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I prefer to live in a multicultural melting pot, so to say. However, the human condition in multicultural societies such as Britain or the US or India can be one of growing uneasiness and disenchantment instead of being comforting and ennobling.
Shukla (2017) is a collection of essays by 21 writers. It is a brilliant exploration of what it means to be Asian, Black and minority ethnic in Britain today. You cannot miss out these experiences of immigrants in Britain if you are keen to pursue higher studies there.
You also cannot be blind to these experiences if you are carried away by the 1891-92 “Leaves of Grass” poems of Walt Whitman so as to harbour the illusion of settling down well as an equal to the white person in Europe or North America. Whitman had thought of America as the “centre of equal daughters, equal sons”, who are “strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable”, and who identify themselves with “Freedom, Law and Love”; and saluted America as the “grand, sane, towering, seated Mother” who is “chair’d in the adamant of Time”. Unfortunately, white supremacism—the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them—is a blunt or subtle reality experienced by most immigrants in the western countries.
As Shukla points out, this volume is a documentation of what it means to be a person of colour now under the systemic racism that runs through Britain. The beautiful, powerful and unapologetic essays in the volume underline the point that “the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants—job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees—until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants. And we are so tired of that burden.”