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9 The UK: Finding happiness Before you read a) Look at the title of this section (“Finding happiness”) and at the title of the text below (“Three generations, two cultures”) and guess what the text might be about. b) Write down what your expectations are without looking at the text. Reading: The Mattani family Read the text in detail and check whether your assumptions from task 1 were right. Three generations, two cultures What is it like to be a family embedded in more than one culture and history at the same time? For the Mattani family in Leicester, it all comes down to finding happiness. 1  2  “At the school that I went to in London, there weren’t very many Asians so all the other people thought of me as alien, from Mars. And if I mentioned Africa, they thought I had been living in the jungles with the lions.” Priti Mattani is fortunate. The curious stares and name-calling of teenage school pupils in the late 1970s were her first and only taste of racism in Britain. More than 20 years on, she is married to Hemant and they are parents to two teenage daughters, Shefali, 16, and Nefali, 10. Priti and Hemant both graduated from British universities before going to run the family business in Leicester. The business has gone from strength to strength and specialises in two of the most important elements of Indian culture – clothes and music. They have recently dipped into the dotcom waters with a website which tries to persuade customers to come to the heart of England “for the best in everything Indian”. Like many of the first generation of Asians who arrived in the Midlands city, their families left India to start successful businesses in Central and East Africa. Chandu Mattani was born in Gujarat and went to Zambia and then Zimbabwe at the age of 18. In 1977, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year, he decided to bring his family to Britain. Now the Mattani family are looking back at their own decades of success in Britain. Leicester proved an easy choice of new home for Chandu. First, it was fertile ground for business. Secondly, he could be sure that his culture would not be diluted in one of the emerging centres of British-Indian life. […] The experience of being British with roots elsewhere means the Mattanis celebrate and savour a little of everything that has formed who they are today. “What we’ve learned is that it’s important to take up the good things from all communities and religions,” says Hemant. “We’d like to pass that onto our daughters as well.” So it is hardly surprising that when you raise the question of how Priti met Hemant you get what many would consider an unorthodox response. “We both didn’t tell our parents until a time we’d decided that we wanted to get married,” Priti laughs. […] One of the stereotypes of Indian-Britons is the arranged marriage. But it’s a custom that has been rapidly fading into history since the mid-1970s. In the case of the Mattanis, the path to happiness was undoubtedly smoother because the two families were already close friends who shared a cultural and religious background. So what would happen now if Priti and Hemant’s own daughters brought home boyfriends from different races, religions or even castes? “You don’t have much choice now,” jokes Hemant. “At 12 they threaten to call some of these action lines or parents lines to complain. At 16 they get their provisional driving licences and at 18 they say they’re going to do what they’re going to do!” What they have done as parents, he says, is try to show their daughters 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 132 Ethnic and cultural diversity Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verl gs öbv