My own parents travelled to the United Kingdom from the city of Calcutta in recently independent India (1947) in 1961 in their early twenties and myself and my younger brother were both born here. My parents thought they were coming to the golden world of Shelly, Keats, Byron and of course Shakespeare, but the reality was a lot harsher to begin with. They were graduates from university and spoke English well but struggled for years facing poverty, racism, bad housing and exclusion from employment. They were proud Bengalis, who believed fiercely in giving their children a good education and my father, in particular, was a brilliant storyteller.
I grew up hearing the stories of the epic Mahabharata, Ramayana, the history of India and the struggle for independence from British colonial rule, which his family were closely connected to. Through my father’s stories of the injustice of the British Raj in India, through the years, I also became very interested to learn more about British colonialism. It is a fact that at its height the British Empire was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1920, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, and covered 24 percent of the Earth's total land area.
