German | Indian

My Mum’s family are South Indian Catholic, she spent her teenage years in Singapore and came to the UK in her early twenties. She came to the UK in the early 1960s as a young Indian woman, and retained a sense of pride in who she was, despite the challenges, whilst assimilating to the local culture. She instilled a confidence in my sister & myself to believe we were as good as anyone else, what mattered was our moral code and values, i.e. how we treated people, not what colour skin we have.

My Dad’s family were German Jewish and came to the UK as refugees in the 1930s. Dad was born in London in 1940. I don’t feel any connection with the German or Jewish sides, maybe because the family had to leave Germany with the rise of Nazism and moved to the UK before my Dad was born. He doesn’t speak German and doesn’t keep any of the religious or cultural Jewish practices.

They met in London in 1962, at a party. My Dad had recently returned from Kerala, where my Mother came from, as he’d been doing his PhD research there. They got talking because of that connection, and discovered mutual interests e.g. in classical music. Both were close to the families, my Dad lived with his Mother at the time, and this won the approval of my Mothers’ Father (‘he is good to his Mother’). Both families had similar values e.g. around the importance of education. Looking back, both families were remarkably forward-looking and accepting of the marriage for that time.

I feel closer to my Mothers’ side, she comes from a devout Catholic family and brought us up with her family’s culture and values. I feel very at home with my cousins on her side. We first went to India when I was 10, and I didn’t like it at all. I couldn’t take the dirt, smell & noise. I returned in my early twenties for a friends’ wedding, and fell in love, especially with south India. That trip inspired me to work in global health. Since then, I have been to India many times, for work. It has a special place in my heart and I feel some sense of belonging, especially when I see women that look like my Mother. I’m not used to that in London.

We grew up in a very White suburb of North London. I went to a Catholic girls’ school which was mainly White but fairly-mixed culturally (Italian, Irish, Polish). I was not particularly aware of being ‘different’ at secondary school although I did get teased in primary school, e.g. someone wrote in my leaving book, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I was born pink – what happened to you?’. That took me by surprise because I wasn’t really aware of looking different. I think because my parents had always given us a strong sense of our worth. Mum was (and is) fiercely confident about her value in any society, as a woman and especially as a woman of Indian origin, and she passed that onto us.

I don’t feel I have an identifiable culture and have always felt that I don’t ‘belong’ in any cultural group. The only place I feel I truly belong is in London, my home town, and where I don't stand out because so many people are also mixed-race. English culture feels alien to me. I find it telling that I chose to marry someone who is also a mixed-race Londoner (Afro-Caribbean/Scottish). I felt an immediate sense of comfort that for once I was not the ‘outsider’ or unusual one. He has also helped me acknowledge that I am not White (as I used to perceive myself due to my social networks), but am legitimately BAME.

For a long time, I just assumed I was White, because my friends were mainly White, and I fit in well with the White culture socially and at work due to being brought up in North London and having an academic, middle-class background. However, I am fiercely proud of my Indian origins and I don’t want to be thought of as ‘White’.