I thought I knew Britain in 1969, when I came to this country from India to study at Loughborough University. But I quickly realised that was not the case. For me, the last half-century has been a long process of learning. At times this was very painful. Once, I even feared for my life at the hands of football racists. I have also seen the UK reinvent itself as a much more caring, welcoming place. However, we still have some way to go to become a truly diverse society.
My initial surprise was to discover that, on their little island, the British did not live as they had done in India during the Raj. Not only were bathrooms not en suite, but many homes even had outside loos. The dinner jacket that had been specially tailored for me before I left Mumbai proved redundant, as I found the British no longer dressed for dinner. The only people I saw wearing dinner jackets were waiters in Indian restaurants.
Not that this made Indian food acceptable, as I discovered when, in the spring of 1969, fellow Loughborough students and I came down to London to see the musical Hair. All of London seemed to be taken up by this story of multiracial, multicultural love. After the show, as I headed to an Indian restaurant, I saw two police officers rush past me and grapple with a burly white man. The windowpanes of the restaurant were shattered, and an Indian waiter in a bow tie held a towel to his badly cut forehead. Despite this, he could not stop the blood trickling down his white dress shirt, colouring it crimson. When I inquired of a passerby, he said: “Some drunk had a fight with an Indian waiter. But then only drunks go to these curry houses. Dreadful.”
That opinion was reinforced a few months later by a white woman in my crummy Paddington hotel, who said to me: “I must tell you, we can’t stand your food. It’s the smell. It infects everything and you can’t get rid of it.” Back then, anybody suggesting that chicken tikka masala would become a symbol of a harmonious multiracial Britain would have been dismissed as a fantasist, if not somebody trying to subvert British society.
It may seem surprising, but I had not expected to be marked out solely by my colour. It really shook me and I did not know how to handle it. During that first summer, I had worked in a Leicester factory where the foreman was unable to pronounce my name, so he called me “Mick”. This made one of the workers exclaim: “Bloody hell, we’ve now got a coloured Irishman, have we?” His mates fell about laughing. Landladies in London refused to rent me a room. One in Hampstead, on learning I was Indian, said: “I am dreadfully sorry, my husband would not like that.” The most traumatic moment came when a young lady, whom I thought I was getting on with very well, said to me: “I cannot have a relationship with you. I want white babies.”
The summer before I came to England, I had been sent to represent India at a youth city event held by Israelis in Haifa, to convince the young people of the world of their desire for peace. I had met the Israeli president wearing my Nehru jacket and felt proud to be Indian. By the end of my first year in this country, I was trying to deny my Indianness and ended many an evening consumed by self-hate.
At that stage, I could not have imagined that I would fulfil my dream of becoming a writer. The novelist Shiva Naipaul mocked me, saying I had come to England for the “colonial lash”. In fact, I actually received colonial dividends. Unlike in India, where the only job I got was through nepotism, here total strangers, many of whom could not even pronounce my name, opened doors in the written and broadcast media. In 1974, I became the first cricket correspondent of the radio station LBC: Ian Marshall, the then sports editor, had no hesitation in giving a novice the chance. The only problem was my name. I was sometimes referred to as Richard Rose.
So – thinking it through to write a memoir – I know I have a positive story to tell, but still I feel Britain is a work in progress. And just when I feel this work is heading in the right direction, we hear from equalities minister Kemi Badenoch, who suggests the battle for diversity has been so comprehensively won that any further steps towards it are wasteful of resources and that the idea of unconscious bias is “outmoded”. And the net result is that many on the right portray anything that promotes diversity as “anti-white”. But then, that is pretty much what I heard back in 1969 when many white people complained legislation outlawing racism, which had become law a few months before I arrived, made them foreigners in their own land. Badenoch may feel that sounding like a Hyde Park Corner rabble-rouser – and speeches downplaying the wealth Britain extracted from its colonies – will help her to get to No 10. And she may be right. But it will not help Britain make the changes that are still necessary.
Because it seems to me that to become a truly diverse society, this country must come to terms with its less than glorious imperial past. Back in 1969, my professors at Loughborough told me that nobody cared for the empire. Today, such is the nostalgia that the empire is presented as a sort of Victorian NGO, with books making the moral case for colonialism. This makes me wonder whether I am expected to feel grateful that my ancestors were conquered by the British.
This divide over the past has fuelled the culture wars; I would be labelled a woke warrior for saying that William Wilberforce was keener on abolishing Hinduism than slavery. As he stated, missionary access to India was “the greatest of all causes, for I really place it before abolition [of the slave trade]”. Comparing Christianity with Hinduism, he told the House of Commons in 1813: “Our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.” Wilberforce described Hindu deities as “absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty”.
When defenders of the empire talk of the past being nuanced, they cherrypick the parts that show Britain in the best light. They conceal or find excuses for the horrific acts. But unless they stop editing the past, how can we become a truly multicultural nation, with people of different colours and creeds understanding where we have all come from? Those who argue they are defending this country with tall tales and tired narratives actually do it a disservice. They stop us becoming our future selves – an aware, mature, self-confident country. Given how far Britain has progressed since 1969, and how far it could go, that’s a pity.
Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie: Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British, published by Hurst
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