New Delhi, Oct. 18 -- Reform UK education spokesperson Suella Braverman has triggered a new debate on being 'English'. Recently, on 'BBC Question Time', she said British citizenship doesn't make one 'English'. In this category, she even put herself, as both her parents are of Asian heritage. To be English, she used the words that you have to belong to 'English soil'. To be 'English', one's ancestors must have been born in Britain, unlike second-and third-generation migrants whose parents or grandparents were born in Britain.

This is the reason why she says that multiculturalism has failed because, in her view, it has allowed immigrant communities to retain their own cultural, religious and linguistic identities without putting enough emphasis on integration into mainstream British society.

She is of the view that an immigrant can integrate into British society through language, values and participation; she clarified that Englishness itself depends on ancestry and lineage. That means integration does not necessarily equal Englishness in her framework. The best example of this definition is Rishi Sunak, a practising Hindu, in whose government she was home secretary. He could become prime minister but can't be called 'English'.

However, if George Orwell, who was more English than English even while making a cup of tea, were alive today, he would have completely rejected Braverman's argument because, to him, 'being English' is not defined by biological ethnicity or pure ancestry, but rather by a 'lived sensibility' and a distinct, shared cultural inheritance. In his famous 1941 wartime essay 'The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius', Orwell was against viewing national identity through a rigid racial lens. Instead, he described Englishness as an ongoing, fluid civilisation that acts as a continuous culture over time. According to Orwell, anyone who assimilates into and shares this democratic, lived culture can be part of the English identity, regardless of their strict ancestral lineage.

Orwell emphasises that Englishness is a distinct culture with its own 'flavour' that is immediately recognisable to a foreigner. His 1946 essay 'A Nice Cup of Tea' serves as a perfect, concrete case study of what he meant by 'being English'.

In the essay, he uses tea as a metaphor to explain how, by assimilation, even a foreign product becomes 'English'.

Orwell writes, "Anyone who uses that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea." Even at that time, he abhorred Chinese products, as he dismissed Chinese tea because it lacked 'stimulation'. The tea comes from India and Sri Lanka (Ceylon), but the way it has been adopted, absorbed and woven into the very fabric of what it means to feel English at home.

Orwell had prescribed strict rules for making a good English cup of tea: the water must be actively boiling; the tea must go straight into the pot without a strainer and anyone who puts sugar in their tea is 'misguided' and ruining the flavour. That, according to him, to be English is to care deeply about the specific 'flavour' of your daily life.

One doesn't know how Braverman makes her daily 'cuppa'. To use her argument, for Orwell, tea's ancestry was important - only Indian tea could make a good 'cuppa'.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.