1. "Finding My Voice: How My Anglo-Indian Roots Shaped My Creativity"

There is a line in my novel I’m currently writing that says, “I am rootless, restless”. It is a feeling I am well familiar with. From the moment when I was asked at 7 years old by a classmate, “but where do you really come from?”, I have felt disconnected and unsure of my place in the world.

My heritage is mixed and shrouded in mystery to some degree, due to a lack of public records about my family. I have discovered (with the help of a family member) that my heritage is mainly composed of links to India, Ireland and Portugal. My family have all assimilated to English culture and have largely dismissed their connections to India. My mother was told to give up her Hindi and Tamil languages when she was a young girl, on a ship England bound from India. My great grandmother used to make pepper fry for dinner and replace poppadoms with hula hoops. My grandmother and great aunt had Catholic shrines in their homes with framed prints of Perpetual Mother and Sacred Heart Jesus, showing their allegiance with their westernised religious practice. But even they felt compelled to add a small figurine of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god or a piece of coconut as an offering to Brahma. I guess they felt it couldn’t hurt to double their chances of getting into heaven. It was their way of holding onto a culture they had been taught to feel ashamed of and to relinquish.

I have over the years tried to learn more about these parts of myself. In order to be a true artist, I felt it was crucial to be as authentic as possible. How can I create if if I don’t know who I am? During my late teens in sixth form, I became friends with a group of Indian girls. We were equally fascinated by each other, and soon learned that although we may have shared the same skin colour, our lives could not have been more different. I envied their strong sense of identity, their ability to speak several languages. They envied my young, liberal parents and my freedom to be whatever I wanted. I never saw it as a blessing at the time, instead seeing it as a curse. Looking back, I can understand my anxiety and confusion around having no clear sense of who I was. But I can also appreciate the gift of having these different influences to draw upon, which is something I feel more comfortable doing now. In terms of music, I no longer feel like a ‘fake’ for using Indian instruments or samples in my work. My Anglo Indian roots have also taught me about American 1950s music and fashions, as these were a huge influence to my family. Patsy Cline’s music was played often in my grandmother’s house and my mother sang her songs too. Patsy taught me what heartbreak and raw emotion is, and this is something I’m not afraid to shy away from in my own music.

Lately, I have been exploring Indian Carnatic music alongside writing lyrics that hopefully resonate with anyone who has ever felt they don’t belong. I’ve also been experimenting with using tabla samples with breakbeats as I’ve done this constantly throughout the years. I never get tired of creating new ways of making beats interesting.

In terms of my writing, I’m always asking family members for their stories and they have helped me tremendously when writing my novel. I am still continuing to explore the interwoven aspects of Indian heritage in British life and look specifically at cultural shifts in England during the late 1960s/early 1970s. This time period has always fascinated me and I will continue my research around it.

So, to return to a question I posed earlier, “how can I create if I don’t know who I am?”, I feel I can now answer this. We are all evolving constantly as people. We don’t need to know exactly who we are, but the more we work on ourselves, the clearer this becomes. And the art we create becomes the journey. And the journey is the art. I’m grateful that I have so many influences to draw upon. I feel more aligned with my Indian heritage than before, and am looking forward to continuing my exploration. Ireland…you’re next.