Author:
Publication: Times Online
Date: July 10, 2006
URL: http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2006/07/hindu_indian_de.html#comments
The Hindu community is one of Britain's fastest
growing and best integrated ethnic groups. The 2001 Census put the numbers
at nearly 550,000 but community leaders believe that with the pace of immigration
since then, there could be more than 700,000. They are Britain's third largest
faith community after Christians and Muslims. And as we report exclusively,
they are fed up with being described as Asian. This was the most surprising
finding of the first comprehensive survey of the community, by the Runnymede
Trust and the Hindu Forum of Britain and sponsored by Ruth Kelly's Government
department. This picture shows dancers at the Hindu Forum ball earlier this
year.
This picture shows Hilary Armstrong lighting
a Diwali candle at the House of Commons last year. For a couple of years now
there has been a Diwali party at the Commons. I went to the first one and
it was hot, crowded and great fun. That's the thing about Hindu festivals,
they are always fun and in addition there is always as much of the most tasty
free food you could possibly eat and more, and often it is free. Hinduism
is a festival-based religion. And that is another issue the Runnymede research
uncovered. In planning issues, for example, local authorities fail to understand
how different the Hindu and Muslim communities are. And Hindus are also fed
up with being judged from the UK paradigm of the Abrahamic faiths, one that
is so integral to our society that we take it for granted and don't think
of its effect on the peoples not of the Book.
Communities Secretary of State Ruth Kelly
is to launch the report at the House of Commons this morning. She told me
earlier: "We need to be sensitive to terminology." She said the
story of Britain's Hindus was "a very encouraging story of positive integration."
She said: "I think that the Hindu communities in Britain have made a
huge contribution to the social and economic prosperity of our society. What
we now need the community to do is identify the issues they face so that we
can respond."
She said the community would be helped by
the new Commission on Integration and Cohesion that her department is in the
process of setting up and that will visit towns such as Leicester, Oldham
and Barking to help different ethnic cope with diversity and change. She acknowledged
that the Hindu community was keen to be treated in a comparable way to other
faith communities. "In some respects they are a model community,"
she said. "They have led the way in integration and building up understanding
while maintaining links with their own heritage and culture."
Ramesh Kallidai, secretary general of the
Hindu Forum of Britain and the driving force behind the survey, tells a story
that is not untypical. Ramesh, aged 40, came to Britain from Mumbai, India
on a work visa in 1993 and is now a British citizen and working as an IT consultant
with Fujitsu Services, currently on a project with the NHS.He and his wife
Deepali live in Hertfordsire and their son, Neel, aged 4, attends a Church
of England school and speaks only English.He has led many consultation exercises
between the UK government and the Hindu community and has had more than 14
years of research experience in studying and writing about Hinduism. The most
important finding of the study, he believes, is the strong desire among Hindus
to disown the term "Asian". Ramesh said: "We don't want to
be called Asian. The term is too broad. And within it the communities are
too diverse. It does not do justice to anyone to club all the different communities
together and provide them with the same type of service."
He gave a personal example of the difficulties
that can arise from the view that there is one, homogenous Asian community
in Britain. "Three days after the London bombings, I had just come out
of Portcullis House in Westminster and was rushing off to a memorial event
for the victims of the bombings, where I would be sharing a platform with
Sir Ian Blair and Tessa Jowell. Outside Westminster tube station, I was stopped
and searched by police. They took me to a corner and said they were deeply
suspicious of me. They called armed police. They refused to touch my bag.
Everyone passing by was glaring at me as if I was a criminal. Two armed police
came and pointed their guns at me and asked me to open my laptop.
"They were doing their duty. I have no
problem with any of that. I would rather they searched 2,000 people and save
one life than search 20 and somebody die. But what really was a matter of
great concern to me was that every police officer, when they do a stop and
search, has to produce a piece of paper called 'voluntary self-identification'
so they person they have stopped has the chance to state their ethnicity.
These police did not do that." He believes if better and more statistics
were collected by all public authorites, there would be greater awareness
and understanding of Hindus and their religion in Britain.
Other examples are also readily available.
Wedding parties, for example, need to accommodate hundreds of people at a
time, sometimes for days on end. The Hare Krishna temple at Watford (the one
founded by former Beatle George Harrison) in the summer erects in its grouns
the biggest Hindu marquee for wedding parties in Britain. The marquee is booked
solid so the community is trying to get planning permission to extend the
wedding season another month. It is being refused, even though all the traffic
goes directly off and onto the M1 motorway. Hindus have been told things such
as: "Why don't you do what we Christians do and go somewhere else for
the reception?"
Then there are the funerals. Hindu cremations
again demand a two-hour ritual, something few if any crematoria are willing
to provide. But the community's attempts to get planning permission for their
own crematoria are being met with incomprehension.
It is impossible to imagine a Britain in which
similar refusals were encountered by Christian, Muslim or Jewish communities.
So Hindus, even though they have a large middle class, tend to be property
owners, have children who do well at school and suffer comparatively little
deprivation, are feeling discriminated against. Also, the community's relative
prosperity disguises real pockets of deprivation. But Hindus feel they miss
out on funding and also on representation on bodies aimed at helping ethnic
communities.
Then there are just simple things, such as
hospital food. Hindus complained to researches that hospitals would serve
halal food but not the vegetarian fare required by some Hindus, or food without
garlic and onions prohibited to others.
And then there is the troubling nature of
this little paragraph detailing the discussions in one focus group, in Manchester:
Participant One: "There are various other
aggressive methods used [to convert Hindus]. Recently I saw the leaflet whereby
a Muslim youth is offered £10,000 for converting a Hindu girl into Islam."
Interviewer: "You saw this leaflet?"
Participant Two: "Yes, we have all got
a copy."
Participant Three: "We've seen it. Lying
around universities."
Interviewing Ramesh, I asked whether he had
ever seen this leaflet. He had, and vouched for the veracity of this exchange.
While work is clearly needed in Muslim-Hindu
relations, one answer to some of these difficulties would indeed be in a change
of nomenclature. When dropping the term "Asian" was first mooted,
I was rather dumbfounded. If not Asian, what were they? But thinking about
it, it makes increasing sense. Asians, as Ramesh Kallidai who runs the forum
pointed out to me, include Russians, Chinese and indeed the whole continent.
I am Caucasian but consider that too broad a defition of my identity. I prefer
English, or British. Hindus are not clear yet, but coming out of the research
were preferences for British Indian, Indian, Hindu or even Desi. That is a
Hindi word meaning routed in one's country. Desi is being adopted by many
in youth culture. There is already a Desi nightclub in London and the US has
Desi MTV. It has a nice sound to it, desirable perhaps, and just could catch
on. Ruth Kelly, who hopes her new Commission on Integration and Cohesion will
address some of the issues raised in the report, told me that sensitivity
to terminology is a must.
The biggest influx of Hindus to Britain came
after independence in 1947. Many came over as cheap industrial labour in Britain's
expanding economy and quickly moved up through sheer hard work into the middle
classes, becoming stalwarts of the legal, medical and other professions. The
Hindu communty has the second largest middle class of any ethnic monority,
second after the Jewish community. But for 150 years before that and right
back until the early 17th century, many Indian lawyers, doctors, traders and
other travelers were welcomed to Britain. The immigration was linked inextricably
to Britain's colonial history. Some Hindus became extremely eminent, others
remained less known but have become recent subjects of academic study as interest
in this area grows.
In At the Heart of the Empire, Antoinette
Burton describes how "Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking
a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's
attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford
to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji
Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected
London to colonial scrutiny in the process."
I have always felt an affinity with Hinduism
because of my own family's history in India and Burma. My grandfather on my
father's side, Professor Alan Gledhill, was a lawyer and Judge in Burma. There
is a family story that he trekked physically to India after Burmese independence,
leaving many possessions behind. In India he again worked as a High Court
judge until partition, when he advised and wrote the definitive text book
on the new Pakistani constitution. You can still buy some of his books in
India. He returned to London and became Professor of Indian Law at SOAS. His
wife and my grandmother, Mercy Harvey (originally of the Bristol Harveys),
was born in Calcutta. Again, According to our oral family history - I've never
been able to substantiate this - her father died in an earthquake in Calcutta
in 1906 and her mother died six months later of a broken heart. Mercy, a Catholic,
was a little baby at the time and was raised by her Indian "aya".
She never really recovered from losing her parents and on coming to England
after independence took to her bed and never got up again.
Many good and many not-so-good things came
out of Britain's colonial era. I like reading Niall Ferguson on all this.
I myself would not exist had the heat and shade of Calcutta not brought my
grandparents together. The more I think about it, the more the habit of labelling
all people of Indian and Pakistani origin as "Asian" seems a relic
of the less-benevolent aspects of our colonial past. This research gives a
valuable insight into one of Britain's most estimable but least understood
communities. Just because Britain's Hindus have little tendency towards violence
in their political expression does not mean that every attempt should not
be made to honour the community's needs.
