By Amaya Lewis-Patel, Second Year, English and Classical Studies
In my first year at university, my accommodation was opposite a kebab shop. Dehydrated and hungry after a night out, my flatmates and I would herd towards its welcoming neon sign. As a pescatarian who cannot stand the dryness of falafel, I abstained. I would wait for the others just outside the fried-food warmth of the shop. While my friends recited their orders, learnt by heart, I eavesdropped on the conversations of the drunk students around us.
White boys in quarter-zips would deliver loud lectures, boasting about who they had ‘got with’. I was never quite sure who they thought they were impressing. The middle-aged man behind the counter would attempt to conduct the carefully tuned orchestra of cooks behind him over (or under, in the quiet tones of his native tongue) the din. Then, there was an obsequious, ‘Thanks, bossman’. Then a handshake-cum-high-five dripping in irony and the grease of the chips that would be left, half-eaten, on some kitchen counter stained with years of vodka-crans and VKs.
And on the way to the club, we would walk past the corner shop. Again, I would witness the strange interactions between white male students and the man behind the counter. Some inside joke would be referenced by the boy, and the man would reply with a laugh or a taught response through smilingly gritted teeth. I felt sick and avoided eye contact. There was nothing obviously ‘wrong’ with what the boys were doing, and they may have viewed it as friendly banter. Yet it made me remember the fake Indian accents and stereotypes about nerdy brown kids that I had encountered in school – maybe this was the new, adult version of it.
‘Bossman’. The name asserts a respect, a deference to a ‘boss’ and superior, even as it confirms the (ab)use of this man’s labour and dignity. There is nothing deferential in the term. An appellation of racial, socioeconomic othering – yet another way of laughing at the brown man.
Think of Raj, the corner shop owner in the David Walliams children’s books, like Gangsta Granny or Boy in a Dress. He provides humour because he is a caricature of South Asian corner shop owners. Walliams perpetuated and legitimised a stereotype for the whole generation of readers who are now my peers.
These novels or their BBC adaptations were my first exposure to the South-Asian-corner-shop-owner stereotype. I remember being excited by the fact that the corner shop opposite my grandparents’ flat was also called ‘Raj’s News’. I assumed that the fictional Raj was based on the Raj I knew, who spoke in Gujarati with my grandfather on his weekly visit to buy the Sunday paper for my grandmother. This man had watched me grow up, and always greeted me with a smile and a ‘Say hello to your grandparents’.
I wasn’t sure how to make sense of the dirty shop, financial opportunism and sneakiness of the Raj in Walliams’ books. He was nothing like my Raj. Unwilling to explain racial stereotyping to an eight-year-old, my mother pointed out that it was a common name in India: it must be a coincidence. She reminded me that my uncle was also called Raj – and he was a doctor.
Though South Asians make up the largest non-white ethnic group in the country (6.9%, compared to 4% Black and 1.3% Chinese and Asian other), our invisibility in the media is undeniable. Alienation and ‘othering’ rely on the ability to reduce the multiplicity of South Asian identity to a stereotype, a single racial image. It is not unique to the UK: in America, there is Apu from The Simpsons who owns the ‘Kwik-E-Mart’, voiced by a white man putting on an Indian accent.
Yet it is undeniable that this stereotype stems from reality. Many South Asian immigrants to the UK in the late 20th century turned to self-dependency, opening their own shops. These businesses have often been open for generations, seeing children become parents and grandparents. In a student city, however, the constantly changing clientele seems to break down this sense of shop as being rooted within the community. A shop is only your local for the years of university, or more likely for the one year that you live near it. The relationship formed with its owners is necessarily temporary and given less thought.
So next time you go into a corner shop to collect your Vinted parcel, or stumble into a kebab shop for a late-night doner, remember that you are being allowed into the space. Your voice can go down a few decibels for the two minutes you wait for your cheesy chips. Because maybe, in twenty years, when you revisit your university city, the shop will still be there, unchanged – if it has not been pushed out by a minimalist coffee shop or supermarket chain. Will you greet the owner by name like an old friend, or will you only remember that catch-all term, ‘bossman’?
