Identity crisis: Hanif Kureishi, Karachi, 1985: 'The colonized inevitably
aspire to be like their colonizers—you wouldn't catch anyone of my uncle's generation
with a joint in their mouth. It was infra dig, for peasants. They shadowed the
British, they drank whisky and read The Times; they praised others by calling
them 'gentlemen'; and their eyes filled with tears at old Vera Lynn records.
'But the kids discussed yoga, you'd catch them standing on their heads.
They even meditated. Though one boy who worked at the airport said it was too
much of a Hindu thing for Muslims to be doing; if his parents caught him chanting
a mantra he'd get a backhander across the chops. Mostly the kids listened to
the Stones, Van Morrison and Bowie as they flew over ruined roads to the beach
in bright red and yellow Japanese cars with quadrophonic speakers, past camels
and acres of wasteland.'
[...]
'Although Pakistanis still wanted to escape to England, the old men in their
clubs and the young eating their hamburgers took great pleasure in England's
decline and decay. The great master was fallen. It was seen as strike-bound,
drug- ridden, riot-torn, inefficient, disunited, a society which had moved too
suddenly from puritanism to hedonism and now loathed itself. And the Karachi
wits liked to ask me when I thought the Americans would decide the British were
ready for self-government.
'Yet people like Rahman still clung to what they called British ideals,
maintaining that it is a society's ideals, its conception of human progress,
that define the level of its civilization. They regretted, under the Islamization,
the repudiation of the values which they said were the only positive aspect
of Britain's legacy to the subcontinent. These were: the idea of secular institutions
based on reason, not revelation or scripture; the idea that there were no final
solutions to human problems; and the idea that the health and vigour of a society
was bound up with its ability to tolerate and express a plurality of views on
all issues, and that these views would be welcomed.' [Granta].
