Context: 1960s/70s Britain & Immigration
Britain in the 1960s and 70s: A Nation in Transition
Anita and Me is set in the fictional village of Tollington, based on the real village of Essington in the Black Country, where Meera Syal grew up. The novel is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s — a period of enormous social change in Britain. To understand the novel, you need to understand the world Syal was writing about and the tensions that shaped it.
The British Nationality Act 1948 gave citizens of Commonwealth countries the right to live and work in Britain. The ship HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Docks in June 1948, carrying 492 passengers from the Caribbean — the symbolic start of mass post-war immigration.
Immigration from the Indian subcontinent increased significantly during the 1950s and 1960s. Families like the Kumars came to fill labour shortages in factories, foundries and the NHS. They were invited by the British government, yet often faced hostility from local communities. This contradiction — being invited yet unwelcome — is central to Meena’s experience in Tollington.
Enoch Powell and “Rivers of Blood”
On 20 April 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered a speech in Birmingham warning that continued immigration would lead to violence. He quoted the Roman poet Virgil: “I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” The speech was dubbed the Rivers of Blood speech. Powell was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, but polls showed 74% of the British public agreed with him.
Syal references Powell’s rhetoric directly. Sam Lowbridge parrots anti-immigration slogans echoing actual racist election material used in the 1964 general election in Smethwick. The speech emboldens characters like Sam to voice their racism openly. Syal shows how political rhetoric gives ordinary people permission to be cruel. For Meena’s parents, the speech represents the painful reality that no matter how hard they work, some people will never accept them.
The Black Country: Coal, Community and Decline
Tollington is a former mining village. By the late 1960s, the coal mines and factories that had sustained communities like this were closing. Syal captures a world where the old industrial working class is losing its identity. The motorway being built nearby (the M6) literally tears through the landscape, symbolising modernisation destroying traditional community. This economic decline fuels resentment — immigrants become a convenient scapegoat for problems caused by deindustrialisation.
The closure of mines and factories created economic hardship and a loss of identity for white working-class communities. Syal shows how this frustration was redirected towards immigrant families like the Kumars, rather than at the economic system that caused the decline.
Syal’s Autobiographical Roots
Meera Syal was born in Wolverhampton in 1961 to Punjabi parents who had emigrated from Delhi. She grew up in Essington, a small mining village where her family were among the only South Asian residents. Like Meena, Syal experienced the tension of being caught between two cultures — speaking Punjabi at home and English at school, eating Indian food but craving chips, wanting to fit in while being visibly different.
While Anita and Me draws heavily on Syal’s childhood, it is not autobiography. Syal has said Meena is a “heightened version” of herself — funnier, bolder, more rebellious. Anita is a composite character. However, the emotional truth — the loneliness of being the only Asian child, the desperate desire to belong, the richness of family gatherings — is deeply personal. Syal published the novel in 1996, when British Asian voices were largely absent from mainstream literature.
Why Context Matters for OCR
The modern prose section of your closed text exam tests your ability to analyse the studied text and compare it with an unseen extract from a modern prose text on a related theme. Part (a) asks you to compare the two extracts (20 marks), and part (b) asks a related question about your studied text (20 marks). Context is assessed in this section — AO3 (context) — so knowledge of post-war immigration and Syal’s background is essential. Spelling and punctuation are not marked here.
AO1 (personal response with textual references), AO2 (analysis of language, form and structure) and AO3 (context) are all assessed. You must integrate all three — a response that analyses language brilliantly but ignores context will not reach the top band.