ABSTRACT
Britain’s South Asian ethnic minorities are largely the product of an influx of immigrants, which began in the 1950s as a movement of intending sojourners who instead became settlers, creating a new life for themselves in a different social context (Anwar, 1979). Since their arrival, they have raised new generations whose personal lives and self-images have been conditioned by circumstances very different from those familiar to their parents. The first immigrant generation transplanted into Britain’s ways of being, seeing and living that were determined partly by the experience of imperialist domination and partly by resistance to it. Those who settled in Britain, and more especially their British-born descendants, have participated in the evolution of a new self-image and identity – the British South Asian way of being. This self-concept is influenced by the British social and political environment and includes responses to the rejection and oppression experienced by non-White minorities (Grewal, 1988).
