Introduction

On arriving in Britain in the early 1980s I discovered that I had unexpectedly entered a sort of cultural “limbo” of immigrant doctors and nurses from British ex-colonies, many of which (such as Bangladesh, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, the islands of the Caribbean) had, until then, registered only dimly on our awareness. I began to see how profoundly the view of the world that I had grown up with in India was dominated by the preoccupations of the “white” West (Britain, Europe, and the United States of America), or by the Indian response to these. The nature and legacy of these historical relationships seemed to make “objectivity,” highly prized by our professional trainings, impossible when considering culture. This chapter tracks some of the responses of immigrant professionals such as myself, from the earliest stages of bewilderment, through anger at what we learned to identify as “racism,” and into the relief of contemporary debates about ethnicity and multiculturalism that a social constructionist viewpoint has introduced. It hopes to draw attention to those subjects that seem impossible to discuss in professional settings, obstructed as much by external realities of discrimination based on “ethnic” categories and the uncertainties of professional survival, as by fears about ourselves and our undiscovered prejudices.