English | Indo-Guyanese
I’ve always felt like my ethnicity and race are things I ought to explain - often it can seem as though I owe people who can’t place me according to a particular racial or ethnic background, and want some sort of explanation for the ambiguity that they perceive. But doing this, even when in response to a not particularly invasive curiosity, can be practically difficult. The complicatedness of recounting my family history raises questions about my own identity.
People are often surprised to find out that there is such a large Indian population in a country like Guyana: geographically, it isn’t immediately clear why a South American country would have this connection, even once you consider it is culturally Caribbean, the link to India isn’t obvious. This is because after the abolition of slavery, Britain sourced workers from India and China, often coercively & under terrible conditions, to become indentured labourers and carry out the work that people had previously been enslaved for in the West Indies. I find myself repeating this history lesson almost without fail to explain my ethnicity and heritage, as indentured labour and servitude are hardly ever taught in British schools or spoken about in British culture.
I know that my parents were conscious that having an interracial relationship might be a difficulty, as were my mother’s parents in terms of having a marriage which crossed religious boundaries. They were worried about any difficulties we might face as mixed-race children. I think this played a large part in influencing our upbringing & perceptions of ourselves as quite British. It’s valuable in some ways, I feel like I can assimilate easily - but it can make joining up perceptions other people have of me with how I actually feel about my own racial identity difficult. I don't think they wanted to hide any of our culture and background out of shame or prejudice - it was rather a worry that we would be worse off for having it so openly displayed through something like a typically South Asian name, and would be better off assimilating as much as possible.
Studying Philosophy @ University of Cambridge
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