Book Review: 'London Company'

Book: London Company
Author: Farrukh Dhondy
Publisher: Hachette India
Price: Rs495
Pages: 240

In the 1960s, Britain was in flux. Immigrants were flowing into the country; the civil rights movement was gathering weight (as were the women’s and gay rights movements); the ideas of a sexual revolution were being explored; and the politics of race was inspiring street rebellions.

When writer Farrukh Dhondy moved to Britain to study and, later, work, he found himself in this thick swirl of discrimination and bigotry and, consequently, in the movement that emerged to fight it. London Company is a fictionalised memoir of his experiences and encounters in this turbulent time. It’s not quite a history but a “apart of the process of Britain finding itself.”

The story of London Company begins with Farrukh and his girlfriend Natasha moving to Leicester to make their own lives, away from family and the norms of the Indian community, only to find that British society is not quite ready for them. Turned away on sight by landlords, directed to Asian ghettos to look for accommodation, refused service in neighbourhood pubs, the couple get co-opted into an Indian workers’ agitation. They strike against a factory and desegregate a pub successfully, and get a heady taste of politics and activism.

When the couple move to London, they join the British Black Panther Movement (BPM), inspired by the more famous and militant American Black Panther Party. This is also when Farrukh finds work as a teacher, making him one of the more respectable members of the movement. He explores his voice as a writer, but the same movement dismisses his writing as “fairy tales”.

Various characters wander in and out of Farrukh’s life, the most compelling of these being the boys he teaches, West Indian writer CLR James (whom he befriends), and the poets he encounters. Dhondy relies on strong dialogue, authentic idiom, and, probably, some amount of embellishment in capturing the nuances and eccentricities of these interactions.   

In one BBC interview, James and a young Rastafarian poet, Locks, are discussing Jamaican patois, when the former is provoked by the youngster referring to “Shek-zapeeree” into retorting: “I have lived three or four times as long as you among Caribbean people and I have never heard the name Shakespeare pronounced in the way you said it. You should have some respect. I know that all of you have changed your names but please don’t change Shakespeare’s.” 

On the antics of the BPM, Dhondy writes with a degree of irony because as Farrukh and Natasha become embroiled in the group, the complexities and contradictions in the ideology and dynamics emerge and Farrukh becomes disenchanted. Sent to the Caribbean to chronicle the revolts on the islands because of the belief that these “people’s histories” would boost the BPM rhetoric, Farrukh arrives in Trinidad only to be milked for money and to find “the memory of an attempted armed revolt didn’t seem to exist”. When he returns to London, he finds Natasha involved with a fellow member of the BPM, the same one who proposed his Caribbean writing project in the first place.

He finally walks out of the movement — in the opening chapter of the book — when the Party publicly condemns a member for “shagging some white bitch under the Collective roof”. Farrukh later introspects: “Of course I was conscious that... there would be nuances of power struggle, a conflict of opinions, manoeuvres and masquerades. There would be a tolerable boy-scoutism, loyalty and disloyalty to the pack and accusations of indiscipline, but... (this) was like watching vicious kids a dog that’s cowering or tear the leg off a sparrow they’ve captured.”

London Company provides wonderful insight into the Britain of the times, the difficulties of being an immigrant, the excitement and, sometimes, the dangers of being involved in a political movement.