James Kneale, Amit Singh, and Sivamohan Valluvan
James Kneale is a historical geographer at University College London interested in nineteenth- and twentieth century drink and temperance, particularly in Britain.
Amit Singh is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Sociology at the University of Manchester, and the author of Fighting Identity: An Ethnography of Kickboxing in East London (Routledge, 2022).
Sivamohan Valluvan is a sociologist at the University of Warwick who has written widely on racism, nationalism, multiculture and cosmopolitanism. His last book was The Clamour of Nationalism (Manchester University Press, 2019.)
Glassy Junction, Southall, UB1. Copyright: Ewan Munro, 2008. https://www.flickr.com/photos/55935853@N00/3106439813/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
This essay presents a short outline and expansion of a paper that was published at the start of this year. It argues that falling numbers of British pubs have come to symbolise national decline because they are thought to be white working-class spaces under threat from ‘globalisation’ and ‘multiculturalism.’ For us these ideas represent a double problem. First, these sites have never been ‘naturally’ white spaces, though some became that way through the operation of racist exclusions. Second, these stories do not mention other kinds of drinking places, ones that have long served as far more open and convivial sites of what Paul Gilroy called urban multiculture—like the ‘desi pub.’ We will return to definitions of desi pubs later, but for now it is enough to define them as British drinking places run or frequented by British Indians, as explained in David Jesudason’s recent history and guidebook, Desi Pubs.
First, however, we want to quickly explain what we dislike about contemporary laments for the ‘death’ of English pubs, which sometimes become arguments about a white working class apparently ‘left behind’ by economic and social change. As a populist nationalism has replaced neoliberalism as the defining feature of contemporary British politics, a particular understanding of working-class culture has emerged. The argument can be reduced to a chain of assertions: pubs are working-class spaces; that working class is white; therefore, pubs are white spaces. The pub becomes increasingly valued as a sign of working-class authenticity, but one under threat, a victim like its patrons; pub closures become a grievance with a wider significance. As our paper demonstrates, this idea has animated much discussion about the fate of pubs, making them essential for politicians seeking to prove they have the common touch—even when they are teetotal, like former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
Of course, this story ‘whitens’ both the working-class and the pub. The recent discovery that Britain’s first known Black voter was an eighteenth-century pub landlord is significant, but people of colour have been pub proprietors, patrons, workers and entertainers for much longer than that. The absence of these figures from many popular and academic histories of pubs is one part of the problem. Another is that many pubs were ‘whitened’ through more or less blatant forms of racist exclusion, from the unofficial colour bar that governed access to drinking places in London after the First World War, to the working men’s clubs that became whites-only spaces in the 1960s and 1970s. Crucially resistance to this exclusion and segregation has also been documented, as part of wider struggles against racism.
Imperial histories also need to be considered. The desi pub is strongly associated with Sikh Punjabi migrants who migrated to Britain after Partition and Independence, and Sikhs were already well known for their drinking. Alcohol was consumed in many, if not all, parts of the world before the era of European empire. In India colonial authorities attempted to govern and racialize its subjects through alcohol licensing, and Indian temperance took on an anti-imperial character.
Many of the first Indian migrants who arrived between the 1930s and 1960s were Jat, a Punjabi ‘caste’ of agricultural workers who were already associated with heavy drinking. The Ramgarhias who arrived after their expulsion from former British colonies in East Africa in the 1970s were thought to be less interested in drink. Finding themselves amongst Jats, however, they adopted their customs; as one told Parminder Bhachu, “we used to work with them, we went to the pubs with them, we drank heavily…” Pubs have acted as ‘migrant infrastructure’ in Britain for centuries, and the largely male workforce that arrived in Britain to work in healthcare, transport, or industry sought them out as a restorative space apart from work, poverty, and racism. Pubs were also sites of labour organization, particularly through the work of the Indian Workers Association (IWA), who represented those ignored by British unions.
Amit’s own family history serves to introduce the first of two examples of the desi pub. His paternal great grandfather claimed to be the first Indian given a liquor license by the British in Tanzania, and that pub was then inherited by his grandfather. This Indian-Tanzanian-British drinking place reminds us that the pub was something these migrants brought with them when they travelled to Britain, as Amit’s grandfather did when he left Tanzania for Southall, in West London’s outer suburbs. Amit’s father was later a regular at Southall’s Railway Tavern in the late 1970s, which was run by a white couple who welcomed a mixed clientele, and when they moved on to a smaller pub he ran it for five or six years before buying the freehold and converting it into the Glassy Junction two years later in 1994. The Glassy would become the most famous desi pub in Britain. A classic Victorian boozer decorated with exaggerated Punjabi iconography, Glassy Junction accepted rupees for payment and served food from a tandoor oven, but was still recognisably a pub. It attracted attention from academics, newspapers—the Guardian, New York Times and Times of India—and TV, was featured in three Bollywood films and is remembered fondly by the former patrons interviewed in Jesudason’s book.
It's possible to tell a different history of Southall, though, one that makes it clear that Glassy was a hard-wrought achievement. Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an eighteen-year-old Indian student, was stabbed and killed by racist skinheads outside another Southall pub in 1976, and drinkers at the Railway Tavern were attacked as they left. In 1981 a gig at the nearby Hambrough Tavern attracted white supremacists who antagonised local residents, who burned the Tavern to the ground and chased the far right from Southall for good. British pubs are not always open and hospitable to all.
Desi pubs are also strong in West Midlands towns, which recruited Indian migrants to work in local foundries. Though they made up only about 3% of the population of Smethwick in 1964, the town’s pubs operated a colour bar, segregating its Indian drinkers in separate rooms. Similar conditions existed in Wolverhampton. A particularly racist general election contest in Smethwick exacerbated existing tensions in 1964, and in 1965 Avtar Singh Johul, a foundry worker active in the IWA, invited Malcolm X to visit the town; they were refused service at the Blue Gates pub. Malcolm X told local reporters, “I have come because I am disturbed by reports that coloured people in Smethwick are being treated badly… This is worse than America, this is worse than Harlem.” The IWA organised sit-in protests and other direct action in Smethwick pubs operating a colour bar before the Race Relations Act 1968 made this discrimination illegal. Pubs were sites of political protest because they were valued by their patrons. The Blue Gates is now one of the most successful desi pubs in Britain.
For us it is significant that Jesudason points to the convivial nature of these pubs as a central part of their importance. They are not pubs for British Indians alone, an enclave associated with specific racialized identities within white society, and nor are they selling an upmarket lifestyle. Desi pubs are ordinary. It was the white working-class patrons of these pubs who caught Jesudason’s eye, who “lived lives far removed from gentrified areas, with many friends who were Asian, and even knew a smattering of Punjabi. Instead of running away or complaining about ‘immigration’ these ordinary people embraced change and discovered their lives could be enriched by it.” The definition of the desi pub he settled upon is “a place steeped in British-Indian culture that fosters inclusion.” The photos Jagdish Patel took for his 2023 project documenting West Midlands desi pubs similarly show white, Asian and Black men and women mingling together, as they do in their workplaces and streets. Southall’s Railway Tavern hosted a similar mix, and Amit’s father proudly recalls that “everyone was welcome!” at Glassy Junction. And that returns us to what desi pubs are. ‘Desi’ means home, but not—in this sense, at least—a recreated homeland; the desi pub was home to people like Amit’s father, a self-described “third-generation publican,” who grew up in a pub in Dar Es Salaam and recognised the same kind of welcome in Southall’s Railway Tavern.
For us this project is not simply about recovering or re-presenting a history of these vital forms of ‘migrant infrastructure’ in order to challenge some of the more problematic ideas about Englishness and pubs currently circulating. It is also an attempt to recognise them as essentially convivial spaces, offering a glimpse of a mundane but vital urban multiculture of a kind that is much needed in Britain today.