Mixed feelings about identity

In Both, Not Half explores the diverse facets of mixed identity, going beyond individual experiences

Both Not Half: A Radical New Approach to Mixed Heritage Identity

Author: Jassa Ahluwalia

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages: 344

Price:  Rs 499

In the first chapter of Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Penguin, 2022), titled “Heritage, Childhood, Family, Origins”, the 2019 Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo notes that growing up she was labelled “half-caste” ­— a “term for biracial people at that time”.

Ms Evaristo was born in 1959 to a Nigerian father and an English mother. The British actor, writer and filmmaker Jassa Ahluwalia was born in 1990 to an English mother and a Punjabi father. The three decades between them underline the fact that the discourse and vocabulary related to mixed heritage didn’t advance beyond “half”, as if there’s a neat calculus to mixed inheritance.

Ms Evaristo tried to understand identity and articulate the hurt that people with mixed heritage end up accumulating while growing up in an unwelcoming environment. In Both Not Half: A Radical New Approach to Mixed Heritage Identity Mr Ahluwalia explores the various facets of mixed identity.

Published in May and divided into eight chapters that cover a range of subjects — from casting people of mixed heritage in movies to masculinity and queerness to discovering the essence of one’s faith — the book is timely in light of the race riots that have erupted in the UK.

It begins with an interesting anecdote. It’s 1994. At a wedding in Moga, Punjab, three-year-old Ahluwalia is dancing joyously, though he’s unable to find his “rhythm”. Despite his blonde hair and white skin, he was “the very image of a Punjabi folk dancer” as one can see in the video that his father made on a camcorder that the writer has published on his Instagram. In the same video, he is wearing a pageboy suit doing Bhangra to dhol beats.

Juxtapose this with a grown-up Jassa’s irritation when a street vendor thinks he is white. Mr Ahluwalia narrates this incident in his viral TEDx Talk and notes in the book: “Oh shad deh yaar, mera sir part dha pya! Kini vari main kya, mere kul paani hai! Kisi hor nu thang kar!”  (Translation by the author: “Leave it dude, my head is killing me, I’ve said so many times, I’ve got water, go bother someone else.”)

These incidents can be considered cornerstones in understanding identity — how it’s shaped not only by one’s self-image developed in a sheltered environment but also by the biases people have internalised for aeons. Mr Ahluwalia articulates this brilliantly in this book. The differences between his and his father’s experiences are telling. Mr Ahluwalia’s brown father, who had moved to the UK in 1973, had grown up “carrying a cricket bat to the park, regardless of whether there was a match to play; he was well attuned to and unsurprised by the racism and violence he encountered.” Mr Ahluwalia, on the other hand, “didn’t feel othered.” Instead, his “whiteness insulated” him.

Mr Ahluwalia also engages with identity beyond individual experiences, particularly in the second chapter titled “My Name Is Jassa Ahluwalia and I Have Imperial Nostalgia.” The arguments here are scholarly and meticulously question classical heroes — such as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim  — and interpretations of history. It ends with an interesting story in which the author relates how his “legal name” almost killed him.

The (ongoing) discrimination in cinema against non-white people is well documented in the chapter “Half-Casting”. Interestingly, here, too, Mr Ahluwalia offers some intriguing trivia. Mumbai-born British actress Merle Oberon hid her mixed heritage her entire life. Later, pop culture would remark that Michelle Yeoh was the second Asian to be nominated for the Oscar for Lead Actress — and the first to have won — because the first was Oberon. To that end, the author concludes: “Being a chameleon is part of the joy of being an actor, but I wanted to play with my true colours.”

A person’s identity is a spectrum, and one of them is defined by nationalism — the narrative a nation forces on individuals, which Mr Ahluwalia discusses thoroughly in “Useful Fictions, Dangerous Narratives”. The chapter documents the myths that leaders offer to amass support, the kind of insecurities majorities develop to threaten — and often murder — minority communities, how language politics divides and unites and, most importantly, how embracing this part of one’s identity is crucial, but to be blinded by it is foolish.

A good memoirist must be vulnerable in the face of events. Mr Ahluwalia accepts the fact that he wasn’t a good ally to his queer, brown sister Ramanique, and grieves and rekindles his relationship with his grandmother (“BG”) by understanding the

underlying principles of Sikhism. In the chapter “Adventures in Masculinity,” he talks about experiencing non-normative desires and how toxic masculinity is detrimental to living a more fulfilling life.

The bouquet of issues that Mr Ahluwalia tackles in this book makes it clear that writing about identity is a tricky business. However, he makes it look easy. His book also seems to be doing what Manifesto did to Ms Evaristo, who writes, “As a race, the human one, we all carry our histories of ancestry within us, and I am curious as to how mine helped determine the person and writer I became.” It’s the history that wasn’t available readily to Mr Ahluwalia, which is why he wrote Both Not Half to fill this gap.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. On Instagram/X: @writerly_life