Context: 1960s/70s Britain & Immigration
Britain in the 1960s and 70s
Anita and Me is set in the fictional village of Tollington, a thinly disguised version of the real Black Country mining village of Essington in the West Midlands, where Meera Syal grew up during the 1960s and 1970s. Understanding the historical and social context of this period helps you make sense of the novel, because the novel’s themes of identity, racism, and belonging are inseparable from the real events happening in Britain at the time.
Post-war Britain faced a severe labour shortage. The 1948 British Nationality Act gave citizens of Commonwealth countries the right to live and work in the UK, and the arrival of the Empire Windrush in June 1948 — carrying 802 passengers from the Caribbean — became a symbol of mass Commonwealth immigration. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of families arrived from India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, and other former colonies to fill jobs in factories, hospitals, and public transport.
The Kumars in Anita and Me represent this wave of immigration. Meena’s parents are educated, professional Punjabi immigrants who came to Britain seeking a better life. They are part of a small Indian community in an overwhelmingly white working-class village — a situation that mirrors Syal’s own family, who were one of the only non-white families in Essington.
Enoch Powell and “Rivers of Blood”
On 20 April 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered a speech in Birmingham that became known as the “Rivers of Blood” speech. Powell warned that continued immigration would lead to violence and social collapse, claiming that “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” Although Powell was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, polls showed that 74% of the British public agreed with him.
Syal shows the same rhetoric working at village level. When Sam Lowbridge stands up at the village fete and objects to the collection going to “some darkies we’ve never met”, shouting “This is our patch”, he is repeating the language and attitudes that Powell legitimised. The novel shows how mainstream political rhetoric gave ordinary people permission to express racist views openly. For Meena, this is a pivotal moment: she hears someone she knows — someone from her own village — publicly declare that people like her do not belong.
Tollington is based on the real villages of the Black Country — an area of the West Midlands historically defined by coal mining, iron working, and heavy industry. By the 1960s, the mines were closing and communities were losing their economic purpose. Syal uses this decline to mirror the anxieties of the white working-class characters: their world is changing, their jobs are disappearing, and they look for someone to blame. The immigrant families become convenient scapegoats.
The village’s insularity is crucial. Tollington is small, close-knit, and resistant to change. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. The Kumars are visible precisely because they are different: their food smells different, their language sounds different, and their customs are unfamiliar. Syal captures this with dark humour: the “Aunties” (the Indian women who visit the Kumars) are treated as exotic curiosities by the white neighbours, who simultaneously enjoy their food and resent their presence.
Syal’s Autobiographical Voice
Anita and Me is a semi-autobiographical novel. Like Meena, Syal grew up as the daughter of Punjabi immigrants in a white working-class village. Like Meena, she was one of very few non-white children in her community. Syal has described how she used humour as a survival mechanism — making people laugh before they could make her feel small — and this is exactly what Meena does throughout the novel.
However, the novel is not straightforward autobiography. Syal has stated that she “exaggerated, invented, and rearranged” events for dramatic effect. The character of Anita Rutter, for example, is a composite of several real people rather than a single individual. This matters for the exam: you should refer to Syal as the author making deliberate creative choices, not simply recording her memories.
Syal uses the semi-autobiographical form to explore the dual identity of second-generation immigrants with both authenticity and artistic control. Meena’s voice feels genuine because it is rooted in Syal’s own experience, but the novel’s structure, symbolism, and character arcs are carefully crafted fiction.
Your prose question It credits your response to the text (AO1), your analysis of language, structure and form (AO2) and your accurate written English (AO4). Context is not assessed here, so a separate history paragraph earns nothing. Background still helps you understand the novel: the Windrush generation, Powell’s speech, the decline of mining communities, and the experience of second-generation immigrants all explain why the characters behave as they do. Use it only where it sharpens a point about Syal’s language and characters.
Syal wrote the novel in 1996, looking back on the 1960s with hindsight. This gap between the time of writing and the time of the story allows her to combine a child’s innocent perspective with an adult’s understanding of racism and prejudice.
The Wider Immigration Debate
The novel captures a moment when Britain was wrestling with a fundamental question about national identity: who counts as British? For white characters like the “Ballbearings Women” and Mr Christmas, Britishness is defined by whiteness, rooted in a nostalgic vision of village life that never truly existed. For the Kumars, being British means contributing to the community, working hard, and raising children who speak English and attend the local school. Yet they are never fully accepted. Papa’s assertion, “We are the British,” is both a statement of fact and a challenge to those who would deny it.
Syal shows that racism in Tollington is not always violent or overt. Much of it is casual, embedded in everyday language and assumptions: the neighbours who assume the Kumars eat “strange food,” the shopkeeper who watches Meena more closely than white children, the surprise when Meena speaks with a Black Country accent rather than a “foreign” one. This casual racism is in some ways more insidious than Sam Lowbridge’s open hostility, because it is normalised and therefore harder to challenge.