The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)

About the Author:-

Hanif Kureishi      

Kureishi was born in South London to a Pakistani father and an English mother. His father was from a wealthy Madras family, most of whose members moved to Pakistan after the Partition of British India in 1947. After his parents married, the family settled in Bromley where Kureishi was born.

Contextual information:-

Immigration in the 1960s. Britain saw the first significant wave of immigrants in the late 1940s and carried on through to the 1960s (Caribbean, African and Asian). In the text Haroon and Anwar; faced a “colour bar” in housing/employment.

Most immigrants received hostile treatment and racism by British white working class organisations – (In the novel page 149; “Eat, Shit Pakis,” & p. 53). 

However advocacy of ‘Black Britain’ emerged in the 1960s as a response to discriminatory social conditions. Immigrants in Britain came together and drew on the US Black Power movement (e.g. Angela Davis and Malcolm X for inspiration – see page 95 of text).

In the 1980s Thatcherism, followed by high unemployment as well as nostalgia for Imperialism (restlessness and violent racism increased by Thatcher’s famous ‘swamp’ speech: - “People are rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.” - 1978)

Around the same time Enoch Powell’s and “Rivers of Blood” speech also criticized Commonwealth immigration: “Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood.” (1968)

Kureishi’s novel is profoundly anti-Thatcherite and argues against the idea of “domestic colonization.”

Narrative devices:-

Bildungsroman

The novel is a coming of age novel tells the story of a first generation of British-born immigrant coming of age and asserting their rights & culture. It is a multicultural novel that signifies generational differences (e.g. between Haroon vs Karim)

Themes:-

Race/ Racism/Resistance to Racism

Kureishi ionizes assumptions of immigrants and “Pakis”:- (Haroon, Princess Jeeta offer different historical contexts for racism). He also crosses racial lines: Allie, Charlie, Karim and Jamila negate and offer alternative to Edward Said’s colonial discourse (Eva exoticises this and Haroon exploits this).  

Racial intermixing/ changing landscape of Britain

Duncan Sandys (Conservative MP) said in the 1980s that: “The breeding of millions of half-caste children would merely produce a generation of misfits and create national tensions.” (1967)

Kureishi who himself was of mixed heritage, wrote in reply:  “I wasn’t a misfit, I could join the elements of myself together. It was the others, they wanted misfits; they wanted you to embody within yourself their ambivalence.” (Dreaming and Scheming, 27-8) In the novel Kuerishi reflects this defiance- (Karim says: “having emerged from two old histories.” Page 3)

Racial prejudice & Stereotypes

Karim asked to play Mowgli in his school play of the Jungle Boy: “You were just pandering to prejudices” (p.152)

Class

There is a shifting meaning of class in Britain in 1960s and 1970s with increasing class divisions and social mobility in post-war Britain.

“For immigrants and their families, disorder and strangeness is the condition of their existence. They want a new life and the material advancement that goes with it. But having been ripped from one world and flung into another, what they also require, to keep everything together, is tradition, habitual ideas, stasis. Life in the country you have left may move on, but life in the diaspora is often held in strange suspension, as if the act of moving has provided too much disturbance as it is.”  -- Hanif Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming  (3)

Gender and Sexuality/ crossing boundaries

The novel shows sexual experimentation and freedom from strictures of gender roles and sexuality. (Depicted in Karim’s bisexuality and mixed-race origins).

All in all resistance to racism is depicted through crossing race/class/gender/sexual boundaries but at the same time it is limited, so there is desire for greater historicisation of Britain and immigrant histories to combat racism.

Alternative identity

The novel shows a new way of being English: “That is, it [Kureishi’s work] reconceives urban Englishness as a racially mixed, erotically charged, and economically determined state of being; as a condition of painful ambivalence […] ; as a mode of life encompassing both violence and toleration, both cynicism and heartfelt commitment to “the new enterprise culture.” From Jefferson Hunter, English Filming English Writing (Indiana UP, 2010): 4-5

Further reading

Hanif Kureishi, Introduction to London Kills Me: x

Hanif Kureishi, Dreaming and Scheming

W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation’ (1987)

From Jefferson Hunter, English Filming English Writing (Indiana UP, 2010): 4-5

Ball, John Clement. "The Semi-Detached Metropolis: Hanif Kureishi's London." ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. Vol 27, No 4 (October 1996): 7-27

Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands

Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Hanif Kureishi.  (Manchester UP, 2002)

Edward Said’s Orientalism.