On the vada at the char rasta, and what scripture and scholarship say about Kali Chaudas. By Hetal Upadhyay.

Every year, on the night of Kali Chaudas, I asked myself the same question, and every year I let it go unanswered. Why the vada?

In our home in Gujarat, the festival began long before Diwali. From Agyaras, a divo was lit at the door each evening. Many homes drew a small rangoli every day through Vagh Baras, Dhanteras and Kali Chaudas, keeping the finest for the new year.

I did it my own way: one big rangoli, six feet square, sometimes ten feet by ten, that took me two or three nights to finish, with fatakada lighting up the street between the colours. Looking back, the art was my meditation, done with nothing but joy.

We come from a family of Pandits, with Shaiva and Shakta roots, and as in most Pandit families, Shiva is our Aradhya, the main deity of the home, so no puja was ever complete without him.

While we children bent over the rangoli, my parents kept the night in worship: puja, sometimes a yagya, the Durga Saptashati and the Shri Suktam. I was young, and I do not remember every rite, but I remember sitting with my family in Shiva worship on Kali Chaudas, while the mandirs around us rang with the Hanuman Chalisa.

The vada walk

Then, late in the evening, came the vada. Vada and puri were fried, and a few were taken with a lota of water through every room of the house, akha ghar mathi, and circled over each person's head. In Gujarati we call this ovarvu (ઓવારવું). Every home keeps it a little differently; this is how ours did it.

Then we walked them out to the char rasta, where the four roads meet. The water was poured first, the vada and puri set down, and we turned for home. There was one rule nobody explained, but everybody kept: you do not look back.

For years I did it without knowing why. Then, one year, I began to ask. I followed one question into the next, through scripture, history and the work of scholars. What I found was a story far older than our family, older even than Diwali as we know it. And it begins exactly where the vada ends: at the crossroads.

The first clue: the crossroads belongs to Rudra

My first answer came from the oldest place I could look. The Shatapatha Brahmana, one of the earliest ritual texts of the Vedic tradition, describes a rite called the Tryambaka. Cakes are offered to Rudra on a road, at a crossroads, because, in Julius Eggeling's translation, "the cross-road, indeed, is known to be his favourite haunt."

The share is offered to Rudra together with his sister, Ambika. The family walks around the fire, and the remaining cakes are carried out of the settlement and left on the first tree or ant-hill they meet. The purpose is plain: to draw Rudra's arrows, illness and harm, away from the family and its children.

I read that twice. Food circled, carried out of the home, and left at the crossroads for the fierce power that lives there. It was our vada, three thousand years earlier.

Then the Taittiriya Brahmana stopped me again. It says Ambika is autumn, the season through which Rudra strikes with disease. Kali Chaudas falls at the very end of autumn, as the year turns towards winter.

The historian D. D. Kosambi, writing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1960, went further. He argued that crossroads were among the oldest places of mother-goddess worship in India. In the Sanskrit play Mricchakatika, the hero leaves an offering for the Mothers at the crossroads on a dark-fortnight night, and the Mahabharata speaks of Mothers "who dwell at the crossroads".

When a Gujarati mother carries vada to the char rasta, she is walking a very old road.

Why we never look back

The rule that had puzzled me since childhood turned out to be written down too. The Ashvalayana Grihya Sutra, a Vedic manual of household rites, describes what a family does after a death (4.6, in Hermann Oldenberg's translation).

Before sunrise, they carry the old household fire out and throw it down at a crossroads. They walk round it three times. Then, the text says, "they return home without looking back", bathe, and begin again with a new fire.

When I read that line, I could see myself as a child, walking home from the char rasta, trying hard not to turn my head.

Something carried out of the home, set down at the crossroads, circled and left behind, and the family turns for home without a backward glance. What has been given away is not to be called back, not even by the eyes.

Ovarvu: the circle and the lota

Next I wanted to understand the circle itself. Why ovarvu, circling the vada-puri and the lota over every head and through every room? Every Gujarati grandmother would say: to take the najar off.

I was surprised to find that scholars had studied exactly this. The anthropologist David Pocock wrote about najar in a Gujarati village in Mind, Body and Wealth (1973). Decades later, Martin Oran Wood followed Gujarati Hindus in Britain and New Zealand (Fieldwork in Religion, 2010) and found the same practice alive: things circled over the head and thrown outside to remove the evil eye. Wood notes that najar is "intimately connected with food".

Kali Chaudas does this for the whole household at once. The food gathers up the envy, the quarrels, the heaviness of the year, what we call kakalat. The water goes with it, poured first at the crossroads and around the offering, a ring that seals what has been left there.

Not everyone believes. In Ahmedabad, a Valmiki community leader picks up and eats the crossroads food each year to show that no harm follows. His protest reminded me that a ritual lives in its meaning, not in fear. For me, the meaning is simple: before the new year, I name what weighs on my home, I carry it out with my own hands, and I let it go.

Who waits at the crossroads

If the vada is left for someone, I wondered, who is it left for? In Gujarat today, the crossroads is said to belong to Bhairav. That fits the Vedic picture perfectly, because Bhairav is Rudra's own fierce form.

In the Skanda Purana's Kashi Khanda, Shiva creates him and names him Kalabhairava, "the one whom even Time fears", and makes him the guardian of Kashi for ever. Bhairav keeps the cremation ground, the boundary and the crossroads: every place where one world touches another.

And I thought of the Hanuman Chalisa I heard from the mandirs as a child. A verse quoted in the Vrata-ratnakara says Anjana gave birth to Hanuman on the dark fourteenth of Ashvin, at the great midnight: this very night.

The Chalisa calls him the son of Shankara, and promises that ghosts and spirits do not come near when his name is spoken. That is why many Gujarati mandirs sing it and offer him oil and sindoor on Kali Chaudas.

So on the night the household sends its troubles out to the crossroads, it honours the two guardians who stand there. One is the fierce form of Rudra himself; the other is the protector born at this very midnight.

The demon who was a king

The deeper I went, the more the night turned upside down. We call it Narak Chaturdashi, after the demon Krishna killed. But in Assam, Naraka is remembered as a founding king.

The Kalika Purana says Vishnu made him ruler of Pragjyotisha, today's Guwahati, and told him to worship Kamakhya above all, and the scholar Paolo Eugenio Rosati shows that the early kings of Kamarupa proudly traced their line to him. He ruled well until pride took him, and he fell. Even in the Bhagavata Purana, when Krishna slays him, it is Bhumi, the Earth and Naraka's own mother, who comes forward to pray for his son.

So the "demon" of this night was a good king ruined by ego. Sri Ramana Maharshi said it simply: Naraka is the thought "I am this body", and when it falls and the Self shines, that is Deepavali.

Fourteen lamps in Bengal

Our divo at the door led me east. In Bengal the same night is Bhoot Chaturdashi. Families light fourteen lamps, choddo prodip, around the house for the ancestors of both parents' lines, and eat choddo shaak, fourteen leafy greens, a custom first written down by the sixteenth-century scholar Raghunandana.

The greens, neem, giloy and mustard among them, are seasonal medicine; one writer suggests the illnesses of the changing season were the night's real "ghosts". Fourteen lamps and fourteen greens on the fourteenth night of the waning moon: a ring of light around the home, just as our ovarvu is a circle through it.

The village bride and Kali's tongue

It was in Bengal, too, that I found the gentlest story of all. The most famous image of Kali, Dakshina Kali with her tongue out, was once simply a pot: for centuries Bengal often worshipped her in that form. The sixteenth-century tantric scholar Krishnananda Agamavagisha of Nabadwip, author of the great Tantrasara, wanted to give her a form. The legend says the Goddess told him in a dream to shape her on the first figure he saw at dawn.

At dawn he saw a young village bride plastering cow-dung cakes on a wall, one foot raised on a stone. When she noticed a stranger watching, she bit her tongue in embarrassment, as women of her time did. That pose became Dakshina Kali. The tongue we read as rage began, in this story, as modesty.

Kali's night before Lakshmi's morning

By now my childhood question had grown into a bigger one. Why does all this clearing happen on the night before Lakshmi? Kali Chaudas falls on the dark fourteenth, the same tithi as every monthly Shivaratri, which may be why my family sat in Shiva worship that night. The next night, the new moon, belongs to Kali in the East and to Lakshmi in our homes. Shiva's kind of night, then Shakti's.

The Bhavishya Purana describes women beating winnowing fans at midnight to drive Alakshmi, misfortune, out of the house before Lakshmi comes. That is our vada walk in another form: first the heaviness goes out, then the light comes in.

The Skanda Purana's Kartika chapter adds a dawn oil bath on this Chaturdashi, promising that whoever takes it "does not see the world of Yama", with a line I love: Lakshmi lives in the oil, Ganga in the water.

This bath was never part of our Gujarati night; it is kept more widely as Narak Chaturdashi in Maharashtra, the South and the North. But Ayurveda gives it a reason: the Charaka Samhita prescribes oil massage in early winter (Sutrasthana 6.14). It also completes what Dhanteras began: Dhanvantari rose from the ocean with a pot of amrit, not a cash box. Health first, then wealth.

The Devi Mahatmya calls the Goddess kalaratri, the Night of Time, in a hymn sung to her as Yoganidra, the sleep that holds even Vishnu. Every great night of our year asks us to do the opposite: to stay awake. I thought of myself as a child, awake through the night over a rangoli, and smiled. Perhaps I was keeping the vigil without knowing it.

What the tantras hold about this night

The last door my question opened was the deepest. Every thread of this festival, Rudra at the crossroads, Kali on the dark night, Bhairav at the boundary, Hanuman at midnight, leads into the tantras, the tradition my family's Shaiva and Shakta roots belong to.

The root is one line of the Devi Mahatmya, in Brahma's hymn to the Goddess as Yoganidra:

कालरात्रिर्महारात्रिर्मोहरात्रिश्च दारुणा ॥
kālarātrir mahārātrir moharātriś ca dāruṇā
"You are Kalaratri, the Night of Time; Maharatri, the Great Night; and Moharatri, the fearsome Night of Delusion."

Tradition gives these great nights their festivals: Kali Chaudas and Diwali as Kalaratri, Maha Shivaratri as Maharatri, Janmashtami as Moharatri, with Holi's night of fire beside them. Gujarat's tantric practitioners go further and call Kali Chaudas itself the Maharatri. Lineages place the names a little differently, but all agree these are the nights when tradition asks us to stay awake.

The Mahanirvana Tantra teaches that Time swallows everything, and Kali swallows even Time; a night of Kali is a night when time itself bows.

The Todala Tantra pairs her with Mahakala, Bhairav's own form, and even says Kali herself arose as Krishna, so Krishna's victory over Naraka and Kali's worship meet on one night. Hanuman's birth, too, is placed at this hour, in a verse quoted in the Vrata-ratnakara:

आश्विनस्यासिते पक्षे भूतायां च महानिशि । भौमवारेऽञ्जनादेवी हनूमन्तमजीजनत् ॥
"On the fourteenth of the dark half of Ashvin, at the great midnight, on a Tuesday, Anjana gave birth to Hanuman."

Mahanisha, the great midnight, is the classic hour of tantric worship, when the outer world falls quiet and mantra goes deep.

One firm rule goes with it. The Kularnava Tantra says there is no siddhi without initiation from a true guru. The deep sadhanas belong to the initiated; for the rest of us, a lamp, the Name, the Devi Mahatmya or the Hanuman Chalisa, and a quiet, wakeful heart are enough.

Closing

So the walk to the char rasta is no longer a mystery to me. It is a Vedic offering to Rudra, a handing-over to Bhairav, a cleansing of nazar, and a quiet goodbye to the old year's heaviness, all in one short walk with a lota in my hand.

This year, when I set the vada down at the crossroads and turn for home, I will know who I am leaving it for, and why I do not look back.

On Mother Narmada, the Parikrama and Dada Guru. By Hetal Upadhyay.

Most rivers are crossed. The Narmada is walked around.

Of India's holy rivers, the Narmada is the one with a living tradition of circumambulation from source to sea and back again. Pilgrims set out from Amarkantak, in the Maikal hills of Madhya Pradesh, where the river rises from a sacred tank. They follow one bank all the way to the Arabian Sea beyond Bharuch in Gujarat, cross over near the mouth, and walk back up the other bank to where they began. The full circuit runs to some 2,600 to 3,500 kilometres, depending on the route. One rule governs it: the river must always be kept on your right.

That single rule says a great deal. You do not conquer the Narmada, bridge her or cut across her. You go around her, the way a devotee walks around a deity in a temple. The river is not the backdrop to the pilgrimage. She is its centre.

Who is Narmada?

To those who walk her banks she is not "the river" but Narmada Maiya, Mother Narmada, also called Ma Rewa. Her name is usually read as "the giver of delight". Tradition calls her Shankari, the daughter of Shankar: one account says she arose from Lord Shiva's body as he meditated at Amarkantak; another, from his sweat.

She flows west for about 1,312 kilometres, the longest west-flowing river in India, through Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, and her basin touches Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh too. On her banks stand Omkareshwar, one of the twelve jyotirlingas, and Maheshwar, and the ghats of Jabalpur.

Her sanctity is spoken of in a way no other river quite shares. It is said that bathing in the Ganga purifies, but that the mere sight of the Narmada is enough. A popular saying holds that every pebble in her bed is Shankar: Narmada ke kankar, utte Shankar. The smooth stones shaped by her current, the banalingas or Narmadeshwar lingas, are worshipped in homes and temples across India as self-born forms of Shiva.

Why walk around a river?

The Reva Khanda of the Skanda Purana is devoted to the Narmada and her tirthas. Tradition holds that the sage Markandeya was the first to complete the parikrama, and that Agastya, Bhrigu and Atri found their realisation on her banks, which are called a tapobhumi, a land of penance and meditation.

In the old way, observing every rite, the parikrama took three years, three months and thirteen days. Many still walk it barefoot over six to eight months, carrying little, sleeping in ashrams, dharamshalas and village homes, and depending on the hospitality that the riverside villages have offered pilgrims for generations. Others today make the journey in stages or by road.

People set out for many reasons: a vow, a prayer, penance, gratitude, a question they cannot answer at home. What they share is the discipline itself. The parikrama asks you to give up control of your days: where you eat, where you sleep, how far you get. In return it gives you something modern life rarely offers, a single direction and a single companion. The river is always there, always on your right.

I went to the Narmada to find my mother. And there, by the river, she found me. Somewhere along those banks I began to feel that my mother and Maa Narmada were never two. They say every pebble of the Narmada is Shankar. Walking beside her, I understood why. The blessings came so gently and so often that I stopped counting. One day I will share more. For now, I can only say that I went around the river, and the river quietly completed a circle within me.

What the river asks of us

The Narmada carries water to millions of people, powers dams, irrigates fields and sustains forests, fish and villages. She also carries, quite literally, the sand that builds our cities. That is why the debate about her is not only spiritual. Sand mining, pollution and building on her banks are questions of law, policy and everyday choices.

The parikrama tradition offers a way of seeing the problem that policy papers often miss. If the river is a mother, then she is not a resource to be extracted but a relationship to be kept. You walk around her, you do not walk over her.

Dada Guru and the Narmada Mission

For many devotees today, the Narmada is inseparable from Samarth Sadguru Bhaiya Ji Sarkar, known to followers as Dada Guru, the founder of the Narmada Mission, based in Jabalpur.

His devotion has taken the form of protest as well as prayer. In the winter of 2020–21 he sat on a fast-based satyagraha at Gwarighat in Jabalpur, more than eighty days long, for the conservation of the Narmada and of cows. His demands were practical: enforce the Madhya Pradesh High Court's 2019 orders protecting the river's biodiversity, stop illegal sand mining, end encroachment and construction on the riverbanks, and notify a green belt along the river.

He has said that he has eaten nothing since October 2020 and lives on Narmada water alone. In May 2025 the Madhya Pradesh government had a team from Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Medical College in Jabalpur observe him for a week, under camera surveillance, while he walked 20 to 25 kilometres a day along the river in 40-degree heat. Their report described his response as "unique and hitherto unreported", and the state cabinet agreed to send it for further research.

Whatever one makes of the science, the message to his followers is clear. Reverence for the river is not complete in the temple. A mother who is worshipped must also be protected.

Dada Guru is an avadhoot, and sitting before him felt like coming home. I felt loved the way only a mother loves, blessed in a way I still cannot put into words. It was as though I had found my parents again, found God, found a place where I belong. Since that day I have known there is someone I can always turn to. Even when I am far away, he is with me, holding me close and watching over me.

On a word that promised a shared wealth, the struggle that is left out of its story, and why Britain is so keen on India now. By Hetal Upadhyay.

Every institution chooses its name with care, and the Commonwealth chose a beautiful one. It promises a wealth held in common. After three-quarters of a century, it is reasonable to ask a plain question of that promise: common to whom?

The story we are told

The official story of the modern Commonwealth is a gentle one. An empire, we are told, wound itself up with dignity. Power was handed over, flags were lowered at midnight, and in 1949 the London Declaration allowed a new Indian republic to remain in a family of free and equal nations. It is a story of graceful transition.

It is also a story with the struggle taken out. India did not receive its freedom; it took it, over decades, at enormous human cost. Savarkar named 1857 India's First War of Independence, and his book was banned before it was even printed. Chandrashekhar Azad chose to die fighting in Allahabad's Alfred Park in 1931 rather than be taken alive. Subhas Chandra Bose raised the Azad Hind Fauj to fight for India's freedom, and when its officers were put on trial at the Red Fort in 1945, the country rose behind them. In February 1946 some 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy mutinied. A Britain that could no longer trust the Indian soldier could no longer hold India. None of this was graceful, and none of it was a gift. Then came Partition, which I have written about in “Who Is British?”. The Indian Republic of 1950 was not the end of a gentle handover. It was the hard-won result of a long resistance, and it began life carrying the bill for two centuries of someone else's prosperity.

The wealth that stayed

Britain left India with its institutions dismantled, its industries hollowed out and its treasury drained. And then, almost at once, the vocabulary changed. The country that had been the jewel of an empire became, in the language of the new world order, a developing nation, a Third World country, a place that received aid rather than a place that had been drained of its wealth. The wealth had been created in common; it was kept in one place.

That is the heart of my objection to the word. A commonwealth in which one partner holds the capital, the institutions and the reputation, and the other is assigned to the third tier of nations, is not a commonwealth. It is a hierarchy with better manners.

What did “common” ever mean for Indians?

It is worth asking what membership has actually given an Indian citizen. For a brief period after 1948, Commonwealth citizens could settle in Britain freely, and many of the families who rebuilt this country after the war came under that rule. Then the door began to close: the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968, and the Immigration Act of 1971, steadily removed the advantage.

Today there is no Commonwealth visa for Indians, no preferential route to work or study, no reduction in fees or surcharges. An Indian family applying to visit Britain faces the same costs, forms and waiting times as anyone else, with no Commonwealth preference at all. A resident Commonwealth citizen may vote in a British election: that is a privilege of living here, not a door to arrive through.

So what was common? The obligations flowed one way. Britain could draw on India's soldiers, its markets and its talent; India received very little that it could claim as of right. Whatever the Commonwealth has been for others, for India it has never looked like a shared wealth.

Why the warmth now?

The trade agreement signed on 24 July 2025 and in force since 15 July 2026 eases duties on around 99 per cent of Indian goods entering Britain, and the British government expects it to add some £25.5 billion a year to trade between the two countries. I hope the current government builds on it.

But we should be clear about why the warmth has arrived. India's economy is already the size of Britain's, and on the IMF's own forecasts it will pull ahead again by 2027. Britain needs India's market, which it does not have at home. It needs India's manufacturing, which it no longer has. It needs India's minds: its engineers, its doctors, its students, who fill British universities and hospitals. And it needs something harder to find: a partner it can trust. Britain knows Indians as honest, reliable people who keep their word, and at a time when Britain is working to depend less on China, India offers manufacturing it can rely on. Britain's own critical minerals strategy, published in November 2025, sets a target that by 2035 no more than 60 per cent of any critical mineral should come from a single country, in a world where China mines about 70 per cent of rare earths and refines about 90 per cent. That trust is India's leverage. Britain is courting India not out of sentiment for a shared past, but because it needs a partner it once treated as a possession.

India owes no gratitude for this courtship. It is not generosity; it is need. India, and the Hindu diaspora in Britain, should negotiate from strength, as equals who remember the terms of the last arrangement, and stop thanking Britain for courtesies that are more than seventy years overdue.

What a real commonwealth would require

If the word is to mean anything, a few things would have to change. Honesty about the past, taught in full in British schools. Real reciprocity in the movement of people: fair visa costs, recognition of qualifications, a route for talent that does not treat Indians as a risk to be managed. And respect for India as what it is, one of the great powers of this century, rather than what it was made to be.

British Hindus and British Indians stand at the centre of this. We came through the door Britain later shut, and we built: businesses, hospitals, schools, temples, whole high streets. We pay our taxes in full, we keep our heads down, and we have been thanked for it with silence. We have earned the right to say plainly what has been common and what has not, and we should no longer whisper it.

The Commonwealth was always a promise. For India it has never yet been kept. Britain needs India now. This time, the promise will be kept on India's terms, or not at all.

On remembering India's soldiers of the World Wars. By Hetal Upadhyay.

Every November, Britain pins a red poppy to its lapel. It is one of the most familiar acts of public memory in the country, and one of the most moving. This year, some people will wear a second flower beside it: a small saffron marigold.

I will wear one. Not as a gesture of grievance, but as a correction to the record. The men it stands for crossed oceans to fight a war that was not theirs, and Britain has never properly said thank you.

The record

The numbers are not in dispute. Close to 1.5 million men from undivided India served in the First World War. In the Second World War, 2.5 million served. Around 74,000 died in the first war and around 87,000 in the second.

The Second World War force is routinely described as "the largest volunteer army in history". I object to that word. India was a colony. There was no conscription law, but there was pressure on every side: officials were pushed to fill "huge quotas", and in the Punjab historians record "much forced recruitment", including women "taken hostage until their male family members enlisted". Some scholars have called it conscription in disguise. A colonial force raised under colonial pressure is not a volunteer army in any honest sense of the word.

We call it the Commonwealth, yet the wealth was never common. Nor was the sacrifice. Tens of thousands of Indian soldiers died, many of them recruited under pressure in villages across the Punjab, and still the history books speak of volunteers. They fought for a freedom they themselves did not have. Many of their names were carved in stone; their story was left out of the classroom.

They came from what are now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and served alongside Gurkhas from Nepal. They were Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Christian. Eleven of them received the Victoria Cross in the First World War alone. They fought in the trenches of Flanders, in Mesopotamia, in East Africa, in Burma and in Italy.

These numbers are often repeated. They are less often felt. Behind each figure is a family in a village that waited for a letter.

Why a marigold

The poppy grew on the battlefields of Flanders. The marigold grows in courtyards, temples and wedding garlands across South Asia. In 2018, the United Service Institution of India chose it as India's flower of remembrance, working with the British High Commission. Its saffron colour stands for sacrifice.

The choice is a quiet one. It does not replace the poppy. It sits beside it, and asks that the record be read in full.

What has only now been remembered

The most striking evidence that the record is still incomplete came this summer. In July 2026, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission added 9,909 Indian Army casualties who had never been commemorated. Researchers found them through the Punjab Registers project.

Nearly ten thousand names, more than a century late. That is not a matter of opinion. It is a measure of how much work remembrance still asks of us.

In November 2025 a parliamentary early day motion called for these soldiers, of every faith, to be remembered. It gathered 23 signatures, out of 650 MPs. That, too, is a measure of how much attention this history commands.

The point is not that nobody, anywhere, has ever remembered these men. There is a memorial gateway on Constitution Hill, and a scattering of plaques and services, many organised by Indians themselves. The point is that no British government has ever said, at the scale the sacrifice deserves: your people came, they fought for this country, and part of its freedom is theirs.

Between Britain and India

Which brings me to the question British Indians still hear: why did you people come here? It deserves an answer, so here is mine. Britain came to India first, drawn by its wealth, and stayed to colonise and rule. The drain of that wealth, the famines and the hurried Partition I have set out in “Who Is British?”. What I want to add here is what was done to our minds. Britain dismantled our institutions, rewrote our textbooks and sidelined our scholars. In 1835 Macaulay declared that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. Our spiritual traditions were dismissed as superstition, and we were taught that we needed Britain to civilise us. It was never true.

Those who could resist were silenced: Bhagat Singh was hanged, Savarkar was sent to the Cellular Jail, and countless others from Bengal, Punjab, Gujarat, the South, Kashmir and every corner of India spent years behind bars. Those who had preserved learning or led in battle were recast as oppressors.

Jallianwala Bagh is the massacre the world remembers, but it was one of many. Mangarh, Pal-Dadhvav and the reprisals of 1857 are only the few we know by name; countless others were never recorded, and their dead remain unnamed.

What was taken was never a gift. The Koh-i-Noor still sits among the Crown Jewels, and the debt has never been acknowledged, let alone repaid. Yet those of us who came here are still asked why we came.

Our ancestors did not arrive here only in uniform, to fight Britain’s wars. They came as lascars working the empire’s ships and as ayahs and servants in British homes, while across the empire many more were shipped out as indentured labour, recruited under pressure rather than by choice. Coming later became a necessity, but it did not begin as a choice.

So when someone tells a fourth- or fifth-generation British Indian to "go back", I would gently ask: back to where? This is not a feeling. Police in England and Wales recorded 82,490 race hate crimes in the year to March 2025, up 6 per cent on the year before, and religious hate crimes against Hindus and Sikhs alone numbered 441. Behind each number is someone who was told they do not belong.

We are not here for free. Our ancestors paid for a share of this country's freedom with their lives. That freedom belongs to us as much as to anyone born under the poppy. For British Indians, that is not a grievance. It is a source of pride.

None of this was taught at school. I learned it later, and I suspect most British Indians did too, if they learned it at all.

This year the Hindu Cultural Centre, which I co-founded, will mark Remembrance too, in that spirit: wear the flower, tell the story, remember the names.

What we remember, and what we teach

Remembrance is not only about the past. It is about what a country chooses to teach its children about who built it, and who fought for it. I have written about that separately, in "Who Is British?", on what England's schools teach about India and Empire, and what they leave out.

For now, the invitation is a modest one. Wear a marigold beside your poppy. Ask an elder what they remember. And look up one name on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database.

One name is a beginning.