In his latest book ‘Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain’, British Journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere. In an exclusive interview with Asian Voice, we spoke about his book, his views on ethnic diversity in Britain and the responsibilities that come with being an author.
In the online synopsis of your book, there’s an interesting and relevant statement that says, “However, even among those who celebrate the empire there seems to be a desire not to look at it too closely - not to include the subject in our school history books, not to emphasize it too much in our favourite museums.” Can you elaborate on this?
There is a school of thought in Britain that talks up British Empire. Historians like Niall Ferguson and Jeremy Black have helped create the popular idea that British imperialism was good, so much so that for many, to be proud to be British is to be proud of imperial history. At the same time, there is a group of people who feel there was much darkness in imperialism, and that the bad things need to be understood and taught. So race-equality think tank the Runnymede Trust has called for lessons on migration, belonging and empire to be made mandatory in every secondary school in England. A campaign calling itself ‘Fill in the Blanks’, led by sixth-form students from South London, all of whom have family from former British colonies, seeks ‘to mandate the teaching of colonial history’. The historian William Dalrymple has described as a ‘real problem’ the fact that ‘in Britain, study of the empire is still largely absent from the history curriculum . . . Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively racist and expansionist force responsible for violence, injustice and war crimes on every continent.’ Notably absent from this campaign are most of the aforementioned historians and public figures who argue that British empire was glorious. Which makes you wonder: if it was so glorious, why not back initiatives calling for the balanced teaching of it to become compulsory?
Why do you think the British must read the history of British Asians (or other ethnicities) who have been a part of the British Imperial rule in their respective countries and eras?
Simply because it explains who we are, and why we belong.
With imperialism and the post-modern society, how do you think multiculturalism is integral to British society and what unites all ethnicities in Britain after-all?
Here is a simple but profound fact about Britain: it is a multicultural, racially diverse society because it once had a multicultural, racially diverse empire. Or as the Sri Lankan writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan once famously put it, “We are here because you were there.” Understanding the imperial origins of our multiculturalism was the most profound revelation for me personally in my book research, because it transformed my own sense of place in Britain and exposed how little we collectively understand about the British Empire. Let’s face it, Britain has long struggled to accept the imperial explanation for its racial diversity. The idea that black and brown people are aliens who arrived without permission, and with no link to Britain, to abuse British hospitality, has been the defining political narrative of my lifetime. It was famously propounded by Enoch Powell, an MP for my home town, who regularly called for the repatriation of immigrants, and taken up by the far-right groups who were keen to etch graffiti onto our Wolverhampton homes telling us to “F*** off home”. (One of my earliest childhood memories is hiding, with tens of other Sikh families, in the local temple, as far-right gangs terrorised Wolverhampton.) It continued being spread by a new generation of politicians keen to paint brown immigrants as spongers and has found expression in the Windrush scandal, which saw British subjects who had arrived before 1973, in particular those of Caribbean origin, refused benefits, legal rights and medical care before facing deportation. And in my adult working life it continues to make itself felt in the way I am, as a writer of colour, regularly told to “go home” on social networks (if you want to pay my train fare to Wolverhampton, I’ll take up the offer), in being referred to as a “second-generation immigrant” (how can you be any sort of “immigrant” if you were born here?), and in the routine accusation that I am ungrateful if I criticise any aspect of my home nation (I was born here and reserve the right to be as critical of my beloved nation as my white colleagues).
As an author of a book that is so relevant for contemporary times, what kind of responsibility and ethics did you adhere to while attempting such an intense and what is being touted as “contentious but necessary subject”?
Well, my hope for the book was simply that it informs and entertains. I hope it answers some of the questions that have been raised as a result of the Black Lives Matters protests. Such as: does most of our wealth really come from the empire? And: was Brexit really inspired by our imperial history? And: should we return all the artefacts we stole from our colonies and put into our museums? But more than anything, I hope my book will demonstrate to people how the British empire is absolutely embedded within us and how there are many more serious and troubling imperial legacies than colonial statues. More important than statues, for example, is the troubling fact that the museums which are so part of our national life refuse to engage honestly and sincerely about how they obtained their imperial artefacts. Then there is the way we fail to acknowledge we are a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire – which makes our national conversations about race tragic and absurd. Then there is the manner in which our imperial history inspires a sense of exceptionalism, which results in dysfunctional politics and disastrous decision-making. Meanwhile, our collective amnesia about the fact that we were, as a nation, wilfully white supremacist and occasionally genocidal, and our failure to understand how this informs modern-day racism, is a catastrophe. I can see why it could be offensive for a black person to walk past a statue of a slave trader in their own city, and I personally find it degrading, as a British Indian, that, when I go to see anyone in government, I often have to encounter a statue of Robert Clive, who was widely loathed during his lifetime, who, according to Samuel Johnson "had acquired his fortune by such crimes that his consciousness of them impelled him to cut his own throat”, and who, when he committed suicide in 1774 was secretly buried in an unmarked grave. But these other legacies are more serious: at their worst, they curtail and destroy lives.
How long did it take you to draft the book and what was your process, especially because you’ve managed to release the book during the pandemic?
I realise most people will think the book was inspired by the Black Lives Matters movement. After all, the West has suddenly been gripped by an extraordinary desire to understand how colonialism may have shaped modern structural racism. But my book is only timely by accident. I actually began looking into the question of how imperialism has shaped modern Britain several years ago, in 2018, when it was a relatively esoteric concern. Making a Channel 4 documentary about the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 made me realise that British Empire explained a lot about my life. The racially patronising attitudes imperial Brits had towards Sikhs explained the strange way we are both indulged and rejected as a minority in Britain. Enoch Powell’s embracing of racist politics, which overshadowed my upbringing in Wolverhampton, could be explained by his rampant imperialism. The simple fact that I was living in Britain, as a symptom of a multicultural society, was itself due to the fact that a bunch of Brits invaded India several hundred years ago. This got me wondering about all the other ways the empire shapes British life, from our politics, to our wealth, our psychology, even the way we travel. Having been taught very little about it at school and university, I was stunned to realise that empire basically explains who we are. Writing it gave me a real focus during lockdown last year. I was hoping I would be promoting it in the real world, but here I am still... because writing is such an isolated thing, I basically feel like I have been in lockdown for 4 years!
