What the modern sensibility reveres is the marriage of hearts and minds — not of legal entities, or strands in the social fabric. Being admitted to this institution, via its bureaucratic rituals — interrogation by a council official, signing a register, publicly exchanging vows with a wording enshrined, to my surprise, in statute — reminded me of the civic nature of marriage. Deciding to get married, and whom to marry, is in addition to being a personal choice, a political one. It involves much larger questions than simply the conundrum of desire: questions about community, and where we slot into the society around us.

With this sudden realisation, I wondered what it meant that every couple waiting at the registry office was of the same race. All appeared to have “married in”. I should not have been surprised. In multicultural Britain, most marriages are still between members of the same ethnicity. Only 10% of households comprise an “inter-ethnic cohabiting couple”, to use the ONS vernacular. Perhaps, for the white majority, it’s simply the likeliest outcome to fall for someone of the same race (only 4% of white people do otherwise). But ethnic minorities marrying primarily among their own, rather than into the generality, is quite against the odds. Yet that is what transpires. British-Asians — of whom 90% marry in — are the most exclusive, compared with 60% of black Britons. Among all minority groups, though, something greater than the free play of attraction seems to be at work in the choice of a life partner.

I’m a British-Asian; so is my wife. Our marriage wasn’t arranged, and is thus what Indian-English calls, often with a hint of scandal, a “love marriage”. We’re both journalists, and since the society around us is our subject-matter and our audience, we’ve had to be pretty well-integrated into it. We are not entirely secular, since we do practise a religion — not a popular one these days — but in a fashion our peers would approve as “moderate”. Our marriage followed Western norms of individual choice more than South Asian norms of parental orchestration. Nevertheless, we have done as most ethnic minorities do: we married in.

Why does this matter? “Ethno‐religious intermarriage is regarded as the most complete form of social integration,” the demographer David Voas has said. “Its frequency is therefore of public interest.” If marriage is an institution, it’s apparently a segregated one, which surely offends Left and Right equally. That liberals trumpet diversity while conservatives favour assimilation normally results in disagreement, but on this issue, their values lead to the same conclusion; ethnic in-marriage is a failure of diversity and of assimilation.

For a long time, popular culture has therefore been unanimous in promoting a vision of all ethnicities coming together through intermarriage in society’s great melting pot. That phrase itself we get from a play by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill. The Melting Pot — from 1908 — sees a Jewish refugee from Russia, David, falling in love with a Christian woman, Vera. He writes a symphony celebrating the melting away of distinctions between “East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross.” Vera is so moved that she marries David.

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Much of what I watched, while growing up, told the same story: classic movies like West Side Story and Pocahontas, Hollywood franchises like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the breakout films of the South Asian diaspora, Mississippi Masala and Bride and Prejudice. All insist that the model minority integrates through marriage. The cultural signals were often more subtle. By the time I got to university, for instance, the message was underscored in the notion of “hybridity” — then all the rage in literary theory — which saw culture itself as the fruit of crossbreeding. Our future was hybrid, we were told, and race, like gender, was a boundary to be transgressed.

So I did my part. My relationships exemplified the liberal ideals of multiculturalism and mobility. There were romances in various corners of Europe. During that high-water mark of Britain’s membership of the EU, so many of my generation pursued ever closer union, quite intimately. And for most Westerners, integration in relationships continues to hint at a grander political project. Hence the outrage over the government’s salary threshold for spousal visas, prompting one commentator to declare: “Western liberalism was built on the principle of marrying out.”

It was during the Enlightenment that the West began to adopt the ideal of marrying out, alongside other beliefs about the individual’s freedom from communal constraints. By the 19th century, as exotic women caught the eyes of imperial adventurers, Western intellectuals were promoting intermarriage as a form of progress, something the more benighted races were incapable of. “Savage nations,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote, “form no intermarriages”.

Anthropologists actually tell us the opposite. What they call exogamy — marriage outside the group — originated in primitive societies where wives were practically slaves. It was therefore treacherous to inflict marriage on one’s own; brides were captured from elsewhere. Once civilisations accorded women a higher status, they tended towards endogamy — marriage within the group. A woman’s right to inherit property, for instance, provided an incentive to keep her wealth within the clan and dignified her with a lucrative hand to be vied for.

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Consider the world of Jane Austen. Her quintessentially English novels document the workings of a basically South Asian-style endogamy. The landed gentry scheme to find suitable claimants to their daughter’s dowries while their daughters scheme to find companionship. Literary critics call it the marriage plot. This, in the critic Tony Tanner’s famous definition, is how “society attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property”. The marriage plot isn’t fiction: it described the norms of the elite, an in-marrying cadre of Cecils, Churchills, Darwins, Huxleys, Macaulays, Thackerays: the great scions of Britain’s classic liberal age, which was built, in fact, on the principle of marrying in.

Outraged by such rampant endogamy, George Bernard Shaw argued that one of the goals of politics should be “to keep the entire community intermarriageable”. Intermarriage was being posited then as a remedy to class division, much as it would later be promoted to prevent ethnic ghettoisation. But Shaw himself married within the Anglo-Irish intelligentsia, just as Israel Zangwill, even as he was writing The Melting Pot, couldn’t help but marry a fellow Jew. Those who preach inclusive political ideals have often been the most scrupulous in-breeders. For a while my MP was an exemplary socialist whose father and mother were both Labour MPs. He also married a Labour MP, herself the sister of yet another Labour MP.

Intermarriage is an ideal everyone professes but few practise. Of course, not living up to an ideal is no reason to discard it. But many other cultures, including those foundational to the West, do seem to have had a more realistic view of human behaviour. The citizens of Athens, the first democracy, could not marry non-citizens, much as Romans would not marry so-called barbarians. Such laws have, fortunately, been abolished. Today, they would be indefensible. But our habits haven’t changed all that much in the intervening millennia, even if our ideals have.

In my newly married life, I have been wondering what, after a youth of romantic hybridity, changed for me. In The Right to Sex, the Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan argues that attraction isn’t what we think it is, something ultimately private and “pre-political”. Instead, our deepest desires are conditioned by politics and — this is her aim — subject to critique. By my mid-twenties, it was only to women of my own ethnicity that I was drawn. This shift, on reflection, appears to me political, or at least politicised.

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The Queen's war on nationalism

By Tanjil Rashid

If my interethnic relationships took place in an era of intercultural optimism — of free movement, free trade, open borders — my yearning to be with a woman of my own “kind” coincided with the counterrevolution against that world. In Eden, before tasting the bitter fruit that exposed their otherness, Adam and Eve loved freely; the explosion of identity politics across the West marked the end of another innocence — our innocence about distinctions of race. From Black Lives Matter to Trump’s “Muslim ban”, the rhetoric of interracial suspicion permeated the entire Anglosphere. As politics became more identitarian, so did my romantic inclination.

In a framing that has caught on since the West’s post-liberal turn, people are supposed to be Somewheres or Anywheres. The Somewhere is rooted in a close-knit community, sceptical about change, about outsiders, while the Anywhere is cosmopolitan, embraces change, celebrates the other. Recent years have seen the Somewheres in revolt. And my marriage, I now realise, was in league with that revolt against the precarity and flux of Anywhere. In an uncertain world, I retreated to the safety of Somewhere, moving with my wife back to East London, where we can without embarrassment dine nightly on curry and rice.

Marriages, intrinsically, involve a vision of being rooted somewhere. The “Anywhere” catchwords — freedom, mobility, change — all run counter to it. That’s why the greatest liberal philosopher, J.S. Mill, equated marriage with slavery: it was an insult to human autonomy. (He still wed.) This contradiction, between an institution based on constraint and a culture that valorises freedom foremost, is keenly felt today. For the first time in history, fewer than half of adults in the UK are married. The impetus of the Enlightenment that first promoted intermarriage as an ideal has since led to all sorts of alternative relationship patterns, in which many have found fulfilment. But for ethnic minorities wishing to stick to matrimony, to marry into familiar territory is to follow the unavoidable logic of the institution itself.

If marriage within ethnic limitations reflects the “Somewhere” ethos, the “Anywhere” ethos can be encapsulated in dating apps, with their unlimited romantic possibilities, wherever you may be in the world. At first this seemed ideal for my generation. But several years down the line, the same people often long for some kind of alternative. Popular culture is becoming more and more fascinated by ethnic minorities who spurn the apps in favour of something a bit more traditional. Many a Netflix-viewing Anywhere has been addictively streaming the hit show Indian Matchmaking (and the spinoff, Jewish Matchmaking). In the recent Rom-com What’s Love Got to Do with It?, a white woman finds herself fascinated by her neighbour’s arranged marriage to a fellow Pakistani. It was written by Jemima Goldsmith, formerly Khan, who knows well the challenges of a mixed marriage.

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In my own “Anywhere” days, I was only dimly aware of such challenges. There was an unease I felt that I could not properly account for. I recall once awakening from a dream about my future children, in which I could not speak to them in my mother tongue, the only language of familial intimacy I know. There was also the occasional nuisance of cooking two differently spiced meals over dinner. If no diplomatic solution could be found for a conflict over seasoning, what hope was there for much more vexed religious and cultural disagreements, between, as Zangwill put it, “the Crescent and the Cross”? Only now do I realise that there was always a kind of political unrest brewing within otherwise romantically compatible relationships.

Marriage is political, and choosing whether to marry in or out has been like choosing between citizenships. But there are no citizens of the world in marriage; whenever you choose someone, I feel, you are also committing to Somewhere. For those of us who have been shipwrecked on these shores by the odyssey of migration, the need to feel at home is all the more acute. A marriage must feel like home. After all, what is the home, the nostos, that Odysseus ventures to return to?

It isn’t a state, nor even really a place; it is a marriage. And if I can put it in a word, with my wife, I feel at home.

Wholly forgotten amid the Jubilee celebrations was the fact that, when the Queen acceded to the throne, she became sovereign not only of the UK, but also of a Muslim nation from which a million Britons like myself hail. The caption, for those who don’t read Urdu, translates as: “Elizabeth II, Queen of Pakistan 1952 – 1956.” It is the most remarkable detail in the chronicle of the Queen’s reign which began in February 1952, just as my father was born in a village in East Pakistan that through the strange meanderings of history was located in her dominions. My family’s fate has, ever since, been twinned with Her Majesty’s.

Of all the titles Elizabeth Windsor acquired on her father’s death, “Queen of Pakistan” would be the shortest-lived. The monarchy of Pakistan, founded in 1947 as a homeland for India’s down-trodden Muslims, was quickly abolished. In time, so was the country itself, most of its population seceding to form a new country (Bangladesh). Although a rump state still claims the name Pakistan, the country of my parents’ birth no longer exists. Yet its sometime sovereign, Elizabeth II, miraculously lives on — the only remnant of the original Pakistani state as it existed before its collapse in civil war and genocide.

That national failure led to my parents’ emigration to the UK, and so my family fell once again under Her Majesty’s reign. They were “New Commonwealth immigrants”. But my father was truly a New Elizabethan, among the first subjects to be born under the new Queen — and born British, since the Nationality Act of 1948 established, with astonishing magnanimity, a common citizenship for the whole British Commonwealth. Three generations of my family have been born subjects of the same Queen, while a full five generations have lived under her reign, in the UK or the erstwhile Dominion of Pakistan.

In all this time, the monarchy has been the dominant political fact in our lives. The labels on our passports — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK — have changed more than once; with the potential break-up of the United Kingdom they may do again. But while countries and their borders, governments and their ideologies, come and go, the one unfathomable fact that endures is the monarchy, whose legal subjects British-Asians have been ever since India was annexed more than a 150 years ago. And this legal relationship stretches back even further for those of Caribbean heritage, as far back as the 17th century.

No-one can claim the relationship began consensually. But whatever the iniquity of our initial subjection to this crown, it is that same crown that now guarantees our equality in this land. The Proclamation of 1858 that made my ancestors British granted them the exact same rights as all other subjects. It was Queen Victoria herself who had insisted on Indians “being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown”, words that would be recited by Indians at political gatherings. The principle was frequently ignored, but it was, as Gandhi put it, our Magna Carta, an assurance of equal treatment, decreed by the highest possible source, that still holds true today.

Monarchy, the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “is the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. There’s something strangely celestial about that description, but he was onto something. As Shakespeare observed, “there’s such divinity doth hedge a king”. Elizabeth II is Dei Gratia Regina (“Queen by the grace of God”) and as even the imam of Cambridge mosque preached on Friday, “she is a servant of the Almighty Allah”. If, in our secular age, there can no longer be God-given rights, the monarchy’s pompous charade of divinity makes it the closest thing we have to an absolute — and that is what I’d like my rights to be.

Minorities don’t trust the “human bustle” — which is all we would have without a monarch. From history we learn that wherever a throne is eliminated, in due course so are ethnic minorities. Consider the multiculturalism of Mitteleuropa under the Habsburgs or of southeastern Europe under the Ottomans. A dozen languages were spoken in the imperial parliament in Vienna, while on any given day in an Istanbul cafe conversations could be heard in Turkish, Ladino, Greek, Armenian, French and Kurdish, at least. But since republican governments replaced these monarchies, the fate of every 20th-century cosmopolis on the continent has been one of merciless homogenisation through ethnic cleansing, population transfers or socio-economic strangulation.

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There’s a kneejerk association of monarchy with nationalism. But the two have mostly been pitted against each other since the imperial age in which European monarchies transformed into continent-spanning empires characterised, especially in the British case, by free trade and free movement. Nationalists opposed the cosmopolitanism and pluralism of these empires, eventually corralling their multiethnic populations into new nation-states, republics in the main, which now struggle to cope with a fraction of the ethnic diversity that their territories previously boasted under imperial rule.

Conservatives today won’t own up to a truth of which they should be proud: the original basis of our multicultural society was the imperialist, royalist ideology of High Toryism. This becomes clear from the debate around the Nationality Act of 1948 that enabled my father’s emigration. It was then the Conservatives who worried about Labour reforms destroying “our proud boast of the open door in this country to people from all the colonies”. The parliamentary statement by Lord Kilmuir, as Shadow Home Secretary, deserves quoting at length:

We deprecate any tendency to differentiate between different types of British subjects in the United Kingdom. We feel that when they come to the UK there ought to be an open door and reception for every type…We must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone, from every part of the empire.

What united — and still unites — all these disparate people is the Queen, mere loyalty to whom makes us all British. Our oath of allegiance is to “Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors” — no more, no less. The symbolism of that is profound. It means my mother, a hijab-wearing Bengali Muslim woman who speaks little English can be unimpeachably British in a way she could not be unimpeachably French (even her clothing would not be deemed in keeping with “Republican values”). The simplicity of our oath is one of our constitution’s forgotten jewels, its tolerant spirit generally diffused throughout the state — a state that isn’t truly a nation-state since it claims four different “home nations”. Apart from Scotland, all have an underwhelming sense of nationality. As Daniel Defoe’s ditty scorning English nationalism went:

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

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By contrast, the nation-states born of decolonisation in the last century demand of its citizens fealty to a nation, that nation commonly being defined in ethnically exclusive terms. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the Roma minority that once had only to express loyalty to the emperor is under pressure to become Hungarian. These are societies at the mercy of ethnonationalism and xenophobia, lacking that impartial light of monarchy which, at its best, allows people of all races and religions to appeal to something beyond their differences from one another.

These unstable political forces haven’t been totally absent even in our tolerant monarchy. In 1968, targeting East African Indians, the Labour government consciously restricted dark-skinned British passport-holders from entering the country, legislation which even the anti-immigrant firebrand Enoch Powell considered, in some of its clauses, to be comparable to the Nuremberg Laws. Still, shortly afterwards, Powell made the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech that made him the biggest name in UK politics.

Powell envisioned a renewed English nationalism, which arose from a disillusioned critique of imperialism not unlike those taking place in former colonies. He came to believe that the foreign adventure of empire — Powell was a veteran of the Indian Army — had suppressed English identity. Decolonisation was an occasion to rediscover it, as if it were an old oak in an abandoned garden. He railed against the “bogus mythical self-consoling invention of the British Commonwealth”, against the Queen’s new role as its Head, and of course against Commonwealth immigrants. The irony is that Powell could have made the same arguments as an Indian, say, and been regarded as a fairly standard postcolonial polemicist.

Queen Elizabeth deserves credit as probably Powell’s most successful adversary in those turbulent decades. She single-handedly preserved the old imperial High Toryism which Powell and later Tories had turned against, using her charm to launder out of it the darker stains of imperialism. Whereas for Powell, the nation-state was “the ultimate political reality”, for Elizabeth it was the British Empire in its new, egalitarian guise, the Commonwealth. In her famous broadcast on her 21st birthday, Princess Elizabeth pledged her life to serving “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”.

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Of course, the Queen never addressed him directly, but she was shadow-boxing against Powell’s English nationalism. Powell’s ravings grew more virulent. “It is truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land,” Powell would bellow. But all the while, Elizabeth would reaffirm her own commitment “to that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races”.

Eventually, Powell’s decorum yielded. In 1984, he attacked Queen Elizabeth — from a family of immigrants herself — using a phrase that would later be invoked, knowingly or otherwise, by Theresa May: “citizen of nowhere”. She was, Powell claimed, more concerned for “a vociferous minority of newcomers than for the great mass of her subjects…threatening the place of the Crown in the affections of the people” — a prediction that was utterly refuted by the jubilant Union Jack-waving of millions over the holiday.

Like most, at times I found myself chafing against the kitschier aspects of the spectacle. But then, when I saw the circle of saffron-robed sadhus from Gujarat at Neasden’s Hindu temple ignite a sacred flame in honour of the Queen, I remembered all over again what the lighting of all those beacons truly symbolised: a celebration by our motley, many-hued human bustle of the light that shines above it.