The Boy with the Topknot

by Sathnam Sanghera

  * If we are to believe Lieutenant-Colonel Malcolm, writing in 1812 after spending several years in the Punjab with the British army, this is something of a racial trait. In his inadvertently entertaining ‘Sketch of the Sikhs: A Singular Nation’, Malcolm complains that Sikhs are ‘bold and rather rough in their address; which appears more to a stranger from their invariably speaking in a loud tone …’ In a note, he adds: ‘Talking aloud is so habitual to a Sikh, that he bawls a secret in your ear. It has often occurred to me, that they have acquired it from living in a country where internal disputes have so completely destroyed confidence, that they can only carry on conversation with each other at a distance: but it is fairer, perhaps, to impute this boisterous and rude habit to their living almost constantly in a camp, in which the voice certainly loses that nice modulated tone which distinguishes the more polished inhabitants of cities.’

  * The opposite rule applies with female relatives.

  * Or it could be that people have different personalities when speaking in different languages. The phenomenon was recently investigated by a psychology doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, who conducted a study monitoring the character traits of 225 Spanish/English bilingual subjects in both the US and Mexico as they responded to questions presented in the two languages. According to Scientific American Mind (June/July 2006), she found that when using English, the bilinguals were more extroverted, agreeable and conscientious than when using Spanish. Her conclusion was that people who speak two languages ‘feel like a different person depending on which language they are speaking’.

  2. Vertigo

  * I was not surprised to read a report from the Financial Services Authority in 2006 showing that among Britain’s major faith groups, Hindus and Sikhs come out tops in terms of managing their own money and making ends meet. It transpires that some Sikh communities within Britain actually have low credit ratings, because so few of them have credit cards or credit records.

  * The fashion crimes Punjabi immigrants inflicted upon their offspring were picked up on by one of the earliest appraisals of Sikhs in Britain. ‘The taste in baby wear is unusual to European eyes,’ wrote Canon Selwyn Gummer and John Selwyn Gummer in When the Coloured People Come, an analysis of Sikh settlement in Gravesend (1966). They continued: ‘One baby appeared at the age of three weeks wearing a white knitted mob cap, a colourful flowered dress stamped “Pride of Bombay”, a black and yellow coat knitted in key pattern and blue and red striped leggings.’ Unfortunately, this is the only worthwhile observation in the book, which continues with remarks about the low intelligence of Sikh children (‘The percentage of literate Asians in the older age-groups is in finitesimal. Naturally the children of such parents are backward … Many of them … are of low intelligence as distinct from illiterate’), the racket Sikh women make during childbirth (‘When the women are in labour they make a lot of noise which appears to be traditional rather than activated by pain’), birth control habits (‘Rubber condoms and caps irritate the skin of these people and for that reason they are not very popular’), and concludes that ‘the Sikhs are strangers in a strange land and they are intellectually and educationally ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of a modern civilization’. John Gummer later found fame as a squeaky-voiced Tory agriculture minister, a tenure which was memorably marked by an attempt to demonstrate the safeness of British beef by feeding it in public to his daughter.

  4. The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

  * The entry concludes: ‘In the evenings, the smell of hops from Banks’ Brewery permeates the town like the stench of a trapped animal slowly decaying in a drain pipe.’

  * I kept a copy. ‘I currently work closely with your dad at the Croft Resource Centre. He arrived this morning carrying an article you had written in your newspaper. On previous occasions he has approached me with your articles and expressed joy at seeing your photo in the newspaper. Your article made me smile. Your father has a great sense of pride and smiles from ear to ear as he enters the room full of ten Asian males to say, “Look, my son has written this” …’

  6. Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime

  * Max Birchwood and Chris Jackson, Schizophrenia.

  9. Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)

  * Rocky had died, and Georgina had, like so many kittens before and after, disappeared on an afternoon when Mum went for an unannounced walk. But somehow we persuaded Mum to let us keep Lucky.

  10. Something Got Me Started

  * What happened, it seems, was a version of the phenomenon you sometimes witness in English families where a husband starts calling the mother of his children ‘Mum’. My grandfather’s contemporaries called him ‘chacha’ as he was the youngest of four brothers – actually, he was an only child and they were cousins, but I’m trying to keep things as simple as I can – and his children copied them. In turn, some of their children – his grandchildren – called him ‘chacha’ too, though Mum always insisted we called him ‘baba’, the word for paternal grandfather, with a respectful ‘ji’ added on.

  * A ceremony on the final day of a wedding where both families exchange blessings.

  11. You Got It (The Right Stuff)

  * Figures taken from Gurharpal Singh and Darshan Singh Tatla, Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community, c. 2006.

  † According to research published by Asian bridal magazine Viya in August 2007.

  * Having said that, Dal, Ruky’s brother, recently asked me to be best man at his wedding, a job I accepted on the grounds that (i) he is lovely and (ii) I thought it would involve little more than standing next to him for a few minutes on the morning of the third day of the wedding. Imagine my shock therefore when at 9 a.m. on the big day I was dressed in an Indian sherwani, with a garland of flowers around my neck, and was being asked to lead a group bhangra dance of around thirty people down a suburban street in Wolverhampton. While being filmed. So far, I have avoided watching the video …

  * Second-generation couples in my family seem to have inherited the habit. Husbands and wives may now be liberated enough to visit pubs and restaurants together, but the men invariably end up necking pints at one end of the table, while the women sit together at the other end nursing glasses of orange juice, or, on very special occasions, a single glass of wine – a frustration for those who prefer conversation with the opposite sex.

  12. This Is a Low

  * I’m hoping that writing this in a smaller font will make it sound less misogynistic, but in my experience, second generation Punjabi women – being the product of patriarchal culture – are either depressingly servile or terrifyingly aggressive. As one of them once put it to me – or rather screamed at me – Sikh girls don’t have personalities, they have post-traumatic stress disorder. They have to fight so hard and so persistently for their independence that they become brutalized by the experience, and even when they have their freedom, they can’t stop fighting.

  * ‘A particularly distinctive feature of British Sikh society today is the high rate of alcoholism among males. Consumption of alcohol has always been high among Sikhs, with the per capita rate among Sikhs of Punjab among the highest in the world, but recent studies have shown a growing epidemic. Consumption rates are higher than in any other ethnic minority and in the white community; Sikhs from Punjab seem to be prone to high levels of consumption; in one study 80 per cent of men of Asian origin who died from alcohol-related liver disease were judged to be of Sikh origin. Alcohol-related problems are rarely discussed …’ Gurharpal Singh and Darshan Singh Tatla, Sikhs in Britain: The Making of a Community.

  13. Devil’s Haircut

  * Or at least I thought I’d thought of everything, until I picked up a newspaper recently and read about a fifteen-year-old Sikh boy in Scotland who cut his own hair, and then tried to cover up the act by punching himself in the face, writing racist remarks over his body and pretending he’d been the victim of a brutal race attack at the hands of four white males. It was a brilliant pla
n, and would’ve worked perfectly if his parents hadn’t reported the attack to the police, if the police hadn’t assigned dozens of officers to the case (who then visited several local high schools, questioned 120 people, set up a dedicated text service and email address for people to contact), if 200 Sikhs hadn’t held a vigil in the city, and if a top Sikh religious institution, the Siromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, hadn’t then raised the matter with the prime minister of India. Eventually, presumably out of guilt, the boy fessed up. The police, presumably out of embarrassment, didn’t press charges for wasting police time.

  * I realize now that this was because the barber would always give him a bowl cut, torture for someone with an innate sense of style like my brother. But at the time his behaviour deepened the association between cutting hair and voodoo, death and sin.

  14. Two Rooms at the End of the World

  * I think they assumed I was doing something serious and swish in the City, but I was in fact working at a cable channel based in Canary Wharf called Live TV, where my responsibilities included working on the self-explanatory programme Topless Darts, and dressing up as the station mascot – ‘News Bunny’ – to act out the news in hand and ear signals as it was read out by a news reader on the hour.

  * My brother remembers a conversation with our late Chacha in which he talked about how he would go to the gym with my father, and how my father once won a powerlifting contest.

  * D. Bhugra, ‘Indian teenagers’ attitudes to mental illness’, British Journal of Clinical and Social Psychiatry, 1993, 9.

  15. I Remember That

  * Apparently, it is traditional to dispose of a cut topknot in natural running water, the parcel packed with sugar. But as Wolverhampton is a long way from the nearest bit of sea or river, we settled for a canal, wrongly assuming that the water flowed. Most likely, my disembodied plait is still languishing at the bottom of the Broad Street locks.

  16. Summer of ’69

  * Besides, I was making up the rules as I went along.

  17. Stay (Faraway, So Close)

  * Dusty Spring field, of course. The single most beautiful love song ever recorded.

  19. It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over

  * The most a British Punjabi genealogist can hope for is that after months of research, and recurrent visits to the subcontinent, he will discover a small parchment helpfully informing them that his father’s father was a farmer, that his father’s father was a farmer, and that his father’s father was a farmer too. Doubtless, future generations of Sikh Punjabis in Britain will have a similar experience when they learn that their father’s father was an IT consultant, that his father was an IT consultant and so on, back for two centuries, until they eventually discover that – shock, horror – one of their original ancestors was a farmer.