Man wearing shalwar kameez in Tooting

A friend of mine wanted me to accompany them to give my verdict about the Pakistani food in Tooting, London. They are non-Pakistani and they wanted an opinion from an insider of the culture to test whether the food was authentic or not. I accepted their invitation.

On the day of our meet-up, I first walked from Tooting underground station towards Tooting Broadway to get a sense of what was new. I was also looking for something that would catch my attention and that I might develop into a research project. When we met, we roamed some more given my obsession with linguistic practices “in the wild.” To work up our appetite, we proceeded to explore material aspects of social and cultural public life in Tooting, which has been made famous by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, a well-known native of the area.

Saxons and Romans coming through

The origin of the word “Tooting” is Anglo-Saxon, even if the meaning is disputed. Inhabited since before Anglo-Saxon times, Tooting lies on Stane Street, a 91-km road originally created by the Romans from Londinium (London) to Noviomagus Reginorum (Chichester).

So, Tooting has been at the intersection of “foreign” and “local” for at least two millennia. It is obvious that in relation to places like Tooting the imagined homogenous, monolingual ideal has always been a myth.

Pakistanis moving in

Going back to the topic of our day out in Tooting and the spatial practices we were looking for, the first thing that caught my eye was a young man in a dark green modern-day Pakistani-style “kam” or shalwar kameez walking ahead of us. Is this foreign or is this a local practice now, I wondered. Should wearing a shalwar kameez be considered part of a Tooting identity? And what kind of language practices might the person in shalwar kameez have been involved in before the moment I saw him? Was he coming out of a mosque? It was too early for any mandatory prayer times nor was it a Friday. His clothes were slightly formal, fitting for a Pakistani-style party. Perhaps he was off to a wedding or a milad or something similar?

Anarkali shop front

While shalwar kameez, just as any other form of clothing, can exist outside the realm of practice, linguistic happenings are tied to the communicative spaces and geographies where it appears. I wondered whether his outfit would not invoke Pakophobia (see a biography of the word P*ki  here) by some parts of Tooting’s population? And how does the clothing of this man relate to his class, status, and education?

Indexing “Global Britain” locally

Moving forward, I found some words written on shops that caught my attention: “Anarkali,” the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) sign, Habib Bank, Nirala, and a couple of other familiar names originating from Pakistan and neighbouring countries. These naming practices are a form of action in a specific place and time within London. These names may not be indigenous to Britain, but they are embedded in this local neighbourhood.

The word Anarkali, for example, has a history bundled in this eight-letter word: the semantic meaning of the word “anarkali” is the bud of pomegranate. The word is also reminiscent of the legend of Anarkali, a courtesan in the Mughal court of Lahore who had a tragic love affair with the Mughal Prince, the famous bazaar in Lahore named after the courtesan, the Indian film Mughal-e-Azam, and last but not least, a popular Pakistani song from 2002 called Supreme Ishq Anarkali. All of these associations came to my mind.

The word Anarkali at the front of the shop was written in Roman rather than in Urdu, making it legible to descendants of South Asians migrants who might have only spoken competence of Urdu, the lingua franca of multilingual Pakistan.

Our delicious lunch at Spice Village, Tooting

We walked past Anarkali and stopped wherever we found something interesting to observe. There is rising gentrification in the neighbourhood, but the processes of relocalization of various intersecting practices are visible in multi-layered, multimodal language practices.

Food and restaurants were central to our conversation. Pointing to the restaurant Lahore Karahi, my friend said: “That’s one of the restaurants Sadiq Khan likes the most. I read heard it in an interview.”

Sharing a Tooting meal

Sadiq Khan also recommends the restaurants Daawat and Spice Village on the Visit London website.

With these endorsements, it was not surprising that Lahore Karahi and Daawat were full. We settled for savoury dishes in Spice Village for our lunch, followed by a very desi dessert in Daawat.

The question then is: how much of local Pakistani languaging practices are considered part of the fabric of the local ecology by the policy makers of modern-day “Global Britain“? And how much can we as educators and researchers make use of all languaging practices in our environment without labelling them under the binaries of minority/majority, local/foreign, indigenous/migrant?

Ramadan Lights on Coventry Street

Ramadan in London is exceptional in many ways. As the centre of a former Empire which still exerts a global pull on its former subjects and their descendants, London has been at the heart of a wave of migrations since the times of the British Raj. Initiatives inclusive of Muslims have normalised the Muslim presence. While there is no doubt that islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate is on the rise in Britain, too, the relative ease and acceptance of being a Muslim in the public space is manifested here in pragmatic ways, such as the widespread availability of halal food.

London’s Ramadan celebrations are in a class of its own. London’s Ramadan illuminations of 2023 were a testament to the diversity, inclusivity and vibrancy of London. When London’s first ever Ramadan lights were switched on by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Lord Mayor of Westminster, Hamza Taouzzale, Muslims felt acknowledged in the public space generating a sense of understanding and promoting an equitable society.

Open iftars are another example. These have taken place for decades in Britain, and Muslims and non-Muslims break the fast together in public spaces. Sharing meals with strangers is a powerful experience for people of all faiths. Open iftars are incredibly important to get visibility and also to have communitywide engagement with each other, as is the essence of Islam. Some of the picturesque and breathtakingly beautiful environments where open iftars have taken place include Victoria and Albert Museum, Trafalgar Square, and Cambridge University.

Ramadan 2023 marked a particularly significant moment in British history as Muslim leaders were for the first time invited to the official residence of the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street for an iftar meal.

Corporate Europe is starting to celebrate Ramadan, too. Furniture retailer IKEA, for instance,  launched the GOKVÄLLÅ collection this year with clear connections to the Ramadan spirit.

My Ramadan

The visibility of Ramadan in public shapes personal experiences of Ramadan, too. For me, we start preparing for Ramadan months ahead by getting the house ready, shopping, and cooking. What I aim to do is complete mundane task before the start of the Holy Month, so that there is more time for spiritual reflection and Quran reading.

Ramadan lights in the streets and open iftars remind me of the beauty of our human diversity through these newly formed traditions in Europe.

As the Quran states, “Among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. There are indeed signs in that for those who know” (30:22).

I wish all who celebrate and observe the month of Ramadan a time full of divine blessings! Ameen.

Alia Amir’s grandfather with his three daughters, ca. 1950 (Copyright: Alia Amir)

I admire people, who, on the move, maintain and transfer their heritage languages to the next generations. By “maintain,” I mean the transfer of spoken language or as a boli (Mahboob, 2023).

In our family, our generation has grappled with the challenges of preserving all of our languages, and unfortunately, we have not succeeded in passing down all these languages to the next generation.

Multilingual Kashmiri ancestries

My paternal grandfather Shams-ud-Din was born in Srinagar in Kashmir, and raised in a Kashmiri-speaking family, shortly after the Great Famine of India (1876-1878) under British Crown rule and after Jang-e-Azadi (the War of Independence) (1857), also referred to as “Mutiny” from the British Raj’s and coloniser’s perspective and language.

The Great Famine of India itself, during the Crown rule, not only took the lives of millions of people but also caused mass displacements and internal migrations. This era did not only result in an astounding loss of life, but also came to have long-lasting consequences for health. Recent research shows that the British Raj era heightened the risk of diabetes in South Asians, a testament to the complex and extensive consequences of historical episodes.

Even though my initial childhood years were spent with my grandfather, I am not aware of the extent of his formal education. Vivid in my fond memories of him, however, remain his proficiency in several languages. He was well-versed in writing English, Persian and Urdu, accompanied by the eloquence of his bolis, Kashmiri and Punjabi. A brief part of his life was spent in service of the Empire’s machinery, the British Hindustani Police. Despite that, I recall the fervor in his stories about the resistance against the angrez rulers.

My paternal grandmother, Rehmat, was also a Kashmiri, however, her Kashmiriness manifested slightly differently from my grandfather’s. Her story, and subsequently my story and my linguistic skills, are also entrenched in the environmental, socio-historic events and linguistic ecology of the region. Her family, along with numerous others, were among the migrants from Kashmir to the-then unified Punjab, specifically Lahore, colloquially referred to as the province’s heart, during a famine in the seventeenth century under the Company Raj.

Among these migrant Kashmiris was Allama Iqbal, one of the foremost poets and philosophers of the region. He wrote in Urdu (also called Hindustani at that time), Persian, English, and German, while he was a lecturer of Arabic. Also fluent in Punjabi, one of the major languages of Sialkot city, where his ancestors settled, Allama Iqbal’s second and third generations (as well his predecessors) can be regarded as fully assimilated into Punjabi culture and language. It highlights a poignant contrast – the loss of one language, and the gain of another, a reminder of the pulsating progression of cultural and linguistic identities.

South Asian diglossia

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris exemplify how diglossia functioned in multilingual communities. Pakistan and other South Asian nations similarly encapsulate traits of diglossic countries. In the case of South Asia and Pakistan, the notion of one language or one ethnic group is rendered a myth, just as the assumption that one nation necessitates one language. Based on this assumption, in linguistic communities such as the Kashmiris, it remains a challenge to pinpoint a single language that represents all of them. This monoethnic perspective, however, is rooted in Eurocentric global North discourses and epistemologies which does not capture the nuanced realities of bilingual communities (Bagga-Gupta et al., 2017).

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also showcase that the purposes of languages in one’s repertoire can be different, and those uses do not necessarily need to confirm imperial language categorizations. For instance, consider the Punjabi language in present-day Pakistan (and in the context of British Hindustan). Even though it is a written language as well, it has never been used as a medium of instruction or even taught as a compulsory subject in schools. Its absence in primary, secondary and higher education does not mean it is endangered in any form. Take the example of ‘Pasoori,’ a Punjabi song from Pakistan that garnered 696 million views and was the most searched song on Google in 2022. This not only showcases the song’s immense popularity but also underscores the idea that languages can thrive in various forms and modalities.

New bolis in migration

Allama Iqbal and my grandfather’s generation of Kashmiris also exemplify that language shift occurs in diasporic communities when the connection between the homeland and the migrants is weakened. Language shift means that when communities settle in new lands, new varieties will become part of the repertoire.

Fast forward to 2024, I find myself incapable of being able to speak all the bolis of my grandparents. I have lost two of my heritage bolis. Similarly, my children cannot speak all the bolis of their grandparents. Triple migrations and moving from one place to another have left us leaving one language for another; however, we still carry some of the mannerisms of our bolis in other languages – our Kashmiri-Pakistaniness manifests in English, Urdu, Swedish, and a mixture of all the above! We perform our identities through new vehicles, in new mediums, new bolis.

My autoethnographic account, my story, my loss of language is similar to some of those who are on the move and from those whose ancestors are forced to leave whether it is because of colonization, famine, family reunification, forced persecution, or fear.

My deep admiration extends to those who successfully maintain and pass on more than one heritage language in all modalities. I have strived to break free from the confines of limiting language competence within Euro-centric epistemologies and linguistic standardization ideals, recognizing their inherent written language bias (Linell, 2004) and the promotion of the notion of one language for one linguistic community. On the contrary, I argue that linguistic communities transcend beyond the geographical boundaries of nation states, provinces, regions, or clans.

Within the broad landscape of linguistic theories and epistemologies that conceptualize the multilingual competence of communities within the former British Raj, there emerges a pivotal challenge deserving attention: Euro-centric epistemologies and theorization fall short of accurately labelling and describing both individual and societal multilingualism. This challenge becomes vividly apparent in my family’s diglossia, where the interchange between two distinct linguistic varieties mirrors the diverse language practices found in both Pakistani society and its diaspora.