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Mukul and Ghetto Tigers undertook a documentary film project which explores the question ‘Who am I?’ raised by second generation immigrant children whose parents left pre partition India during colonial times and settled in other parts of the British empire including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania. The project investigates what it means for young people in Croydon growing up in a system with a colonial legacy and explores how the past horrible historic events experienced by their parents and grandparents still affect the lives of young people. A dedicated group of young people aged between 15-35 year olds have been interviewed by film maker Rolf Killius and Community Arts producer Lata Desai.
The project relates to the historical dimension, the colonial set-up before the 1970s, to the socio-cultural situation of young people with diverse cultural background in today’s UK.
The speciality of this project is: Through the viewpoint of a new generation it investigates questions of ‘identity’ and ‘heritage’. It asks questions such as what it means for young people growing up in a system with a colonial legacy where much of the old elite is still in control of the society, where the street names, places and monuments are often named after colonial ‘heroes’, where the history books are full of the ‘glorious past’, but slavery, exploitation and killings are nearly ‘forgotten’, where school education in respect to the recent colonial history with its atrocities is nearly absent, where the reasons for immigration into this country (Windrush Generation, East African Asians; the colonial past in general) are only recently discussed, where people with a slightly different colour or accent are still asked ‘where do you come from?’, meaning to ask whether one belongs to this place or not, where people are not judged ‘what they are?’, but rather ‘what specific socio-economic or cultural heritage they are from?’, where racism and unequal treatment is still part and parcel of the every-day experience for many people…
