How I Passed the English Cricket Test

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/opinion/kenan-malik-on-britishness-and-belonging.html

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LONDON — How times change. Last week, I was at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London — the “home of cricket,” as England’s cricket officials like to boast — to see England play India. I was born in India, yet I was cheering England.

Thirty years ago, I certainly would not have been. I can remember the Indian cricket team touring England in 1986. India won that three-match series 2-0 (with one draw). I was ecstatic.

Why the change in attitude? Answering that question will, of course, reveal much about myself. It will reveal much about Britain. Perhaps most of all, it will reveal much about the nature of identity.

We live in an age of constant soul-searching about the meaning of national identity. Public debates about what it is to be “English” or “British” have become a ritual almost as familiar as an England soccer team being humiliated at a World Cup. But these debates rarely grasp the realities of the ways in which people experience their identities.

In 2007, the last Labour government produced a green paper titled “The Governance of Britain,” which bemoaned the fact that, compared with French or American citizens, Britons had a “less clear sense” of the “values that bind” the British people. It proposed “a British statement of values that will set out the ideals and principles that bind us together as a nation.” Earlier this year, when an attempt to introduce an Islamist agenda into certain state schools in Birmingham was exposed, the coalition government’s response was to insist that “Britishness” had to become part of the educational curriculum.

Craft a statement. Teach a lesson. Politicians may be the only people in the world who imagine that the creation of identities, or the forging of a sense of belonging, can be reduced to such simple formulas.

What most public debates ignore is the complexity, elasticity and sheer contrariness of identity. Whether personal or national, identities can never be singular or fixed because they are rooted largely in people’s relationships with one another — not merely personal but social relationships, too — and such connections are always mutating.

Thirty years ago, Britain was a different place. And I was a different person. I grew up in a Britain where racism was woven into the fabric of society in a way that would be difficult to imagine today. Racism was vicious, visceral and sometimes fatal. Assaults and stabbings were common; firebombings of Asian houses were almost weekly events.

My parents were of a generation that accepted racism as part of life. I was of a generation that challenged it, politically and physically. We confronted far-right thugs, organized street patrols to protect black and Asian families, and stood up to police harassment. And this inevitably shaped our sense of who we were.

My generation did not think of itself as “Muslim” or “Hindu” or “Sikh.” We wanted to be seen as British. When Britain told us, “You don’t belong,” we responded both by insisting on our Britishness and by identifying with those who challenged British identity. Such is the contradictory character of belonging.

So I refused to support any British team, still less an English one. (The relationship between Englishness and Britishness can seem as unfathomable as the rules of cricket; it is an issue to which I will return another time.) Whether in cricket, soccer, rugby or tiddlywinks, for me it was a case of “anyone but England.”

Today, things are different. Neither racism nor racial violence has disappeared, and hostility to immigration has become a defining feature of British politics. Yet the savage, in-your-face racism that marked Britain a generation ago is, thankfully, relatively rare. The nature of Britishness has changed, too. No longer rooted in ideas of race and empire, it is defined as much by diversity as by jingoism. National identity is being recast in a host of new debates, from the fractious question of Scottish independence to the fraught relationship with the European Union.

Blacks and Asians have long since become an accepted part of Britain’s identity, as well as its sporting tapestry. And I have dropped my “anyone but England” attitude. I, too, now feel the pain of penalty shootout defeats and the rare joy of cricket match victories. Yet, if I am now willing to wave the flag at a cricket field or in a soccer stadium, I will not necessarily do so in all contexts. I may be tribal about sports, but I am not patriotic about Britain.

Unthinking, irrational support for one team over another is an essential part of the experience of sports. Patriots wish us to be equally unthinking in our attachment to the nation in every arena, from culture to war. The myth of nationalism is that “Britishness,” just like “Frenchness” or “Americanness,” comes as a single package. But identity does not work like that.

There are many aspects of British life that I admire, and many that I despise. I only have to visit a London street market to be reminded how open Britain is to foods and goods and influences from all over the world; I only have to stand in line in passport control at Heathrow Airport to remember how deep the suspicion of foreigners runs. Many British traditions resonate with me; many I find abhorrent. This is the nation that produced the Levellers and the Suffragettes, radical movements that helped shape the world; it is also a nation that still clings to a monarchy and the unelected, feudal House of Lords.

Many non-British traditions, too, have helped shape my views, values and ideals. To erase this complexity with the myths of patriotism is to diminish the very meaning of belonging.

As for the cricket match, England was humiliated by India at Lord’s. Some things, it seems, never change.

Kenan Malik, a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, is the author, most recently, of “The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics.”