Britain Gets First South Asian Female Lord Mayor
| AR Articles on Britain |
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| Whites as Kulaks (Jan. 2002) |
| Report from Britain (Sep. 2001) |
| Oldham Erupts (Jul. 2001) |
| No Representation (May 2001) |
| The Racial Transformation of Britain (Aug. 2000) |
| Black Crime in Britain (Apr. 1996) |
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Indian-born Manjula Sood will make history this week when she slips the gilded robes and chain of office over her sari to become lord mayor of the British city of Leicester.
A south Asian woman has never held the largely ceremonial post in the 799 years since it was created in the city—nor in the 1,000 years or so that it has been in existence elsewhere in Britain.
It is a first not just for Sood, 12 years after following her late husband, Paul, into local politics, and just over 38 years after she arrived in the English East Midlands from the Punjab on a cold, dark snowy winter’s day.
It is also the latest sign of the transformation of Leicester, famous for its textile, footwear and hosiery industry, as it moves towards becoming Britain’s first ethnic majority city in the not too distant future.
‘To be the first is a great honour for me,’ the former primary schoolteacher told AFP of the 12-month post, which begins on Thursday.
‘It’s made me very proud of myself that I’m going to represent my city. . . . I wasn’t expecting it.’
The appointment to lead Leicester’s 288,000 or so citizens, 25 percent of whom are of Indian origin, puts Sood among Britain’s establishment, although she has held the ancient post of High Bailiff of Leicester for the past year.
On a wider scale, it also says much about the positive aspects of immigration that are often overlooked here by the debate over the extent to which new arrivals benefit Britain and affect its culture and identity.
At a glance, Sood seems the embodiment of the successfully integrated immigrant championed by modern-day politicians, many of whom she says have been fed at her kitchen table and passed through while campaigning locally.
It is not just the immaculate black sari set off by the shiny Blackberry personal organiser, the comfortable semi-detached house in a residential suburb or the fact that she has taken British citizenship and speaks fluent English.
There are photographs of her two grown-up sons, in gowns and mortar boards, proudly clutching degree scrolls from British universities: one is also a municipal councillor in Leicester; the other works for an investment bank.
A framed woman of achievement and a national merit award from the governing Labour Party are hung on another wall.
On a corner table by the coal-effect gas fire is a photograph of Hindu guru Sathya Sai Baba next to medieval-style Christian religious icons and rosary beads.
An Anglican canon is a close friend; she sits on the Leicester Council of Faiths and social, health and women’s groups; two African Caribbean men have the keys to her house to do odd jobs, she says.
Sood says she feels a duty over the next 12 months to uphold Leicester’s largely harmonious diversity at a time when critics of multi-culturalism warn of no-go areas for non-whites and communities living parallel lives elsewhere.
‘I’m going to be the lord mayor not for one faith but for the city of Leicester,’ she said.
One of her spiritual advisers will be Christian. The other will be Hindu.
The civic service to mark her appointment will also be held in the city’s Anglican cathedral rather than a Hindu temple.
‘Leicester’s a British city,’ she says. ‘I’m representing Leicester as first citizen. The religion of this country is Church of England.’
Sood, though, recognises that her story is not typical of the vast majority of immigrants that came to Britain and that she was fortunate.
She spoke the language, held a master’s degree in sociology and came from a well-off family: her father was a doctor in New Delhi, her mother a teacher.
An assertive nature helped when she went into teaching after being told to settle for factory work like many newly-arrived Indian women—or stay at home in often substandard accommodation.
But she said she still faced the same challenges of casual racism, ignorance and prejudice as the thousands of other Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Kenyan and Ugandan Asians who made their way to Leicester in the 1970s.
As the only Indian teacher among white faces she said she pushed to promote tolerance and understanding between often bewildered newly-arrived children of different faiths and cultures and their local classmates.
Britain is now a more tolerant place than the one she knew in 1970, she says, with people more respectful of diversity of culture and faith.
But work is still required as a new wave of immigrants, many of them from eastern Europe, arrive in increasing numbers—and ‘outreach’ is the aim of her term of office as lord mayor.
‘The communities that came here in the 60s and 70s now feel an integrated part of British society. Now there are new communities finding the same problems,’ she said.
‘History is being repeated. The same challenges are facing them. There’s always some sort of hostility from the host community. It’s a human instinct but if we don’t work at it and don’t kill it it will escalate.’
(Posted on May 15, 2008)
Comments
Good for her. Anyway if you go to the BNP website (their manifesto) they now accept ethnic communities will always exist in Britain, but they want them to stay minorities. Or is this just a BNP ploy, somebody help me out here.
Posted by ethnic browser at 7:37 PM on May 15
With no attempt at irony whatsoever, this makes me ask:
Does England exist anymore? Maybe only in the way that Moravia still exists. Or Etruria.
As for the English? Ask an Uiuitellian.
Or a Comanche.
Posted by Mr. Smith at 8:49 PM on May 15
“There’s always some hostility from the host community.” Fact: That hostility is in no way unfounded. The most absolute law of nature is survival of the fittest. Any species that fails to protect it’s own kind, is on the fast track to extinction.
Posted by THE OLD SAGE at 12:54 AM on May 16
The south Indians of Leicester came from Uganda, having been evicted from Uganda and Kenya in the 1970s, so they are all too aware of racism by blacks. They came here with nothing (literally) except their brains, and got the failing clothing factories working again. Their kids now train as doctors and lawyers, and as a group they are low crime compared to the other vibrant ethnic minorities. The Leicester south indians are Hindu, and tend to be of higher caste, which provides a propriety in that community one now rarely sees elsewhere. The upshot of this is a westernised group with mostly classic middle class family values not seen in the often degenerate white UK community for about 30 years. Don’t confuse Hindus with Muslims or Blacks, which Hindus see for exactly what they are. Though it might upset some less sophisticated AR readers, the south Indians of Leicester are basically like Jewish people (though a jewish people who use the correctly oriented swastika as a religious symbol).
Posted by Vincent ENGLAND at 9:11 AM on May 16
To Vincent England
You’re right, except many of the Leicester Indians are Sikh and catholic (like MP Keith Vaz). From what I’ve heard many somalis are now moving into Leicester so the city will experience trouble in the future sadly!
Posted by AF at 10:21 AM on May 16
This Indian enchroacher wasn’t even born in the white ancestral homeland of the United Kingdom to warrant even the slightest consideration for being allowed to campaign for the position of Lord Mayor.
Non-white ethnic planters shouldn’t be permitted to hold high-profile positions of any sort in white homelands, most especially ancestral white homelands regardless of whether or not the area they reside in has, in the meantime, become majority non-white.
Equivalent developments would not be tolerated in non-white homelands and white nations should be operating exactly these same policies in their own. In other words, since no non-white nation would tolerate white majority demographics and self-segregation, white collectiveness, the threat of white domination of politics, legislature, education, employment and economic infrastructure along with cultural supremacy, likewise white nations have every right to demand the same rules and regulations be implemented against non-white usurpation in white homelands too.
What inflames me so much is, the blatant nerve of this non-white alien to declare “there’s always some sort of hostility from the host nation…” followed by an admission of it being human nature, yet goes on to attempt to defy nature with her remark
“but if we don’t work at it and kill it, it will escalate.”
Of course it will escalate because multi-racial/multi-cultural societies go completely against nature and leads to the indigenous peoples of the territory being
firstly, disenfranchised of their natural human rights, heritages histories,languages, cultures traditions,
secondly, dispossessed of their very living spaces AND
thirdly, being deliberately rendered totally vulnerable to systematic genocidal attacks and miscegenation. In fact, escalation of opposition in whatever form it takes, is a clear sign that the survival instinct mechanism is alive and well, AND functioning normally.
Has this uninvited non-white alien invader forgotten that her own kind did precisely that when they reared up and kicked the white colonialists out of India back in the 1940s?
Posted by A Swain at 11:23 PM on May 16