Rory MacLean reviews Ziauddin Sardar’s entertaining journey [Balti Britain : A Journey Through the British Asian Experience, by Ziauddin Sardar, published by Granta]to unravel the diverse threads of the British Asian experience. From The Guardian:
Not for the first time Ziauddin Sardar opens a door to places many of us would not otherwise see. He begins at a familiar crossroad. Around Birmingham’s balti triangle huddle the largest concentration of balti restaurants in the UK. Tourists flock here for the “hottest weekend breaks in Britain”. Balti ready-meals fill our supermarket shelves.
According to some dictionaries, the dish is named after the Balti tribes of Baltistan. But in truth the balti is a modern British invention. The first balti was conjured up not in the Swat Valley but rather in a Sparkbrook kitchen as a reaction to the ubiquitous curry – that earlier Anglo-Indian creation which
many Brits thought was the only food eaten in the subcontinent. No Pakistani in his right mind would ever cook in a balti (the word means bucket in Urdu). As one restaurant owner tells Sardar, “It’s a joke. It all started as a joke. It was an invention for the goras (white folks).”
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Previously in AW: Chronicle of the British Asian experience
In The National, Burhan Wazir reviews Ziauddin Sardar’s “Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience,” published by Granta Books. [via 3quarksdaily]
Anyone living in London in the late Nineties couldn’t fail to notice that the city’s British Asian population was basking in its own Britpop moment. On Brick Lane, in the city’s traditionally poor East End, new restaurants and bars opened their doors to an influx of young artists attracted to cheap rents and good transport links in the borough of Tower Hamlets. Bangladeshi teenagers in Union Jack T-shirts patrolled the area with their pet boxer dogs, the status symbols du jour of national pride. Musicians like Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation and Nitin Sawhney graduated from the ethnic press to the glossy pages of style magazines like The Face, Dazed & Confused and iD. Fans of those artists could even subscribe to a new magazine called Second Generasion – the title probably seemed clever at the time, but has aged with the same grace as Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic, a Prince album from the era. Around the same time, Eastern Eye, the BBC’s weekend magazine show, began broadcasting Bollywood news and Asian current affairs, and the cast of Goodness Gracious Me dredged all humour from every available British Asian stereotype. Even cinema audiences weren’t immune to the delights of the Asian subcontinent: both East is East and Bend it Like Beckham played to packed screens for weeks.
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