Sathnam Sanghera doesn’t believe in tidy or easy stories. Whether writing about empire in his award-winning books Empireland and Empireworld, or his own family in his 2009 memoir, The Boy With The Topknot, he seems most at home in the uncomfortable space where opposite things can be true at once.
As we get into our conversation, it doesn’t take long for us to start discussing the innately political nature of being a historian. Sanghera insists the two – history and politics – are inseparable, though he’s quick to clarify that he’s never been politically active himself. “I’ve never been on a march”, he says, before pausing to admit that he sometimes wonders if that might be a failure on his part. For him, the black-and-white nature of protests misses something essential. He explains that he would happily join a march if he could take a banner saying “opposite things can be true at the same time”. Complexity, nuance – this is what he truly believes in, and he is critical of the way politicians and social media users tend to ignore it. This conviction seems to underpin his work as a historian; books and history, he emphasises, are all about nuance. This instinct clearly shapes his writing, a constant effort to hold conflicting truths together – particularly in his discussions of empire. For Sanghera, opposing the empire is as much a British tradition as being proud of it: “Abolition is a proud British imperial tradition, as was slavery: both things can be true at the same time.”
He talks about how little of this complexity he encountered in his own education. At Cambridge, he didn’t study a single brown author until his final few terms and empire never came up at all. That silence, he suggests, still shapes the way Britain remembers its past – or chooses not to. “The arguments we have about empire are the same as those that were had at the time”– whether it was too expensive, if we should be focusing on Britain instead – he makes clear: “This is not a new thing.”
When we discuss how empire continues to dominate modern politics, he traces a familiar cycle: Corbyn calling for teaching the “crimes of empire”; Gove defending its achievement as Secretary of State for Education; and, more recently, Sunak complaining that historians try to rewrite the history of slavery too much. “Seemingly unaware”, Sanghera adds, “that’s literally what historians do.” Even Reform have picked up on it, turning history into a talking point at their recent Party Conference in Birmingham. “It’s a constant battle and culture war”, he says, “and we keep going back and forth with it. It’s quite tedious.”
He admits that although he has become well known for writing about empire, when he first started he was surprised by how little he knew. “Almost every day over the last five years I’ve learnt something new”, he says. What particularly struck him was the sheer level of opposition to empire at home – another reminder that resistance to slavery has always existed alongside support in Britain. “There’s this old line that we shouldn’t judge the past by modern values, but it was actually opposed at every single stage.” He explains how figures like Warren Hastings and Robert Clive, both credited with laying the foundation of the British Empire in India, were dragged before Parliament to “answer for their crimes”, and when Lord Clive later died, it was widely believed that he’d taken his own life because he was so tormented by his actions.
For Sanghera, these stories complicate the national myth of moral certainty, revealing how Britain has always been divided over its own sense of purpose. “If you control the past, you control the present”, he says, “history is a narrative of the past; a politician is trying to offer a narrative for the future.”
Despite the attention that his work on empire has achieved, Sanghera is reluctant to view himself as an authority; “I don’t feel like I’ve got a lot of influence”, he says. Although he’s advised various establishment bodies, he “doesn’t get any sense they’re listening to me”. He suggests that even those that once did are now backtracking with Reform on the horizon. It’s part of the reason why he distances himself from party politics altogether – he’s joined the Labour Party twice and quit both times, and admits he has probably voted for almost every political party at some point. “I struggle to be part of something”, he says, “I think I’m contrary.”
For all the noise that surrounds the politics of history, Sanghera seems most animated when talking about writing itself. He’s spent years moving between the genres of journalism, memoir, and history, which he recognises is “not the way to establish your career”. However, he is clear that all forms of writing fundamentally come with the same purpose: trying to understand things for himself. In fact, he suggests one of the most productive things you can do is to put this journalistic lens on your own experiences, as he did when writing his memoir, as it is only this that allows you to confront awkward facts. This curiosity seems to have always guided his work, more than any desire for influence or recognition. “I just like to write the book I want to read… even if no one wants to read your book, at least you’ve learnt something.” He’s just finished writing a book on George Michael and the music of the 1980s and ‘90s, and is currently spending lots of time reading about science – particularly physics and quantum physics. When I jokingly suggest that he might be ticking off degrees one by one – history, politics, music, physics – he laughs then turns serious, “whenever anyone tells me about their degree I almost think I wish I’d done that, cause you just want to learn stuff”.
His literary influences also reveal a love of blending serious subjects with humour. He cites Salman Rushdie, Evelyn Waugh, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, and Jonathon Coe when asked who inspire him. “There’s something about people who write about serious subjects but with comedy that I’m really drawn to,” he says.
This instinct to remain a perpetual student also shapes his approach to writing. At the Financial Times (FT), and in academia, he was trained to remove himself from the story, “they ban it, they knock it out of you”. It was only later, through his FT column and The Boy With the Topknot, that he began to unlearn this habit: “It taught me to have a voice. It went against all my training, all the academia and everything I’d read.” Finding that voice, he insists, takes time – and persistence. “No one really has a voice in their twenties”, he says, “you have to churn out quite a bit of writing before you get it but once you find your voice, that’s it, you’ve got it, you can’t lose it.”
Sanghera is also an obsessive reviser, a self-confessed tinkerer. He feels there is a question unanswered in “almost everything I’ve ever written”, and suggests that “the writer doesn’t finish the book, they have it taken away from them by their editor”. He describes rewriting individual chapters up to 120 times. Though, he can admit, whilst you technically become better at writing over time, there is a certain charm, accessibility, and innocence that older writing has, that he simply cannot replicate now.
As our conversation turns from process to purpose, I ask whether he thinks about how his work will be remembered. “I think about legacy a lot”, he says, “I’d rather be known in my lifetime… it doesn’t really matter what happens to you once you’re dead.” He’s read enough to know how unpredictable memory can be; writers adored in their time, like Arnold Barnett (whose classic novel The Old Wives’ Tale inspired Sanghera’s Marriage Material) are now rarely read. For Sanghera, that unpredictability appears to be oddly freeing – as he describes, “the world decides for you” when it comes to what you are remembered for. It’s obviously not legacy that motivates him, but curiosity.
What is clearly most important in driving this curiosity is reading. I feel, as with all interviews, that I must ask the classic student journalism question of what advice he would give to students. His answer is unsurprising. Read. “We’ve got a crisis in reading”, he says, “even people who want to be writers don’t read enough.” He compares it to wanting to open a corner shop but never going to Tesco – the idea makes us both laugh but the point is serious. “Read. Read a lot. Read stuff you disagree with. Read sh*t stuff. Read good stuff. Read stuff you don’t quite understand.” This is almost radical advice for somewhere like Oxford, where, for all the endless reading done for our various essays and exams, we rarely approach books with this deliberate curiosity he describes. Our approach is too often with the purpose of ticking yet another book off the reading to-do list, rather than allowing ourselves to fall into the brilliance of a truly good book. For Sanghera, reading and writing are inseparable, and certainly neither are the endpoint: “Almost everything I’ve written, I want to rewrite.”
