Coming of Age : 1976 and the Road to Anti-Racism

1981 between young Asian men and the skinheads who had arrived in Southall at a pub in
buses decked with National Front banners. In the process the pub was set ablaze. In Bradford,
12 Asian community activists were charged with conspiracy. All the defendants pleaded
not guilty. This was really a period of political turmoil. A British born generation of Asian
youth had come of age. The slogan ‘self defence is no offense’ took on a real meaning. At
a personal level, these events had a huge impact on my academic work. In some sense I
came to Southall as a naïve research student, but I learnt that I couldn’t be ‘objective’, not
least because when I was interviewing white parents I was experiencing racism from them,
they sat there and talked about Asians in very racist terms, as if I didn’t exist and I began to
realise that actually something called ‘ objective research’ is a myth and we have to look at
what we now call ‘situate knowledges’, -- that is to say that people speak from their own
politically located position.
In my work capacity with the National Association of Asian Youth I met with youth workers
from across the country and we started a number of different groups in different cities
whereby youth workers could jointly engage as professionals on their specific local and
national concerns. People like Ravi Jain played an important role in supporting this initiative.
We organised conferences, and set up locally relevant projects for young people in different
parts of Britain. These youth worker forums were a conduit for a great deal of creative
political energy.
So yes, this period is a watershed in our personal and collective histories. There was
a commonsense view at the time that Asian young people were much more radical than
their parents, that the latter were conservative. I took issue with this position. The parental
generation had been pretty radical in their own time. It’s just that young people expressed
their politics in a different idiom. A number of these issues were placed in relief following
Chaggar’s murder which became a focal point for the contestation of different generational
political strategies in dealing with the aftermath. Questions about how to deal with racism
on the streets and safety of the community became very prominent. Yes, 1976 was a watershed
moment for Southall. Certainly it was.
Unlike any other group, you, as Southall Black Sisters, were the first to use the term
‘Black’ to talk about Asians and Caribbeans, that the women’s group chose to do this is very
significant?
Well, Asians women were always active in politics from the early years of Asian migration
though this is not always recognised in narratives about Asian politics. For instance,
Asian women were at the forefront of a number of well- known industrial strikes. In Southall
itself Harbans Bains was exemplary in her activism, and she always grappled with how
women were unacknowledged. In Southall Black Sisters, we were consciously giving priority
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