ABSTRACT
On the day when I began to draft this chapter,1 a West London weekly newspaper local to my place of second fieldwork carried on its front page a large, imposing photograph. It showed a file of elderly men recognizable as Punjabi Sikhs by their bearded features and turbans and as veteran combatants from the arrays of medals pinned to their chests. Under the bold heading ‘World War Heroes’, readers were informed that ‘Ex-Indian Army servicemen from Southall and Hounslow climbed a remote hill in Sussex for the annual service of remembrance at Britain’s isolated and impressive Chattri Memorial’. The paper is delivered free to some 45,000 households in West London, at least a third of which are headed by persons of English extraction and another third by persons of Punjabi extraction. To native English readers, the photograph shows conspicuously ‘foreign’ men in the pursuit of a ritual that, instead of stressing their foreignness, establishes their claim to being ‘of us’: Thousands of Indian soldiers’, the caption explains, ‘fought and died in the trenches of World War One’ (Greenford, Northolt and Southall Recorder, 29 June 1990:1). London Punjabi readers, conversely, can see in the newspaper coverage of the ritual how a group of ‘us’, often forgotten or ignored, contributed to ‘their’ war victory, thus placing it in a shared history ‘of ours’. News and photographs of such South Asian veterans’ reunions appear several times a year in West London newspapers and in the national press aimed at South Asians in Britain.
