Picturing Resistance and Resilience: South Asian Identities in the Work of Chila Kumari Burman

Abstract

The issues of migration and the allocation of passports is a contentious issue in twenty-first-century Britain. This paper offers a timely assessment of Chila Kumari Burman’s diptych, Convenience, Not Love, 1986–7, which uses the passport motif to present a scathing indictment of British immigration policy in the post-1945 era, which champions the resilience of the British South Asian diaspora in the face of persistent racial discrimination. Taking issue with the stereotype of South Asian women as ‘meek and passive victims’, the paper concludes with a discussion of Burman’s self-portraits from the 1990s, proposing them as ‘radically narcissistic’.