Author Interview

Well, my story’s really more complicated that that. My father came from a very wealthy Indian upper-class family, and moved to England and married a woman, my mother, who was lower middle class. But to answer your question, from my point of view, it’s a sense of where you are in relation to other people. As a teenager, it’s a sense of what you can and can’t achieve, where you can and can’t go. So the expectations of us, as lower-middle-class kids, were that we would be clerks, like my dad, or work in banks or insurance agencies, and so on. One of the things that happened in the sixties was that you were slightly liberated from your sense of class, because the pop stars that we knew, who were mostly lower middle class, like John Lennon or The Who, had liberated themselves from the straightjacket of class. We identified with them, and felt that we could then make our way in London, in culture, in pop, fashion, and in my case writing. So I think of class in terms of constraint, and also in terms of the intellectual deprivation, you might call it, of people who didn’t take culture seriously.