CHAPTER SIX

South Asian Stories

An important, hitherto unmentioned aspect of the history of Black artists in Britain is the presence and practice of artists of South Asian background who were born in the East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Such artists include the likes of Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Juginder Lamba, and Shaheen Merali. Lamba, a sculptor, was one of the most senior figures amongst this group of artists, having been born in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi in 1948. Durlabh Singh, a self-taught artist based in London, was also born in Nairobi in the mid 1940s. Merali, an artist, writer, curator and archivist, was born in 1959 and came to London in 1970 at the age of 11. He was born in Tanganyika – now known as Tanzania – in what was then known as ‘British East Africa’, which comprised Tanganyika and the two countries on its northern borders, Uganda and Kenya. Like Zarina Bhimji, Symrath Patti, Alnoor Mitha, Said Adrus and many other artists, Merali’s family had arrived as part of the British colonial project to import large amounts of South Asian labour to its East African possessions. Such workers – frequently indentured labourers – were used on infrastructure projects such as the building of the strategically and economically important railways through Britain’s East African possessions towards the end of the nineteenth century.

The former British colonies in many parts of Africa contain varying numbers of citizens of South Asian descent. In the main, their forebears were brought to these countries by the British Empire, in effect being moved from one part of the British Empire to another. Taken from British India, they were utilised to undertake governmental clerical work, or the low-skilled or semi-skilled manual labour required for construction projects or agricultural work. This movement of labour occurred most notably in the 1890s, when, as mentioned, labourers from British India were shipped to East Africa under indentured labour contracts to work on the construction of the railways. As with other patterns of economic migration, significant numbers of these labourers returned to India, but others remained in East Africa and thereafter came to constitute a new presence in Africa, particularly in those countries controlled by Britain, from East through to southern Africa.

Subsequently, many of the descendants of these diasporic Asians established themselves in a range of professions, as well as becoming, in effect, the merchant class across much of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Many of them went into sectors such as banking or businesses such as tailoring, serving firstly British expatriates and colonial workers and, subsequently, indigenous African markets. In this context, East Africa’s Asians acted as, and were perceived as, a dominant merchant and professional class, distinctly apart from, and indeed, above African peoples. East Africa’s Asians came to be regarded, in certain quarters, as a legacy of Britain’s colonial adventures and strategising.

Like their African and Caribbean counterparts, immigrants of South Asian background seeking to come to Britain were sometimes subject to not only draconian immigration policies enacted by governments, but also the often punitive whims, vagaries and prejudices of consular officials and immigration officers.¹ Migrants arriving from the countries of South Asia frequently had to run the gauntlet of societal, political and media prejudices. But those arriving in the early 1970s from Uganda were prone to specific and quite distinct additional pressures. Firstly, they found themselves affected by the particularly retributive attentions of Uganda’s leader, Idi Amin Dada, who undertook to expel many of the country’s Asian residents. Secondly, though these Asians tended to be holders of British passports, they were subject to vociferous and quite explicit British racism, which sought to dissuade those expelled from Uganda from regarding Britain as a viable destination. Beyond this, the perfectly legal and perfectly reasonable arrival of these new immigrants acted as a fillip to those British politicians and political parties that expressed pronounced anti-immigrant sentiments.

It was against this particularly charged political backdrop that South Asian immigrants of East African background took their place in the UK alongside their counterparts who had arrived directly from the countries of South Asia. In time, a number of South Asian people of East African background would establish substantial careers as visual artists, and the multiple episodes of migration that were such a pronounced aspect of their histories and their identities would, on occasion, show up in their art practice.

Shaheen Merali, of East African/South Asian background, is one such hugely important artist who emerged in the 1980s. Over the course of several decades his visual arts practice evolved, and he simultaneously developed particular interests in curating, education, arts management, and archiving. In the early years of his practice, Merali’s preferred method of art production was batik. His batik work of the time was astonishing, for a number of reasons. At a time when the demarcations between what was regarded as ‘art’ and what was regarded as ‘craft’ were deeply entrenched, Merali effectively made them redundant by utilising what was commonly considered a ‘craft’ medium in a decidedly ‘fine art’ context of artistic practice and gallery exhibitions. Furthermore, Merali wrestled batik away from its rigid associations with decorative tribal or ethnic arts, and its general synonymity with certain non-European ethnicities. Similarly, with batik being widely considered to be women’s work, Merali singularly dismantled such a gender demarcation. The other hugely important significance of his batik work was that he used the medium, with enormous effect, to comment on a range of personal, social and political narratives, thereby downplaying or questioning batik’s primary association with the purely decorative. His batik portraiture conveyed important political messages.

One such batik was a work from the mid 1980s, based on an old family photograph that showed a group of Merali’s family members as they were about to embark on their own epoch-making journey from India to Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania. (From Ragula to Dar-es-Salaam (c. 1986) batik) Merali utilised this photograph and rendered it with enormous effect and sensitivity as a sizeable batik. Instead of rendering the family portrait in colour, Merali remained faithful to the monochromatic values of the original photograph by executing the batik in shades of brown. The artist’s decision to remain true to the original, and avoid colour, ensured that the work maintained – and indeed, may well have accentuated – the clearly discernible moods of apprehension and uncertainty on his relatives’ faces, as they were about to embark on their journey of economic migration. Behind the group, the aeroplane to carry them stands, a symbol of the travel, relocation, upheaval, displacement and exodus which has played such a significant part in world history and the history of nations, millennia or centuries ago, as much as within more recent decades and indeed, up to the present day. Within this work, Merali offered compelling and engaging commentary on the conditions, experiences and consequences of migration and diaspora for his own family. Within the piece, Merali illustrated something of the physical strains and turbulence caused by his family’s history of migrations from India to East Africa, to Britain years later, then on to Canada. Such histories of multiple migrations have exercised Merali and other artists such as Said Adrus, whose own family was caught up in similar patterns of multiple migrations and uprootedness.

17. Shaheen Merali, PG Tips: 80 Exploitation Flavour Flow Tea Bags (1989).

Another of Shaheen Merali’s fascinating batiks was PG Tips: 80 Exploitation Flavour Flow Tea Bags. The work featured, in somewhat disturbing rendering, the familiar and decidedly benign image of a young, sari-adorned Indian woman picking tea in an Indian tea plantation. The image, one of the most iconic of British food packaging and advertising, provides a comforting and reassuring vision of the diligence with which tea is picked for the British consumer. Concurrently, the image provides a reassurance of economic provision and stable employment for women such as the picker, in what might otherwise be a life of poverty and hardship. The image is of course a myth, a fiction, almost an untruth, that masks – some might say deliberately – the hardships of tea-pickers’ work. In some ways, Merali’s critique of the PG Tips tea-picking imagery mirrors the sorts of critiques of cotton-picking and the sharecropper existence of African-Americans in the agricultural South, in the decades of the early to mid twentieth century. At a first glance at Merali’s piece, the viewer might not notice or realise the unequivocal judgement and condemnation of the piece and its text: PG Tips: 80 Exploitation Flavour Flow Tea Bags. The way the piece reworked and subverted the familiar PG Tips packaging was both a damning testament to the tea industry’s exploitative practices, and a tribute to Merali’s skill as an artist. Within a few years, he would once again return to the subject of the largely unseen ways in which tea cultivation and production had a part to play in the violent histories of South Asia.

For a time he collaborated with Allan deSouza, whose family history was not dissimilar to Merali’s, the two of them setting up the arts initiative Panchayat, a word literally meaning ‘assembly’ when used in the countries of South Asia such as India. Panchayat focused its programme of exhibitions and related activities around the work of South Asian artists in Britain, as well as practitioners elsewhere in the South Asian Diaspora. One of Panchayat’s most significant undertakings was the exhibition Crossing Black Waters, which toured to galleries in Britain in 1992. This was a major touring exhibition that originated at the City Gallery, Leicester. It featured Said Adrus, Anand Moy Banerji, Arpana Caur, Allan deSouza, Nina Edge, Sushanta Guha, Bhajan Hunjan, Manjeet Lamba, Shaheen Merali, Quddus Mirza, Samena Rana, Anwar Saeed, and Sashidharan. A number of the contributors – Adrus, deSouza, Hunjan, Lamba, and Merali – were born in East Africa; a similar number were born in either India or Pakistan, whilst Nina Edge was British by birth.

This was a bold endeavour which sought to present interconnected strands of South Asian diasporic narratives, very much within the twin contexts of contemporary art practices and British societal constructions. Many previous larger-scale exhibitions of work by South Asian artists had tended to exist along lines of national identity, such as Six Indian Painters, presented at the Tagore India Centre, London, in 1964², through to India: Myth and Reality – Aspects of Modern Indian Art³, presented, nearly two decades later, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Here, though, was an attempt to stress the interplay, commonality, or points of dramatic contrast that might be ascertained when a decidedly mixed group of practitioners, all within reach of the designation ‘South Asian’ were brought together.

During the course of 1992, Crossing Black Waters was exhibited at galleries in Leicester, Oldham and Bradford. This programming reflected either a concerted attempt by Merali and deSouza to reach South Asian audiences in towns in which such a presence was relatively substantial; or it reflected an ongoing pathology in which such exhibitions could only find exhibition spaces in towns such as these.

Said Adrus, one of the artists in Crossing Black Waters, was born in 1958, in Kampala, Uganda, in what was known as ‘British East Africa’. This seemingly straightforward biographical detail contains many pointers to the artist’s practice. His family arrived as part of the British colonial project to import large amounts of indentured South Asian labour to its East African possessions. Years later, in the early 1970s, Idi Amin Dada, Uganda’s military leader, was to dramatically ‘expel’ many of the descendants of these indentured labourers. This expulsion created large numbers of refugees and displaced peoples, a number of whom came to the UK, whilst a number went to other countries. Within this sketchiest of outlines we can perceive a layering of conflicting identities for an artist, or a person, such as Adrus. Born in East Africa at a time when it was controlled by the British, represented a coexisting, or a fractious colliding of British, Asian, and African identities, which were to be compounded by the sudden imposition of a largely unexpected refugee or displaced person status. As Adrus himself recounted: ‘my own father had been part of the British Army in Kenya during the Second World War.’⁴ Such service, or selective ‘Britishness’ would ultimately count for little or nothing in the eyes of sceptical Britain, which viewed with suspicion and alarm the prospect of Amin’s exiles seeking to come to Britain.

18. Said Adrus, photograph from Lost Pavilion (2007/08).

Adrus had lived, and continues to live, something of a fragmented life, dividing time between residencies and home in the UK and projects and home in Switzerland (where he has family) and other countries of Europe. In this regard, the realties of his life in effect add layers of complexity to Adrus’s biography and it is these layers of complexity that provide the artist with such fertile material from which to draw, in the making of his work.

His earlier pieces tended to be two-dimensional and relied heavily on the use of image and text. The self-portrait, in a variety of forms, was a recurring feature of this work. As such, the self-portrait was not so much a declaration of self, but more of questioning of self, or perhaps more accurately, a means of critiquing the ways in which society ‘labelled’ and brutalised those it regarded as ‘Other’. Adrus’s work of the 1980s spoke out against racism, discrimination and the interplay between imposed identities and one’s sense of self. In this earlier work, he consistently discussed his political identity and his previous status as a refugee. For him, the royal coat-of-arms, as it appears on the ‘British’ passport, offered itself as a perplexing, mocking and ultimately offensive symbol. In turn, the British passport became an icon of the transparently racist restrictions placed on those Ugandan Asian peoples who found that the ‘British’ passports they held were effectively worthless in terms of allowing them unhindered or welcoming entry into Britain.

Over time, Adrus turned increasingly to mixed media ways of working. Thus, the moving image, on screen and projection, became a central part of his gallery work. With ever more sophisticated ways of presenting his work and ideas came ever more sophisticated ways of reading and mining his own history. Typical in this regard was Adrus’s more recent work, which took as its starting point the Muslim Burial Ground in Woking, Surrey, a Grade II listed site located in a corner of Woking’s Horsell Common. Enclosed within ornate brick walls, the cemetery has a domed archway entrance reflecting the design of the nearby Shah Jehan Mosque, said to be Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, established in 1889. The Muslim Burial Ground was apparently built during World War I to receive burials of Indian Army soldiers who, having fought and been wounded fighting for the British Empire, died at the dedicated hospital established for them in Brighton Pavilion. During the 1960s, the bodies of the fallen were exhumed and reinterred in the Military Cemetery at Brookwood, about 30 miles from London. According to Adrus, the work exists, in part at least, to highlight ‘issues about War, Empire, and Islamic Architecture in the South East of England and notions of contemporary landscape in the Home Counties.’⁵

By far the most successful and prominent British artist of South Asian/ East African background is Zarina Bhimji, who was born in 1963 and moved to Britain just over a decade later. Whilst many of her contemporaries produced work with explicit social narratives, Bhimji preferred to pursue oblique, discrete, often furtive artistic investigations that avoided precise meanings or readings. Bhimji’s work often had an unnerving effect on its audiences, accustomed as they sometimes were to approaching certain artists’ work with a definite and fixed expectation of dialogue and narrative. Bhimji’s work certainly contained much in the way of dialogue and narrative, but such concerns required her audiences to approach and appreciate Bhimji’s practice on its own terms. Her practice was particularly intriguing insofar as her photographs, sculpture, and later, her films, strongly resonated with meaning, but precise meanings were elusive, and it seemed, ultimately illusory. In the words of a press release for one of Bhimji’s exhibitions, her work ‘conveys a psyche of decay, loss, stillness and unspoken histories, but the translation of the artist’s tender, almost lyrical, visual language and the works’ elusive titles […] are left to the viewer.’⁶

Bhimji’s earlier work consisted of poignant photographs of a certain fragmentary quality. The images resonated with absence as much as presence, and what was depicted frequently intimated at loss, violence, trauma and an often-disconcerting partiality. At a time when a number of Black artists were using text as a bold strategy for accentuating meaning and for the communication of messages within their work, Bhimji employed text to confound, rather than to support, an expectation on the viewer’s part of unequivocal social sentiments and ‘messages’. Furthermore, the titles of her works were similarly intriguing, prompting the viewer to further consider, or question, what he/she was looking at. One of Bhimji’s earliest works to reflect her artistic singularity was an installation titled She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence, which was included in several group exhibitions of the late 1980s. The work consisted of a number of photographic images, and text, both elements at once precise and imprecise, encased within sandwiched panels of plexi-glass, suspended from the gallery ceiling. As was the case with pretty much all of Bhimji’s subsequent works, the viewer had to work particularly hard to piece together the disturbing narratives that the artist sought to present. One admirer of Bhimji’s work discussed the work in the following terms:

A new artist had emerged from silence; an artist working with language, film-like pictures, raw and manufactured materials (some stating an Indian origin), with mixed media, performance, memory, anecdote, telling tales of immigration and humiliation, of mothers and daughters, of private and public, of anger and loss. The artist wrote in 1989: ‘I am drawn towards the challenge of my own people. I fight them and I fight for them.’ And in 1988: ‘I want to create, communicate new meanings by bringing Indian languages, objects, memory, dreams, conversations from East African and Indian backgrounds, as well as my experience of western culture, to play in between two realities’. Zarina Bhimji’s work relies on intuition – hers and ours – and speaks with courage, vulnerability and pride … Zarina Bhimji works from her own identity, history and sense of community, framing questions which history in general and her own personal history have forced upon her. She was eight when civil war erupted in Uganda and her family spent two years behind closed curtains.⁷

19. Zarina Bhimji, I Will Always Be Here (1992).

As much as it did anything else, Bhimji’s work unsettled, disturbed and, on occasion, terrified the viewer. Typical in this regard was Bhimji’s installation of little white shirts, hung, en masse, from the gallery ceiling. Each shirt bore distinct evidence of violence, destruction, and desecration, in the form of the partial burning to which each shirt had been subject. It was not difficult for the viewer to associate the shirts with the children or young boys for whom the garments might have been manufactured. Certainly, that was the effect that the artist herself strove for. ‘I made from delicate cotton shirts with disturbingly beautiful burnt marks. They deal with loss and the experience and language of pain, both of which have been important concepts to my work.’⁸

Bhimji’s work was, quite simply, something different. Whilst many artists, including significant numbers of Black practitioners, clung to art forms such as painting, sculpture, printmaking and so on, Bhimji’s work was decidedly mixed media, though an attachment to the photographic image lay at the core of her exhibitions. Her work reflected the extent to which her concerns were most effectively explored, not through linear or explicit narratives, but rather through an assemblage of images and text in which meaning was implied rather than explicit, coded rather than unequivocal, and the viewing experience being experiential rather than merely visual. The readings of trauma and damage elicited from Bhimji’s practice were made stronger by their reliance on what the viewer brought to the work.

As time went on, Bhimji’s practice increasingly reflected an apparent intent to seek to come to terms with her childhood in Uganda. Within her practice, the Ugandan aspect of her identity loomed large in ways that were perhaps unresolved. There had always been, within her work, an element of conscious incompleteness, of unfinished business and within her work, these impulses grew ever more insistent. Bhimji’s attempts to come to terms with a disrupted, fragmented, damaged and conflicted history found a particularly arresting form in her film Out of Blue, shown, to great critical acclaim, at Documenta 11⁹, the major exhibition of international contemporary art which has, since 1955, taken place every five years in Kassel, Germany.

Zarina Bhimji’s Out of Blue, one of the most critically celebrated artist’s films of recent years, is an abstracted narrative of guilt, mourning, and loss, rooted in specific geopolitical, historical, and autobiographical facts. An artist of Indian descent, Bhimji was eight years old and living in Uganda with her family in 1972, the year General Idi Amin expelled tens of thousands of South Asians from the country. As a filmmaker, Bhimji registers impressions of present-day Uganda through light, colour, and texture to bear witness to the recent past.¹⁰

In Chapter Four mention was made of the extent to which African art, and Caribbean art in the UK reached its most intense periods of relative visibility when these umbrella art forms were filtered through the lenses of ‘festivals’. As discussed in that chapter, the stock motivations that apparently lay behind such exhibitions were the twin agendas, inevitably declared by the festival curators and directors themselves, of countering ignorance and facilitating greater exposure to these art forms and artists’ work. The same pathology has been applied to British artists of South Asian background for whom the most intense period of relative visibility to date came through a four-month long South Asian Contemporary Visual Arts Festival (SAVAF) which took place in galleries across the West Midlands, beginning in September 1993. The festival was principally the work of Juginder Lamba, the Kenya-born sculptor mentioned earlier, who had made his home in Shropshire, in the West Midlands. In his capacity as festival director, he gathered together in excess of sixty contemporary artists whose backgrounds lay in the South Asian countries of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The work of these artists was shown in a number of exhibitions across some 20 museums and gallery venues throughout the West Midlands region.

Lamba was keen to facilitate not only greater appreciation of the work of contemporary British artists of South Asian background, but also dialogue amongst the artists, or involving the artists. To this end, one of the features of SAVAF was a South Asian Contemporary Visual Arts Festival Conference held on 29 September 1993, presented in association with Sampad, a Birmingham-based arts agency that existed to promote South Asian arts. The one-day conference took place at a venue known as ‘mac’ – an abbreviation of its original name of Midlands Arts Centre. The declared aim of the conference was to provide a platform for individuals, organisations, and artists involved in the practice, promotion, and education of South Asian visual arts in Britain, to discuss and debate the issues affecting the development of South Asian visual arts in a national and international context. Conference attenders heard contributions from Lamba, the festival director, and a number of other exhibiting practitioners. SAVAF’s stated focus was to demonstrate the high calibre of work by British and British-based artists of South Asian origin and to seek greater acknowledgement of their contributions to national and international developments in mainstream art. In this regard it echoed the stated intentions of Caribbean Focus before it, and the africa 95 and Africa 05 festivals that were to follow it, notwithstanding SAVAF’s particular artistic focus. Lamba stated in the Festival Programme introduction that:

It is hoped that the high profile the Festival will give to South Asian artists and issues affecting their visual culture will have lasting effects through documentation, education and publication. Additionally, the Festival will act as a catalyst for long term provision of opportunities in the programming of art venues, as well as expanding and developing ways to involve communities of South Asian people in their visual culture.¹¹

Lamba secured funding from a range of bodies that included Birmingham City Council, the Foundation for Sport and the Arts, West Midlands Arts and the national funding body for the arts, the Arts Council. The SAVAF exhibitions featured paintings, sculpture, craft, video, film, photography, live art and performing art and took place at venues across the West Midlands, in towns and cities such as Birmingham, Coventry, Sandwell, Shropshire, Stafford, Stoke, Walsall, Warwick, Wolverhampton and Worcester. Two of the biggest SAVAF curatorial undertakings were Transition of Riches, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which featured Sarbjitt Natt, Nilofar Akmut, Symrath Kaur Patti, Anuradha Patel, Amal Ghosh, Jagjit Chuhan, Chila Kumari Burman, and Said Adrus, 2 September – 14 November 1993; and Beyond Destination: film, video and installation by South Asian artists, at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, which featured, Maya Chowdhry, Sutapa Biswas, Alnoor Dewshi, Khaled Hakim, Shaheen Merali, Sher Rajah, Alia Syed, and Tanya Syed, 16 September – 19 October 1993.

One of the biggest problems with festivals such as Caribbean Focus and SAVAF was that, in the long run, they provided only the briefest of respites from a systemic under-representation of certain artists from the galleries of the country. Now, two decades after SAVAF took place, it exists as little more than a near-obscure, pretty much forgotten series of exhibitions, unknown to current generations of art students and young artists, unremembered within narratives of late twentieth century British art history. This certainly was how the undulating profile of African art had come to exist in Britain; years of under-representation, or no representation at all, punctuated by brief, intense ‘festivals’, in which African art could be seen in a number of important venues. A significant number of Black artists found themselves at the mercy of a habitual and chronic undulation, in which they achieved relatively substantial exhibition opportunities and funding, within the context of occasional festivals. Such exhibitions reflected the problematics of the ways in which so many Black artists had come to be framed. It appeared that integrated programming, as an inevitable and normalised part of the curatorial landscape, lay beyond the reach of the vast majority of Black artists.

Some years after SAVAF, a key publication, Beyond Frontiers: Contemporary British Artists of South Asian Descent, was issued.¹² Edited by Amal Ghosh and Juginder Lamba, the book sought to offer, and indeed succeeded in offering, a nuanced, somewhat interlinked series of narratives about the artists who had been brought together for SAVAF, and the wider history of the presence of South Asian artists in the UK. When set in the context of the passage of time, however, the book’s stated intentions, presented on its back cover, of unsettling ‘once and for all, pat assumptions about the meaning and significance of ethnic origin to artists’ contribution to contemporary culture and experience’ remains something of an unfulfilled hope or aspiration.

Beyond Frontiers featured contributions from a broad range of individuals, some of whom made several contributions to the publication. Some contributors were academics and writers, though the majority of them were artists.¹³ For the most part, the presence of most of these individuals in Beyond Frontiers and other such publications and catalogues contrasted, somewhat problematically, with their absence from a great deal of other books and catalogues that purported to have contemporary British art as their focus. It was, as suggested earlier, only in publications such as Beyond Frontiers that many of these contributors were able to express themselves and be represented.