About

Language, gossip, and neighbourly speech are all vital components central to socio-cultural histories for British South Asian communities. Yet, they have been neglected by historians when piecing together British South Asian identities, neighbourhoods, and network formations from the 1960s onwards. This has obscured and over-simplified the role of cross-community neighbourliness in British South Asian community identity formation. Therefore, it is the aim of this PhD project to complicate current historical perspectives of British South Asian communities through a mixed methodology approach. It first aims to collect 40 (approximately) semi-structured life interviews of British South Asians in communities across London. Following this, it will take an interdisciplinary approach to assess these interviews where language and vocabulary, which cross generations and cultures, are placed at the centre of analysis. It will consider the layers of language presented within these oral histories as major vehicles in constructing and shaping narratives. For example, gossip as a form of cultural speech that works to reinforce conceptions of neighbourliness will be privileged.

Furthermore, this project centres around the insertion of multilingualism into cultural histories. This approach can offer a more detailed picture of South Asian community formation in Britain. This project also aims to utilise existing oral histories held by archives and local studies libraries, and often conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, to comparatively analyse how language, ‘neighbourliness’ and construction of narratives have changed over time. The purpose of this project is significant; it will reinforce British South Asians as agents in negotiating their own identities, and it will contribute to current understandings of race, class, and gender in modern Britain, in terms of both discourse and lived experience. If race in Britain is to be more fully understood and studied, it is an urgent scholarly priority that these histories be recovered and illuminated.