From Where I Stand

By Indarjit Singh

When two or more people find sufficient in common to call themselves ‘us’, they will strengthen their togetherness by looking for a ‘them’ to dislike.

INDARJIT’S LAW

It’s fashionable to talk of ‘hate crime’ as if a small minority of people are infected with a virus of hate against those they see as different. It is not like that. Prejudice and fear of difference affects us all. 

I learnt about my Sikh religion almost as an outsider looking in to find surprising teachings on justice, compassion and a need to stand up for others.

Discrimination in employment in the ’60s, normal and lawful at the time, led to my turning down a well-paid job to go to India, where writing under the pen name of Victor Pendry, I became a local hero to the Sikh community suffering majority persecution. This standing up to injustice through writing, speaking and importantly, humour, is the story of this book.

You cannot choose your battlefield

 God does that for you

 But you can plant a standard

Where  a standard never flew.

NATHALIA CRANE

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398432833

Indarjit Singh

Lord Singh of Wimbledon CBE is an internationally recognised journalist and broadcaster and frequent commentator on social and religious issues. He is widely regarded as both the secular and religious voice of the British Sikh community. In 1989 he became the first non-Christian to be awarded the UK Templeton Prize ‘for the furtherance of spiritual and ethical understanding’. Indarjit was named by The Independent, a leading British newspaper, as one of 50 people who have made a major contribution to world peace. In 2011 he was made an Independent Peer in the House of Lords.

Book preview

Dedication

To my mother, Kundan Kaur, to whom I owe much for her humour and compassion for (almost) all, regardless of race or religion, and to my father, Dr Diwan Singh, for his example of living true to his principles despite the difficulties and challenges he faced.

Copyright Information ©

Indarjit Singh 2022

The right of Indarjit Singh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398432819 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398432833 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgements

My wife Kanwaljit and daughters Mona and Rema who persuaded me to put pen to paper.

Nearly expelled on my first day at school, see page 136

Foreword

This is both an endearing and necessary book, written simply and honestly by someone the public has grown to regard with great affection. The early struggles of Indarjit in the 1940s up until his peerage, conferred in 2011, as the first turbaned Sikh parliamentarian, reveals that the racism of the 1960s although now much diminished continues to exist in politics. Far from becoming embittered, Indarjit’s characteristic sense of humour helped him see the funny side of unthinking bigotry as in the lift story he narrated in his maiden speech. He elaborates on this in Indarjit’s Law, which states:’ if two or more people find sufficient in common to call themselves ‘us’, they will immediately look for a ‘them’ to look down on to strengthen their sense of common identity’.

Lord Singh’s deep interest in the interface between religion, culture and politics has been a thread throughout his life; a central part of this memoir is the Mandla court case which eventually resulted in the protection of Sikh religious identity under the 1976 Race Relations Act. Indarjit played a key role as chief witness and the transcript of the court proceeding provides a fascinating and concise insight into the history and fundamental tenets of Sikhism. If we are to be a truly interracial society, memoirs such as these provide the foundations for understanding and tolerance.

Rt Hon Baroness D’Souza CMG

The Lord Speaker (2011-2016)

1

PART ONE:

My Story

Chapter One

My Parents

M

y parents grew up in pre-partition Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. My father’s family were wealthy landowners living in a small village called Takhatpari, which its proud inhabitants referred to as ‘shaar’, or ‘the city’. My father had his heart set on going to England to study law but, unfortunately, my grandfather lost most of the family money in property speculation so my father was unable to pursue his dream. Undeterred, Dad took a job as a government auditor in Amritsar, sending money home and studying in the evening. His ambition changed from studying law to becoming a doctor and, using his savings, he duly enrolled, and a few years later, qualified as a doctor at Amritsar Medical College.

Soon after, he found himself involved in the 1922 Guru ka Bagh movement to free Sikh places of worship (gurdwaras) from the control of government-appointed nominees. Batches of five Sikhs pledged to non-violence would go to the occupied gurdwaras to pray for the freeing of the gurdwaras. They refused to raise a hand in self-defence, despite being beaten senseless by the police and government officials. Every day, several batches of Sikhs would go in non-violent protest and inevitably would be brutally beaten. My father used to dress the wounds of the protesters.

Eventually, nationwide adverse publicity led to the government acceding to the demands of the protesters to restore the gurdwaras to Sikh hands. Mahatma Gandhi sent a telegram to the Sikhs saying, Congratulations, first battle for India’s independence won. The young Dr Diwan Singh, however, was a marked man for having given medical assistance to the protestors.

The 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in a small enclosed public space close to the Darbar Sahib (Golden Temple) was still fresh in the memory of the people of Punjab. Thousands of Sikhs from Punjab had enlisted to fight for Britain in the First World War, encouraged by the promise that India would receive a measure of self-rule on the conclusion of the war. Instead, the government increased repression with legislation allowing internment of political activists without trial. The meeting at Jallianwala Bagh was called to discuss the increasing repression. The authorities decided to make an example of the peaceful protestors. Soldiers commanded by General Dyer manned the only entrance to the walled park and, without warning, fired volley upon volley of bullets at the protestors, including the elderly and children, until there was virtually no one left alive. Estimates of the number killed vary from a few hundred to more than a thousand. Unbelievably, the then Governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, sent a telegram to General Dyer saying: Your action correct.

The massacre was widely condemned in the House of Commons by Winston Churchill and many others. On the centenary of the massacre, the Prime Minister Theresa May described it as a shameful act. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in a visit to the site in September 2019, said: I recognise the sins of my British colonial history that has too often subjugated and dehumanised other races and cultures. The massacre galvanised the freedom movement, influencing the minds of my father and many others. One of the few survivors was a young lad called Udham Singh, who never forgot the cruelty and horror he had witnessed. He later travelled to England and would visit my parents and was also a regular visitor to the gurdwara at Shepherd’s Bush in London. Twenty-one years after the infamous massacre, he assassinated Michael O’Dwyer at a meeting at Caxton Hall in London. Udham Singh, who had secretly nursed revenge for the atrocity he had witnessed as a child, was convicted of murder and hanged at Pentonville prison in London.

My father was a popular and well-loved doctor, but his support for India’s freedom movement and his medical assistance at Guru ka Bagh incurred the anger of the government and it became difficult for him to practise in Punjab. He and his young wife, Kundan, moved to Kashmir, but his continuing support for the freedom movement meant that he was constantly under the threat of arrest. His friends decided to put him, my mother and their infant son Gurbachan (Bachan) on board a ship leaving from Bombay to East Africa; a popular venue for many young Indians at the time.

For a time, this was one of the happiest periods in my parents’ life. My other older brother, Surindar, was born in Nairobi and they had a thriving practice, many friends and an active social life. They would tell us of their friends and experiences. Times were so different then – one of their servants was a reformed cannibal who was always watched with suspicion by another slightly portly servant from another tribe.

My parents, East Africa, 1928

My mum also described another incident when she was resting in the veranda and a leopard appeared and brushed against her sari as it walked away. My father continued to support the freedom struggle in India and, after a while, it became clear to the English authorities, who used to freely socialise with my parents, that this could not continue. He was told he had to stop his support for the freedom movement or he would end up in prison. My father proposed an alternative: Send me to England to study for further medical qualifications. The authorities, not wanting to anger the East African Indians, agreed, and while my mother and her two small children temporarily moved back to Rawalpindi, my dad took a boat to England, the heart of the Empire.

On arriving in London, my father was told that they would not accept his Indian medical qualifications and so he had to sit all the exams again. After completing his matriculation in London, he studied at Edinburgh University and then completed his training at Queen Elizabeth Medical School in Birmingham, obtaining the UK qualifications to practise as a doctor.

Racism then, and later in my schooldays, was quite different from the racism of the 1950s and 1960s over jobs, housing and fear of difference. It was simply a recognition of the natural superiority of white people and the inferiority of others. Dad frequently experienced such racism. He also experienced kindness that he never forgot, such as his landlady in Edinburgh going out of her way to cook Indian food for him. On one occasion, he was rather glad that he wore a turban when, while walking with two Indian friends, they passed some children who remarked: Look, there’s two blacks and a Maharaja!

Once qualified, racist attitudes meant that he was unable to secure a job at a hospital. Undaunted, my father set up his own practice. Back then, setting up your own practice simply involved putting a sign outside your house which read, ‘Dr Singh’. It was then just a matter of waiting for paying customers on which he could build a practice suitable to support a family. It was not easy. There was then no National Health Service and people only used his services when they needed a doctor in an emergency, but, with his clear dedication and a growing reputation for being good with children, he slowly built up the practice.

By 1932, my father was able to bring my mother and two brothers to Birmingham, although life was still financially hard. Once settled and living in rented accommodation with Bachan and Surinder, my mother briefly returned home to Rawalpindi to welcome me into the world amongst the support of her parents and family. I made my first journey by ship at six months of age, sailing through the Suez Canal long before air travel became common.

In 1934, our youngest brother Jagjit or Kak (‘baby’), as we still call him, arrived. Mum, with hands more than full, was not very pleased when I, a nearly two-year-old, fancied myself as an interior decorator and started ripping wallpaper off the walls of our rented house. This was when I was not attempting to eat coal – a ‘foretaste’ of my later mining career.

At one time, while my father was gradually gaining a reputation as a local doctor and building his practice to pay the rent, my mother had to pawn her jewellery to purchase basic food supplies for us. Mum, or Manji as we called her, was a remarkable woman. She was pious and principled, with a lovely singing voice and wonderful sense of humour. She also kept her wits about her. My brother Surinder recalls a time when a thief entered the house and demanded that she gave him money and jewellery. She said she had no money but there was some jewellery hidden in the larder. He went in and she promptly locked the door on him and called the police.

As a family of six we were close and somewhat separated from mainstream British life. Coming to this country, my mother, my brothers and I didn’t understand much English. My mother experienced the stress of looking after four children, particularly during the war years, which sometimes resulted in spells of depression.

My father had become an active member of the only Sikh gurdwara then in England, at 79 Sinclair Road in West London’s Shepherd’s Bush. He would become the President for almost 20 years until the mid-1950s, and throughout this period was often approached to speak, not only as the chief spokesman of the UK Sikh community, but also for other religious communities from the sub-continent.

While Mum was picking up bits of English herself, we would speak Punjabi at home, so while us boys were naturally more fluent in Punjabi at first, once we were at school, we started to speak English more and more until it quickly became our first language.

While we were still quite young and spoke mostly Punjabi, there was one time when we could turn this to our advantage. We were entered into a competition during the celebration of the coronation of King George VI. We were told jokes and anyone who did not laugh at the jokes won a prize. I didn’t understand much English at the time and sat there stony-faced. At the end, I collected my first ever award: a small tin of biscuits.

Chapter Two

School

I

In 1937 ,aged five, I attended school for the first time and was left with an interesting impression of what happens when you take the path less trodden.

It was my first day, and my mother had left me at the foot of the steps leading up to the school. The school was on a bit of a hill, so pupils had to walk up 15–20 steps to get to it. Near the steps was a huge mound of sand, almost reaching the top of the steps. After my mother had seen me off at the bottom of the steps and waved goodbye, I looked at the sand and I looked at the steps. The sand looked much more tempting, so I set off to trek up the giant pile of sand. I could see the faces of horrified teachers at the top of the steps looking at me as I sank deeper and deeper with each step, before finally, I arrived at the top, bringing much of the sand with me. Unknown to me, my mother had also watched horrified and then saw me being told off and warned that I would not be allowed in the school if I ever tried that again. Threatened with expulsion on my first day at school – before I’d even got through the front door! Some years later, I read some words which immediately resonated with me, ‘We do not have to tread the path worn smooth by careless convention.’ They summed up my independent and, admittedly, perverse nature.

Soon after, we moved out of the rented house to a newly-built, detached house at 80 Bandywood Road, Kingstanding, in Birmingham.

It had four bedrooms and looked huge and spacious to us at the time. When I went back in later life, it looked a lot smaller. At the time, it was easy to borrow money, and my father had saved and managed to buy the property for £800. There was a downstairs space for the patients, with a surgery and a waiting room, and an interconnecting door with the house which had a kitchen and two reception rooms on the ground floor.

I joined my two brothers at the nearby school on the same road. (Many years later, Kanwaljit (Kawal), my future wife, was to have her first teaching post at this school.)

At infant school, they tried to teach me to read and write. Not easy. We were told to leave a finger space between words when writing. I did this and was surprised when my teacher got cross, saying, You’re leaving too much space! I protested that I had left a finger space! At first, the teacher did not believe me, then she looked at my larger than average hands and told me to use my little finger! At Christmas, I won a pink writing pad in a jumbled animal names competition. My parents were delighted, but I was not too pleased when they made me use it to practise sums! It didn’t do me much good. When the teacher asked us to say if our dad’s foot was a foot or a yard in length, I wasn’t sure of what a yard was, but confident that my dad’s feet must be bigger than those of ‘ordinary’ dads, I shouted out, A yard! I’m not sure if it was due to a shortage of teachers or the fear of German bombs that led to the school being closed for a few weeks, but to my dismay, my class continued in my dad’s waiting room!

I fancied myself as something of a doctor when I first went to school. I would get hold of some discarded bandages from Dad’s surgery and would insist on bandaging slightly injured classmates, often against their will!

In contrast to my first years at home, school was an endurance when it came to the incessant teasing and taunting. No one had seen Sikhs before, and while today young Sikhs will wear a mini turban called a ‘patka’, this had not yet become the fashion. As a result, before we were old enough to tie a turban, we wore little pigtails, tied at the back and tucked under the coat. It was an open invitation to other children to pull them.

One day after school, there was a group of older boys waiting to tease and bully me. I didn’t know how to respond, but I soon became very angry and hit out at one of the taller boys. I was about seven or eight at the time, and he was about ten or eleven. I must have got a lucky hit at him in his stomach, because he doubled-up with pain and fell to the ground. I pretended I knew that it was going to hurt him, even though I hadn’t a clue about fighting. Consequently, there was a bit of an aura about me. Other children thought that this person could take care of himself, so they had better be careful. The bullying then stopped for a while, which was fine. We had lots of adventures like that – the Singh family of four brothers against the rest of the world.

At the gates of the school there was a large roundabout with lots of trees, many of which are now no longer there. My two older brothers, Bachan and Surinder, had both moved on to senior school by the time I was nine. However, sometimes they would hide behind the trees by the roundabout as we were leaving school. That way, the bullies never knew if our older brothers were around to protect Kak and me.

I remember a time in the middle of winter when the local children decided to throw snowballs at the house. Far from being intimidated, we took it as a challenge and we’d go to the back and make lots of snowballs and throw them at our adversaries – so it was all good fun, though a little intimidating.

Junior School

I entered the junior school at Bishop Vesey’s Grammar aged nine. It was then still a fee-paying school, becoming a state-funded school two years later. Old-fashioned public-school attitudes still persisted, and I was asked to be a senior boy’s fag. I totally refused and threatened to hit the older boy with a slipper lying in his study. Stunned, he decided to ask someone more compliant to do his fagging for him.

Lunchtime often involved chasing and fighting some of the teasers. Once, after school, I chased a boy into the senior school. A tall guy, not in school uniform, tried to stop me. I threatened to hit him if he did not move out of my way. The next day, my brother’s French teacher complained to him of how his younger brother had threatened to beat him up!

Eventually, the Singh brothers would make up more than half of the school boxing team at Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield. This helped with managing the teasing and bullying. I enjoyed boxing, as I did all school sports, even though I wasn’t particularly good at it. I would take blows from my opponents, then wait for my opportunity and hit out hard with my left hand, taking them by surprise. My father, concerned about possible injury, not necessarily to us, cautioned us to step aside from conflict, but he and my mother were secretly happy that we were able to stand up for ourselves.

At school, we discovered that the Catholic children did not have to attend School Assembly or RE classes, and so we suggested to our mother that we should have the same exemption. Our mother would have none of it – she wanted us to go into assembly and join the RE classes and learn something about other religions. At the time, we thought our parents were being unreasonable and it was a long time before we understood their respect for other faiths.

The long summer holidays were spent walking and playing at nearby Sutton Park and a small Roman settlement called Barr Beacon. The ‘Red Army’, a group of boys who carried a red flag taken from some roadworks, were the deadly rivals of the ‘Singh Brothers’, but fortunately, boasts of superiority never resulted in physical conflict. Then, one day, there was a knock on our front door. We opened it to find the leader of the Red Army standing on the doorstep with a catapult in hand. He knew it belonged to Bachan and had come to return it; peace was declared.

We would play lots of indoor games, including pontoon with matchsticks for money, often hiding aces or a royal card in our sleeves. When Kak and I played chess, we often began the game asking if cheating was allowed!

I found school a little boring. The best teachers had been called up for the war effort. The maths teacher seemed to spend forever talking about Pythagoras’s theorem. I could never understand how he got so carried away about a square on the hypotenuse, or why anyone would want to put a square there. I should however, have paid more attention to