Basically the book tells the story of a bunch of 19-year, old middle-class mummy’s boys trying to be men – which they do by asserting their cut-and-paste ethnic identities; by blending their machismo with consumerism; by trying to talk and act as if their affluent corner of a London suburb is some kind of gritty ghetto; by adding to this whole pretence by trying to block out their intelligence; and by grating against typically overbearing mothers who would rather their sons remain boys.
Beyond that, I reckon the most useful (and least wanky) thing to do in this, the “About Londonstani” bit of my website, is to answer the questions people usually ask me about the book.
The most frequently-asked question (or “FAQ” in pinstripe suit-speak) is the one about the ideas, the research and the dissertation behind the book. I could happily bore you here with all the academic stuff about how hyper-masculinity occurs when boys have to define their manliness in opposition to their mothers rather than in relation to their fathers; about cut-and-paste identities; about fictionalised identities; about performed identities; and about how ethnicity is used to bolster machismo. Then I could go on and on about how this can spawn a youth subculture that acts as a substitute for the ethnic identity and allows us to re-assimilate with mainstream society, but on our own terms and from a position of greater self esteem - and how that bodes well for society. But the fact is, all these things are better (and less boringly) explained in an article I wrote for the FT Saturday magazine called What’s Wrong Right With Asian Boys? - which can be found among the articles I’ve bunged in the “About the author” bit of this website because I couldn’t think where else to stick them.... Actually, on second thoughts, that article is such a good place to start that I might as well just link to it again here:
‘‘Mixing and matching: What’s wrong right with Asian boys?’
- Financial Times, April 22nd, 2006’
The other questions people usually ask me are:
1) Why the crazy lingo?
2) Why the ballsy title?
3) Why the twist at the end?
4) Why are some of the characters so cartoonish?
5) Who did you write the book for – adults or teenagers?
1) Why the lingo?
The slang used in the book is just an extension of my decision to write up the research as a novel rather than some ethnographic study - I wanted to write it in a way that people who know this scene would find engaging and so I basically had to write it in the language people use and understand. Whenever I tried switching to “proper English” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), it sounded stupid and just didn’t work.
But I’m not going to waste cyberspace here defending the language against accusations that it’s too crude or base, because to even dignify that with debate means ignoring how the English language has always evolved through corruption.
Having said all of that, the language of Londonstani is clearly important in its own right. Firstly, the young men in the book are supposed to be wannabe bad-boys rather than the real thing and are therefore pretty much all talk. It seemed like the best way to spell this out was to just have them talk.
Secondly, speech patterns are the characters’ main measure of manliness and virility. Mobile phones and tongues become the book’s two phallic symbols (that means symbols for the characters’ dicks, in case anyone doesn’t know). But that’s not to say these things are simply substitute sports cars. Speech and phones are the tools the characters use to get away from their mothers, yet they’re also the same things their mothers try to regulate them with. So they’re a bit like weapons.
Also, “proper English” is a symbol of the dominant culture and system that the main characters are trying to disrespect. So while the young men express their disrespect for mainstream society by carefully pulping the English language, the Panjabi dialogue in the book (spelt the local way rather than the British “Punjabi”) had to observe strict grammatical rules and silent letters, etc. Alongside “proper English”, the book’s other symbols for dominant, mainstream society include the education system; public transport; public institutions and the taxation system that funds them; and the BBC - although the four young men soon learn to love the latter because the broadcaster embraces and celebrates their own version of Britishness. In fact, by the end of the book Jas even learns to love public transport, while ripping off the taxman stops looking like such a good idea when he’s confronted with the mother of all tax evasions... but all this is a digression from the question about language...
Because “proper English” represents the culture and system the young men are trying to disregard, I couldn’t resist using the mobile phone generation’s disregard for grammar and spelling. But mobile phone SMS/text speak is only used heavily by two characters - Hardjit and Davinder - because they’re the most aggressive. The bulk of the book’s language is basically a mash-up of London street slang; popular Americanisms (such as “feds” or “bucks”); Panjabi slang and hip-hop slang.
What I didn’t want to do was capture an exact picture of the way people talk by writing it just as I was hearing it. That would’ve been dumbass-ingly pointless because slang changes all the time and words and phrases would’ve been out of date by the time the book was published (if indeed it ever got published). So instead, I tried to create a timeless version of the slang so that more people could recognise and relate to it regardless of what year they finished school.
Creating a kind of futureproof, timeless slang - instead of taking a snapshot at any particular moment in time - basically meant taking popular words from different years that have already stood the test of time and then stitching them together. So I took words from when I was at school in Hounslow in the late 1980s and early 1990s that people still use today. Then I took words that have stood the test of time from the interviews I did for my university dissertation in the mid-late 1990s (which luckily I’d captured on dictaphone cassette as well as notebooks). And then I combined all of that with words being used today that I think will probably survive. So from each stage of the research I was trying to bin words that might not survive (even if they were more interesting and trendy at the time) and replace them either with other, more enduring slang words or just plain English. The result, I hoped, would be a version of the slang that everyone would recognise but that nobody ever really used (at least in its entirety anyway).
Words that I rejected included things like murk, ends, sick, bare, blazing and arms. For example, instead of “arms” (meaning hostility) I used the word the older slang word “beef” because people still recognise and use it – it’s more likely to stand the test of time, even if it’s not as popular today as “arms”. Of course, not all these calls might turn out to be correct, but the idea was to be recognisable, not definitive.
One potential downside of writing in slang (apart from short-circuiting my word processor’s spellchecker) is that it restricted what I could do with Jas’s narration. He can’t get too sophisticated, not just because he’s always trying to suppress his intelligence, but also because the language doesn’t really allow for it. But that’s kind of the point: as Mr Ashwood says in the book, you can’t really understand stuff properly if you can’t articulate it properly. So the slang eventually helps Jas in his mission to be less intelligent.
I adapted the slang for different characters depending on how hardcore they were. So Jas has his own linguistic rules, Amit and Ravi share another set of rules while Hardjit and Davinder have their own version (the rest of the characters speak “proper English”). For example, Jas always says “in’t” instead of “ain’t” - which hopefully shows how Jas tries too hard to be a bad-boy while Hardjit is comfortable and secure using the British mainstream slang “ain’t”.
This all this caused a nightmare for my publisher because I insisted on going through the manuscript again and again to make sure all the correct linguistic rules were being followed by the correct characters – and I’m not even sure I totally managed it. All this rule-making and future-proofing might seem ridiculous given the fluid nature of slang, but slang often does have rules and I wanted to use rules and subtle distinctions to highlight fundamental differences between characters who, on a superficial level, are always trying to look and sound like each other. The point is, the slang isn’t random. There are rules and codes with all slang - otherwise slang wouldn’t create boundaries and barriers to entry. And in the case of this particular slang, it creates both a racial boundary and a generational boundary. So, just, like every other aspect of the characters’ identities, their seemingly random slang is actually carefully constructed and contrived. Anyway, that’s probably enough words about the language, so here’s a link to the rulebook – aka the Londonstani Style Guide - which I put together when it came to the editing stage (but which I really wish I’d drawn up during the writing stage).
LINK TO
The Londonstani Style Guide
2) Why the title?
A lot of people assume that the word Londonstani refers to the debate about the city’s radicalised Muslims. It’s true that the French security service often used the phrase “Londonistan” to describe what they saw as a hotbed of such activity in London during the 1990s, and the word was widely adopted by the media in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of July 7th, 2005.
But the fact is, some British Asian kids had been using the word Londonstani long before it was applied to radicalised Muslims. I first heard it during my research for my dissertation back in 1995 in a context that had nothing whatsoever to do with Islamic fundamentalism. Instead, it was a much more positive term - a celebration of London’s multiculturalism rather than a criticism of it.
In that original context, “Londonstani” was a self-referential term that basically meant I’m proud to be a Londoner because it’s a place where I can be both British and Asian and still feel 100 per cent like I belong - like I’m a native. It’s like desi slang for the word “Londoner”, it means the same thing (except that “Londoner” sounded Victorian and cockney, whereas “Londonstani” sounded much more relevant in the late 20th Century). That’s why I call it a celebratory term. To appreciate just how positive this is, you have to remember what it was like in the 1980s when British Asian youngsters weren’t welcomed by the bouncers, fit doorwomen with clipboards and other gatekeepers of central London’s nightlife. But by the late 1990s, things had changed so much that Londonstanis almost defined that space - but it was a space shared with people from other races. If you defined yourself as a Londonstani, it meant you felt you belonged here and so it was an identity that transcended ethnicity. And of course, by the same logic that says you don’t have to be white to be a 100 per cent native Londoner, it follows that you don’t have to be Asian to be a Londonstani.
Anyway, I remember deciding back then that it’d make a perfect title if I ever got round to turning my dissertation into a book and it stuck. That’s not to say it was a widespread term - in fact I only heard it a couple of times by a couple of kids - but that was enough for it to stick.
I briefly considered changing the title just after the July 7th bombings in 2005 because I saw the media latching on to a more negative definition of the word. But then I thought, bollocks to that - these people don’t understand the reality of racial integration on the ground, they just see the tiny minority of psychopaths and nutters on TV and in newspapers. I figured the word started out as a positive, constructive term about a reality that still exists today if you bother to look properly, and so we shouldn’t let terrorists or right-wing reactionaries hijack these things for their more destructive aims.
On a less polemical note, it probably goes without saying that I used the term “Londonstani” rather than “Londonstan” to make it clear that this was a book about Jas’s story and not a book that was trying to capture a whole city or even a community within it. But hopefully that goes without saying given that no work of fiction can ever capture or represent a whole minority community – that’s just ridiculously insulting to minority communities because it implies they’re homogenous enough to be represented by a single work or author.
3) Why the twist at the end?
I’m going to be a bit cryptic here so as not to spoil it, but in case I’m not being cryptic enough you should probably skip this section altogether if you haven’t read the book...
Anyway, the twist was my starting point (hence the big clue on the first page and the general fucked-upness of that whole chapter). On one level, the reason for the twist is simple enough: it seemed the most effective way of making the point that this stuff’s not about race or ethnicity, but about how those identities are used like tools to be more of a man.
Of course, that could have easily been done without the twist. But, given that I was hoping the book might attract people who don’t typically care for books, I also wanted to leave them with a slap in the face just for the sake of showing that the printed word actually can slap you in the face - sometimes in ways that films and video games just can’t do.
Assuming I succeeded in all of this, I also hoped the book might generate discussion among people new to reading novels - and one obvious discussion point would be the twist and how it was set up with repeated question marks over Jas’s surname, his constant insistence that “I in’t lyin to you”, his allergic reaction to his parents and his self-confessed resemblance to Justin Timberlake, etc...
Some readers and reviewers have suggested I should have revealed the twist a little earlier on in the book - that that would have allowed me to explore it better. I think that’s totally true and perhaps that would’ve been a better way of doing things. But at the same time I didn’t want to get all didactic about the implications of the twist – I hoped readers would think through what it means for themselves – because otherwise I might as well have written the book as non-fiction as I’d originally planned to.
It was for that same reason that I’ve left some other stuff at the end of the book unanswered - such as the identity of the three masked guys. I know who they are, and their identity is not at all irrelevant, but I wanted to throw it up for discussion. Depending on who those three guys are, the book either contains a warning against racial integration, or a warning against cross-cultural relationships, or, finally, a warning about being seduced by the “Bling bling economics” and lose morality represented by Sanjay.
No prizes for guessing which one of these I was going for - but I thought it would’ve been a bit boring to just spell it out in the book.
But beyond the basic point I was hoping to make with the twist, it might be helpful to consider this: If Hardjit, Ravi and Amit’s ethnic identity is basically just a tool to reaffirm their masculinity, it suggests the underlying hyper-masculinity could just as easily be expressed through something else - for example, football hooliganism, extreme sports or business or whatever. It’s just a front for something else - it doesn’t necessarily have to be emphasised or asserted the way the characters in the book do so. That means your ethnic identity can often be something you choose to express or not - like other aspects of your identity, you can switch it on or off depending on the context. After all, we all select our identities. Nobody tells us who we are anymore - we just have to “be” us by selecting our “self” from different sources. Nowadays, that means people often have to work really hard and/or imagine really hard instead of just having their identity and life simply handed to them because of their surname or gender or class or caste or whatever.
Our identities are therefore a performance (I should namecheck a famous sociologist called Erving Goffman here). The point of the twist, and other bits of the book, is to show the extent to which this can even be a fictionalised performance. After all, the characters clearly don’t live in a gritty ghetto, they pretend they do. It’s all about pretence, so that each of them is as inauthentic as the other. For example, Jas might have selected a contrived name for himself, but Hardjit has an even more fictionalised name because he actually alters it by adding a letter “d” in it - whereas Jas doesn’t actually change any letters in his name, he simply ignores most of them. Meanwhile, Sanjay makes his money from a chain of fictional companies claiming fictional tax refunds. And even when it comes to seemingly fixed and reliable traditional identities, Arun and Jas still end up comparing their parents’ version of reality to the illusory world of The Matrix. Anyway, you can probably see where I’m going with this, right? Never mind choosing whether or not to express or emphasise our racial identity, we’re now at a stage in cities like London where the racial identity itself can be another of these fictionalised performances.
4) Why are some of the characters so cartoonish?
At a general level, because the world changes so fast these days that the ‘performed identities’ I referred to above are now more and more just like cut-and-paste jobs. At a more specific level, the answer depends on which character you mean. In the case of Ravi and Hardjit, I wanted to show that while Jas is clearly caught in the middle of a battle to repress his innate intellect and sensitivity, the other two have already lost their own version of this fight. I wanted to show that it’s actually possible for young men to lose this battle in their bid to become ‘hard’ and macho. In doing so, some of Londonstani’s characters have reduced themselves to two-dimensional ‘cinema screens’ onto which their incomplete, cut-and-paste identities are projected by Bollywood, Hollywood, MTV Base and ads for designer fashion brands.
That’s kind of the whole point – that’s precisely why Ravi (the most two-dimensional character in the book) keeps insulting Jas for being too “deep”. Ravi has effectively relegated the more rounded aspects of his personality because he views having depth of character as weak and effeminate.
Also, while Hardjit’s ‘hardness’ sometimes appears two-dimensional on the outside, there’s a lot going on behind it because of the hyper-masculinity at play. Basically, the characters ‘overshoot’ their machismo because they’re defining their masculinity in opposition to their (overbearing) mothers rather than in relation to their (emotionally detached) fathers. They’re trying to be more manly than their mums rather than as manlyas their dads – so effectively there’s no limit to how manly they feel they need to be. So a character like Hardjit can get ridiculously macho and violent and look like a cardboard cut-out thug – but his compulsion to act this way is much more than just cosmetic.
Sanjay appears two-dimensional because I thought a latter-day James Bond villain figure would help hook in people from the ‘Playstation generation’ who don’t typically read books. So he’s obviously a villain - I didn’t want anyone to have to play “spot the bad guy”. Also, just like Jas and Harjit, Sanjay’s a fake – so he couldn’t exactly come across as an authentic, well-rounded Scorsese villain.
As for Mr Ashwood, well, every time he gets cartoonish it’s because that’s how Jas and the others perceive him – they think of him as a kind of bumbling clown, even though it’s quite clear that he’s not.
5) Who did you write the book for – adults or teenagers?
I think the distinction some people make between adult and teenage fiction is just stupidly dumb. By that rationale, 15 year-olds wouldn’t enjoy 18-rated films and 30 year-olds wouldn’t enjoy 12-rated films. It might be that the “teenage” book category simply allows middle-aged people who are too out-of-touch with younger people to not even bother trying to be in touch with them. Either way, the category makes little sense, particularly when you consider that most teenagers only read the books on their GCSE and A-Level English Literature syllabuses – and they’re not exactly pulled from the “teenage” category.
Anyway, that said, the academic research behind Londonstani was clearly for an adult readership (because my supervisor and examiners were adults), while the decision to write it up as a novel was to extend its appeal to younger people. So the irritatingly annoying answer to the question is: both. But, more importantly, I wrote it for myself - it’s the kind of book I’d enjoy reading. Hope you do too…