I was asked when I was twenty, by a don, if I felt any tension inside myself between the two nations from which my mother and father descend. At the time I said none at all, and I have to say that has been true all my life because in people of mixed blood there are no tensions, we are wholly who we are.
The tensions arise when we mix in two cultures. When we try to mingle in two different ways of living that produces as many tensions and problems as you may conceive. As I was brought up in Cornwall with my mother and never visited by my father, and hardly ever corresponded with my father, the tensions of clashes in cultures never arose. I had no ties to any political system but that of a democratic one, I had no language but English (the native language ironically, of neither of side of my ancestors), I had no influences but those from my mother’s family.
If India ever rose in me in my character it is in my quietness and patience, which I exhibit in large amounts and which is noticeable only by its absence in my mother’s family. But being characteristics inborn in me they are not by definition, in any way a cause of tension.
People of mixed blood are usually confused by the competing expectations of different families, rather than any competing aspects of their own nature.