Excerpt: Over time, Sunak’s presentation of his life has involved a de-Africanising of his origins while increasing the spotlight on his Indian heritage.
I’ll confess to not being that interested in Rishi Sunak until quite recently. My initial thought, when I first heard his name, was, “Huh, Rishi, is this dude an Indian Brit?” Yes, it seemed, he was, and I lost interest again. While Indian Americans are still, relatively speaking, a novelty in the United States, they’re plentiful enough in the heart of the former-yet-still-somehow-pulsatingly-alive Empire that the idea of a British Indian is ho-hum. He was, at the time, chief secretary to the Treasury and, really, he could have been the Minister of Magic for all I cared; he went on to become the Chancellor of the Exchequer until his recent resignation from the Johnson administration (a move more drama than ideology).
Things, of course, have changed and, oh, how they’ve changed. Boris Johnson has to be followed by a successor from within his own party, and most odds are on Sunak. So, of course, I looked more closely at the man who might be Britain’s next prime minister — and its first non-white one.
“Non-white” is one way to describe someone who is otherwise laden with some very long labels like “Brit of Indian origin” or “Indo-Brit whose parents came here from East Africa.” In an interview with the Indian paper British Standard, he states emphatically, “British Indian is what I tick on the census, we have a category for it. I am thoroughly British, this is my home and my country, but my religious and cultural heritage is Indian, my wife is Indian. I am open about being a Hindu.” Which begs the question: what about his African heritage? In all the naming, it’s hard not to miss that there seems to be some deliberate attempt on the part of many to ignore an obvious fact: Rishi Sunak is of African origin.
A significant part of Indian migration to Africa came about because of indentured labour pools created by the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This kind of passage makes for a complicated relationship between “migrants” and the land to which they are forcibly taken: the place of displacement cannot be readily seen as their own and memories of the homeland will persist, even through generations, as the place of origin. A community’s economic origins as indentured labourers creates stigma and a sense of never-belonging, and this has been true for many of Indian origins in Africa and elsewhere. At the same time, other waves of Indian immigrants became the managerial class for the Empire: in Uganda, Indians were the overseers of British properties, creating waves of resentment that resulted in the mass expulsion of Indians by Idi Amin in 1972.
Both of Rishi Sunak’s parents were born in Africa: his father in Kenya and his mother in Tanzania. Even his grandparents spent time in Africa before migrating to the UK in the 1960s, and Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980. To be fair to him, he doesn’t seem to have that much of a connection to Africa, having spent his life in the UK where he lived a relatively privileged life as the child of a General Practitioner and a pharmacist. Sunak went to all the proper schools, including Stanford where he fortuitously met Akshata Narayan Murty who happens to be the daughter of a billionaire and one of the richest men in India: N. R. Narayana Murthy, who founded Infosys. Together, Sunak and his wife are worth nearly a billion pounds. Over time, Sunak’s presentation of his life has involved a de-Africanising of his origins while increasing the spotlight on his Indian heritage.
This isn’t accidental and it’s not just about the larger backdrop of racism where “Indian” stands above “African” in the hierarchy of race and ethnicity. In the years to come, if Africa should become home to several economies that emulate, say, China, in rapid growth, Sunak — always the politician — will no doubt embrace a hitherto unacknowledged African past and heritage. (It’s also likely that Africans will firmly reject him as a native son). But right now, as things stand in the global economy, Africa does not bring the cachet of a properly upwardly mobile migrant story so it’s no wonder that a family whose roots are in fact deep in the continent should persist in rejecting them. In the process, Sunak has crafted an origin story that’s almost farcical in its adoption of the classic immigrant narrative, speaking often of his parents working hard to make sure he got into the best private prep schools and Oxford. It’s a story that’s familiar to American voters who endure such stories from countless politicians, and it’s just as fake. Sunak, in his telling, makes it sound like his parents struggled to make sure their children were fed and clothed when, in fact, they were comfortably well off. He wants the gloss of a hard work tale but without the unseemly association with labour (a clip from an old interview, where he hastily corrects himself to say that he doesn’t have any working class friends, is going around). In such an invention of a life, it’s also important that the parents be rendered almost child-like in their simplicity, with no thoughts or ambitions beyond their precious progeny. Kamala Harris, for instance, frequently paints her mother as a tiny, smiling Indian woman looking down fondly at her successful daughter, “all of 5 feet tall”. But Shyamala Harris was in fact a canny political activist and intellectual in her own right, not some tiny Indian woman overawed by her new country who spent all her time packing idlis for lunch.
Despite similar attempts to recast himself as just another bloke from humble origins and thus emblematic of the opportunities that Britain offers immigrants, Sunak is already being ripped apart by his opponents for all his posturing — and the British press is far more, shall we say, searching in its attitude towards politicians. He has several problems with his record as Chancellor: many have pointed out that his promises to right the economy are odd given that his policies were directly responsible for much of what ails it in the first place. Sunak also faces criticism from Labour for holding on to his U.S green card, and there has been much scrutiny of his family’s personal wealth (until recently, Murthy, who is actually richer than the queen, was not paying taxes on her non-UK income because of her “non-domiciled” status).
All of which is to say: Rishi Sunak’s family history and financial entanglements can’t be hidden quite so easily behind the pretence that he’s simply the successful child of immigrants who succeeded through sheer grit. His is a story of the winding roads of migration, diaspora, displacement, and landings, of exploitation and massive fortunes being built on the backs of exploited millions in areas spanning the globe, from Africa to India to the United States: a colonial story morphing into a neoliberal one and no less bloody now than it was in older times. Rishi Sunak may erase all traces of his African roots but he is still the new face of a new global Empire.
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