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Hans Raj Gupta
Possibly Britain's first Indian bus inspector and a founder of EMBS Community College in Cowley, east Oxford
About
Hans Raj Gupta became Oxford’s first racialized minority bus inspector in October 1967, and it is possible that he was the first Indian in Britain to occupy this role. However, this appointment was controversial and resulted in significant violence. Gupta was attacked outside his home on 16 January 1968 following threatening phone calls from an unknown caller. On 20 February 1968 Secretary of State James Callaghan told the House of Commons that Gupta and his family had access to police protection and that Gupta had left his job because of the attack. He subsequently became a newsagent and co-founded the Black self-help organization EMBS in 1988, with the Jamaican publican Junior Lennon and Pakistani business owner Mohammad Afzal.
Shaw, Alison, Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani Families in Britain (London: Routledge, 2000)
Tuck, Stephen, The Night Malcolm X Spoke at the Oxford Union: A Transatlantic Story of Antiracist Protest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)
House of Commons Debates, 20 February 1968, vol. 759, col 239–242
Lennon, Junior, ‘Oxfordshire Ethnic Minorities Enterprise Development Limited’, Companies Registration Office (14 December 1988)
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
