Sathnam Sanghera on why books can save us and how to understand Empire

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0:36Hello and welcome to How To Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. In my podcast, we look at and celebrate our unique individual failures because ultimately they're the stepping stones to success. Every week, I invite a guest to look at their failures and what has come afterwards that might have helped them grow and succeed. And before we get into my interview with Satnam Sangira, I'm excited to tell you that you can join me afterwards at Failing With Friends, my subscriber series, where we continue our conversation. It's our chance to hear from you, and it's where we discuss your failures and questions.

1:12This week, Satnam and I will be looking at your failures from launching a film career to showstopper meals. It's a good one. Look forward to you joining us. And I would love to hear from you. If you'd like to get in touch, follow the link in the podcast notes. Get Failing With Friends episodes every week and all episodes of How To Fail ad-free. Just visit the How To Fail show page on Apple Podcasts and click Start Free at the top of the page to begin your free trial. Or you can visit failingwithfriends.com if you're not an Apple user.

1:52Today, I'm delighted to welcome back a repeat guest and a dear friend to both me and the pod. Satnam Sangheera was one of my first ever guests on How to Fail when it launched in 2018. In the six years since, a lot has changed for both of us. Satnam has gone on to become one of the most acclaimed nonfiction authors in the country after his third book, Empireland, How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, published in 2021, became an instant bestseller. It went on to reshape the discourse around our national history and was named Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. His new book, Empire World, How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe, takes this work one step further, looking at the legacies of empire across the world.

2:41It is a fantastically nuanced and revelatory, if not an easy, read. All this is a long way from Sangira's childhood in the West Midlands. Born to Punjabi parents, he entered the education system unable to speak English. His father could not read or write, and there were no books in Sangira's home until he won a book token at school. As a child, he was illegally employed in a garment factory for 50p an hour. But he excelled at Wolverhampton Grammar School and went on to graduate from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in English. Since then, he's been a columnist, written both a novel and a memoir, which was later adapted for TV, and has been garlanded with awards, including Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society and an honorary doctorate from Wolverhampton University.

3:34Writing about empire has made him the target of racist abuse and trolling. But, Sangira says, every day I have teachers and kids writing to me and that is priceless. I would never have dared to dream that would happen and I will die happy because of that. Satnam Sangira, welcome back to How to Fail. Thank you and look at you. Last time I did this it was in your dingy... It wasn't dingy. It was Indonji, but it was a small Kentish town flat. As listeners can already hear, we are dear friends. And my last book, Friendaholic, which was all about friendship, you feature heavily in it. There's an entire chapter devoted to you.

4:16You have taught me so much about life, but you have also in many ways taught the nation about their own history. and I wanted to end on that quote because it really brings it home how important education seems to be to you both for you personally but also in terms of what your work does what does education mean to you well thank you um I was thinking on the way here that our preferred form of communication which is self-deprecation can't work for me anymore because when you're the target of like industrialized racial hatred if you then slag yourself off which is what we normally do you let them win and I need to learn to talk to emphasize the positives and talk about it but it goes against my nature but I need to talk about you know the hundreds of schools who use the book as a teaching resource I need to talk about the students who write to me every week saying they're studying history because of empire land and you know I need to talk about the historians who endorse the book, people like Peter Frankopan and Will and Tara Rymple and Elizabeth Day.

5:26Because if I don't talk about it, they kind of win, don't they? Before there's basically one narrative. It was the narrative of the white colonizers. And now there's multiple narratives. You can't put that back into a box. It is perpetually astonishing and somewhat distressing to realise that I am someone who is incredibly interested in history. And yet not even and I had enough curiosity or self-awareness to do the work that you have done for the rest of us. And you're right that you have completely changed the conversation. And one of the things that your work is so good at, and Empire World, I think is even better than Empire Land, at putting this whole thing into context, is being nuanced.

6:08And we tend to have historically this idea that Empire as a balance sheet where you can assess whether it's more good or more bad, depending on your particular political persuasion. Why is it important to attack that balance sheet notion? In my lifetime, we've only ever really discussed empire about whether it's good or bad. And it's such an inane way of looking at history. It's like saying, I'm going to study the climate over the last 300 years, but I'm going to focus on the sunshine. It was much more complex than that. And actually what I discovered in Empire World, it was entirely contradictory, like in ways I didn't expect.

6:44So we spread slavery and monetized it. Same time, we also did something for anti-slavery. We spread democracy around the world, without a doubt. A lot of the studies say that. But also we spread massive instability, caused huge environmental destruction, but then helped to create modern environmentalism. We spread the free press, but then spread press censorship. And no book I've ever read really goes into the contradictory nature of that. They're usually making an argument about whether empire was great or terrible. It was both things. Opposite things can be true at the same time. I think you understand that.

7:22This podcast is a reflection of that. The idea that success can be rooted in failure. That's a kind of profound comment. But I do think the idea that opposite things can be true could liberate us from many issues and in many areas of life. How difficult is that headspace to inhabit, though? Because the amount of research that you clearly do for books like Empire Land and Empire World is not your average kind of research. very often you are visiting places that have a history of terrible trauma. And you have to convey this on the page, whilst also having to contend with people who say, well, what about the railways?

8:06And I wonder how much of a difficult headspace that is to inhabit when you're in the act of writing and how you cope with that. We're an increasingly polarised country. So the idea that opposite things can be true, there's not many people who are into it who are on the side of kind of team nuance. But those of us who are, you know, really need to talk about it. And I think certain mediums allow for it. I think certain podcasts allow for it. But books, I do think books are the thing that could save us as a world, will kind of enable us to accept the complexity of life. But how does it feel in your own head when you are researching and writing this book?

8:48It's confusing because when you go out in the world and talk about these things, they don't have that binary conversation. They have a very sophisticated sense of what the British Empire did because they lived through it. But when you're over here, because we're disconnected, because empire didn't really happen in Britain, we have this very basic view, basic way of talking about it. And so actually, when you're outside in the world, it's not a problem. It's a problem when you're back here. And it's a problem when you're attacked. So when people have a go at me for slagging off the British or being mean about British history, and the other way, one said the left sometimes have a go at me for not being harsh enough about British imperialism.

9:28When you're attacked, the temptation is to attack back and to answer with something binary. But if you reply saying, actually, it's really complicated, that's quite unusual. But increasingly, we need to do that, I think. And how do you cope with those attacks? It depends on the day. Some days I get racially abusive letters and I find them funny. And I'll post them on Twitter and have a good laugh. Sometimes it scares me. Yeah. And sometimes you call the police, you know, and I'm not the only person getting this stuff. You know, David Odu-Soga, it's a matter of record, he's a bodyguard. Professor Corinne Fowler, who wrote the colonialism report for the National Trust and was then, you know, targeted by the common sense group of Tory MPs and right-wing newspapers.

10:16She had to call the police several times, cut and walk alone. You know, there's a well-funded, relentless government-endorsed campaign against imperial historians for people offering nuance and new takes. And the thing is, history is argument. Also, history changes. This is what a lot of people don't understand. It's not like a Django tower that's going to fall if you change it. History changes all the time. Our understanding of the Romans is changing all the time. Our understanding of the Bronze Age is changing. And our understanding of imperial history is absolutely changing, in part because I've realised whilst researching this book is that a lot of information was repressed at the time.

10:58A lot of the evidence was destroyed. You know, there was said to be a pool of smoke over Delhi when we left because of all the documents being destroyed. The men who set up Nigeria famously burnt all the documents. So it's inevitable that the history is going to change. Ultimately, although your work is incredibly nuanced and so impressively well researched, you end up making what seems to be such a simple point, which is that we cannot hope to understand ourselves as individuals or even as a nation or as a world unless we look at our past and seek to understand that and how it made us who we are today.

11:37Now, do you consider this to be part of your life's purpose? Because you could very easily go off and write funny novels because you've proven that you can do that with marriage material. You wrote an incredibly moving memoir, The Boy With the Topknot, which was also very funny and was adapted for TV. You could have stayed in that lane, but you took this on. Is there something bigger than you that you think is driving this? I've had to think about this because the people in my life often ask me to not do this. And I'm thinking about possibly writing about a similarly difficult subject for my next book.

12:13And I think I'm drawn to really difficult conversations. I mean, writing about my life was really hard because I had to tell my parents I wasn't going to have an arranged marriage. It's the most difficult conversation I've ever had. Researching schizophrenia was really difficult. It's a difficult disease. People cross the road to avoid these people. And to face up to the fact that my dad and my sister had this illness was hard. And I think I'm drawn to it. I don't know why. I think it might have something to do with Sikh culture, maybe. I think there's something about Sikhism where, you know, I was taught that you've always got to speak for justice and equality.

12:50And even though I'm not religious, and a lot of some Sikhs even say I'm not a proper Sikh because I don't have a turban and all that, I think I've imbibed those values. And I'm inclined to get involved in really difficult situations. You mentioned there that your father and sister live with schizophrenia. And I wonder if, and you have spoken and written very movingly about it before, and not least the last time you were on How to Fail. But I wonder if that gives this whole sense of immersing yourself in such a toxic period of history and extra anxiety because you're aware of how mental health can be so affected from external forces and also internal forces.

13:40Is there a sort of family worry there about you tipping over into some kind of abyss? actually it came up as in my research for empire world in that you know when you look at the legacy of slavery there's academics who argue that there's a link between slavery and ptsd like in further generations and there's certain psychiatrists and psychologists who argue that you know black people coming to europe have a higher incidence of severe mental illness and that might have something to do with slavery or something to do with the way black people or brown people are treated when they come over here.

14:16So I have thought about it. But in terms of myself, I don't know. Actually, I would say as difficult as this all has been recently, with the trolling, nothing was as hard as confronting my family. I think actually doing that makes everything else seem small. And actually, it gives you courage. You're a truth seeker. You're a truth seeker of history, but you're also, I think an emotional truth seeker like you want to show up honestly in whatever situation you find yourself in hope so and actually really my name means truth is his name um it's one of the first words in the seek bible wow yeah okay my final thing that I want to talk about before we get onto your failures because I know we'll come back to the book because it pertains to one of your failures is that the last time you were on How to Fail in 2018, you spoke about your failure at the mundane things in life, your failure to own a car, to get married, to have kids.

15:16And I know that there were a lot of single ladies out there who were very moved by your plight. But now, happily, you have succeeded in one of those areas, haven't you? I think many of the areas. I own a BMW estate, if that's what you mean. You owned a car? Yeah, I bought my first car. I was talking about your girlfriend, love. I know, I know. But I do have a BMW estate. But yes, I do have a girlfriend. She's called Noor. I think at one phase of my life, I confused wanting to run away and escape my family with being an introvert. Okay. And actually, you know, I never had any space when I was growing up.

15:54I never had my own bedroom until I went to university. I was never left alone to read a book. and I was an introvert who was into books and I was desperate for space. But then I think I took that too far. And then I confused being an introvert with wanting to be left alone. Zadie Smith. Oh my gosh, I know exactly the bit you're going to quote. Yeah, what she said, I hope I don't misquote her, but she's saying freedom without duty and responsibility is not really freedom. And actually true freedom involves duty and responsibility and relationships. Because, you know, as an artist or as a writer, you kind of want to be left alone to just do your stuff.

16:32And I felt that for a long time. But actually, if you don't have relationships and responsibilities, you're not really existing and you're not making the most of life. And actually, it's doing stuff for people and being asked to do stuff is where true freedom resides. And I think she's right. So I am navigating my space out of being an introvert and, you know, living alone for so long to sharing that with someone. Beautifully put. By Zadie, not me. So your first failure actually follows on from that rather seamlessly. Your first failure is joining in. So what do you mean by joining in? I mean group activities.

17:17Okay. Let's go back to school because it's all about our childhood, isn't it? I'm obsessed with childhood satnam and let's absolutely go back to school because it was at primary school that you first, I think, understood that you were clever or that there was something slightly different about you because you were coming top of the class all the time. yeah I was a I had teachers who uh got involved and got me into the grammar school and I was top of everything but then I wasn't top of everything but in the sixth form you know I was elected head boy which is a very peculiar experience because I was never involved with any other groups I never had more than two or three friends I can't quite make sense of it maybe I was like a clown or something but like everyone at school went to a certain nightclub the Dorchester which Catlin Moran is made famous now and it was an indie club and they all went there and had adventures with the opposite sex and had a great time I never went and I used to say it was because they played indie music and I was a pop kid they weren't playing George Michael they weren't playing George so I would stay at home and listen to George and Mariah Carey and Prince and they would all be at the door just having a great time I totally missed that and it goes on I think I joined in my life I've joined several members clubs never last more than six months as you know I'm into F1 like your husband and I've been invited to the races several times I've been offered like packages probably worth tens of thousands of pounds never gone because I prefer watching it alone I don't even like watching it with people I just like being alone watching the F1 in my living room George Michael similarly you know when he died there was an outpouring of grief in Highgate.

19:01Thousands of people left tributes. I now live in Highgate and I didn't go. And there's something in me that can't join in. And I think I've missed out. And okay, so you've already defined yourself as an introvert. We both are. We know this about each other. But where does the reticence, is there a mistrust of groups? I think maybe in your case, maybe a bit in mine, being bullied makes you scared of groups. And I was bullied as a kid when I had a top knot. I think also it's about fear of rejection, isn't it? It's about, oh, my God, the group might not accept me. But also opposite things can be true.

19:45And actually, maybe I just know myself. And I'm an introvert. Totally. Have you made steps now to try and join in more? Not really. No, I continue to be like that. But then again, I like being part of things. So my family is pretty big now. Even my extended family is huge. But, you know, there's so many of them, we don't really hang out that much. But my immediate family, my nephews and nieces have all got boyfriends and girlfriends. And so Christmas is a big affair. And I like being part of that. But equally it exhausts me. And, you know, I like being part of the times. But equally, I don't go in very often.

20:24And so it's something about being part of something, but not actually doing anything. I completely understand that. There's a sort of beauty in the concept of belonging and in the concept of acceptance. But yeah, I don't think I'm a joiner in. And I think like you, it comes from a fear of rejection and being frightened of being the last person picked. on a sporting team, which happened all the time to me. But it's paradoxical because actually, I think you might be like this, I love throwing a party. I love throwing a party too. But you know why? It's because you don't actually have to talk to anyone.

21:02Yes, I've thought a lot about why this is the case. Yeah, so I threw a party for my girlfriend and she was like, oh, who did you talk to? And I was like, literally no one because I was serving drinks and making sure everyone else was being introduced to people. And then you create this idea that you've socialised, but actually you haven't. You can socialize with anyone.

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22:17I want to go back to childhood sat-nam though. So I wonder if part of the fear of joining in is because we confuse it from a childhood of not fitting in. Those two things are confusing. And you had a childhood where you were loved hugely by your family, but when you went outside the home, you had a top knot, you went to school. What was that experience like? Yeah, it was a massive bunch of contradictions. And I felt very alienated at school, quite a white school, not entirely, but quite white. Very white compared to where I was living. And I was basically living in a Punjabi village in Wolverhampton.

22:56You know, the doctor, the corner shop owner, the temple owner, everyone on the street was Punjabi. Lots of people couldn't speak English. So it felt like traveling between worlds. And talk about code switching is really extreme. So I think maybe there's something about how when you switch between worlds like that, it's also exhausting. And maybe I'm tired out by people. Tell us about the Garment Factory, because we did touch on this the first time we spoke for How to Fail, but it's something that I still can't quite get my head around. I do have therapy actually around the corner. So this feels a bit like that.

23:35I'm talking to you and it comes up quite a lot. And I think I had generally a very happy childhood, but that was bad. And, you know, all those hours wasted and being exploited. And I remember once asking the factory owner for a toy because he also ran a shop and he didn't give it to me. He sold it to me. He deducted it for my wages. this guy actually remained in my family's life and i saw him about 15 years ago and he basically said i'm so proud of you you know i made you the success you are i taught you about work and i could have thumped him i really could have hit him and interesting my mom feels the same she was working in the factory and uh you know she was proud of me and she also wanted me to learn about work because there's that Punjabi thing about the work ethic but she also realized it damaged me you know but in terms of bad things that happened to you in your childhood it wasn't that bad how old were you it's probably between the ages around nine and 15 my mom did actually step in and say you've got to stop this and study through GCSEs but yeah I mean I think it did damage me this um distaste for joining in I wonder also if it's about guarding privacy and whether you felt as a child that you were not only code switching between a Punjabi village and your very white school but also between a world of mental health issues and a world outside that didn't understand them.

25:16Was there a sense that you wanted to keep what your father and sister were going through private? You know, I think I am a very private person, which again seems a contradiction because I've written a memoir. But I always say that actually you'll never meet a more private person than a memoirist because I don't know if this has been your experience, but once you put stuff out there, you really learn on how important it is to control what you put out and when to put it out. And people often say to me, oh my God, you shared so much, but actually I didn't. I took stuff out at my family's request and I control the narrative.

25:52You've probably got more out of me than I've said in print in the last 15 years. Well, you said this thing once, which I thought was so brilliant, that people assume if you talk openly or write openly about difficult things. Yeah, you do this. People have a definite sense of who you are. Yes, but they assume that you therefore share everything. But actually, neither you or I share everything. Yeah. There are certain things that we're... Loads of shit I know about you. Yes. And now is not the time to bring it up, Sat Nav. Your second failure is your failure to say thank you. Regret about not thanking people before they die.

26:30Sorry to get morose. Never apologise for something so profound. Yeah, I have that with several people, but mainly with one particular person, my former English teacher, Robin Roberts, who was more than just a teacher. I mean, she really got me into English literature. So she changed my life in that way. But then when things were really difficult for me as a teenager with my sister and my dad suffering from schizophrenia, having breakdowns, she just intervened in a way that teachers wouldn't now. And my mum calls her my second mum because she basically let me stay at hers whenever. Her boyfriend was there, so there's nothing dodgy going on.

27:07She could see or sense things were going wrong and that I might not get to university so she would take me on to school trips where she was taking younger kids out she would basically look after me she came to my brother's wedding she dropped me off at university and you know she helped me edit my books she went and lived in Italy and we just became really great friends and our relationship you know lasted many decades but then she died very suddenly she got diagnosed on a Monday and was dead by Friday. So I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to her. And if I'm honest, at the time, I was a bit annoyed with her because she'd got into her head that the success was going to my head.

27:52And I think when you're in Italy and you're not in the media and you see social media posts, it's easy to think that, you know me, I never leave my house. Yeah. The success hadn't gone to my head. Never. But sometimes people take it upon themselves to lecture you. So I was a bit annoyed with her. And the last time I saw her, I was just passing through an airport. And then she died. And she actually left me her small flat in Milan and made me her executor. And I just felt absolutely terrible about it because I felt I hadn't said goodbye or thank you. although obviously the first thing you do when you know someone dies is that you check what was the last email you sent them and thank god the last email I sent her was asking her if I could take her to Rome for a week because I'd never been and I wanted to see her so I hope she knew that I loved her you know but it really cuts me up that I didn't properly say thank you and since then I probably thank people a lot.

29:00I actually went and thanked my primary school headmaster who got me to Wolverhampton Grammar School just two months before he died. Wow. And I spoke at his funeral and that was a great thing to do. So I think I've learned how to say thank you. I think part of it also is allowing people to say thank you. my mum's been a bit sick lately and hopefully she's going to get better but she started saying thank you to me i i hate it i absolutely hated it i was like why are you saying thank you because you made me everything i have in my life is because of you stop saying it but then i realized that for someone like her who's never asked anyone for anything it's important to say thank you and also you should let them say thank you so my advice to people listening is go and say thank you not only to the people in your life but also like your teachers your writers who've changed your life you know nothing can be lost in saying thank you there's not what's the worst that can happen that's so beautiful thank you for talking about that and for talking about robin will you tell us more about the first time you met her do you remember yeah she was my english teacher and she was incredibly beautiful and I probably did have a bit of a crush on her I just wanted to impress her but more than that she got me before even I got myself she worked out that when she wrote the school reports that my parents weren't reading them because my dad can't read and my mum couldn't at the time read English and so I sometimes wouldn't even show my parents so she would write them to me she'd write little letters to me and she was the only teacher who understood that and that's quite a profound thing and she never had kids of her own actually much of a family she was adopted and had a bad relationship with her family so I think she got a real connection not only from me but from my family I mean she got on really well with my mom and loved coming to family things and loved the food and the large family that she never had you told me you brought a report in today, a school report.

31:13Oh yeah, that's related to my next failure. Oh, it's not, it's not one from Robin. No, I couldn't read that out because it'd make me cry. And you're not going to make me cry. You're allowed to cry. I've almost made you cry. I've seen you well up. I mean, I welled up. I've never cried. I just love that you chose this as a failure because it goes back to what we started off talking about, the power of education. It can change the course of someone's life, but it can change the course of a nation's life. I mean, I don't want to speak in too self-grandizing terms about you, but it really is extraordinary that were it not for Robin, you might not be doing what you are now.