Abstract
This is an outstanding historical testimony laced with family autobiography; full of truth, chilling narrative and powerful stories of resistance. The 1970s was a transformative era of defiance by Bengali families in the East London Borough of Tower Hamlets, particularly in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, against prevailing racist aggression and slum housing. Looking back on my teaching days there, from 1971−1983, I count my school students and their parents as daily protagonists against the violence of the streets and estates. Kashim, a 12-year-old Spitalfields boy, wrote in a poem ‘Our City’ about his life.
I live in London Where racism turns to violence . . . We wake up at dawn And give a big yawn. We’ve got to go to school through a dark tunnel Where we’re sure there’s got to be trouble. We get most of the bullying in school, But there’s nothing I could do. When it gets dark White bullies come out with dogs that bark With knives that glow in the dark, We’re sure we’re going to be struck . . .
1
The ‘dark tunnel’ was the long underpass under the railway approach to Liverpool Street Station that separated the relative security and community solidarity of his own neighbourhood from the racist menaces of Bethnal Green. Shabna refers to such boundaries in her book, which centres around the squatting resistance of Bengali families organised by BHAG (the Bengali Housing Action Group), and the narratives of their relentless struggle to secure basic housing, often in crumbling deserted dwellings with no gas, electricity, inside toilets or bathrooms, where the only relief from the cold, damp and mould were dangerous, temperamental paraffin heaters.
The author begins with a history of the Bengali connections with East London, starting with the Lascar seamen of the East India Company, who began to settle in London’s poorest borough some three centuries ago. But the core of her book are the thousands of Bengali arrivants of Sylhet, fresh from a brutal repression of their emergent nation by Pakistani military forces, who began to migrate to East London from the late 1960s onwards, at the very conjuncture when Enoch Powell made his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and British politicians of both major parties were clamouring to restrict Commonwealth immigration. Despite such a profoundly reactionary and racist ambiance, this generation of Bengali migrants, through persistent campaigning and action, eventually won the right to social housing when, in 1977, the Greater London Council declared a housing amnesty on squatters who had taken over derelict properties.
This true ‘history from below’, uses forty oral interviews (conducted in English and Bengali) with ex-squatters, including the author’s parents telling of their experiences of accidentally squatting in a Deal Street house, where they found themselves ‘renting’ from a housing shark posing as a landlord.
Shabna demolishes the myth attached to Bengalis as passive and weak. From the pages of her book, speaks out veteran squatter Abdul Kadir: ‘Whatever will happen, will happen, we need to live!’, asserting their entitlement to housing as absolute. His wife Sufia declares: ‘I wasn’t scared - how are you going to live if you aren’t courageous? They weren’t giving it to you!’ And anyone who witnessed the mass organisation of Bengali youth, their Brick Lane marches and mass sit-downs against the National Front of the late ’70s will remember how resistance crossed generations. A veteran of the mass Pelham Buildings squat, Mohammed Jashimuddin, recalls how ‘we did it ourselves and we made sure that families and old people got the flats . . . we survived this process because we stayed united. We stayed united!’ Shabna also reminds her readers how the racist murders, such as that of Altab Ali in 1978, created such moments of ‘community anger’ and a coalescence so powerful that it ‘became a turning point in East End social history’.
In that sense, the book is a record of an epochal change. Here were a proud and cultured people, many of whom had been deeply involved in a liberation war in their country of origin, involving a fierce struggle for their language and culture. As Jalal Rajonuddin remembers, they had grasped ‘a new identity, in a sense our own identity of belonging to a community, having the right to speak our own language. It must have played a role in giving us the strength and the impetus for our movement or fight for survival in Tower Hamlets.’ This reminded me of a 1974 account from one of our school’s 12-year-old students, Ouhidor from Chorisuppur, Sylhet: ‘Lots of Pakistani soldiers were killed by lads as young as me, or older than me. The easy way the lads attracted the soldiers of Pakistan was to shout “Joy Bangla, Bangla joy!” (meaning Long Live Bangla!) When the soldiers came and asked the lads “who said that?” or “shut that up!” they said “a group of people going thataway!” When the soldiers moved away from them, they started shooting them, getting guns from their belts or throwing grenades.’ 2 Such youth, now in the streets of Whitechapel or Spitalfields and with such experiences behind them, were to prove anything but passive.
In its intrepid acts of housing resistance, the Bengali community was supported by the committed know-how of house-seizing pioneers like ex-army squatting supremo Terry Fitzpatrick and members of the Race Today collective Mala Sen and the then teacher Farrukh Dhondy. (Dhondy used his Spitalfields experiences to write collections of short stories for young people such as East End at Your Feet and Come to Mecca, which became important classroom reading for students in burgeoning cosmopolitan schools across the capital.)
Shabna concludes with how the now-times struggles in Spitalfields have changed, and how the new urban phenomenon of gentrification has transformed the cityscape, whereby the housing stock and commercial premises of the neighbourhood are being bought up by new forces of incoming entrepreneurs, speculators and wealthy would-be residents, forcing up property prices and changing the character of erstwhile Bengali-centric streets. The campaign around the future of the ex-Truman’s Brewery complex has created the ‘invisible violence’ of new forms of racism and Shabna describes it with powerful insight: ‘There is a sense that racism operates in subtle and invisibilised ways; that it is baked into the system in a way that makes it almost undetectable, except for the pronounced racialised outcomes it delivers.’