Activism, Identity, and the Bengali Photo Archive

In the 1980s, a towering red brick building in London’s East End served as a vital space for activism and community life. Originally built as a school in the late 19th century, the Montefiore Centre later acted as a public meeting place, food pantry, canteen, and nursery. It also became the headquarters of the Federation of Bangladeshi Youth Organisations (FBYO), a national umbrella organisation for some of the youth groups that formed the British South Asian Youth Movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Well-known images of South Asian activism in East London come from social documentarians like Paul Trevor, whose invaluable photographs of Bengali activists, squatters, and protest actions have been displayed at Tate Britain, the National Galleries of Scotland, and London’s National Portrait Gallery. In 2023, while developing the Bengali Photo Archive – a joint project between Four Corners and Swadhinata Trust – I helped uncover a new collection of images that help tell these stories. Over the course of nine months, project volunteers and I digitised a collection of over 700 film negatives belonging to Lloyd Gee, who worked for FBYO during the 1980s and captured an array of snapshots throughout the organisation’s history. These images, along with hundreds of other personal snapshots, documentary photographs, and archival materials, became the basis for the exhibition ‘I Am Who I Am Now’: Selections from the Bengali Photo Archive (5 July – 10 August 2024) at Four Corners. We also held workshops with contributors to the archive, creating new exhibition materials imbued with lived experiences and reflections of community members themselves. Gee’s images provide a kaleidoscopic vision of East End activism. Busy scenes in the Montefiore Centre’s canteen offer us an inside look into an important space for discussion, dialogue, and learning. As Gee and a group of former FBYO members recalled during our workshop in May 2024, the canteen served as a ‘hotbed of political activity and conversations’. It was packed at all times of day, serving community members with cheap, hearty curry and warm tea. As a meeting place for pioneering activists like Ashraful Islam, who helped form the anti-racist Bangladesh Youth League in the mid-1970s, as well as supporters like Greater London Council (GLC) leader Ken Livingstone, the canteen was open to the general public and facilitated conversations between activists and everyday people from across the East End. In addition to being valuable historical documents, Gee’s photographs are impactful for the recollections and memories that they conjure up for FBYO activists themselves. Ashfaq Kazi, for example, remembered activist Rajonuddin Jalal as being central for his introduction to the ‘wider issues faced by the [Bengali] community’, which catapulted him into activism around housing, employment, and preventing racist violence. Also visible is an activist and social worker named Lutfur Rahman, who helped form the Bangladeshi Youth Movement and was remembered fondly by Nadira Huda for his steadfast support of her as FBYO’s only woman worker at the time. And as Ansar Ahmed Ullah recalled, the canteen’s notice board was a crucial tool for advertising and organising concurrent activist movements, like the GLC’s anti-nuclear campaign, which formed part of its Peace Year in 1983, and the Community Alliance for Police Accountability, which Huda described as a ‘revolutionary organisation’ for challenging police racism in Tower Hamlets. Rather than a simple image of community organisation, these reflections reveal the many meanings and histories that photographs can contain. When documentary photography is executed as a ‘dialogical process’, as Mark Sealy has noted, it can ‘[aid] collective and individual stories in becoming part of a larger and inclusive narrative to assist in the building of a more equitable, shared, connected and honest world’. In other words, when images like Gee’s are put in conversation with local community members, they help to weave a social-historical tapestry that celebrates individual stories and collective identities. Gee’s lens also followed FBYO onto the streets, when the organisation organised or otherwise supported anti-racist protests and social work across the UK. Images like these help illuminate hidden histories of community activism, like those of the Daneford School protest in 1986. In the face of racist attacks against Bengali students at the school, the FBYO and the Trades Council organised a peaceful picket of the Inner London Education Authority to demand action. The police responded by violently arresting protesting teachers and one student. One month later, on 22 November 1986, the union called a mass strike. Daneford students showed up to the Highbury Magistrates Court in support of the arrested, calling for institutional change. Marching up Holloway Road to the Odeon, the students and their supporters demanded that ‘all racist boys [be] thrown out of schools’, ‘all racist teachers sacked’ and that the ‘headmaster [do] something about racist attacks—not just ignore’. They also called for ‘Bengali lessons for all boys’. One of the arrested protestors, a teacher named Renu Chakraborty, later wrote in the South Asian feminist magazine Mukti that ‘the name “Daneford” has now become symbolic with the struggle to eradicate racism from our schools’. As Shirin Hirsch has written, this protest was not an isolated act, but instead arose after the Miner’s Strike of 1985, a national student strike that same year, and continued activism from the Black Parents Movement and the Asian Youth Movement. Today, at a time when the right of assembly in the United Kingdom is chilled by legislation like the Crime and Policing Act 2026 and the recent, unprecedented sentencing of activists for ‘terrorism’ related charges, images like Gee’s do more than tell social history from the ground up. They also act as a pointed reminder of the legacy of collective protest against racism, xenophobia, and genocide, and a call to action in the present. While many images from Gee’s collection pertain to activism, they also capture East End social and recreational life. In one of my favourite photographs, families gather in a community centre to commemorate the Bengali language movement by laying flowers at a recreation of the Shaheed Minar, a memorial to the protestors killed by West Pakistani forces in 1952. Other photographs capture lively street scenes from Brick Lane and the surrounding area, as well as numerous sporting activities. These portraits of everyday activity help to visualise ordinary, and often joyful, moments from 1st and 2nd generation South Asian immigrants in Britain. When images like these are shared with wider audiences, as they were during ‘I Am Who I Am Now’, their ability to shape identity through collective memory is clear. As one visitor from Birmingham shared, ‘I feel so connected to these pictures, seeing the joy, connections that people made over the years […] a lot of my family’s photos got destroyed in a flood in Birmingham and others are lost in homes I can’t access due to family feuds […] so seeing everyone else’s pictures fills a void I had of not knowing what life was like for my parents growing up in [the] 70s-90s’. In documenting and showcasing diverse moments from the FBYO and its social world, Gee’s images respond to Stuart Hall’s call for an ‘imaginative rediscovery’ of identity grounded in the ‘re-telling of the past’. Photographs, Hall argues, offer ‘a way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas’. At the same time, they can reveal the ‘critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute “what we really are”’, allowing new generations to form our cultural identities by exploring ‘the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’. Gee’s photographs are valuable archives of community social history, but they can also play an important role in influencing, affecting, and moving contemporary onlookers, particularly those of us from the diaspora. These images also serve as reminders of the importance of community spaces like the Montefiore Centre and youth organisations like FBYO in shaping these histories and identities—resources that are endangered because of decades-long government disinvestment and austerity.