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Compiling the list

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British South Asian is a label, it does not define an experience but broadly it can be applied to people from the Indian subcontinent. As outlined by Minority Rights Group International, the South Asian minority group includes people from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and some from the Middle East (2023).

 

The British South Asians in Film list is an ongoing project by Hamish Mèk Chohan. Films are added to the list as they are discovered or are recommended. British South Asian is not a genre; British South Asians in Film began as an intervention instigated as an act of decolonising the higher education.

 

As stated in James Muldoon’s article, Academics: It's Time To Get Behind Decolonising The Curriculum, “Advocates of decolonisation don’t want to abolish the canon; they want to interrogate its assumptions and broaden our intellectual vision to include a wider range of perspectives.” (2019).

 

“Many political and educational plans have failed because their authors designed them according to their own personal views of reality, never once taking into account (except as mere objects of their actions) the men-in-a-situation to whom their program was ostensibly directed.” (Freire, 1970, p. 67).

 

For students of colour studying in the UK navigating predominantly white canon curriculums, taught within majority white lecturer departments, there is a difficulty faced when the work they choose to produce extends beyond the perpetuated Western narrative. This website was created as there was an observed absence of this type of extensive list existing. A representation of the legacy of British South Asians in film should be greater than an arbitrary top ten list lazily selecting the same films. This resource has been created and aims to be maintained in order to offer a starting point from which the British South Asian experience can be accessed and discussed in a more informed way.

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