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
Arranged marriages fascinate people in the UK ‘like watching horror films’. Don’t scoff, says Ziauddin Sardar (author of Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience), British society could learn a lot from the Asian experience. In The Guardian:
Consider the case of two sisters whose lives are thrown into turmoil by political events. The partition of India was mass trauma. The sisters were uprooted from all the normality they had known and had to trek to Pakistan along with their extensive family. But making a new life in a new place sent family members hiving off in all directions to find jobs and opportunity. The bonds of family seemed to be weakening, indeed on the verge of destruction. So the sisters hatched a plan to countermand the forces that were shattering their tradition. If their first-born children were a boy and a girl then they would arrange their marriage to one another. In this way they could preserve the family and pass on to their offspring the solidity and support the sisters had once known.
How could two women conceive of such a scheme for two people they had not yet conceived? And why would they imagine such a premature arrangement could possibly have a chance of succeeding? Well, consider that as sisters they shared a common heritage of values, socialisation, education and all the nurturing that goes into giving people a similar outlook on life and requirement of human behaviour. Who better to trust to pass these most cherished values and grooming on to a new generation than one’s own sister?
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In The Guardian, Nicholas Clee reviews “Indian Takeaway: One Man’s Attempt to Cook His Way Home” by Hardeep Singh Kohli:
Hardeep Singh Kohli is a broadcaster, writer and newspaper columnist. A keen amateur cook, he was a runner-up on Celebrity Masterchef. He is also one of the 2008 Booker judges. His first book, Indian Takeaway, is a likeable but clumsy contribution to this busy CV and joins a well-worn genre – the travel memoir with a zany twist. Kohli journeys from the south of India to the north, the twist being that he attempts to cook typically British food as he goes. “Understand someone’s food and you understand them,” he reasons, and he sets out to understand himself by bringing together his Indian and British culinary heritages.
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