In 1965, Yash Pal Suri moved with his young family from his home in India to Britain to settle as a much-needed doctor there, along with thousands of other immigrants. While he prospered there, he still felt the yearning for his homeland and his family, so came up with an idea to keep in touch. The telephone service was unreliable and letter writing was too time-consuming, so he bought two Super 8 cameras, two projectors and two reel-to-reel tape recorders and sent one lot to his folks: now he could send them film and audio tapes of his new life and they could keep him up to date with events in India in return...
The idea of sitting through someone else's home movies might not be an especially appetising one for most people, but with I for India director Sandhya Suri, daughter of the doctor, fashioned from her family's personal records a feature that illustrated the history of immigration in Britain, from the point of view of the immigrant. Her father found himself between two stools due to being an outsider in the U.K., but when he returned to India he was seen as an outsider there too thanks to spending a large part of his life abroad.
You might think of the experience of Indians and Pakistanis in Britain as a struggle for acceptance in the face of ignorance and racism from the locals, and the director does include footage from current affairs programmes of the seventies where such luminaries as Margaret Thatcher claim that the British way of life feels as though it is under threat (plus ca change!) and the extreme right wingers such as the National Front make their presence felt. Yet on the other hand, the home movies show the Indian family getting on well with their new neighbours, enjoying get-togethers and birthday parties for the kids.
Not that Yash Pal Suri doesn't have his own gripes, as he never feels as if he completely assimilated into his adopted country; we hear his audio tapes that he is sick of having his name pronounced wrongly (how difficult is it to say "Dr Suri"?), and more importantly how he feels he is missing out on his relatives' lives being such a long distance away from them. This leads to his decision in the eighties to set up a practice in India, taking his wife, who is not so keen although she doesn't want to admit it to him, and three daughters who find a renewed sense of belonging there, along with a new sense of boredom when they find there's not much to do.
One of the ironies of the story is that once the doctor sets up his own surgery, the locals felt that he wouldn't know how to treat them properly (we see a modern day snake oil salesman plying his trade as if to say, this is what he had to compete with) and now he didn't really belong there either. Thus, he made the difficult decision to return to the U.K., where at least he would be guaranteed patients who wanted to visit him. The film ends in the present, with one of the daughters going to live in Australia and her family bidding her a tearful goodbye, but able to understand her motives. I for India is fascinating in places, moving in others, but in some ways it's almost too intimate: you feel as if you're intruding in the Suri family's privacy. However, by taking this level of first-hand depth it evokes the bigger picture of two nations with stronger links than they might acknowledge, even if there are those left somewhere in the middle wondering about their identities.
