According to Sezer, the first generation immigrants or even the English minorities have their valuable contribution to the redefinition of the concept of Britishness. Haroon ; Karim’s father, Anwar his friend or even Eva his second wife struggle to be accepted as typical English citizens as their inferior social class, their origins , their physical appearance or their accents show that they are only strange creatures came to challenge the secure and homogenous British society.( 3).
As Haroon comes from an aristocratic family in India, he always shows his superiority to the British society especially the South suburban as his wife Margaret indicates in these words ” they are higher than the Churchills” (Kureishi 24).Karim presents his father and says:” Like many Indians he is small, but Dad is also elegant and handsome, with delicate hands and manners; beside him most Englishmen looked like clumsy giraffes. He is broad and strong too: when young he’d been a boxer and fanatical chest-expander”. (Kureishi 4).
Haroon suffered the colonial period in India and believed that the English is a superior sacred race. When he is sent to England for education, Haroon’s image of the blessed British is crushed and he is disappointed when he saw the British as ordinary citizens as Karim shows in this passage:
Dad is amazed and heartened by the sight of the British in England, though. He’d never seen the English in poverty, as road sweepers, dustmen, shopkeepers and barmen. He’d never seen an Englishman stuffing bread into his mouth with his fingers, and no one had told him the English didn’t ish regularly because the water is so cold – if they had water at all. And when Dad tried to discuss Byron in local pubs no one warned him that not every Englishman could read or they didn’t necessarily want tutoring by an Indian on the poetry of a pervert and a madman (Kureishi 24-25).
