HIDDEN HISTORIES KAVITA PURI on a murder that sparked a youth movement
IN THE LATE SPRING OF 1976 AN 18-YEAR-OLD boy was walking at night in the Southall area of London near the Victory pub, just opposite the popular Dominion Theatre. He never made it home. The following day, Suresh Grover came across a pool of blood outside the pub. He asked the police officer standing by what happened and was told someone had died the night before. The policeman added: “It was just an Asian.”
That young man was Gurdip Singh Chaggar. He was stabbed to death. There’s a photo of him in a dark red turban and his school uniform, and he looks so young, his whole life ahead of him. I documented his murder in my BBC Radio 4 series Three Pounds in My Pocket. His death was remembered by every British South Asian I spoke to. It shook the community deeply. Many felt it could have been them, or any of their children, if they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It’s hard to imagine now, but in those days racism was rife. Words that cannot be openly said today were flung around wantonly. Sometimes these were backed up by violence. The National Front was in its heyday, making its presence felt. A generation of young British South Asians who had been born and grown up in Britain – this country was their home, even if they were not made to feel that way – had had enough.
Suresh was furious at the policeman’s dismissive attitude. He told me he covered the blood with a piece of red cloth and put bricks around it as a sign of respect, so no one would walk over it. He erected a makeshift sign to say someone had died.
As word spread of Chaggar’s murder, Suresh, along with hundreds of others, spontaneously took to Southall’s streets to protest against racism and his killing. Suresh recalls the police trying to stop them. While they marched, the blood of Gurdip Singh Chaggar had still not been cleared up.
An excellent and important new Channel 4 documentary series called Defiance charts – for the first time on British television – the fightback in Southall and around the country that began with Chaggar’s killing.
In the first episode, I saw, for the first time, news footage from the day after Chaggar’s murder. You can see his blood spattered on the ground and all the way up the pavement’s railings. It’s chilling. What’s even more heartbreaking is that in an interview with Chag
