RADIO and TV presenter Anita Rani has revealed how she began self-harming as a 13-year-old as she struggled to cope with experiencing racist abuse and juggling dual identities – as an Asian growing up in the UK.
In an interview with The Saturday Times (3), Rani, 43, said she faced racism, including the P*** slur almost throughout her life, from childhood at to her early days in the media industry.
Born to an immigrant family from Punjab, Rani grew up in Bradford, where she admitted that she witnessed abuse, with kids shouting “P*** slags” at her aunts.
“I hate it,” she said of the term. “I hate the way it makes me feel, the memories it conjures up.”
Her memoir, The Right Sort of Girl, published this month, tells the story of her growing up as a first-generation brown girl in a patriarchal family in England.
Shame was a major part of her childhood, she said.
Rani revealed she self-harmed aged 13 after a problematic period involving her uncle’s death by suicide, money problems and parents who were over-worked.
At school, she felt different for having brown skin, and at home she felt shame for being too “westernised”.
Recalling her childhood days, Rani revealed she felt confused about her roots and “Indian-ness”. One time, returning from the gurdwara while dressed in her Indian outfit, she felt torn between joining other neighbourhood kids at the ice-cream van queue and chose to stay indoors. On another day when she did overcome her nerves and joined the queue, a white girl looked her up and down and said, “We didn’t know you were one of them.”
Rani, who now fronts Countryfile, Four Rooms and Woman’s Hour, revealed “shame has been this big thing looming over” her whole life.
She said her early TV days were not easy as companies looking for a presenter often “did not know what to do with a brown face.”
She also wondered if her Indian origin might have held her back from being voted into the “Strictly Come Dancing” final.
Zia Yusuf
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