There was a time when I wasn’t troubled by abstract ideas of identity and belonging. The firmly Indian (my family and appearance) peacefully meshed with the firmly British (my accent, social views and upbringing). But as Britain undergoes a convulsive reckoning with its past, these historically antagonistic sides grow less able to face each other. 

Born in Britain to Indian parents, I am forced to traverse a perilous tightrope between two sides of history,  equally present in the bloodied sabre of the colonist and the harrowing cries of the oppressed. Falling means drowning in a void of cognitive dissonance: the death of my identity as I know it. And I’m close.

For the British, my Indian heritage has become a perpetual reel of beloved faces, uncles, aunts and cousins, whose lives are plagued by poverty inextricably linked to British colonialism. For the Indian, my Britishness is now a torturous reminder of the humiliation and oppression experienced under the boot of British tyranny. 

Enmity, disillusionment and guilt seep into the growing gaps between the two sides.

So of course, after years of blissful blindness juggling Empire’s riches with the suffering of its subjects, this tightrope journey has become a momentous struggle. It reaches a turbulent crescendo whenever I draw on Empire’s riches; I’m braving torrents of wind and rain whenever I benefit from our educational and healthcare systems.  

"Enmity, disillusionment and guilt seep into the growing gaps between the two sides"

This psychological disorientation is only exacerbated by Britain’s shameful evasion of its past, something I was made acutely aware of early on in my life. 

With childish eagerness and confidence, I was discussing ‘British Identity’ with my parents after being bombarded with it at school. Hoping to add some context, with the spectre of colonialism looming over them, they taught me about the British Raj. I remember in particular the disturbing details of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when fifty British soldiers indiscriminately fired into a trapped crowd of unarmed Indian civilians. Over 350 were murdered.

The massacre lasted ten minutes, but the soldiers made many lifetime's worth of evil decisions. Every reload of a rifle and pull of a trigger was another opportunity to succumb to the blood-curdling cries, to any remaining shred of humanity. Yet, the unrelenting storm of hatred raged on until the soldiers ran out of bullets. 

My frail, young mind was catapulted into abject disillusionment, left wondering what other sinister secrets lay behind the reassuring, sympathetic smiles of my teachers preaching ‘Britishness’.

There, in that anecdote, is the Great British Contradiction. We’re rightly eager to throw our liberty-loving hearts against censorship and oppression in other countries, but do we ever look inwards? Hasn’t colonialism been inexplicably wiped from our own school books? We revel in our freedoms, yet our nation’s soul remains firmly shackled by our history. We’re quick to celebrate ‘British values’, but too afraid to invoke these in condemnation of our own past. It’s as if we’ve slapped a semicolon somewhere in the 20th century, hoping everything before it is ignored, but of course, the past invariably and irrevocably transforms the future. 

"It ultimately fell to my dad, a working-class Indian immigrant, not my hundreds of history and citizenship lessons, to teach me this dark, but necessary, chapter of British history."

It ultimately fell to my dad, a working-class Indian immigrant, not my hundreds of history and citizenship lessons, to teach me this dark, but necessary, chapter of British history. It’s a national embarrassment that I can honestly say, in 15 years of education, I learnt more about Henry VIII’s waistline (60 inches, what a unit) than the British Empire. An empire that ruled 25% of the world untouched in primary as well as secondary school. If ignorance is bliss, curricula writers must be in unbound nirvana. 

The sun has long set on the British Empire, but decades later its corrupting influence echoes through time, not least in Britain. Our current, cowardly approach of evasion and omission, for me, only added treacherous insult to grievous injury. Honesty is the first step in carving out an inclusive national narrative from the moral ruins of our history. 

Thousands will be born today in Britain, a significant fraction of these births representing a beautiful, but blinding collision between two (or more!) nations. They, like me, will be thoroughly British, yet unavoidably beholden to other countries. I may struggle with belonging and identity, but there is no reason they should.

Despite all the forces conspiring to fling me off my tightrope, I am propelled by the hope that, with honesty and integrity, together we can build a Britain humbled by its history, instead of haunted by it. 

Britain’s past belongs to none of us, but its future sure as hell does.