View source for The Buddha of Suburbia

            
First novel written by the playwright, filmmaker, screenwriter, [[Hanif Kureishi]], which soon after the publication in 1990, became very popular. Three years later, it was adapted as a BBC mini-series (featuring a soundtrack by [[David Bowie]]). 

The novel is mainly set in London (suburbs and city) with some episodes in New York. It‘s representative of British life in the 1970s. 

The main protagonist, Karim, tells the story of his growing up in London, being a mixed-race British citizen, in a country where racism and related stereotypes of the “other” are very much diffused. He’s looking for an identity which would solve the conflict of being an Englishman in an Indian body, seeking for money, sex, drugs, success, a higher social position,  extreme experiences who let him wander from the suburbs, to the City to the USA and then back to London.  

His “hybridity” (a concept which occupy a central place in Postcolonial Studies and much discussed by [[Homi K. Bahbha]]) in terms of race and sexual orientation – he’s bisexual - are reflected in the lack of any definiteness, any satisfying arriving point, his “boredom”, his different epiphanies followed every time by a new beginning, new encounters of re-enconters, new mode of identity expression, his diasporic experience in every aspect of life.

Written in first person, the novel is a ''Bildungsroman'', that is it follows of the development of the main character, from teenage life to adulthood, though it does not end up with full maturity as the classical expressions of the genre: at the end of the novel Karim is, as a matter of fact, full of hope, wondering (and letting us wonder) how his journey is going to continue. While the other characters have found a stable position in life he’s thinking to change his life once more again: “I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn’t always been that way.”
 
=== SUMMARY ===
 
Karim Amir is an “Englishmen born and bred, almost” (Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia, Faber Fisches, 1990, London, p. 3). “Almost” because he is the son of a mixed marriage between and Indian man, Haroon, and a British woman, Margaret. 
He considers himself to be English, although other people don’t: as soon as they see his skin and face features they start imaging how many stories of “aunties and elephants”(Idem, p. 141) he could tell not expecting that he’s from the London suburb Orpington. At the beginning of the novel Karim is seventeen, lives “restless and easily bored” (Idem, P. 3), “looking for truble, any kind of movement, action, sexual interest I could find” (Ibid.) belonging nowhere (or maybe belonging to a “third space”, in the words of  Homi K. Bahbha), in-between. 

His very traditional family (he also has a younger brother Allie), breaks up after the adultery committed by the father (to which Karim assist, as to other many events, being often a voyeur, voluntary or not), who falls in love with Eva, a charming, well-educated one-breast (because of a cancer) woman, with a passion for Orientalism (Buddhism, Yoga, Indian clothes). 
 
Haroon leaves the family, and this sepration is the opportunity for Karim to start a new life: he goes to live with him, Eva and her son Charlie (whose beauty makes people cry and whom Karim will love and have sex with, though they won’t have any proper relationship), exploiting all that a woman like Eva can offer him. Margaret goes to live with Allie, her older sister  Auntie Jean, and her husband Ted being for a long period lonely and depressed. 

From that moment Karim has three families and four places where to stay: Haroon, Eva and Charlie; Ted, Anuntie Jean, Margaret and Hallie, Uncle Anwar, his wife Jeeta and his daughter Jamila (a sort of feminist with whom Karim has quite regularly sex and who will be obliged by the old-fashioned father to an arranged marriage with Changez,a fat lazy Indian boy), and apart from their respective houses he can stay in his old abandoned apartment.

While Haroon becomes a sort of paid guru for souls in trouble (he's “The Buddha of Suburbia” of the title, altough Karim defines him in this way only later on in the novel), Karim attends for a short period college which Eva arranged for him. But he soon stops going there too and strolls around London, spending lots of time with Jamila and Changez. 
Jamila has married him only beacause the father had done an hunger strike menacing to let himself die if she hadn’t obeyed him. She will never touch Changez. Changez satisfies his sexual needs with the Japanese prostitute Shinko, who soon becomes a good friend of Jamila. He also discovers Jamila and Karim have sexual intercourse, but after an initial disappointment forgives them and lives with Jammie in a commune where she will firstly bear a “communal baby” (whose father is Simon) and then have a homosexual relation with Joanna. 

Meanwhile Karim, Eva, Haroon and Charlie move to live in South Kensigton, in the City and at this point starts the second part of the book – part one is titled “In the Suburbs", part two “In the City”. The new flat is a ugly and old, only Eva likes it. 
But the city, on the contrary, appears to be amazing and full of opportunities to Karim: “London seemd a house with five thousand rooms, all different” (Idem, p. 126).
Eva starts giving parties every night, inviting upper-class Londoners, and introduces Karim to Shadwell a theater director, who engages him for a part in his production of ''The Jungle Book''. It soon becomes clear to the enthusiastic Karim that he’s not been cast because of his talent but because of his ethnicity which makes him the ideal person to interpret Mowgly. However, Karim is not able to imitate the Indian accent as Shadwell had expected.  Karim, aware of being firstly considered because of his presumed authentic otherness accepts this compromise to start a career as an actor. 

The ensemble directed by Pike include Eleanor, the first woman with whom Karim really falls in love. It seems to be a sane passion but soon they get involved in group sex with Pyke and his wife Marlene, a swinging couple. Karim is submitted to Pike, another compromise he accepts to realizes his ambitions, but when Eleanor gets involeved in a regular relationshiup with Pike, Karim breaks with both of them. Karim looks for Charlie, who also lives in New York and stays with him for a while until two events disappoint him so much that he decides to come back to London. Firstly, Charlie beats up a journalist, without any reason, secondly, he seeks for extreme sexual (bondage) experiences to which Karim is asked to assist. The latter realizes at this point not to love Charlie any more.

Karim is offered the part of the “rebellious student son of an Indian shopkeeper” (Idem, p. 259) in a soap opera “which would tangle with latest contemporary issues”(Ibid.): “abortions and racists attacks, the stuff that polpe lived through but that never got on TV” (Ibid.). 
While he was in new York things had changed in his family: his mother has an English boyfriend youger than her, Eva has become popular with her furnishing business (he has started removing the ugly flat in Kensington with the help of Ted, Karim and later Eleanor, and had transformed then this activity in a proper business), and looks very dynamic and happy while Haroon appears to be older and melancholic. Finding out that Margaret is seeing another man hurts him, and it seems to be a reaction to it the fact that at the end of the novel he and Eva announce they will soon get married. 
Everybody seems to have find his/her way, but not Karim, ready for a new beginning in the so much beloved London. 
 

=== POSTMODERN BRITAIN ===
 
The ''Buddha of Suburbia'' offer the reader an image of Enlgand in the ’70-‘80s, of course from the point of wiew of a racial hybrid who faces the racist aspects of postcolonial period. 

Politics, feminism (as [[Simone De Beauvoir]]), music (e.g. Kevin Ayers, Pink Floyd, Who, David Bowie,), drug, sexual liberation, neofascism, racism on one side, superficial taste for orientalism (Buddhism, Yoga), capitalism, induividualism, eager of higher social class staus, search for success, fame in the increasingly obtrusive medias, sexual scandals (Profumo scandal), brands (e.g. Levi’s), youth subcultures (as [[Teddy Boys]]), media product (Faschion magazienes as Vogue, Harpers’ and Queen), Bars (Chatterton Arms, Nashville, Pink Pussy Club): these aspects are all contained in the novel, more or less deepened, only cited (as the [[Profumo Affair|Profumo scandal]] or [[Enoch Powell]] controversial notoriety) or emptersonad by a character (as Jamila’s feminism), giving a complex and wide idea of how life must have been in the [[Swinging London]] of those years.


== BIBLIOGRAPHY ==

Kureishi, Hanif, ''The Buddha of Suburbia'', Faber Fisches, 1990, London

Morten Jacob, Sander Andersen, Frederik Nikolaj, Sandfeld Hansen, Rebekka Hellstrøm, Anneli Hiltunen, Adam Tarant Hobbs, Helene Thau Jackson, Joséphine Münch, Supervisor: Lars Axel Petersen, ''The Buddha of Suburbia: Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Society'', Roskilde University, International Basic Studies in Humanities 3.1.1., Spring Semester Project 2011.

Yu Cheng, Lee, ''Expropriating the authentic: cultural politics in Hanif Kureishi's "The Buddha of Suburbia"'', in EurAmerica, Vol. 26, No. 3 (September 1996), pp. 1-19. 


== EXTERNAL LINKS ==

http://www.gutenberg-gym.de/redaktion/buddha/index.php?rubric=Buddha+Of+Suburbia

http://www.hanifkureishi.com/

http://www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/kureishi/moloney1.html

http://rudar.ruc.dk/bitstream/1800/6418/1/Front%20Cover_merged%5B1%5D.pdf

http://www.ea.sinica.edu.tw/eu_file/12015053344.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gX_LF0aBKI