I shared a flat with four other guys at the Kelvinhaugh Street Flats in Glasgow. Two of them were Scottish, one Greek and one Japanese. Once, a Pakistani grocer took the liberty of asking me, ‘Do you eat in the same plates as those goras – the white people?’ Two years later, it was in Edinburgh. Betty was an old Scottish lady, and I used to have a chat with her in my idle time. She used to watch some soaps on her 16-inch TV box, and occasionally I used to help her with little things during that time. One day, Betty spoke with tears in her eyes. ‘I have a Pakistani family living next to my place, and they have stopped their children from saying hi to me.’
These instances revealed to me the problem of assimilation of Pakistanis in predominantly white, Christian societies of the West. I asked a Scottish friend why didn’t I have to face the same problem with white people as other Pakistanis. According to him, I didn’t distance myself from the people in the neighborhood, and that made the difference. I experienced this more intensely ten years later, when I lived in the suburbs of Glasgow – Barrhead – with my family. When we were returning to Pakistan, the local church, where my son had visited once for a community play, arranged a leaving party. The community contributed towards a small parting gift for him. I don’t know if other Pakistanis living in Britain can relate to this story, those who keep themselves at a distance from the goras.
British diaspora films produced in the 1980-90s help us understand this cultural difference from a British perspective. These films mostly premiered on Film on Four, Channel 4, which had allocated special airtime for the Indo-Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain, with an aim to appeal ‘to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society.’ Films like My Beautiful Launderette (1981), Rita Sue and Bob Too (1987), My Son the Fanatic (1997), East is East (1999), et alia, featured the problems faced particularly by Pakistani diaspora in British society. First-generation Pakistani emigrants found it increasingly hard to blend in the society of their new chosen homeland. Ironically, they were happy to reap the material benefits of living there, but they outrightly rejected the social values of British culture. Those Pakistani men who married British women, à la, East is East, or had British girlfriends, as we see in Rita, Sue and Bob Too, insisted that those women adopt Pakistani culture if they wished to stay in a relationship with them. It’s not just Pakistani men. We can see this attitude among Pakistani women too; in a 2004 Scottish film, Ae Fond Kiss – it’s the sister of a Pakistani man, Tahira, who takes a stand against his relationship with a Scottish woman. A common feeling, which Pakistanis living in the UK, harbor in their hearts is that the British treated us badly during the Raj, plundered our wealth and now it’s time for them to pay back – ‘we’re here because you were there.’ This phrase also serves as the title of Ian Patel’s book, shortlisted for the BBC History Magazine award in 2021 that examines the problem of assimilation of Pakistani emigrants in the UK.
The colonization of India and Africa by Europeans had deprived the Muslims of their empires – Moghul and Ottoman – leaving the Muslims with a feeling of animosity towards the West, the white people. These sentiments also reflected in the pejoratively used terms – goras, firangi – for the white people. The Hindus never had the same problem with British rulers during the Raj in India as the Muslims. And therefore, the Hindus living in the West found didn’t find it hard to assimilate in those societies. This also explains the distinct nature of the relationship with the West that India and Pakistan have maintained respectively.
Towards the end of the previous century, the New World Order insisted on a homogenous world culture, global language, global market and so on. In this all-encompassing global village, assertion of individual cultural identities that posed any challenge to the notion of multiculturalism, internationalism, or propose a parallel socio-economic system, became problematic. However, as the balance of power shifts with the emergence of Asian nations as economic powers in the 21st century, Pakistan needs to reconsider its approach entirely on how to adapt to the emerging order. The hangover of a glorious past and old feelings of animosity towards others, nonetheless, need to be discarded.
‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but ourselves, …’ – Shakespeare, Julius Caesar