For diaspora communities, identity is often bound up with ethnicity, culture and religion. These are all key markers of who they are.

If you are raised in the country of your ancestors, for example India, the need to assert your ethnicity is less necessary, as it would be a statement of the obvious. It is only when you find yourself in a different situation, either in another country, or when there are significant numbers of people who are of a different ethnicity in your country of origin, that ethnicity becomes an important way of identifying yourself. The same applies to cultural and religious identity.

So a Gujarati in their own village is unlikely to describe themselves to a neighbour as Gujarati. However, if they travelled to another part of India, they might feel it important to describe themselves in this way, and if they travelled out of India, they might feel the need to describe themselves as Indian, and perhaps share their religious identity to new acquaintances.

For the South Asian diaspora, ethnic, religious and cultural identity can be a way of connecting with their heritage and family, which is why you may find enthusiastic support for the Indian cricket team from people who were neither born nor raised in India. For some, to play down these aspects of their identity is tantamount to betraying their roots.

Others feel there should be less focus on these and that people need to identify more with their country of residence, especially if they are citizens of that country. Some would argue that it would be acceptable to incorporate aspects of their ‘home’ culture into their lives, but their ultimate loyalties should be with their country of residence.

Second and third generation diaspora South Asians feel the pressure of getting the balance right more acutely than the older generations. On the one hand, many now are proud of their cultural heritage and keen to affirm it, but some have never even been to their countries of origin and find it hard to balance traditional religious beliefs and values with life in increasingly secular societies.

There is of course much more to identity than ethnicity, culture and religion, but these are likely to continue to be important aspects for the South Asian diaspora, as a visible minority with distinctive cultural traits. It is important that people feel free to express these aspects, and also to adapt them without fear of being accused of betraying either their ‘home’ or ‘host’ country, so they are expressing their personal identity in a genuine way.

Religious belief, for example, is deeply personal and though often tied up with cultural practice, is not something that should be taken lightly and accepted unquestioningly. According to the 2001 UK census, nearly 72 per cent of the population are ‘Christian’, yet other surveys suggest that a smaller percentage actually believe in God, which would contradict the first statistic. Many people seem to have assumed they are Christian because Britain is perceived to be a Christian nation. In the same way, some South Asian diaspora people may identify with the religion of their parents, without even fully appreciating what this means.

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