Capital Accounts

London Calling, Sukhdev Sandhu's study examining London through black and Asian eyes, is long overdue says Faisal Islam

London Calling
Sukhdev Sandhu
HarperCollins £20, pp 389

London is evolving into a different country to the rest of Britain. Part of that is the centralisation of financial, cultural, media and political power within the M25. Much more of it is about migration. The Economist believes that the unfettered flow of the world's workers to our capital is helping ease 100,000 Britons per year out as property becomes too expensive. A Welsh nationalist politician says that English people are moving to Wales to escape Asians.

While there's plenty said about the growing presence of brown Britain on these shores, what has brown Britain said of its adopted homeland? Sukhdev Sandhu's 389-page trawl through four centuries of storytelling about the capital city, through the eyes of black and Asian writers, is a clarion call for an over-looked literary tradition.

Sandhu's belated contribution focuses on the relationship between black writers and London, the capital of Empire, and then, as now, a magnet for the curiosities of its multiracial subjects around the globe. A fin-de-siècle travel ogue by Indian writer T.B. Pandian describes London as a 'Mecca for the traveller in search of truth, the Persepolis of human grandeur in repose. To the searcher of enlightenment it is a Buddh Gaya; a Benares for the sinner in search of emancipation. Damp, dirty, noisy London, thou art verily a Jerusalem for the weary soldier of faith'.

Such devotionals are more easily granted by those passing through London than those who actually have to live within it. Sandhu illuminates a century-old tradition of travel writing from upper-caste Indians, waddling through Victorian society, picking up most of its vices, and inspecting how its culture was repackaged for the average Englishman at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition.

One of the remarkable aspects of these stories was the instant access gained by these newcomers to the English establishment. Upper-caste Indians did not start life at the foot of Britain's social scale. They were catapulted over socially immobile, white, working classes straight into upper-class London. The path to the likes of V.S. Naipaul is clear.

But it is a more tendentious route back to the mid-eighteenth century slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, and Ignatius Sancho. Sancho, a freed slave turned ardent royalist, was the first black man known to have voted in an election for the House of Commons. He saw London 'not just as a place to live in or to make money, but as a set of values, a tone of voice,' says Sandhu.

Sandhu's ambitious survey does show that there has always been a rich seam of talent that publishers have failed to mine. But his central thesis - that this metaphysical conception of London as freedom unites Sancho's story with those of Rushdie and Kureishi - is questionable.

Sustaining a linear narrative that goes from the celebrated slave writings of Equiano to the posturing rage of V.S. Naipaul proves a tricky feat. An afterword by the author admits as much. And for those sceptical of the fetishisation of London, the study loses its central thread. The book, at times, risks descending into a list of writers with high melanin counts.

Perhaps Empire and returning home to the 'motherland' are more coherent themes that run through all the texts surveyed here. There are glimpses of exceptional insight into the relationship between different migrant groups, the propensity of newcomers to take on some of the most unpleasant of London tropes (Equiano ended up a slave-owner), and the fact that black writing is hardly defined by ceaseless radicalism. 'Throughout the centuries, the primary struggles for most black and Asian Londoners have been domestic, not political,' writes Sandhu.

There remains a presumption of representation that surrounds writing by brown Britons. Monica Ali, for example, has been gently criticised for writing about Bengali culture without knowing the language. The symbols of twenty-first century multicultural Britain promoted by the publishers happen to be attractive, mixed-race, young women.

Sandhu shows that whatever the hue of their complexion, successful writers are automatically part of an elite. Their stories are the perspectives of people rather than 'cultures'. This cocktail of literary archaeology, social critique and storytelling reopens a window on a marginalised world.

Source: The Guardian, UK