Indobrit

My daughter’s Euro appearance had made me question my own identity. Imran was firmly ensconced in the British way of life with the expensive prep school he attended near Eaton Square. It proudly upheld every aspect of public school life. He looked Mediterranean or maybe half Arab, he didn’t look at all Indian, with his chestnut eyes and his coarse dark brown hair. His eyes were shaped like almonds and his skin was creamy white, he was a child of the new Millennium, growing ever towards that murky gene pool which will eventually make us all look the same anyway. She was resolutely, unforgivingly white.

I knew so little of my own culture and where I came from. Of course Jena was still there to tell magical stories but they seemed faraway in the way she told them, as if they happened at the time of Ali Baba or Aladdin. What of me would this little white child take into the world? As a parent I was most concerned that she had understood the great sub-continent which she could call half her home.

I wanted to start my own magazine.

The time was certainly ripe, Farrukh Dhondy had been kicked off Bombay Dreams to make way for his erstwhile protégée, Meera Sayal to write the final book for the musical. I was sitting in front of Meera during on of the first public rehearsals, she was agitated and insecure. Selfridges did Bollywood that Summer and Jessica Hines, the archetypal white firenge and long time paramour of another Big B, Amitabh Bachan consulted on Indian Summer, Channel Four’s attempt at mainstreaming Indian Cinema to the masses. Her main claim to fame was that she had become pregnant by Aamir Khan, who later denied paternity of the child.

Indobrit was born in the Summer of 2002. The launch party was held at the Cinnamon Club in Westminster, under the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. It was a defining moment for ethnic publishing as it was the only magazine aimed at an ethnic audience, which attracted hoards of white British readers and mainstream establishment advertisers. It took off, from its first issue, which had a cover depicting Ray Panthaki, who had found some success and quite a lot of fame with the success of Bombay Dreams and Rachel Shelley who had starred opposite Aamir Khan in Lagaan. The cover, which has them both staring like deer caught in the headlines was filmed in the lounge at the Cobden Club.

Inside, we had not only fashion and films but also issues which affected us as young British Asians. Our writers were cherry-picked either for their controversial stance on a subject or because they were specialists in their fields. Internationally acclaimed writers such as Pico Iyer wrote for us, we were amongst the first magazines to recognise the potential of power broker, Fareed Zakaria. It looked beautiful, I had used the same format as Glamour which had launched the year before, it was handbag size but big enough for good art direction and to commission photo shoots in exotic locations.

The British Asian is a strange creature. We are an envious and fearful bunch. My little magazine was punching way above its weight. With good connections in the mainstream press, we usually managed to have one or two articles from each issue syndicated in the mainstream papers and I was friendly with the gossipistes who eagerly reprinted tit-bits, such as Guy Adams who then wrote the Spy Column for The Telegraph and Richard Kay from The Daily Mail. The magazine “mainstreamed” exotica and another world onto the horizon of the young and urbane. By all accounts, it appeared successful. We had mainstream distribution and the publication could be found across the UK and in India at bookstores. It enabled a generation of people and readers to be proud of who they were and to understand more about where they came from. We always covered interesting stories from India, and I was surprised that the Indian perspective is a lot broader than ours, which is firmly constricted by being stuck in this cold and lonely island.

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