London Company
Farrukh Dhondy
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Born in Poona in 1944, Farrukh Dhondy moved to the UK in search of higher education. Armed with a scholarship to Cambridge, he arrived wearing a tweed jacket, synthetic shirt with a tie over woollen trousers only to discover a world that was split wide open with its peculiar combination of contraries. Where, on the one hand, the universities were awash with ‘mods, rockers, defiant young men with unkempt hair, and young women with the beginnings of the idea of a sexual revolution’, another altogether less tolerant, more illiberal world existed cheek by jowl with the liberal one. While one set was swinging ‘with the Beatles and the Stones, with the sad and lyrical rebellion of Joan Baez’s voice and the gravel and grit of Bob Dylan’, the other lot was guarding their territory with ferocious zeal, keeping ‘blacks’ out of ‘whites only’ pubs, and practising a form of apartheid that is hard to believe in the present-day multi-cultural Britain. It is of this England of the Swinging Sixties that he writes in his latest book, London Company.
Comparing the physical ‘movement’ of peoples – from India, Pakistan, West Asia and Africa – to the civil rights movement that changed the face of America, Dhondy notes how the intention of this mass migration in the 1950s and ’60s was not to become the agents of change; those who came, in wave upon relentless wave from the erstwhile colonies, arrived in search of livelihood or education, yet they ended up transforming Britain and setting into motion forces of globalisation that would have far-reaching consequences. Initially, these ‘black’ faces lurked in the fringes of the ‘white’ consciousness; they worked on bus and train routes, cleaned the streets, took up the most menial of jobs at the lowest of wages. Dhondy recalls, with frankness and a trace of astonishment, his own encounter with the ‘black’ or ‘brown’ population that lived on the margins: ‘That a few hundred thousand Asians, perhaps a million, worked the factories and mills on night shifts in the Midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire was not something I became aware of till later, when I came down from university and made my acquaintance with unsheltered Britain.’ London Company begins with his coming down from Cambridge, coming down quite literally from the protected world of academia into the real world of biases, prejudices and exclusion. Living in London, with his girlfriend, Natasha who had accompanied him from India, Dhondy recounts his experience of racism – be it in finding rented accommodation or a drink in a pub or an encounter with the police – which, in turn, led him and Natasha to find common cause with the Black Panthers. He paints vivid portraits of the colourful characters who steered this radical movement modelled on the America Black Panthers. Apart from Dhondy himself and Natasha, the dramatis personae of this engaging bildungsroman comprise members of the Central Core dominated by the charismatic Fermina who energetically organised protest marches, took charge of distributing pamphlets and kept the house in order; Sharky who had renamed himself ‘Shaka’ after a Zulu war hero; Alby, a former bus conductor and now note-taker and pillar of the Movement though he cannot read nor write; Solomon who steals Natasha from Dhondy but maintains that the ‘personal is not the political’. While the majority of members were Afro-Caribbean with only a handful of Asians, an all-powerful core group had decided that all members of the Black Panther Movement were to be called ‘blacks’ for ‘it would have been a heresy to suggest a division of race, culture or perspective. The ideological justification for this inclusive membership was that we had migrated from Britain’s former colonies and were “politically black”. Skin colour didn’t matter so long as it wasn’t white.’ It was disconcerting therefore in the early days for Dhondy, a Parsee from India’s West Coast and quite fair-skinned by most standards, to accustom himself to be regarded as a ‘black’. Dhondy’s own induction into the Black Panther Movement – after suspending his disbelief at the ‘masquerading aggression of the name and some of the rhetoric’ he routinely heard at the Central Core (CC) meetings — and subsequent disenchantment, form a substantial part of the narrative. Despite all members being called ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’, the inherently flawed and undemocratic functioning of the CC becomes irksome. The last straw is when Dhondy, by now a fledgling writer having sharpened his pen by writing pamphlets, leaflets, diatribes and reports for the Movement’s organ, Freedom News, is told to ‘submit’ his stories for review by members of the CC. His collection of multicultural stories entitled The East End at Your Feet, represented the Asian and African youth instead of caricaturing them; seizing an altogether new space, it also struck a chord with the reading public and brought some measure of fame to its young author. Unfortunately, its success doesn’t go down too well with the CC that believes All Art Must Serve the People. So, while London Company paints many luminous vignettes of the counterculture of the 1960s Britain, of a time when young people actively believed in change and experimentation, of an age when boundaries were meant to be pushed and rules broken if not flouted, it also shows the artist as a young man taking his first steps in the literary world. Running as a parallel strand throughout the book is Dhondy’s struggle to find gainful employment in order to stay on in London, his budding career as a teacher and thereafter as an established writer. By the time the book ends, Dhondy – who in later years would have a prolific and eclectic career as a writer, translator, script-writer, commissioning editor – has moved away from the Movement, quit his job to become a full-time writer and, like his adopted country, learnt to live with change in all its constancy. Rakhshanda Jalil | Issue 2 | Earthern Lamp Journal
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Hardcover: 248 pages
Farrukh Dhondy