Breaking the Color Bar — How One Man Helped Desegregate Britain’s Pubs (and Fought for an Anti-Racist Future)
Malcolm X is walking down a road in Smethwick, England, called Marshall Street. He wants to witness with his own eyes the racism endured by South Asian immigrant foundry workers, which has seen them banned from buying property along this ordinary stretch of small terraced houses. He wants to visit a pub to see the “color bar” in action—the practice of forcing non-white customers into segregated drinking rooms away from their white colleagues and neighbors. But most of all, he wants to meet the comrades fighting in the same broad anti-racism struggle, more than 3,000 miles away.
He’s seen angry white people before, and he’s used to their brutal resistance to his presence. A group of women are holding a banner, while others are shouting: “We don’t want Malcolm X here!” Despite their attempts, he is able to meet the band of Indian activists who have been protesting against the color bar, using peaceful tactics similar to those employed by the Freedom Riders in the United States earlier in the decade. They fear for his safety—particularly one Sikh man, named Avtar Singh Jouhl—but he refuses their offer of walking with him in convoy. If he is attacked, the press are here and would—hopefully—report the unprovoked violence. He turns to Jouhl and says, ‘‘This is worse than America. This is worse than Harlem.”
[Content warning: This story includes accounts of racist slurs, discriminatory language, and violence.]
They take him to a pub called the Blue Gates and enter its smoking room, where Jouhl tells Malcolm X that they aren’t allowed to be served. They order a drink. The bartender tensely tells them that her boss won’t allow it and they have to leave for the public bar. Malcolm X has a soft drink and leaves. Nine days later, on February 21, 1965, he is shot dead as his pregnant wife and his daughters take cover in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom.
But this isn’t an article about the U.S. activist. Instead, it’s the story of the nearly forgotten man who spent a lifetime fighting against racism, and who sought a better life for his family in 1950s and 1960s England. Avtar Singh Jouhl ended up battling prejudice in pubs, factories, and at the highest political levels. But despite his great deeds—taking Malcolm X to a segregated pub is only one brushstroke on the giant canvas of his life—he didn’t even have a Wikipedia page until I created one.
His is a deeply personal tale that starts during the colonial period in a village in northern India, and touches on pivotal world events, including the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, war rationing, apartheid, the Black Power movement, and the 1984-85 miners’ strike. (During that strike, Jouhl, in what feels like an Asian version of the film “Pride,” helped send six coaches to the picket lines for solidarity, despite the fact that the British-Indian workers encountered racism from the miners.)
This story even continues into the present day, touching on fallout from the 2016 Brexit referendum and life under COVID-19. And it’s a tale that helps to explain the gaps in my own family history, and why I was subjected to so much racism when I grew up in a small market town outside London.
I was finally able to tell this story after I was given access to hours and hours of video memoirs, plus archive interviews and email contact with the now-84-year-old Jouhl (he was unable to speak on the phone as he was undergoing dialysis treatment for polycystic kidney disease). It is a commission that has consumed my life, and listening to the tapes has changed me and the way that I think of myself.
In an acknowledgment of the global and intersectional anti-racism struggle, Jouhl made a comment that has stayed with me. “Many Asians don’t consider themselves Black, and some are being offended at being called Black. I don’t want people who are oppressed and discriminated being described as Asian. These people are Black.”
I, like Jouhl, have lived a life of racism and oppression. I see myself as a comrade in that fight. And I can see the urgency in his message even today: More Asians need to sign up, and understand that it’s our struggle, too.
ASIAN AGITATOR
The village of Jandiala, in the district of Jalandhar, Punjab, was named after a jand tree which is said to still be flourishing today. Before 1947, it was home to a tight-knit but tolerant community that included many religious groups, like Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Dalits. It may seem primitive to modern eyes—the villagers had to defecate in a field, which women were only allowed to visit at night—but by the time of Jouhl’s birth in November 1937, Jandiala was thriving, with an array of shops selling textiles, sweets, groceries, pakoras, and samosas.
The village only flew one flag from its giant, 100-foot pole, but it wasn’t the Union Jack of its then-colonial rulers. Instead, it was the red flag of communism—and it marked the life of Jouhl, who was born into a family of “self-sufficient peasants who cultivated their own land.”
Jouhl’s family members were illiterate and couldn’t read or write in Urdu or Punjabi (the latter wasn’t taught in schools until 1947), but they supported the communist movement by donating grains for conferences. Jouhl had three elder brothers who worked on the farm, as well as a sister, but he was the only child in his family chosen to go to school, as the fees were prohibitively expensive.
His first school days, when he was aged six, were spent under the shade of trees, sitting on jute mats learning Urdu in an all-boys class of about 40 children. But it was when he went to high school in September 1947 that his true personality shone through, when he began to agitate against school fee increases, and to mock his teachers who were brutal with the cane. It was a strict education, where physical discipline was commonplace, and school was regularly disrupted by government demands that children work on the nearby land.
One year, there was a plague of locusts, and the authorities required that kids be taken out of school to dig up the insects’ eggs, which would then be sold for profit. Jouhl at first resisted, saying “this wasn’t a student job,” but then came up with the idea to band together with his classmates, dig up the eggs, and sell them themselves to subsidize their own educations.
They presented the cash in assembly, and were caned for their trouble. “My father slapped me across the face because of my activities in school,” Jouhl told oral historian Doreen Price in a series of interviews conducted between 1990-1992. It was the first of many protests for Jouhl, who would prove to be a lifelong agitator and a thorn in the side of the ruling classes.
UNROOTED FAMILIES
“I left reluctantly for England,” Jouhl says in his video memoirs. “My wife didn’t want me to go. I was only 20 years old. It was very difficult without our father.”
Partition had fractured life in India, and Jandiala was no exception. The villagers protested at the red flag being removed and a compromise was struck to erect another 100-foot pole to fly the new tricolor Indian flag alongside it. The egalitarianism of communism was meant to run hand in hand with an independent India, but despite assurances from the village elders, Muslim residents felt unsafe, and 5% of the population of the village moved to refugee camps as violence erupted. A lot of western Punjab became uninhabitable after the pressure for land resulted in jungles becoming uprooted and agricultural families, like Jouhl’s, fearing for their future.
It was amidst this political turmoil that Jouhl also experienced personal circumstances that impelled him to grow up fast. His father died when he was 16, in 1954, the same year that Jouhl married his wife, Manjeet. It was an arranged marriage—he was engaged at the age of nine or 10—and she was his comrade and only love until her early death in 1981 at the age of 40. A decade after her death, he told Price: “I can’t have another partner, as I’m still devoted to her. She was a great comrade, and we stood shoulder to shoulder throughout the situation in the U.K. It’s a dilemma. Being lonely is not an asset in the [anti-racism] movement.”
For Jouhl’s family, and for many Indians, the economic opportunities of living in Britain meant that uprooting their lives and moving halfway across the world was an attractive possibility. He paid 1,000 rupees to process the passport application, and 1,300 rupees for a flight after gaining admission to the London School of Economics to eventually fulfill his dream of becoming a history lecturer. (At that time, 500 rupees in India would buy an acre of land, and a teacher’s salary was 50 rupees a month. Every £40 earned in Britain could be sent back in exchange for 530 rupees.)
Jouhl temporarily left Manjeet in India—they were reunited three years later—and flew into Heathrow on February 4, 1958 to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, who had left in 1953, and his elder brother. Both of them were then living in Smethwick, an industrial town near Birmingham. But nothing would prepare Jouhl for the conditions that awaited him—or for his first taste of beer.
INTOXICATED INDIANS
“My brother got the telegram,” recalls Jouhl. “He came to London after spending all night drinking.”
The following scenes of Jouhl visiting a pub for the first time have actually been shared before, by the BBC’s Charles Parker, who spoke to Jouhl as a source for his 1967-1968 play, “The Great Divide.” It’s clear why—Jouhl’s first drink was very memorable.
His brother Chachi arrived to meet him at 4 a.m. at the London house where he was staying for his first night in the U.K., which was owned by a married couple who were originally from Jouhl’s village. Chachi was “barely able to stand up” and brought a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label, which he opened on the train they took from Paddington back to Birmingham. Jouhl refused alcohol on the journey, and it wasn’t until he was taken to Victoria Square in the second-most-populous city in the U.K. that he finally tasted beer.
“They said, ‘Let’s have some sugar cane juice!’” Jouhl retells in his video memoirs, and to Price. “I said, ‘This isn’t sugarcane. This is beer.’ They said, ‘No harm will it do.’ They said the sugar cane was crushed under the bar. After the second pint I was intoxicated and asked them if it was beer, and they had a bloody good laugh!”
The beer Jouhl was drinking would become synonymous with his life in Smethwick as, he tells me by email, it was a Mild Ale brewed by Mitchells & Butlers Brewery, then ubiquitous in the segregated pubs in the town. It was served on cask, and was low-alcohol, at roughly 2.8% ABV. It was poured through a sparkler and had a resultantly creamy head.
After his first trip to the pub, Jouhl was taken to his new home, where he was visited by numerous immigrants who hailed from Jandiala and who were desperate for news about their village in the age of the telegram. They each gave him £1 to send back to India, and Jouhl stayed up that night until 4 a.m. listening to Punjabi folk songs. He discovered that all his flatmates were illiterate, but he was happy to write their letters to relations back in India, which made him very popular in the local community.
“It was so much friendliness,” he says.
For now, at least, it was.
INDUSTRIAL RACISM
The conditions in 54 Oxford Road, Smethwick, where Jouhl was living, would have been typical for Indian immigrants, many of them Sikhs, who were working in industrial jobs. According to “Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community” by Gurharpal Singh and Darshan Singh Tatla, three-quarters of Sikhs were manual workers, “often taking up employment that was either low paid with irregular hours or marked by extremely difficult working conditions” in foundries serving Birmingham’s automotive industry.
In this four-room house, about 15 to 16 people lived together, which meant at least three to every bed. At one time, 24 tenants were crammed in. They washed in a tin tub, and there was no hot water, so a boiled kettle was used when bathing. The house was much smaller than Jouhl’s family home in India, and had an outdoor toilet with an electric heater only used on Sunday mornings. Smethwick was still a predominantly industrial town in those days: When clothes were hung outside during the day, they would be brought in dry but black from soot.
I opened the door, and there were all white men. I asked why and they said, ‘Gaffer [the landlord] doesn’t let us drink in that room,’ and we were allowed to only go in one smoke room and one public bar. I asked why and was told, ‘The gaffer says we talk very loudly and white people don’t like us talking very loudly. And when we talk in Punjabi the white people complain that we are talking about them in our language.’ This was just the excuse, because in real terms it was the color bar operating, and it was in every public bar in Smethwick and Handsworth.
Rent worked out to 50p a week, and food was £1 a week, which was cooked in groups; three people would eat curry from the same bowl. Not every person in the household worked, so the unemployed were subsidized by the others, and even had their pub pints bought for them. Food was still rationed in 1958 as a post-war hangover, and a shopkeeper of Indian origin provided them with potatoes, butter, and atta flour (used for chapattis). It was in one of these food deliveries that Jouhl found a card that would change his life: It was an advertisement for the Indian Workers’ Association (IWA), a communist collective not affiliated with any trade union or government body, which campaigned against racism. He joined straight away.
Although Jouhl intended to study, upon his arrival in Smethwick his brother made him work in the local foundry, Shotton Brothers, and send money home like most of the others did. Some, however, found the allure of the pub too great, and would spend their earnings on booze. Jouhl calls them “Johnnies,” while “Charlies” were those who spent their wages on sex workers. Still, he says that in his experience both groups were in the minority, and most people were there to forge a better life. For Jouhl, most nights it was “couple of pints, roti, cup of tea. Bed.”
But it was his first visit to the local pub, the Wagon and Horses, that gave Jouhl an inkling that this new life faced huge obstacles. In those days, the large pub had two smoking rooms, two public bars, and an assembly room.
“I opened the door,” he tells Price. “And there were all white men. I asked why and they said, ‘Gaffer [the landlord] doesn’t let us drink in that room,’ and we were allowed to only go in one smoke room and one public bar. I asked why and was told, ‘The gaffer says we talk very loudly and white people don’t like us talking very loudly. And when we talk in Punjabi the white people complain that we are talking about them in our language.’ This was just the excuse, because in real terms it was the color bar operating, and it was in every public bar in Smethwick and Handsworth.”
The color bar may be Britain’s most shameful secret. While many people in the U.K. now see apartheid and segregation as part of other countries’ histories, few are aware that up until very recently, non-whites were barred from certain jobs, shops, pubs, and even toilets. Buckingham Palace, it was revealed last year, banned “coloured immigrants or foreigners” from serving in clerical roles in the royal household until at least the late 1960s. The Race Relations Act of 1965 sought to end public discrimination, but private clubs—such as the Smethwick Labour Club—could still legally ban non-whites.
Jouhl also tells of non-white drinkers being given glasses with handles, presumably so white customers wouldn’t use the same vessels as them, but I am unable to corroborate this account. In any case, the segregation and abuse Jouhl and his flatmates faced was very real.
Publicans somehow justified their actions by denying their policies were a color bar, and claiming they were following a “squalor” ban, as a doctor of Indian origins who worked in Smethwick at the time noted. “Several doctors and teachers have tried to gain admission,” wrote Dr. Dhani Prem in “The Parliamentary Leper: A History of Colour Prejudice in Britain.” “But they were refused. No one can accuse the doctors and teachers of squalor. As a matter of fact, many of them live a better and cleaner life than do many of the white visitors to these pubs.”
Smethwick, though, was no extreme case, as the color bar also operated throughout the country, and especially in London. A pub near where I currently live in Lewisham, southeast London, the Dartmouth Arms, famously barred a drinker when he visited with a Black friend. The white pub-goer was none other than the mayor of Lewisham, who wanted to see the color bar with his own eyes. And it wasn’t just pubs—shortly after his arrival, Jouhl went to a barber who told him he “didn’t cut Indian hair”.
“I don’t think it was purely a Smethwick problem,” says Chris Sutton from the Smethwick Heritage Centre, who has agreed for the first time to speak about Malcolm X’s visit to the town. “It was certainly happening in Birmingham and other larger towns and cities like London.”
The apartheid faced by those deemed “colored” was everywhere, and in the foundry where Jouhl worked there were separate toilets for the non-white workers. They faced extreme workplace prejudice, and were only allowed to be “molder’s mates,” which meant they undertook all the dangerous, hot work for a lot less pay. Even housing operated a color bar: Non-white people were regularly denied mortgages, and subsidized council housing was not available to recent immigrants locally because the Tory-run Smethwick council stipulated that applicants had to be living in the town for 10 years to be eligible.
Jouhl realized the color bar had to be broken—and to do so, collective action was needed.
DONKEY WORK
“It was very primitive conditions,” Jouhl reveals to Price. “After casting around lunch the foundry filled up with smoke and we couldn’t see each other. There were no extractions and it was a very old building. There was a canteen but no Indian food was provided and therefore we took our food from home, warming up our curry and roti in the casting. During lunchtime we used to go every day for a pint in The George on Oldbury Road. It was hard, hot, shitty jobs for Black workers.”
Jouhl’s son Jagwant retells the story to me on Zoom (he’s shielding from COVID, as he’s inherited his father’s kidney problem), about pints of Mild being filled up at the bar for the arrival of the Indian workers. But he also says that political meetings were held in the pubs. “He wasn’t an alcoholic,” he says. “But the [IWA] beer culture started in the work in the foundries.”
Sutton confirms the conditions in these factories would’ve been horrendous. “Most of the buildings would have gone back to the Victorian age or even before,” he says. “A lot of people have told me about the heat. It was a different world. They all started to shut down when the pressures of the Far East markets got too much.The community was strong, though, with a lot of people following their dads and grandads into the same firm.”
Jouhl was paid £7.50 for 50 hours’ work in 1958, but was “furious” to discover that he was doing the “donkey work” while white workers were paid more than £16 for the same hours. Most people would have chalked this up as deeply unfair, and then gone on to different work or to university, if they were able. But for Jouhl, the wider working-class struggle and anti-racism cause was too great to ignore. He never went on to the London School of Economics as he had once planned, and instead spent nearly 30 years working in foundries in the Black Country before becoming a senior lecturer of trade union studies at the then South Birmingham College’s Trade Union Studies Centre.
Jagwant says that Jouhl was a welfare worker when he first arrived at the foundry, helping the illiterate workers with all sorts of problems. He then became an official shop steward and represented his fellow molders so well that a joke in one of the foundries was that when he died he would go to heaven, and when the factory boss saw him on a cloud he would say: “I’m not going in there! He made my life hell when I was alive!” Jouhl rose to general secretary of the IWA’s U.K. branch in 1961, shortly after his wife Manjeet joined him in Smethwick on December 23, 1960.
It was under the banner of the IWA that the color bar was broken in the workplace, when Jouhl was involved in getting some “big lads” to push aside the guy in charge of the segregated toilets. He says he actually wanted to be dismissed for his actions, as it would be a “great cause,” but his employers were too scared of him.
During the early 1960s, the IWA used these tactics in the town’s pubs, organizing pub crawls with white left-wing university students who would buy their comrades of color pints in a nationwide campaign. When landlords noticed the color bar was being broken, they would bar the “offenders,” and campaigners such as Jouhl would then give evidence at licensee meetings, which resulted in some pub landlords losing their licenses.
This led to the first Desi pubs being set up by Sikh landlords, who reclaimed these spaces for their diverse customer base. As Jouhl puts it, “You can play Indian songs here. It was not possible in a white pub.”
Desi pubs were establishments taken over to provide safe spaces for South Asians to drink, and a community hub where immigrants could access services, networks, and advice. They served Indian food, played bhangra, and catered to hard-drinking “Desis.” Nowadays Desi pubs remain around the country in different forms but are multicultural places for all.
The backlash from the media was significant, and one of Jouhl’s main comrades, Jagmohan Joshi, had to endure his British wife and fellow anti-racism campaigner, Shirley, being depicted as a “whore” for marrying a non-white husband. It also resulted in a lot of bad publicity for Mitchells & Butlers Brewery, which ran many of the pubs in the area. Leadership briefed their publicans to be more savvy when barring campaigners, who were now being told they couldn’t be served in the white areas because a “meeting was taking place.”
And that’s when Malcolm X made his visit to the U.K., and witnessed this state of affairs for himself. “It was the shot in the arm for the anti-racism struggle in Britain,” Jouhl says in his video memoirs.
THE GOOD FIGHT
Nowadays, Smethwick is a majority Black and Asian town (just under 60%) with slightly higher-than-average unemployment, according to Labour councilor Manjit Singh Gill. “It’s a very integrated community,” he says. “There are a lot of people from different backgrounds and hate crime is very low.”
Late last year, before the Omicron variant made travel precarious, I visited Marshall Street with Paul Magson, who wrote a play named after the thoroughfare. It was here that Tory Member of Parliament candidate Peter Griffiths infamously campaigned in 1964 with the slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbor, vote Labour.” It was also here where Malcolm X saw Britain’s segregation first-hand.
Malcolm X said there was no point, and we walked into the bar where several IWA members were. He had a soft drink and chatted with different people about the color bar. He was there for 15 minutes, and he said, ‘Keep up the fight. The only way to defeat the color bar and racism is to fight it back.’
Today, Marshall Street is home to many Asian families, and half of it has been knocked down to make way for newer-build Barratt-style homes. There’s a plaque to Malcolm X and a Desi pub, the Ivy Bush, at the end of the old road but, otherwise, it’s fairly unremarkable considering the battleground it once was.
Jouhl was credited for inviting the 39-year-old Malcolm X to the area, but he reveals in his video memoirs that fellow communist activist Claudia Jones—who was also instrumental in establishing the Notting Hill Carnival—was key to his extraordinary trip, which was deemed “deplorable” by the town’s mayor.
Jouhl remembers his trip vividly. He talks of groups of white residents shouting, “We don’t want Malcolm X here,” and that he feared for the civil rights leader’s safety during his midday visit on February 12, 1965.
“We didn’t know if a white person would throw something,” he says in his video memoirs. “I asked him that we [the IWA] could accompany him [in the street]. He said, ‘I’m OK. I’m confident. I will keep my eyes open [for any bricks] and I will handle that. But I will walk alone in Marshall Street.’ It was his decision, but we kept an eye open when he started walking. He saw the posters that said, ‘Colored people need not apply.’ He said, ‘This is worse than in America. This is worse than Harlem. In New York I haven’t seen such things, but there we have other attacks and discrimination against Black people.’”
After the short walk in Marshall Street, Malcolm X spoke to the press and told Jouhl and Joshi that he only wanted to visit one pub. The duo took him to the Blue Gates. “I accompanied him into the smoke room,” Jouhl says. “And I ordered a drink and the barmaid already knew me and she said that, ‘My [landlord] doesn’t allow Black people to drink here. You can have a drink in the bar.’
“Malcolm X said there was no point, and we walked into the bar where several IWA members were. He had a soft drink and chatted with different people about the color bar. He was there for 15 minutes, and he said, ‘Keep up the fight. The only way to defeat the color bar and racism is to fight it back.’”
The visit may have been short, but its impact was massive—the fight against the color bar had gone global.
BLACK PANTHERS
In a twist of fate, the Blue Gates is a Desi pub today. When Magson and I enter on a drab weekday in November, I’m wowed by the huge space. It’s possibly the largest pub I’ve been in, but it’s empty, apart from two elderly men (one white, one Black) watching the darts on TV. The void is filled by Narinder Singh Deu, brother of the current landlord, who is holding court and keen to give me a warm Smethwick visit.
He knows that I’m here because of Malcolm X, and he allows me to take many photos of the open-plan bar, which was once partitioned as brutally as India, as Britain, and as Jouhl’s life. He also regales me with some Sikh wisdom (“It’s bad luck for me to tell you how many rooms are upstairs”) passed down through the generations.
We drink a couple of Milds (for £2 a pint—by far the least I’ve ever paid for pub beer), which are amazingly well-kept and -poured, with notes of caramel and a smooth head. Deu retells an old saying that “Mild covers thirst as well as food,” which he says is why he doesn’t serve pub grub.
The Milds slip down so well that Magson and I are inspired to embark on a mini-Desi-pub run, visiting pub after pub owned by Sikhs who are now embedded in this Black Country town. It becomes obvious that this is a community that is far removed from my own experience of being among families of new immigrants. Deu, in contrast, is third-generation; it was his grandad who took over the pub in 1977.
After my numerous pints of Mild, I leave for the train station, passing a lit-up gurdwara and war memorial to all the Sikhs lost in both World Wars. It dawns on me: This is the area that I’ve been searching for all my life, a place where Asians have seemingly come to terms with their past and have conquered the racism they experienced, thanks in part to the sacrifice made by strong Sikhs like Jouhl. For a moment, it feels like I’ve found my own version of Wakanda.
However, on the train back I read “Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain” by Sathnam Sanghera, who grew up in the Midlands, and the reality dawns on me: A society of strong Sikhs who succeed where other immigrants have failed by winning over European locals is a fallacy and, in fact, a colonial artifact designed to divide non-whites up and make rootless Asians (my family were born in the then British Malaya, and had no religious ties) revere “good immigrants.”
“The British empire explains the way we see ourselves (especially in relation to other Indian groups) and our continued survival as a community,” Sanghera writes. “The history of relative indulgence surely explains how Sikhs are sometimes treated in modern Britain compared to other minorities. While other minority ethnic immigrant communities are demonized.”
Luckily, Jouhl knew this too, and although he was a highest-caste Sikh—a Jat—he saw himself as working-class, oppressed, and not better than anyone else. He was hated by white factory bosses and landlords, but he stayed true to what he believed in and described himself in simple terms: “I’m Punjabi. I’m Indian. I’m Black. That’s my identity.”
GO HOME
Nine days after his visit to Smethwick, Malcolm X was assassinated. At the time, the British media hypocritically called his death a shocking tragedy. Later that year, Parliament passed the 1965 Race Relations Act, which “banned racial discrimination in public places and made the promotion of hatred on the grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins an offence.”
A year after the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, U.K. pubs were now breaking the law if they continued with their racist color bar—although some places, such as Smethwick’s Labour Club, still discriminated well into my lifetime, according to local historians. The legislation would seem like a victory for campaigners such as Jouhl, but more anti-racism work was, of course, necessary; changing the law didn’t suddenly turn Britain into a non-racist country. Separate Black, white, and Asian pubs were a fact of life for British-Asians of my generation (I was born in 1978).
Changing laws also didn’t eliminate the one word that has been ubiquitous in my life, as well as Jouhl’s: “paki.” The slur was used violently against Jouhl when he stepped on British soil, and it’s a word I was taunted with decades later in playgrounds. I was last called it a few years ago, the day after the Brexit referendum, when it was shouted at me from a car window. For some British-Asians, it’s a regular occurrence: My local bottle shop is run by the Patel family, and they are often called “pakis” by shoplifters. Gill confirms that his cousin—who works in a hospital and wears a turban—is often targeted with the word.
The current worry [I have with] this generation is that very few actually have any knowledge or are bothered to go back and look at what happened in the past. The only thing my parents’ generation had was their voices and their ability to organize and build alliances.
“Paki” is a slur that carries as much weight in the U.K. as the word “nigger” does. It has been weaponized by far-right National Front gangs though, horrifyingly, white people are still claiming that it’s a harmless abbreviation of “Pakistan,” or just “banter.” In fact, as Sanghera writes, the use of the word “nigger” to describe Indians was commonplace in the 1860s, and it was replaced by “paki” in the ensuing century. Fittingly, I have also been called a “nigger” in the past.
My first ever visit to a pub in the 1990s, in the white-dominated town I grew up in, was marred by racism, when a local mocked me for looking like a taxi driver. These incidents were always ignored by my family, who never had the emotional tools to deal with them. But for the first time in my life, I feel like the words of an avuncular figure like Jouhl can help me process the trauma.
In his conversations with Price, Jouhl reveals that, in the ’90s, during a visit to a pub in Birmingham, he was subjected to a similar racist attack. “White men shouted, ‘Taxi, taxi, taxi! Go back home, you fucking paki!’” he says. “Even if you are a millionaire, they say, ‘You bloody paki!’” The resilience of such hateful, discriminatory language is a direct holdover from Britain’s colonial past, he notes. “We had 300 years of this in India, and that’s the reason I don’t blame the actors.”
If this racism was an imperial import, as Sanghera also notes, the color bar was too. “In Amritsar, the social separation of races was so routine that Indians were forced to buy platform tickets at the railway station while Europeans could go on the platform freely, European clubs allowed no Indian members and Indian servants lived entirely separately from their British masters.”
Today, the color bar still isn’t taught at schools—a middle-aged, privately educated friend I speak to about this article cannot believe such prejudice existed in the U.K.—maybe because it shows us the brutality that lies beneath modern-day Britain. But it was real and it was modern: It existed when “Mary Poppins” was shown in cinemas, when the Beatles recorded “Rubber Soul,” and when the James Bond films were a global phenomenon.
Jagwant agrees with me and says: “The current worry [I have with] this generation is that very few actually have any knowledge or are bothered to go back and look at what happened in the past. The only thing my parents’ generation had was their voices and their ability to organize and build alliances.”
Jouhl, under the guise of the IWA, fought various immigration acts that barred entry from “Black” countries and ensured the organization he was a secretary of became a “darling of the Punjab” by fighting for Indian workers to be given British passports—it’s one reason why Windrush deportations have featured fewer British-Asians. And it’s possibly the reason that a man who always agitated against the state was given an OBE by the Queen in 2000 for service to trade unions and community relations.
It’s hard to sum up the legacy of Jouhl’s work because in all his interviews, he humbly refuses to take sole credit for any achievements, seeing the fight against racism as a pure act of solidarity. Whenever he speaks about a success or a defeat, he says “we” at the start of the sentence, carefully acknowledging the role his comrades in the IWA played. This modesty—and the ways in which collective action is often misunderstood—is probably why history has thus far overlooked his contributions.
“Any racist law has got to be opposed, violated and broken,” he says. “There’s no point in a ‘democratic process’ if that process is producing these laws. But I don’t think I’m brave—I just have the instinct of the working class.”
Although he incurred a lot of opposition from his friends and family for accepting an OBE, the award also shows how much he changed the established order. Without his hard work, towns like Smethwick likely wouldn’t have the rich Desi pub culture they do now, and immigrant workers in the now-demolished foundries would have continued to be treated terribly by their bosses.
After hearing about the IWA in the course of researching this article, I decide to join the communist organization, and I feel like I’ve finally reconciled my purpose in life: to keep fighting racism in whatever form it takes.
It was Jouhl’s fight. Now it’s mine.
Words by David JesudasonIllustrations by Colette Holston