I carried my radical, unnecessary self-identification with Maggie Tulliver on through college, through semesters of alienation in writing classes where professors would liken me to Jhumpa Lahiri and tell me how lucky I was to be “exotic.” During my last semester, I even wrote a term essay on how women in Victorian British novels demonstrate virtue.

One of my favorites was The Mill on the Floss, a Victorian novel written by Mary Ann Evans under her pen name, George Eliot_._ The protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, was a rebel. I vividly remember how Eliot describes her, shaking her head like a Shetland pony before chopping off her hair in defiance of femininity. I so closely identified with Maggie that the little town of Lincolnshire, where the novel was set, could have been Rajkot, Gujarat, where I first read the book in secondary school.

I grew up in the post-colonies—namely India, Hong Kong, and immigrant communities in the U.S. The whole time, my head was deep in British classics; I read them as if they were my own history.

English is not our mother tongue, but so many of us speak it. So many of us even take pride in how well we speak it.

When Princess Diana died, Katherine and I sat in my room and wept, because we thought there were no more princesses in the world. Her death made our own lack of royalty more real. I performed a mournful solemnity I had picked up from books about childhood capers like those of Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and recalled a picture of Diana touching Black children with HIV/AIDS. “What a saint,” said an older aunty type. “For a princess to touch disease like that.”

Katherine would have me clatter the far keys of her baby grand piano to create a dramatic atmosphere while she paraded around in her mother’s fancy clothes. In our fantasies, she was the princess, about to get married. She acted like she was a celebrity, but she was just a white British girl. I thought she was the most cosmopolitan, most self-possessed of our Hong Kong elementary school classmates. (My mother, now hilariously, accused me then of “kissing white ass.”)

In the entire essay, not once did I mention race. I must have tacitly understood that those elevated to classical protagonist must be white, as white was not a color but the absence of it; that in narratives, whiteness performs as a sort of blankness, a canvas to paint metaphor and simile on; that it lends neutrality to fraught topics, and allows the story to enter the mainstream. The literary white woman, whether she was snipping her locks off with farm scissors, blushing through Derbyshire, or yearning for a room of her own, was my unquestioned role model.

But largesse is not a negotiation, nor is it altruistic. Establishing English as a lingua franca around the world benefits the English the most, just as fulfilling the White Man’s Burden of “civilizing” indigenous peoples involved, for example, stealing an estimated $45 trillion from South Asia , about 17 times the U.K.’s annual GDP. I guess that is what England means by “commonwealth.”

In 7th grade, we were encouraged to enter a Commonwealth essay writing competition. The prompt was to imagine new worlds. I came up with one where I became a doctor and created a township village where education was free and jobs were guaranteed. I was benevolent and rich and would visit to serve tomato soup to the populace. It was a neoliberal fantasy wrought of white guilt I had unknowingly absorbed. As Sara Crewe would call it: “largesse,” the kind that rationalized the Commonwealth extending the “gift” of English to its former colonies.

The idea that one could have innate worth was so attractive to me—after all, the Hindu concept of karma fundamentally justifies caste supremacy and privilege. I wanted to be recognized as worthy just for my speech and manners, as Sara Crewe had been.

Burnett’s fixation on princesses—more a state of mind than a title—through the lofty, imaginative protagonists of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden fostered literary narcissism in me. Sara Crewe of A Little Princess was a storyteller; despite her fall from fortune, she unnerves her elders by retaining her regal stature and ability to weave narratives. Though demoted to a lowly servant, she benefits from what she calls "magic" —dinners set out by a monkey-toting lascar who parkours into her quarters every night. She feels deserving of the remarkable kindness because she will always be a memsahib, one who can speak both posh English and strangled Hindustani. Then, when the diamond mines in the stories about her family turn out to be reality rather than childish fantasy, she is able to turn back into a princess.

Because of “largesse,” England is the stepmother who never loved any of us. I am preoccupied with my place in her embrace. Today, I bring up the Kohinoor Diamond often, as the massive jewel, which was expropriated and remains unreturned, is just one example of how we were mistreated and how that mistreatment has been denied. I hug the train of England’s dress because I cannot reach up to her bosom; I still want her approval, but she is hard to please. She never wanted me anyhow.

The message of the British period drama is clear: that history is charming, that nostalgia can cloak any monstrosity, that the British deserved every plunder.

I am guilty of spending hundreds of hours watching all the historical drama series. The pleasant diversion of period dramas is, in its essence, psychosocial integration made possible by colonial propaganda. You watch period dramas and take as truth their message: British colonialism was quaint, glorious, and a high point in civilization.