Growing up between cultures is tough – until you realise it’s a creative blessing

Songs, like smells, can dump you in your past in faster than you could say Blue Mink. And on the odd occasion I hear that band’s 1969 hit Melting Pot, I’m back in front of the telly in my jammies watching Top Of The Pops on our tiny black and white TV. There are frost patterns on the window as there’s no central heating – or indeed a bathroom – in our Black Country village home. Mum is cooking our nightly Punjabi supper using hoarded spices she guards like gold; dad is surrounded by paperwork from his clerical job because no one wants to hire a philosophy graduate from New Delhi to do anything vaguely philosophical; and I’m holding in a wee because I don’t want to run to the outside loo.
But it was worth it, to watch the divine Madeline Bell with her huge afro sing out the liberal mission statement of the 70s: What We Need Is A Great Big Melting Pot! Its message seemed to be targeted at kids like me, the first generation born in Britain to newly immigrated Indian parents: fit in, work hard, don’t frighten the neighbours, and one day maybe you too could be accepted into the pot and go on to create, as Madeleine promised, “coffee-coloured children by the score”.
Given the song came out the year after Enoch Powell’s infamous Rivers Of Blood speech, I was keen not to be one of the bodies floating down the foaming Tiber and duly worked my little brown butt off.
I came top of the class in English and passed on to the grammar school, sighed over the blonde heroines in Jackie magazine cartoons, wrote furiously in my diary about my unlikely acting and writing dreams, and daily repeated my parents’ mantra: “You can do well in this country but you have to work twice as hard as the white person next to you. And that coffee-coloured children thing? Graduate first and then we’ll see.”
It was inevitable that our parents’ view of integration would not be ours. They believed wholeheartedly in British meritocracy, having left family and roots behind for the promise that their children would have the chances not offered back home. Yet their new home in Britain was also a place where their mother culture continued. Of course they went out into the world and worked hard, but they also shrugged off their office clothes and factory uniforms like disguises when they came home. Then they sat on the floor, ate with their fingers, sang tunes from the old country like every newly arrived immigrant before them.
It didn’t make them less engaged in British society, less willing to slog hard, less appreciative of the opportunities for which they had to fight. But they never expected the state to celebrate their differences. We were already doing that at home, within our own communities.
As many of our parents came from the world’s biggest democracy and multi-faith country, living alongside a mesh of other faiths and customs was nothing new, not exactly a melting pot but separate and equal pots all bubbling away together. “Yours looks nice – want a taste of mine? Up to you.” And that’s how it went until the defining moment when my generation looked into the pot and said: “Please Sir, I Want Some More.”
The Southall uprising of 1979, when the Asian community ejected the far-right National Front who had provocatively decided to march through the area, came as a shock to many people. Those nice, well-behaved Asians who never made any trouble had finally fought back.
It was a sign of the pressures that my generation was buckling under. I had spent much of my adolescence trying to fit in, but struggled. On the one hand I was already too western for the gaggle of parents who brought us up communally (“You want to study English? Useless. Go for medicine. A spleen is the same in every country”). On the other hand I was too foreign for the cool kids at school (“Why can’t you come to the disco? Will your dad beat you with a barbed wire brush?”). We had to manage a supreme cultural juggling act: to belong without being erased; to hold on to those aspects of our mother culture that nourished us, but to discard those that were becoming irrelevant in this new country.
It was fascinating to understand what abuses had been justified and continued under the false banner of ‘tradition’
It was a confusing and sometimes exhilarating process, choosing what to keep, what to let go. Respect for elders? Tick. Speaking Punjabi? Must try harder but tick. Wearing shalwar kameez? Probably not outside the home, it makes people stare and shout instructions at me in bad English – so weddings only, small slightly embarrassed tick.
Knowing your basic history, colonisation, Indian independence, partition, Britain’s invitation for labour from the former colonies, essential and huge tick. (When you are continually asked why you are over here, you really should know the answer.)
And then there was the bin list: forced marriage, female subjugation, religious bigotry. It was fascinating to understand what abuses had been justified and continued under the false banner of “tradition”.
And here is the surprising thing: far from turning us into a confused mongrel generation, this continuing questioning of who we were made us supremely entrepreneurial. Many of us first generation-ers are the ones who went on to carve out careers in business and the arts: not quite belonging, continually having to see society from two different viewpoints is a supremely creative place to be.
Looking at the generations below me, I realise the edges of conflict may not be so sharp for them: arranged marriage has morphed into assisted marriage. Their English friends learned to love curry and wearing bindis some time ago. Of course, there are still plenty of challenges facing us. Issues of representation and diversity are ongoing, and sometimes it can feel like one step forward and two back. But forward we must go. India’s emerging superpower status is beginning to lure some of the third generation back there, seeing new opportunities in a growing economy, going back to the place their grandparents left for exactly the same reasons.
Alongside those who have walked the cultural high wire successfully are those who fell through the net, or jumped: the minority who aspire to a medieval version of their culture and religion that many of their parents fought to change. The irony is unbearably sad, and some would say, inevitable. But they are a minority.
One hopes that the majority are not forgotten, the ones who are just getting on with life, loving, living, contributing, still aspiring, still here.