- The Guardian, Saturday 26 January 2008
From 1979 to 1984, I worked mostly in the theatre - at the Royal Court, the Soho Poly and the RSC. Then from 1984 to 1987 I wrote the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid for Channel 4. This made me a bit of money which meant that I could take a couple of years out to write some fiction.
I'd written novels throughout my teens, and in many ways The Buddha of Suburbia was the novel that I'd always been writing. The first half of the novel was ready to go, while the second half was influenced by the years I'd spent working in the theatre.
My father was an immigrant, and my family lived through the first postwar transformation of Britain in terms of race. Some of that I explored in My Beautiful Laundrette, but there was plenty left over that I wanted to say. I felt that the period I'd lived through - the 1960s and 70s - was ready to be examined in terms of race, sex, fashion, drugs and music. I believed that the novel was the best place for this material as I'd really be able to stretch out and consider it properly. But also because it would be a direct method for me - by which I mean it wasn't mediated through a director or actors. It was an opportunity for me to find my voice as a prose writer.
I was also fascinated by the radical politics of the 70s and became involved with the Workers Revolutionary party, the Communist party and the Socialist Workers party, mainly through my actor friends. I wanted to explore the convolutions of liberals when it came to race. After all pop music, too, turned - often hilariously - towards the Orient as a place of inspiration and nourishment due to the spiritual vacuum of the west - and it was this that I wanted to satirise, this placing of Asians. This is why the father in The Buddha of Suburbia, Haroon, is both revered as a mystic and wise man, and spat on as a Paki. If Haroon was alienated in Britain because he was Indian, then his son Karim is alienated in a different way - mainly because people told him he didn't have a place. Bear in mind that I wrote this at a time when society hadn't shifted, hadn't started to see itself as multicultural, so a character like Karim, who was both English and of Indian descent, would be marginalised, placeless.
I think I thought of myself as a British writer, an English writer even; English literature and British sitcoms had been a major influence on me. The Buddha of Suburbia therefore gave me the chance to write comedy, which was and is something I enjoy more than anything else - particularly comedy verging on farce, which is especially true of the character of Changez in the novel.
Music is very important in this book, too. It was my obsession when I was growing up, as it was for many people of my generation. This was a time when postwar music was at its best, from the mid-50s until 1976, just after the beginning of punk. Music was seen by the lower-middle classes as a way of getting out - through art school - into a band. In the novel, Charlie Hero is of course a musician, and he was representative of some of the kids that I grew up with - the Bromley contingent as they were known, including Billy Idol, and the kids who formed Siouxsie and the Banshees and others who became pop photographers or went to work for Vivienne Westwood.
Cyril Connolly once said that if a book you've written is still in print 10 years after it was published, it's an achievement, so at least I've managed that. But I guess also that when The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette and Midnight's Children appeared, they opened the door for multiculturalism. Writers who in former times were thought to be marginal began to enter the mainstream. Whereas before you only heard English names, you began to hear Rushdie, Kureishi, Mo, Ishiguro - and it became clear that race and its ramifications were to be the central issue of our time.
· Hanif Kureishi will be talking to John Mullan on Monday January 28 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1. Doors open at 6.30pm. Tickets cost £8 (returns only). Email book.club@guardian.co.uk or call 020 7886 9281
