Hanif Kureishi | Biography

Hanif Kureishi is one of the best-known British-Asian writers working for the stage and, more recently, for the screen. He has also acquired a reputation for his fiction. As his career has progressed, he has placed an increasing emphasis on his own ethnic background and on the difficulties and the possibilities created by the clash and fusion of cultural and religious traditions.

Kureishi's background has been the subject of controversy, with his mother and sister disputing his versions of it. He was born in London on 5 December 1954 and raised in Bromley, Kent. His mother was English; his father, the son of a doctor, was a lieutenant colonel in the Indian army who immigrated to England after the partition of the Subcontinent in 1947. The father had ambitions as a novelist but failed to obtain a publisher for any of his works.

Kureishi's introduction to the theater came when he was eighteen, when he submitted a short play to the Royal Court Theatre and was invited to meet its literary manager, Donald Howarth. While majoring in philosophy at King's College of the University of London, he worked at the theater selling programs and reading unsolicited scripts for Howarth; he also supported himself by writing pornography under the pseudonym Antonia French. He chose to study philosophy because he believed that the disciplines that were more popular with the students of his day, psychology and sociology, were too crudely scientific in their explanation of human behavior. His antipathy toward the social sciences was no doubt influenced by his predilection for social realism, which was influenced, in turn, by his father's interest in the novel and his own avid reading of French and Russian fiction.

Nineteenth-century European realism and Kureishi's concern as a British-Asian writer with those who are on the margins of society determined the nature of his first significant play, The King and Me (1980). It is about a married couple, Bill and Marie, who fill their empty lives with the worship of Elvis Presley; Marie spends every afternoon dancing with Elvis in her imagination. The plot of the play concerns their preparations for an Elvis show, part quiz and part impersonation, in which Bill is to compete to try to win a trip to Memphis for them.

Outskirts: A Play in Twelve Scenes Set over Twelve Years (1981) takes a bleak view of postindustrial Britain. Two friends, Bob and Del, meet regularly--initially as boys--at the "bombsite," an area of wasteland where they talk candidly about their lives and try to buy drugs. They are desperate to leave south London. Bob, unable to obtain employment, has turned to neofascist groups to provide his life with meaning. His mother is waiting at home to beat him with a golf club for doing so; nevertheless, she has his best interests at heart. The same cannot be said for Del's father, who gets vicarious satisfaction from forcing Del to reveal details of his sexual activities with his girlfriend.

Borderline (1981), Kureishi's first significant play written from a British-Asian perspective, concerns two generations of Indian immigrants to Britain. Amjad, a member of the older generation, has suffered racism at the hands of his neighbors, but he holds onto his idealistic fantasies about English justice. He also holds onto traditional Asian culture and wants to marry his daughter, Amina, to a wealthy businessman, Farouk. Another member of the older generation, Anil, complains that "England's a cemetery" and, although he is living with an Englishwoman, alleges that Englishwomen are "stuck-up," "cold," "racist," and "common." Meanwhile, his wife and children are waiting in India for him to send for them. A younger-generation Asian, Ravi, comes to stay with Anil; he believes that he will be able to get rich in England, but one of the first things he notices on his arrival in the country is the dole queue, or welfare line.

Two of the younger-generation characters, Amina and Haroon, are lovers who secretly meet in back of her father's restaurant, in parking lots, and in other out-of-the-way places. In such spaces, with Haroon, Amina can be a different person from the one her father imagines; she can become, in her own words, a "terrible person," candid about sex and employing a frank English vocabulary. Haroon becomes associated in Amina's mind with the risky places where they meet, and it comes as a shock to her when he breaks off their relationship to go to a university outside London because he wants what he had earlier dismissed as "the white lie" and "whitewashed history." After her breakup with Haroon, Amina becomes active in the Asian Youth Front. At the end of the play she urges the Youth Front members to burn down the hall in which the neofascists are meeting.

Kureishi's ethnic background and suburban upbringing in London are reflected in Birds of Passage (1983), which concerns the impact of the economic recession on a lower-middle-class family and their friends in Sydenham. The suburbs represent an imagined Englishness that is more real for its inhabitants than are the economic realities of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Britain; as the protagonist, David, a Labour Party councillor, says:

They're a genuine combination of middle-class and working-class life. Bank clerks, milkmen, civil servants and labourers live side by side with flourishing hedges between them. We have comfortable houses with gardens. We are neither integrated nor alienated. Out here we live in peace, indifferent to the rest of the world. We have no sense of communal existence, but we are tolerant, not cruel. There's a kind of quiet gentle righteousness about the suburbs that I like.

Economic reality is brought home to David by the loss of his job and the failure of his brother and sister-in-law's business. David's daughter, who has a totally different worldview from that of her parents, works as a prostitute to get money to better herself. The most unsympathetic character in the play is David's upwardly mobile former lodger, Asif, an entrepreneur who looks down on the majority of his fellow British Asians: "Most English don't realize that the immigrants who came here are the scum of Pakistan: the sweepers, the peasants, the drivers. They've never seen toilets. They've given us all a bad reputation because they don't know how to behave." Ultimately, David is forced to sell his house to Asif: British imperialism over Asians has symbolically come full circle.

Characters in Kureishi's later work for the screen--My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988), and London Kills Me (1991)-- are more independent-minded than in the plays written for the stage, and their social and family circumstances are more complex. In My Beautiful Laundrette, for example, Tania is a development of Amina in Borderline. She is as sexually assertive as Amina and openly flirts with Johnny, her cousin Omar's white, neofascist gay lover. While Amina escapes the arranged marriage with Farouk through her father's sudden death, Tania runs away. Tania openly acknowledges her father's relationship with Rachel, a white girl, and revels in her mother's disapproval of her flirting with Johnny.

Kureishi's later work for the stage and most of his work for the screen confronts the challenges of the new pluralism. The simple oppositions of Asian/British, traditional/modern, exploiter/exploited, victim/villain, and home/exile become complex and blurred. His works suggest that values have to be worked out through negotiation of the conflicts created by love and desire and by the clash and fusion of cultural and religious traditions.