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Farrukh Dhondy
Writer, activist, broadcaster, educator and editor
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Location(s)
74 Railton Road
London
SE24 0LF
United Kingdom
About
Farrukh Dhondy is a writer, editor, activist and campaigner. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Poona (now Pune), where he was born in 1944.
In 1964 he was awarded a scholarship to study at Pembroke College, Cambridge, initially in natural sciences but he later switched to English literature. He graduated in 1967 and went on to study for a master's at Leicester University. He started teaching at the Leicester College of Further Education in 1968–9 while also working as a freelance journalist. During this time, he became active with the Leicester branch of the Indian Workers’ Association.
On his move to London to teach at Archbishop Temples School in Lambeth, he joined the British Black Panthers and was also a member of the Bengali Housing Action Group. In 1973/4 he set up the Race Today Collective, along with his friends Darcus Howe and Mala Sen. As a founding member, he remained involved until the early 1980s.
In 1984 he took on the role of Commissioning Editor for Multicultural Programming for Channel Four Television, a position he held until 1997. During this time, he also became acquainted with Tariq Ali, Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie. Dhondy had commissioned Rushdie to write two documentaries – ‘The Riddle of Midnight’ and ‘The Painter and the Pest’.
Dhondy is an acclaimed novelist and screenplay writer. He wrote the comedy series Tandoori Nights, broadcast on Channel 4, which ran from 1985 to 1987. He also wrote news stories for Black on Black and set up the seminal documentary series Bandung File. Alongside his journalism and anti-racist activism, Dhondy is also an accomplished novelist, screenplay writer and playwright.
Tariq Ali, Darcus Howe, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Mala Sen.
British Black Panthers, Indian Workers' Association (post-1950), Race Today Collective.
Plays:
Romance, Romance; and The Bride (London: Faber, 1985)
Vigilantes (London: Hobo, 1988)
Moving the Goalposts (Oxford: Heinemann, 2000)
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble (Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 2002)
Fiction:
East End at your Feet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976)
The Siege of Babylon (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978)
Poona Company (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980)
Trip Trap (London: Victor Gollancz, 1982)
Come to Mecca (London: Collins Educational, 1983)
Bombay Duck (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990)
Black Swan (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992)
Janaky and the Giant and Other Stories (London: Collins, 1993)
Run (London: Bloomsbury, 2002)
Adultery and Other Stories (New Delhi: Tara, 2003)
Cambridge Company (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2016)
London Company (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2016)
Non-fiction:
(with Barbara Beese and Leila Hassan Howe) The Black Explosion in British Schools (London: Race Today, 1982)
C. L. R. James (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001)
Jansen, Bettina, Narratives of Community in the Black British Short Story (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Mathison, Ymitri, 'The Second Generation British Asian’s Search for an Interstitial Identity in Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette and Farrukh Dhondy’s The Bride and Romance, Romance', South Asian Review 27.1 (2006), pp. 233–48
Pines, Jim, Black and White in Colour: Black People in British Television since 1936 (London: BFI Publishing, 1992)
Procter, James (ed.) Writing Black Britain, 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
Ranasinha, Ruvani, South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Sands-O’Connor, Karen, British Activist Authors Addressing Children of Colour (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023)
Whitcombe, Bobbie, 'East-West: The Divided Worlds of Farrukh Dhondy', Children’s Literature in Education 14. 1 (1983), pp. 35–43
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
