British Sri Lankan broadcaster and author Nihal Arthanayake has plans to spend more time in the country of his origin where he connects “instantly” and sees people “who look like me.”
The BBC Radio 5 Live presenter said Stockport in Manchester where he currently lives is a monocultural place which is “very white” and “it’s unsettling to be a minority”.
“The place I want to spend more of my time in as I get older is a house that we have in Sri Lanka,” he told Jimi Famurewa on the Where’s Home Really? podcast.
“There’s something about the lure of that country. There’s something about the energy in that country… There is something about … seeing the colours that I connect with so instantly,” he said.
Born in Harlow in Essex to Sri Lankan parents, Arthanayake said he asserted his heritage because he was routinely questioned about his Britishness.
“So you will be constantly saying, ‘I’m British, I’m as British as you’ to some racist on Twitter, right?… You shouldn’t really engage with racists on Twitter. But when they start saying, ‘Oh, you’re not British, you’re not that.’ Then you say ‘No, I’m British Sri Lankan. That’s what I am’.”
Arthanayake, 51, who cut his teeth in the music industry as a rap recording artist before becoming a radio and TV presenter, said he cheered for Tottenham Hotspur as a child before music took over him.
He, however, admitted his experience with football fans was “negative” because of some of the “racist thugs”.
“We had a lot of West Ham fans in Harlow town, some of whom were part of their notorious firm the ICF (Inter City Firm). And they were violent, racist thugs, that’s who they were. So you ended up kind of slightly tarring football with a thing (like) that.”
He said the experience left him with scars in his mind and “so even today… I cannot really get excited about England”.
He recalled how he was called the P word for the first time in East Ham when he was a child.
“I was in a WH Smith, looking at magazines. And these two or three skinheads came up to me who can’t have been that much older than me and said, ‘Are you a P***?’ And I’d never heard the word before.”
Arthanayake could be 11 or 12 when the incident took place and he was unaware of what the word meant.
“I looked at them and genuinely innocently, because I’ve just thought it was a case of mistaken identity, and I just went, ‘No, I’m not.’ And then they looked at each other. And they went ‘Oh, alright then’, and then just walked off.”
