For the so-called "second generation" - the sons and daughters of that first wave of migrants who arrived here from the Indian subcontinent - the moment has arrived. The stigma of previous decades has been replaced with a cachet: to be British Asian is to be cool. You can't flick through a magazine or turn on the television without being slapped in the face by a dollop of Indo-chic The West End laps it up. Even The Halifax Building Society decided to Bollywood-up its ads - and only natives of Halifax, like myself, can grasp the true irony of that particular Yorkshire town embracing the classical Indian dance form bharat natyam. Throughout the country, people with money are chucking it in the direction of anybody with a sub-continental story to tell or a swahleen to play Producers are hunting for the next Bend it like Beckham.
The literary world rejoices as it discovers Monica Ali's Brick Lane And to be frank, we love it. Why shouldn't we? After years of standing on the sidelines w Our time has come. It's Christmas, or indeed Holi, every day. Second Generation, a three-hour drama I have directed for Channel 4, typifies this new self-confidence. It is an epic British Asian love story that weaves together the lives of three generations of Indian immigrants, drawing together the narratives of class, family, religion and nationhood. We travel from the Thames to the Ganges, from Brick Lane to Chitpur Road and are shown a world never seen before on British television.When I first read the script last September, it was immediately clear that Neil Biswas's writing tapped a new Asian consciousness. The themes that dominated Asian narrative in the eighties and nineties were rendered irrelevant. The Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Launderette, brilliantly apposite for their time, both grapple with the cultural catch-22 of immigration: how much of our heritage do we have to sacrifice to be accepted in this country? Moreover, are happiness and economic success mutually exclusive in a foreign land? But that was yesteryear.
The British Asian world depicted in Second Generation suffers no such identity crisis. The Asians of 21st- century Britain are not only proud of their heritage but are encouraged to shout about it.Sharma, played by Om Puri, is a magnificently wealthy and well-respected curry magnate. He is not ridden by anxieties about his success, because his achievements are self-evident. But while his children bask in the glory of this new found cultural freedom, he is haunted by a different question as he nears the end of his life: what is the cost of this success? Or, more brutally, what has this country done to me?My work on Second Generation brought into sharp focus how much emigration had cost my own father. During the summer of 1980 I was six years old but have a clear memory of my brother and I mucking about at the local park during the holidays. Out of the blue, we found ourselves victim to a particularly vitriolic and racist invective from a couple of teenage girls The memory sticks even now. Not because it was my first experience of prejudice and not because it robbed me of a childhood innocence, forcing me to contextualise the comments and stares of which I was increasingly aware.
It lingers because of our instinctive reaction: we raced home and demanded our passports so that we could prove to these bullies that we were British. It turns out that, along with everything else that I had inherited from my Bengali father, I had his overwhelming desire, during those unwelcoming decades, to be accepted as completely British by those who took it upon themselves to define the term.As an Indian GP arriving from Calcutta at the dawn of the Sixties, my father had consciously stripped himself of his Indian identity as far as possible He did so, as he would tell us, "to get on". The photographs from that time say it all: dapper suit, Brylcreemed hair, handkerchief arranged in top pocket, eyes burning with ambition This was a man determined to beat them at their own game. So while other arrivals from the sub-continent found strength and solace by regrouping in their communities, my father turned his back on his roots.
