Season 2: Sathnam Sanghera in Conversation with Sara Wajid

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.

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. 

For more information on Writing West Midlands, visit https://writingwestmidlands.org/

Follow the festival on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @BhamLitFest

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 wen...