What’s a Marwatee?
DISCLAIMER: This blog post is about potentially sensitive issues relating to my personal experiences, it is NOT intended to offend or ridicule anybody. If you find you are offended, please request to speak to a manager and hope for the best. If you are not offended, please pass go and collect £200.
The UK is full of Indians, as in to the point of us completely invading major areas like Leicester, North London etc. You know Indians are nearby when you see some of the following:
1) The corner shop uncle – Ramesh uncle sits behind the counter at a corner shop and will normally never ask you for ID. He keeps the shop open later than all the others and normally wears a white shirt, dark trousers and a serious expression. He is quiet and generally lives very close by with his bubbly wife Bharti and five children.
2) The house which ALWAYS seems to have weddings – Normally a semi-detached house in Wembley inhabited by a large Punjabi family. It’s always covered in fairy lights, blares out Sidhu Moose Wala mixed with some old school Malkit Singh and attracts thousands of other Punjabis.
3) The cool guys – Their natural habitat is normally a BMW or a Golf, clad in Sports-Direct tracksuits and dripping in costume jewellery stolen from their mothers, the cool guys live their lives as Cuban gangsters outside their house, but during the day you will find them in plain clothes and side partings on their way to school.
4) The high-street of dreams – Wherever Indians gather we build our own high-street without which we cannot survive. As well as the mango smugglers, there are the ever-famous paan-walas selling everything from rare paans to random sweets, shops selling overpriced lehngas, and a crowded, legendary Biriyani corner, basically an entire Indian ecosystem; this is also the perfect spot for aunties to gather in their salwar kameezes and sports shoes to chat happily about their disappointing daughters.
The UK is somewhat like a home away from home, most of this influence comes from the majority of Indians here being Punjabis and Gujaratis, two very vibrant and yet distinctly different communities of Indians who have flourished and stayed loud and proud of their culture. Not to be a traitor to my own, but before I knew anything about my community, I just assumed that this is what all Indians here are like - that we all must be Gujarati or Punjabi or just eat samosas and dance to Bollywood songs.
When I was little the only thing I saw Maharashtrians doing differently to the general Indian community was that we religiously attended the “Maharashtra Mandal”. No, it wasn’t a gigantic gold-plated community space full of Maharashtrian scholars (although it does sound like that); it was a very large, eerie, gothic church in North London where Maharashtrians would gather on a frequent basis for important events, including Ganesh Chaturti and for some reason Christmas.
For an adult it’s a really important initiative and community to be part of, to connect with fellow Maharashtrians in the UK is vital to retain our culture and our ways of living; there would be Marathi plays, gatherings organised by aajis who brought home-made pohe and batate vade, and more. For a child however, it was a total bore of bores. All I cared about at the time was playing with other children my age and for some reason there never seemed to actually be any other Maharashtrian children coming to these events. The functions were tailored towards adults, so on top of being bored I didn’t really know what I could learn, I didn’t even want to learn I just wanted to play. I eventually concluded at the age of seven that the Maharashtra Mandal had to be for old people and that maybe Maharashtrians just don’t have children or there must be a secret mini-Maharashtra Mandal for kids that I didn’t know about. I mean, where did they hang out? It was a pity, but I accepted it as the truth for a while.
It made me think that it wasn’t “cool” to be Maharashtrian because there was barely anybody else my age to relate to; but as I grew older I found myself debating that idea because let’s be honest, we don’t have butter chicken but we do have amazing comfort food, our community has given birth to some of the most patriotic freedom fighters India has seen, our language is beautiful and when I found out Madhuri Dixit and Milind Soman were Maharashtrian too, it was game over. I think I actually did faint. Being brought up to be proud of my background made it almost frustrating for me that there wasn’t a group of people I could share that pride with.
It begs the question – why are Maharashtrians not well known the same way other Indian communities are? And why should I be ok with it?
Depending on where you live you may think I am being dramatic with those questions, but there have genuinely been situations when I have said I am a Maharashtrian and people have looked at me with a blank stare as if I was wearing my knickers on my head. The conversation normally goes like this, it’s a Friday after work and we are at the pub, a friend of a friend will ask:
“Wow so you are Indian right?”
“Yes, I am Marathi”
“A what? A Maarwatee?”
“So you know where Bollywood is? There. I’m from there.”
“Ohhh yes Mumbai, yes that’s where Shah Rukh Khan lives, do you know him then?!”
So the conversation has gone from me trying to simplify what a Maharashtrian is, to people assuming I have casual catchups with my mate Shah Rukh Khan.
I personally find that the main reason there isn’t much well known about Maharashtrians is because there simply aren’t many of us around.
During my childhood we would go to the most random corners of the UK to find other nomad Maharashtrian families that my family knew from being back in India together.
You may also recall going to places like Chester, or the quiet part of Birmingham to visit Maharashtrian family friends and typically finding a house with lemons and chillies dangling from the doorways with “THE DESHMUKHS” stamped on the front door in red writing.
Even at university, there is always the “Hindu Society” which heads up all the Navratri and bhangra events, but there isn’t a huge recognition for a Maharashtrian style of celebrating Ganesh Chaturti let alone creating awareness about the local culture of Mumbai. Lately however through the years of isolation there has definitely been an influx of Maharashtrian people to the UK. It’s actually incredible to find out that there are now neighbourhoods of Maharashtrians all over London. Most of them are typically the “IT crowd” from India who are insanely clever and have some how come over in mass herds so now there is an actual hope for children of the next generation to have more of a Maharashtrian influence in their lives.
I suppose what I have always felt is a sense of “I wish I knew what I was missing out on” when I visit family in Mumbai/Pune. Things are changing for the better as I get older because I find myself actively seeking out learning about the uniqueness about my community; but there is still so much we can do for the child who has been brought up in the UK who needs to be brought into their community rather than kept on the edge because they are “westernised.”
Although I don’t have a problem with people thinking Shah Rukh Khan is my friend, it would still be great if they told me “Ah yes! I’ve always wanted to meet a Maharashtrian!” instead. There is a long way to go for us to break our culture into the mainstream but it’s possible and it’s happening; on a serious note though, if anybody has SRK’s mobile number just drop it in the comments thanks.
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