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Kirkus Reviews June 1, 2024, review of Dhondy, Farrukh: THE FREEZIES. p. NA.
New Internationalist no. 483 June, 2015. Shah, Subi. , “Farrukh Dhondy: the Indian-born British writer, playwright, screenwriter and activist tells Subi Shah about his time in the Black Panther Movement, the difference between books and literature, and reading Woman’s Own.”. p. 46.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Farrukh Dhondy
Born 1944 (age 80)
Poona, India
Education The Bishop's School; University of Poona; Pembroke College, Cambridge; University of Leicester
Occupation(s) Writer, playwright, screenwriter, activist
Spouse Mala Sen (m. 1968; div. 1976)
Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944) is an Indian-born British Parsi writer, playwright, screenwriter and left-wing activist who resides in the United Kingdom.
Education
Dhondy was born in 1944 in Poona, India, where he attended The Bishop's School, and obtained a BSc degree from the University of Poona (1964).[1] He won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences before switching to English, earning a BA degree in 1967.[citation needed] After graduating he studied for a master's degree at Leicester University and was later a lecturer at Leicester College of Further Education and Archbishop Temples School, Lambeth, London.[2]
Early activism
In Leicester, Dhondy became involved with the Indian Workers' Association and later, in London, with the British Black Panthers, joining the publication Race Today in 1970, along with his close friend Darcus Howe, and former partner Mala Sen,[3] and discovering his calling as a writer.[4]
Writing
Dhondy's literary output is extensive, including books for children, textbooks and biographies, as well as plays for theatre and scripts for film and television.[5] He is also a columnist,[6][7][8] a biographer (of C. L. R. James; 2001),[9] and media executive, having been Commissioning Editor at Channel Four television from 1984 to 1997. During his time with Channel Four, he wrote the comedy series Tandoori Nights (1985–87) for the channel, which concerned the rivalry of two curry-house owners.
His children's stories include KBW (Keep Britain White), a study of a young white boy's response to anti-Bengali racism. In 2011 Dhondy published his translation of selections from the Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, Rumi: a New Translation. Dhondy also wrote the screenplay for the 2005 Bollywood historical blockbuster Mangal Pandey: The Rising, starring Aamir Khan and Toby Stephens. In 2012, Dhondy scripted a short film called The K File. This film dealt with a fictional take on the judgement of Ajmal Kasab and was directed by Oorvazi Irani. In 2013, Dhondy's play Devdas was premiered in London and was subsequently replayed globally. 2013 also saw the publication of his novel Prophet Of Love (HarperCollins). His collection of Rumi translations was published in 2014 and received a 4.5-star rating on Goodreads.[10]
Dhondy was lauded in the respected political magazine New Internationalist, in its prestigious "final page", which led to the resurgence of his lifelong campaign to recruit more BAME talent at the BBC, with an article subsequently printed in the New Statesman[11] (covered in The Voice newspaper).[12]
His latest book, Hawk and Hyena, follows the story of Charles Sobhraj. Dhondy appeared on the podcast The Literary City[13] with Ramjee Chandran to talk about his escapades with Charles Sobhraj as well as about his autobiography, Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life.[14] Dhondy was at the 2022 Jaipur Literature Festival, London edition to talk about his books.
Honours and awards
Children's Rights Workshop Other award: 1977, for East End at Your Feet, and 1979, for Come to Mecca, and Other Stories;[citation needed]
Collins/Fontana Award for Come to Mecca, and Other Stories;[citation needed]
Works represented in Children's Fiction in Britain, 1900–1990 exhibition, British Council's Literature Department, 1990;[citation needed]
Whitbread Award for first novel, 1990, for Bombay Duck.[citation needed]
Books
East End at Your Feet (short stories), London: Macmillan Publishers, 1976.
Come to Mecca, and Other Stories, London: Collins, 1978.
The Siege of Babylon (novel), London: Macmillan, 1978.
Poona Company (short stories), London: Gollancz, 1980.
Trip Trap (short stories), Faber and Faber (London, England), 1985.
Vigilantes, Hobo Press, 1988
Bombay Duck (adult novel), London: Jonathan Cape (London, England), 1990.
Black Swan, Gollancz (London, England), 1992, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1993.
Janacky and the Giant, and Other Stories, London: HarperCollins, 1993.
C. L. R. James: Cricket, The Caribbean and World Revolution, 205pp, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001.
The Bikini Murders, based on the life of Charles Shobhraj (also known as "the Bikini Killer"), 2008. Currently in production as a feature film.
Rumi: A New Translation (trans. & ed.), Harper Perennial, 2011
Prophet Of Love, HarperCollins, 2013
Fragments Against My Ruin: A Life (autobiography), 2021
Plays
Mama Dragon, produced in London, England, 1980.
Trojans (adaptation of a play by Euripides), produced in London, England, 1982.
Kipling Sahib, produced in London, England, 1982.
Vigilantes (produced in 1985), Hobo Press, 1988.
King of the Ghetto (television series), British Broadcasting Company (BBC1), 1986.
Split Wide Open (screenplay; based on the story by Dev Benegal), Adlabs/BMG Crescendo, 1999.
Devdas, premiered in London, 2013.
Farrukh Dhondy
Drama Fiction Non-Fiction
Born:Pune, India
Publishers:HarperCollins India
Agents:Blake Friedmann Literary, TV & Film Agency Ltd
Biography
Farrukh Dhondy was born in Poona, India in 1944 in a Parsi family. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from the Poona University in 1964 and was awarded a scholarship to read English at Cambridge University, after which he moved to Leicester University for his Master's degree.
From 1968 to 1978 Dhondy worked as a further education lecturer and schoolteacher in the Midlands and London, before entering television. From 1984 to 1997, Dhondy worked as Commissioning Editor, Multicultural Programming, for Channel 4 TV, UK. In this capacity, he was responsible for hundreds of hours of TV in all genres: entertainment, situation, comedy, TV drama, film, education and factual, and helped greenlight iconic shows like Desmond’s and The Bandung File.
From 1997 to 2002, Dhondy worked as a freelance journalist and writer, contributing articles to Indian newspapers and magazines like The Pioneer, Asian Age and India Today. In 2002, he joined a film company based in India, Kaleidoscope International. His literary output is immense. His most recent works are the novel The Prophet of Love (2013), the play Devdas, which premiered in London in 2013, and a collection of translation of Rumi published in 2014.
Dhondy has five children and lives in a village in Oxfordshire with his Irish-English wife.
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Critical perspective Bibliography Awards
Critical perspective
Farrukh Dhondy is an Indian-born who has been active in Britain as a fiction writer, playwright, media executive and activist since the mid 1970s, especially known for his provocative young adult fiction, and his role in shaping British television viewing habits.
A prominent figure in what has been called Britain’s “alternative establishment” (Michael Rosen, The Guardian) of the 70s and 80s, Dhondy’s has been an ever-present and provocative chronicler of British multicultural experiment for almost forty years.
Though his disparate body of work can seem hard to position, two key traditions help to situate his writings. The first broad context is the cultural renaissance of Indian writing in English of the 1960s and 70s. In interviews, Dhondy has stressed how he was shaped by the cultural ferment of the India of his youth, in which key questions about literary independence were up for grabs:
'I was pressured into going to engineering college for a year in Bombay from which I literally ran away and spent a year hoboing around doing nothing. That was the time I first met Indian writers. They were asking themselves, ‘Why should Indians write in English?’ and ‘What is the writer's role in Indian society?’'
Dhondy’s novels and stories have always engaged with these questions, and demand to be read as part of an expatriated national tradition. Inevitably, like other writers of his generation, such as Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Firdaus Kanga and Shashi Tharoor, he has written in the long shadow cast by the success of Salman Rushdie.
Perhaps more instructive, however, is to see Dhondy as a figure of dissent in the lineage of radical British-based writers of South Asian heritage. Upon his move from Leicester to London and emergence on the literary scene of England during the late 1970s, he soon became well-connected within this world, and has spoken about the crucial influence of the culture of British 1970s radicalism on his writing:
'we spent our time analysing the immigrant political position, running study groups in the works of George Jackson and slipping in Marx. The chutzpah of this type of defiant organisation attracted hundreds of footloose youths from South, West and North London and, later on, in Birmingham, Bradford and other cities in the Midlands and the North. We demonstrated on the streets, pamphleteered, lectured and hectored in public places and sought every opportunity to channel the dissatisfaction of Afro-Caribbean, Indian or Pakistani immigrants into organised demands and rebellion.'
This world left an indelible mark on Dhondy’s writings. He was profoundly influenced by the writings of Tariq Ali and in turn served as an important influence for Hanif Kureishi and other younger figures who were focusing in more consciously provocative ways on subjects like immigration, race, nationalism and sexuality.
Though he might resist being, in his own words “typecast as one of the multi-cultural writers in Britain,” his has remained one of postcolonial Britain’s most powerful and recognizable voices. Always concerned with the complexities of race and identity politics, Dhondy has sought to portray Britain as a melting pot in which characters see the same events from different social and racial perspectives. A marked theme is Dhondy’s notably positive reading of the nature and future of race relations. Racism, he argues, is “not historically important,” but rather a “cultural outbreak” in the overall structure of society. And what might be termed a post-racist outlook shines through in the warmth of his best works.
His first major works were collections of short stories for young adults on topical issues of the day. East End at Your Feet (1976) was the first, and announced the arrival of a major new writer for teenagers. Radical in both subject matter and language, it was seen as a new and unprecedentedly authentic vision of contemporary multicultural London, and the lies of inner city youths of the type that Dhondy was teaching in the comprehensive school system. His second collection Come to Mecca (1978) contained more stories of young first- and second-generation Britons of Bengali and other descent exploring their conflicted sense of racial identity, set again in the schools and factories of the East End.
Often angry in tone, this was self-consciously provocative fiction. And the content of the books were on occasion the cause for controversy, both for their ‘street’ language and their challenging content. This was especially true of stories such as ‘Free Dinners’, a white boy's account of the downward spiral of Lorraine, a “coloured” classmate, as she drifts from contented schoolgirl into a life of prostitution. Dhondy was calm amidst this criticism, arguing to the children’s book magazine Books for Keeps that his provocations were all a deliberately part of his “confidence that Britain's working class - the most sophisticated in the world - will eventually create a modern, enlightened socialist state.”
His next book Poona Company (1980) turned back to the India of his childhood for a series of loosely-connected short stories about youth in south-east Bombay. “I wanted to write about India” Dhondy has said, “and show a kind of India that's invisible today because it hasn't been portrayed in literature so much, in English” adding that he was interested “to see if the Multiculturalism of progressive teachers extends to stories about India too.”
During the 1980s, Dhondy’s energies were largely directed towards writing and producing for British and Indian television, most notably as Commissioning Editor for ‘Multicultural Programming’, for the UK’s Channel 4. This period was particularly notable for his creation of a number of situation comedies such as Tandoori Nights (1985-7), which had a famous run on Indian television, and later the sitcom No Problem (1993-95). In this capacity, he was also responsible for hundreds of hours of TV in all genres: entertainment, situation, comedy, TV drama, film, education and factual, and helped commission iconic shows like Desmond’s and The Bandung File.
Returning to the world of fiction, Dhondy published his first novel, Bombay Duck in 1990. The novel was made up of two loosely interconnected parts of almost equal length: the story of two immigrants to Britain and their cross-cultural transactions and translations. The first presented the staging of the Indian epic Ramayana, a roman a clef featuring a thinly veiled depiction of Peter Brooks ‘s production of Mahabharata. A Parsi teacher, assessing the successes and failures of multiculturalism, narrated the second part. By turns comic and polemical, Dhondy sued his twin vision to skewer various British subcultures; Indian class prejudice, the British theatre scene and educational system.
The novel met with mixed critical reception. The Sunday Herald thought that “Dhondy rarely puts a foot wrong”, but others were not so sure. “It is a brave first novelist who sails full tilt at the deep cultural waters between the Indian subcontinent and the West,” wrote Candice Rodd in the Independent, “unabashed, Dhondy offers not one but two dense and energetic narratives which address, among much else, the painfully current issue of religious fundamentalism … This book takes a lot of risks and they do not all entirely pay off.” For the Sunday Times, Firdaus Kanga observed that, in being “named after a small, stinking fish, Farrukh Dhondy's first novel makes an olfactory literary promise that it fails to keep. No whiff of India rises from this book, which is shot in black and white, dreary as a documentary … Bombay Duck is sliced into two parts that hardly ever come together.”
In 2001, following two further volumes of tales for children, Dhondy published a long-awaited biography of the historian and political activist CLR James, whom Dhondy knew personally and whose private papers he had access to. To many this idiosyncratic biography did not live up to expectations, offering as much anecdote as genuine historical account. The Morning Star praised it as “a fascinating work of intergenerational empathy between powerful writers in English of two continents.” But Stephen Howe’s response in in the Times was more typical, as he noted that “James's fans had thus awaited the long-promised study by Farrukh Dhondy with eagerness. Dhondy, a broadcaster and novelist with an engaging style and a range of interests almost as broad as James's own, seemed well placed to produce something special,” and yet, “the result does not just disappoint those expectations, but is pretty much a disgrace … a wasteland of impressionistic, often seemingly careless writing, riddled with flippant judgments.”
The following year, Dhondy published another novel, Run (2002). The books offered an updated version of his wry take on postcolonial British realities, narrated in the first person by a fourteen-year old protagonist Rashid Rashid. Familiar Dhondy themes were resumed: the nuances of racial identity, the difficulty of belonging, confrontation with the authorities, drug peddling and prostitution. The action was frenetic, moving from London to Slough to Devon to Scotland and back to London,
His contemporary Michael Rosen applauded in his Guardian review the fact that “Farrukh Dhondy is back in town. It seemed as though he had deserted the world of children's books to be a TV commissioning editor and adult novelist, but here he is writing a modern teenager's 18th-century rogue's tale.”
Dhondy’s memoir of his early days in England, The Rebel in Leicester (2012), is an autobiographical piece which revisited the material of Poona Company. As the Indian Express recognized, it was “a sort of sequel but written over two decades later,” tracing the distance between “Dhondy, now a respected, liberal columnist and writer, with the fiery, militant rebel and activist”
Certainly, Dhondy’s current positions put him at odds with his previous self. Yet he remains a respected and provocative commentator on contemporary multicultural and radical affairs. However, as much as he has always cherished and held close to his role as an activist, it is his previous role as teacher that comes through most in his work. Dhondy remains closely tied to this vocation, he has said, both for the “the discipline, and for keeping in touch with people. Otherwise you become one of those writers who writes about writers.” And it is through retaining this pedagogic and educational zeal that his subtle verdicts on the multicultural experience have derived much of their topical force.
Dr Tom Wright
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Bibliography
2013Prophet Of Love
2011Rumi: A New Translation
2008The Bikini Murders
2001C. L. R. James: Cricket, The Caribbean and World Revolution
1993Janacky and the Giant, and Other Stories
1992Black Swan
1990Bombay Duck
1988Vigilantes
1985Trip Trap
1982Trojans
1982Kipling Sahib
1980Poona Company
1980Mama Dragon
1978Come to Mecca, and Other Stories
1978The Siege of Babylon
1976East End at Your Feet
Awards
1990Whitbread Award for first novel
1979Children's Rights Workshop Other Award
1977Children's Rights Workshop Other Award
1978Collins/Fontana Short Story Award
The extraordinary life of Farrukh Dhondy
From first-generation immigrant at Cambridge, to Black Panther, to Channel 4 exec, the Pembroke alumnus shares his story
Farrukh Dhondy (right) after his talk with Pembroke Politics
Felix Esche
by Chris Patel
Friday April 21 2023, 12:00am
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“E.M. Forster said: “I write to win the respect of people I respect.” George Orwell said: “I write because I want to know what I think.[...] I started wanting to write because I couldn’t play football, cricket, hockey or boxing.” But don’t feel too bad for Pembroke alumnus Farrukh Dhondy, because he’s done just about everything else. From first-generation immigrant at Cambridge, to socialist activist, to Channel 4 executive, Dhondy has been on both sides of the establishment. He has always used his position to challenge race and class divisions.
These days, Dhondy has countless novels, plays and television scripts to his name, but he had to shelve his writing dreams in order to emigrate from India to England. “The only reason one could get out of India on a scholarship was to do something that would lead to either science, engineering, or a profession.” Dhondy completed a Natural Sciences degree at Pembroke in 2 years, then switched to English, doing 3 supervisions a week in his summer holidays to catch up. Pembroke was the place to study English in the Sixties — every aspiring author wanted Ted Hughes’ former room, and the late critic and broadcaster Clive James would “sit around in hall and pontificate about every damn thing.”
According to Dhondy, sixty years ago there were no second-generation immigrants in Cambridge. None of the non-white students were British-born, so, with their homes halfway around the world, Dhondy and other international students stuck together. They were “kicked out of college for the holidays [...] so we were put into wherever we could find digs. So I was living in an attic in Fitzwilliam Street.”
“The battles that we fought have resulted in both blacks and Asians getting access to the meritocracy”
Dhondy’s “socialist leanings” determined his next move — the Atomic Energy Commission of India offered him a job, but as “Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister at the time, was making an atomic bomb” he chose to teach instead, while working as a freelance journalist. Dhondy soon recognised that in schools, “the way the black kids were treated was not right.”
“Each year was divided into ten divisions, so the third year was 3-1, 3-2, 3-3, 3-4, 3-5 … and then 3X and 3Y, for all the kids who they said had misbehaved in the other classes [...] And it was all whites in the top and all blacks in the bottom.” Despite saying that he didn’t really experience racism at Cambridge, throughout our interview, Dhondy drops clues that show how deeply racism was embedded in English society. He studied for a Master’s degree in Leicester, during which time his local pub was “The Pack Horse” and all too matter-of-factly, Dhondy says, “of course they called it The P*ki Horse”.
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Dhondy’s socialist leanings and awareness of racial injustice led him join to the British Black Panthers. He quickly mentions that, unlike America’s Black Panther Party, the BBP was nonviolent, and only “gave itself that name to attract young blacks and Asians.” Dhondy also belonged to the Bengali Housing Action Group, helping South Asian immigrants avoid eviction. Despite not using violence, Dhondy became the target of violence when his flat was firebombed.
The bomber, who was never caught, attacked four other black and South Asian houses that night, and Dhondy’s flat, he explains, was bombed because it was above a Black Panther bookshop. “I woke up choking, and I thought someone was putting a pillow on my face. There was nothing there, just smoke.” Mercifully, Dhondy escaped with only cuts on his legs from the glass of his exploded window.
Dhondy identifies clear parallels between the black British experience and the British Asian experience: “the kind of discrimination one used to face in the access to professional jobs, for instance. The resistance and the battles that we fought have resulted in both blacks and Asians getting access to the meritocracy.” He jokes, “the simplest examples are Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, for God’s sake, Kwasi Kwarteng — I’m not proud of that.”
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Later, Dhondy worked for Channel 4, and soon became their Commissioning Editor. “Channel 4 was given a remit by Parliament to do things that nobody else had done before,” namely, multicultural programming. Dhondy wrote for Black on Black, a news programme aiming to counteract the largely negative news coverage of black people. He also wrote sitcoms such as No Problem!, featuring a Jamaican family, and Tandoori Nights, set in an Indian restaurant.
Even in this enlightened climate, Dhondy faced obstacles. Dhondy believed that, for black and Asian communities to “join the national conversation”, they had to be represented by journalists who belonged to their communities. He set up a documentary programme called The Bandung File, and included esteemed journalists on his team, but until he introduced white executive producers, Channel 4 wouldn’t give the green light.
Socialism and antiracism course through Dhondy’s veins, but he also argues that, for television audiences, there’s a time and a place. “A television audience doesn’t want to listen to lectures — why should they?”. To Dhondy, the best television strikes the balance between message and entertainment. “If you’re writing a sitcom, write in the situation, with some bloody com in it!”
Farrukh Dhondy
Farrukh Dhondy is an award-winning author, screenwriter, playwright and activist. Born in Poona (now Pune) India in 1944 in a Parsi family, he came to the UK on a scholarship to read Natural Sciences and then English at Cambridge University. After university he kicked off a career in journalism interviewing Pink Floyd and Allen Ginsberg and covering the first meeting between the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. While a student and schoolteacher in Leicester and London he got involved with political activism, at first in the Indian Workers' Association, Leicester, and then in the UK Black Panther Movement and subsequently in the Race Today Collective where he worked alongside Darcus Howe and CLR James. He published his first books in the late 1970s and several TV drama and situation comedy series in the early 1980s and in 1984 worked as a Commissioning Editor, Multicultural programming for Channel 4 TV, UK in which capacity he was the driving force behind Desmonds, Salaam Bombay and the trailblazing Bandung File among fourteen years of diverse programming.
QUOTED: "Young activists set an example for their community in this accessible adventure that conveys both humor and pathos."
Dhondy, Farrukh THE FREEZIES Tradewind Books (Teen None) $12.95 6, 1 ISBN: 9781990598272
The Freezies, three determined social outcasts, try to help a quiet man in need.
Kai, Leo, and Suleikha (who goes by "Sully") live in an English village. Some locals, who wish to keep away "squatters and travellers," quickly become outraged when an unfamiliar van towing a trailer shows up on the common. The driver, Mr. Christaki, plays the violin beautifully. When a small mob of residents recruits the police to evict him, Leo's parents, a lawyer and a barrister, instead invite Mr. Christaki to relocate to their property and hire him to teach Leo violin. Following the winter holidays, Mr. Christaki returns from a trip to London with a 4-year-old girl, and he's suspiciously vague about her parents' whereabouts and how long she'll be staying. Then one day, the van, trailer, and both inhabitants are gone. In alternating points of view, the young narrators recount these events--including a revelation about Mr. Christaki's identity--with delightful frankness. Leo, who reads white; Kai, who has Jamaican and Polish heritage; and Sully, who is of Indian descent, are by turns unintentionally amusing ("We don't play. We hang out or chill") and trenchant in their observations ("Parents don't know how hard it is to make friends and keep them"). The trio, who share strong convictions about standing up for others, also learn about trade unions, asylum law, and xenophobia over the course of the story.
Young activists set an example for their community in this accessible adventure that conveys both humor and pathos. (Fiction. 12-16)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Dhondy, Farrukh: THE FREEZIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673916/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e125e6f3. Accessed 1 Nov. 2024.
When you came to England to study, was it a culture shock to swap India for Cambridge?
I wasn't shocked by England or its culture. Reading everything I could lay my hands on, from Shakespeare to PG Wodehouse to Woman's Own, had prepared me for most of it. But never having washed my own clothes in India, I used a washing machine for the first time at my college and poured a whole carton of washing powder into it. The bubbles filled the college basement and overflowed onto the croquet lawn. I didn't own up.
How did you end up as one of Britain's first English-language Indian writers?
I did a natural science degree in two years and the Indian Atomic Commission wrote to me congratulating me and offering me a job. I was aware that [then Prime Minister of India] Indira Gandhi was building a nuclear bomb and, being of a determined socialist bent, I resolved not to take the job. I did a third year in English at Cambridge and then went to London. Very few people want to employ quantum physicists, however, so I washed dishes and walked dogs instead. I started writing for the newspaper of a radical immigrant agitational group called the Black Panther Movement (BPM). I had a job as a schoolteacher and I wrote, anonymously, stories about incidents in my school. A young man came one day and asked for me by name. I asked if he was the police and he said he was an editor at Macmillan and would I write a book of short stories for him?
What issues were most important to you at that time?
The BPM was open to West Indians, Africans, South Asians and other ex-colonials. We demonstrated, wrote, spoke and stimulated strike action, resistance and boycotts on any and every issue from inequalities in wages, housing, police harassment, schooling, employment--you name it, we sloganized it! There were others in the BPM who wanted to take up terror tactics in imitation of the IRA. There were also those who began to treat it as a cult with an anti-white morality. The crunch came when they held a kangaroo court to condemn some poor member on charges of sexual profligacy. Several of us saw it as degeneration and wanted no part of it. We decided to break up a Movement that seemed to us to have moved from political purposes to witch-burning.
What issues occupy you today?
I don't know if any single political issue occupies me today but if I was forced to choose I would say the tendencies of medieval fundamentalism of all sorts ought to be imaginatively fought and obliterated.
As either writer or commissioning editor (for Britain's Channel 4) you have been responsible for some of Britain's most groundbreaking 'multicultural' literature, Tv and films, from the book Bombay Duck, to the BBC series King Of The Ghetto. What is your proudest accomplishment so far?
Encouraging a generation to stop whining about racism, join the Western Intellectual Tradition (WIT) and bring their unique cultural traditions and vision to it.
What is your greatest fear?
Losing those dearest to me.
Who inspires you?
Those who endeavoured to interpret the world, from Newton and Shakespeare to modern scientists.
What do you make of the new crop of English-language Indian literature? Which current writer do you most admire, and why?
I wouldn't call published books 'literature'. It's only when there is critical tradition which can differentiate between the needs of a culture and its excrescence that literature is born. That being said, I find poets such as Adil Jussawalla, Jeet Thayil and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra compelling.
What are your future plans?
To self-consciously assess and understand my capacities and plan according to this prompting.
Subi Shah is a journalist and TV producer, based in London.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
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Shah, Subi. "Farrukh Dhondy: the Indian-born British writer, playwright, screenwriter and activist tells Subi Shah about his time in the Black Panther Movement, the difference between books and literature, and reading Woman's Own." New Internationalist, no. 483, June 2015, p. 46. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A415562428/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dd8a66e3. Accessed 1 Nov. 2024.