Shreya Sen-Handley | No Time Like Now To Relish Your Diversity

Thirteen years ago, in a column for The Guardian, I wrote about taking my tenderly young half-English children to a temple in Leicester to experience their first Durga Puja. Not a patch on the Pujas of Kolkata, with its amazing artistry, dazzling illuminations and epic hustle and bustle, this modest event still managed to capture that spirit of bonhomie. The ‘bhog’ was delicious and generously apportioned, and the organisers warm and welcoming to strangers like us rocking up to their marigold-draped door.

Our gold-and-purple sari-clad baby girl jigged her heart out with the resplendently dressed dancers, who rewarded her with their delight at her impromptu performance. Meanwhile, my toddler son was floored by the mouthwatering Luchi-Aloo-Dum, but bemused by the rapid-fire Bengali swirling around him, having spent his short years hearing his white Englishman father and Indian mother communicating in English, decided to join in with a resonating exit in SPANISH, “Adios Amigos!”

Causing much hilarity around him, it also convinced me to keep them attuned to their Indian heritage. Growing up in a lively but undiverse British city, without Indian family or community around us, we knew it would be up to us to provide them with a well-rounded upbringing. Giving them beautiful Sanskrit names (short ones so locals wouldn’t struggle with them, yet they did), we dished up delicious Indian nosh frequently, keeping the Indian connection crackling through weekly videocalls and annual trips back, not to mention our inventive immersion in desi festivities, and they lapped it all up, fortunately.

Celebrating Diwali late this year because of school exams, we joyfully carried home sheesh kebabs, samosas, jalebis, aachars and mango lassi from the nearest Indian deli, cooking two kinds of daal and a big pot of mutton-aloo-gobi to go with it, as our teenagers lit twinkling diyas to the strains of Anoushka Shankar. Transported back to my vow of thirteen years ago, to keep the Indian fires burning for our progeny, it felt like we’d succeeded in shaping two open-minded, altruistic, global citizens, a lot Indian and enormously British.

Both children have half-jokingly striven to out-desi the other, but being British-born and bred, with British schooling and accents, and half-white genes (more obvious in my Mediterranean-looking son than my doe-eyed and dusky daughter), they’re as British as Shakespeare, Cadbury’s and Annie Lennox (Best of British, in other words). Talking of The Bard, coming from an Anglicized, widely-travelled Calcutta clan as I have, I’ve encouraged their love for British literature, theatre, history and entertainment, more even than their environment and many a white Briton with their own children. Our multicultural, empathetic and modern worldview has neither been rued nor questioned, by us or any other.

Until now, when the brown and black are constantly challenged to prove how British they are. If white supremacists and violent racists have been shadowy, slavering monsters all these years, existing beyond the pale of our everyday world, or even better, consigned to history, they’ve come out in force. They live next door; take a corner and you’ll see fascist flags flying from many windows. They flourish in the headlines too, making them ever-present rather than distant, crawling out from under the slimy rubble that was their natural home. Now they’re in every home and venerated; Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick, and Katie Hopkins, amongst others.

POC are under siege instead. Not only facing daily vilification, abuse and threats from politicians and press, but the general populace. An Indian grandad is murdered by white teenagers whilst innocuously walking his dog. Several South Asian women are raped in the space of a few weeks in “racially aggravated” attacks. A highflying professional woman in a hijab is refused service in a shop, and she’s far from alone but the only one who was heard. It’s happened to me too, a brown woman in everyday Western clothes, blanked in an ice-cream parlour in Cornwall, which I’d imputed to their notorious insularity. But no, it is no longer relegated to dark corners, demonstrated by the summer of openly racist, violent riots we endured last year.

Sadly, Britain’s not alone in this. Europe’s witnessed a horrifying resurgence of fascism, with a few far right leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni having seized control, while the likes of France’s Marine La Pen hover on the brink of power. And need anything more be said about Trump’s takeover of the US? This self-appointed beacon of democracy is now a tinpot dictatorship, but more dangerous than most such banana republics in its rejuvenated imperial ambitions and vast size and strength. This rising tide of aggression against the different and the progressive is swamping all the world.

But then I think — hasn’t it always been there, just papered over in recent decades? When I returned to India after having spent a good chunk of my childhood abroad, I thought and spoke differently to anyone at my school including the teachers, and was routinely punished for it. Made to stand outside the classroom daily to isolate and humiliate me for my “obharatiyo” or un-Indian ways, I stared at my scuffed shoes and plotted my escape. A decade later, after India’s economic liberalisation, I became the youngest regional head of a multinational television channel, and those same teachers were beating down my door for favours for their offspring.

Life will always be cyclical, and the wheel of fortune’s revolutions will set the world to rights again, to a place that prizes diversity and advancement, but as with every other era of encroaching darkness, those who care must light the way.