We're There

WHO hasn't had that occasional fantasy, that one day we shall do to England what England did to us. And then looked for signs that we are 'taking over' England. Looking at no more than the salwar-kameezes at Heathrow airport, the browning of Southall, Wembley, Leicester and Birmingham, and at some Indian faces in English preserves, the spillover here and there of our many-ness. But Southall is hardly revenge for the Raj. It's bright and lively, but not the stuff these fantasies are made of. And our shopkeepers in England are not the shopkeepers the English were in India; this business is about piling pennies, not building empire.

We could be looking in the wrong place. An Indian touch is coming now to an England that has never stepped into Southall. India has lived in England either in its little-Indias, or in a chattering fondness among the upper classes to whom a love for India is that just right evening announcement. Now, India is stepping into that middle England of beer, beef and football. Admittedly, a little, but that's a lot. Not exotic India, not ghetto Indianness, but as just a fact of everyday life, a factor in everyday living.

Take Anne, say, or Sarah or Jane or whatever you want to call her. She wakes up, heads for work. No, it'll probably not be in a Maruti Zen, though there are a couple of thousand of those on Britain's roads. She might take the London Underground, computerised by an Indian firm, but she almost certainly doesn't know that. But think what she knows, hears, sees every day. The morning radio is playing the top of the British charts, and Indian is right there at the top. Brimful of Asha from Cornershop, versions of Indian songs from bands like Asian Dub Foundation, Jazz Man, Apache Indian have all made it to the top of the British charts. Asha Bhonsle, then, and the new album Rafi's Revenge, now playing in Britain's homes and its cars day and night.

She heads for work in one of those boring Marks & Spencer suits, but come evening and she gets more and more Indian looking her best. Some years now after Diana glamourised the salwar-kameez and the trendy design house Red or Dead devoted a show to Indian design and others discovered the sari, that Indian look has stepped from the catwalk on to the street. Something emphatically Indian in colour and style, even salwar-kameez-like maybe, hangs among wearable options. And in the business of beauty she is looking more and more to Indian magic. If Cherie Blair can wear a sari and then go to an Indian for beauty treatment before all the front pages, so can she, so must she. Meditation, yoga, she's known about for some time. And of the Indian meal to follow. Some time in the day she might just be reading Indian from Rushdie to Roy, watching Indian cinema, seeing Indian faces read the news on TV, hear about Indian millionaires, about Indian experiments in Western art, buy Indian-made clothes and bags.... The English today don't get away from something Indian for long.

ENGLAND went to medieval India; a modern Indianness has come to a Britain, slowly breaking out of its Anglo-Saxon caste system. Overwhelmingly Britishness has come to be seen as more than Union-Jackism, as Indianness is more than narrow nationalism. Britain is now a more listening nation. The British have always looked on Australia and Canada as somewhat odd extensions of themselves. America and Europe have been there long. But those are known little rivals. Now the new openness has brought an openness to India more than to any other country or culture.Indian is not another ethnic other.

The English are responding, some might say with predictable perversity, to an un-English assertion of Indianness, or Asian-ness as it is more acceptable to say in Britain to include some neighbourly additions. Finally, finally, the Brits could be on their way to finding out what Rafi and Asha are all about. The single Brimful of Asha from Cornershop, which knocked Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On off the number one spot "just caught the public's imagination", says Gary Walker from the label Wiiija which launched the British-Indian hit. In the language of the music world, the underground is moving overground, to rock to "saddi rani" Asha Bhonsle—"she's the one that keeps the dream alive/from the morning past the evening to the end of life."

바카라 웹사이트Tjinder Singh, frontman for Cornershop, did with the name of his group what he wanted to—proclaim that Indianness is about more than shops in corners. "We wanted to take on the negative connotation of Asian people. I think Cornershop is a whole lot more positive." Their album When I Was Born for the Seventh Time uses the cover of The Beatles' Norwegian Wood—in Punjabi. Singh, who was born in Wolverhampton in the Midlands and had his first lessons in Hindustani music at a gurdwara, learnt how to mix the electric guitar with the sitar and harmonium, funk with the dholki, and English verse with Punjabi vigour. Middle-class Britain is listening, and dancing, and listening again.

The Asian Dub Foundation grew out of an assembly of Bengalis, Bangladeshis, Tamils and Punjabis at some community lessons in East London. The ADF followed Cornershop to the top of the charts this year and their new album Rafi's Revenge is the hot new music today. At the end of the '90s the Indian young in Britain are bringing up an India that many in India are forgetting. The ADF sing Naxalite. Or Assassin, about Sha-heed Udham Singh who killed the nephew of Gen Dwyer. It's an angry band, angry about the past and about the present, its music a rare expression of political statement that works. "Struggles in Asian history have become our folk stories," says Das from the ADF. "We don't want revenge, but some acknowledgement."

Rafi is intended to stand for Real Areas For Investigation, but Mohammed Rafi comes in as himself, not a title or an idea, though this is Rafimixed with 'jungle' and funk. He's explained to British audiences as "the Frank Sinatra of the Asian music scene." The mix is the mantra of the day, the mix ultimately of Indian into British. "Why do you have to be one thing?" says Das. "I'm Hindu, English, British, Asian, European, a bass player and a dad." A mix also of politics and music. One of their celebrated singles is called Free Satpal Ram, a song to campaign for release of Satpal Ram—in jail in 55 different institutions for the past 12 years after a white racist attacker died in an assault on him. Ironically, their anger over sidelining British ways brought them into the mainstream.

Das, guitarist Chandrasonic and the other ADF members (Master D, Pandit G and Sun-J) are now much feted at festival shows across Britain. Rafi's Revenge established them as a serious group. The charts, and the top places on the charts brought in the snooty music press to take a closer look at Indian groups. The small British label Outcaste invites many young Indian groups, and its tie-up with Tommy Boy Records of the US promises big things to come. The tie-up has already brought the release of a new album Dancing Drums by Badmarsh & Shri, and a new set from Nitin Sawhney.Last year Warner Bros signed up an Indian singer, Amar. And this year everyone is rushing to shows by Black Star Liner, a group from Leeds also signed to Warner Brothers.

The new music has developed from rock bhangra, still immensely popular. There's not a weekend when Britain's young don't dance to bhangra in the discos. But the new rock is more than something electronic to accompany a bhangra beat, it's stuff to listen to. A devoted fan, Simon Scott, has opened a music store in Leeds, Tan-doori Spice, exclusively for Asian British music. The new creations are glamorously blessed. British-Indian pop has surfaced with Madonna for company. Her album Ray of Light opens with a prayer in Sanskrit. And if Madonna wears mehndi, Naomi Campbell dons a bindi. "The Asian invasion is heading this way," The Sunday Times reported. "In the charts, on the catwalk, even on the best-dressed cushions."

This year England is wearing Indian as much as it is hearing Indian. At the British Fashion Week last month, the Indian look was everywhere...in the audiences, clinching evidence that the Indian look on catwalks of the last few years had delivered. Pash-mina shawls seemed almost to line the front rows at one of the shows. And far more unexpectedly, the bindi was around. And the nose-pin in traditional Indian style, at times even some high-rise Kundan jewellery. "I am very surprised," says Shilpa Patel at an Indian boutique in Wembley, "but we have a lot of white women here now buying bindis." Bindis, glass bangles, the nuth are a bold combine for London's women. Worn even with something of a short shadow sari over trousers. Trendy, not traditional, interesting if not entirely Indian. Fashions go, of course, as much as they come. But for now Indian is fashionable; more, it is fashionable-able.

The trouser-sari is quite the new theme in style, there's been nothing like this before. Designers Dries Van Noten, Rifat Ozbek, Vivienne Tam and Dolce & Gabb-ana all presented trouser-saris at their last shows. Trousers embroidered and beady, the sari arising surprisingly from them as though from a petticoat, travelling up, not six yards of it, though, to hang over the shoulder a little pallu-like. Who says this should not be called a sari.

"There are just lots of sari fabrics everywhere," says Kavita Daswani, a Hong Kong-based fashion critic. "Anna Sui did a sari theme last season, and there's lots of it around in London now." The biggest sellout at the London fashion week was an Australian designer selling skirts and dresses embroidered in Delhi. "There's a great deal of beading work about, all done in Delhi," says Daswani. "It's astonishing, you can't cast your eyes around at a party these days without seeing heavy duty Indian everywhere."

바카라 웹사이트Kiki Siddiqui, who runs Ritu's boutique near Oxford Street, is getting an increasing number of working city women who don't want to go out in that little black number anymore. "Most of our clients are Europeans," she says, "women who have the confidence to wear something different." It helped, no doubt, that Diana shopped here for salwar-kameezes. That Cherie Blair appears publicly in a sari. That Campbell modelled in salwar-kameez by Giorgio Armani. The salwar-kameez, or as they say in the fashion world, interpretations of it, is West-friendly enough. "A salwar-kameez is only a tunic, trousers and a scarf," says Kiki. "It's just the way it's put together." The boutique is beginning to get repeat customers among working women, for whom the salwar-kameez was more than a one-off adventure. Forget those hatty-frocky women of My Fair Lady. "A lot of women go to Ascot, to the theatre, to the opera wearing our clothes," says Kiki.

Indian sweet shops have turned into boutiques to service that new Indian look, and it isn't just Indians going to these stores. Southall and Wembley have been discovered for styles usually affordable and often exquisite. In Southall a couple of halwais and a travel agency have closed to make room for a row of boutiques. Southall is claiming some meccahood now for Indian design, it's the Indian day out. Seeing this, the local Ealing Council has drawn up a budget of a quarter of a million pounds to develop Southall officially as a tourist attraction.

The new Indian look, the new Indian music come together at the Anokha Club in Central London. Talvin Singh plays DJ here, everyone is waiting for his new album OK, a new kind of mix—every mix is a new kind. On the dance floor white women are dancing to Brimful of Asha wearing those trouser-saris. Sometimes Western cuts, but the colo-urs are bright and unembarrassed Indian, not muted to what designers once considered acceptable. This has been the Indian summer everyone was waiting for, and it is outlasting the summer.

English women seem to have understood at last that there could be a trick to Indian ways of staying beautiful that go beyond fashion. Since the New Age is what we are told we're in, the ways towards beauty, as much else, lie East. A new book Holistic London, lists more than 2,000 centres in London that offer this holistic treatment for health of body, mind, spirit, whatever. Holistic London is substantially and often famously Indian. "A lot of this is stolen Indian stuff," says Ayurvedist Gopi Warrier. "It's a clear takeover of our intellectual property rights." British quacks practise Indian, in a sort of practice that is hardly un-Indian.

When Cherie Blair went to an Indian beautician at Chiltern Street, she attracted more interest than the usual snippets under giant headlines in star-chasing tabloids. Every newspaper went on at length on what Bharati Vyas had to offer that could bring Blair, Cher and other celebrities rushing to her clinic. Vyas announces a "special and unique brand of wisdom" at £30 for 30 minutes. "Everybody who matters is with me," she says quite simply. But wisdom? "Beauty on the outside begins on the inside. I give hands-on therapy on how to feel well inside and outside, and that brings beauty." Wisdom is that extra-Eastern.

Vyas has a three-month waiting list of who she calls "high-powered ladies" among London's glitterati, TV personalities, stage and cinema stars, the wealthily social, the climbing, the climbed. Her nine studios, numbered Cave 1, 2, 3, etc, offer beauty and wisdom to 920 clients a week, and London wants more. The treatments are more than £1 million-a-year business, and that is besides the bottled wisdom she sells through the House of Frasers stores. She is not a beautician but a wisdom guru; she does not talk about beauty, she is a giver of statements on it.

Agents market Shahnaz Husain products. Clinics have sprung up through London offering traditional Indian beauty treatments with haldi and besan, lemon juice and honey, and of scalp and body massage in an upmarket version of "is champi mein barhay-barhay gun". These days when London wants to look beautiful, it looks to India.Travel agents have turned health and beauty agents promoting wonder holidays in Kerala. A woman wrote in The Daily Telegraph about her greatly toned down legs post-Kerala. Brits are looking busily this winter to book health and beauty in Kerala. "We have been sending health tourists every year but now the demand is very high," says Dandapani, a travel agent.

"A lot of practitioners are taking Indian remedies," adds Gopi Warrier, who runs a business in Ayurvedic treatments from a clinic at Earl's Court. To counter this pilfered knowledge, proper vaids came together to launch an Ayurvedic College in London earlier this year. The college offers a shortened three-year course from the usual five or six years in India. The first batch of students is almost entirely white British. Now the upmarket store Harvey Nichols has begun to offer Ayurvedic massages at its Urban Retreat. Not proper, the vaids say, but popular. Books with Ayurvedic diets, and tips from ever-ready beauticians offering diet charts as a part of the new holistic paradigm are circulating in London now to add healthy 10-point-lists to the established British fondness for Indian food.

CHICKEN tikka masala is not healthy or unhealthy, the Brits think, it's just great. Two years ago the Indian food business in Britain was estimated at 2.2 billion a year, and growing at 20 per cent a year. Cut the growth, the figures are still phenomenal. Britain was said to have 9,000 Indian restaurants, 3,800 in London itself, more than the total in Delhi and Bombay put together. Everybody, but everybody, eats Indian. More and more the question is not to eat a curry or not (only the British 'eat' a curry), but where to have it. The British Tourist Authority officially declared the curry (and not fish and chips) to be the official British food. And if by some wisdom we are what we eat, the British already are substantially Indian. Readymade Indian meals sell almost £1 billion a year at superstores; restaurants have new competition from takeaways that deliver cheap. Spice has come even to British kitchens. With Indian recipe books as with restaurants, the question is, which one?

All serious business becomes an institution, so has Indian food in Britain. And it is spawning institutions. For the first time, Indian food has become a formal discipline at a British university. The Thames Valley University has launched a series of courses in Indian food this year, from short-term courses to a full-year programme. Food biz has grown so fast over the past two years that restaurants are running out of chefs to cook Indian. Leicester East MP Keith Vaz has raised this problem in Parliament, and launched a campaign with the Home Office to issue work permits more readily to chefs from the Indian subcontinent to sustain this now very British business. A food college in Birmingham launched courses to train Indian chefs, but the programme had to be wound down, among other reasons for lack of teachers. Demand has risen steadily, but immigration officers are sitting on the supply.

In Manchester restaurant owners on Rusholme Street, lined by about 80 restaurants serving Indian food, have come together to train and even use chefs. "This sort of thing is beginning to happen in many areas where there are large clusters of Asian restaurants," says Asif Hashmi, editor of the glossy Tandoori magazine that goes out to all Indian restaurants in Britain. The debate on chefs has become a political one: getting chefs from India threatens to bring unemployment in the business in Britain.Issues concerning Indian food are now a matter for British government policy.

Accompanying an Indian meal is Indian drink. Cobra, Kingfisher beers are standard now with naan and curry. While the beers are being marketed as stand-alone drinks in the superstores, they haven't quite flooded the market and still need naan for support. But the beers have their followers. So do wines like Anarkali and the Indian champagne Omar Khayyam. No, not Indian champagne: it has been ruled that only the French make champagne. So, say Indian wine, champagne-like. But when they order, they order Indian champagne, and get it, and like it.