Nowhere Man

In a hierarchical society is there any greater privilege than being able to declare yourself free of class, wonders, Shougat Dasgupta

- Shougat Dasgupta

WHEN I WAS 11, i became aware of class. It says something about my sheltered upbringing in the Arabian Gulf that I was not already aware of socioeconomic stratification, of inequality, of the idea that some people had less and others more, or that birth and surname could be stand-ins for character. True to this upbringing, my first encounter with class was not personal but through my growing interest in British popular culture, mainly football and pop music. I had already been following English and Scottish football for three or four years, insofar as this was possible in the 1980s with so little live football to watch. Instead there was shortwave radio tuned to the BBC World Service, weekly televised highlights, and books and VHS videos. And imported newspapers and magazines, days and weeks old and very expensive, bought for me by my bemused father.

Around the time, I saw a clip from a 1964 BBC Panorama documentary in which a presenter marvelled in Received Pronunciation at the swaying, singing Kop in Liverpool’s last home game of a championship-winning season. “An anthropologist studying this Kop crowd,” says the presenter, looking at the massed ranks of wan, skinny boys and old men singing Beatles songs, “would be introduced into as rich and mystifying a popular culture as in any South Sea island.” Here was an Englishman standing before other Englishmen as if before an alien tribe. The educated, plummy-voiced BBC reporter might as well have been from another planet, so distant was he from the shared culture of the crowd. Like the reporter, I wondered how they were so in sync, so tuned to one  another that they improvised lyrics and segued into different songs and chants in one unfaltering voice.