Nisha Ramayya

NR: We...my parents, and they still live in the same house, moved...when we moved to Glasgow, went to the south side, Pollokshields, which is...it's an interesting place, because it's...it includes...so Albert Drive, which is the road that's parallel to the road where my parents live, Aytoun Road, Albert Drive is...on one end of it, it's got a really massive Punjabi and Pakistani community, loads of shops, loads of...like it's where...it's...it used to be call...like, I don't know, like, pol...used to like, the...like people used to call it like – including affectionately but also I'm pretty convinced as a slur, depending on who was saying it – they would call it like Pollokstan, or that kind of thing. Punjabshields or, you know, like these...have these references. But it also has...this statistic might be way out of date, but when I was at school, I remember, it was the place that had the...also the worst sort of deprivation, you know, like social economic deprivation. On the other end of Albert Drive, so the same road, it had the most concentration of millionaires living in mansions. So like this one long road that is completely stratified and like on ethnic and economic lines. So, you know...and my parents chose to live...they chose to live there, because we were close to the school that they...their Indian friends had recommended. They sent my brother and I to the private school, Hutchesons' Grammar School. And so we were in Pollokshields, but we were right in...you know, we we're right in...our house...like right in between the two sides. And so they would...it was great for my parents, because they would...like that was where they did all their shopping, you know, get...really get all the best like mangoes as well, you know, like at that time of year. But, the...yeah, it's...so that...it's an interesting area. And when we were children, my dad had some friends, like colleagues, who were from all sorts of different parts of the world because the hospital he got a job at was like an international hospital. But mostly...and my mum was...my mum went back...she stopped working for a bit, and then she went back to work, and so she also made some friends at work who were not...who were like white Scottish people, mostly were her friends from where she worked. But the...mostly their social life was around the Indian community. And I really remember...and so they had...my mum had this one friend, Maureen, who was like the one white friend who would be round a lot. And also they had...my dad and my mum worked with this woman, Jackie, whose...who lived close by, and whose children had gone to the same school. So they were like...and she was also...well, she would be...her and her husband John would like come to like the sort of family parties, and they might be the only white people there, or Maureen would be the only white person there. And I remember my mum...my friend Clare Holohan saying like, ‘Your parents don't have any...why do they not have friends with white people...why aren't they friends with white people?’ And I was like, ‘Oh no, they are, they’re friends with Maureen.’ It was like...but I remember when she said that, I felt both like really defensive for them, but then also I was like, what I...did I...I was like, ‘Why don't you have more white friends?’ And they really, I think, hadn't even thought about it, or they didn't think that they were...that their friends were sort of lacking in diversity in that sense. Because I guess of their workplaces, so they were maybe...they were like...as far as they were concerned, during the day they were interacting with all sorts of people, but then in their kind of...at the weekends, they were...it was...it's more selective.

RA: You've touched on this, but could you say something more about the ways in which British Asian writers and writers of colour more broadly in Britain are positioned in certain ways by the publishing industry, by the media, perhaps also by readers more broadly?

NR: Yeah. Well, I think that it's something that I...when I was starting to kind of take writing seriously and wanting to publish, I felt like a real lack of...I...just...being frank, I felt that the kind of British Indian or South Indian, South Asian writing that I was reading that was like...that was around me...so that this is in a more passive sense, without me going out to find it, but what I could find in libraries or what was...I was on reading mat...curriculum in terms of poetry, not fiction, I just was not ex...I didn't find exciting. It didn't like make...didn't sort of scratch my brain, or...I felt there it was a very...it was a really a lot of nostalgia and a very simplistic ideas of like, over there good, over here bad, you know, which was also a limitation of my reading and my ability to like express certain things. But that was a feeling, and I was always going elsewhere for having my brain scratched, or to think about poetry. But when I started... and I started becoming...there was a lot of...like, when I guess the Spread the Word and the Complete Works programme kind of came into my view. And this was like...and highly publicized. And I, you know, definitely begin by saying, loads of brilliant writers have been on that programme, or like as mentors or as mentees. And loads of brilliant work was produced. But the rhetoric, or the discourse around it was all about winning prizes. It wasn't...although it began as being about the only 2 per cent of poetry published in the UK was by Black and Asian writers, by the end of it, it was like, now this percentage of prize winners are Black and Asian writers. And there's a...being published and winning a prize are completely different things. And I did...there was also...so around the time, that there were a few big prizes won by Black and Asian writers, there was also a lot of racism in how their work was written about in like...in newspapers and in literary publications. Really vile like reductive, racist stereotypes being used to describe their poetry. Even if it had...you know, and like I can...you know, I can quote, because I remember at the time it was so enraging. Like, Sarah Howe's work was described as sort of representing Oriental poise, right? Claudia Rankine was described as like a sort of militant Black woman. You know, like these...and it was just absolutely disgusting. And those were just a couple of examples, like there were so many. At the same time, there was a sense that like there were other Black and Asian writers who were working...who were writing way less explicitly about race, migration, racism, colonialism, who were thinking about it, but it was not appearing so straightforwardly on the surface of their words, that were...that kind of being ignored. And that was when I...that...so then I was really wondering like what happens to experimental writers of colour, like what...how is their work read?

NR: So, my partner Rob is...we...in fact, we met at that same poetry festival that Bhanu read at. But he...we didn't...we kind of...we sort of had a correspondence for a while. He's a poet as well. And we moved in together, I think pro...like six years ago. And it really...yeah, so when...and when we moved in together, I...it was the first time I was living not with friends. you know, like with...in house-shares, which I had loved doing. But it was my first time living with a partner. And I...and also in an unfurnished flat, so had to...I got loads of stuff down from Glasgow, like linen, for example. Like my mum’s got like packed linen cupboards of Indian bedclothing and cushion covers and towels and, you know, all of these kinds of things, and as well as like other bits and pieces. So the flat became a place where I could just...and I had so many things I'd gathered over the years from India, from...or gifts from family members, like art...religious kind of like statues, figurines, as well as like artworks, things like that. And so I kind of finally had a place to spread it all out. So my home...and that...and Rob really like...he enjoys all of that as well. And so my home now, it's been...it's like when you walk in, like I've got like, you know, an icon of Kali like on...in the door made in rice that I got in Kolkata. And you, you know, walk up the stairs, and like I've got some...you know, some of my grandmother's puja items, like her little puja bell, and some other things like that. So there's lots of Indian art and some old photographs and things around the home. And then...and that's...so there's like aesthetically like and affectively like feels Indian, but also in my way like it's really colourful, but also we have loads of like...I mean, obviously loads of Rob’s things. We've got artwork made by friends. We've got like so loads of big paintings or posters from poetry readings, paintings that friends have made, like some other like...I'm trying to think what's...got...we've got some Charles Rennie Mackintosh, so we've got some Scottish...some Glasgow stuff. But then...and we cook...and Rob, like he's...he has been interested in like learning about Indian cooking, Indian music. Like he's been...he's...you know, he's interested in things like that as well. Also, like we've always been excited when we found like Irish-Indian crossovers, or...I mean, obviously there's loads of Irish-Scottish crossovers, but also like, you know, there's lots of fusion things, which are always like...or examples of like historical accounts of Irish people in Hyderabad or Scottish people in Hyderabad. So we've kind of shared that...and so we’ll do...and in...we...I...we have like, you know, agarbatti like, it's lit all the time. It's like incense, so kind of temple incense. So like it kind of smell...and we cook Indian food. So it's like smells and it feels, and it looks Indian or like, as I say, my version of Indian. But then also, when it's Diwali, for example, Diwali being the main one I think, we would light candles and maybe like we have...before we like read aloud something from the Ramayana or listened to some music, or, you know, tried to think about it. And sometimes I felt like...and I kind of have a hankering...and one thing I really miss is when people stop getting married...I'm not married, but when all my cousins and family friends stopped getting married, I stopped getting to dance to both like Bollywood music, Punjabi music, the...you know, like the...in Glasgow, especially like the absolute glee when like Panjabi MC came on the wedding playlist, guaranteed. In Glasgow, every single Glasgow wedding, Glasgow Indian wedding would have a bagpipe player and a tabla player doing like a kind of...I don't know if it was the same ones every time, they get...getting invited, but it was like...it was really fun, and like I really miss that. I miss those kinds of parties. Because in London, I don't have that. I don't have people that I can...although I have Indian friends, I don't have enough of them that we can dance together or like go to those kinds of dance parties. So...but yeah. So, in my home life, it feels very...it really...and because like I've got loads of books, poetry, like as I say, listening to music. I like love listening to like Lata Mangeshkar particularly. It's...it was one of my favourite people to listen to, who my grandmother listened to, my dad listened to while cooking. So, you know, I...and I think that if I...I mean, I don't have children, if I did have children, I definitely would be like...these would be...I think, in a way, having children...I think this was maybe...it was like this for my mum, my dad maybe, but for...I think a lot of diasporic parents having children is a way to re-encounter their culture as well and like to get...to relearn through sharing it with their children or learning alongside their children.

(with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil) Threads (London: Clinic Publishing, 2018)

States of the Body Produced by Love (London: Ignota, 2019)

Fantasia (London: Granta, 2024)

Image credit

Jemima Yong