“I’d like to have a conversation with you when you’re free.  I wanted to know your experience of being a child of a mixed race marriage”, a good friend of mine asked.  She is married to someone from a different culture and struggled with whether it was wise for them to have children and how feasible it is to incorporate and intertwine two different backgrounds.

A (Sunni) friend of mine had a friend who married into the Bohra community. He was telling me how his friend never felt accepted. One of the reasons that mixed marriages are frowned upon is the issue of raising children. An often-used reason is that it’s hard to raise children and they end up “confused”. (Let’s be honest, my trusted friend Log Kya Kahenge plays a major part in this, but nobody will really come out and say it).

I would like to share my unique viewpoint as a child brought up in these circumstances. I thought the best way to approach this is through a list of pros and cons.

Pros

  • I have a solid understanding of two different cultures
  • I have the ability to connect to two different sets of people due to shared heritage
  • I have a great sense of belonging, twice
  • I understand two different religions (that believe in the same God – so really, there’s not much confusion there)
  • I was raised bilingual
  • I have two sets of friends
  • I have contrasting families with very different ways of interacting with me
  • I am proud of my heritage on both sides, so double the pride
  • I have a skin colour that is brown enough to be considered “tan” and desirable to English people and fair enough to be desirable by Indians.  Win-win
  • I have a cool story behind my name
  • I get to have a very different relationship with both sides of my grandparents and experience their love in very different ways
  • Both sets of parents have different interests, so I can do a wider variety of activities with them. (Plays with dad and bollywood movies with mum)
  • Both parents have different cultural outlooks on parenting so I get to have the best of both methods
  • I didn’t get kicked out of my house when I went to university
  • My mum cooks Indian and English food
  • Kheer as well as apple pie (It deserves a separate bullet point)
  • I have a better ability to be open as well as respectful of adults
  • I can bring aspects of both cultures to the other.  E.g. English manners and Indian respect for elders
  • Hearing my dad attempt to pronounce Gujrati words is hilarious

Cons

  • My mum had to work extra hard to raise me as a bohri Indian.  Incorporating English was easy as it was where I was raised
  • Learning and retaining Gujrati was hard.  When half of the adults in your household don’t speak Gujrati, any family interaction was in English.  Essentially the only time I spoke solely in Gujrati was speaking to my mum, as my grandfather and brother communicated with me in English.  I make a lot of grammar mistakes in Gujrati, but at the end of the day, it’s better than a lot of people whose parents are both bohri.  I can communicate well in both Gujrati and Hindi
  • I would sometimes (or maybe a little more often than that) resent having to go to Masjid, reasoning that as I am half bohri, I only need to attend 50% of the time.  I think pretty much all of my friends feel the same way about going to Masjid, so I don’t think this is exclusive to being mixed
  • Some people look down on my dad because he is not “bohri enough”. I have to ignore multiple pleas from my grandmother to teach him Gujrati
  • One of my parents had to take a back seat.  I think mixed children work if you predominantly raise them in one culture (the harder one to adopt).  As they grow older they will be more inquisitive and explore their other heritage, but at a formative age it may be better to stress one while incorporating some aspects of the other.

In conclusion, raising a child in a mixed marriage has some challenges, but I would say that the pros outweigh the cons.  Plus, I think my brother and I have turned out okay.