Paper short abstract:

I examine the development of Britain’s chief South Asian communities concomitant with the transition from Imperial subject-hood to legal citizenship. Chance, and the unfinished transition to national citizenship, rather than cultural peculiarities, explains these communities’ enduring strangeness.

Paper long abstract:

It is only recently, since the 1950s, that there have been South Asian communities of any size or significance in Britain. Along with many another new Commonwealth arrival, the settlement of South Asians followed patterns that had been set by the dissolution of the British Empire. This wider historical underpinning to these migrations, and later to refugee flows from East Africa, also found expression in changes to migration and citizenship legislation.

In this paper, I trace the arrival and settlement of South Asians, distinguished in two periods: the first period, 1948 until 1981, when for the first time British citizenship was defined and entered legal statue; and then the second period, from 1981 until the present-day, a period which saw the status of British South Asian Muslims move to the political foreground and the debate over migration and citizenship reinvigorated. I argue that the fortunes of the chief South Asian communities since settling in Britain have been determined by chance, by historical contingency, has too have the perceptions of the wider British society toward them. Rather than identifying cultural incompatibilities that purportedly render South Asians as permanent strangers, I argue that the key problematic, that which imperils their acceptance or otherwise, is the unfinished legacy of Empire, the unfinished transition from subject-hood to citizenship, unfinished business affecting all Britishers and not just British South Asians. I end by noting that the opposite to 'stranger' is not a 'citizen', but a 'friend'.