British Mirpuris

Three Pounds in My Pocket

Kavita Puri hears what that catch-all term “Asian” really means for British South Asians. Although the Indian subcontinent is a vast place, the main migrant groups from the early "three pound" generation came from a handful of places.

One of the pleasures (let's make that the only pleasure) of driving to and from Cardiff from London is stumbling across interesting shows on Radio 4 which I would otherwise never imagine I ought to catch. That is how I came to be listening the Three Pounds in My Pocket  (link and precis above) on Friday.

Four minutes forty nine seconds into that installment I learned that the majority of British Pakistanis in England have origins in the Mirpur District, which is in Azad Kashmir; Mirpuris migrated because of the Mangla Dam, which was built in the 1960s and eventually flooded the surrounding farmland.

Maybe that is where the girls' grandfather was from?

I am heading East on the M4 this morning, I wonder what if anything on https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl7j/2019/12/22 will catch my fancy.