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.

“Naughty boys” in the media: image from the Channel 4 gangs and drugs drama “Top Boy”

Teacher expectations can constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy: teachers behave differently towards children depending on their expectations of them. The ways in which teachers treat students affect students’ self-concept, motivation, achievement and aspirations. Over time, the performance of high-expectation students will increase and the performance of low-expectation students will decline, until student performance and behavior closely conforms to what was expected of them in the first place (for an overview of teacher expectations and labelling, see Rist 2015).

Teacher expectations don’t just come out of the blue but are related to social stereotypes: they are gendered, classed and raced. As we say last week, working-class Hispanic boys in the USA get a poor deal in formal education. The same is true of working-class ethnic-minority boys in many other contexts around the world.

A 2008 study of the mismatch between student aspirations and teacher expectations poignantly illustrates this point and shows how formal education can serve to limit, rather than expand, opportunities for teenage migrants. The researcher, Melanie Cooke, followed three teenage migrants in London schools over a period of six months.

At the time, the three boys were16 and 17 years old. We meet Felek, an unaccompanied refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan, whose family had pooled their resources to smuggle him out of Iraq and across Europe almost two years earlier. We meet Carlos, an asylum seeker from Angola, who had arrived in London with his family about a year earlier. And we meet Santos, a Portuguese national, whose parents are from Angola and Cabo Verde, and who had come to London to live with his grandmother.

All three boys have high aspirations: first, they want to learn English and find a place in London where they fit in; something that seems impossibly difficulty to achieve. They are disappointed with the slow progress of their English language development, and they are struggling with the fact that, in the one to two years they have been in London, they have not been able to make a single local friend. Felek has met other Kurds and also spends time with other young asylum seekers from Albania and Somalia. The friendship networks of Carlos and Santos are exclusively with other Portuguese speakers.

While they are keen to make friends and find a place where they “fit,” they are frequently harassed by local youths, and conflict and fights are a regular part of their experience.

All three boys have high expectations of their future, and all three see themselves as studious and academic. Felek dreams of becoming an engineer or a doctor to give back to his family and homeland. However, none of the three has received any guidance regarding educational pathways and, other than “studying hard” have only the vaguest ideas how their dreams might be achieved.

In sum, Felek, Carlos and Santos see themselves as fundamentally “good boys,” who have been through a lot already, who see migration to the UK as an opportunity, and who want to make the most of this opportunity to further their careers and to make a contribution to society.

Unfortunately, that is not how educational policy makers and their teachers see them.

As regards educational policy, as teenage arrivals they simply fall between the cracks of the educational system. While new arrivals up until the age of 16 are sent to mainstream schools in the UK, arrivals above this age are treated as adults and are offered English language classes designed for adults, from all kinds of backgrounds, who lack basic vocational skills (for an overview of educational provisions for refugee youths in Australia, see Moore, Nicholas & Deblaquiere 2008). The classes are designed to teach numeracy, literacy and English that will allow graduates to transfer into a vocational course and to become “job-ready.” Other than English language training, no pathway that would continue their secondary education is available to them because no one ever seems to have envisaged that teenage migrants might have educational aspirations.

As regards their teachers, they know next to nothing about their students’ life outside the classroom and so draw on stereotypes about Middle Eastern and black male adolescents in their interactions with their students: they see them as ignorant young men who lack discipline and who have no past and no future. As one teacher puts it: “they come to this country … they get off the plane and they have no idea … about anything” (quoted in Cooke 2008, p. 32).

The teachers, both of who are middle-class women, one British Asian and the other white British, in particular react to what they see as the boys’ sexism. Carlos and Santos, for instance, have both been banned from interacting with younger girls in the mainstream school to which their English-language program is attached. Supposedly, this was because the boys were causing trouble. However, Carlos’ and Santos’ explanation of the event that led to the ban is quite different: in their account, another young boy, who is also a recent arrival from Angola, one day went to school wearing girls’ pants. According to Carlos, this is what happened next:

So those girls noticed he had women’s trousers. So they started teasing him. He doesn’t speak English very well … so the only thing he did was answer back, and because we were in the middle, they blamed us all. And they said if you do anything more, they will throw us out of school. (Quoted in Cooke 2008, p. 29)

This innocuous story contrasts with the teacher’s view of Carlos as a “gangster rapper” and “the naughtiest of the naughty.”

One way to control the boys and to keep the dreaded “gangster” that the teachers believe to be lurking inside the boys at bay is through sticking strictly to the curriculum and through controlling classroom interactions in minute detail. As a result, valuable opportunities for the boys to find their voice in English are lost. Felek’s class, for instance, at one point reads a text about the refugee journey of an Afghan boy. It is a story that not only Felek but most students in the class can relate to well, and some had, in fact, watched a TV show about asylum only the night before. Therefore, they are keen to talk about the text and discuss it. However, the teacher stifles these attempts at discussion and sticks to her lesson plan, which treats the text only as basis for comprehension exercises, new vocabulary practice, reading aloud, and as a gap fill exercise.

The researcher concludes that school is not a good place for Felek, Carlos and Santos:

[T]he learners described in this article are, educationally speaking, getting the worst of all worlds, despite the intentions of their teachers. A large part of the blame for this must be laid at the door of policy makers who fail to address ESOL teenagers as whole people with transnational, diasporic complexities and aspirations and who regard teachers as technicians. Blame might also be laid at the door of teacher education, which fails to envisage the potential of education as an arena for social transformation or to encourage teachers to develop as “transformative intellectuals.” (Cooke 2008, p. 37)

As Western societies are struggling to comprehend why so many young men from immigrant backgrounds are turning “bad,” Cooke’s research offers us a glimpse of how such large social processes play out in everyday interactions: how students become not what they hope to become but what others expect them to become.

References

Cooke, M. (2008). “What We Might Become”: The Lives, Aspirations, and Education of Young Migrants in the London Area Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (1), 22-40 DOI: 10.1080/15348450701804698

Moore, H., Nicholas, H., & Deblaquiere, J. (2008). ‘Opening the Door’ Provision for Refugee Youth with Minimal/No Schooling in the Adult Migrant English Program Project 2.1: ‘Modes of Delivery for SPP Youth’. Canberra: Australian Government, Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Rist, R. C. (2015). On understanding the process of schooling: the contributions of labeling theory. In J. H. Ballantine & J. Z. Spade (Eds.), Schools and Society: A Sociological Approach to Education (pp. 47-56). London: Sage.

Linguistic diversity in Sydney (Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

The media in Anglophone countries regularly engage in a bit of a bragfest about the linguistic diversity of their cities. In Sydney, where I live, the local paper only recently boasted: ‘From Afrikaans to Telugu, Hebrew to Wu, the depth and diversity of languages in Sydney rivals some of the world’s largest cities.’ Not to be outdone, Melbourne – Sydney’s eternal rival for urban preeminence in Australia – quickly followed suit and declared itself ‘justifiably proud of its linguistic diversity’ because ‘more languages are spoken in Melbourne than there are countries in the world.’ These two Australian cities are not alone in their rivalry over the greater number of languages spoken in their communities. Across the Pacific, Canadian media, too, tally the linguistic diversity of Canadian cities and find ‘Toronto leading the pack in language diversity, followed by Vancouver and Montreal.’ Similarly, the media of Canada’s southern neighbor suggest that US cities, too, compete in some kind of multilingualism championship: ‘New York remains the most multilingual city in the country, with 47% of its massive population speaking at least two languages.’ Continuing our journey east across the Atlantic, British media play the same game and we learn that Manchester has been ‘revealed as most linguistically diverse city in western Europe’ while London is celebrated as the ‘multilingual capital of the world.’

Strangely, while media texts such as these regularly brag about the extent of urban multilingualism, another set of media texts can be found simultaneously that bemoans the language deficit in Anglophone countries. Here we learn that the populations of Anglophone countries are lacking the multilingual skills of the rest of the world and will therefore be left behind when it comes to the global economic opportunities of the future. There is concern that students are not studying foreign languages in school and that, as a result, they will miss out on job opportunities at home and abroad. Additionally, lack of foreign language capabilities is presented as diminishing opportunities for international trade, limiting global political influence and threatening national security. The situation seems to be so dire that employers have to leave positions unfilled, secret services are missing out on crucial information and policy makers simply throw up their hands in despair and fund students to study abroad even if they have no knowledge of the language in their destination nor any intention of studying it while there.

Reading depressing news such as these one has to wonder how they can be squared with upbeat language news circulating in the media at the same time. How can the cities of Anglophone nations be hothouses of linguistic diversity where large numbers of languages are spoken by the population at the same time that there is a widespread linguistic deficit?!

The answer to this conundrum lies in the fact that commentators and politicians bemoaning the fact that Americans, Australians or Britons do not know languages other than English have a very different segment of the population in mind than those commentators who note their multilingualism.

Clive Holes, a professor of Arabic at Oxford University, explains the differential visibility of language skills with reference to Arabic in the UK: there are few students who study Arabic at university – a language for which there is high demand both in the private and public sector – and those who do are mostly middle-class students, who have no previous experience with Arabic. The kind of language they study is ‘Arabic university style,’ a variety that is focused on written texts and a standard form that is quite different from the varieties of Arabic spoken across the Arab world.

At the same time, Britain is also home to a large number of people who learnt to speak Arabic in the family. 159,290 residents of England and Wales identified Arabic as their main language in the 2011 census. According to Professor Holes these people have ‘more useable language skills’ than those who study Arabic at university without a background in the language. Even so, those who have Arabic as their main language are being overlooked for Arabic-language jobs: ‘They are an incredibly valuable national resource that we are failing totally to use.’

The existence of an apparent language deficit in contexts of so-called linguistic super-diversity points, yet again, to the fact that some language skills are more equal than others. When it comes to bragging about linguistic diversity and the number of languages spoken in a place, we are happy to count ‘diverse populations;’ but when it comes to the economic opportunities of multilingualism, these same ‘diverse populations’ become invisible all of a sudden.

Pakistani flour mill workers recovering from a near-fatal lung infection due to poor occupational health and safety conditions, West Ham Hospital, 1960s (Source: Qureshi 2012, p. 7)

To be transnational has become rather fashionable: never before in human history have so many people been on the move, airfares have never been so cheap, new communication technologies have never been so, well, new, and space and time have never been so compressed. As a result, migrants are no longer just ‘migrants’ but have become ‘transnationals’ maintaining links between their country of origin, their current country, and, not unusually, other countries where they have spent time.

The cool imagery of the new transnationalism is sometimes ruptured by analysts pointing out how class and race constrain or enable different forms of transnationalism. However, even critical accounts such as these are usually based in generic embodiments of ‘black’ vs. ‘white’ or ‘Asian’ vs. ‘Western.’ By contrast, few commentators – whether academic or not – bother to look at actual bodies on the move.

A fascinating ethnography with chronically ill working-class men from Pakistan in London (Qureshi 2012) is an excellent attempt to correct this situation. Qureshi starts with the observation that, according to the literature, Pakistanis in Britain have

developed a ‘transnational ethnic world’ that is continually reproduced through longdistance phone calls, frequent return visits and holidays, the consumption of circulating goods and media products, exchanges of gifts, philanthropic investments in schools, hospitals and humanitarian projects in Pakistan and so forth (Qureshi 2012, p. 2).

Descriptions of a British-Pakistani transnational world such as these are based on normalized assumptions of healthy, materially secure migrants whose first priority is their cultural and ethnic identity. The chronically ill men the researcher encountered in East London told a different story, a story where their ailing bodies tied them to London.

The post-war manufacturing boom in Britain was to a considerable degree made possible by the labour of commonwealth migrants. After 15-20 years of hard ‘back-breaking’ manual labour, many of these men found their health deteriorating at exactly the time when the manufacturing base started to disappear in the 1980s. With their bodies no longer able to do hard manual labour and their education insufficient for ‘light’ office jobs, many of them have been unemployed ever since.

Benefits-dependent, these men have for more than two decades been made to feel superfluous and useless. The fact that their labour (migration) cost them their health has ironically meant that they are neither here nor there. Their lack of financial resources has tied them to London and has made practices of transnationalism difficult: for instance, ‘cheap’ airfares are not ‘cheap’ to them but involve years of budgeting ahead and borrowing; their disability coupled with the fact that Pakistanis back home see them as ‘rich’ and expect bribes and presents at every turn, makes movement in Pakistan difficult and unpleasant for them; and, phone cards, the so-called ‘social glue’ of transnationalism, have to be carefully rationed.

Not only do they find it difficult to maintain transnational ties with Pakistan. Sometimes, actually severing those ties is their only way to stay afloat: for many of them, selling ancestral land titles in Pakistan or houses they might have built there during better times is their way to cope with unexpected larger expenses such as home renovations.

Qureshi’s interlocutors are predictably bitter about their experiences: they feel they had given their youth and health to Britain, that Britain had aged them prematurely but does not allow them to age well. One man said:

I used to keep very well you know, I was doing a good job. You can’t even imagine. I have a younger brother here, he was younger than me by 13 years but when we sat together, people used to think I was the younger one. Before I came to this country, from ’75 to ’90 I never used to go to the doctor, never ever to the hospital. But now I’m just a big mareez [patient]. (Qureshi 2012, p. 13)

It is not only their failing health and financial precariousness that they feel bitter about but also the way in which they have been treated by ‘the system’: the legal-medical apparatus through which they continually have to prove their disability and ill-health in order to be entitled to benefits while simultaneously finding that the same system has been slow to attend to their medical needs and has often exacerbated their condition through long waiting times or malpractice.

Interestingly, they do not attribute the ‘miscommunication’ they experienced in their encounters with medical practitioners to language difficulties or cultural differences, as is often assumed in the literature on intercultural health communication, but to racial and class discrimination. They see doctors taking sides with the state and with employers rather than with patients and feel that doctors’ priorities often are to save money rather than to heal.

The people we meet in Qureshi’s work are not cool transnationals belonging to two places but bitter patients who are alienated from two places. As such,

the men’s life histories serve to critique scholarly accounts of ‘space–time compression’ that privilege migrants’ cross-border mobility and exclude the slower paced and more localized lives of migrants who might be bound by material circumstance to one place, or to a stretching out of time in the present. (Qureshi 2012, p. 16f.)

*With a tip of the hat to Said, whose title ‘Wo ich sterbe ist meine Fremde’ I have been trying to translate/imitate.

QURESHI, KAVERI (2012). Pakistani labour migration and masculinity: industrial working life, the body and transnationalism Global networks DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-0374.2012.00362.x