black boyfriend? Never can happen’), East is East, ( ‘Bad film, that Ayub Khan should go to hell, he is the devil’), Brick Lane, ( ‘Our women do not have affairs, insult to our ways’) and on and on.

The novelist is even lonelier and more misunderstood, at times, as in the case of Rushdie hated beyond belief. Kureishi too gets them going, and Monika Ali and Guatam Malkhani who found himself ostracised for writing about Muslims in his novel Londonstan. He wasn’t a Muslim objectors said, and so had no right to imaginatively enter their ghettoes.

Chila Burman is an exuberant artist whose Indian dad settled in Liverpool, sold ice creams from a brightly painted van. The sun is rising for her, deservedly so. Collectors in India are enthusiasts but it is proving much harder to win over British Asians:’ They just don’t go to galleries How many of us do you ever see at the Royal Academy? And yet we come from such visually vibrant cultures and traditions. I think it is because they are all into films and community entertainment. Very few young Asians go into art, though some are now going into graphic design. ‘ Her work is truly original, beautiful, political, ecstatic, ironic, philosophical and disturbing. A collage of her own fine breasts in garish bras was a London Underground poster, must have shocked traditionalists. She tries to be understanding: ‘Why have these weird images that are likely to invade your subconscious than a nice goddess with a flute in a golden sari? That way you get a picture and you please the gods. Cheaper too.’ Zarina Bhimji, shortlisted for the Turner Prize last year is again, praised by outsiders, shunned by insiders. She did once manage to get her stuff displayed in a Muslim centre, including a feminist piece featuring real female public hair. They put up with the upsetting image- which shows some change I guess.

Shobana Jeyasingh, trained Indian classical dancer and avant-garde choreographer knows well the clash between Asian heritage or religion and modernity: ‘Contemporary art is the enemy of everything they value and it is difficult, stubborn, uncompromising’. She created a piece which was performed at City Hall, across a vast, curved window, a work that was both baroque and yet had unmistakably classical Indian roots. Dancers wore plain red dresses. This upset Asian businessmen invitees in a three piece suits who wanted traditional Indian costumes, bells on ankles. Jeyasingh believes this conservatism is to do with the scars of colonialism, the collapse of collective self confidence which has yet to recover.

Between Bollywood and Ravi Shankar is where British Asian Arts flounders, or in some cases flourishes, in that unclaimed territory, our own space.

That opening makes white gatekeepers nervy. They understand bhangra, or Bolly, or anything with the appeal of Goodness Gracious Me. Saadi was recently invited by Scottish Opera to write a mini opera – as were Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith. Saadi’s heroine was a working class Asian Glasgow woman who beats extraordinary odds. Ignorant critics treated it like a late night curry. Not ‘ethnic enough’ for some; too damned strong for others. Some of the Arts Council cuts this year are just as foolish and simplistic. Audacious art which didn’t keep to cultural lines lost funds. Nothing new here. In the sixties the gifted British Asian artist Balraj Khanna was much admired. His pictures are obviously influenced by Miro and Klee. Yet, critic, Philip Rawson wrote:’ His work is suffused with pure Indian sensibility. Its content is modestly universal, but, it is imbued with an element of sensuous charm natural to his native ITALS PREVIOUS MINE tradition’.

What does all this mean for the artist? Some, like Jeyasingh and Verma refuse to compromise, creatively challenge Asian and white expectations. Others sell their exotic selves to the white liberal world to find phenomenal success. Then there are those who stay authentic and true while mostly speaking to curious strangers. How they would love to reach and touch their own people with whom they share a complex and changing identity. In every one of the artists I have spoken to, there was spoken or unspoken sadness about this disconnect.

The younger generation of British Asians may well have been more responsive to their artists if British society wasn’t drifting into banality and mass culture. One soulful composer ( who wanted to remain anonymous) ruefully observes:’ Asian kitsch has cache now. The young would rather go to fashion shows than exhibitions, listen to Brittney rather than Nitin Sawney. There are of course brilliants individuals who will always rise but with no blood links, cultural pathways to and from their people. We British Asian artists are lost before we were found and I am very depressed about the future. ’

This is a longer version of a published piece in the Independent

Published in The Independent