Martin Davidson, the chief executive officer of British Council, at the launch of Vron Ware’s Who Cares About Britishness? Picture by Aranya Sen

Who Cares About Britishness? This is the intriguing question that Vron Ware asks in her book, launched in the city last Wednesday.

“A Global View of the National Identity Debate” is what Ware grapples with in the work commissioned by Counterpoint, British Council’s cultural think tank. Her attempt to understand how the world perceives Britain, and how cultural identities are constructed, had brought Vron to Calcutta in 2006, when she listened to 20 young participants discuss “Indianness” at a daylong workshop. Mumbai, Bangladesh and Pakistan were her other South Asian stops.

“Vron chose to go to countries which have strong links with Britain, whose people form a part of the diaspora living there,” explained Sujata Sen, the director (east India) of British Council, at the launch.

The Britain that Vron writes about is not one that many Indians would recognise. In fact, one young British student who was present at the launch said Vron’s Britain — which she describes as “a composite nation, a patchwork of anomalies” — was not one he could relate to.

But now, with people from across the world calling Britain home, issues of integration are increasingly being raised.

“The most important thing is that these questions are being asked,” said Martin Davidson, the chief executive officer of British Council. Global events, such as the London bombings of 2005, had made cultural identity a particularly relevant issue, he explained, with the threat coming from within and not without.

Who Cares About Britishness? “is a post-colonial account of what the creaking centre of an old empire is gradually becoming”, Ware writes. “It represents an attempt to think with a new generation of young people, whose marginalised voices are rarely heard in pronouncements on national identity delivered from on high.”