'My visit to India has made me reflect on my Britishness' - West Midlands poet Roshan Doug takes emotional trip to India

This evening I’m looking at some colonial buildings – relics of a bygone age. Buildings my great-grandparents must have walked amongst, brushed past, perhaps even leaned against while discussing family, prices or politics.

I sense a poem is taking shape.

These buildings stand in the heart of old Delhi, sun-warmed and faintly fraying at the edges.

The balconies tilt with quiet defiance. The plaster flakes without apology. Time here doesn’t demolish; it accumulates. Layer upon layer.

I’m feeling poetic, nostalgic, perhaps even emotional, as if I’m touching history. Going back in time.

That reaction probably began in primary school. I’ve loved history since those early classroom days when maps and monarchs felt more thrilling than multiplication tables. I used to image ordinary people amidst wars or civil turmoil. How they must have spoke, lived and felt. The past, for me, has never been a distant country. It has always felt like a neighbouring room – close enough to step into if you lean hard enough on the right door.

But this is different. This isn’t Tudor intrigue or Victorian reform. This is personal. My great-grandparents would have known streets like these in a Delhi that was colonial, constrained and yet alive with possibility. Did they glance up at these same façades? Did they complain about the heat? Did they imagine that one day a descendant would return – English-educated, mildly sunburnt, and reflecting a little too theatrically on balconies?

I was born to Hindu parents who left India for Britain in the late 1950s with courage, thrift and an unwavering faith in education. I grew up entirely at home in the UK, read English at university – eventually became a professor teaching the works of Shakespeare and Dickens – and even wrote for the late Queen. Britain shaped my mind, my humour, and my instinctive respect for an orderly queue. It is, unequivocally, my home.

And yet Delhi has opened another door.

This city doesn’t do understatement. Horns don’t politely suggest; they declare. A shrine glows between a chemist and a mobile phone shop as if divinity were simply another neighbour. Faith isn’t tucked away. It breathes in public.

As a Hindu raised in Britain, religion was often meaningful but contained – observed at home, explained at school, occasionally celebrated in festivals. Here it is ambient. It shapes the rhythm of the day. The epics my parents mentioned over dinner – the Mahabaret or the Ramayan – feel less like heritage and more like a living soundtrack.

Yesterday I met a poet friend – Sudeep Sen – for coffee. Our conversation stretched long past the first cup. He, too, writes about identity and cultural shifts, about the strange elasticity of belonging. We laughed at how diaspora children are forever being asked to choose sides, as if identity were a football transfer window. He said something that has stayed with me: ‘We don’t live in between worlds. We live in both.’

That feels right.

For years, I resisted the neatness of hyphenated labels. But standing here, imagining my ancestors’ footsteps aligning briefly with mine, I realise identity isn’t a corridor with opposing doors. It’s more like a house with adjoining rooms. One shaped by Britain – its literature, its scepticism, its parliamentary dramas. Another shaped by India – its civilisational depth, its unapologetic metaphysics, its glorious noise.

You don’t have to switch off the lights in one to enter the other. 

Britain remains home. My voice and vocation were formed there. But here in Delhi, something older hums in recognition – not in conflict, not in competition, simply in continuity.

The buildings don’t know me. The city doesn’t pause. But in their worn stone and stubborn endurance, I recognise a lineage – and perhaps a little of myself.

And tonight, as the city settles into its restless sleep, I sense that both rooms are brightly lit, beautifully.

Roshan Doug is an educationalist from the West Midlands and a former Birmingham Poet Laureate.