British/Irish | Indian

Photo credit: provided by subject

My Mum was born in India, and my Dad was born in the UK. I was lucky that both my parents loved each other’s cultures deeply, my Mum had a passion for the English language and its literature, especially Irish poetry, which led her to move here. My Dad loves India, its history, culture, food, so thankfully I grew up seeing both cultures through these perspectives, both as my own heritage and from an outsider’s point of view.

The combining of cultures came quite naturally, I was born in Ireland but from an early age I visited India every year with my family, and our household had a lot of influences from Indian and Irish cultures. I felt very at home in both countries. When I was younger I didn’t identify so much as ‘mixed-race’, but rather the majority of people would recognise only my ‘foreign’ side. In Ireland people saw me as Indian and in India people saw me as Irish, and I was often told I ‘didn’t know how things worked here’. I felt the need to label myself as just one thing rather than Indian, Irish and British, I took it seriously and ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out which was my dominant identity.

Growing up in Ireland, there were very few people of colour, one of the most frequent questions I have been asked is ‘where are you from?’. This generally didn’t bother me when I’m in a conversation with someone and they are asking because they want to get to know me better, but especially when I was younger (around 8 years old to my teens), this would be almost the first thing most people said to me. At that stage not really knowing what people were getting at, I would simply say ‘Dublin’ which was where I was born, and to me made perfect sense, what came next in the majority was ‘are you sure?’. That perplexed me, especially at a young age. Eventually I learned they wanted to hear ‘my Mum is Indian’, and then they would be satisfied. I am very proud of my ethnicity, but as a child, hearing those questions over and over made me feel like an outsider, like the place I had called home for my whole life couldn’t possibly be that.

This rarely happens now, and if it does, I am expecting it. The difference is that I take it as an opportunity to talk about both sides of my heritage, rather than just one. Thankfully both my parents and grandparents were very accepting in that regard and were so welcoming to each other’s cultures.

I think it’s a great thing to be in an interracial relationship, you learn about a new culture and it broadens your view on the world. And most importantly it ensures you love that person regardless of their background and removes any bias. It can be comfortable to be with someone of your own race, basically it’s easy in some ways, but that has nothing to do with the actual person, and I realised it has no bearing on how successful the relationship will be.

Generally I have experienced many more positives than negatives. I’m incredibly grateful that I have been brought up feeling at home in two different countries, that I have connections with friends, family, languages, religion, in both India and Ireland. It’s been a great blessing and source of happiness for me.

There have been challenges though, but thankfully I am now moving past them and they are not so common anymore. When I lived in Northern Ireland, it would be common for people to stare or make racial remarks at me, there were very few people of colour there at that time. It still bothers me to think about it, and what was more is that as a child I didn’t talk back when those comments were made, I was too scared.

In the past couple of years there have been some incidents, last summer a woman shouted at me on the street telling me to go back to where I came from, I was utterly shocked that someone could say something like that nowadays. It’s still painful to hear, but at least now I have the courage to speak up when it happens.

I understand that some people will always have a bias, but it’s up to them to overcome it. It’s not about their upbringing or provinciality, some of the most welcomed I have felt was in small rural towns or villages, in both Ireland and India. For a lot of people I met, they didn’t have any experience of multiculturalism, they hadn’t travelled outside the country, but had been welcoming and interested in my background. What is important is to see each other as real people, when I’m shouted at on the street or had rude comments made to me, this was mainly from afar, they weren’t talking to me as a person, just as an oddity. When we start seeing each other as individuals, and care for each other, that’s when those divides break down.

As a family we visited India every year and I will always be thankful that my parents made an effort so my brother and I could form a strong connection with our Indian heritage. Those trips are some of my most precious memories. My brother and I would spend most of the day playing outside with our friends, cycling, running around with the dogs. It was a beautiful time, combined with that childhood excitement, life there felt so vibrant and free.

I still go back to India often, but one of the hardships of the pandemic is that I haven’t been able to visit for a while now. It feels like a part of me is missing and I really long for it.

On occasions I had been filling out forms, and usually they would ask for nationality or ethnicity, which are simple questions with definitive answers. But on one particular occasion, while filling out information before an exam, the question was ‘what way would you define yourself; not ethnicity, not nationality, but in your opinion what do you regard yourself as?’. This really threw me, I was stuck for a moment. Usually these questions give a ‘mixed’ option, but even then they only give two spaces, which always forced me to leave out part of my story. But this particular question fuelled my wonderings even more. I tossed it around in my head, I really didn’t expect to have to decide this under such pressure. In the end I couldn’t decide on one so instead wrote ‘Irish/Indian/British’.

Nowadays I am more confident in myself, and I’ve realised that any combination of ethnicities, perspectives, cultural nuances that I have is possible, merely by the fact that I am that. It’s ok if I don’t know which ethnicity or which heritage comes overwhelmingly first, they’re all equal and important to me, I shouldn’t have to pick one, and I am not going to struggle with the fact that I don’t have an answer ready to go.

Growing up in Ireland it was rare to see representation, but that has been changing fast and I so appreciate the efforts the community has made to make this happen.

If I were to be reborn, I would like to be exactly the same as I am now. I have a deep connection with both countries, Ireland and India. With the people and animals I’ve met, with my family and friends, with the air, the sky, the landscape. Wherever I am I feel a deep longing for the other half and for as long as I remember that has been the biggest challenge and the biggest blessing. I feel both settled and unsettled, and that is what makes me feel alive.

As a child, it can be hard to wrap your head around having two homes so far apart from each other, it confronts you with the concept of vast space and time at an early age, and this is what made me feel so lucky. Out of all the combinations of space and time, I was lucky to have lived this life, met these people, had these experiences. It was awe inspiring and grounding at the same time.

The only aspect I would like to change, is that it took me too long to realise I didn’t have to pick one culture, one land, one identity, I didn’t need to feel cut in two as ‘half’ but could hold both sides of my heritage together, Rather than half, I can be both.