Desh Pardesh: The South Asian Presence in Britain

Despite the steady growth and increasing maturity of the South Asian presence in Britain–which now includes more than 1.5 million people–accurate, up-to-date and sensitively presented information about this increasingly significant section of the population is hard to find. Desh Pardesh (literally "at home abroad") should at least partly remedy this deficiency. However, attempts to fill the gap by means of wide-ranging generalisations are increasingly irrelevant. What this book aims to do, by contrast, is to show that although South Asian settlers and their children have now made themselves thoroughly at home in Britain, they have not done so uniformly, but with each community tending to adapt in its own distinctive way. Taken together, these accounts dispel the widespread assumption that "Asians"–or at best Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs–constitute homogeneous social groups. Despite the fact that all have encountered similar problems over immigration and racial discrimination, each chapter highlights the extent to which members of a specific community have both maintained and transformed their own long-established traditions–cultural, familial and above all religious–the better to pursue their collective interests in a largely hostile environment. The rigorous and detailed analysis presented in this volume provides the basis for a far-reaching re-examination of the way in which the religious and cultural character of the British social order has been transformed as a result of the South Asian presence.