London Company
Farrukh Dhondy
Hachette India, Rs 495, Pp 241
London in the 1960s was the centre of the universe. The Swinging Sixties, as they were called, exhibited an explosion of cultural and creative talent, from the Beatles and Rolling Stones to Carnaby Street and miniskirts and mods and rockers. London became the Capital of Cool, a youth-oriented phenomenon that was hedonistic and rebellious and emerged from Britain?s economic recovery post-World War II. While it was a revolution meant to jettison the old and embrace the new, it was also a bubble, an artificial world, that hid the other one inside its grimy bedsits and crumbling council estates.
The celebrated cultural revolution completely overshadowed the other one that emerged from the immigrant influx and the racial face of Britain represented, publicly, by Enoch Powell and his National Front. It was into this parallel world that Farrukh Dhondy arrived with his Indian girlfriend. He had moved to London after graduating from Cambridge to find an identity and decide his career path.
There is a sense of deja vu here. An earlier novel was titled Poona Company, a short story collection about his early years in a middle-class Parsi home in what was then Poona, training to be an engineer. It ended with him getting a scholarship to Cambridge and leaving India. London Company is a sort of sequel but written over two decades later. That gap makes it difficult to associate Dhondy, now a respected, liberal columnist and writer, with the fiery, militant rebel and activist of London Company. Contrary to the book?s title, Farrukh?s (as the book refers to him) initiation into picket lines, demonstrations, race relations, worker?s unions and encounters with the police happens in Leicester.
Circumstance rather than ideology drove him in that direction. A teaching job in Leicester made him painfully aware that South Asians and blacks from the West Indies, were not welcome in certain residential areas and many restaurants and pubs. Leicester, an industrial hub, had attracted thousands of immigrants forced to live in ghettos, which is where Farrukh and his partner find themselves after being repeatedly refused accommodation. The local pubs were meeting grounds for militant trade unionists. Farrukh joins one called the Indian Workers Association (Militant) with the emphasis on the bracketed word, and through circumstance and segregation, moves on to an even more radical outfit called the Black Panther party, inspired by Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver in America.
Dhondy knows the power of dialogue and patois, especially considering that much of the book relates to the West Indians in the Black Panther movement in Leicester and London.
Moving from Leicester to London, the picketing and the protests get more militant. It?s a torrid period for immigrants. By 1961, there were over 100,000 South Asians in the UK and apart from racial segregation, there was a huge shortage of housing to replace bombed buildings to accommodate the immigrant influx into urban areas. The solution?high-rise housing estates?and the social problems they created, changed the face of London forever. This book is as much about those changes as it is about one man?s story and his search to find meaning in his life. There are the usual elements that define most novels; tragedy, romance, fate and circumstance, careers and money, or the lack of it, but Farrukh?s personal backstory, fictionalised only for effect, adds reality and authenticity to a tale of struggle and hardship and open discrimination, before he finds some balance and measure of security, financial and psychological, from his fledgling writing career.
The incidents are worth recording because they carry a sense of history, but the big drawback is that there is too much detail and too many disjointed encounters that keeping track of the sprawling cast of characters becomes tedious. What he does achieve remarkably well is to write a story within a story; the struggle to find himself is set during a period when Britain was also battling to define itself. That duality, alone, is worth the price of the ticket.