On Anthropomorphic Personification And Related Phenomenon

Melting pots and latent suspicions.

February 21, 2007 at 6:42 pm (Random)

Britain is a melting pot. And Gods know, with such supporting evidence as Shilpa Shetty’s recent victory, it seems fair enough to assume so. And yet they wish to chuck out doctors, and we find this:

The requirements for naturalisation as a British citizen depend on whether one is married to a British citizen or not.

For those married to a British citizen the applicant must:

• hold indefinite leave to remain in the UK (or an equivalent such as Right of Abode or Irish citizenship)
• have lived legally in the UK for three years
• been outside of the UK no more than 90 days during the one-year period prior to filing the application.
• show sufficient knowledge of life in the UK, either by passing the Life in the United Kingdom test or by attending combined English language and citizenship classes. Proof of this must be supplied with one’s application for naturalisation. Those aged 65 or over may be able to claim exemption.
• meet specified English, Welsh or Scottish Gaelic language competence standards. Those who pass the Life in the UK test are deemed to meet English language requirements.

For those not married to a British citizen the requirements are:

• five years legal residence in the UK
• been outside of the UK no more than 90 days during the one-year period prior to filing the application.
• indefinite leave to remain or equivalent must have been held for 12 months
• the applicant must intend to continue to live in the UK or work overseas for the UK government or a British corporation or association.
• the same language and knowledge of life in the UK standards apply as for those married to British citizens

All applicants for naturalisation must be of “good character”. Naturalisation is at the discretion of the Home Secretary but is normally granted if the requirements are met.

- From Wikipedia.

But then consider this: Britain’s been a melting pot for a while (not unlike India, actually). First came the earliest humans, the true British (and Irish), to be invaded time and again, by mainland Europeans. First came the Celts, then came the Romans. They intermingled. And became Romano-Britons. Then the Romans left. Soon after the Roman withdrawal, came the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes and occupied the majority of what is today England. And they brought their tongues and dialects with them, which soon caught on. Unsurprisingly, for the Romans had long used auxiliary Germanic troops to buffer their numbers. So the languages and dialects therein, that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had brought with them, the seeds of Old English, were not foreign to the land, they had already been around since almost as far back as the Romans had been. So were left of the Romano-Britons, the Welsh and the Scots, and of the Celts and Gaels, the Irish. And the rest were Anglo-Saxons, the English. But it did not end here, for in 1066 William the Conqueror came to England, himself of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon descent, upon the death of the last Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, claiming the throne for himself due to his descent from Ethelred, the Anglo-Saxon king who had initiated a blood-tie alliance with the Normans, in order to gain allies in his constant war against the marauding Danes. By the 16th century, the Normans had long lost Normandy, but had gained all of Britain. The repeated invasions of the land had finely meshed the British identity and well into Middle Ages, the Welsh called themselves Brythoniad, Brythons, Britons. The Irish and Scots, didn’t care less, and continued for a long while to exist as countries in their own right, and mistrust ran deep all around. The Normans and Anglo-Saxons played an active part too: the English name for Wales derives from the Germanic word walha, meaning stranger or foreigner.

So no wonder they don’t like it (though they might pretend otherwise, to the fullest extent) when we Indians (and Chinese and Vietnamese and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, and other Asians) go there en masse. Perhaps some ancestral racial instinct is telling them that it’s yet another conquest. They haven’t learned yet how not to distrust each other, much less the rest of Europe. Against that deep-seated a mistrust of anything remotely foreign, added to a very geographically localized definition of all that isn’t foreign, what chance have we Asians?