Sad to say that none of the ex-pats who were interviewed in India for Home from Home (Radio 4, Friday) talked about missing the BBC. Their removal to the subcontinent from the UK might have left them with a longing for a pint of Guinness, but not a word about Jazzer and the Grundys, Nicky Campbell or even John Humphrys. It was as if British radio had never touched their lives, in spite of growing up here.
Hardeep Singh Kohli, the turban-wearing broadcaster with a broad Glasgow accent whose taste for highly spiced food derives from his family ancestry in the Punjab, went in search of British Indians who have gone back to live in India — PIOs as they are known there (People of Indian Origin). In the past decade more and more of them have been choosing to return to the homeland of their parents, and sometimes grandparents, driven back by a search for roots, for a sense of belonging, the desire for something called ‘home’.
Perhaps the strangest tale came from Nainesh Patel, who was born in East Africa and brought up in Leicestershire, where he built up a business making samosas to a family recipe. One day a businessman from Chennai visited his food factory, tasted the samosas and decided they were better than anything he could buy back in India. So he started taking them back to Chennai and selling them at a local food market. Now Mr Patel has himself moved to Mumbai, running his business from there, the country of his ancient forefathers.
There has been a ‘special’ relationship between India and Britain, much deeper and yet more intangible than the transatlantic alliance, since the days of the early East India Company. Scratch the surface of many UK families and you’ll find ancestors who lived at some time on the subcontinent, often for generations, moving from the West to find a different, richer life in the East. For a while in the mid- to late-20th century the drift of people changed, as Indians travelled to the UK to find work and better opportunities. But now the tide has turned and many British-born Indians are going East, tempted by the lure of a booming economy.
In Bangalore, Singh Kohli met with Shashi Halai and his French wife Marianique, who have taken the sweet treats of French patisserie to southern India. Halai, born and brought up in Finchley, north London, went back to visit an aunt in Bangalore and was inspired to stay on and start up a bakery business there. He built his own brick ovens, and now runs a restaurant, crêperie and pizzeria as well as the bakery. Life is not easy, dealing with the Indian bureaucracy, the endless form-filling, and the inability to get anything done without paying a bribe. But their two children are now going to much better schools than would be available to them in the UK, and their money goes a lot further.
Generally, all those who have taken the plunge and gone East have not regretted the move, except for an entrepreneurial couple, Nina and Rajiv, whom Singh Kohli came across in the heart of a high-security gated community just outside Bangalore. Here the landscape looks as if a bit of LA has somehow been shipped across the ocean, with manicured lawns, high fences and streetnames like Carnation Close and Falcon Crest (which would make a great title for a soap set in such a strange, hyper-real estate). ‘It’s like no India I’ve ever seen before,’ says Singh Kohli.
What unified these adventuresome families was the feeling that in spite of having lived all their lives in the UK something was not quite right. They didn’t quite belong. But in India something clicked. ‘The day we landed here, I knew I wasn’t going back. I felt I had arrived home’ — even if this meant they quickly had to abandon their ideas about India as the land of the snake charmer. Now you’re more likely to find an Italian restaurant on the street corner, and to eat croissants for breakfast.
Monday’s Afternoon Play (Radio 4) gave us an unsettling insight into what it might feel like to suffer from schizophrenia. Henry Cockburn was at art college in Brighton when he began to have visions that told him to climb impossibly high walls, to swim naked in the sea and sit under trees for hours in the snow. There followed seven years of life in and out of mental institutions as he struggled to come to terms with the need to take pills to regulate his response to these callings. His father, a war correspondent, encouraged him to try to describe what his visions felt like. Henry’s Demons, by Henry and his father Patrick, took us on a slightly scary journey inside Henry’s mind. Brilliantly done in just 45 minutes, and produced by Karen Rose.
Comments