I grew up with a couple of narratives about the people middle-class Calcutta in the 1960s referred to as 'negroes' or, in non-English languages as ' habshi' or 'hobshi'. In my house, the chief story was that Gandhi ji fought for the rights of non-whites in South Africa before he returned to India to lead the struggle for independence. The secondary story was one that was unfolding at the time, of the civil rights struggle in the United States. While I had no stomach for the text-packed main English daily, I devoured the images in the imported Life Magazine, whether they were glorious colour shots of Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti in their Italian villa or the black and whites of GIs fighting in Vietnam. One of the stories I kept going back to was a series of photos of an unarmed negro being gunned down in the American south. You couldn't actually see the people doing the shooting, but time and time again my parents would explain what was happening. Taken from behind the man, the first photo: a gunshot hits the man, making him drop into a crouch, while his daughter (I think) who was walking next to him manages to crawl away to safety. You can see from the frames that the photographer is also now crouching to avoid the bullets. Second photo: the man tries to crawl away as well, but he's hit again. The third photo: as the noonday sun beats down, the man is trapped in the middle of the Mississippi mud road, unable to move, a sitting duck. The next three photos are smaller, the man still, dead, then people running out to try and help him, but too late. I remember the photographs as being starkly contrasty, all almost pure blacks and whites and no greys, the man in a white shirt and dark trousers, his head and arms slightly blurred smudges of black, the deep grey shadows of trees where the white shooters lay in wait, the sun-scorched country road just a tad less white than the man's shirt.

A little later, Life began to carry photos of a man my parents called 'the Gandhi of America', a certain Martin Luther King Jr, who said he was centrally inspired by Bapu's message of non-violence. Soon enough, there was another series of photos denoting tragedy, King waving from a motel balcony moments before he was fatally shot, the funeral march, the mourners, King's wife and family at the service in church. Again, the significance of this event was explained to the eight-year-old, how King was leading the fight for the rights of negroes like the man who was murdered in the earlier series of photographs.

At some point in the late 1960s I discovered Western pop music. First of course were the British and American white bands, but soon after that came Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte, and a couple of years later the jazz, blues and funk greats. Escorting the music was whatever reading I could find about it. Some kind person explained to me and my parents that 'negro' was no longer an acceptable word and we should be using 'black' instead, because that is what people like Cassius Clay/ Muhammad Ali and others called themselves. By the time a Gujarati friend of my parents came back from the US - an early NRI returning from New Jersey for a holiday in Calcutta - I knew something about the enslavement of Africans, about ongoing segregation and Black Power. So, at a lunch party where Y- kaka began complaining that 'kaaliyas' (blackies) were moving in and ruining their New Jersey neighbourhood, I felt outraged. "But kaka, we are also black only, no?" I asked. There were huge hoots of laughter from the other grown-ups and a sudden and fierce clampdown from my parents who knew too well my tendency of being painfully rude and loud-mouthed. Later, I was told I'd been right, perhaps, but that it was unacceptable for a 12-year-old to give lip to an uncle.

That uncle may have escaped my precocious interrogation, but I was not going to get away so easily from the repercussions of the racism of Indian expats like him. Across the 1970s I became fully engrossed in the different kinds of African-American music, from jazz to reggae, and by the time I got to my college in Vermont I was proud that I could tell Muddy Waters from John Lee Hooker, or a Charlie Parker solo from one by Coltrane. What I wasn't at all prepared for was that some people might not be able to tell the difference between me and some US-settled South Asian. Almost the first friend I made in college was a black American and, nearly 40 years later, he and I remain among each other's closest friends. There were other African-Americans who also befriended me and I, foolishly, made the assumption that I was generally cool with Americans of colour. It took one older man, in from the Bronx for the summer programme, to burst my bubble. When I joined him and a couple of my other black American friends at a table in the college cafeteria, I found myself caught in a sawn-off blast of anger and sarcasm. It took me a few minutes to understand that this man and others in his community were suffering under constant racism from South Asians, especially the desi doctors and surgeons who manned the health services in the poorer, mostly black boroughs of New York City.

That was in the late 1970s. In the mid-1980s I found myself working in the Bombay film industry and living with a friend's aunt who ran an international student hostel near Churchgate. A lot of the students in the hostel were Africans, mostly men, and even then there was tension, with stories rife with racism, petty and serious, against these foreign students. Later in life, I've spent a lot of time in London where the mix and context are quite different from the US or India. But there, too, I've witnessed the rub of racial distrust between the two communities of colour, South Asian and Afro-Caribbean, both of whom are in a minority in a largely white society. Despite my experience in Bombay, in the United Kingdom or the US, I've always been tempted to put the tensions between South Asians and blacks down to economic and class reasons, perhaps a little bit down to the histories of desis allying with the colonial whites in east Africa. What still startles me, though I know it shouldn't, is the racism we Indians in India, Indians of all classes, level at Africans and people of African descent.

In the matter of skin colour there is no getting away from the fact that the binary of fair = good, dark = bad is ingrained not only across generations of the more powerful castes and classes but at a wider level. Even now, instead of embracing our society of full-spectrum browns, we yearn after some idea of 'whiteness' that is fully exploited by the make-up companies and (at least the Bombay and Calcutta) film industries. We are not only racist towards blacks and darker-skinned people in general, we are, in our metros, especially in Delhi and the North, also racist towards people from the Northeast and towards Tibetans and Nepalese. Add to this the fact that we are also quite racist towards white people, treating them as non-human and objectifying them even as we shamelessly kowtow to wealthier Caucasians, and you have a sad picture of a society that's not happy in its own skin.

On top of this let's put the increasing levels of violence in our society, a lot of it let loose by the State itself. We do have a long history of racism towards Africans but the stripping and lynching of a black woman because someone of similar ethnicity had just done a hit and run? That takes the sickness in our society to a whole different level. When I read of the brutal attack on the African woman near Bangalore, I wondered how a people so chock-a-block with difference manages to hate difference so much, whether that difference be one of skin colour, facial features or modes of life or schools of belief. I wonder whether anything at all has changed for the better since the small-eyed, sliver-minded, Cal-Gujju NRI uncle came back for his annual trip in the early 1970s. When I raise these questions with a friend, she just laughs. "What are you saying? That ecology organisation has just gone and reappointed that ghastly man despite the harassment complaints against him! You need to understand we are also 'racist' towards our own women, leave alone people of other races and nationalities!"