January 8, 2023

The Golden Mile in Leicester, United Kingdom, is home to one of the biggest celebrations of Diwali – the Hindu festival – outside India. About 100 miles north of London, roughly a quarter of the city’s 400,000 population are of Indian origin, making it the city in the UK with the largest Indian population.  

This Golden Mile is a collection of photographs of Indians in Leicester by Kavi Pujara, published last year. “For over fifty years, families around This Golden Mile have had a shared experience of migrating to Leicester and have re-articulated their South Asian identity to exist within an English context. These experiences bond this community, and they bond them to me,” Pujara, 51-years-old, told the Martin Parr Foundation. “I made this work to give voice to that bond…Communities like this are not an erosion of British values or its culture, but a vital artery in our intertwined and tangled colonial histories.”

In 1928, Pujara’s grandfather emigrated from Gujarat, in British India, to the British colony of Kenya. Forty years later his parents emigrated from Kenya to the UK, since post-independent Kenya restricted the business activities of Indians who also held British passports.   

Pujara, a self-taught photographer, was born in Leicester, near the Golden Mile, a street of Indian stores selling jewelry, sarees and samosas. Pujara grew up in the city, at “a time when overt acts of racism – being spat at, chased by the National Front, being called ‘wog’ or a ‘paki’ and being told to ‘Go back home’ – were common, as the Parr Foundation’s website describes it.

In 1990, at age 18, Pujara left for London. He earned a BSc in Software Engineering, University of Hertfordshire, 1994; and an MA in Screenwriting, Royal Holloway University, 2010.  

He works as a picture editor at BBC News, which he joined in 2009. Earlier, from 1995 to 2008, he was a documentary film editor at BBC Channel 14. He was a visiting tutor in film editing, Animation Department, at the Royal College of Art, London, 1999 – 2003.

In 2016, he returned to Leicester, where he lives with his wife and two children. The Parr Foundation, based in Bristol, UK, held an exhibition of Pujara’s photos last year, to coincide with the publication of his book.

“This Golden Mile,” writes Pujara, “exists in the poetry of homes, temples and street corners; it’s down the alleys and through the gaps in steel fencing leading to crumbling industrial plots. This Golden Mile is both an entry point and an ending, the last mile of a long journey to Britain.”

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