What is the origin of the racial epithet ‘Paki’, which Prince Harry used to describe a course-mate?

(Updated January 23)

The ruling house of Windsor seems to have a penchant for falling repeatedly into the same treacherous pit of indiscretion. Recently, a private video filmed in 2006 surfaced showing dashing Prince Harry, who is third in line of succession to the British throne, uttering the politically incorrect word ‘Paki’ to refer to his Sandhurst course-mate cadet Ahmed Raza Khan, now a captain in the Pakistan Army.

Members of the Pakistan immigrant community in Britain reacted sharply to the prince’s reference. More important, the British government took serious official note of the princely indiscretion, while the British Army has said that it would take appropriate action to deal with this incident.

In the meantime, Prince Harry has apologized to Captain Raza and expressed regrets. As far as this writer is concerned, that should end the matter, because no purpose would be served by going on and on and hounding the prince about a remark that was clearly not intended to be insulting or demeaning. The butt of the remark is serving thousands of miles away from Britain and is reported to be quite nonchalant. He has never complained about his treatment at Sandhurst, where he received a sword of honor from the Queen for being the best overseas officer cadet.

Prince HarryPrince Harry has been advised to exercise more discretion in future and to learn from the example of his father Prince Charles, who is considered to be sympathetic to the concerns of immigrants and is reputed to have close links with South Asians. Unfortunately, people have now started hounding Prince Charles for calling an Indian friend by his preferred nickname Sooty. The latter, whose real name is Kuldip Singh Dhillon, has staunchly defended the heir to the British throne as a man of "zero prejudice".

The etymology of word ‘Paki’ indicates that the epithet was probably coined in the 1960s in the mill towns in Britain, where thousands of Pakistanis were freely migrating to work in the cotton mills, because their ancestral lands around the town of Mirpur were being flooded by Mangla Dam in Kashmir. Subsequently, Tarbela Dam displaced people around Haripur but one does not hear as much about these people ending up in Britain, because by then a stricter visa regime had been established.

Today ‘Paki’ is applied willy-nilly to all South Asians when they are targeted by racists, be they Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Nepalis or Sri Lankans. It is the equivalent of the ‘N’ word used against African Americans. The earlier word ‘Paks’ had crept into the American lexicon of the Cold War and was not considered derogatory. Some might argue that South Asians should not mind being referred to as ‘Pakis’. After all, the epithet is the equivalent of the more ancient ‘Limey’ used by Americans to describe their British cousins, who as sailors were issued lime juice to prevent scurvy. But Limey like Paki can be used disparagingly and many a fist fight has broken out in countless bars and pubs as a result.

Incidentally the word Paki migrated to Canada in the 1970s along with Brits who have left their overcrowded island for good, carrying with them prejudices of the old world.

At a pound a day bed and breakfast hotel in London in 1967 I became acquainted with a Glaswegian and his wife who worked there. I asked the man what the Brits thought about Pakistanis. He told me that the Scottish workers were fed up because the new arrivals worked at break-neck speed while operating the machinery and the locals couldn't keep up. Also, the Pakistanis did not socialize or hang out at pubs, all they were interested in was overtime and the management exploited them to apply pressure on the locals to work harder. The Scotsman then regaled me with an ethnic joke about 19 Pakistanis being killed because their bed had collapsed!

What this young Glaswegian was describing was the result of the first wave of immigration. The second stage was reached when the Pakistani workers had saved enough money to buy their houses outright in lump sum cash, which led to the creation of ethnic neighborhoods, with strong curry smells, the most prominent example being Bradford. It then became possible for the immigrants to call their spouses, and move up the social ladder by becoming merchants. By then the mill towns were fading away in the face of foreign competition and it gradually became more and more difficult for South Asian workers to migrate to Britain.

The third stage was reached when the children of the immigrants who were born in Britain grew up and tried to carve their own niche in British society. In the playgrounds they were variously referred to as curry munchers, chutneys, wogs (a 19th century racial slur also applied to Egyptians) and ‘stanis. The South Asian community became politically active at the local and national levels in British politics. Multiculturalism became accepted and respectable. It was no longer permissible to use racial epithets. For example, in 2003 a Briton was banned from uttering the word 'Paki' on pain of being sent to prison for five years, according to the Times of India of 13 August 2003. He had called a local government official of undisclosed South Asian origin a "Paki bitch".

The fourth stage was reached after 9/11. Religion was becoming an important social issue even before 9/11; but after that defining moment it became the issue. But that is another tale that needs to be told separately.