The politics of Britain’s Asian Youth Movements

Abstract

The Asian Youth Movements (AYMs) of the 1970s and 1980s were powerful examples of political movements influenced by black politics and a version of secularism that became a unifying force between different religious communities. Drawing on interviews with participants in the youth movements and material collected together for the ‘Tandana-Glowworm’ digitised archive of AYM ephemera, the author contextualises the AYMs in the political history of Asians in Britain, analyses their distinctive political stance and describes the leaflets, magazines and posters which they produced. The legacy of the AYMs, it is argued, lies in their example of organising politically at the grass roots across religious divides.