2020 was an uncomfortably full and taxing year, but in October, I had the fortune to talk on a panel with two remarkable people, Kavita and Shalina. For her recent book and Radio 4 series, Partition Voices, Kavita has done the very brave work of finding survivors of the events of 1947, when the final act of the British Raj was to partition India into India and Pakistan, and millions died in the horrific violence that ensued. These stories have hardly been told. They are shocking and moving and telling them is necessary. I used to think this was Indian history, of interest to me because my family came from India. Now I see that this is British history and needs to be understood. Shalina is an inspiring history teacher, who teaches children in Kenton in north-west London. She does a brilliant job of teaching children from diverse backgrounds history in a way which gives them a sense of their own context and doesn’t shy away from the difficult truths in our past. Meeting Kavita and Shalina was an important part of my year.
I’ve also been reading more widely this year. Perhaps I have been looking to the past for a sense of myself as an immigrant to these shores. I read William Dalrymple’s book, Anarchy, on the East India Company and also Robert Tomb’s weighty book, The English and Their History (and I would whole-heartedly recommend both). I feel this year, as perhaps others do too, that our understanding of our history is rightly evolving. That voices in history which may not have been heard are being acknowledged.
And again, I have found myself thinking again of the balance of humility and self-confidence. Tombs talks about whether we should feel pride or shame in our history and suggest that better than either of them ‘would be to accept responsibility: both for repairing and compensating for the failings of past generations, and for preserving and handing on their achievements.’ This feels extremely sane to me. Kavita and Shalina are doing important work, in Kavita’s case, literally enabling voices to be heard for the first time speaking about horrifically traumatic lived experience. And yet, reading Tombs, I was left feeling a sense that there is, in spite of the darker moments, much to celebrate. And a sense, too, that as an immigrant, I am entitled to celebrate our history (and, I think, to question it) as much as anyone else and by doing so, to contribute to our collective future.
If I’m honest, Dishoom has in many ways, reflected my need to understand and express some of my heritage. The stories that we write which become the basis for building each of our restaurants always involve some fiction or some character, grounded in some aspect of Bombay history. We do enormous research into these stories, but each of them feels like it comes from something within me that I want to articulate. Our King’s Cross restaurant is one of my favourites in this regard. So much of the history of Indian independence that my grandfather taught me about is reflected here. He and my grandmother took me around India a young boy in the 70s and 80s to visit Gandhiji’s birthplace in Gujarat, the Red Fort in Delhi where Independence was declared, Jallianwala Bagh where hundreds of unarmed, innocent men, women and children were killed in a park by General Dyer who asked his artillery to open fire. He would talk to me about Bhagat Singh, of the relationship of Nehru and Jinnah, of the politics of congress in the 1940s. This narrative of Indian independence is contained within all the artwork and photography on the walls, the graffiti, the fly posting, the design and even the Irani café rules in that restaurant. (My grandfather would have loved this restaurant.)
