I’m British But…

Bhangra, the fusion of Punjabi folk and Western pop music, is the guiding thrum of I’m British But… (1990). Announcing her as a talent to watch, Gurinder Chadha’s dynamic 30-minute documentary, about second-generation South Asian communities living in Southall, West London opens with a bhangra-inflected remix of “Rule, Britannia,” a sonic hybridity that forecasts the film’s deeper exploration of ethnic tensions in the United Kingdom, made at a time when such representations were excitingly exploding onscreen. 

In talking head interviews, subjects wade through the gluey nature of what it means to be British Asian, seemingly unable to fully inhabit one identity without betraying the other. Some see India or Bangladesh as homelands, others consider them alien countries. Some feel that the integration of Desi customs into British popular culture is progressive, others find it appropriative. The unnamed subjects’ narration of their family histories is appended by charming musical interludes: the band Kala Preet performs on the rooftop above a footwear store while a small crowd gathers beneath, evoking The Beatles’ famous 1969 rooftop concert; a modish rapper-DJ, late to discovering his roots, folds Buddhist chants into his mixes and relishes in “forcing them to dance to our music.” The restlessness conveyed by the speakers finds a mirror in bhangra’s chimeric collision of sounds. “The first tangible cultural expression of [our] idealism,” as one interviewee describes it. 

This sense of restlessness was shared by the young Chadha herself—today, celebrated as one of Britain’s most successful working filmmakers—who was born in Nairobi to Kenyan Punjabi Sikh parents. The family eventually relocated to Southall when she was an infant, and the racism her family endured upon moving visibly informs her work which examines, uncompromisingly and playfully, how Indians in England square Eastern traditions with Western culture. I’m British But… was Chadha’s directorial debut, soon followed by other short documentaries such as Acting Our Age (1992), about the South Asian residents of an elderly home in Britain, and What Do You Call an Indian Woman Who’s Funny? (1994), about four women cabaret performers reflecting on the intersection of race and comedy. In Bhaji on the Beach (1993), Chadha’s debut feature, a busload of young and elderly Indian women from Birmingham grapple with their differing social views—on single-parent households, interracial relationships, and patriarchal cultural norms—in the wake of third-wave feminism. In Bend It Like Beckham (2002), her best known film, an endearing rom-com about a Punjabi teen (Parminder Nagra) in London who becomes a footballer much to the chagrin of her family. Her conservative parents, preoccupied with her older sister’s upcoming wedding and distressed by their younger daughter’s tomboy traits, have forbidden the sport—in no small part because her father faced discrimination from white cricketers in his youth.

Bend It Like Beckham  (2002)

Naturally, the ’90s boasted a wave of cinema devoted to the diasporic experience of the adult children of the Windrush Generation, which, although principally associated with Caribbeans, also included South Asian communities who migrated to Britain before 1973. Among them was British Nigerian director Ngozi Onwurah, whose dynamic, dystopian sci-fi Welcome to the Terrordome (1995) would become the first feature directed by a Black British woman to receive theatrical distribution in UK cinemas. Like Onwurah and Chadha, this second generation was coming of age and had begun grappling openly with their dual cultural identity through sound as much as image. Take, for example, the four-minute film Bhangra Jig (1990) by director Pratibha Parmar (also a Nairobi-born Indian transplant) who superimposes footage of young British Asian dancers onto colonial architecture to reinscribe these histories with new faces and bodies. 

Onwurah would herself release a notable 1990 work, The Body Beautiful, that observes the slipperiness of diasporic identity with enlightening care. Onwurah’s autobiographical short features a formidable performance from the filmmaker’s own mother, Madge, as a white woman who underwent a mastectomy while her children were young. Years later, in Newcastle upon Tyne, her biracial teenage daughter (played by Sian Martin) pursues a modeling career, forcing them to confront their racial and bodily differences. “I had been muted,” says Madge after her procedure, concealing her soft frame from her beautiful, angular daughter, who has absorbed not only rickety attachments (to parents and to place) in her upbringing, but a beauty standard that crashed down on them both. The daughter, initially oblivious, eventually reflects on the public indignities her mother has suffered as a consequence of her illness—the same strain of intolerance fetishistically upheld within the modeling industry, which functions as a microcosm of an intolerant British society. “This is our shared body, and this is our blood,” her daughter concludes, resisting the joint performance of Britishness and beauty. 

I’m British But… also invokes the shared body of South Asian migrants through a grisly history which washes over the present: 190 years of the British Raj, imperial violence, and periodic manufactured famine. When asked about the multifarious connotations of the term “British,” one interviewee brings up the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when British troops opened fire on unarmed Indian protestors in Amritsar, killing hundreds. Chadha flits between archival images of anti-racism demonstrations in the UK and newspaper headlines—“22 RACIST MURDERS IN 2 YEARS!”; “RACIST KILLING OF OUR BROTHER”; “ONE MORE ASIAN MURDERED”—before cutting back to our steadfast DJ rapping under the warm blush of club lights. Throughout the film, ethnic difference is communicated, like bhangra, through the clash of seemingly competing objects, or the integration of Asian music, fashion, and cuisine into existing English molds. Here, the threat of targeted violence is isolated but eruptive, like a flare meant to signal the history living within bhangra’s poppish, unifying beats. The final image of a young British Asian DJ, creating and gesticulating to his own sounds, constitutes a palimpsest rewrite of Western customs. (Notably, the film opens with Chadha’s hand and a marker emerging from the bottom of the frame to cross out and scribble the title overtop of the British Film Institute’s vanity card.) 

There is an initial carefulness to Chadha’s direction, deploying swift jump cuts like a kind of optical remix, creating new meanings through diagrammatic associations, and balancing positive testimonies of young adults of color residing in Britain with the intolerant realities of the country. Footage of young South Asians dancing in a nightclub is interpolated by scenes of trains and engines—signs of mobility, migration, and progress. Throughout, vehicles in motion populate the film as a shorthand for immigration while interviewees describe their parents’ relocation into a new professional ecosystem: working as cabbies, bus drivers, farmhands, lamplighters, and shop owners. But in this solemn last stretch of the film, the middle ground of assimilation shrinks into dissent, with the intertitles declaring, “Once your brothers fought and hanged / For the sake of freedom / Yet you will embrace that same noose now / and beg yourself, for submission.” I’m British But… reminds viewers the cost of hybridity, the ellipsis affixed to their Britishness. Bhangra blends, as does culture, but self-possession in the face of hostility is the strongest form of preservation. 

I’m British But… (1990)