The coverage has been wide, the tone circumspect, the voices diverse as the 70th year since the partition of the Indian subcontinent has been marked across media and cultural institutions in the UK.

People I know from all generations and backgrounds have watched, read and listened; then, aghast, confessed that they had only basic prior knowledge of the brutal politics that caused one of the biggest migrations in human history, that saw the rape of thousands, the deaths and displacement of millions, the division of entire families, with repercussions still felt today.

I already knew how little place these devastating events have in our mainstream national consciousness – but this month brought it home.

My earliest memory of seeing partition and Indian independence discussed in the British media was in 1997, when India and Pakistan turned 50. A picture of Gandhi was on the front page of the Independent newspaper. I looked closer – it wasn’t Gandhi. It was Ben Kingsley as Gandhi from the film by Richard Attenborough, only the caption on the picture was wrong.

My parents were first-generation Indian immigrants; I grew up with the usual level of nostalgia, cultural protectionism and pride, balanced with the determination to excel at integration(without wearing denim, listening to Madonna or ever, ever smoking a cigarette). There was no clinging to notions of “Mother India”. But that newspaper error was piercing. Back then, I aspired to become a journalist, and suddenly the profession seemed tarnished. This felt carelessly offensive, even personal. In a strange reversal, I felt ashamed for Indians in Britain; embarrassed that a revered figure such as Gandhi could be usurped in a national newspaper by the actor who played him in a British film.

An apology was printed: “Sorry ’bout that”. It only made things worse. That apostrophe was a shrug, a bantering wink, a “nothing to get upset about, old chap”. In those words, I suddenly understood what the dividing line of “unconscious bias” – known, in its more ugly form, as institutional racism – looks like on the page, and what side of it I was being put on. When I finally did do a hapless week of unpaid work experience there, I remember zero other faces of colour on the whole editorial floor.

Before that, there had been 1974’s Plain Tales from the Raj series, which offered “a panorama of British India recorded by some of those who lived in it” on Radio 4. In 1987, when India and Pakistan turned 30, journalist Zareer Masani published a book from the research on his follow-up series, Indian Tales of the Raj. “Why are the British so obsessed with the Raj?” asked his Indian interviewees, who included industrialist Ratan Tata. That first generation didn’t want to look back, preferring to bury old trauma and humiliation. In the UK, their silence conveniently tallied with a mainstream white culture used to thinking about the Raj, at best in a cavalier “sorry ’bout that (but we did give you the trains)” kind of way; and at worst as a golden age for Britain.

Still, in 1997, I thought we were a long way from the days of Enoch Powell’s 1968 so-called “rivers of blood” speech, made as my parents arrived here to study and eventually to settle. To many like them, that speech hit deeply: Peter Brooke, researching Powell’s personal archive in 2001 notes that its language is rooted in ideas from Powell’s time working in Indian military intelligence between 1943-46. The rivers of actual blood spilled during Partition, with its British-as-innocent-bystander narrative, perhaps fuelled his racialist ideology.

The resurgence of Powell’s rhetoric and sentiments has had devastating effects on this country, stoking racial fears in white communities, reigniting insecurities in many first-generation Asian immigrants, undermining the confidence of those “who were born here”, even as in public we laugh off nonsensical calls that we should “go home”. I can’t help but wonder if greater representation of people of colour in schools, cultural institutions, media and arts industries, and better knowledge of empire and partition, imparted regularly to all via those same modes (in the way that the British glories, losses, heartbreaks and triumphs of the second world war are) might have helped to halt the pernicious re-use of Powell’s ideology. A shaming thought again – though this time I know the shame is not mine.

One of the most telling segments I heard this summer was on Woman’s Hour. Gul, an immigrant, and her second-generation daughter, Urvashi, talked about their relationship with Gul’s former home: Pakistan. One wanted to forget, the other longed to know it – one was so glad for Britain’s opportunities, the other wondered if she would have been happier there: being born and growing up in Britain as a person of colour, she never felt secure. That must have been difficult for her mother to hear, but it’s a feeling that too many young people of colour have growing up in the UK. It’s real source is not only in the silences at home, but the silences in our society.

Things are changing. In public life, this year it seems a new generation are making an English, sometimes regional-accented, noise about lack of diversity, confident enough to call out institutional racism in public. They came of age in the late 1980s and 1990s. Their history is refugee, their origins are immigrant. The gap in mainstream knowledge of how they came to be here is being filled, and by them. In some quarters, it seems they are being heard. But it’s an uphill struggle: we still have Raj-era nostalgia on our screens, a dearth of BAME role models in teaching, from primary to professorial level, at senior levels of publishing, arts and education administration and in the media. Three or four people of colour (if that) per organisation remain the exception, not the rule.

By the centenary of partition in 30 years’ time, I want to feel honour-bound and yet yawningly familiar with the Indian “lest we forget” archive footage being rolled out again, the recorded memories of those who lived through partition, even while being moved and deeply respecting their sacrifice. To see BAME names in the credits of all programmes, not just on BAME themes, and not feel a weird sense of pride in a person I’ve never met because they are from a minority community. I want to have people of all backgrounds roll their eyes, not in amazement, but because they already know more about the events than the radio is telling them.

Everyone in this country is a postcolonial subject, bound by a shared history, beyond religious or racial communalism. That’s what the prolific and diverse partition coverage this year has begun to admit into our national conversation – and it is way overdue.

Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young is published this month by Galley Beggar Press