Talking About the Past and Reliving It: Colonial Violence, Diasporic Memory, and the Afterlives of Empire in Britain

Abstract:

While India’s rich heritage in literature, science, philosophy, and the arts has been globally celebrated, this recognition often obscures the violent legacies of British colonialism and the enduring struggles faced by the diaspora. This paper examines how historical events such as massacres illuminate the brutality of the empire and its lasting impact on postcolonial communities.

The work is framed by a moment of dissonance: in 2024, while delivering a talk on the 1976 murder of Gurdeep Singh Chaggar, race riots once again erupted in the UK. Drawing from this intersection, the paper explores how colonial violence established racial hierarchies, systems of surveillance, and structures of dehumanisation that continue to shape life in Britain today.

By connecting violence in colonial India to postcolonial injustices – such as the 1979 virginity testing of South Asian women at Heathrow Airport and the Coventry experiment in which Indian women were unknowingly fed radioactive chapatis – the paper argues that these are not isolated events but part of a broader continuum. They reflect a structural continuity: the regulation, exploitation, and medicalisation of the Brown body across imperial and post-imperial time.

About the speaker

Dr Bhavna Sennik (Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology and Counselling Psychologist) specialises in decolonial approaches to psychological distress, colonial and systemic violence, and human rights. She has developed NHS services for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and works at the intersection of clinical practice and structural critique. Her research explores the ongoing impacts of coloniality, disaster, and racialisation, with a particular focus on how ‘race equality’ frameworks can function as instruments of surveillance, institutional whiteness, and erasure.