Avtar Singh Jouhl, who died in October 2022 at the age of 84, was national president of the Indian Workers Association (IWA) and a pivotal figure in Britain’s anti-racist movement over the past 60 years. He was a national institution, memorable for his quiet and distinctive voice, methodological thinking, and a fondness for storytelling.

I first met Avtar in 2014 while researching the history of Desi pubs in the Midlands. Wanting to highlight the IWA’s role in challenging the widespread practice of colour bar in the 1960s (often done through the simple act of going into certain pubs to share a pint), I had sought him out. While we had some common friends and a long involvement in challenging racism, the far right, and communalism in Britain, his political engagement had about three decades on mine. Speaking to him, I began to understand what John Berger meant when he said that ‘[W]e live not only our own lives, but the longing of our century.’

Born in the Jalandhar district of Punjab, India in 1938, Avtar came from a farming community with strong ties to the land and the sort of powerful resilience displayed during the farmers’ protests in late 2020 across India. When he began school in 1943, India had entered the most turbulent period in its modern history; the year before, the Quit India movement had been launched to great popularity, resulting in the imprisonment of over 100,000 people, widespread censorship of the press, and food shortages that culminated in over 4 million deaths in northern India. By the end of the Second World War, British authority in India had collapsed, and the country was so torn that when independence was granted on the condition of partition of the country, large-scale violence was inevitable.

The writer and activist John la Rose attempted to acknowledge the struggles waged by peoples in the Caribbean against colonialism and for popular power by famously stating that ‘We didn’t come alive in Britain.’ This also applied to Avtar and his generation. His cousin was imprisoned, and his parents were frequently arrested. Avtar learned his politics through his lived experience and the political education classes he attended in Punjab. Like many others from his background, he became active in the Indian Communist Party during the independence struggle. During Partition his family hid Muslim families to protect them, and after Independence he was active in the Student Federation of India, resulting in his arrest at one stage.

Arriving in Britain and settling in Smethwick in early 1958, he soon met the communist militants Maurice Ludmer and Jagmohan Joshi, which led to him joining the Communist Party, the Indian Youth League, and the IWA. They would all join with Shirley Fossick (later Joshi) to set up the Co-ordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CCARD). It was CCARD, alongside the Conference of Afro-Asian-Caribbean organisations (CAACO) in London, that would lead the campaigns around colour bar, racism, immigration laws, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, housing practices, and other issues through much of the 1960s.

Decades before the concept of intersectionality was devised, Avtar and others were thinking through and practising these concepts. Joshi and Jouhl were Indians, Hindu and Sikh, respectively; Maurice Ludmer, a Jewish Salfordian and ex-servicemen’s leader who was the founding editor of Searchlight; Shirley Fossick, a young feminist involved in anti-apartheid struggles; and Claudia Jones, a Black American Marxist feminist. It was through these connections that the local and global anti-racist struggles became clear — the American civil rights movement, struggles in the Third World, and the anti-racist struggle waged by Africans, West Indians, and Asians in Britain were all represented. It was through these struggles that Black as a political colour began to emerge and these fights began to be connected.

It was Avtar who told me about the great influence of Claudia Jones, an experienced campaigner who taught him two important lessons: how to speak and listen to people in their vernacular, and how to challenge the state and push back through the bureaucracy and language that the state itself utilises. She was introduced to the IWA through her friend Abhimanyu (Manu) Manchanda and campaigned in the infamous 1964 by-election in Smethwick, where a vicious racist campaign was being waged on the ground of this once-safe Labour seat. It was during this time that she invited Malcolm X to visit Smethwick, and although she sadly passed away before that could happen, Avtar was instrumental in organising Malcolm X’s momentous trip to the area.

By the beginning of the seventies, the optimism of the sixties had largely vanished; many veteran civil rights leaders had either passed on or been assassinated, and many of the major anti-colonial events like the Bandung Conference seemed a distant memory. In this context, it was left to Avtar and other comrades in organisations like the IWA to continue to spread the importance of linking the anti-racism movement and working-class politics in Britain with the work of challenging imperialism abroad.

Alongside the fight to build the strength of Indian workers — in the day-to-day struggles at factories, mills, and foundries from London to the north of the country, and in the vicious fights at Grunwick and Imperial Typewriters — the IWA also put a great deal of energy into lobbying the Indian government on human rights issues, particularly during the 1975–77 Emergency.

The organisation also responded strongly to the increase in racist attacks, the increasingly brutal immigration laws, and the problems for immigrants in policing and education. In this context, Avtar was instrumental in establishing the Campaign Against Racist Laws. He organised some of the largest marches in central London against immigration laws and worked closely with the newly formed Anti-Nazi League and various anti-deportation campaigns.

As Thatcher took power and deindustrialisation hit the Midlands hard, communities faced real problems. Avtar helped set up the Shaheed Udham Singh Welfare Centre, a welfare centre for the Asian community. Established in Soho Road, Birmingham in May 1978, it continues to function as a welfare and advice centre. In those bitter struggles that defined the eighties, Avtar played a crucial role in bussing hundreds of IWA members up and down the country to provide much-needed solidarity to the miners during the 1984–85 dispute.

In later years, Avtar recognised the importance of writing about and archiving the anti-racist struggles, donating his personal archives to the Wolfson Centre in Birmingham Library. In the cultural sphere, he worked with writers like Kit de Waal as well as theatre companies like Banner Theatre to further his message. Always a widely respected figure, for his involvement in the Desi pubs work Avtar is commemorated, alongside Malcolm X, in a stained-glass window at the Red Lion Pub near Smethwick.

In an interview later in his life, Avtar remarked: ‘I am content I have served the working class by advancing socialist policies, building [a] trade union organisation, [leading] anti-racist and anti-imperialist campaigns as well as leading struggles for equal rights and participating in welfare work.’

He deserves to rest content. The hard political struggles that people like Avtar and his comrades fought have made Britain a better place and a more equal society. That isn’t to say the work has been completed: the controversies over Birmingham’s Black and Asian communities being excluded from playing any meaningful role in Commonwealth Games hosted in the city in July / August 2022 and the recent communal troubles in Leicester are stark reminders of the need to continue fighting.

But his ideas, acts, and words are a reminder of a genuine tradition of struggles to overturn the existing order — and one that is always in danger of being forgotten. In the early 1960s, a leaflet was published called ‘Don’t Blame the Blacks’. It was a reminder that ‘incoming’ immigrant communities often understood English history better than the English working classes themselves; that issues around social justice and equality in social spheres, pubs, clubs, and factory floors were interlinked to imperial projects abroad; and that to properly wage a fight for justice, both social justice and equality needed to be realized. In the current climate, where the politics of anti-racism are always at risk of being appropriated and rewritten to serve existing power structures, we need people who fight energetically to build better, shared worlds — people like Avtar Singh Jouhl — more than ever.