The India Club was not chic or fancy. It was a no-frills restaurant, serving delicious lamb bhuna and fish curry.

Joseph Mitchell, the American journalist and writer, elevated the art of writing about the demise of favourite restaurants which are now lost to the relentless forces of development. He passionately believed that the soul of his cherished city, New York, could be found somewhere, it would be in the backstreet eating houses.

In the wistful echo of Mitchell’s spirits, I cannot help but lament the rude health of cherished London establishments, each bearing its own unique tapestry of fondness.

Whether it is the announcement of the closure of the two-Michelin star restaurant Le Gavroche, a pioneer of the food scene for more than five decades, or the closing down of the legendary Banner’s café in Crouch End after three-long decades which also drew the enigmatic Bob Dylan, it felt the gems from long-ago London, untouched, unreconstituted and ungentrified, were falling apart, each at a time, as the long days of summer start to fade away.

However, my heart will always resonate most profoundly with the permanent closure of the India Club – the capital’s most singular restaurant and bar – an institution to my mind that belongs to a different category.

Ever since my time in London, the India Club has been my go-to place: a comfort during demanding days, celebrating birthdays, personal occasions or cultivating sublime friendships from all walks of life, especially concerning or linked to South Asia.

India Club- A Sense of Belonging

As a frequent visitor of the Club, the space gave me a sense of belonging: a natural human instinct as a South Asian migrant. I never imagined that the place where I once found space, comprehension and calmness amidst the hustling culture of London to contemplate pressing issues while holding a glass of Mango Lassi (which seldom they run out of) would reject me twice during its final phase: a reminder of the luxury I had taken for granted during my formal days at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

While the closing of the Club was long anticipated, if not too far, the very soon dreadful announcement from the Marker family – who have run the club for almost 30 years with utmost dedication and commitment – induced a flood of emotions, including shock and sadness, as it often happens when one tries to brush off the reality under the carpet, despite knowing it entirely. It was indeed a long silence before a final adieu, as the long days of summer started to fade as a distant memory.

For more than seven decades, it stood as a bustling epicentre for the Indo-British groups, forged in the wake of Indian independence and the tumultuous partition era, including the Calcutta Rowing Club, Goan Association and the Curry Club.

Within its walls, photographs of Dadabhai Naoroji – the first Indian MP in the UK – and other dignitaries, including former defence minister of India VK Krishna Menon, compounded with other Indian scenes hung, which attracted the likes of the Indian Journalist Association, Indian Workers Association, and Indian Socialist Group of Britain converged as a vibrant hub for their myriad events and endeavours.

Yet, the final days have been a hotter ticket, the busiest I have ever seen, with its well-wishers and loyalists, some even in their late 90s with more enthusiasm and sadness than one can expect, coming together to bid their final farewells and reminiscing their bygone “golden days.” From time to time, depending on how quickly the tables were cleared, a line sprawled almost an hour before the opening of the Club, with more than two hours waiting in the evening out onto the sidewalk – a surge drawn by nostalgia, as a member of the Marker family told me.

However, for anyone who has not been there, describing the place is difficult. Situated in the heart of London’s Strand across the road straddled between Fleet Street and the Royal Court of Justice, it attracted a cosmopolitan clientele of employees from the Indian House, journalists, lawyers, lecturers and students from the London School of Economics and King’s College, next door. While the building wears a weary look and the decor frozen in time, giving it a timeless quality, if a restaurant was ever a cult, the India Club is it.

Yet, the India Club was not chic or fancy. It was a no-frills restaurant, serving delicious lamb bhuna (roast) and fish curry passionately to its customers with one purpose: to further ‘Indo-British friendship.’

And in many myriad ways, it achieved its motto. It is only telling that the closing of the India Club comes at a time when Britain is desperate to deepen its ties with India, more than ever.

But the Club has been resilient all these years. Despite the Club increasing its prices with the impact of the cost of living crisis, the prices continued to be fairly decent than any other Indian restaurant in central.

In 2019, the club proudly labelled itself a community treasure when it hosted a National Trust exhibition on its premises. As a testament to its historical significance, the British Library now houses oral histories from this exhibition, among which is the story of David, the son of the legendary waiter Joseph.

During my initial visits to the Club, I took my friend from Brazil to the club – who has a fine sense of dining and cultural understanding. “Is that Mahatma Gandhi?” she asked, as she pointed to the painting on the wall while eating Paneer Butter Masala, which continued to become our go-to dish at the club. “We should come here often,” she smilingly said. Which we indeed did.

During the final week of the Club, we celebrated our second London anniversary in the Club together. Unlike whenever we promised to be at the Club soon without any kind of waiting, this time we waited for two hours to get the table (we got lucky to get the same table which we often used to dine at!) and unfortunately, there won’t be any more evenings like those.

And as the sun set on September 17, an era has come to an end. The India Club was one of the lasting institutions that played a pivotal role in the narratives of diasporas and independence movements of the nation. Similarly, I could think of the Polish Club, overlooking Hyde Park with the history of the Free Polish forces and their base in London. The Irish Club too, located in the opulent Eaton Square, exuded significance.

Currently, the India Club is looking for an alternative space nearby. However, even if that materialises in all fairness, will it be able to recreate the spirits of the institution in a new settling? Scepticism only abounds.

Cities are ever-evolving landscapes, forever in motion. At a time like this, when cultural vandalism is all pervasive, what does one do? I chose to cling to memories, more than ever, that acted as a hub of intellectual exchanges and fostering of progressive ideas.

Kalrav Joshi is a London-based journalist-writer. An alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), he writes on politics, culture, technology and climate.

Courtesy : “The Quint”; 26 September 2023

Photo courtesy : Kalrav Joshi

After a grievous injury in Rome, the writer has been chronicling his recovery through remarkable Twitter threads.

Hanif Kureishi, the British Novelist, screenwriter, playwright and director, has been narrating the most imaginative stories since earlier last month from an unusual place and space — a hospital bed in Italy under utmost distress.

What has emerged is a striking chronicle of a man coming to terms with an injury most terrible. His Twitter threads, night after night, make his readers laugh and weep all at once, with his typical acerbic wit in place.

His last novel, The Nothing (2017), is centred around an elderly man in a wheelchair, trapped in a frail and frustrated body but still feeling the urge to create. The irony is not lost as Kureishi himself now lies paralysed.

After a grievous injury on Boxing Day in Rome, the writer has been chronicling his recovery in the most remarkable way possible through Twitter threads, collected on his Substack newsletters. Unable to hold the pen, he dictates them to his son Carlo.

“I have never been so busy since I became a vegetable,” one of the dispatches starts, alluding that the writer of the cult classic, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), has not lost his penchant for arresting opening lines.

Unable To Hold a Pen but the Words Keep Coming

Kureishi considers his pen to be an extension of his body. For decades, the author has been a wordsmith. Novels, short tales, plays, and screenplays have gushed forth, with no fear of being censored.

The writer’s difficulty in grasping a pen, however, is a painful and heartbreaking realisation. In one of his posts, Kureishi expressed the physical act of putting pen to paper, how he likes to “write a word, a sentence, then another sentence, until I feel something wake up inside.”

“As I make these marks, I begin to hear characters speaking, and then they start speaking to each other if I’m lucky; if I’m even luckier, they might start amusing one another,” he added.

“I’m sure many painters, writers, architects, sports people and gardeners love their tools, and see their tools as an extension of their body. I hope one day I will be able to go back to using my own precious and beloved instruments,” he wrote.

It is uncertain whether he will be able to hold a pen or walk again, and so his readers worry and wonder: will the world ever be the same if Kureishi can’t write?

He assures in one of his posts, “… I will continue to write freely and spontaneously, as I am doing now. I have never written like this before.”

Kureishi, 68, was born in Bromley, South London, in 1954, to a British mother and an Indian father who immigrated to Britain to study law.

Coming of age in the ’80s, he explored the relationship between race, culture, identity, and politics in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain through his work.

He has acknowledged the complexities of identifying with England – its colonialist history and myths of nationhood – but has remained steadfast in his pursuit of what it means to be British and how that complex citizenship may be portrayed.

In the past, he has criticised the Conservative government in England for discriminating against minorities and the working class.

“This row between us and them (the Tories and the conservative press) was also an argument about language and representation. These people wanted to control the freedom of imagination. They were afraid of anyone who saw Britain as a racially mixed, run-down, painfully divided, class-ridden place. For their fantasy was of a powerful, industrially strong country with a central, homogeneous culture.”

Hanif Kureshi in his autobiographical essay, The Rainbow Sign.

Situating Asians within ‘Multicultural Europe’

Kureishi became a beacon of hope for a new generation of Asians challenging not only racism but also the traditional image of what it means to be Asian.

All this at a time when Britain was quite different, with racist stabbings and firebombings being ordinary and “Paki bashing” being a national sport. He not only liberated British-Asians from their manufactured identities but also gave real characters, not just stereotypes.

Kureishi’s language and representation portrayed Asians that were neither meek nor obedient but rather amusing and casually knowledgeable.

With his best-known screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), he told the story of a love affair between a bored Asian adolescent named Omar and a working-class white youngster named Johnny against the backdrop of bigotry and recession in ’80s Britain. This love story of two boys broke traditional narratives of immigrant life.

When Nasser, the landlord, evicts a black tenant, Johnny objects that he should not be so nasty to another black person.

“I am a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani,” Nasser says condescendingly. With this small act, he escaped the cage of identification imposed by both racism and anti-racist notions of ethnic belonging.

Furthermore, it was also a remarkable and radical work which tackled the idea of homosexuality within the Asian community in those times. To him, it is evident that community and identity politics are riddled with traps and paradoxes, tensions and contentions, but it is precisely the structural conundrum that has contributed to his fiction and films.

Enduring Legacy of Brave Writers

Three years before The Satanic Verses (1988), Kureishi’s screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, enraged fundamentalists. In an interview to Prospect magazine, he recalled that around 100 people would turn up every Friday in New York, and would hold demonstrations outside the cinema. One of them read: ‘No homosexuals in Pakistan.’

The watershed moment for Kureishi, however, was the fatwa that was issued against Salman Rushdie, after which he started researching fundamentalism.

“It changed the direction of my writing,” Kurieshi reportedly remarked. “Unlike Salman, I had never taken a real interest in Islam. I come from a Muslim family. But they were middle-class—intellectuals, journalists, writers—very anti-clerical. I was an atheist, like Salman, like many Asians of our generation were. I was interested in race, in identity, in mixture, but never in Islam. The fatwa changed all that.”

Once, one of the nurses at the National Health Service (NHS) mistook Kureishi for Rushdie. In a humorous anecdote, Kureishi recalled the moment.

“As the nurse flipped me over she asked me, “How long did it take you to write Midnight’s Children?’” To which, Kureishi replied, “If I had indeed written Midnight’s Children, don’t you think I would have gone private?”

Rushdie, who lost one hand and one eye in a vicious on-stage attack in 2022, has been writing to Kureishi regularly. The two writers happen to be old friends.

“My friend Salman Rushdie, one of the bravest men I know, a man who has stood up to the most evil form of Islamofascism, writes to me every single day, encouraging patience,” Kureishi mentioned in one of his dispatches. “He should know, he gives me courage.”

And while there is tremendous anguish around the world, they together are a poignant example of brave writers who endure.

Reviving the Best of What Twitter Could Be

For Kureishi, writing is everything. In an interview in 1996, he said, “I write really in order to keep myself alive. To interest myself. To find out what I think.”

Despite oscillating between moments of sadness and despair and between moments of raging creativity, he is determined to keep writing. In fact, according to his son Carlo, he is writing abundantly these days, despite his condition.

His tweets appear to be spontaneous, but Kureishi painstakingly plans them. The newsletters embody the most innate and primal purposes of literature: to survive and hold on to it.

“Every day when I dictate these thoughts, I open what is left of my broken body in order to try and reach you, to stop myself from dying inside.”

His writing is rife with irony and despair: mirroring the darkest realities of human lives.

His dispatches from an unfolding crisis is an extension of what he does best: narrating drama, musing over art, sharing painfully poignant anecdotes and reflecting on life, all with a touch of wit and sadness and humour and intimacy.

These posts are all part of what has evolved into a Twitter journal, in which he keeps his followers up to date on his progress in real time. His regular and unexpected posts reveal some intimate ideas on creativity, loss, anecdotes, coffees, and cunnilingus.

It is a voice without any illusions and pretence. Let us not lose sight of where we are though. His condition remains uncertain.

“I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don’t know who I am anymore. Someone new is emerging,” Kuresihi tweeted on January 13.

Meanwhile, he clings to himself, existence, hope, and, above all, wit.

°°°

(Kalrav Joshi is a multimedia journalist based in London. He writes on politics, democracy, culture, and technology. He tweets @kalravjoshi_.)

Link: https://www.thequint.com/us-nri-news/hanif-kureishi-unfolding-crisis-dispatches-telling-of-act-of-creation-italy-hospital#read-more 

‘Postcards from Home’, an exhibition in Oxford’s Ashmolean displays the shared history of India-Pakistan partition.

 

 

Anecdotes of migration, longing for an ancestral home, and the poignance of finding love are at the heart of ‘Postcards from Home’, an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Britain’s Oxford. The thoughtfully chosen postcards from India and Pakistan, carrying the past into the present, add another intriguing dimension to the storytelling project.

“My mom said, ‘Yeh project tujhse khuda ne banwaya hai (God has made you work on this project),” says Manisha Gera Baswani, a New Delhi-based artist, who collaborated with artists from both sides of the border to bring the stories alive.

The exhibit intends to revive and reconcile the south Asian diaspora before, during and after 1947, in the British land that divided the Indian subcontinent into two nations.

Ironically, the exhibition, being held in the 76th year of Independence, is displayed in a museum that houses several disputed relics of the British colonial history in south Asia.

Manisha Gera Baswani collaborated with artists from both sides of the border to bring the stories alive.

Photo: Manisha Gera Basin

‘Healing Wounds’

The project, conceived by Baswani, tries to understand the tumultuous history of India and Pakistan through the lens of 47 artists from both sides. The exploration offers heart-breaking and resilient personal anecdotes of migration, longing for an ancestral home, and the poignance of finding love.

With its work and collection of oral histories at the Ashmolean, this arguably second modern south Asian exhibition has recieved critical acclaim and interest. If one takes the tour of the Ashmolean Indian Art Galleries in the museum, the postcards are displayed in a different section towards the end, aptly reminding how recent the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent is.

“Wounds do not heal easily. Therefore, it inevitably becomes important to showcase and document oral histories through which people can relate, understand and get terms to their histories. The displaying of the exhibition towards the end of the tour compels us to pause and reflect on our most recent traumatic past,” says Sana Rizvi, a 23-year-old MPhil student at the University of Oxford.

Rizvi took some of the postcards from the exhibition to Pakistan to present them to her parents earlier this year, a reminder of the shared history of India and Pakistan.

The exhibition has generated critical acclaim and interest in the south Asian diaspora.

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

While non-violence became the bedrock of the anti-colonial struggle in India, the horrors of the bloodshed and brutality caused by the violent Partition in August 1947 continue to gnaw the sub-continent even today, as the region remains susceptible to a lot of religious and ethnic violence.

The postcards tell stories that seamlessly traverse borders and make it impossible to divide or nationalise histories.

The postcards are displayed in a different section towards the end, aptly reminding how recent the bloody partition of the Indian subcontinent is.

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

Documenting Oral Histories of Shared Realities

Though a painter by training, Baswani feels an affinity towards the lens. She has a body of work displayed in documenting and capturing insights across Asian traditions globally – in the India Art Fair, White Chapel Gallery, London and Lahore Biennale.

Baswani’s ability to create an overarching projection of lived realities is especially relevant now, as the Indian subcontinent celebrates 75 years of independence from the British.

So, what drew her to this particular project?

Unaware about the nuances of photography, Baswani would often bring out the camera and capture the creative spaces of her artist friends in their studios or an art camp. However, she did not pursue her passion as an approach until she visited Karachi in 2015, where many Pakistani artists who, upon hearing she was Indian, would recount the stories they had heard about the time their families spent in pre-Partition India.

Baswani herself has grown up with stories of partition. In many ways, Pakistan, the land of Baswani’s forefathers – Baswani’s parents lost their home in Quetta and Sargodha during the partition – and a ‘terrain’ of her heart, became the fertile soil for the seeds of this liminal project.

The project, conceived by Baswani, tries to understand the tumultuous history of India and Pakistan through the lens of 47 artists from both sides.

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

When Was Bengal First Partitioned? No, Not in 1947

She was blown away by the responses after she sent out a message to all the artists in her phonebook with names that sounded Punjabi or Sindhi, requesting them to share their memories associated with the partition.

Baswani is an artist with access to art groups in both nations, which makes her endeavour unique. Her work demonstrates that cross-border communication within the creative community is extraordinary – many of them have utilised history to bring diverse yet compassionate narratives of the past. In addition, this is a one-of-a-kind endeavour to chronicle artists, a blind spot in south Asian culture.

This is a one-of-a-kind endeavour to chronicle artists.

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

Friendships in Times of Divide 

In her postcard, Saba Iqbal, a Karachi-based artist, writes about friendships that thrive across borders. It reads:

“He (my grandfather) had joined the army in the education corps and was posted in Majir Cantonment in Karachi. One evening, he was sipping his tea on the lawn when a gleaming car with an Indian flag came into his driveway. He could not believe it was his dear friend Roop Chand from St Stephen’s College, Delhi. Mr Chand was now the Indian ambassador to Pakistan. The next day, my grandfather was summoned to the headquarters for an explanation as to why an Indian national, and that too the ambassador, was allowed into the cantonment area? He would have had to bear serious consequences had Brigadier Pinto, a British senior in command, not stepped in to save him. The brigadier stood his ground that no partition line can stop two old best friends from meeting each other.”

The Indian artist Krishen Khanna was able to find ‘companionship’ with Renu, whom he first met at Pahalgam in Kashmir at the age of eight, accompanying their professor fathers for a retreat.

Reminiscing about his days, he beautifully writes, “… My first advance towards her was coldly rejected. At 13, when I left for London on the Kipling scholarship, Renu dropped her handkerchief for me to pick up and take as a memory. Instead, I picked it up and graciously returned it to her. This convinced her that I had no idea of romance.”

Krishen Khanna was able to find ‘companionship’ with Renu, whom he first met at Pahalgam in Kashmir at the age of eight

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

“On the day of Partition, 15 August 1947, Renu left for England to study. We kept in touch through letters which I still have. On her return, we got married in the year 1950. Together now for 85 years, in a journey that began in Lahore, we are currently in a sacred space of deep companionship. We do not have to say a word to each other when we are with each other.”

The postcard ends on a liminal note, “Some things remain the same, some change drastically, and yet every state can be wonderful. At 93, I still have Renu and I am as crazy about her as I was when she was six. And I do miss Lahore …”

Postcards try to capture the realities of life about what  brings the region together.

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

Despite All, a Story of Longing

With much water flowing down the Ganges that tears its constituent apart, the postcards try to capture the realities of life about what, often unacknowledged, brings the region together. The intrinsic nature of longing and love find a central theme of this collection.

In the 1920s, Nilima Sheikh’s grandparents lived in Burnley, in the north of England, where her grandfather was a practising doctor. After losing his mother to tuberculosis, Lala Lajpat Rai persuaded the duo to help in establishing one of the first specialised tuberculosis hospitals in south Asia in 1934 – TB was rampant in the subcontinent at the time.

“It is heartening to know that the Gulab Devi Memorial Tuberculosis Hospital for women, named after Lala Lajpat Rai’s mother, continues to be a landmark institution in Lahore. It has grown, I am told, with wider-thoracic care facilities and is now known as the Gulab Devi Chest Hospital,” she eloquently writes.

Gulab Devi Memorial Tuberculosis Hospital for women was named after Lala Lajpat Rai’s mother

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

Audience visiting the exhibition are reminded of their past, irrespective of their origin. “I have grown up with stories of partition from my parents as a child of an immigrant. The exhibition spoke not only to me but also of me. And that is the beauty of it. In particular, the postcard written by Nilima Sheikh caught my attention. It is indeed a testimony of layered history on how she can find home in Lahore and speak volumes about the commitment to the cause that remains undeterred, irrespective of the nation you hail from,” says one of the visitors at the exhibition.

“And that is what our generation needs to learn from them. Remember, only love has the power to win over hate,” adds the British Indian who longs to visit Pakistan soon.

From Lahore, the artist R M Naeem envisages through postcards, “I dream that our nations bridge back the brotherhood that was broken. Nations need boundaries … Love does not …”

Visitors at the exhibition are reminded of their past, irrespective of their origin.

Photo: Manisha Gera Baswani

(Kalrav Joshi is a multimedia journalist based in London. He writes on politics, democracy, culture, and technology. He tweets @kalravjoshi_.)

Published: “The Quint”; 02 December 2022