The coronation of King Charles III – and his wife, Camilla, the queen consort – will, on the face of it, reflect a modern Britain entirely at ease with itself – and its past.

Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh leaders will for the first-time feature in the centuries-old ceremony at London’s Westminster Abbey.

Among those in attendance will be the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – the first British Asian and Hindu to hold Britain’s top job – and Humza Yousaf, the newly-elected first minister of Scotland and first-ever Muslim head of government of any Western democracy.

But behind the pomp and pageantry, questions about the monarchy’s ties to Britain’s (often bloody) colonial past and its days of Empire will remain, not least among the UK’s large British-Asian population.

“Absolutely not,” responded Aamir Darr, a bookseller from England, when Al Jazeera asked the Pakistan-born 62-year-old if he would be watching the coverage of the coronation on television on May 6.

“If [King] Charles wants to indulge in this, then it should come out of his own pocket,” stated the founder of the Multicultural Bookshop in Bradford – a city which hosts the second-largest Asian community in England and Wales. “We’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis where people can barely put food on the table. During Ramadan, for the last couple of years in Bradford, I know people who couldn’t put food on the table for them and their families.” For Darr, the upcoming investiture of Charles as Britain’s new head of state, following the death last year of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, jars especially with the ongoing controversy over the UK’s colonial past.