Konnie Huq, George Edalji, Dev Patel, M.I.A., Syed Ahmed, Freddie Mercury, Jay Sean, Kia Abdullah, Mark Ramprakash, Susheela Raman, Lakshmi Mittal, James Caan |
| Total population |
|---|
| England (2009)[1] 3,166,800 (6.0%) Scotland (2001)[2] 55,000 (1.1%) Wales (2009)[3] 53,000 (1.8%) Northern Ireland (2001)[4] 2,700 (0.1%) |
| Regions with significant populations |
| London, West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, West Yorkshire, Sheffield, Lancashire, Slough, Reading, Berkshire, Luton, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cardiff, Greater Glasgow |
| Languages |
|
Primary language: English Ancestral languages: Hindi, Bengali, Sylheti, Telugu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kutchi, Tamil, Urdu, Potwari, Nepali and others |
| Religion |
|
Predominantly Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism |
British Asian is a term used to describe British citizens who descended from mainly South Asia, also known as South Asians in the United Kingdom. In British English, the term the 'Asian' usually excludes East Asians (see East Asians in the United Kingdom).[5]
Prior to the formation of the United Kingdom, immigration of South Asian people to England began with the arrival of the East India Company to the Indian subcontinent. This continued during the British Raj and increased in volume after the independence of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh from British rule, chiefly for education and economic pursuits. A major influx of South Asian immigrants, mostly of Indian and Pakistani origin, also took place following the expulsion of Indian communities (then holders of British passports) from Uganda and other East African nations (see African migration to the United Kingdom).
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In British English, the word "Asian" is often used to refer to those of South Asian origin, particularly Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, as well as the less numerous Sri Lankans, Nepalese and Maldivians.[6] Additionally, Britons who mark the "Other Asian" category on the UK census are normally of the various ethnic groups found among Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi, and Yemeni ancestries, and can include Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Azeris and various Afghan groups.[7] Although there are exceptions,[8] the term generally excludes people of East Asian (such as Chinese, Korean or Japanese) or Southeast Asian origin; they are more likely to be defined by their country of origin, or may instead be grouped under the umbrella term "oriental". This is reflected in the "ethnic group" section of UK census forms and other government paperwork, which treat "Asian" and "Chinese" as separate. This usage contrasts with American English, Canadian English, New Zealand English and Australian English, in which "Asian" refers mainly to people with East Asian ancestry.
The terms "Asian" or "British Asian" are contested. According to Qasim Mohammad, Britain's Hindu community considers the term somewhat vague given the religious and national origin difference between Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Some members of Britain's Hindu community are debating whether to adopt a specific label based on nationality (e.g. "British Indian") or religion (e.g. "British Hindu"). Others see a certain degree of unity in the South Asian diaspora; the term desi is also sometimes used to name a South Asian person, pointing to a common identity, but is more often a word used within the South Asian community. Although Pakistani and Bangladeshi Britons form most of the Muslim community in the UK there is no recorded debate as to how they wish to be identified.
According to the 2001 UK Census, there were approximately 2,331,423 South Asians, constituting 4.0% of the population of the UK. Those who of Indian origin numbered 1,053,411 (1.8% of the population), 747,285 people were of Pakistani origin (1.3%), 283,063 were of Bangladeshi origin (0.5%), and 247,664 were other Asian (0.4%). South Asians make up 50.3% of the UK's non-European population.[9]
British Indians tend to be religiously diverse, with 56% Hindu, 30% Sikh, and 13% Muslim, while their counterparts of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin are much more religiously homogeneous, with Muslims accounting for 92% of each group. South Asians who marked "Other Asian" as an ethnic group and then wrote in their specific ethnic group were mostly (23%) of Sri Lankan origin. This was followed by fill-ins of Middle Eastern (9%) origin. Due to a growing sense of affiliation with Britain, many third generation South Asians chose to not mark "Asian or British Asian" and instead marked "British Asian" in the "Other Asian" write in section.[7]
South Asian ethnic groups mostly originate from a few select places in South Asia, these are known as place of origins. British Indians tend to originate mainly from the two Indian States, Punjab and Gujarat. Evidence from Bradford and Birmingham have shown, Pakistanis originate largely from the Mirpur District (in Disputed Area of Kashmir), other are chhachhi pathans from Attock District, and some from villages of Nowshera, Peshwar and Ghazi, in London Borough of Waltham Forest there are substantial numbers of people originating from Jhelum.[10] Studies have shown 95 per cent of Bangladeshis originate from the Sylhet region in the north east of Bangladesh.[11][12] In Tower Hamlets, people have origins in different thanas in the Sylhet region, mainly from Jagannathpur, Beanibazar and Bishwanath.[13] The language spoken by Indians are, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati and Kutchi. People from Pakistan speak Urdu, Punjabi, Mirpuri (a dialect of Punjabi), Sindhi, Kashmiri, Pashto, Hindko and Seraiki. Bangladeshis from Sylhet speak Sylheti, a dialect of Bengali. People from Sri Lanka mainly speak Tamil. Those who speak dialects mainly refer their language to the main language, for example Sylheti speakers say they speak Bengali or Mirpuri speakers say they speak Punjabi. The reason for this is because they do not expect outsiders to be well informed about dialects.[14]
The unemployment rate among Indian men was only slightly higher than that for White British or White Irish men, 7 per cent compared with 5 per cent for the other two groups. On the other hand Pakistanis have higher unemployment rates of 13-14% with Bangladeshis having one of the highest rates, around 23%.[15] Some surveys also revealed the Indian unemployment rate to be 6-7% [16] Persons of Indian or mixed Indian origin are more likely than White British to have university degrees, whereas Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are less likely.[17] With the exception of Bangladeshi women, every other group of South Asians, have higher attendance at university than the national average.[18] GCSE pass rates have been rising for all South Asians.[19]
According to the United Kingdom Census 2001, South Asian men from all South Asian ethnic groups intermarried with another ethnic group more than South Asian women. Among South Asians, British Indians intermarried with a different ethnic group the most both absolutely and proportionately, followed by British Pakistanis and British Bangladeshis.
No one knows the earliest origins of settlement of South Asians in Great Britain for certain; if the Romani (Gypsies) are included, then the earliest arrivals could have been in the Middle Ages — although not normally included as South Asian, the Roma and Sinti (most in the UK have been Sinti) are both believed to have originated in parts of what is now North India and Pakistan and to have begun travelling westward around 1000, though they have mixed with Southwest Asians and Europeans over the centuries. Romani began arriving in sizeable numbers in parts of Western Europe in the 16th century.
People from South Asia have settled in Great Britain since the East India Company (EIC) recruited lascars to replace vacancies in their crews on East Indiamen whilst on voyages in India. Many were then refused passage back, and were marooned in London. There were also some ayahs, domestic servants and nannies of wealthy British families, who accompanied their employers back to "Blighty" when their stay in Asia came to an end.
The Navigation Act of 1660 restricted the employment of non-English sailors to a quarter of the crew on returning East India Company ships. Baptism records in East Greenwich suggest that young Indians from the Malabar Coast were being recruited as servants at the end of the seventeenth century, and records of the EIC also suggest that Indo-Portuguese cooks from Goa were retained by captains from voyage to voyage.[20] In 1797, 13 were buried in the parish of St Nicholas at Deptford.
Since the 17th century, the East India Company brought over thousands of South Asian lascars, scholars and workers (who were mostly Bengali and/or Muslim) to Britain, most of whom settled down and took local white British wives, due to a lack of South Asian women in Britain at the time.[21] Due to the majority of early South Asian immigrants being lascars, the earliest South Asian communities were found in port towns. Naval cooks also came, many of them from the Sylhet Division of what is now Bangladesh. One of the most famous early Bengali immigrants to Britain was Sake Dean Mahomet, a captain of the British East India Company. In 1810, he founded London's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House. He is also reputed for introducing shampoo and therapeutic massage to the United Kingdom.[22] By the mid-19th century, there were more than 40,000 Indian seamen, diplomats, scholars, soldiers, officials, tourists, businessmen and students in Britain.[23] By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were around 70,000 South Asians in Britain,[24] 51,616 of whom were lascar seamen (when World War I began).[25]
Following the Second World War and the breakup of the British Empire, South Asian migration to the UK increased through the 1950s and 1960s from Pakistan (including present-day Bangladesh) and Commonwealth countries such as India, at the same time as immigrants from former Caribbean colonies were also moving to Britain.
Although this immigration was continuous, several distinct phases can be identified:
In 1972 all South Asians were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, then president of Uganda. Those holding British passports came to Britain. Many such displaced people had businesses in Uganda, and built up their lives again in Britain. Some became retailers while others found suitable employment.
The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962 and Immigration Act 1971 largely restricted any further primary immigration, although family members of already-settled migrants were still allowed. In addition, much of the subsequent growth in the South Asian community has come from the births of second and third-generation South Asian Britons.
South Asians are said to contribute 6% to the UK GDP, whilst making up only 4% of the population.[26][27] Although there are roughly double the number of South Asians in the UK today compared to people of African descent, South Asians are less represented in global and British media than any other major group; in the UK there is less than half the amount of South Asians represented in the media than those of African and Caribbean descent.
The biggest influence of South Asians on popular culture has probably been the development of Indian restaurant, though of the 9,000 in the UK, most are run by Bangladeshis; their ancestral home was part of British India's Bengal province until partition in 1947. South Asian have also played a pivotal role in rejuvenating a number of UK street markets. According to the New Economics Foundation, Queen's Market in Upton Park, East London is officially the most ethnically diverse.
Just like Canada, Bhangra music has in addition become popular among many in the general British public (although only really popular amongst certain South Asian British, mainly of Punjabi origins)[28] not only from the works of British South Asian musicians such as Panjabi MC, Swami and Rishi Rich but also incorporated into the works of a number of non-South Asian musicians not only British but including North American artists such as Canadian Shania Twain, who created a whole alternate version of her multi-platinum album Up! with full Indian instrumentation, produced by legendary South Asian producers Simon & Diamond. Diamond, better known as DJ Swami has also collaborated with superstar rapper Pras, of The Fugees, and his band Swami have become one of the most renowned acts in South Asian music history, having had songs in major Hollywood movies and best-selling video games. One of the first artists of South Asian Indian origin to achieve mainstream success was Apache Indian who infused reggae and hip hop with Indian popular music to create a sound that transcended genre and found a multicultural audience. he is the only Indian artist to have achieved 7 top forty hits in the National UK charts. A subsequent wave of "Asian Underground" artists went on to blend elements of western underground dance music and the traditional music of their home countries, such Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh, Asian Dub Foundation, Panjabi MC, Raghav, and the Rishi Rich Project (featuring Rishi Rich, Jay Sean and Juggy D).
The influence of South Asian music has not only been from South Asians living in the UK, but also from some UK artists that were starting using South Asian instruments creating a new and dynamic sound that was a mixture of sitars and tablas with a more rock traditional rock-based Western instruments like the drums and guitars. This created an inauthentic use of such cultural resources as all of the instruments were used to create an overall sound that treated all the instruments and influences equally.[29] Bhangra South Asian identity and the search for authenticity There is one important thing to notice is the relationship of Bhangra and other musical genres namely Reggae, Dub, and Soul Not only has South Asian culture popularity in the UK has boomed, it also has influenced many local artists that created their own mixture of genres.[30]
The films East is East, Chicken Tikka Masala and Bend It Like Beckham and the TV shows Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No. 42 have managed to attract large, multi-ethnic audiences. The success and popularity of British Pakistani boxer Amir Khan influenced the revival of boxing on ITV Sport.
Lakshmi Mittal is currently Britain's richest man and the fifth richest man in the world. The Mittal family owns 43% of Arcelor-Mittal, the world's largest steel manufacturer, which was known as Mittal Steel Company before the merger with Arcelor. He was listed in the Forbes List of Billionaires (2006) as the richest Indian and the fifth richest man in the world with an estimated fortune of $55.0 billion and, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2006, is the richest in the UK, with a net worth of £29 billion. The Financial Times named Mittal its 2006 Person of the Year. In 2005, he was the third richest man in the world according to Forbes List of billionaires (2005).
UK Sikhs have the highest percentage of home ownership, at 82%, out of all UK religious communities.[31] UK Sikhs are the wealthiest south Asian immigrant group in the UK and the second wealthiest (after the Jews) religious community in the UK, with a median total household wealth of £229,000.[32]
In the disability arena, Ivan and Charika Corea founded the Autism Awareness Campaign UK.
This refers to the growing body of literature that refers to and documents aspects of the South Asian experience.
Well-known South Asian writers include: H.S. Bhabra, Salman Rushdie, Gurinder Chadha, Nazrin Choudhury, Rekha Waheed, Hanif Kureshi, Monica Ali, Meera Syal, Gautam Malkani, and Raman Mundair.
Jawed Khaliq the first world champion boxer of Pakistani origin was born in Nottingham England. Amir Khan, the silver medallist at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, has become a cultural icon in the UK with audiences of up to 8 million watching him live on national television whenever he fights. He represents Britain in boxing and he is the current WBA world light welterweight champion. Another notable boxer is Haider Ali who won the first ever gold medal for Pakistan in boxing at the commonwealth games in Manchester in 2002 in the featherweight division he now fights professionally out of Luton, England.[33]
Nasser Hussain was the captain of the England cricket team. Michael Chopra played for the England national under-21 football team and became the first footballer of Indian descent to play and score in the Premier League. In 2006, he made news for scoring the fastest goal in Premier League history, as Chopra had only been on the pitch for ten seconds after coming on as a substitute.[34]
List of other British South Asian Sport personalities:
Early South Asian stars to break into English and Hollywood films include Sabu, remembered for his lead roles in The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Black Narcissus (1947).
Since the 1970s, South Asian performers and writers have achieved significant mainstream cultural success. The first South Asian musician to gain wide popularity in the UK and worldwide fame was Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, East Africa, to parents of Parsi descent from Bombay. In 2006, Time Asia magazine voted him as one of the most influential South Asians in the past 60 years.[35] At around the same time, music producer, composer and song-writer Biddu gained worldwide fame for a number of hit songs, including "Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas and "I Love to Love (But My Baby Loves to Dance)" for Tina Charles. In the 1990s the South Asian artists who gained mainstream success included Apache Indian, whose 1993 single "Boom Shack-A-Lak" was used in many Hollywood movies, and Jas Mann, who headed Babylon Zoo and whose 1996 single "Spaceman" set a UK chart record when it sold 418,000 copies in its first week of release.
Prominent South Asian actors in the 1980s included Art Malik, for his roles in The Jewel in the Crown and The Living Daylights, and Sir Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji), one of Britain's most acclaimed and well-known performers. Kingsley is one of few actors to have won all four major motion picture acting awards, receiving Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards throughout his career, including the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Gandhi (1982).[36] The actress Parminder Nagra has a prominent role in the US TV series ER, and played the lead role in the successful British film Bend It Like Beckham (2002). The actor Naveen Andrews plays the role of Sayid Jarrah in the popular US TV series Lost, and also had a prominent role in the award-winning film The English Patient (1996). The actor Kunal Nayyar plays the character of Rajesh Koothrappali in the popular US sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. Long-running British soap operas such as Coronation Street, EastEnders, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks have all had a number of South Asian characters.
The comedians Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Papa CJ and Shazia Mirza are all well-recognised figures in British popular culture. The presenter and match maker of the BBC marriage arranging show Arrange Me a Marriage is a South Asian-Scot Aneela Rahman. Hardeep Singh Kohli is a presenter, reporter and comedian on British television. British Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian contestants have appeared on The Apprentice including Syed Ahmed, Tre Azam, Lohit Kalburgi, Ghazal Asif, Shazia Wahab, Sara Dhada, and most notably Saira Khan, who is now a British TV presenter. The broadcasters Daljit Dhaliwal, Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Samira Ahmed are known for working on Channel 4 News.
The term South Asian then was given the popular tag "Br-Asian", this was carried forward by two South Asian well known media business owners by the names of Moiz Vas and Nav Sagoo who together helped to define the term in the late ninety's and through to the millennium. They were responsible for various huge achievements for the community such as the South Asian Music awards which aired on ITV1 in the UK and Nav Sagoo then went on to conceive the first ever Br-Asian stage at Glastonbury in 2004 and 2005, taking every household name from the South Asian music scene out to the fields in the west country. Urban went Rural for the first time but with headline acts such as Rishi Rich, Jay Sean, Swami, Raghav to name a few even flying in were Indian supergroup Pentagram.
In 2008, in the second season of Britain's Got Talent, one of the country's most successful reality television shows, the South Asian dance duo Signature, consisting of Suleman Mirza (a British Pakistani) and Madhu Singh (a British Indian) performing a fusion of Michael Jackson and Bhangra music and dance styles, ended up as the runner-up on the talent show, second only to George Sampson. The most successful South Asian musician in 2008 was the British Tamil artist M.I.A., who was nominated for two Grammy Awards for her single "Paper Planes", and has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for "O... Saya", from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack. The actor Dev Patel, who played the role of Anwar Kharral in the teen drama series Skins, also played the leading role in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, for which he received several awards and was nominated for the 2009 BAFTA Award for Best Leading Actor.[37]
In 2009, Mumzy Stranger, an R&B and hip-hop music artist, became the first British Bangladeshi to be releasing a music single, called "One More Dance".[38] In October 2009, Jay Sean's single "Down" reached the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100[39] and sold two million copies in the United States,[40] making him the first South Asian-origin solo artist and "the first UK Urban act ever to top Billboard's Hot 100,"[41] "the most successful male UK urban artist in US chart history,"[42] and the most successful British male artist in the US charts since Elton John in 1997. Such artists have heralded a new generation of British Asian musicians - Shizzio, 21 Perspective and Raxstar are just some of the names from the British Asian music industry.
Although there are South Asian communities all over the UK, towns and cities with particularly significant South Asian populations include:
The council area with the most South Asians is the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, whose population is 35% South Asian, most of Bangladeshi origin. The district with the largest Muslim population in England and Wales is High Wycombe, according to a report by the Buckinghamshire County Council.[43] An exact figure is not given, however.
Counties with a high population of South Asians include -
London Boroughs with a high population of British Asians include -
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