April 2021’s online event featured author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera discussing his latest book Empireland. In conversation with Sara Wajid, the co-CEO of the Birmingham Museum’s Trust, he discussed the ways in which legacies of empire permeate everything from the NHS to our national museums and how the events of the past year have demonstrated the urgent need for us to understand and reckon with our imperial past.
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Credits
Curator: Shantel Edwards (Festival director)
Production: 11C/ Birmingham Podcast Studios for Writing West Midlands
TRANSCRIPT
BLF Series 2, Episode 11: Sathnam Sanghera
Intro
Welcome to the second series of the Birmingham Lit Fest Presents…podcast. We are really excited to be back for a second season and to continue to connect readers and writers in the Midlands, and far beyond.
You can download our podcast episodes from all the places you would normally get your podcasts every Thursday and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @bhamlitfest. All of our festival events can be found on our website www.birminghamliteraturefestival.org.
April 2021’s online event featured author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera discussing his latest book Empireland. In conversation with Sara Wajid, the co-CEO of the Birmingham Museum’s Trust, he discussed the ways in which legacies of empire permeate everything from the NHS to our national museums and how the events of the past year have demonstrated the urgent need for us to understand and reckon with our imperial past.
Sara Wajid
Good evening, everyone. I'm Sara Wajid. I'm the co-CEO of Birmingham Museum Art Gallery, and I'm here this evening to talk to Sathnam Sanghera about his book Empireland. I'm speaking to you from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. This is the industrial gallery. As this is Birmingham Literature Festival. No doubt many of you will recognise the museum, so I thought I’d give you this treat to be able to peek inside the museum when you haven't been able to for so long now in lockdown. As I said, I'm the co-CEO of Birmingham Museums Trust. And I'm really delighted to be having this conversation with Sathnam. He's such an important person, not just as a UK journalist, but particularly for the Midlands. And this is quite a special conversation. We were talking just now in the virtual green room about whether we've met before. And clearly Sathnam doesn't recognize me or remember me from the early 2000s but he was very much on my radar when I was a journalist, not nearly as good a journalist as him, which is why I'm now museum director and no longer a journalist. For those of you who may want to refresh as to Santhanam’s biog, he was born to Indian Punjabi parents in 1976 in Wolverhampton. He's been a Times columnist and feature writer since 2007 and his memoir, The Boy with a Topknot, a memoir of love, secrets and lies in Wolverhampton, was adapted for BBC Two in 2017. I’m a big fan. His novel Marriage Material was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards. And he's also presented a range of TV documentaries, including The Massacre that Shook the Empire on Channel Four. Sathnam, welcome. Good to see you. Congratulations on the book, it’s a wonderful book and its been received extremely warmly. I must say I was a bit surprised to see you writing on this topic. When I first heard about the book I was like what's this, he's not a historian. You know us in the museum and history world can be a bit snobby like that, like, right, like what right does this fella have to come into our territory and start writing about this stuff? Doesn't he interview celebrities? Isn't that his domain? Then I read the book and obviously I was very impressed, which is why we're talking now. But firstly, I wanted to ask you a bit about identity. As much as this book is about public understanding of history and Empire, I guess what makes it stand out from historians is your reflections on your own identity and how Empire has shaped you and your journey in writing this book and how it's affected you. There's a bit in the book where you're reflecting on this and describe it saying ‘on embarking on this journey, I'm making an effort to decolonise myself.’ I wanted to know what you meant by that, and how it's going.
Sathnam Sanghera
It’s an ongoing process. And I guess the phrase decolonisation, you know, a lot of people are allergic to it. Actually, I was allergic to because I didn't feel like I needed decolonising because when you've had a very good education, where everyone tells you you've had the best education in the world, you just think there's nothing wrong with what you've learned and what you've looked at, and the way you've focused on certain things. But it was probably three quarters of my way through this book that I realized that actually I had been colonised. I think that what made me realise it as I was reading about the way Indian kingdoms were taken over by the British. And one of the ways they conquered these Indian royal families was by putting the children through a British education. The Sikh Empire wasn't lost on the battlefield, it was lost in a school room, where Maharajah Duleep Singh was turned into an English gent, you know, was sent off to Britain and became a kind of toy for Queen Victoria. That ended the Sikh kingdom. And later in life he realised what had happened and he tried to reconnect with his Sikh heritage, and I really related to that. And I think, at a similar age in my 40s, I realised I had been coloniSed. And I'm trying to do something about it. But you're right, in that it was a bit weird that I'm writing about this subject. You know, I did a reading about 18 months ago, to some friends in a restaurant, it was a small event. And the general reaction was one of complete confusion, because they couldn't quite work out whether it was history or memoir. And it was quite an esoteric subject then. But then suddenly, six months later, we had Black Lives Matter. And suddenly, I was turning on the news and there was, you know, a mainstream news item about how British Empire created modern notions of racism, how we exported racism to America. And suddenly, this niche thing I was writing about, became of international concern. So, it's only accidentally timely to be honest, and there was no certainty that it was going to work.
Sara Wajid
I just want to draw you out a little bit more on what you were saying there about your education. In your earlier memoirs, when you refer to your schooling, and the grammar school, I hadn't registered it as a kind of quite posh school. And that, and that tells you something, doesn’t it because I went to a minor public school, so I'm like grammar school? He's not a posh boy. But actually, when you were kind of reflecting on quite how colonial the ideologies were in your school, because you went to your reunion, and found, you know, sort of singing these super colonially school songs and all the rest of it, that really struck a chord with me. We are both Punjabi immigrants, you started school not really speaking that much English, I think I remember from your memoir, although you went off to your posh University and did your top-notch English degree, as I did an English degree too. And for me, I've been very conscious that I've been wrestling with that colonial public-school kind of education that I had, and that realisation was quite near the surface for me, that public schools are a very colonising environment, ideologically, politically, culturally, cricket, all of that stuff. And for me, in a sense, museums are very much a reflection of that. And I often think I've found myself in museums because I'm continuing this kind of Freudian like struggle of adapting or wrestling with that kind of public-school ideology.
Sathnam Sanghera
The public school system in Britain was the system that was used to produce officers for the British Empire. And I've since learned that not only was that the case, but the state school system was set up to mimic the public school system. So even though Wolverhampton Grammar School was a grammar school, you know, it was a state Grammar School in the 20th century, it became an independent school just before I joined. When I was there, it was a mixture of kids on 100% assisted places, and posh kids. And so, I didn't really think it was particularly posh. But it had that culture, you know, that traditional British culture, which goes back to the Victorian age where, you know, we sang the national anthem, and our school song talked about conquering the planet. Partly, the reason I didn't understand it is that the school song was in Latin. We were singing these words and we didn't really understand them. But I think the influence of Empire, as I tried to explain in the book, extends in so many silent ways. And so, it took quite a lot of research and thinking to realise and to trace the ways it continues to influence modern life.
Sara Wajid
It sounded a bit like that was also about your education at university as well, as I say you studied English literature. And it seems that it was a very narrow curriculum. We talk now about decolonising the curriculum but you were at university more than 20 years ago, and it sounds like your reading of someone like Edward Said, that was certainly not part of your tertiary education.
Sathnam Sanghera
No, actually Edward Said blew my mind. I mean, he wrote this one particular essay about Jane Austen and Mansfield Park, about how the Empire can be traced throughout the story and throughout the dialogue. I studied Mansfield Park for A Level, I hated it. I thought there's nothing in it I could relate to, and I had to do anyway, it struck me as amazing that actually there was loads of stuff that was interesting to me. And that was about Empire, we just didn't have the teaching to tell us that. You know, I was in my final term at university before I read a single brown author, you know, V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureshi, Salman Rushdie. That's incredible, I find that amazing now. So, all of my impressions of India, most of them came through British writers, you know, by Paul Scott, and Forster and so on. And I realized that my gaze, or Western gaze upon the East, it was Edward Said who made me realise that and also, I mean, the term decolonisation often attracts the criticism that it's about deleting, you know, the great white authors, I don't think it's about that at all. I think it's a failure of education, that I didn't have a wider perspective. It's completely in keeping with the academic tradition, to widen perspectives, that I didn't know that about Mansfield Park was a failure of education, you know, and I think we should, instead of using the phrase decolonising, we should use the phrase widening, because that's what this is about, you know, it's about widening perspectives. And that is entirely what schools and universities should be doing.
Sara Wajid
I also felt there was something, I suppose there was a sadness underneath that realisation. For a lot of immigrant parents, they invest a huge amount in the education of their children, as a route to social mobility. And certainly my parents’ generation, invested so much, and made a lot of sacrifices for children to have what they perceived as being the best education that the host country had to offer, because they saw it as a shield, and armour that their children are going to need, because they're already going to be on the backfoot in this country, so give them and equip them with the best that they possibly can through the education system. But that same education system, I guess what you seem to be revealing and surfacing, actually took something away from you.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I guess that was the lesson of my first book as well, in that, you know, I would never complain about my education, because it changed my life in ways I wanted it to change. But when you're socially mobile, you do lose something, you lose your connection with where you're from, you know, I became very middle class in a working-class family. And that is a universal problem, you know, and so going back to where you're from, you kind of miss it. But it happened much more profoundly, in the, in the case of Empire. I wouldn't complain about the education I had. But I think immigrants think about education as something as an economic transaction. So, they want their children to go to the best school to get the best job. What that doesn't take into account is that education changes you as a person. And that's something that immigrants don't necessarily buy into. It's something they don't necessarily want. And it's actually ultimately my education that has got me here. So, it's a bit of a paradox, isn't it? I remembered what I was saying, three quarters of the way through it.
Sara Wajid
I guess the other thing about your childhood and your upbringing, and Wolverhampton that looms so strongly throughout the book is Enoch Powell. And we're similar in age, I've got a couple of years on you. But in Powell, I remember as well very, kind of vividly from my childhood that he was almost a sort of bogeyman figure in my household growing up, even the name still to this day, gives me the spooks a little bit, you know, just freaks me out. But I suppose I wanted to hear from you about how and why you involve him and thread him throughout a book like that, and what you think he means, particularly in the Midlands, today?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I feel exactly the same about Powell. He didn't overshadow my childhood in that we weren't a political household. Like many immigrant families, the focus was just on working, getting some money, escaping poverty. And even at school, his successor, Nick Budgen, came to visit. But I had very little awareness of what he represented, but his shadow of my adult life, I mean, he was a big presence in my novel, as I was writing about the 1960s/70s experience of Asian immigrant. And I realized that, you know, he's an incredible man who kind of encapsulates the confusion we have about Empire, because, you know, he obviously is most famous for being anti-immigration. But his great ambition in life was to be the Viceroy of India. And as soon as you know that, everything else kind of makes sense because he had an imperial notion of race. The Empire had a hierarchy, right, people at the top, separated from brown people, you know, and in his Rivers of Blood speech, he talks about the black man having the whip of the white man. And for him, multiculturalism was an inversion of that racial hierarchy. That's why it troubled him so much. He went on to say some very peculiar things about Empire. He actually argued that empire never happened, which is a kind of weird, postmodern kind of argument, which I've never seen anyone else make. But I think that indicates how troubled he was by the failure of his ambition, by the way in which we ended up having a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire. That was never part of his plan. I think that disturbed his sense of Britain, and his own sense of himself.
Sara Wajid
History seems like it's having a moment And I don't just say that as a museum director; stepping back and looking over the last year, and the focus on statues and decolonising and our reckoning with our own history around Empire, it feels within the last year. But writing this book during lockdown, I particularly wondered how it felt to situate yourself in these histories, some of which are very painful, ugly, as you particularly talk about at the beginning of the book, what did that feel like, in such a claustrophobic year?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I mean, it was hard. But it's four years of reading so it wasn't just lockdown, I was finishing the book in lockdown. But yeah, it was hard to look at some of the violence, you know, Sikhs being tied to the end of cannons and blown into pieces, because that way they couldn't have a proper funeral. You know, things like that. And obviously what happened in Tasmania, which was a genocide where native Tasmanians were hunted for sport, it's quite hard to read that stuff. And I used to stop myself from reading it after two o'clock in the day, because I found that if I read it later on, I'd have nightmares about it. But the other surreal thing about it was during lockdown, when suddenly this niche issue I was writing about became a global concern with Black Lives Matter. And suddenly, statues are coming down, people are talking about colonisation, people are talking about Robert Clive, you know, the Robert Clive statue, and who I've been thinking about for two years, and it's quite surreal. And I tried to compare it in the book to being a fan of a really obscure soul singer, and suddenly he's covered by Robbie Williams, and people are singing his song, it was a bit like that.
Sara Wajid
I mean, Empire's hardly an obscure corner of history.
Sathnam Sanghera
But it's very poorly understood. You know, I mean, I didn't I knew very little about it, you know, and I think in general, we don't know, that's part of the reason why I wanted to write the book, because it's really, we don't really see ourselves as the country that created the greatest empire in human history. We see ourselves as a country that won World War Two. And what that does, it helps us forget, because we beat the evil, racist Germans, it helps us forget that we were wilfully white supremacists for more than a century.
Sara Wajid
I noticed you use the pronoun ‘we’ there and you do in the book at times when, for instance, you might be talking about white British expats, or British attitudes, sometimes racist attitudes. And then you use the term ‘we’ almost directly afterwards when you're talking about Britishness and I felt at moments that I didn't quite buy that ‘we’. It doesn't sit right in your mouth. I don't believe you mean ‘we’ when you're talking about that, we're talking about racist white British people. Why use ‘we’?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, it's very interesting, actually, when I did my documentary, The Massacre, about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, about a year and a half ago, I used the word ‘we’ all the way through it without thinking about it. And I got loads of letters from people saying God, why do you say ‘we’ and it's like, thing is I am British, as I am Asian, the Sikhs, you know, were involved, took the side of the British during the mutiny, it was quite a thing. Sikhs fought in huge numbers in both World Wars, they took advantage of opportunities to relocate within empire for centuries. And so, for me, it's very easy to say ‘we’, I generally don't put any thought into it. The only time I thought about it is when I had the book read by a couple of historians. And they said, you know what, you should never use the word ‘we’, the first thing that happens when you go to university to study history is that your tutor tells you never to say ‘we’, you need to de personalise it. And I was like, you know what, I'm not a historian. And this isn't a history book, a conventional one. I'm going to keep the ‘we’, because I meant it. But I understand some people feel, I think it's a reflection of how British you feel. And it's a reflection of your personal experiences in this country as a child of immigrants.
Sara Wajid
I guess overall, the thrust of the book is that if we knew our history better, that we would be a happier, multicultural, cohesive society, that multiculturalism would be working better if only British people knew more about Empire and the history of empire.
Sathnam Sanghera
A lot has happened since that has made me a bit depressed. I mean, there's been a massive backlash against Black Lives Matter, amongst, frankly, the English nationalists in this government. And so, it's been weaponised by a right-wing sect of the Tory party. And so, you have Robert Jenrick writing columns about how he wants to introduce legislation to protect statues, you have the Culture Secretary saying he wants to punish you if you respond to woke campaigners. There's no doubt it's become vicious and depressing but I’ll tell you why I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic because change is happening regardless, whatever the politicians do. Young people feel incredibly strongly. First of all, they feel very strongly about Black Lives Matter. And all the surveys show that secondly, they're getting the information from outside the school room, there's so many Instagram accounts, there's films like Black Panther, nothing is gonna stop that. Nothing. And also, you gotta remember, the national curriculum increasingly isn't all, you know, if you're an academy, or if you're a private school, you don't have to follow the national curriculum. And the amazing thing I have had, since the book has come out, is hundreds of history teachers saying, you know what, I already teach that, or I'm going to teach that, and they can. And I think they're responding to the desire amongst the younger generation. So, I guess, ultimately, as young people, that makes me feel optimistic, though, occasionally, when I read the newspapers, I want to shoot myself.
Sara Wajid
And how do you feel when you're going to museums?
Sathnam Sanghera
Well museums, they’re very nice, yours looks very nice. I've not been in yours. I'm gonna do that.
Sara Wajid
How dare you, yes, make sure you come. But that's interesting, I mean, you're a person who's written a book on Empire, but you've never been to the main museum in your own region that you hale from. You talk about museums a lot in the book. But before you started reading the book, what was your relationship with museums, were you someone who went?
Sathnam Sanghera
Probably not, I mean, I've been to London museums. I think as you get older, you get more interested in history. And when you're a young person, you're not necessarily interested in the past. And also, the Midlands, when I was a young man was something I just wanted to escape. You know, even though it's become the thing I write about now, which often happens when people leave somewhere, it becomes the inspiration. So, I didn't go to Wolverhampton Art Gallery until I was about 25. And so, it's something I'm doing as I get older. But yeah, museums are a major aspect of our culture. And I think they've not faced up to the fact that they got a lot of their stuff by looting, and also, that looting was condemned at the time. That's my ultimate point. You know, I pick out Tibet and Ethiopia, two invasions we did in the 19th century, in the early 20th century. And they were, you know, we had Gladstone complaining about what happened in Ethiopia. You know, in Tibet, I think the Geneva Convention was already around, and it said no looting allowed or no pillaging, and we still did it. And there was outrage. And so, people often say, oh, you know, you can't apply modern morals, modern ethics to the past, we need to remember how unpopular it was at the time, Queen Victoria was complaining about what was done with the skull of someone from Sudan. And we need to remember what people said at the time. Another thing we need to remember is that if we gave back a few things, our museums wouldn't be empty. The British museum displays 1% of his collection. I suspect that number is not so extreme with you guys. How much of your collection do you display?
Sara Wajid
Oh, a tiny fraction. That's the truth for most museums. Birmingham Museums Trust is multiple venues and we've got up to a million objects in the collection, only a tony fraction of those are on display. But the museums that you talk passionately about in the book, and the questions of the cultural politics around restitution is increasingly contested and as you referred to, politicians are getting more and more involved in and using museums as distractions and material for the culture wars.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah. But again, the reason I'm optimistic about it is, you know, there's legislation and stuff in the British Museum, I think the V & A are returning things, but I don't think local museums are restricted in the same way. I think Manchester Museum’s given stuff back, and actually Oxbridge colleges are giving stuff back, individuals are giving stuff back. And this is happening internationally and there's loads of museums in Africa, ready to take these things. And so again, yeah, you can get depressed when you think about what is happening at the British Museum, what people are saying, what politicians are saying, but the real life goes on, change is happening, man. And so that's why I'm quite optimistic about it.
Sara Wajid
And what do you see for the future of museums? I mean, you talk about the difficulty of decolonising yourself; as a museum director, I wrestle with the question of whether museums can be decolonised. To some extent, it's a bit like a question about whether society actually fundamentally can be made non racist. For many people, museums are themselves so intrinsically and fundamentally a technology of empire, that they're kind of beyond hope, that they’re a lost cause, because they're essentially born out of the building of empire. And whether it's a small fraction or a large amount of the collections which have their roots in technically loot, essentially, the whole project is tainted. Do you have a view on that after all the museum people you spoke to?
Sathnam Sanghera
I don't believe that. I mean, I think our museums are an important part of our culture, and we should protect them. Also, there's a reason and there's a use in having so many artifacts from around the world in one place. But if we start returning a few contested things, and let's face it, we're talking a few, right? I think you can have amazing scholarship, you can have the final exhibition of an item that's being returned. That could be an amazing thing, you could discover amazing things, you could improve relationships with other nations at a time, with Brexit, we really need to improve our relations with India and parts of Africa. And I think you can enrich all of us, and then you can start displaying some of the stuff you've got hidden away. I often think about it, if you reversed it, say if the French during the Napoleonic Wars, took Stonehenge to Paris, and then just put it into storage. And then they were like, you know what, we're not giving it back. But equally, we're not gonna display it either. I mean, how offensive is that? I feel like that about some of the Sikh artifacts that the VNA has got, this is really culturally important stuff. And not only are they not on display, you can't even find them online, you know, they're not even catalogued properly. And so, it's just a waste. So, I think if we begin the process of restitution, it can only enrich museums.
Sara Wajid
Talking of memory, restitution, and pain, there was a story in the news today, a story about the recognition of the unequal treatment and remembrance of soldiers in the First World War. African and South Asian soldiers who are not remembered, whose graves were not marked in the way as white soldiers were. Now this is not going to come as a big surprise to most British Black and British Asian people, that the respect was not afforded those soldiers, we already really know. I guess that the news element of this story was that there was a recognition of institutional racism underlying that process and what looked like an opportunity for some restitution and acknowledgement. Reading it this morning, I was thinking, I wonder whether there's more damage and more pain in this confirmation and revelation about the actual extent of the racism behind the decisions not to mark those graves properly, or whether the healing is worth it, the healing of surfacing these stories. Now, mostly, I think the healing is worth it. That's why I'm in business. But what do you think about these questions of healing, and kind of picking at these wounds?
Sathnam Sanghera
For me, I use the analogy of therapy, or marriage guidance. Say, if you're having therapy with your partner, you might discover really uncomfortable things about them, they might discover uncomfortable things about you that might be painful. But overall, it might make you stronger. I think history is the same thing. These things we're finally confronting, can actually let us face up to the fact that we are a multicultural society, because we were a multicultural empire. And equally, we have institutional racism, because we grew out of the institution of British Empire, which was wilfully and proudly racist. And this story this morning is great. But actually, the truth is much worse in that after World War One, the government decided very specifically to delete the contribution of Black and Asian troops. It's not just that they forgot to commemorate them. They did it on purpose. And I think what that does, once you face up to that, you can then see why institutional racism still exists. Because that wasn't that long ago, you know, we're talking about the 20th century. And I think that can only be a positive thing, because it highlights the amnesia, and there's amnesia everywhere, you know, the way we remember the Indian railways, you know Tony Blair, in his memoir, talking about handing back Hong Kong to China, and, you know, not knowing anything of the history, the amnesia is just absolutely everywhere in our culture. And education can only be a good thing.
Sara Wajid
I just wanted to turn to that point, you're talking about multiculturalism and at one point in the book, you say, it’s a kind of, almost a throwaway comment. But you say, I'm not a fan of pure multiculturalism, some phrase like that, and you refer to the sort of insularity of certain communities like your own and the harm that that does to the community itself being too insular, not learning English, for example. And it sort of slightly pricked something uncomfortable in me because it reminded me, it made me think about Munira Mirza, the government advisor who's heavily involved in the recent race report, whose own background in Bradford and upbringing seems to have informed a very particular and specific take on multiculturalism, her take on that being that communities that are empowered to be themselves, that are being funded to do anything to develop a specific community, end up being divisive for society. And that actually, you know, anything that really recognizes or affirms that there is institutional racism is divisive. So, I just wondered, slightly far from history here, but I just wanted to kind of pick you up, I guess on that comment about pure multiculturalism.
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I totally disagree with Munira Mirza, and she's become this right wing, culture warrior. But I mean, it's an argument I had in my first book, you know, that if communities like mine don't integrate, they suffer, you know. If people don't speak English, they can't access services properly, they miss opportunities, then there's the culture clash between generations, you know, I suffered in that respect. It took my family quite a lot of pain to get to where they are now. I would say they are happier now having integrated, and I have a sister living in Canada where they don't push integration so you have entire ghettoes, you know, you have four miles or Sikhs, and you have four miles of Chinese people, they never mix. I don't see that as a healthy thing. You know, I want a nation where everyone integrates and talks and gets things from one another. But ultimately, I believe that you can tolerate differences between us because we had a multicultural empire, you know, our differences are just a reflection of how British we are, ultimately.
Sara Wajid
The other thing that comes through really clearly is your kind of joy and excitement about some of the stories that you're learning for the first time. It's sort of, quite a lot of them are familiar to the work I do, I was quite familiar with many of the stories but it was really lovely to encounter your joy in encountering different characters who you are coming across for the first time, that shampooing surgeon, who is a bit like the sort of Mary Seacole of the, you know, British Asian History World. Tell me about that experience and who you enjoyed meeting?
Sathnam Sanghera
Yeah, I guess you know, I grew up with this vague idea that we were recent arrivals, that brown people didn't really exist, that we came without permission and we kind of imposed ourselves on the British, so it kind of blew my mind. It would have changed my life if I'd known about the fact that, you know, there were Black people in London in 1600, that Queen Elizabeth the first was complaining about there being too many Black people in 1600 or 1601. I think the first Bengali was born, Bengali boy, was born in 1614. But he’s an amazing character, Dean Mohamed is an amazing man. He came over with the East India Company, went to Ireland, married an Irish girl called Jane Daly and then came to London, opened the first curry house, was the first Indian to write in English. I think he wrote a book, but it's a terrible book, but he was the first. Then he went to Brighton and called himself a shampooing surgeon. It sounds like he was a kind of massager of some sort.
Sara Wajid
I know that's quite a vague term.
Sathnam Sanghera
It is a bit vague. And in the course of it, he manages to break someone's arm and leg. He becomes wildly famous, and he becomes a champion surgeon for the King and the Prince of Wales. But then, like so many Imperial figures, when he dies, he's forgotten. I was never taught about him. And I think it's important to remember that we are not here as a novel experiment. We've been here for centuries. It’s that famous line, isn't it? We are here because you were there. But there's a dominant narrative in this country, in our newspapers, and in our TV, that we're newcomers, we've got to earn our right to stay when actually, even in the 20th century, you know, we arrived as citizens. Being a citizen of empire made you a citizen of Britain, you know, and that's something that's forgotten, especially in relation to the Windrush scandal. Basically, we've got a scandal where British citizens were deported to a country they didn't grow up and live in. That's incredible. And then we argue about whether institutional racism exists. If we have that, I think we have institutional racism.
Sara Wajid
What do you think the Midlands has to offer the British story, not just in terms of history, but today, the particular demographic mix here in the Midlands, the unique history, the history of anti-racism and political movements. To me, it feels like a very exciting time, and that the rest of the country has got quite a lot to learn from the Midlands, but they don't actually quite yet realize it. And neither does Birmingham and surrounding areas. But there is something very special here.
Sathnam Sanghera
I think that's a really good way of putting the actually. It’s the greatest surprise of my life that I've made a career out of writing about the Midlands because I so desperately wanted to leave. And I think I’ve realised as I get older, not only is there an emotional connection, but you know, there's something about people in the Midlands, they’re unpretentious and they're funny. And also Punjabi people are unpretentious and funny. So something about Punjabi immigrants in the Midlands is very appealing. Also, you know, especially Wolverhampton, and I guess Birmingham by association, was the first area in Britain to really experience mass immigration. So, I feel like we've been through a lot of the issues that the rest of the country went through decades later. So, in that way, I think we're ahead. We're ahead of the national narrative. That's what makes it for me a really interesting thing to write about, because it's a microcosm of Britain.
Sara Wajid
Well, that feels like a really good point to pause. Sathnam, thank you very much for a really interesting conversation.
Sathnam Sanghera
Thank you. I'm going to come to the museum and I'll text you and maybe you can show me around.
Sara Wajid
Yeah, we'd love to show you Birmingham Museum Art Gallery, and all the venues in Birmingham Museum trust. It's been a real pleasure talking to you.
Sathnam Sanghera
Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.
Sara Wajid
Thank you, everyone.
Outro
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