“Does every generation have to prove itself in Britain?”

In the latest series of Three Pounds in My Pocket, BBC journalist Kavita Puri explores the experiences of South Asians in Britain in the 1990s and beyond. Here she talks to Rob Attar about a golden age that couldn’t last

The latest series of your documentaries on South Asians in Britain centres on the 1990s. Would it be fair to describe this as a golden age?

Yes, the 1990s were absolutely the golden age, and that’s how the people that I interviewed talked about it. The programme is called Three Pounds in My Pocket because when the generation that came over in the 1950s and 1960s arrived, they could only bring as little as £3. By the time you get to the nineties, it’s really the children of the £3 generation who are coming of age. They were in their twenties and had a very different relationship to Britain. Many were born here, this was their country, and by the nineties, they were navigating their way, and their identity, in Britain. For so many of them, it was a mixture of home life - which may still have had ties back to the mother country, whether it was India, Pakistan or Bangladesh - and also Britain. The 1990s was really a wonderful decade for expression in terms of music and film, and culture generally.

What were some of the main cultural expressions of the British South Asian community at this time?

In my last series, I talked about daytimers - underground clubs that British South Asians went to so they could listen to music and dance. But the events would take place in the middle of the day, partly because their parents might not have let