I was born and brought up in Poona (now renamed Pune), in Western India and spent most of my boyhood and adolescence there, going to school and then college before coming on a scholarship to Britain. I had been afforded a place to study Natural Sciences at Pembroke College Cambridge and flew from Bombay (now Mumbai) in September 1964 to begin my undergraduate studies.

It was the first time I had been out of India, though being the son of an Indian army officer who was transferred every few years from one Indian military station to another, I had travelled widely across India. When India was partitioned in 1947 and I was three years old, I had been brought by my sister and mother in a packed and protected military train from Quetta in Pakistan across the fatal dividing border.

I was twenty when I came to Britain, spent a week in a boarding house in South Kensington, and then ‘went up’ to Cambridge.

There were two other ‘foreign’ students in my year, Matty Kambona from Tanzania and a lad called Peters from Antigua in the Caribbean. There were no British-born students of ethnic origin in my year or in the University, though there were Indians and Pakistanis in other colleges. I soon made friends with several of them and noted a sort-of division that existed. Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister’s son was at Trinity, a year ahead of myself. He associated with what we regarded as an elite gang of rich Indians with whom we were acquainted, but who formed a separate group. They ate dinner in Cambridge restaurants rather than in ‘hall’ as we scholarship boys were compelled to do, and they were spirited away in limos to London or wherever at the weekends.

Taher Ayub, the son of the Pakistani dictator Ayub Khan, was at Kings. He surrounded himself with other Pakistani undergraduates and had luxurious rooms in the college opposite those occupied at the time by E.M. Foster, no less. Taher would invite Indian students to drinks in these rooms, to demonstrate that as a Pakistani there was no animus towards us. Exceptionally for an undergraduate, he had a bar in his rooms with every sort of available spirit and we weren’t reluctant to  accept his invitations and be plied with these.  He’d sit back, wearing a Pathan salwar khamiz in an easy chair from which he’d welcome us and shout to one of his acolytes in Urdu saying, “Can’t you see the guests have arrived, fetch and arrange the whisky.”

Neither Taher nor Rajiv passed their exams and, as per the University’s rule, had to leave after the single failure.

My college, Pembroke, required first year undergraduates to live in rooms in the courts of the college. In our second year we moved into the hostel-like houses which the college owned in the town. Each of these was supervised by the families of the college porters who ensured that we undergraduate tenants adhered to the rules. I didn’t.

During my second year at Cambridge my teenage girlfriend from Poona, Mala Sen, had, without seeking permission from her parents, come to Britain to be with me. It was virtually an elopement. She lived and worked in London, and I would either hitch-hike to her over the weekend or she would, on a rare occasion, come to Cambridge and spend the weekend with me. Having a girl in your room overnight was strictly against the rules and on one of these occasions the subterfuges we employed to dodge them failed. I was expelled from the house and spent a few days in the guest rooms of my college which were usually occupied by visiting professors and guests of Pembroke. Of course, the fact that I had been expelled for breaking the cardinal rule brought me the respect of the undergraduate population who considered my misdemeanour an enviable boldness.

I had to find accommodation very fast and was directed by the university’s housing agency to a tiny two-up-two-down house to rent in Trafalgar Street close to the centre of town. My friend Mathai Joseph who was at Churchill college was keen to leave his rooms in Churchill and moved in as the co-occupier.

Freedom from the rules of college and digs. No curfew, no supervision of who stayed. And of course, we had a kitchen, a bedroom each upstairs, and a spare room downstairs which friends would avail themselves of if they had girlfriends or guests. We had memorable times in our tiny and totally adequate house and many years later I wrote:

Unlike Rajiv Gandhi and Taher Ayub, I had fortunately passed my first and second-year exams. Havind studied Natural sciences, mainly Quantum Physics, the University deemed two years constituted a degree. A third year was still required, but in any discipline I chose. I switched from physics to English and had to do an extra term in the four-month summer holidays to catch up on Chaucer, Milton, practical criticism à la F R Leavis and other disciplines I had missed through the first two years of the English ‘Tripos’.

The University holds in June what are known as the May Balls. Each college hires bands to play, converts its halls into dance floors and bars, and holds a party for which the members of the college have to buy tickets, dress formally, and attend through the night. Around dawn the custom is to hire punts and for gangs of friends to punt down the river Cam to the village of Grantchester or go the other direction towards Ely.

On our last day of university we got a crowd of perhaps eighteen of us from various colleges, with our girlfriends or boyfriends, to meet at dawn and share three punts for the ride. As we poled the boats down the river we passed under several bridges. On one of these was a young man with several cameras hanging round his neck taking snaps of the boats as they passed. All of us, full of the night’s champagne were in high spirits. One of the girls stood up in the punt and letting down the top of her dress, took of her bra and shook her breasts at the camera. “If you want more, you’ll have to pay,” she shouted.

The young man clicked away. Of course, we laughed and shouted out to him asking what he was doing with the snaps. He came down from the bridge and talked to us from the banks. He said he was doing an article on Cambridge madness. Someone asked if it was just a photographic piece and he said no, he was working for an agency, but he hadn’t found a writer yet to supply the editorial to accompany the photographs.

Someone in my punt said, “You’ve just found one!”

We invited him to join us a few hours later in Trafalgar Street where we were all going to have breakfast after the punts. The photographer, Andrew, came. He signed me up to write the article, which I did. When I subsequently moved to London, he gave me occasional writing jobs and I was happy to be paid for them.

In London, I joined Mala in a bed-sitter in a rooming house in South Kensington. In the next street was my boyhood friend Adil Jussawala who also had a tiny bed-sit on the third floor of a Victorian terraced house. Before living in the city, I would often impose myself on Adil and sleep on his floor during the term breaks at Cambridge.

An accomplished poet at that age, in his twenties, Adil had already published distinguished collections of poems and continued to publish others in various literary journals. I was working at part-time jobs in the metropolis, washing dishes in the restaurant of the Roundhouse Theatre, walking dogs, hoovering houses etc. At the same time I was scribbling away writing stories and poems and being paid for articles I wrote every now and then for an agency.

Adil was invited to bring two other Indian poets to read at The London Poetry Society which had its small auditorium in Earls Court. He invited me and Hubert Nazareth, another immigrant from Bombay and a prolific poet, to form the reading trio.

The sponsors who invited us wanted, I felt, for us to present something which reflected our non-Britishness. I was naturally full of memories of India and even perhaps nostalgic and home-sick for its people and climate. I was writing fanciful pieces about back home at the time and decided to present a dramatic poem for several voices at The Poetry Society.

Our reading led to invitations at different venues, and we read our work as it progressed to several, I hope, appreciative audiences. It is reproduced for the first time since then, London circa 1968, at the end of this memoir.

One of the assignments Andrew called me to cover, was the first meeting of the Beatles with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Together we went to the Hilton on Park Lane where the meeting was to take place. The army of reporters and camera crews outside were being held back from the hotel entrance by metal barriers and a police cordon.
None of us were to be allowed in.

It was 1967. I was wearing an Indian kurta over flared trousers and had long black hair and a beard. I was even wearing beads. We stood there disappointed until a limo drove up. George Harrison stepped out of it and was immediately attended by a police escort. He spotted me and asked “Do you want to come in?”

What else could I have answered?

He grabbed my wrist and started taking me past the cops. I grabbed Andrew and we were taken by Harrison through the Hilton entrance to the room where the Maharishi awaited the Beatles and Yoko Ono. We were the only reporters there.

After the encounter, as Andrew and I stepped out we were besieged by reporters and editors. They were clamouring with offers and deadlines, mentioning the number of words, the amount they’d pay and the time they wanted a write-up by. I could choose. The best offer, with a day to write the article at a length that suited me, and for a competitive fee, came from one Karl Miller, the editor of a very respectable weekly called The Listener. I opted for it and wrote the unflattering article about the four, Yoko and the Godman.

A few weeks later Karl Miller called to invite me to a writer’s drinks gathering at The Listener. Of course, I went. One of the other guests at the party asked me what I did, where I’d been, and the not unexpected social questions. When told what I’d read at Cambridge he seemed keenly interested. “If you were given the opportunity, how would you like to expand or pursue your interest in English studies?” he asked.

“If that ever happened, I would like to write a thesis on Kipling and India,” I said.  “Well you can,” he replied. He said he was professor G S Fraser from Leicester University, and he would give me a scholarship to do precisely that for an MA. I took up the offer. Mala said she’d find a job in Leicester, and I would continue to write for a London agency called Forum World Features. Between us we’d manage food, clothes, shelter, and anything else.

I went to look for accommodation in Leicester. Not knowing the city at all, I went to estate agents who sent me on two different trips to several landlords with rooms to let. I was turned down at each-and-every one of these. The landlords or ladies would open their doors and say that the room had just gone. One or two were more direct saying they didn’t want ‘my type’ in their house and one even said she didn’t mind but her neighbours would if she rented the room out to a coloured person.

I went back to the estate agent and made my feelings plain and walked out, not knowing what to do next. As I walked towards the station a young lady from the agency came running after me. She worked there as a secretary and had heard what had happened. She was very sorry and very aware of the racism I had shouted about. I told her not to risk her job, and then she said my best bet, in fact a certain one, was to go to the Asian area of Leicester and look on the newsagents’ noticeboards where local lettings were advertised. I asked where this ghetto was, and she pointed me to Narborough Road.

She was right. I found a few numbers, was shown rooms and chose a ground floor let in a terraced house. The entrance was under the staircase with one room and a covered kitchen in the back yard and a toilet and shower actually in the yard. I called Mala.

We moved in a week later and I started my studies. She found a job with the gas board and after the rent and food we found we could afford half a pint of beer each on a Friday evening. We availed ourselves of such at the local pub, which was full of mainly Punjabi factory workers celebrating their weekly pay day with several pints of beer into the hours past midnight.

On one of these Friday evening jaunts we noticed five of the Punjabi workers seemed in depression and in heated conversation. We asked what the matter was and were told that they had been suspended from their factory for standing up to a white supervisor. The supervisor had insulted a female Punjabi worker who asked to leave the shift to go to the toilet. A fight ensued and the five were dismissed.

We asked if they had a trade union. They didn‘t. They were members of the Indian Workers Union, an organisation our good friend Sain Chaudhry thought good for nothing but fighting over Bhangra costumes. When we asked how many workers in the factory were Asian, we were told it was 90%. Great! We left the pub and went to the Students Union at Leicester university which was open all night at that time, and we cyclostyled leaflets in Punjabi and English alleging that the factory had been unfair to these workers. We then went outside the factory gates to waylay the first morning shift.

As we distributed leaflets and spoke to them, we persuaded every single worker to stay out and join our picket. The management and supervisor went in. In four or so hours they emerged and invited our ‘leaders’ for talks. Sain Chaudhry, two others, and Mala went in. They came out with an agreement. The strike was to end immediately, and the five workers would be reinstalled. The offending supervisor would face admonishment, and everyone would get a two per cent pay rise. There were loud cheers as the shift went back to work.

It was that incident that prompted the Indian Workers’ Association to invite myself and Mala to become Honorary Secretaries.

The episode had inspired several of the members to appreciate the effectiveness of strategic worker’s action. The Leicester IWA turned militant and in the next months achieved several radical victories —- desegregating a pub where the fascistic National Front used to hold meetings, joining rallies against Enoch Powell’s racist appeal, stopping an American propaganda film called the Green Berets about the Vietnam war, and several other actions. This series of activities culminated for myself and Mala in a conference of all black and radical organisations in Britain at the Alexandra Palace in north London in 1969.

It was at this conference, where a lot of speakers talked a load of rotten cliched Maoist rhetoric, that I first heard of the British Black Panther Movement. Their spokeswoman Althea Jones talked about the ex-colonial immigrant presence in Britain being the lowest rung of the British working class and being denied several political and social rights by the institutes of Britain and being victimised in several ways through institutional and individual racism.

It resonated, and I went up to her and her group after and asked if they accepted Asians. She pointed to two of the group saying, “What do you think they are?” I asked to join, and they said I had to participate in their activities as a sort of apprenticeship. I did. One of the tasks of this apprenticeship was to attend and write reports each evening of the proceedings in the Old Bailey of the trial of the Mangrove Nine. This was the famous trial of nine black defendants who had been arrested at a demonstration protesting the police’s constant harassment of a Caribbean restaurant called The Mangrove. One of the defendants was called Darcus Howe. He became my firm friend and joined the BPM at the end of the trial through which he was acquitted of all charges of conspiracy and affray.

The BPM published a weekly agitational newspaper called Freedom News. Its editorial policy, suggested to us by the Trinidadian writer and Marxist philosopher CLR James, was to relay in reports the incidents and experiences we had in our own working lives. So, a bus conductor would write about occurrences and emergencies he or she encountered at the bus garage or on a shift. I now had a steady job as a schoolteacher in a South London church school and I wrote regular, anonymous narratives of encounters and occurrences there.

Both Mala and I were invited by the leadership of the BPM to join it and were elected members of the Central Core. BPM activities became a dominant factor in our social lives. Two transforming episodes followed.

The BPM moved into a squatted property on 74 Railton Road in Brixton. The ground floor became a radical bookshop which was also named Freedom News. Above the shop there were two storeys of the Victorian flat-fronted terrace. Being deemed a responsible member whose friend, a young architect, would renew the upstairs rooms and convert them into two flats, I was asked to occupy one of them.

My friend Keith Cowling and I got to work and converted the rooms into two self-sufficient flats on a very tight budget. Keith was rewarded with the free tenancy of the first floor and I with the second.

The fire engine came and as I sat on the neighbour’s steps opposite the burning 74 Railton, the Fire Chief said it was definitely a fire-bomb and did I have any enemies.I said, not personal ones or any that would want to kill me. The attack was obviously on the bookshop and what it stood for.

I phoned a colleague and close friend from the neighbour’s house. Her flatmate took the call. Without waking her, he and his girlfriend arrived in their car and drove me to the hospital where they attended to my burns and sprains.

The evening papers carried the story. Five shops and homes of Asian and black people had been fire-bombed that night. The police didn’t so much as question me. One former neighbour said he had seen a man on a scooter throw something in the direction of the bookshop but hadn’t realised that it was a bomb. Or anything more than a bottle which he’d drained. Wrong time, wrong place?

The BPM broke up a year later for reasons that would take too much space to analyse here. They were succeeded by an agitational collective based around a magazine called Race Today. Race Today was born in 1973-74 under the editorship of Darcus Howe. The magazine had existed before as the publication of the Institute of Race Relations, but its adoption of Darcus as its editor was a change of direction and purpose. I was one of its founding members and worked with it through the ‘70s and into the early ‘80s.

I was still writing anonymously about my teaching job when, in 1975, I was approached by an editor from Macmillan’s publishers who invited me to write a book of stories about second generation immigrant children. This editor Martin Pick, regularly read Freedom News and had tracked me down by asking his newspaper-seller, a member of the BPM, who wrote them. He then went to the Inner London Education Authority “to find a teacher called Farrukh, of which there couldn’t be many.”

In the years after I resigned from Channel 4 and resumed my freelance writing career I kept in close touch with Darcus as one of my closest friends. On April 1st 2017, Darcus died. For his funeral, attended by thousands, I wrote this poem as a peroration:

This is the dramatic poem for several voices which I wrote, and that a group of us performed in different venues around the country, circa 1968.