This chapter reviews the history, culture and politics of South Asian languages in the UK. South Asian migration to the UK dates back to the British colonial period. It expanded in the twentieth century, first with British Indian participation in the two World Wars and then with post-war British policies that initially encouraged South Asian immigration for low-skilled labour. South Asian communities in Britain share some characteristics but differ markedly in other respects. Overall, sustained migration, relatively large settlements, and a reduction in the early explicit hostility to migrants has meant that South Asian speech communities have tended to maintain their languages, though with inroads by English in each successive generation. South Asian languages initially struggled to be included in school curricula and university provision. Some languages, such as Urdu and Arabic, have wider religious or cultural appeal and see much higher uptake through education than other South Asian languages, even languages with more native speakers. Almost no research has been conducted on structural change within South Asian heritage languages, a rich area for future research on language contact and generational change.

Kaliprasanna Sinha’s Hutom Pyanchar Naksha (Observations of Hutom the Owl[GK14]; 1862) provides a bird’s eye view, so to speak, of nineteenth-century Calcutta, the bustling metropolis that also served as the seat of the British government in India. In reading the vignettes of urban life that the text proffers, this essay makes note of Sinha’s even-handed satire of the foibles of natives and the British alike. But given that it is the nouveau riche Bengali gentry that becomes the target for Sinha’s most trenchant critique, the essay considers how Hutom[GK15], written in the aftermath of 1857, an event that Sinha often refers to, presents, nonetheless, a more lateral view that redirects, if not displaces, received notions of colonial resistance. Hutom [GK16]affects, instead, a charged insouciance that revels in its immediate socius that it also critique. It does so, though, by deploying the form of the literary sketch and a narrative mode that is antinarrative or, more specifically – nonevental – in ways that are transimperially imbricated with nineteenth-century literary history, English as well as Bengali.

In this chapter, I focus on the Bengali-language Arshinagar (2015) directed by Aparna Sen, and the Hindi-language Dhadak (2018) written and directed by Shashank Khaitan. Both films are adaptations of Romeo and Juliet that place the play within the context of current socio-political issues of communalism and honour killings in India.

Detective or crime fiction has had a long and varied history in South Asia, at times inflected by local concerns, at other times transporting readers into a world of international intrigue. This chapter traces its development from its colonial origins under the aegis of a local boom in print media, ‘intrusive’ colonial law and policing and the influx of European narratives combined with precolonial tropes. The chapter focuses on iconic ‘homegrown’ detectives like Byomkesh Bakshi in the 1930s, the quintessential Bengali gentleman detective engaged in the high pursuit of truth, the debonair detectives Faridi and Imraan created by Indo-Pakistani writer Ibne Safi in the 1950s–1970s, and the heroes of ‘hard-boiled’ Hindi crime fiction in the 1970s–1990s. Crime fiction has also allowed women writers to imagine bold female detectives who challenge and debate gender norms, from Kamala Satthianadhan’s trailblazing Detective Janaki (1934) to Sujatha Massey’s Perveen Mistry. Crime fiction in South Asia has been intensely translational, not just from English but also across South Asian languages. It has pioneered its own distribution channels and spawned adaptations across media platforms.