Asian Pub Landlord
From the collection of
From the collection of
Hans Raj Dhanjal from Wolverhampton is the first Asian pub landlord in the Midlands and, like all landlords, he's not just there to pull pints but to be a friendly ear and solve his customers' problems. As reporter John Meredith finds out in this 1968 news item it's not race relations that are foremost in his mind but the complexities of the Black Country dialect as practiced by the regulars of the Heart of Oak.
From local news to feature film, through home movies and TV documentaries, this collection showcases South Asian Britons in front of and behind the camera. The contribution of colonial troops is illuminated through the earliest newsreels, while hardhitting current affairs programmes highlight the struggles faced in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Public information films produced for South Asian audiences feature alongside Hindi-language films made in Britain and interviews with prominent Asian-British figures. A bold wave of British Asian filmmaking in the 1990s is represented through early works by the likes of Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia.