On a busy high street in Southall in June 1976, people quietly shuffled past a police cordon outside the Victory pub. Behind the tape was a pool of blood that had come from Gurdeep Singh Chaggar, an 18-year-old Sikh teenager who had been stabbed to death during a racist attack in the centre of the south Asian community in west London.
His death stunned Southall. The idea of white youths coming to their area to kill a Sikh boy seemed unthinkable, but in reality it was part of a sustained campaign of racial violence that spread across the entire country. In his classic book Staying Power, about the history of the Black and south Asian presence in Britain, Peter Fryer estimated that, between 1976 and 1981, 31 people had been murdered by racists in Southall, Brick Lane, Swindon, Manchester and Leeds.
The Singh Chaggar story is the opening act of Defiance: Fighting the Far Right, a new three-part documentary series on Channel 4 that tells the story of how groups of British south Asians fought back against a tide of racial violence that has mostly been forgotten. Groups such as the Asian Youth Movement in Bradford battled fascists in the street, organised legal defences for deportation cases and vowed to protect their own communities when the police refused to do so.
Riz Ahmed’s production company, Left Handed Films, are part of the team behind the series. They’re joined by Rogan Productions who have a track record of making incredible, little-told stories of Britain’s racist past, including Uprising – the three-part documentary inspired by Steve McQueen’s Small Axe films that homed in on the aftermath of the “New Cross massacre,” Subnormal: A British Scandal and Black Power.
Growing up in Wembley, north-west London, Ahmed knew of Southall – although it wasn’t until later that he heard about the radical history of the area. He was also aware of the threat the far right posed: in 2016, he wrote about how in the 1980s, he and his brother were confronted by a skinhead “who decided to put a knife to my brother’s throat”.
Ahmed says Defiance isn’t just a chance to revisit a particularly restive period of British history, but is instructive at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is rising again. “It’s so easy to feel that you’re living in a unique time, and that the struggle is unlike anything we’ve faced before,” he says.
“Yet, I think it’s emboldening and inspiring for the new generation to understand how far back the struggle goes, the bravery of the people that have been a part of that struggle and lessons we can learn from it.”
Like Uprising, Defiance is a reassessment of shocking events but it also recalibrates our understanding of south Asian Britons during the Margaret Thatcher era. This is a story of them taking part in pitched street battles, fighting police violence, fascism and political organisation; this is not just a story of besieged, silent shopkeepers, quietly sweeping up broken glass after yet another racist attack. In the past, if documentary makers focused on racial tension in the early 1980s it was usually the story of Black Britain – of Brixton or Toxteth. South Asians have often been an afterthought, presented as compliant victims or “good immigrants” who don’t cause trouble.
“It was always a myth,” says Ahmed.
“It’s also a myth sometimes perpetuated by south Asians themselves, to remove themselves from the firing line. And yet, alongside the stories of compliance or cooperation, is a very rich history of defiance and resistance. Now more than ever, we need to understand that progress is often not about compliance. Progress is about resistance.”
In Defiance that myth of compliant victimhood is blown apart. The groups were organised and relentless: every spokesperson – such as Balraj Purewal, who co-founded the Southall Youth Movement – seems to have the same intensity in their eyes, even now, 40 years on. They worked out in makeshift gyms and learned martial arts for self-defence. The Southall Youth Movement took on a group of skinhead Oi! bands that played a gig in the Hambrough Tavern in Southall, which resulted in 61 police officers injured, 70 arrests and the pub being burned to the ground. Asian youth movements sprang up around the country; made up of young people who took on fascism in the street.
On Brick Lane in east London, young Bengalis went toe-to-toe with National Front magazine sellers; in Walthamstow, a few miles to the north, the community rallied around firebombed families; while in Bradford a group of a dozen south Asian men fought a landmark court case with a slogan of “self-defence is no offence”. The Bradford 12 case was “a legal watershed of activist-advocacy” and inspired protests and campaigns from Guyana to Los Angeles.
“If we don’t know our history and our story, we don’t know what we are as a country,” says Ahmed. “If we can’t learn lessons from past struggles and mistakes, we’re going to repeat them.”
The far right – primarily the National Front and skinhead groups – are the main antagonists in Defiance, and even though the NF’s support at the ballot box had collapsed by the early 1980s, their marches through cities such as Leicester, Bradford and areas of London such as Lewisham caused widespread fear and carnage. When the racist murders began, far-right leaders such as John Kingsley Read welcomed them. But the reaction from politicians and the police was even more shocking.
The killing of the anti-racist protester and teacher Blair Peach, who died after being struck, almost certainly, by an officer from the Metropolitan police’s loathed Special Patrol Group while walking away from an anti-fascist protest in 1979, is revisited in detail. Afterwards, the Met’s then commissioner, Sir David McNee, warned people to “Keep off the streets and behave yourselves, [then] you won’t have the SPG to worry about.” Thatcher, who in 1979 fought an election campaign where her anti-immigration stance was a defining feature, discouraged south Asians and anti-fascists from confronting the far right, instead telling people to “ignore them”. (Easier said than done when racist attacks were a daily occurence.)
Watching Defiance casts new light on the events of last November when then home secretary Suella Braverman (herself a child of south Asian immigrants) was accused of inciting the far right protesters who descended on central London on Remembrance Sunday.
Ahmed refuses to mention Braverman – or Priti Patel or Rishi Sunak, whose parents also came to Britain in the era Defiance presents, and have taken anti-immigrant stances – by name. “I’m not talking about those individuals,” says Ahmed. “I’m just talking about the wider phenomenon of people betraying their communities’ interests, and betraying their own identity, betraying the struggle of their parents, let alone their ancestors, in order to secure the furthering of their own ambitions. That kind of behaviour is not new. But I think increasingly, people just see through it.”
Another echo today of the Defiance era are the pro-Palestinian protest marches, many of which include the children and grandchildren of the south Asians who fought fascism in the 70s and 80s. In October, Ahmed released a statement writing that the “indiscriminate bombing of Gaza’s civilians and vital infrastructure, the denial of food, water and electricity” by Israel was “morally indefensible” and constituted “war crimes”.
What does he make of the description of the pro-Palestinian protests as “hate marches”? “I think asking for bombing campaigns to stop and for children to no longer be murdered doesn’t strike me as a very hateful message. It strikes me as a message of peace and love,” he says.
“I don’t think you can ever bomb your way to peace. I think that is where most of the world’s human beings are at in terms of how they feel about this. ‘Stop the bombing, stop the fighting and let’s move towards peace’ is a message that generally ages quite well. When we look back, I feel as if that message will be on the right side of history.”
Defiance is an overdue corrective to the history books, an invitation to look again at an era we thought we knew. “These are crazy stories,” says Ahmed. “You could not make them up. From a purely televisual cinematic point of view, they are enthralling to watch.”
It’s a fair point but why has it taken this long for British television to bring them to the small screen? “I think that for many years there’s been an assumption in Britain that certain stories are mainstream,” says Ahmed.
“We are expanding our idea of who we are as a country, because of work like this … we’re sitting on a really rich global goldmine of stories [that] are absolutely central to us understanding who we are as a country. But they are also dynamic, inspiring and exhilarating. That’s the version of Britain that excites me.”
Defiance: Fighting the Far Right is available online via Channel 4’s website
This article was amended on 9 April 2024 to state where the series can be streamed.
