I was hoping my first visit to a pub would be a rite of passage.

Aged just fifteen, I felt more anxious about being the lone brown face in a white environment than I was about being served my first pint. Opening the door, an old man at the bar shouted: “Anyone order a mini-cab?”

The town I lived in, Dunstable which borders Luton in Bedfordshire, had very few Asians like me in it—apart from, guess what? Nothing could have prepared me for the humiliating laughter that broke out after being mocked for daring to enter their world. I’d like to say I had a witty response to their cab driver jibe but you can never be prepared for this kind of ignorance, especially when you’re an awkward 15-year-old.

It didn’t stop me from having my first ever pub pint that evening (Wadworth 6X) and it hasn't dimmed my love for pubs in the intervening 20 years. Moving to a more diverse area helped, but even then there were many establishments that I didn’t feel comfortable in. Especially as the beer industry has a blighted record in the way it treats people of colour.

I found my confidence by visiting so-called desi pubs, where I was served by other British-Asians keen to make these spaces their own. Two in particular: the late-night karaoke bar-come-Indian restaurant, The Blue Eyed Maid, and the small local The Gladstone which are both in Borough, South London.

The Maid was run by a landlord called “Jay” and protected by a rota of Asian bouncers, which immediately put me at ease. I visited frequently during my time as an evening editor at a nearby daily newspaper (my colleagues and I ended up dubbing it the One-Eyed Sub.) It was raided during the 2017 London Bridge attack and is now, sadly, permanently closed. The Gladstone was a more sedate environment and a desi pub in the truest sense: providing a rich Anglo-Asian experience similar to the bars across London, particularly in Southall, and in the West Midlands.

As Parminder Dosanjh at the arts organisation, Creative Black Country explains: “desi means country, and in this particular case mother country.”

Desi is a word that was never used in my house. My Dad was of South Indian origin but was born and raised in Singapore to a family that claimed to be Anglo-Indian, and my mother was Malaysian. We only spoke English bar the occasional Malay word, which inevitably centred round food, as both my parents liked to cook. India was an alien and exotic place to me. I was essentially rootless, feeling out of place with white people and without kinship from people of my own colour.

But I did hear “desi” once when I was visiting one of my few Indian friends in Luton when their parents would ask for a cup of tea “desi style.” I never dwelled on it and only recently realised that it means “back home” and is from the Sanskrit word desh, which means land and country. When used in the context of bars it usually means traditional English pubs owned by Indian immigrants that serve Punjabi food. Although in recent times they can be used to describe any pub that fuses Indian and English culture.

Desi pubs were first set up in the 1970s in places such as the West Midlands to give refuge to Indian immigrant workers escaping the discrimination of “colour bars” where they were banned from drinking in lounges or smoke rooms. In fact, Malcolm X had seen this apartheid first-hand when visiting Smethwick, on the west side of Birmingham, to meet the Indian Workers’ Association a few days before his assassination in 1965.

The first desi pubs became true community hubs, with immigrants also able to access services such as legal, marriage and employment advice within them. Some even had a community pot where people would contribute funds that paid out to anyone suffering illness, accident or misfortune. But the hostility these pubs and Asian landlords received is also an important part of wider British social history, as it runs parallel to how England treated other groups of immigrants such as the Windrush Generation.

Parminder, who commissioned Desi Pubs a 152-page glossy catalogue celebrating their rich tradition in the Black Country, explains that the first Asian landlords needed a great deal of strength and resilience to go toe-to-toe with racists especially as sites which eventually became desi pubs—such as The Red Lion in West Bromwich—were formerly hubs for fascist groups like the National Front.

““It’s really important that you can go to a pub, play your own music, [eat] your own food, feel like you’re part of the community and just make new friends. That’s what pubs are about, right?””

— Megha Khanna, The Gladstone

“When Jeet the landlord took over The Red Lion he was threatened and had regular visits from people saying ‘Go! You don’t belong here, we want our pub back,’” Parminder says. “Jeet often talked about having a baseball bat under the bar and if he was faced by a gang he would pull it out; not actually as an act of violence, but just to show them he was not threatened.

“He’d often say: ‘Come in and have a drink in the bar. If you’re not pleased with our service, then you’ve got the right to complain. If you’re happy, then stay and have a drink, but we want no trouble.’ So he had this really wonderful kind of noble approach as well as a warrior spirit,” she adds.

Jeet’s example demonstrates how pioneering Asian landlords were prepared to soak up the racism of customers, and how they perhaps had a higher acceptance threshold of prejudice compared to my generation.

Parminder goes on to tell me that our British-Asian contemporaries have taken over the pubs from their fathers and in many cases “gentrified” them so they appeal to white and brown folks alike. It feels as though without the first generation’s bravery, many Asians would not feel at ease frequenting and running bars in the UK.

A pub like The Gladstone in Borough is a fitting legacy to that “warrior spirit.” Landlady Megha Khanna took over in April 2017, and changed the food from pies to dishes, such as chicken tikka, and introduced Diwali celebrations with live Indian music. The pub isn’t simply a transplant from Megha’s home city of Delhii though, with its local community relishing how it deftly mixes east with west but retains the feel of a traditional boozer. It’s the pub of my dreams, and I wish it existed to my teenage self.

“The locals absolutely love it that there’s an Indian family running a pub,” Megha says. “They like the fact that it’s a family-run pub.”

Her customers also have a lot to thank Megha and her brother, Gaurav, as they provided an incredible service during the 2017 London Bridge terror attack which happened in the first few months of their stewardship.

“The day the attack happened we were having a birthday party at the pub for one of our friends,” she tells me. “There was a lot of panic as we were pretty close to the area where it happened and we had to calm everybody down.”

“People were not able to get back home because the roads were closed so we offered shelter at our pub until they could figure out how to get home. There were people in the pub who had escaped the attack and needed to call their partners. We let them charge their phones, use the toilets and we gave them free drinks. We didn’t sleep until five o'clock in the morning.”

Sadly, being an Asian-run pub still marks them out—even now in 2021—and they suffered a racist incident when a group of agitators protesting against the Black Lives Matter demonstrators descended on them after a rally in the summer when they were serving takeaway-only drinks. Luckily this was an isolated occurrence.

“There were a bunch of racist people who made their way to the pub from Waterloo,” Megha says. “They said something [derogatory] about Indians running a pub and one of our local customers told them off.

“It’s really important that Asian people feel pubs are safe places. I went to a pub once in the North and people were just looking at us. It’s really important that you can go to a pub, play your own music, [eat] your own food, feel like you’re part of the community and just make new friends. That’s what pubs are about, right?”

She’s right. I never was part of the white community in the town I grew up in, and the best I could expect would be a similar treatment and be stared at by the locals. Having a desi pub in your area is a marker laid down that says “every culture is welcome” and reflects how Britishness is broad, and is made up of many colours.