Finding Pakistan in Global Britain

A friend of mine wanted me to accompany them to give my verdict about the Pakistani food in Tooting, London. They are non-Pakistani and they wanted an opinion from an insider of the culture to test whether the food was authentic or not. I accepted their invitation.

On the day of our meet-up, I first walked from Tooting underground station towards Tooting Broadway to get a sense of what was new. I was also looking for something that would catch my attention and that I might develop into a research project. When we met, we roamed some more given my obsession with linguistic practices “in the wild.” To work up our appetite, we proceeded to explore material aspects of social and cultural public life in Tooting, which has been made famous by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, a well-known native of the area.

Saxons and Romans coming through

The origin of the word “Tooting” is Anglo-Saxon, even if the meaning is disputed. Inhabited since before Anglo-Saxon times, Tooting lies on Stane Street, a 91-km road originally created by the Romans from Londinium (London) to Noviomagus Reginorum (Chichester).

So, Tooting has been at the intersection of “foreign” and “local” for at least two millennia. It is obvious that in relation to places like Tooting the imagined homogenous, monolingual ideal has always been a myth.

Pakistanis moving in

Going back to the topic of our day out in Tooting and the spatial practices we were looking for, the first thing that caught my eye was a young man in a dark green modern-day Pakistani-style “kam” or shalwar kameez walking ahead of us. Is this foreign or is this a local practice now, I wondered. Should wearing a shalwar kameez be considered part of a Tooting identity? And what kind of language practices might the person in shalwar kameez have been involved in before the moment I saw him? Was he coming out of a mosque? It was too early for any mandatory prayer times nor was it a Friday. His clothes were slightly formal, fitting for a Pakistani-style party. Perhaps he was off to a wedding or a milad or something similar?

While shalwar kameez, just as any other form of clothing, can exist outside the realm of practice, linguistic happenings are tied to the communicative spaces and geographies where it appears. I wondered whether his outfit would not invoke Pakophobia (see a biography of the word P*ki  here) by some parts of Tooting’s population? And how does the clothing of this man relate to his class, status, and education?

Indexing “Global Britain” locally

Moving forward, I found some words written on shops that caught my attention: “Anarkali,” the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) sign, Habib Bank, Nirala, and a couple of other familiar names originating from Pakistan and neighbouring countries. These naming practices are a form of action in a specific place and time within London. These names may not be indigenous to Britain, but they are embedded in this local neighbourhood.

The word Anarkali, for example, has a history bundled in this eight-letter word: the semantic meaning of the word “anarkali” is the bud of pomegranate. The word is also reminiscent of the legend of Anarkali, a courtesan in the Mughal court of Lahore who had a tragic love affair with the Mughal Prince, the famous bazaar in Lahore named after the courtesan, the Indian film Mughal-e-Azam, and last but not least, a popular Pakistani song from 2002 called Supreme Ishq Anarkali. All of these associations came to my mind.

The word Anarkali at the front of the shop was written in Roman rather than in Urdu, making it legible to descendants of South Asians migrants who might have only spoken competence of Urdu, the lingua franca of multilingual Pakistan.

We walked past Anarkali and stopped wherever we found something interesting to observe. There is rising gentrification in the neighbourhood, but the processes of relocalization of various intersecting practices are visible in multi-layered, multimodal language practices.

Food and restaurants were central to our conversation. Pointing to the restaurant Lahore Karahi, my friend said: “That’s one of the restaurants Sadiq Khan likes the most. I read heard it in an interview.”

Sharing a Tooting meal

Sadiq Khan also recommends the restaurants Daawat and Spice Village on the Visit London website.

With these endorsements, it was not surprising that Lahore Karahi and Daawat were full. We settled for savoury dishes in Spice Village for our lunch, followed by a very desi dessert in Daawat.

The question then is: how much of local Pakistani languaging practices are considered part of the fabric of the local ecology by the policy makers of modern-day “Global Britain“? And how much can we as educators and researchers make use of all languaging practices in our environment without labelling them under the binaries of minority/majority, local/foreign, indigenous/migrant?