Ask most people in Britain when Punjabis arrived and the answer will be the 1960s, some version of a man getting off a plane with a suitcase and going to work in a factory. That happened, in very large numbers, and it is the centre of the story. But the first gurdwara in Britain opened in 1911, forty years earlier, and the man who paid for a good part of it was a Maharaja.
Before the Boats
There were Punjabis in Britain long before there was a Punjabi community. Lascars — South Asian seamen — crewed British merchant ships from the eighteenth century onward and were put ashore in the port cities. Pedlars worked the northern towns between the wars. Students came to the Inns of Court and the medical schools.
The most conspicuous early arrival was Duleep Singh, the deposed last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, brought to England in 1854 at the age of fifteen and installed as a country gentleman in Suffolk. His daughter Princess Sophia Duleep Singh became a suffragette and sold The Suffragette outside Hampton Court, where she had a grace-and-favour apartment — a fact that sits oddly and permanently in the middle of both British and Punjabi history.
In 1911 the Khalsa Jatha of the British Isles opened a gurdwara at Shepherd's Bush in west London, assisted by a donation from the Maharaja of Patiala. It served a community of a few hundred. And in 1940 Udham Singh walked into Caxton Hall in Westminster and shot the man who had approved the Jallianwala Bagh massacre — a Punjabi story that took place entirely on British soil.
The Factories
The migration that built the modern community began after 1945, and it began because Britain went looking for workers.
Reconstruction and full employment left British industry short of labour in exactly the jobs that were hot, heavy, shift-based and badly paid. Recruitment ran through Commonwealth channels, and through the informal networks that mattered far more: one man in a foundry writing home about a vacancy. Because those networks reached back into the Doaba, the migration was concentrated to a remarkable degree on a small number of districts around Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur and Kapurthala.
The map of where people went is a map of where the work was. Rubber and food processing in Southall, where a factory taking on Punjabi labour in the 1950s seeded what became the largest Punjabi settlement in Britain. Foundries and metal-bashing in Smethwick, Wolverhampton and the Black Country. Textiles in Bradford and the West Yorkshire mill towns. Paper mills at Gravesend. Buses and railways nearly everywhere.
Most of the early arrivals were men, living several to a room, working double shifts and sending nearly everything home. Wives and children followed later — a shift that the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act accelerated, first by prompting a rush to arrive before the controls came in, then by making family reunion the main remaining route. That is when the community stopped being a workforce and became a population: houses instead of lodgings, schools, shops, and gurdwaras in converted churches and cinemas.
Then East Africa
In 1972 the pattern changed again. Idi Amin expelled Uganda's Asian population at ninety days' notice, and close to forty thousand people arrived in Britain in a matter of months, on top of the earlier movement out of Kenya. Many were Punjabi, and many were nothing like the labour migrants who had come before: shopkeepers, accountants, professionals, arriving with qualifications and no capital because it had all been left behind.
They went where there were already communities — Southall, Leicester, Wembley — and they changed the economic shape of those places quickly. The full account of how they came to be in East Africa in the first place is a separate one, and it starts on a railway line out of Mombasa.
The Turban
The defining civil rights fight of Punjabi Britain was about a piece of cloth, and it took a decade.
Transport authorities took the position that a bus crew's uniform included a cap, and that a turban was therefore not permitted on duty. The dispute ran first in Manchester and then, most bitterly, in Wolverhampton, where the council refused for two years. Sohan Singh Jolly announced that he would burn himself to death if the ban stood. In April 1969 it was lifted.
Then came helmets. When crash helmets became compulsory for motorcyclists, the law effectively barred turban-wearing Sikhs from riding, and in 1976 Parliament passed an exemption. And in 1983, after a Birmingham school refused to admit a boy who would not remove his turban, the House of Lords decided Mandla v Dowell Lee — holding that Sikhs are an ethnic group and therefore protected by the Race Relations Act. That judgment is still the foundation of Sikh legal protection in Britain.
Each of these was argued as a small administrative matter, and each of them was a question about whether you could be fully British without ceasing to be visibly Sikh.
Southall, 1976 and 1979
The other half of the story is what it was like to live there.
In June 1976 an eighteen-year-old named Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered in a racist attack in Southall. The response from young Punjabis born or raised in Britain was not the response of their fathers: the Southall Youth Movement was founded within days, on the explicit basis that the community would defend itself rather than petition. Three years later, in April 1979, an anti-fascist demonstration in Southall ended with the death of the teacher Blair Peach after police action, and a town that had been treated as quiescent labour was on the front of every newspaper in the country.
The Indian Workers' Association had been organising in the factories since the 1950s. What changed in the late 1970s was that a British-born generation stopped asking.
What It Became
Punjabi is now among the most widely spoken languages in England and Wales. Bhangra was reinvented in Britain in the 1980s — the daytimer scene, built for young people who could get out of the house in the afternoon but not the evening, produced a music that eventually travelled back to Punjab and changed it. Southall's Sri Guru Singh Sabha gurdwara, opened in 2003, is among the largest outside India.
The route runs from a foundry in Smethwick to the Cabinet, and it took about three generations. It also runs from a gurdwara in Shepherd's Bush in 1911, which is worth remembering whenever the community is described as new.