The People’s Archive • Migration • Leicester, 1970
By Kavi Pujara:
1970, England: Paul McCartney leaves The Beatles, Enoch Powell is re-elected as a Tory MP two years after delivering his infamous anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech; and my mother Sarla (pictured right) celebrated her niece’s 16th birthday (pictured left).
It’s their first summer in the UK having migrated from East Africa the previous winter. Their move to the UK was triggered by the Kenyan government’s Africanisation policy in the late 1960s which stopped issuing trading licences to non-Africans, forcing Asian business owners to close up and leave the county of their birth.
My father spent eight months dissolving his business, sending my mother and brother ahead of him to the UK to join my aunt. These women laid the foundations for a new life with few resources or state help. They found accommodation, enrolled their children into schools and found employment while navigating new cultural codes, inclement weather and language barriers.
These were challenging times in a racially-charged England. However, what I love about this image is that they still found time to get dressed up and celebrate a girl turning sixteen, without their husbands, fathers or The Beatles.
Photo © Kavi Pujara, all rights reserved.
This photograph was submitted to The People’s Archive by Kavi Pujara in 2021, and it still feels as powerful now as it did when it first came in. It is the kind of image that says a lot in one frame. Not just about Leicester in 1970, or about migration and settlement, but about family, resilience, pride and the reality of building a life in a country that could be hostile and unwelcoming. It is striking as a photograph in its own right, full of colour, presence and character, but it also gets to the heart of what The People’s Archive is about. A photograph can hold history, stir memory, and make you stop and think properly about the people in front of you and what their lives might have carried. That is what we believe in at the People’s Archive and across BCA more broadly.
Photography belongs to everybody, and images like this show exactly why.
