Raghav to Ron: The incurable longing to be White

I met Joe in the British city of Birmingham — a confident young Sikh with neatly cropped hair, stylish trainers, and a quick grin. “My friends prefer to call me Joe,” he told me, explaining that his full name was Joginder Singh, but it sounded “too heavy” in local circles. He claimed to speak five languages: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, and Arabic. Impressive, I thought.

But when I casually asked him in Punjabi to name his parents’ village in Punjab, he blinked. “Sorry, what?” he said. He didn’t understand the question or the language. It became clear that Joe’s Punjabi was, at best, ornamental. He knew nothing of his ancestral geography, nothing of the land his name came from. The loss wasn’t just linguistic, it was existential.

There are many like him: second-generation, urban, global-facing, but adrift from their own roots. Whether through name changes, borrowed accents, or inherited discomfort with indigeneity, they have become fluent in many things, except themselves.

This is not merely about names. It’s about longing, discomfort, and — perhaps most of all — a quiet, persistent shame. The legacy of colonialism in India is not just political or economic; it is psychological. Its symptoms are often subtle: a switch from Ramesh to Ray, a declared distaste for Indian food (“too oily”), a conversion to Christianity in private while performing secularism in public, a refusal to speak the mother tongue to one’s children. Together, these gestures form a pattern, not always deliberate, but telling.

Name-changing is often the entry point. Sometimes it’s explained away as practical, a way to avoid awkwardness in a London boardroom or on a Zoom call from Singapore. But why must Raghav become Ron, or Arundhati, Annie? Why not assert the original name instead? When these changes are unprompted, they signal something deeper: a subconscious effort to align with a world that still privileges Whiteness.

Even at the highest levels of public life, cultural fluency can become both performance and puzzle. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — who famously lit Diwali lamps on the steps of 10, Downing Street — is often heralded as a symbol of British multiculturalism. But for all his outward pride in heritage, questions persist about his comfort with the languages of his forebears. Born to Punjabi-speaking parents from East Africa, Sunak rarely, if ever, speaks Punjabi in public. By contrast, his wife, Akshata Murty — a first-generation daughter of South India — is said to be fluent in Telugu. The irony is not lost on observers: assimilation and amnesia often travel together.

There is another consequence to this assimilation: vulnerability. The assimilated, successful Indian, especially in the West,  is often seen as ideal prey. Smooth, wealthy, deferential, and eager to belong, they are quietly courted as donors to prop up failing institutions that wouldn’t dream of diversifying their boards or returning colonial loot.

At one London tennis club, I heard a well-connected woman describe how the British Museum, despite its standoffish public image, was “actively courting wealthy Indians” to fund a new India exhibition, maybe even an expanded India gallery. No mention was made of restitution. Just glitz, access, and the implied honour of being seen.

The “good wog” — to borrow the crude but still-used term — becomes both ornament and cash machine. Their money is welcomed; their questions are not. As one insider at a cultural foundation admitted, “They want Indian money, not Indian memory.”

The British honours system, too, has long served as a subtle mechanism of absorption and control. When brown men and women are knighted, ennobled, or made dames, they are symbolically welcomed into the establishment — but rarely on their own terms.

For every Lord Patel, Baroness Verma or Dame Priti, there is a quiet expectation: that they will not disrupt the consensus that elevated them. They must wear their distinction with grace, not grievance. Advocacy for caste justice, reparations, or museum restitution rarely figures in their maiden speeches in the Lords. Some even go further, aligning themselves with right-leaning agendas to prove loyalty — immigration scepticism, cultural “integration” or unwavering fealty to crown and empire.

This isn’t to suggest cynicism in every case. Many accept honours with genuine pride. But the institution rewards a certain kind of Indian — urbane, non-threatening, publicly grateful, and, above all, post-Indian in tone.

To be celebrated, one must be seen as safe.

A recent case in China offers a revealing contrast. Cindy Yu, writing in the London Times, described how a young Chinese woman’s relationship with a Ukrainian gamer exploded into national scandal. She was expelled from university and accused of ‘damaging national dignity’ — not for breaking the law, but for being seen with a foreigner. The incident triggered a wave of online misogyny and nationalist outrage, revealing how deeply some Chinese remain haunted by colonial-era humiliation. As Yu notes, even today, foreign approval — or the perception of it — can provoke national anxiety.

The outrage fell hardest on the woman herself, not on the man who leaked the videos. The scandal exposed a different form of post-colonial psychosis: not mimicry, but hyper-vigilance. Where Indians may try to please, the Chinese lash out to protect dignity, even at the cost of their own.

This performance of cultural discomfort is not new. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay laid out a vision for an Indian elite that would mirror its rulers:

“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern — a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Nearly two centuries later, Macaulay’s children walk among us — suave, erudite, and unsure of their own skin.

The Indian education system, especially in its elite iterations, still subtly rewards mimicry. English remains not just a language but a status marker. A polished accent is admired; an authentic Indian one is mocked. As political psychologist Ashis Nandy put it:

“Colonialism is first of all a matter of consciousness and needs to be defeated ultimately in the minds of men.” (The Intimate Enemy, 1983)

In Delhi recently, an American diplomatic contact told me how he and his colleagues were astonished by the reluctance of local Indians to speak their own national language. “What they all like doing,” he observed, “is using a hybrid tongue they call ‘Hinglish’.” No other nationality, he added, seemed so shamelessly dependent on the language of its former conqueror.

And yet, defeat is far from complete. The psychic scar endures.

There is also the matter of religion — or, more precisely, its abandonment. While many have genuine reasons for religious conversion or secularism, it is difficult to ignore the pattern among some urban elites who quietly adopt Western religious identities for social convenience. A friend who now attends church services in central London admitted he doesn’t believe in God but finds the congregation “better connected.”

This extends into other cultural practices. Yoga is passé, Pilates is in. Diwali becomes a bland “festival of lights.” Holi is reduced to photo ops. A senior editor at a London publishing house recently asked me to “avoid anything too mystical or saffron” in a pitch, as though Indian spirituality were a liability to be managed.

The word emasculation might sound provocative, and is, by design. But the anxiety is real. There is a growing sense, especially among men, of needing to shrink themselves to be accepted: to speak less loudly, smile more, apologize for one’s accent, avoid seeming “too ethnic.” Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks: “The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.”

That elevation, however, is always conditional. Even the most “assimilated” Indian can find themselves on the wrong side of a microaggression — or worse — with no cultural grounding to return to.

Too often, the celebrated Indian in the West is not merely being honoured but enlisted. The knighthood, the barony, the board seat at a think tank or museum, come with invisible strings. Behind the flattery lies function: to reassure, to influence, and, sometimes, to deflect.

These well-placed individuals are quietly expected to legitimize British (or Western) narratives — not Indian ones. Whether it’s defending the retention of looted artefacts, echoing foreign policy lines on Kashmir or Palestine, or criticizing elected Indian or diaspora movements deemed “too radical”, the role is clear: be brown, but speak White.

Would their son, born fluent in English but stripped of Punjabi, be recruited by GCHQ or MI6 as the “perfect asset” in Lahore or Delhi? Would he, in a future war framed as humanitarian, be deployed to South Asia as a British soldier — tasked with pacifying a people he no longer recognizes, but vaguely resembles? The cycle is cruelly elegant: disinherit a boy or girl of their past, then send them back to conquer it.

This is not always conscious. But the structure rewards those who distance themselves from nationalist sentiment, cultural assertiveness, or demands for historical redress. It punishes those who don’t.

In essence, the assimilated Indian becomes a bridge — not between cultures, but between empire and erasure. Their function is often not to represent India, but to pacify it especially in spaces where the West still hopes to extract loyalty, capital, or silence.

To be clear, this is not an attack on modernization or multiculturalism. Names evolve. Faiths shift. Languages mix. But what’s worrying is when these changes are driven not by curiosity or confidence but by fear, shame, and a desire to disappear.

Across the Atlantic, Indian Americans are navigating a similar tension — but with different levers. The Pew Research Center’s recent surveys of Asian Americans note that most Indian-origin adults are highly English-proficient and comfortably bilingual at home, and that the community’s median household income sits at the very top among US groups. Those facts make “practical” name-smoothing tempting, and they explain why museums and universities so energetically court Indian donors.

Yet Pew also records a quieter undertow: a noticeable minority admit to hiding parts of their heritage in certain settings. Prosperity has not erased the psychology of fitting in; it has sometimes just made it tidier.

By contrast, Chinese and Japanese diasporas often present different compulsions, for structural reasons. Chinese communities abroad maintain dense weekend language schools and, until recently, a network of roughly a hundred Confucius Institutes on US campuses, normalizing public use of Chinese and lowering the felt need to anglicize identity to succeed.

Japanese Americans, meanwhile, are one of the most multi-generational and US-born Asian groups; English-dominant and long embedded, they show deep assimilation — but it is generational and organic rather than the sudden mimicry demanded of newer professional migrants. The outcomes look similar on the surface; the routes and pressures are not.

Inside India, there are anchors that resist the script. In the South, a century of language-pride politics, from Periyar to the anti-Hindi agitations of 1965, created public norms that make Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam respectable in elite space. Scholars such as Duncan B. Forrester chronicled how those movements shifted policy as well as pride.

Among Adivasi communities, sociologist Virginius Xaxa has argued that the battle is less about aping the West and more about fending off assimilation into dominant groups; where communities retain schooling, land, and ritual life, cultural continuity is stronger. Different histories, different inoculations — and fewer incentives to perform “Whiteness”.

And there is a strategic cost to getting this wrong. A country that speaks of itself as a future world power cannot outsource its voice to mimicry. Soft power is not a costume; it is the residue of confidence carried in names, languages, and an unapologetic sense of origin.

If India expects to be taken seriously in chancelleries and boardrooms — from climate talks to tech standards — then its envoys, entrepreneurs, and diasporic elites have to bring India into the room without apology. Otherwise it will not work. Power that disavows its own texture becomes a subcontract, not a strategy.

B.R. Ambedkar once wrote: “The assertion by the individual of his identity is a declaration of war against the social order that would keep him in his place.”

Perhaps what India — and Indians — need most now is not another global ranking or rebranding campaign, but a return to cultural self-respect. Not a wall of nationalism, but a quiet, firm confidence: to speak one’s name without apology, to live without the need for mimicry, and to recognize that the longing to be White is, in the end, a longing to be someone else entirely. 

 

Shyam Bhatia is an India-born British journalist