Set in Hounslow, a suburb near Heathrow airport, the book follows the narrator Jas and his three friends while they cruise the streets cursing, fighting and trying hard to be desi rudeboys and not coconuts (brown on the outside but white on the inside because of their complete assimilation into mainstream British culture). Jas is himself a former nerd, trying desperately to ape his friends and shed his “poncey” image. “I swear I’ve watched as much MTV Base an Juggy D Videos as they have, but I still can’t attain the right level a rudeboy finesse. If I could, I wouldn’t be using poncey words like attain an finesse, innit.”

Once you get past the quirky language, Londonstani is a fun read, a humorous exploration on the need for machismo among British South Asian youth. Still, some of the reviews have been harsh, accusing Malkani of misrepresenting the Asian experience in Britain. One of the harshest reviews was written by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal in the Evening Standard, who incidentally published his first novel Tourism this summer.  

At a book-reading in Washington DC, Malkani addressed the criticism that the book is not an authentic voice of the ghetto. It is not meant to be. “It’s a book about middle-class kids trying to be virile,” explains Malkani. The book is not a tale from the ghetto or even so much a take on racism as it is about the assertion of aggressive masculinity as a proxy for identity. Not downplaying the role of racism, Malkani decided to focus on the issues of gender and masculinity which he had researched extensively at Cambridge University.  

The genesis of the book was a dissertation at Cambridge on why British Asian youth were discarding the stereotype of being nice, disciplined, nerdy kids and instead aligning with aggressive hip-hop culture. (Malkani writes in the FT that his advisor also saved him from himself by adding the subtitle “Assertive ethnicity, masculinity and identity” to the title “Chocolate flavored coconut milk”) So why the machismo? Malkani believes this is due to the strong and overbearing influence an Indian mother has on her son while the father is either physically or emotionally unavailable. In defining themselves in opposition to their mothers, Indian boys end up overshooting the mark. The success of the dissertation prompted Malkani to expand it into a book but rather than write a dense, academic piece that “rudeboys” will never read, he decided to write in a style he hoped would be more accessible to kids more enthusiastic about play stations than books.  

Some sociologists believe that minority communities need an aggressive, anti-assimilative identity to get comfortable with their individuality and ethnicity, so they can reintegrate into mainstream society later on their own confident terms. The “rudeboy” attitude has evolved to the creation of a vibrant desi sub-culture in Britain, more as an identity formation against the mainstream British society. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the traditionally nice, geeky Asian boys couldn’t get into the hip Central London clubs leading to the birth of a uniquely desi sub-culture as exemplified in music and language. Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney exemplified this fusion of British as well as Asian sub-culture in the late 1990s while recently desi beats artists such as Jay Sean evoked black rap artists. Language was also used as a tool by Asian youth to build a barrier not only between them and mainstream society but also between them and their family.  

And the Asian sub-culture seems to have arrived on the scene with nightclubs playing desi music and even attracting white boys like Markie Mark (“the original desi gorrah”). While there is a diversity of South Asian experiences, South Asian youths have largely identified themselves under a larger desi umbrella and Malkani believes this sub-culture is much more porous, diverse and fluid. He quotes the example of the popular DJ Nihal (or Nihal Arthanyake) of Sri Lankan origin, who fuses Indian bhangra beats with hip-hop, RnB, Bollywood etc in his music.  

Malkani says he has tried to compress the British-Asian experience of the past 15 years into 10 months in Londonstani. The middle-class neighborhood of Hounslow provides the setting to explore the issues touched upon in the book. With its co-dependence on Heathrow airport (something Malkani has written about in the Financial Times) it is “not complicated by deprivation” and is a bridge between Central London and South Asian communities residing outside or on the outskirts of London. According to Malkani, Hounslow has been the birthplace of this assertive behavior and the uniquely desi sub-culture that Brit-Asians are now justifiably proud of.  

Cambridge-educated, FT journalist but Hounslow boy Gautam Malkani might not be the original “rudeboy” and Londonstani might be a bit hyped, but it is engaging, funny and an interesting take on the desi sub-culture in Britain. So, have the “rudeboys” read his book? “They are still on chapter 4,” chuckles Malkani. 

(Saswati Bora used to be a journalist but now works as a researcher. She dreams of one day learning Spanish, cooking a mean fish dish, and not getting depressed while looking at her bank account. She lives in Washington DC and maintains a blog at: http://saswatibora.com/pblog/index.php)

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