Remembering Jagmohan Joshi - Indian Workers Association (GB)
At BRIG, we pay close attention to the forces that determine the relationship between State institutions and citizens. Jagmohaan Joshi has been among the great leaders who have influenced our thinking. In this respect. The analysis offered by the great anti racist campaigners like Joshi, Sivanandan and Stuart Hall has as much currency now as it did nearly seventy years ago.
Joshi, in particular, remained unshaken in his conviction that there was a direct connection between British imperialism and colonial exploitation abroad and the virulent racism and colour discrimination of post war Britain. It is an unavoidable fact that this racism continues till today albeit in different forms, but still wreaking havoc in the lives of black people in Britain.
Joshi was also clear about the fundamental connection between class and race. He shared the same view expressed by Stuart Hall who saw race as the agency through which class is experienced by black working people. At BRIG we are all too aware how race and class are inextricably tied together in determining the condition of life of black communities.
Joshi never made a distinction between different ethnic and national groups who had been subject to colonial oppression either through slavery in distant lands or through exploitation in their own countries. For Joshi, the only effective struggle against racism was based on a broad-based alliance of all colonized people. It is heartening to see that after a period of deliberate ‘ethnification’ of black communities, the BRIG membership draws from a whole range of cultural, ethnic, national and religious groups united in a common struggle against racism.
In the final analysis, Joshi believed in the power of the people to determine the course of history. Both in his politics and in his poetry he looked forward with optimism to a new dawn in which all people would be free of oppression and injustice. But Joshi was no romantic. He knew that the struggle would require real commitment, determination, conviction – and sacrifice. And it will take time, perhaps even decades. The baton has been passed on by the early campaigners like Joshi to our generation. We at BRIG do not underestimate the enormity of the task ahead of us but we are ready to face it no matter how long it takes.
Joshi would have wanted nothing less.
Jagmohan Joshi speaking in 1969: Courtesy of Jagdish Patel - “Reclamation” Exhibition (Nottingham 2023)
https://www.facebook.com/jagdishpatelphotography/videos/740158404536260
Further Reading:
100. Lal Salam! Red Salute to Jagmonah Joshi https://woodsmokeblog.wordpress.com/tag/jagmohan-joshi/
The Brown in Black Power: Militant South Asian Organizing in Post-War Britain - DiasporaIndiaIssue 3Essay - Aug 27, 2019 - Arsalan Samdani https://www.jamhoor.org/read/2019/8/27/the-brown-in-black-power-militant-south-asian-organizing-in-post-war-britain