How Punjabi are you and does it matter?

Open Minds Online Group June 2022

Are you Punjabi-British? Are you Asian-British? Are you Punjabi but can’t speak Punjabi? Are you British at all?

At June’s group we started thinking about what it means to be Punjabi, but our conversations quickly opened out into a conversation about being an ‘other’ (someone who is made to feel different) in the UK and how racism can affect the way that we think about ourselves.  Identity is a complicated thing and no matter how many times we talk about it in our groups, the conversation always brings up new ideas or new ways of thinking about the same things.

The challenging thing about being brown in the UK is that it is still common for people to make assumptions about us because of our skin colour. When people ask us repeatedly, “where are you from” it can sometimes also be painful as they seem to be saying – “it looks like you couldn’t be from here”.

Some of us remembered when the UK was a much more racist place. In the 1970’s and 1980s it was more common for people to be physically aggressive or verbally abusive to you because of your skin colour. We talked about how some of us experienced this kind of racism when we were growing up and how these experiences still shape the way we think about racism in the present.

Of course, this wasn’t everyone’s experience and some of us spoke very proudly of being both British and Punjabi. For them, there was no issue between these two parts of their identity and they enjoyed being able to take bits from both parts.

As we talked it became clear that lots of what we were discussing was about migration. Punjabi people are spread across the world and a lot of our shared culture is made outside of Punjab.  For those of us who were born in Punjab, they had a very different point of view about their roots. The more we talked, the clearer it became that there is no one way to be Punjabi and this is something to be celebrated.

Calling yourself Punjabi or LGBTQIA+ means that you have a way of describing part of yourself to other people. It can be a way to connect with other people who share the same label and share your common or different ways of seeing the world. Our discussion this month reminded us of the fact that even though we all identified as having Punjabi or South Asian heritage, when we’re all in a room together, we realised that this part of our identity is only one part of how we see ourselves. We are all much more than our Punjabiness or our LGBTQIA+ness and don’t let anyone make you believe anything else!

With warm wishes,

The Open Minds Project ­

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