Reading the whiteness of British Asian literature: A reading of Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love,Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton

Abstract

A text is assumed to reflect truth when its ideology meets that of the reader. British Asian literature has tended to be read as giving an insight into South Asian communities, as reflecting “truth”. Dominant readings do not tend to “see” the ways in which this literature, in terms of perspective, ideology, and the direction in which it faces, is located in Britishness as whiteness. This article, through a close reading of Sathnam Sanghera’s popular memoir The Boy with the Topknot, reverses the gaze on the community that the memoir is assumed to reveal, in order to highlight and identify what becomes normalized, invisible, universal in such a text. The article seeks to show how “Britishness” as whiteness is the normative perspective of the text, embodied in the second-generation British narrator as ideal integrated/assimilated citizen. From this perspective, non-whiteness, in the form of first generation immigrants as well as Sanghera’s younger self, is othered. The text reflects the state’s integrationist and assimilationist policies, founded on the assumption that “identity” is a construction that needs to be left behind, while intimating that a normalized whiteness/Britishness as “non-identity” should be embraced, revealing an internalized historicist racism. Meanwhile, “identity” and “difference” are used to sell British Asian texts such as this memoir — they are packaged as “multicultural”, “hybrid” (and, increasingly, “diverse”) products, and this is also how they are popularly read. Therefore, my reading of this text, as located in Britishness as whiteness, unpacks what terms such as multiculturalism, hybridity, and diversity may conceal. A counter reading of the text, which draws out the violence it reveals, of the historicist British racial state, highlights the role of readers’ assumptions in the construction of a text, suggesting that other readings are possible. This is also illustrated by alternative readings of the book by Sikh readers.

Dominant readings

Despite the popularity of Sathnam Sanghera’s The Boy with the Topknot (2009), ¹ in particular due to its grappling with mental health in the South Asian community, there has been little academic engagement with this text. ² However, it has been widely reviewed in mainstream media and online, and a presentation of some of these reviews can give us a sense of the dominant readings of the text, particularly since these reviews form a near universal consensus about the work. The memoir was declared by Francis Gilbert on BBC Radio 4 to be “one of the most important books written in the last 10 years. It’s going to be part of the canon of how Britain sees itself” (Gilbert, 2009: n.p.). Almost all of the reviews of the memoir identify it as funny, playful, and entertaining. We also see repeated references to the honesty and courage of the text and writer: “It is clear that the literary world should welcome a truthful and honest voice”, writes Hardeep Singh Kohli in The Times (2008: n.p.). “Brave, candid […] unguarded […] in its quest to find the truth” (Sanghera, 2017: n.p.), writes Blake Morrison, judge for the 2009 Mind Book of the Year (for which this memoir was the winner).

A part of this understanding of the text as “true” is the idea of authenticity; the assumption that Sanghera, writing about his family and community, offers an authentic representation of the “other”. ³ The text is seen to reveal lives that are different, and otherwise inaccessible. According to the judges for the 2008 Costa Award, the memoir offers “insight into parallel culture in Britain today” (Sanghera, 2017: n.p.). Gilbert describes the book as “a wonderful window into a completely different culture” on Radio 4 (Gilbert, 2009: n.p.). Sanghera is seen as a bridge, a native informant (Spivak, 1999: 4) of sorts — explaining the “East” to the “West”. “He can speak to this middle-class Radio 4 audience”, Gilbert goes on to say, “but he also has this insight into a culture which is completely different from anything we’ve ever seen before in literature” (Gilbert, 2009: n.p.). Gilbert’s repeated use of the term “completely different”, his implicit assumption that this Radio 4 audience is wholly white, and the implications of who is included and excluded in the “we” and in “literature”, indicate the direction that he faces; all this emphasizes the othering of Sanghera’s family.

These reviews assume and simultaneously create a dichotomy between the different authentic other — for example, the parent figures in the text — and the accessible British narrator self. Kohli identifies this Britishness as the normative position, from which having Indian parents is incidental, or even inconvenient. He argues that the book is born out of “a new generation of very British writers who happen to have had Indian parents” (2008: n.p.). However, while implicitly carrying the assumption of Sanghera’s Britishness and of this Britishness as signifying normality (this being the basis of the accessibility and reliability of the representation), most reviewers choose to emphasize Sanghera’s multicultural roots. This is the commercial basis on which the text is sold — the assumption that it represents the other and that this representation is true and “authentic”. Meanwhile, the memoir’s representations of the other do not disrupt dominant ideological assumptions ⁴ — indeed, as will be shown, they confirm racist stereotypes. In this way, perhaps these representations are seen as true and authentic primarily because they confirm the assumptions that mainstream readers bring to the text.

An Orientalist East versus West dichotomy, often articulated in British Asian texts and in dominant readings of them, carries the assumption that these conflicting categories are equal. However, the dominance of the “Western” perspective, as the normative location, can be apparent in the ways in which these categories are represented, as these reviews illustrate: “It’s also a book about moving between two worlds: white and Asian, metropolitan and provincial, pluralistic and tight-knit”, writes Morrison, and in his mapping of these value-laden binaries, with the negative connotations of the “provincial”, or the positive association that “pluralistic” is assumed to carry in relation to “tight-knit”, he gives a certain value also to “white” and “Asian”, East and West. Such valuation is all the more apparent in the following quotation by Zena Alkayat in the Metro: “Sanghera strives to overcome the chasm between his urban, modern life and the cloistered, uneducated life of his parents” (2008: n.p.). This chasm is not simply one of two different worlds — but between what is seen as an ideal realm and a contrasting negative sphere that is “cloistered” (in other words, suffocating, backward). Similarly, the following summary for the Radio 4 Bookclub sees Sanghera’s journey away from his family’s “culture and religion” and towards “Western values” as a positive one, an odyssey of “discovery and independence”:

Writing the book was Sathnam’s way of confronting his mother with some uncomfortable truths; that after his grammar school and Cambridge education, he had moved away from the family’s culture and religion and was not going to accept an arranged marriage. This was a journey of discovery and independence for Sathnam that began on the day he went to the barbers on his own, and had his joora — his Sikh topknot — cut off. (BBC, 2012: n.p.)

Sanghera’s “journey of discovery and independence” signifies neither, since the path and destination are already prescribed; they carry a sense of inevitability. His is a journey towards Britishness, which requires the rejection of overt symbols of religion such as the topknot. Secularism is, Talal Asad (2003) argues, intrinsically woven into the idea of citizenship. Although this plays out differently in specific national contexts, at its heart this citizenship requires some separation of the public and private domain, with religion delegated to the latter. This is partly in order to create a national “unifying experience” that transcends potentially conflicting particularities of class, gender, race, and religion (2003: 5). Inherent in this secularism and citizenship (and in the journey of “discovery and independence” described above) is the idea of progress, of being “civilized” — signifying the soft racism, in the form of historicism/progressivism, that the racial state exercises (see Goldberg, 2002). The assumed East/West “culture clash” narrative therefore, is about the oppression (reverse racism) of the “East”, as so-called Eastern parents are perceived as holding irrationally onto culture and religion, thus preventing the forward march towards assimilation.

This understanding of the text is all the more overt in the following review by Imran Ahmad (2008: n.p.) (author of a memoir outlining a similar narrative: Unimagined: A Muslim Boy meets the West. (2007) (This title was later changed to The Perfect Gentleman in the US version), in the Daily Mail, a newspaper known for its racist, anti-immigrant stance:

An elegant diatribe against the destructive and self-perpetuating emotional blackmail which underpins the “arranged marriage” […] a glimpse into the Sikh Punjabi community (which has perhaps been eclipsed by we Muslims always making such a hullabaloo); an intimate journey of emotional growth towards freedom and responsibility for one’s own happiness; and finally, a harsh appraisal of unquestioning, runaway “multiculturalism” which places the full burden of accommodation (in every sense) with the indigenous society and frees the immigrant from any obligation to change (2008: n.p.).

Again, the idea of freedom from the “oppression” of the East is evoked. And, in a way that is perhaps only suggested in more “moderate” reviews, Ahmad pulls from the book the “problem” of immigrants who refuse to integrate, echoing the general questioning, in public discourse at the time of publication, of a soft multiculturalism that led to segregation. ⁵ Just further along the same spectrum is the fear of being swamped by “alien” immigrants, a fear that racist readers on websites such as Amazon, Goodreads, and personal blogs, use this memoir to justify. Perceiving the text as a window into the lives of immigrants, they see in it a confirmation of their own racism (see for example Timsalmon.org, 2013).

I shall show how The Boy with the Topknot lends itself to all these interpretations; it is directed towards those who will read the text in this way, seeing Britishness as whiteness, assuming that immigrants in Britain need to integrate or assimilate. Such shared assumptions are perhaps the reason why texts such as The Boy with the Topknot get published and sell. Whiteness is at the heart of the relationship that literature has with the racial market state (Goldberg, 2002). On the other hand, non-dominant readings of the text, for example, by some Sikh readers (shared on Sikh websites), present a different perspective. For example, the following comment by Marine Kaur on the website The Langar Hall (2009), questions the representation of a Sikh boy in the book:

What kind of an image does this create for the mainstream public of Sikh boys with topknots? So, good for him, he wrote an unusual and entertaining book and got an award from the mainstream. But let’s be clear, he has done nothing for the faith he left behind, except paint a tragic image of its young boys.

Similarly, a comment shared on the same website, by Lord Indarjit Singh, questions the ideology of the work rather than assuming that it represents the “truth”:

The story is in essence that of a boy disadvantaged […] by being born into a Sikh family and then going on to overcome his handicap by cutting his hair, living with a non-Sikh girl and becoming a successful journalist. He sneeringly describes assorted suppressions and cultural practices in his family in a way that suggests to the general practices [sic] that these are a part of Sikhism — and therefore justification for him to remove his top-knot and become civilized.

These alternative readings illustrate how the beliefs that a reader brings to the text contribute to its construction. These Sikh readers do not assume that the text reveals the “truth” but are aware of it as a representation, as ideological.

Truth in autobiography

At the heart of the dominant readings quoted thus far is the assumption that The Boy with the Topknot reflects the truth, all the more so because it is a memoir. However, “truthfulness” can be seen as a reflection of what is already believed to be true for those to whom this “truth” is addressed. The autobiographical text in particular exists in relation to the reader — its creation is a two-way process. “Autobiography then”, writes Paul de Man in his essay “Autobiography as De-Facement”:

[I]s not a genre or a mode but a figure of reading or of understanding. The autobiographical moment happens as an alignment between two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution. (1979: 921)

This is contrary to the commonplace assumption (shared by the dominant readings above), that autobiography reflects life in a passive, mimetic way. “Autobiography seems to depend”, de Man states, “on actual and potentially verifiable events in a less ambivalent way than fiction does. It does seem to belong to a simpler mode of referentiality, of representation, of diegesis” (1979: 920). This assumption of autobiography’s close relationship to “reality” as secularity is perhaps integral to the attraction widely felt for the genre.

Theorists of autobiography have long critiqued this assumption. “Autobiography is not and cannot be”, writes Jerome Bruner, “a way of simply signifying or referring to ‘a life as lived’ […] there is no such thing as a ‘life as lived’ to be referred to. On this view, life is created or constructed by the act of autobiography” (1995: 161). Narratives, Bruner argues, are culturally formed, situated and local, addressing those who share a similar stance. He uses the term “negotiability” to refer to the qualities of the text which make it recognizable. Such negotiability is, writes Waïl S. Hassan, referring to Bruner’s work:

[W]hatever makes it possible for an autobiography to enter into the “conversation of selves” […] the forms of its engagement with sanctioned narratives, cultural codes, discursive norms, ideological imperatives, and textual procedures that prevail amongst its readers and which produce for them the truth effects of the autobiography. (2011: 80)

A text faces a certain direction and speaks to a specific readership. The perceived “truthfulness” of a text, meanwhile, is connected to the degree to which it conforms to this specific readership’s expectations of form, genre, narrative, content, and ideology, to dominant assumptions about truth and identity. Such an understanding of autobiography is all the more pertinent when engaging with minoritarian autobiography, due to the limited ways in which autobiographical writing from the margins can enter the centre; the centre can only access and “understand” the margins through narratives which conform to its own structures and ideologies, for example, through success stories about the development or emergence of the individual. However, as Nikos Papastergiadis writes, memoirs from the margins often subvert these expectations:

[C]onvert(ing) the tools and forms of representation that were used to describe them into instruments of self-projection. When the artists who had been previously relegated to the margin take over the prerogative of representation, then there is not just a sort of “theft” back of power but also a challenge to the traditional structures of agency. (Papastergiadis, 1998: 184)

Hassan makes a similar argument in relation to Arab American literature. Referring to Bruner’s idea of “negotiability” in the autobiographical text and of “truth” as “socially sanctioned narrative”, he analyses how the narratives of Arab American memoirs reflect the author’s “stance” (a term that Bruner uses to refer to the autobiographer’s posture towards the self and the world) — how they speak to and destabilize the centre. According to Hassan, these Arab American memoirs are subversive for their intervention into the social construction of identity. They perform a double function, simultaneously “contesting the identity assigned by the dominant majority discourse while at the same time utilizing its sanctional narrative procedures in order to enter into its regime of truth” (2002: 9). These texts, Hassan argues, in order to speak to, to appear “true” to, the centre that they are addressing, negotiate the constraints of the genre; appearing to recreate Western conventions of narrative and ideology such as linearity and individualism — creating “a selfhood that is intelligible in light of American paradigms of subjectivity” (2011: 81) and narratives about the emergence and development of this self. They appear to recreate stereotypes, familiar tropes regarding Arabs, engaging with cultural difference, Islamic practices, and the politics of the Middle East. Yet they simultaneously challenge dominant assumptions and ideas.

Memoirs by the oppressed have tended to be overtly political in this way — whether it is the early slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince or memoirs by Maya Angelou and Buchi Emecheta or in the Indian context, by Dalit/Bahujan writers such as Om Prakash Valmiki, Urmila Pawar, and Kancha Illiah. Written from and about the margins, these memoirs have a liberationist agenda; whether it is the abolition of slavery or a critique of racism/sexism/casteism/Hinduism. ⁶ While telling stories about individual lives, the suggestion is that there are many others like them — they are written in a spirit of solidarity with those others. Implicit in their stories is a critique of an oppressive system or structure. Although The Boy with the Topknot seems to belong to the same subversive tradition, it does not perform this double function. It looks like those earlier memoirs — the packaging highlights the writer’s origins in order to connect the product to the “margins”. However, the resistance, the critique, has been hollowed out. It uses “sanctional narrative procedures” (the story of individual self-emergence, the success story) to enter the centre’s “regime of truth”, ⁷ but does not disrupt dominant discourse. The narrative enters the mainstream primarily in order to confirm its assumptions, to “belong”. It is a hyperbolic, performed, and commodified negotiability that leads The Boy with the Topknot to become a bestseller. The memoir is a reassuring confirmation of dominant British ideology; in particular, the agenda of the government in power, celebrating the system and country that has allowed the narrator/writer to “make something” of his life — the idea of hope and self-improvement and opportunity, and the notion that Britain offers these, form the ideological substratum of the text. The text is not anchored in collective experience; for example, there is little critique of structural racism. Rather, the text is a product and propagator of neoliberalism, the idea that we live in a post-racism, post-race/ethnicity era and society. Indeed, the focus of the text is on the prejudice (referred to in the text as “racism”) of the writer’s family. This is part of the logic of what Goldberg refers to as the post-racial contemporary: “[r]acism loses its historical legacy; anyone can now be racist” (2002: 25). This ideology is central to the market state which at the same time uses “otherness” to sell products such as Sanghera’s memoir.

The market

Sanghera’s memoir, as multicultural product, misleads; capitalism has absorbed the resistance of the marginal memoir. As argued by Brouillette (2007) and Huggan (2001) in their examination of the commodification of postcolonial literature, it is important to analyse texts in terms of their processes of production and marketing. “Talk of saving literature from ‘reduction’ to commodity status is now scarcely possible”, writes Brouillette (2007: 3). The needs of the publisher of Sanghera’s memoir, Hamish Hamilton (now part of Penguin Random House), to make a profit is central to the construction of the text. Sanghera’s memoir is a commodified product not only in its marketing, but also in the writing process; it is tied up with publishing/marketing industries from the conception of the text, through every stage. However, the text (including author interviews that form the paratext) participates in erasing this aspect, obscuring the commercial imperative. Although Sanghera gives various reasons in his memoir and in interviews for why he set out to write his book, he never presents overtly, except in the acknowledgements perhaps (where, however, the publisher getting in touch with him is turned into a human gesture), the commercial aspect. Sanghera was working as a journalist when he was approached by Viking (Penguin) editor Mary Mount — she suggested that he write a memoir: “These works would never have been written if Mary Mount, my remarkable editor at Viking had not got in touch, listened and convinced me that books aren’t always written by other people”, Sanghera writes (320).

Sanghera’s memoir is presented as heartfelt, a form of therapy cum art, as true. In an interview, Sanghera says: “my main reason for writing the book was therapeutic — to draw a line under it all and forget about it. And that’s actually what’s happened” (Batt, 2008: n.p.). This suggests that the writing of his memoir comes from a “pure” intuitive place. It is a personal journey through which Sanghera comes to terms with his own and his family’s past. This explanation is reflected in the narrative structure of the book. The dominant narrative thread in the text is chronological, following Sanghera over six years until the present, as he discovers that his father has schizophrenia, as he researches his memoir, as he bats away his mother’s pressure upon him to get married, and as he finally writes and gives his mother a letter to tell her that he will marry a girl of his choice (most likely an English girl). We see him at the start of the memoir, having little to do with his family — he is disconnected, judgmental, and angry with them. By the end of the memoir, however, he has softened towards them — there is a reconciliation, some change in how he relates to them. By the final paragraphs of the memoir, he declares:

I’m no longer running away from my family, I talk to Puli all the time, I’m taking my parents to visit Bindi in Canada next year, my best friends, a boy and a GIRL, are coming to spend time with me in Wolverhampton soon, and now (as the phone rings during a lunch meeting) I’m not going to say “It’s just my mother” and let it go to voicemail, like I used to, I’m going to take it, and talk to her … I know now my family will love me regardless of what I do or do not do, and that is a feeling I never expected to feel and this is a moment I wouldn’t change for anything. (2009: 318) ⁸

The primary reason given in the memoir for this change is the fact that, through the letter that Sanghera gives his mother, his family comes to accept him for who he really “is” (carrying the assumption that who he “is”, is fixed). The memoir meanwhile is “a way of forcing me to write that letter — sometimes it’s easier to be courageous when you have an audience. Making the letter a public act was a way of dragging my mother away from the Punjabi community into my world” (143). The readers therefore, become witnesses, participants, aides even, in the journey, the therapeutic process. Such an understanding of Sanghera’s memoir blurs its constructed nature, making its assumptions, its ideological bias, “invisible” — and therefore all the more powerful and influential, as the reader responds at an emotional level.

Sanghera is writing his text (and consequentially himself) into the British Asian and misery memoir genres, interpreting his life according to these marketing categories and performing his self according to the requirements of these marketable genres. Sanghera repeatedly writes that The Boy with the Topknot is his effort to write a misery memoir, a bestselling genre by 2008. In the last two decades, as memoirs became increasingly commercialized, sought- after commodities, topping bestseller lists — the misery memoir emerged as a commodified, caricatured version of the memoir form. The path was laid by early misery memoir successes such as A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer (1995), about the dramatic abuse that Pelzer suffered as a child at the hands of his alcoholic mother, and Angela’s Ashes by Irish writer Frank McCourt (1996), about his impoverished upbringing. These memoirs present painfully honest, heartfelt narratives of dramatic suffering, as a sort of catharsis. Unlike the marginal memoir, the misery memoir is not concerned with structures, but is about individual redemption, a celebration of the ultimately triumphant human spirit. Memory and recollection are filtered (consciously and unconsciously) through the aesthetic and ideological assumptions inherent in the commodified form. Sanghera’s memoir fits into this structure, as well as into the British Asian brand, which has always carried working-class connotations, along with the idea of an East vs. West culture clash. The “misery” of the misery memoir is constituted primarily by the fact of “Asianness”, the author having been born into a working-class South Asian and Sikh family. At the heart of both genres is the assumption of a normative white and middle-class gaze. From that location, and for that readership, the writer shares his/her difficult and yet ultimately triumphant journey. This is apparent above all, in the attention-grabbing blurb at the back of Sanghera’s memoir. “By the time I was eight”, Sanghera tells us:

I had never been to a cinema, used a telephone, been inside a church, used a shower, sat in a bath — we still used a bucket and jug — seen the countryside or the sea, read a newspaper, had a white friend, owned a book, met a Muslim or a Tory or a Jew. (back cover)

The white, middle-class location of Sanghera’s gaze is apparent here; it is unlikely that a white middle-class writer would declare in this manner, that he/she had never had a non-white friend or entered a Gurdwara, although both are likely, indeed common. Sanghera had also, the blurb continues:

[N]ever had a haircut, had only just learned to write his surname in English and was working for 50p an hour at a local sewing machine factory. Within fifteen years Sathnam would have a Cambridge degree, a job on a national newspaper, a comprehensive collection of George Michael records, a flat in London, and a relationship with an English girl that he kept agonisingly secret from his family in the West Midlands. (back cover)

The contrast between Sanghera’s past and present is sensationalized — the exotic, together with poverty and the regions are combined to create a shocking medley of all the “normal” things that Sanghera had not seen/done/owned by the age of eight. This is contrasted with the normal and successful life that the writer now leads. All of these signifiers of normality reveal who the memoir is directed towards — those who consider life without these “normal” things extraordinary, uncivilized, barbaric perhaps — those like Alison, one of Sanghera’s English girlfriends, who (reminiscent of Desdemona listening to Othello’s stories about his travels, his exotic past) “used to listen to my stories of Wolverhampton with the kind of suspended disbelief others reserve for stories of the Wild West — the fascination of someone who had never travelled further north than Oxford” (58). The memoir, in its assumptions, its explanations of Asian culture, in the stories it tells, addresses such a white middle-class readership that is assumed to be universal. The role of this white gaze in the packaging of the memoir is especially apparent in its title and front cover, both of which emphasize and ‘other’ the topknot from a normative white perspective. It is significant that the first edition of the memoir, published by Viking, was titled If You Don’t Know Me By Now. In 2009 the memoir was published by Penguin with the new title The Boy with the Topknot. This change, almost certainly for marketing purposes, demonstrates the whiteness at the heart of the idea of market in the British context, even (especially) for the multicultural or diverse product.

The popularity of the British Asian and misery memoir genres is connected to post-9/11 New Labour policies such as integrationism, conditional citizenship, and the idea of social mobility. This is the context in which Sanghera’s memoir was written and published. The analysis that follows looks at the ways in which the text and the self in the text are entangled in Britishness, as shaped by the state.

State-sanctioned ideology

The Boy with the Topknot is an effort to fit the author’s life story into a British Asian narrative of an East/West culture clash, seemingly between equal categories. Yet it is the idea of an upward journey — the idea of social mobility — that is at the heart of the memoir. In the book as well as in interviews Sanghera repeatedly brings up the need to explain to the world that he now inhabits, where he has come from, how far he has travelled, and what his life once was:

If you met […] Sanghera now, you’d be hard pushed to tell him apart from any other smartly dressed, articulate London media professional. He writes a business column for The Times, and before that was a feature writer at the Financial Times, where he began his journalistic career as a graduate trainee in 1998. This swift ascent didn’t endear him to everyone. “I remember people having a go at me for being a bit of a spoiled brat and having this great job”, he says. “It made me feel inexplicably angry and teary. I just thought: You have no idea”. (Batt, 2008: n.p.)

Here lies the core of the memoir — the story of the writer’s journey from a family of farmers in rural Punjab, working-class immigrants in Britain — from a childhood in the regions, in Wolverhampton, amidst poverty, to becoming a successful London-based journalist. The very structure of the narrative is founded on this ideology as it charts the upward journey of the writer from the margins — to London, to success in the cultural centre.

Lynsey Hanley (2008: n.p.) writes in her review of the book in The Sunday Times: “How far he’s come, you think, against such odds, and you want to punch the air and cry at the same time”. The memoir is a celebration of the country which has allowed Sanghera to “make something” of his life. The idea of hope and self-improvement, of apparent opportunity and the notion that Britain offers this, is the foundational ideology of the text. In the letter that Sanghera writes to his mother, he states:

I have a job which involves me using the language of the country I live in — a job I do because I love it, not to survive. I’ve had eighteen years of education — free education, thanks to the country I’ve been allowed to grow up in […] I’ve had a million and one opportunities within my grasp. (298)

Through such a declaration Sanghera’s memoir, in its writing, its publication, and its feting, becomes a mouthpiece for the propaganda and polices of the New Labour government under which it was written and published. As Owen Jones (2011) writes, along with meritocracy, the idea of social mobility — the idea that more people could and should join the middle-class — was at the heart of New Labour’s campaign, a campaign that started under Thatcher. “The political parties”, Jones declares:

[P]refer to talk about social mobility and equality of opportunity rather than equality of conditions […] Rather than improve the conditions of the working class as a whole […] Social mobility is offered as a means of creaming off a minority of working class individuals and parachuting them into the middle class. (2011: 97)

Jones’ work tends to carry the implicit assumption that the British working class is white. However, when his argument is applied to people of colour, who form a large percentage of Britain’s working classes, the idea of upward mobility carries within it more clearly a teleological idea of progress, founded in historicist racism. Goldberg describes the movement from naturalist racism (which fixes the other as inferior), towards a subtler historicist racism; according to which others (“those deemed not white”) are allowed the possibility of becoming more human: “the elevation of those who had been considered objects of nature to subjects of history […] being placed not before time but in time even if as inhabiting a time not yet modern” (2002: 93).

The Boy with the Topknot imparts the assumption that arrival in the West (signified by London and success in mainstream media) is the culmination of a journey, which began with the author’s parents’ migration from rural Punjab to England. While Sanghera is shown to have travelled far, evolving from other (as a child) to self, the distance is:

[N]ot as much as my mother — the distance she has travelled, from collecting cow manure in baskets for fuel in the fields of Punjab to my leather sofa in Brixton, is a greater distance than I have travelled from Prosser Street (Wolverhampton) to this restaurant. (318)

The story of Sanghera’s parents’ life in Punjab, his father’s schizophrenia (diagnosed only in Britain), the early years of his parents’ marriage, can be seen to exist not for their own sake but as performing a function — part of the narrative of the upward rise of the author. Such an idea of progress is apparent even in his family’s move from Prosser Street in the Punjabi-dominated Park Village, to a new house on Beacon Hill, a white middle-class area. While Sanghera remembers his younger self feeling a sense of achievement in the move, when he visits home as an adult, having moved further up the ladder, he feels frustration with the same house and lawn that he was once proud of:

We had only moved to a different part of town, but it felt like a different world. Here people kept their dogs on leashes, rather than letting them roam the streets, had broadsheet newspapers delivered everyday and washed their new cars on Sunday mornings. But now no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t recapture that feeling of awe. All I felt was irritation at the sight of our front lawn. I used to spend hours getting the edges perfect and the stripes just right. I wanted it to be indistinguishable from the lawns of our white neighbours. But in my absence not only had most of our white neighbours moved, and the surrounding lawns been hacked, the edges of ours had been cut away unevenly and someone had made a hole in the middle and plonked a bush in it. It was a mess. (192−93)

Like cutting his hair, wanting to trim his lawn so it was “indistinguishable from the lawns of our white neighbours” is connected to the narrator’s aspirational desire to assimilate into white, middle-class Britain. Meanwhile, in Sanghera’s absence the neighbourhood has changed. Not only has Sanghera moved ahead, leaving his family behind, but (perhaps due to white flight), the white, middle-class neighbourhood that he left behind has apparently regressed, “the East” moving in and trampling all over it. The awe that Sanghera felt as a child, and the irritation that he feels as an adult that his neighbourhood is no longer white, is not examined and critiqued. Integration is, as Stokely (later known as Kwame Ture) Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton write in the context of America, “based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, black people must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school” (1967: 68). This reinforces, they argue, the idea that whiteness is superior to blackness.

This idea of progress, of a journey of uplift, is also captured in the idea of a “fall”, which is how the author’s return home after many years, to research his memoir, is represented. “Things were very different six years ago, when I was twenty-four”, he goes on to write:

I worked for a newspaper then, a job in the media, writing about the media; I had a girlfriend — let’s call her Laura, and let’s say she was a TV producer — and I didn’t split my time between London and my parents’ home in Wolverhampton, as I do now. (2)

This idea of a fall, and therefore a hierarchy, is apparent also in the notion of being “dragged back”, when the author compares his own life with his sister’s: “While I had escaped many of the restrictions of Punjabi culture”, he writes, “by marrying an Indian with even more traditional ideas than our mother she had been dragged back into its worst aspects” (281). Sanghera shows himself as distinct from all his siblings and the rest of the community he has come from, superior because he left the culture and community he was born into.

He is impatient with those who, unlike him, are not able to lose their “Easternness”, which belongs to the past; those living in Britain should divest themselves of its accessories, its outward signs, if not the “backward” mindset. “You’re in England now, make some kind of effort to learn the language of your new home” (6), he thinks, addressing, in his head, the taxi driver who insists on speaking Punjabi with him. This reflects government policies and the media’s emphasis on “integration”, both of which place the onus on immigrants to change themselves and to integrate, including the speaking of English. According to this perspective, there is no substantive identity connected to culture, religion, language, or worldview beyond easily discarded external manifestations. The implication is that those who face racism deserve it, because they don’t adapt.

This emphasis on integration or assimilation is embedded in the practices of the racial state, which was overtly manifested in government policies under New Labour. As argued by Les Back et al. (2002), Arun Kundnani (2007), and Tariq Modood (2013/2007) there was a change in policies around multiculturalism after 2001; a regressive turn was taken in how the government (and media) approached race, ethnicity, culture, and religion. This came after a period of unrest in northern towns in the summer of 2001 — these disturbances, a growing segregation, were attributed by those such as Kenan Malik (2002) to the freedom that multiculturalism had granted different communities. There was inevitably an anti-Muslim element to this discourse, connecting it to the post-9/11 context. David Blunkett, who was appointed Home Secretary in 2001, produced a White Paper titled “Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain” (Home Office, 2002), followed by the 2002 Nationality, Asylum, and Immigration Act, both advocating integrationism. “The concept of institutional racism was replaced”, writes Kundnani, “by the new language of integration, community cohesion and diversity management” (2007: 131). There was a renewed focus on citizenship, on creating a “national culture”. Previously a distinction had been drawn between race and immigration, and cultural diversity was purportedly celebrated while cracking down on immigration. However, from this historical point onwards:

[I]mmigrants were […] to be divided into categories of wanted and unwanted according to market needs (managed migration) while ethnic minorities were to be ranked — and expelled — according to their perceived assimilation to British values (community cohesion). (2007: 129)

An overt distinction was henceforth made, between good (assimilated) immigrants and bad, first generation, or radicalized, “different” immigrants. Blunkett made controversial statements suggesting various tests for citizenship, including the need to learn English, suggesting that speaking English at home would help South Asians to “overcome the schizophrenia they experienced” (2002: n.p.). He denounced practices such as “forced” marriage and female circumcision — which were seen as consequences of the emphasis thus far, on “cultural difference” and “moral relativism”. Indeed, arranged marriages with foreign spouses were frequently cited as a cause for disturbances and the White Paper called for them to be reduced. Meanwhile, as Back et al. (2002: 448) argue, there was a civilizing element to this discourse — suggesting that these communities needed to learn democratic, civilized mores.

This is the context in which The Boy with the Topknot was written and published. We can read the memoir as a proponent for “national culture” — as a mouthpiece for New Labour policies and accompanying media propaganda — for example, in the condemnation or mockery of those who don’t speak English fluently or of marriages between British Asians and those coming from the subcontinent:

They were often in England “on holiday” or “seeking asylum”; sometimes they would admit they’d entered the country illegally […] the one thing that would legitimize and/or extend their stay was marriage to someone with a British passport. As soon as they made it through Customs and Immigration, or as soon as they were liberated by their human trafficker of choice into an alleyway in Dudley, and before they had even got used to Western customs such as not spitting on the living room floor, arranged marriage aunties were scouring the land for potential spouses […] this represented a matrimonial opportunity for those lingering in the relegation zone of the arranged marriage league table […] [including] the offspring of those parents who were most concerned about Westernisation and wanted their children to marry Indian spouses to keep alive their traditions of religiosity, illiteracy, alcoholism, manual labour and domestic violence. (168−69)

We see here in the text, as in the reviews, a valuation of “East” (carrying the negative connotations of illiteracy, alcoholism, and domestic violence) from the perspective of a normative West. Meanwhile Sanghera presents himself as a good, integrated immigrant. It is from this perspective that Sanghera tells of his own journey from other to British self, showing perhaps that such a journey is possible. Such integrationism is based, write Carmichael and Hamilton about Black America, on the assumption that:

[T]here is little of value in the black community and […] little of value could be created among black people. The thing to do is siphon off the “acceptable” black people into surrounding middle class white community […] [This] kind of integration has meant that a few blacks “make it”, leaving the black community, sapping it of leadership potential and know-how […] They become meaningless show-pieces for a conscience-soothed white society. (1967: 67)

Through a performance of self Sanghera emerges, in the text, as such a showpiece, serving as an indictment for those who are not able to similarly make a “success” of their lives.

The performance of the self

Richard Dyer states: “There is no more powerful position than that of being ‘just’ human. The claim to power is the claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” (2005: 10). He connects such power to whiteness, for “whites are not of a certain race, they are just the human race” (2005: 11). He is one of a number of theorists and writers (Hazel Carby, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Steve Garner), who have written of the need to draw attention to, to racialize, whiteness in order to unpack the power that it derives from being the normative framing position, assumed to represent “humanness, normality and universality” (Garner, 2007: 34).

While Dyer writes of the “invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white […] discourse” (2005: 11), the same invisibility, and therefore dominance, of whiteness can also be found in discourse by non-white writers (e.g., British Asian literature), when whiteness is internalized and reproduced.

Texts such as Sanghera’s memoir are assumed to represent otherness and are marketed as such, as “British Asian”. Meanwhile the text, and the self that Sanghera constructs, purport to identify with a post-race/ethnicity perspective, wherein race/religion/ethnicity are irrelevant constructs. Sanghera, in a Telegraph article in which he identifies five defining British Asian novels, writes:

I despise the term “British-Asian writer”. It is almost as annoying and meaningless as “post-colonial”. Frankly, I see myself as a British writer. Or maybe just “writer”. I’d rather be mentioned in the same breath as Catherine O’Flynn or, in my dreams, Jonathan Coe, than alongside the names of the authors on this list. (2013: n.p.)

It is significant that it is only white writers such as Catherine O’Flynn or Jonathan Coe who Sanghera sees as simply “writers”. As theorists of whiteness have argued, apparently neutral terms, such as “writer” or “human”; along with the idea of post-race, become a veil for continued white dominance. In wanting to be seen as simply a writer, Sanghera seeks to associate himself with white power. This seems possible in the post-race, middle-class world that Sanghera occupies since there is apparently no racism to remind him that he is not white.

Sanghera repeatedly informs us that all his friends in London are graduates and professional: “all my London friends talked about writing books”, “almost everyone I dealt with in London was white […] I sometimes forgot I was Asian…” (26). These assertions recall Fanon:

I am a white man, I was born in Europe, all my friends are white. There are not eight Negroes in the city where I live. I think in French, France is my religion. I am a European, do you understand? I am not a Negro, and in order to prove it to you, I as a public employee am going to show the genuine Negroes the differences that separate me from them. (2008/1952: 50)

Fanon’s seminal work Black Skin, White Masks, exploring as it does the psychological aspects of being a black man in a racist society, is helpful for a resistant reading of Sanghera’s memoir. Sanghera tells his mother: “to be honest, if I ever manage to persuade anyone to marry me, they will probably be […] English” (314). It seems slightly odd that Sanghera is sure of this likelihood when he doesn’t have a girlfriend. The memoir carries this assumption throughout; that there is little chance of Sanghera loving a girl of any nationality, race, religion, class, and caste — other than a white, middle-class girl. ⁹ This echoes Fanon’s exploration of the ways in which a colonization of the mind accords a certain significance and attraction to the white woman, as a way of acquiring or coming closer to whiteness: “By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man […] I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness” (2008/1952/: 45). There is little reflection in Sanghera’s memoir on what may be behind his desire or assumption, it appears so deeply internalized, it is taken for granted.

Indeed throughout the memoir there is little separation between the representation of Sanghera’s inner and outer self — he presents himself as the performance. While he talks about the codes he must follow in his London life, what he refers to as the “fundamental tenets of middle-class London life”, there is no sense that Sanghera finds these oppressive to follow: “In London media circles”, Sanghera writes of one of these learnt tenets, “admitting you believed in God was taboo” […] never confess to religiosity […] you may as well confess to pedophilia” (2).

This is why, we are told, he has not admitted to his friends that “there was once a time when I prayed for an hour everyday”. Meanwhile, we are told, towards the end of the memoir, in the letter that Sanghera writes to his mother: “I think I believe in God” (299), and it is through his understanding of the idea of equality inherent in the Sikh religion that he attempts to convince her to accept the likelihood of his marrying a white woman. This admission and argument reveals the fact that the letter (addressed to his mother) faces a different direction to the memoir and also reveals cracks in the performance of self that Sanghera creates in the memoir.

Faith and religion, like identity, culture, ritual, and language are mostly reduced to a surface spectacle in the memoir, there is little sense that people may have a deep emotional attachment to them. They are relics of the past, disposable, an inconvenience that can and should be discarded when they hinder social acceptance. Asad writes of the violence of this idea of progress, whereby European rulers attempted to create their own view of fully human subjects, imposing “what they considered civilized standards of justice and humanity” without concern for the violence and suffering that resulted from subjects being forced to abandon practices that were seen as “backward and childish” (Asad, 2003: 110−11).

From the very beginning of the memoir, we see the performance of an adult Sanghera as civilized Western self. His return home is presented in this attention-grabbing opening as a sort of fall from grace, although in truth he is there to research his memoir. The reader is drawn in through hyperbolic contrasts and shared assumptions, dramatizing a situation that is simultaneously lived and fictional:

Drinking alone needn’t necessarily be a lowering experience. If you’re in the right place, say Paris or New York, in the right bar, somewhere with pavement tables or window seats, and in the right frame of mind — having just made a couple of billion from shorting the US dollar, for instance — I imagine it could be quite pleasant kicking back with a whiskey sour, watching those less fortunate than yourself (i.e. everyone) shuffle past you as you sit snug and smug in your tailored Gucci suit. But sipping neat vodka smuggled into your mum’s house in a promotional Fitness First rucksack, dressed in a lumberjack shirt that cost £7.99 fifteen years ago, and peering out at a double-glazed view of Wolverhampton […] isn’t so cheerful. (1)

There is, in this opening, an understanding between the self and a certain reader towards whom the text is directed. This imagined reader is someone who will understand the significance, the tackiness of the Argos flatpack desk, the Asda own-brand vodka, the “promotional Fitness First rucksack” — all of which are performative accessories in this allegedly humorous situation (since there is no real reason for Sanghera to drink this vodka, use this rucksack, wear this shirt). For this reader, the “right bar” in Paris or New York is an appropriate place to drink, and wearing a tailored Gucci suit is “normal” or at least an aspiration. This is the location that Sanghera, as narrator, occupies: middle-class, aspirational, metropolitan, and cosmopolitan.

From other to self: The violence of becoming British

From the British perspective of his present-day self, Sanghera (mis)remembers his childhood self, depicting the ways in which he has changed since then. There is the suggestion however, that he always bore traces of, or the potential to become, a self. While separating his present-day self from his past (when he was beholden to his mother) there is the implication, as he interprets his memories, that he was always different from the others around him, in anticipation of what he would become: he recounts, as a three-year-old growing up in Wolverhampton and knowing only Punjabi, being fascinated on hearing his sisters Bindi and Puli speak “in English, which I think is the coolest thing in the world, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe” (34).

Although he only starts speaking English when he starts going to school, Sanghera shows himself as instinctively recognizing, from a young age, the superiority of the English language. In the memories that he selects and how he represents them, the imagined reader catches glimpses of his almost prophetic early faith in the superiority of all things Western — he is like a religious convert in his embrace of the “West”. Akin to a mystical experience, he describes how, when he was four or five years old, as his brother played with the radio, he turned the dial:

[W]hich turns the burr into a hiss, and then a chatter, and then, finally, there’s the sound of something […] musical. I can’t tell whether the voice belongs to a man or woman. Or whether the singer is black or white. Or what the singer is singing about. All I know for sure is that it sounds nothing like the ragis who sing Mum’s prayers, and that I like it. Like it very much. My first pop song. (28)

It is Western pop music that Sanghera goes on to listen to as an adult. Having an almost inherent taste for “real culture”, he never connects with Punjabi music, remaining immune to its influence: “I tend not to care about the things that second-generation Asians tend to care about: Bollywood, bhangra, R&B” (163). Elsewhere he writes, “I was going to say that the single worst thing was being forced to dance to bhangra, a genre of music for which I’d developed no enthusiasm, despite being force-fed it for ten hours at a time in the factory” (167). This idea of being force-fed is echoed literally, early on in the memoir, as Sanghera recounts being fed by his mother as a three-year-old: “the torture of breakfast; a saucer of dalia, porridge cooked in the Punjabi style”, followed by tea “brewed in the Punjabi style”. He tells us how “coughing and spluttering” he “manag[es] to swallow the concoction somehow”, and “clamping [his] mouth shut [he] escape[s] his mother’s clutches” (32−33). (He is more interested, we are told, in his sisters, who are speaking in English.) It is odd that a memory of being fed by a mother who loves him, is remembered as almost violent.

It is only if we read against the grain of the text that we can read into it the violence of white supremacy, which leads Sanghera to relate to his past and his family in this way. White supremacy leads him to feel uncomfortable speaking (even forgetting how to speak) Punjabi. As an adult he finds himself unable to communicate with his family and feels disconnected from his past. We also see, in a counter reading, glimpses of shame and guilt in the text regarding what is presented as an inevitable change, a journey of “progress”. He writes of his mother:

She seemed smaller than ever before. Mum had always complained of being old and tired […] but she was beginning to look it. I felt a pang of protectiveness, warm feelings blotted out with the ink of irritation when she defended her overpacking […] I bit my tongue. I lose my temper so easily with my family and can’t decide whether this is because my family are simply exasperating, or whether it is because I speak in Punjabi to them and my Punjabi skills are so poor that I get frustrated at my inability to express myself. (15−16)

In this way the text, granting snapshots of the ways in which Sanghera has changed, reveals the loss that this involves, and shards of real love and attachment. For the self in the text is not simply a performance, but an internalization of a sense of shame and inferiority. This is apparent in Sanghera’s need to distinguish himself in the present from “the boy with the topknot”. Creating a sharp distinction between his childhood self (as other) and the self he is now, Sanghera uses the topknot as a visible marker to demarcate these two selves. This is apparent in the reference to the topknot in the title (which was changed in the 2009 edition of the memoir, most likely for marketing reasons) and adorning the front cover (a photograph of young Sanghera with a topknot), making strange something that is ordinary for South Asians, Punjabis, and Sikhs. The topknot becomes a marketable, exoticized signifier of difference.

Sanghera recounts the bullying that he faced in his new school, on account of his topknot: “[N]ow I was one of just a few topknots in the whole school, and my days were marked by taunts of ‘Oi turbanator’ and ‘Is that your packed lunch on your head?’ and (with a squeeze) ‘Oink oink’ and (with a mimicked topknot siren) ‘Nee-naw, nee-naw’” (174). The implication, in this memoir, is that by having a topknot he deserves to be bullied. The narrator internalizes the racism of the comical representation of a Sikh in one of the early depictions of South Asians in British mainstream culture in the 1970s television series Mind Your Language, in which an Englishman teaches English to a group of foreign students who embody national and religious stereotypes. Sanghera refers to those years when he had a topknot as his “prolonged Ranjeet-Singh-the Punjabi-Tube-worker-from Mind-Your-Language phase” (80).

The cutting of his hair signifies the point at which the narrator goes from being “Eastern” or other to a Western self. The scene in which his hair is cut is presented in the text as a positive turning point — when the narrator becomes “normal”. Henceforth Sanghera flourishes in life, and it is only his mother’s desire to get him married to a suitable girl that is a stumbling block. He describes the point at which he first discovers the rewards of assimilation: “I was fed up of being teased about my topknot… I LOATHED the way it made me look”, he writes as he explains why he cut it. After he cuts his hair, the racism that he faces in his English private school seems to come to an immediate halt. He ostensibly gains acceptance almost overnight: “I’d wanted to blend in, to no longer stick out and face mockery, but now I […] was actually being admired” (225; emphasis in original).

This functions as a life lesson for Sanghera on the benefits of outward change and “fitting in”. The moment is figured almost as conversion narrative: “I went from running away home at the end of school, to chairing the fundraising committee, helping set up the school council and a debating society” (228), he writes. He goes on to become headboy, gets a place in Cambridge, and becomes a successful journalist. We see no resentment or suggestion that the ensuing acceptance is conditional; indeed, he seems gratefully incredulous that he is accepted by his classmates immediately after cutting his hair. He has encounters with women. He makes new friends, including David Radburn, his first white friend, “who seemed to want to visit me at home” and who:

[I]nvited me to stay with him in the mansion he shared with his family in the Staffordshire countryside, and the family home he shared with his family in Yorkshire. And it was during these stays that I learned numerous lessons about life, including: bread doesn’t always come sliced; some people have curtains with linings; boiled eggs don’t have to be hard-boiled; there are people out there who allow their children wine with their evening meal; there are radio stations out there that don’t play music. (229−30; emphasis in original)

At one point, he refers to “my Dave influenced gentrification” (235). In school, Sanghera picks up those codes of behaviour that will help him to gain further acceptance: “I could, with hard work […] cultivate the air of effortless superiority so prized by the English private school system: working like crazy at home, and acting up in class, pretending it all came effortlessly” (228).

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Steve Garner writes of the relationship between class and whiteness and the economic and professional benefits of acquiring both through cultural capital:

In its most basic terms, cultural capital is an acquired set of values, beliefs, norms, attitudes, experiences and so forth that equip people differentially for their life in society. As certain types of such capital facilitate access to the higher echelons of the education system and therefore confer privileged access to higher-paying employment, this capital can be “cashed in” for material goods. Bourdieu argues that the dominant (upper middle-class) culture reproduces its dominance by rewarding children in the education system who speak its language, and share its assumptions and aspirations. The greater one’s cultural capital, the more one is conversant with ruling-class culture’s norms. (Garner, 2007: 49)

In the very necessity of behaving in a certain way in order to “get ahead”, the need to change from other to self, the inevitable loss of language and disconnection from family, and the ensuing sense of superiority towards those “left behind”, a resistant reader can perceive from the text the violence inherent in the process of becoming white or British — and, more broadly, the violence of Western hegemony.

Meanwhile, although the memoir is purportedly the story of Sanghera’s reconciliation with his family, there is no interrogation or articulation of the internalized racism, shame, or white supremacy that contributed to this rift. Instead, the narrative is one that shows the need and seems to suggest the possibility of his family coming along, joining him on the journey of “progress”. We see Sanghera enthusiastically endorsing the need to evolve, sharing optimism that his family is also evolving, albeit at a slower pace (his memoir/letter intends to help his mother to achieve this “evolution”):

I have always sensed a struggle in you between the Punjabi values of your parents and your natural intelligence, a struggle between your izzat and more modern ideas, and the hope is that I can drag you out of your Punjabi world into my own. (302)

The onus is completely on his mother to change — she is the problem. In the letter he says “I want you to meet my friends and accept them. I want you to come and stay with me more in London” (302). There is no question of his friends accepting her, of her being made to feel uncomfortable in his London life.

However, since the other in the text is not distant and abstract, but the narrator’s own mother, due to the fact that the memoir is grappling with lived experience and with familial emotional attachments, we also see, in moments of guilt and protectiveness, Sanghera’s implicit recognition that there is no place for his mother in the London life he inhabits. Citizenship or integration is not equally open to all:

I nearly threw up […] when I saw her arrive at Euston, with the inevitable two carrier bags of food. Mum is such a strong presence in her world, but out of context she always looks vulnerable. I used to hate it when she visited me at college: I’d feel hyper protective to the point of almost physically lashing out at anyone who didn’t open a door quickly enough, or stared a little too long […] I once even found myself shouting at a member of staff at Heathrow Airport who had barked at Mum for not following his English instructions. (307)

Sanghera’s memoir may therefore be interpreted as illustrative of the ways in which notions of multiculturalism and hybridity can be a front for continued Western hegemony in a neoliberal era of commodified multiculturalism; the ways in which the West, with its ability to swallow marginal identities, can absorb somewhat, a figure such as Sanghera (although he will remain vulnerable). Meanwhile some others will always remain others.

The Boy with the Topknot is a popular work which, due to its subject matter of mental health, its status as one of the early articulations of regional working-class Punjabi lives, and its misery memoir form, has been received as especially powerful and affecting. The ability of the text to evoke an emotional response, as well as its hyperbole and humour, mask the serious implications of its normalization of white supremacy and investment in Britishness. This increases the need to engage with the text critically. This article has questioned the uncritical celebratory way in which this memoir has been received in the mainstream, due perhaps to readers also being implicated in structures of whiteness and the received ideas of historicist racism. Since the text is assumed to represent multiculturalism, hybridity, and diversity, this critical reading suggests what these terms may conceal; their entanglement with the British nation and citizenship, indicating the subtle and pervasive pressures that are placed on British citizens, including its writers.

Conclusion

At the same time this article is an effort to correct the overriding lack of academic engagement (perhaps due to a form of academic elitism) with an important work. A counter reading of The Boy with the Topknot reveals the book’s complexity and richness — all the greater due to the imperative to grapple with experiences and emotions that the memoir form places on the writer; such a reading reveals the shame, vulnerability, guilt, and trauma behind Sanghera’s upwardly mobile journey. A counter reading also shows us glimpses of a resisting subject in the form of Sanghera’s mother. Her protest against British hegemony exists outside the text; her character does not face the “multicultural” centre that is intertwined with “Britishness”.

It is important not to exceptionalize this memoir; the direction that it faces (whiteness) and its narrative of intergenerational culture clash, as a story of integration and citizenship. Rather, the book belongs to a trajectory of representation in British Asian literature, film, and television since the 1980s, and even earlier in white representations of Asians. The particular form it takes in Sanghera’s memoir can also be seen in other post-9/11, “third generation” ¹⁰ British Asian literature, particularly by male writers such as Nirpal Dhaliwal (2006), Sarfraz Manzoor (2007), Gautam Malkani (2007/2006), Bali Rai (2001), Sunjeev Sahota (2011), and Daljit Nagra (2007). Meanwhile, texts such as Rai’s (Un)arranged Marriage and Nagra’s (2007) Look We Have Coming to Dover! are on school syllabi, fulfilling diversity requirements, but also perpetuating racist stereotypes and white supremacy. ¹¹ “Nagra’s poetry trots out old stereotypes of the awkward, cheerful Indian interloper, that Other of post-1960s Britain”, writes Sandeep Parmar (2015: n.p.), in an important recent article. She also implicates the reader, whose “enduring affection for both satirizing and shaming the newly immigrated is cruel” (2015: n.p.).

The white gaze in these texts has real consequences in the world, not only in terms of encouraging or justifying racism (from its most violent forms to everyday oppressions founded in assumptions of white normativity), but also in encouraging the internalization of these hierarchies in non-white readers. Such writing and representation, directed — whether consciously or unconsciously — towards white readers, is pervasive and normalized, and it is perhaps what publishers connect with. In this way, it becomes difficult to think of contemporary mainstream published English-language British Asian texts that do not centre whiteness in subtle or overt ways. Learning to see this white gaze, refusing to face a white audience, and questioning integrationist assumptions would produce very different literature.