I married Indian born Atam Vetta when mixed relationships were rare and viewed with hostility not just in the UK. In 1966, they were illegal in South Africa and in most Southern States of the USA (until Loving v Virginia). In India they are not illegal but many upper-caste Indians do not approve of marriage outside of caste.
In the UK attitudes have revolutionised. Mixed relationships are no longer rare and it is predicted that by 2075 the majority of the population will be of mixed ancestry. There are mixed relationships in all three of my novels. My aim was to explore what we have in common whilst being honest about the challenges. The ultimate prize is an enhanced understanding and the creativity that comes with crossing cultures.
I felt the urge to write a novel that could appeal to the children of marriages which, like mine and Atam’s cross boundaries. Sculpting the Elephant is about an Oxford artist called Harry and an Indian historian called Ramma. No one chooses to fall in love with someone from a different country, a different colour, religion, or caste but when it happens how do you cope with the consequences?
I hate stereotypes. The aim of my books and my lived experience is to get people to see each other as individuals – crossing invisible barriers. My Indian-born husband Atam Vetta’s PhD was in quantitative genetics. I learned from him that each of us is unique. Sadly the world is not organised to cope with that scientific truth.
London 1945: the heir to the largest tribe of Bechuanaland (Botswana) arrives in Britain. Seretse Khama, an urbane 24-year-old was welcomed into the elite world of Oxford. But when he fell in love with Englishwoman Ruth Williams, the full force of colonial power was brought to bear to prevent their marriage.
It has personal resonance for me because when I met Atam, in 1964, Smethwick was in the grip of a racist campaign. Atam and I volunteered to help the sitting Labour MP, Patrick Gordon Walker combat the Conservative Peter Griffiths’ campaign. The slogan was, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour vote Labour’. Atam was welcomed because he spoke Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu and we accompanied Patrick Gordon Walker canvassing. When I watched A United Kingdom, the film about Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, I knew that they had portrayed it well when the government representatives treat him with some respect but ignore Ruth. It was on Patrick Gordon Walker’s watch as Colonial Secretary that Seretse Khama was exiled from his country. He was not the right man to fight a racist campaign and he lost.
This 4 minute video I made for the launch of STE gives the background.
The true story of a love which defied family, Apartheid, and empire - the inspiration for the major new feature film A United Kingdom, starring David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike
London, 1947. He was the heir to an African kingdom. She was a white English insurance clerk. When they met and fell in love, it would change the world.
This is the inspiring true story of Seretse Khama and Ruth Williams, whose marriage sent shockwaves through the establishment, defied an empire - and, finally, triumphed over the prejudices of their age.
Possibly the definitive fictional account of the experiences of the Empire Windrush generation but it was the mixed relationship that resonated with me. The perspective of white women who marry men of colour is rarely told.Queenie Buxton is a white British woman who rents lodgings to Gilbert and Hortense when they arrive in England from Jamaica. Queenie is pregnant with a baby whose father, Michael Roberts was in the RAF. The UK is justly proud of its role in defeating fascism in WW2. The only problem is that the narrative is often white-washed. The more than 2 million Indians who fought in WW2 are usually ignored. Men and women from the Caribbean responded with a desire to help the ‘mother country. Michael Roberts - this fictional black character is a good example.
Hortense shared Gilbert's dream of leaving Jamaica and coming to England to start a better life. But when she at last joins her husband, she is shocked by London's shabbiness and horrified at the way the English live. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Queenie's neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there. Through the stories of these people, Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.
Kwame’s paternal grandfather was an Ashanti chief and his maternal grandfather was a British Chancellor of the Exchequer – who better to explore the issues of identity? This book is an antidote to nativism.
My novel Brushstrokes in Time was criticised on a South East Asian Facebook group for ‘cultural appropriation’ - not because it is not authentic - it is based on eyewitness accounts of the Stars artists themselves interviewed over three years. The problem for them was nothing to do with the style, content, or quality of the novel but only the identity of the author as ‘not Chinese.’ Kwame says, ‘All cultural practices and objects are mobile’ and ‘ownership is the wrong model.’ Ideas have always spread from East to West and West to East and our cultures are richer for it. Mixed relationships are not only about colour but also about creed, country, clan, and class. If you are of mixed ancestry why should you have to choose one or another of your parent's and grandparent's identities? Shouldn’t we draw on all of them to create our own?
Who do you think you are? That's a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods.
Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict.…
Mixed relationships are not new: think Antony and Cleopatra. The most famous and possibly the earliest in US history are of Pocahontas and John Smith. If you want a romantic Disney-type version of the story, this book is not for you.
Where I live you will find the world’s first public museum, the Ashmolean. Most of the original collection was assembled during the 17th century by the John Tradescants, father and son. They collected objects from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The most significant American object is Powhatan’s Mantle. Powhatan was Pocahontas’s father. It is a reminder of how much the white settlers owed their survival to the local people.
Dr. Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow and Angela L. Daniel "Silver Star" claim that they are revealing for the first time the oral history of the Mattaponi tribe regarding the story of Pocahontas and John Smith. This probably is the most authentic of stories about them but is a disturbing read.
The True Story of Pocahontas is the first public publication of the Powhatan perspective that has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation within the Mattaponi Tribe, and the first written history of Pocahontas by her own people.
Shakespeare’s tragedies resonate in most cultures because they address the human condition. That is why Romeo and Juliet have spawned West Side Story, many films, and Russian ballets. I personally organised the Joe and Zara workshop with a mixed group of teenagers working on a modern take on the story. The young people in this ten-minute video from the workshop are impressive.
Othello too is tragic. Othello describes how Desdemona would come again ‘greedy –to hear tales of adventure sorrow and suffering. ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed and I loved her that she did pity them.’
I relate to that.
The second Oxford edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works reconsiders every detail of their text and presentation in the light of modern scholarship. The nature and authority of the early documents are re-examined, and the canon and chronological order of composition freshly established. Spelling and punctuation are modernized, and there is a brief introduction to each work, as well as an illuminating and informative General Introduction. Included here for the first time is the play The Reign of King Edward the Third as well as the full text of Sir Thomas More. This new edition also features an essay on Shakespeare's…
An entertaining mystery on a 1894 trans-Atlantic steamship with an varied array of suspects, and a detective who must solve his case in six days to prevent international conflict.
Retired from the British Indian army, Captain Jim is taking his wife Diana to Liverpool from New York, when their pleasant cruise turns deadly. Just hours after meeting him, a foreign diplomat is brutally murdered onboard their ship. Captain Jim must find the killer before they dock in six days, or there could be war! Aboard the beleaguered luxury liner are a thousand suspects, but no witnesses to the locked-cabin crime.…
In The Spanish Diplomat's Secret, award-winning author Nev March explores the vivid nineteenth-century world of the transatlantic voyage, one passenger’s secret at a time.
Captain Jim Agnihotri and his wife Lady Diana Framji are embarking to England in the summer of 1894. Jim is hopeful the cruise will help Diana open up to him. Something is troubling her, and Jim is concerned.
On their first evening, Jim meets an intriguing Spaniard, a fellow soldier with whom he finds an instant kinship. But within twenty-four hours, Don Juan Nepomuceno is murdered, his body discovered shortly after he asks rather urgently to…
