Rishi Sunak, our ex-prime minister, recently described himself as “British, English and British Asian”. It was his intervention in yet another of those regular arguments about what defines national identity. In this case, he was replying to a podcast, first broadcast several months ago, in which the podcaster Konstantin Kisin, in discussion with Fraser Nelson (who took a very different view), said that Sunak could not count as “English”, though he might be “British”: “He’s a brown Hindu”, said Kisin. “How is he English?”
It’s part of a long tradition that uncomfortably questions whether “brown” people, Hindu or not, can really count as English. It is presented in various subtly different forms. But for many of us, the issue was fixed in our minds in what became known as the “Tebbit test”: Norman Tebbit’s claim, back in 1990, was that you could tell which immigrants from the Caribbean or South Asia were properly “integrated” in the UK (which identified as “English”, in other words) based on the national cricket teams they supported. If they cheered for India, they were not a loyal, identifying, Brit.
It would be foolish to say that national identity is a simple, easy concept. Does a piece of paper, a citizenship certificate perhaps, make you British? Well, yes and no. And even those who are most certain of their views still confess to a few fuzzy edges (as Kisin did in conceding that Sunak might be “British” but not “English”). But there is a fundamental flaw in many of these disputes: namely the assumption that national identity is somehow singular, and you can’t have two or three. It’s that singularity that Sunak was challenging.
Not all nations (or empires) ancient and modern make that assumption. One of the most striking aspects of the Roman empire is that multiple identities were absolutely taken for granted. There are tombstones which depict the deceased more than once, both in distinctive Roman toga and in alternative Greek dress (the elaborate frieze on the tomb of Zoilos at Aphrodisias in modern Turkey is one good example). At the same time, Cicero and other Roman notables were proud to proclaim two patriae (native lands/native towns). In Cicero’s case, it was Rome and the Italian town Arpinum (and I bet there were times when he cheered on Arpinum against Rome). The most eloquent of all though was the early Roman poet Ennius, at the end of the third and beginning of the second century BCE, who was the author of (among much else) a famous epic poem on the history of Rome (later rather eclipsed by Virgil’s Aeneid). Ennius – imagined by Raphael above, on the left next to Dante and Homer – was born at the town of Rudiae in south Italy. He was a native speaker of Oscan, as well as being fluent in Latin and Greek; and he was famously quoted as saying that he had three hearts (tria cordia) or, in our terms, three identities: Oscan, Roman and Greek. (For Ennius, we should probably assume, language was the key to identity.)
I don’t know if Rishi Sunak is much aware of Ennius, but I think he was saying something along those same lines.
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