|
Brick Lane Masala, Summer 2002
Brick Lane is but one street in a city layout that necessitates
a pocket "mini’ mapbook the size of many paperback best
sellers, and like many other streets in the warren of London’s
urban grid, this home of "little Bangla-town" doesn’t
even extend its length in one straight line, instead taking several
eccentric doglegs in its scant half-mile course. Yet this street
is a microcosm of the cultures colliding and coinciding in this
improbable mega-city, not only today, but historically as well.
Brick Lane serially has been a haunt of Jack the Ripper and his
victims, Orthodox Jews, Bangladeshi immigrants, and in more recent
years, yuppies.
I came to Brick Lane this summer curious how this predominately
Muslim neighborhood, dominated by the Jamme Mosjid (recently famous
for its Al Qaeda recruiting abilities) might have changed in the
year since my last visit--much as Western-Islamic relations have
been forcibly brought to global attention in that span. I was
hopeful that I, an American woman, would be received with the
same hospitality that I had been the year before, but I was cautious
in my dress and in choosing when my camera came out of my shopper’s
bag. There might be reasons beyond recent events for my appearance
to generate hostility--yuppies and interior design boutiques serving
them have begun encroaching on this immigrant enclave since the
London docklands went from slum warehousing to hip luxury housing
in the mid nineties.
My project this summer was simple: photograph this street and
its businesses, its residents and visitors at work and at play,
and look for the boundaries between the yuppies, the historically
Orthodox Jewish population, and both the religious Muslims and
the more secularly inclined of the Bangladeshi community. Could
I tell by looking at a shop exterior that it was across the road
from the mosque, or down in the Jewish area near Bethnal Green,
or part of the cluster of fleeting small Bangladeshi businesses
all offering Hindi films of suspect provenance and dirt-cheap
international phone cards? The answer was more complicated than
I had expected.
Although the varied communities that make up the street display
their cultural memberships in store windows, such as the myriad-hued
sari fabrics of Sarshire Ltd or the Bollywood film posters of
B2B (Fig. 1), there are no strict zones of similarity in Brick
Lane: the closest approximation to that one can draw would be
that many of the secularly-oriented Bangladeshi businesses cluster
at the end closer to Aldgate East tube station, and the beigel
bakeries are nearer to Bethnal Green. But an art gallery showing
the controversial German art exhibit of plastic-coated cadavers
is within sight of the mosque, and modern furniture stores rub
shoulders with bargain buffet curry houses. The street is both
an alien landscape and a gritty, thoroughly East London Street.
The dingy brick facades of the shop buildings are largely uniform,
betraying little of their contents until one passing by is just
upon the window display and can suddenly be plunged into a world
of specially-designed mannequins for displaying saris (Fig. 2),
as at The Modern Saree Center. Standard London street signs coexist
with the same names again in South Asian scripts (Fig. 3).
Walk quickly through this neighborhood without glancing at the
microcosms of the store windows, and one would never guess this
is the unlikely one-stop place in London to worship at a conservative
mosque, party all night at one of London’s most popular nightclubs,
grab a beigel with lox at 4:30 am (Fig. 4), or buy Hindi films
with scantily-clad heroines and stunning musical numbers to the
tunes blaring from curry-house doors.
--Marianna Martin, 2002
|
