Dr Rupy: Yeah, I remember my mum would give me Indian food to take as a pack lunch at school. I would then sell it to my friends and buy chips.
Satnam Sanghera: And my brothers and sisters, they would love school dinners.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: They loved that, they loved smash.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And those desserts. When we actually I would go home and have my mum's food. And now the way I feel has completely changed and I can't control myself around my mum's food.
Dr Rupy: Uh-huh.
Satnam Sanghera: I just, every day is a cheat day at my mum's.
Dr Rupy: Welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast. The show about food, lifestyle, medicine and how to improve your health today. I'm Dr Rupy, your host. I'm a medical doctor, I study nutrition and I'm a firm believer in the power of food and lifestyle as medicine. Join me and my expert guests where we discuss the multiple determinants of what allows you to lead your best life.
Satnam Sanghera's journalism has covered far-reaching topics including racism, homophobia and even pianos in train stations, which he bizarrely doesn't like. I'm not too sure why. But when he decided to turn his attention to empire and Britain's colonial history, the backlash he received from the public and even some historians was fierce and unnerving. In fact, Satnam has received abuse online, ridicule and even death threats. As a person of Indian heritage with their roots in the divided provinces of Punjab and Bengal, I thought I knew a lot about British history, but I didn't realise how little I knew until I read Empireland and watched some of Satnam's incredible documentaries on Channel 4. Today, we tell the story of British imperialism through the lens of food: spices, sugar, potatoes, cauliflower, even processed food. These are all ingredients I thought I knew a lot about. But when you dig a little deeper, you can uncover just how incredible our past is and what we can learn from. As we negotiate a new relationship with the wider world, it's never been more important to understand the nuance of our national history. At no point in today's discussion do we refer to empire as either good or bad. Like the weather or our relationship with our immediate family, it's complicated. I also think the medium of social media is the wrong place to have these discussions that require compassion instead of judgment as we wrestle with uncomfortable and sometimes brutal historical truths. I hope today's discussion will enable you to cherish food in a new light that appreciates its complicated past, as well as how grateful we should all be for the variety and selection that adorns our market shelves. Satnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi immigrant parents in Wolverhampton in 1976. He entered the education system actually unable to speak English but went on to graduate from Christ's College, Cambridge with a first-class degree in English language and literature. He's been shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards twice for his memoir, The Boy with the Topknot, and his novel, Marriage Material. Empireland has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and was named a Book of the Year at the National Book Awards of 2022. And that inspired both the Channel 4 series, Empire State of Mind that I referred to earlier, and Sanghera's children's book about the British Empire, Stolen History. Remember, you can watch today's podcast episode in full HD on the Doctor's Kitchen YouTube channel. It is one of the easiest ways to support the Doctor's Kitchen just by hitting subscribe on YouTube and checking us out there. We're doing so much more content online for video, including recipes and a whole bunch of other solo podcasts that I'm going to be doing on nutrition and the medicinal effects of foods, particularly spices. And if you want to take your knowledge to the next level, we have developed the app that will help you eat well every day. The Doctor's Kitchen app, you can download it right now on the App Store and Android users in January 2024, you will have access to your own app as well, plus many features that you guys have been asking us for too. Remember, you can subscribe to the newsletter, that's where you're going to find out first about the app and the next downloads and the new versions that we're going to be doing. Just go to thedoctorskitchen.com/newsletter, sign up for free. Every week we send you recipes, we send you information about ingredients, the historical context of them as well as how to get them into your diet every single week with health benefits. For now, onto the podcast.
Dr Rupy: Satnam, you've covered racism, homophobia, but you've said empire is the most controversial and divisive topic you've ever covered. Why is that?
Satnam Sanghera: Because when you're talking about British Empire, you're talking about racism, basically. Empire wasn't always racist, but for a large part of the imperial history, it was about subjugating, white people subjugating brown people, discriminating against them, sometimes killing them, stereotyping them in awful ways, stopping them from doing certain jobs, saying they were intrinsically a warrior race. And so you're into the most toxic subject in the world, which is white supremacy. You know, there's no way of talking about that in a light way. Also, when you're talking about British Empire in Britain, you're often talking about people's sense of their own history, of their family, because a lot of families were involved in imperial history. And immediately you're playing with the suggestion that people's families weren't always good people. And so people take it very, very personally. This isn't distant history. Lots of people in Britain, whether you're brown or white, have direct links to empire, like we do. And so it gets very, very personal very quickly.
Dr Rupy: There was a YouGov poll that asked people what they love about being British. Number one, NHS, obviously.
Satnam Sanghera: Of course.
Dr Rupy: And we'll get into the NHS and you know, how that's got roots and obviously the reason why the NHS exists and and who supported it. Um, number two, countryside. Hard to argue. I love the British countryside. I think it's amazing. Maybe you've got something to say about stately homes. Uh, and the third thing was history.
Satnam Sanghera: Really, above tea.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah, I know. I was expecting tea up there.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, history. It's such a weird thing to say that you're proud of history. It's a bit like saying I'm proud of the rain or the weather. Because history is not one thing.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: It's good and bad.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: But we have this idea and you know, our British Asian Prime Minister has repeated it, the idea you need to be proud of British history to be proud of being British. It's a really dangerous idea because history is by by definition really complicated. To use it as a tool of patriotism is really dangerous. But he's not the only one doing it. It's done around the world. Indians are doing it, you know. Uh, and you know, Putin is doing it. You rewrite history to reflect the best things of what you think, the best things are about the national identity.
Dr Rupy: And I think that probably answers part of the question as to why people find your content, your books so abrasive to them because it really does rub up against what they feel most proud about. And I think I've heard you say, you know, to view the lens of empire through pride or shame are just way too naive concepts to to apply to that. It's just too myopic to to think about our history through those different emotions because in reality it's very complicated.
Satnam Sanghera: It's very complicated. It's a bit like people saying, often ask me, was British Empire good or bad? That's like saying, has the weather over the last 300 years been good or bad? And you're like, well, it's changed quite a lot, hasn't it? British Empire changed quite a lot. And what I've realised, especially I'm writing the sequel now, I've just finished writing the sequel to Empireland, is that whatever you say about British Empire, the opposite is true to a certain degree. So, British Empire involved slavery, three million Africans sent across the Atlantic. It also involved anti-slavery. We abolished slavery, which was a great thing. Then we went around the world abolishing it. Empire involved the spread of democracy, say to countries like Australia, South Africa and so on. It also involved sowing instability in places like Palestine. My God, we're really living with the results now. Nigeria, Burma, Myanmar, um, Pakistan, you know. So it's both things and also empire for example involved massive destruction around the world. It also involved building things. It involved the destruction of forests and the environment, but then it resulted in environmentalism. It involved the destruction of species. I mean, killing elephants and tigers for fun were part of the imperial mission. But then it results in conservation and national parks. So, all I'm saying is that British Empire is complicated and it was opposites. I'm not saying anything particularly angry or radical, but still that is too much for some people.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I think it's a lot for a lot of people because I think it's very hard for people to wrestle with the paradox of it being both good and bad.
Satnam Sanghera: Opposite things can be true. And actually weirdly, I go to talk to kids and I I present them with that idea. I say opposite things can be true. And I will say, look, compare it to your parents. You love your parents, but God, you really hate them as well. And empire is the same and kids can get their heads around that. But I think social media is not something that can deal with nuance and complexity, which is all what history is about.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And I've heard you say also that kids are most receptive to the ideas that you put forward, particularly, I mean, obviously in Stolen History, which I think is great. I almost wish I listened to that first before reading Empireland because that was a really good overview and actually dumbed down a lot of concepts that I didn't realise and I was pretty ignorant of. I said to you before we jumped on the podcast about how I was a little bit nervous about this interview because I thought it was going to reveal a lot of my shortcomings in my own history and my own knowledge of of the British Empire, but also my background as a as a British Asian, as a Punjabi, as a Sikh. Um, and I'm willing to be vulnerable and and have things pointed out to me actually about what I should know today. Um, when you chat to kids about it, are they able to wrestle with the good and bad better than adults?
Satnam Sanghera: Totally. I think it's partly because Britain is becoming more and more liberal and kids are growing up in a very different world to the one we grew up in. Also, you cannot go to almost any school in Britain today without encountering massive racial diversity. I spoke at a school recently where the kids spoke 36 languages between them. And they all at the end said thank you in 36 different languages. And it's natural to them. And I always ask at the beginning, I always ask kids put their hands up if their parents or grandparents come from abroad or if they do. And often half the class does. And often it's all former imperial countries or mostly. So they feel the direct link to empire. We never had it explained to us. You know, the narrative when I was growing up is that there's lots of brown people everywhere, but that's because they came uninvited to take advantage of the British. You know, growing up in Wolverhampton with Enoch Powell as a local MP, that was the narrative. I think that's been the dominant narrative of immigration in Britain in the last few decades. But the fact is, brown people have been here for centuries. And they're here for reasons and they've made contributions. And actually, you could argue that British history is imperial history, you know, for the last few centuries.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned growing up in Wolverhampton. I want to learn a bit more about your upbringing and I mean, you talked about it in previous books and everything, but when you think of yourself as um, a resident of Wolverhampton, as as British, where where do you get that sort of um, the the Punjabiness from it for want of a better word? Like, do you do you feel a connection to to India more so now or did you have that when you were growing up as well?
Satnam Sanghera: Well, you should mention that you're also a British Punjabi. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, I mean, I think we grew up in very similar surroundings in that everyone around me was Sikh. And I didn't think it was unusual. The chemist was Sikh. You know, the doctor was Sikh. You know, everyone except the teachers was Sikh. It was a majority brown school I went to. So it didn't feel unusual. Um, but now I think like lots of British Asians, I can feel both at the same time. Um, but you know, you and I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the British Empire, you know. Because millions of people emigrated here because of the empire. The Sikhs in particular took advantage of the opportunity to emigrate more than almost any other group. They ended up in Kenya to build the railways, they ended up in Uganda, in Britain, wherever you go, I always say there's a Sikh taxi driver, right? Wherever you go. But that's because of empire, right? But also, I didn't realise before I started researching this that the Sikh identity was shaped by the British. You know, we grow up with this idea that we're a warrior race. Maybe not you and I. I think we'd be crap at fighting. But you know, that Sikhs talk about themselves as the warrior race, right? That's an identity completely contrived and created by the British. They decided that certain races, because they took their side, were great fighters. So it wasn't just the Sikhs, it was also the Gurkhas. Every time you hear the Gurkhas discussed in Britain, it's through the idea of the military identity. The British created that. It's such a powerful idea that now these communities see themselves through that those British imperial eyes. But also the Sikh community, you know, it was a tiny community before the British adopted us. After 1857, the Indian Mutiny, the Sikhs took the side of the British. So the British loved them. And so they developed them as this military warlike race. But as a result of that, the numbers of Sikhs increased massively. Loads of people converted to Sikhism in order to be indulged by the British. But at the same time as kind of indulging us, they also discriminated against us, you know, and blew us up and shot us when necessary and didn't allow us to drive the trains. And when we arrived in Britain, we weren't allowed in Wolverhampton, they often weren't allowed to be teachers or bus conductors. So it was a weird thing where they respected us but also discriminated against us. But I didn't understand how important empire was to our identity. And I don't think our community generally understands that.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I don't think it was something that I was aware of when I was growing up at all about the the history of Sikhs and the background and the fact that that warrior class was instilled upon us or pushed upon us. Um, you mentioned something earlier about how we as a country are becoming more liberal. But I guess the counter to that and some people might be surprised to hear that if you think about it through the lens of Brexit, right-wing politicians, social media, culture wars.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, it's opposite things are happening at the same time. Society is getting more and more liberal. And actually, you know, empire is now on the curriculum in Wales. It's been taught in loads of academies, in private schools that don't have to follow the curriculum. But for the last 13 years, politics has become more and more right-wing. It's become, empire has become a culture war that the politicians love getting involved in, Boris Johnson, wang on about Winston Churchill, or you know, Kemi Badenoch talking about how great the empire was and you know, she grew up in Lagos and she doesn't see the problem. You know, but that's politics. Politics is disconnected from what's happening in society. And you know, there might be an election soon. Things can change very quickly. And the general move of society is towards tolerance. And you ask people whether, you know, colonialism and slavery should be taught in schools. The last survey I saw, and it was about three quarters of people thought it was a good idea. You would never guess that from reading the Daily Telegraph. Would you? Um, so it's a completely contrived culture war, which unfortunately I found myself in the middle of.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Which is why I'm on this podcast to escape those people.
Dr Rupy: I want to talk a bit about how you deal with that actually in terms of your coping mechanisms considering your, you know, your history and your background. Um, but we said before we jumped on this pod, uh, that you could tell the entire story of empire through the lens of food. And obviously this is a food podcast, nutrition podcast. I'd love to talk a bit about, um, spices, the foods that we have today and how that's really influenced culture as we see it within, I mean, you're you're sat, uh, in front of a whole bunch of different cookbooks there as well. So a lot of.
Satnam Sanghera: All unopened.
Dr Rupy: All, no, no, no, they're very open, trust me. I've read all of them, I promise. Um, why don't we start off with, uh, with food? I I I I remember reading in in Empireland about and both books actually about nutmeg and how the spice nutmeg is is critical to the empire story.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, I wrote about nutmeg in Empireland. Actually, my new book, Empire World, there's a whole chapter on plants. And this is something I've not really thought about because botany is a separate kind of discipline, separate to anything I've thought about, like history or anything. So yeah, nutmeg is a classic example. You know, one of the reasons empire began was the search for spices because British food was really boring, right? They discovered nutmeg. At the beginning, there was only one island, the island of Run, this tiny island which I really want to go to. It's in far East Asia, in modern day Indonesia. I think it's about four miles long. The only place they could find nutmeg, you could buy a nutmeg there for one pound, you could sell it in Britain for 600 pounds. You know, that's how valuable nutmeg is. We actually went to war with the Dutch over this tiny island. And as a consequence of that, we inherited New Amsterdam, which became New York. New York City. It's incredible. It's incredible this tiny nut became, moved global events. But so many of the foods did that in empire. The other one, great one being sugar, of course. Sugar, originally when it came over to Britain, was regarded as a spice. They didn't know what it was, but they knew they liked it. Imagine if you'd never had a Mars bar and suddenly you have a Mars bar. They went wild for it, right? So they, imagine if anyone's ever seen those videos on YouTube of like a kid trying ice cream for the first time and then like their eyes become wide and then they're like, what on earth is this? That that would have been the experience. Yeah, so they just couldn't get enough of sugar. So they started growing it in industrial quantities in the Caribbean. Of course, with enslaved labour, three million Africans sent over the Atlantic to furnish us with the wonder of sugar. But also, sugar ended up being boycotted as part of the abolition campaign, you know, when people learned about the misery of slavery. And we've got to remember the British also abolished slavery and went around the world abolishing it.
Dr Rupy: Who started the boycott of sugar? I'm assuming this was back home.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah, there was, it went on for decades. The abolition campaign, there's an idea that suddenly the British got rid of slavery. It was a very slow process. The slave trade was banned first and then much later slavery was banned. It went on for ages and even it's because people were making so much money out of sugar and slavery. I mean, even today, one of the richest MPs in parliament, Richard Drax, his family wealth comes from slavery. It's only recently, I think they've got rid of the plantations or they might still have them. I've been to that plantation in Barbados. You can still see the mill they used, you know, and the tens of thousands of slaves who were, who died there, you know, it's incredible. This wealth, the Harewood family, you know, David Harewood, the actor, his family name comes from the fact they were enslaved by the Harewood family who own one of the biggest stately homes in Britain in Yorkshire, Harewood House. The Queen, when she went to Barbados in 1966, was a guest of the Harewood family because they married into royalty. So the connections are still quite modern. And this is real history, you know. So sugar encompasses the horror, but also some of the positive things about empire. And then there's tea, of course.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Tea, I'm going to ask you a question there. Where do you think tea comes from?
Dr Rupy: So, the tea I drink, I think comes from India. Um, I know from reading your book, there are origins in China as well. And the British sought to bring some of those leaves and actually they realised there's plenty of it growing in Assam. So that's my, that's my.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, sort of, yeah, sort of right. A lot of Indians think India, think tea is an intrinsic national drink, comes from India.
Dr Rupy: 100%.
Satnam Sanghera: Not true. The British made tea a mass market drink in India. In 1900, almost no one drank tea in India.
Dr Rupy: Really?
Satnam Sanghera: There was a concerted campaign, marketing campaign to make Indians drink tea. And now you get people going, oh my God, Starbucks selling chai, that's cultural appropriation. But actually Indians only ended up with chai because the British wanted to make money out of Indians drinking tea. It's a really, it's a really interesting history. They started pushing tea to Indians. Indians started mixing it in milk with spices. The British didn't like that because they said, oh, you're not using enough tea. We need to make money out of you. And they, they kind of took against chai. So it's a complicated history where it involved kind of rebellion, but also, you know, co-opting. But people were drinking tea in India going back centuries, but in tiny communities. It became a mass market drink because of the British. But originally, it was a Chinese thing, fundamentally. The British got their tea from China. Hence the saying, not for all the tea in China. And then, you know, we went to war with the Chinese. You know the Opium Wars?
Dr Rupy: Uh, I know about it from the book, but please tell me a bit more about it.
Satnam Sanghera: Basically, the British were paying China so much silver for the tea, it wasn't economically good for them. It's a trade imbalance. So they thought, you know what, it'd be great if they took something in return. The Chinese didn't want anything from the British. They were just like, buy our tea, give us silver. And then the British had this idea that actually opium grown in British India could be sold to the Chinese because the Chinese were quite into opium. So they started selling Chinese, the Chinese opium illegally because Chinese didn't allow it because obviously it's a hard drug. And eventually the Chinese were like, this is bad, it's making lots of people quite addicted. Stop it. And the British went to war to force the Chinese to take their opium.
Dr Rupy: Really?
Satnam Sanghera: People don't know this. The Chinese know it.
Dr Rupy: The Chinese know it well.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, the Chinese talk about the century of humiliation. The reason we ended up with Hong Kong was because of this. Because we won the Opium Wars. And as a settlement, we were allowed to sell opium, continuing to sell hard drugs into China, and we got Hong Kong as a base.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Satnam Sanghera: And that's incredibly poorly understood. Even Tony Blair in his biography, when he talks about handing back Hong Kong to the Chinese, he says, oh, I was only dimly aware of the history. It's like, how can you be dimly aware of the history when the reason you're there is because of this history. And the Chinese really know it. It's taught. Every Chinese person will know about the Opium Wars.
Dr Rupy: Wow.
Satnam Sanghera: And it's what, and also tea played a role in, you know, us losing America. The Boston Tea Party, you probably know about. The tea that was thrown into the harbour in Boston was East India Company tea. The Americans were cross about being forced to take East India Company tea because they got their tea through other routes. And people forget, it was tea involved in us losing that colony, the 13 colonies in America. So tea played a role in changing our relationship with two major superpowers. And you know, now, also, there's tea plantations in places like Kenya, Sri Lanka, India. Those are all former British imperial territories. The tea you drink in the morning, so you're partly right, will probably be a blend of Indian, Chinese, Kenyan tea. So you wouldn't be drinking that tea if it wasn't for the British Empire.
Dr Rupy: Wow, that's phenomenal.
Satnam Sanghera: Isn't it wild?
Dr Rupy: That is wild. When you think about it as something as, I honestly didn't know that we weren't drinking tea in India in large quantities prior to that introduction. And you're right about the whole appropriation stuff because I I honestly see that quite a bit on social media about how people are appropriating chai and they're using it in, but actually when you dig into the history.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, I mean chai is an Indian drink. Indians created it, but it wouldn't have become so big. But the British went around, you know, when you think of chai, you think of the Indian railways, right? One of the marketing tools the British used was to sell tea on the railways in the Punjab. And so that's how it became a big thing there. But I mean, there's, it's complicated in the sense that there were small communities in India drinking tea. Another wild aspect of the story is the British were obsessed with trying to grow tea in India because they could keep the revenues then. And they sent Robert Fortune, a spy, he dressed up as a Chinaman, to steal plants from China, not knowing there were tea plants already in India. They knew, but they ignored, they ignored the people saying, hey, by the way, we've already got tea in Assam. And they ignored it. They spent decades stealing tea from China. But that guy, you know, in the end did help with the establishment of plantations because he brought Chinese people over to India and also their equipment to set up plantations. But the level of knowledge about tea was so bad that the British, even though they were drinking tea in huge quantities, didn't realise that green tea and black tea was the same plant. They didn't understand. It took them decades to work out it was the same plant, just processed differently.
Dr Rupy: Wow. And you mentioned about how in China it's very well known. Have you ever conversed with Chinese historians and ratified whether there is this sort of resounding resentment toward the British for the Opium Wars and and everything that happened after?
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, it's huge. In fact, it created all sorts of racist stereotypes about the Chinese which are still valid today. So the idea they're xenophobic, that you can see that playing out in our newspapers all the time, right? The idea you can't quite trust them because once we started growing tea in in British India, we wanted British people to drink that tea, not the Chinese tea. Started saying that Chinese tea was bad, that they use chemicals to dye it. Some of it was true, but it was exaggerated. And that fear of the Chinese still, I think, persists today. And you know, a Chinese historian I talked to recently said, oh, you know, you might as well call the Opium Wars the Tea Wars because it was all about tea. And it's a connection we don't really make. It's a wild story.
Dr Rupy: It is. And as, you know, we move into a new era where the dominant superpowers are going to be China, India, and all these previous colonies, um, we have to, we're going to have to reconcile a lot of this history.
Satnam Sanghera: We need to know this stuff.
Dr Rupy: And know it. Yeah, exactly.
Satnam Sanghera: It's embarrassing.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And it's embarrassing in different ways in each country. It's embarrassing that we go to Jamaica and like don't remember what we did to the enslaved. It's embarrassing that we're involved in Palestine at the moment. Rishi's off in Israel and he doesn't, he's not talking about the fact that the situation was partly created by the British. The British basically promised this land at the same time to the Arabs and the Jews. In this completely stupid, amateurish correspondence. It was always going to end really badly. And then they legged it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: Well, it's just there's a similar pattern with partition.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah. Occasionally politicians do have awareness. I remember David Cameron once saying, I'm not going to talk about Kashmir because you know, we created that. It's like, yeah, we created that because we basically sold Kashmir to a Hindu monarch who was known to be crazed. It's a Muslim majority state. That wasn't going to end well. It hasn't ended well. You know, Jack Straw talked about how many of the world's problems stem from the British.
Dr Rupy: Going back to food, I mean, there's so many other foods. Should we talk about some of the other foods?
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Some of them you'll know. Rum.
Satnam Sanghera: Rum, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Created in Barbados as a kind of byproduct of slavery by the different communities there. Gin and tonic, you probably know that. People are saying the quinine, they all know the quinine in tonic helped people with malaria, right? But actually, I've discovered in my Empire World recently, gin and tonic was, there's no evidence that gin and tonic was ever drunk medicinally. Because there's not enough quinine in that tonic to have an effect.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, it's it's very, very low.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah. Very small. Quinine was taken with alcohol. Separately, tonic water emerged as a health drink. An entrepreneur put them together and he created the idea that it was a healthy drink. But actually it was never taken medicinally. That's another wild story. And I've been going around for the last three years saying gin and tonic is a classic byproduct of empire. Actually, it isn't.
Dr Rupy: Right. Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: This is how this history is really complicated. Yeah, yeah. Oh, another thing I've just learned in Empire World, ganja.
Dr Rupy: Ganja.
Satnam Sanghera: What would you say ganja is?
Dr Rupy: Marijuana.
Satnam Sanghera: And which country?
Dr Rupy: Uh, I would, uh, I'm probably going to mess up which country exactly, but let's just say Jamaica.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, ganja associated with Jamaica. Ganja is actually an Indian word. It's an Indian herb, a plant, brought over by Indian indentured labourers, brought over to replace the slaves. And they brought ganja with them. If you think about it, ganja sounds like an Indian word, doesn't it? And now it's associated with Jamaican identity. The Indian indentured labourers brought to Jamaica actually didn't do very well. And there weren't many of them. There's not many Indians in Jamaica. But they brought their food and culture and ganja was one thing. Also, Jamaican rotis.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Roti.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Comes from India.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And I didn't, I didn't understand that either.
Dr Rupy: I've always noticed that they call it roti, but there there is a slight different process that they would use to make their roti.
Satnam Sanghera: Also goat curries.
Dr Rupy: In India.
Satnam Sanghera: That's all Indian.
Dr Rupy: No way.
Satnam Sanghera: Isn't that wild?
Dr Rupy: Really?
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, I just, I never really made the connection.
Dr Rupy: Hold on, the plant, so ganja does mean marijuana. Is that is that.
Satnam Sanghera: It does, yeah, it's what the Indians brought with them.
Dr Rupy: And because I heard, I know in Punjab they call it a different name, like, I think it's bhang.
Satnam Sanghera: Bhang. I get confused about they have bhang lassis, don't they?
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: I get confused about whether that, I know they're really strong.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And a lot of truck drivers drink them. Is that ganja or is it opium? I don't know.
Dr Rupy: I'm not too, I'm not too sure what it is. I know the Nahang Sikhs do take some sort of tonic with some of these plants. I'm not too sure whether it's marijuana or opium or something. And they they use that, you know, in the sort of, um, in the throes of war to sort of, uh, harden them against the, yeah, the.
Satnam Sanghera: To develop courage.
Dr Rupy: Exactly. Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: It still happens now. People in Russia, you have soldiers using amphetamines in battle. It's a long history of that. Another thing about Jamaica, breadfruit. Breadfruit was introduced by the British as a kind of food for the slaves. They thought, oh, you know, it would save us a lot of money if we just grew breadfruit and forced the slaves to eat it. The slaves didn't take to it. So it never developed as a food for the enslaved. But breadfruit is now a Jamaican food. And that suggests that the enslaved resisted it as an act of defiance. And quite often the enslaved are seen as passive people. But actually this history suggests that actually in the ways they could, they took on the British.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And the colonials. I love that story about breadfruit.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Um, but then of course you've got, uh, curry, of course.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: You go to India and ask for a curry, they're going to be a bit confused.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: It's not really, it's just this word given to the incredible diversity of of Indian food. The British called it all curry.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: But now it's probably the most popular food in Britain.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and my mum always corrects me with that because it's like, no, a curry doesn't necessarily mean a curry of what we think of as a curry. You know, we we say gravy to mean the sauce that you put in your curry and then there's all different derivations of curry depending on where you are in India as well. There's just so much diversity.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, my mum when she said she was making a curry, it was this very difficult to eat, I don't know if your mum ever did this, thing that you had when you were very sick.
Dr Rupy: Yes, full of turmeric.
Satnam Sanghera: Yes, full of turmeric. Yeah, yeah. And and, um, uh, very saucy.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Can we talk a bit about it? I was going to talk about this because one of the most annoying things about the stuff my mum went on about about food which we resisted is that almost everything she said has become a health food.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, I know. I know.
Dr Rupy: So like turmeric was the answer to everything. If you like had a cold or broke your leg, it's like have some turmeric. And now turmeric is everywhere.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: It's so annoying. Another thing is ghee.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: Obviously, Punjabis love a bit of ghee. My grandfather would like melt butter into his tea. And we'd be like, God, that's unhealthy. But now bulletproof coffee.
Satnam Sanghera: Bulletproof coffee.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: It's melting butter into.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: So, so bulletproof coffee, uh, which is a brand, has got, um, ghee, uh, and it's mixed with just plain like filter coffee and they they blend it up. And then sometimes you can add turmeric and stuff like that to it. You can have different fats in the coffee. And it's used as part of a either a low carb or a paleo or a ketogenic lifestyle because it's very, very high in fat. Um, and the reason why Indians, particularly in Punjab, use that is because it is very dense in calories and nourishing. So if you're going to be, you know, on the fields, moving the ploughs, working with the buffaloes, sowing seed, all that kind of hard labour, you do need those extra calories. Today, we don't need those extra calories. So when my mum or my dad is saying, you know, I have like hot milk and then I add some ghee to it, no, dad, that's not, that's not healthy for you whatsoever. It's way too many saturated fats.
Satnam Sanghera: I first came across bulletproof coffee when I went to interview Laird Hamilton.
Dr Rupy: Oh, yeah, Laird Hamilton. Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: He's a superfood guy.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: This island called Kauai of Hawaii.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And he gave me some in the morning. And he said it was the only thing he had for the first seven hours of the day. And I had it and I understood because it's very calorific. Fills you up, doesn't it?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: You don't really feel hungry for the rest of the day.
Dr Rupy: Totally. But that guy is a, he's a pro surfer, right? He's a big wave surfer. He exercises like an absolute beast. And for that person living that kind of lifestyle, man, you can tolerate that.
Satnam Sanghera: But it made sense of my grandfather because you know, my grandfather, like a lot of Punjabis, he was 76 and doing hard manual labour in foundries. So yeah, he had butter in his tea.
Dr Rupy: 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And it kept him going.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. My my granddad who stayed in, um, on the farm his whole life, he would have a similar drink. But up to the day he passed, he would be in the fields, he'd be, you know, sleeping with the the animals outside. Like he lived that kind of lifestyle. And I think for those people, it's a nourishing drink for, you know, to to to satisfy the workload that you have every single day. For for us today, like living, I mean, we're sat on chairs, we're just having a nice chat. This isn't as much expenditure we're going to have for our.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah. I agree with that. But it's annoying the way all the things she, my parents said were healthy have turned out to be quite healthy.
Dr Rupy: I mean, this is how I started the Doctor's Kitchen in the first place because I had my own heart conditions 15 years ago now. And my mum was the first person to suggest to me that I should be looking after my diet and my lifestyle before I have any cardiac procedures. And I thought she was just super wacky. Turns out, you know, a year and a half after putting into these changes, I reverted my own heart condition and actually doing a deep dive into the literature and nutrition, I learned a lot about the use of spices, the use of largely plants, fibre, looking after your gut. And all these things are just coming true, which is annoying.
Satnam Sanghera: I'm not on your podcast. But also, I remember we would grow our own vegetables. A lot of Punjabis did because they were farmers. They came to England, we grew our own vegetables. My mum would make fresh curries with aubergines and spinach and we all we wanted was frozen food. Pizza, frozen pizza. It's all we ever wanted.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: And now looking back, you know, she was giving us incredibly nutritious food.
Dr Rupy: Nourishing food. Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: You mentioned processed food. Was that a British invention? I remember hearing a bit about that in Empireland.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, so another wild story. You can't say the Brits invented processed food. The French were also involved in like developing the technology.
Satnam Sanghera: Okay.
Dr Rupy: Uh, and you can't say it was just British Empire that led to processed food becoming big because people ate it in America and at home and on. But it's fair to say that the growth and success of of food processing and the industry relied and was supercharged by the British Empire. Because basically, you've got lots of people around the empire who are homesick for British food. They're scared of the indigenous food. They're probably quite racist about it. And suddenly, tinning technology means they can have a version of what they had at home.
Satnam Sanghera: Right.
Dr Rupy: So in the 19th century, it began with tinned food being used by the navy. And you can imagine what a change it made there. You know, suddenly, it became compulsory for all ships to carry tinned meat in I think 1831. There was a massive scandal in the mid-19th century when some putrid meat was sold to the navy on mass. And the navy had to sell, destroy about 6,000 pounds worth of food because it, too much meat had been put into the cans and it hadn't been cooked properly. So it was just rotting. And this led to a backlash against tinned food. It began to be associated with food poisoning.
Satnam Sanghera: Okay.
Dr Rupy: But then it came back. And people, you know, out in the sticks, in isolation, in war zones, loved tinned food. So you would have tinned foie gras, tinned truffles, tinned pickles.
Satnam Sanghera: Tinned truffles?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, crystallized eggs in airtight cans. Can imagine how those tasted.
Satnam Sanghera: What?
Dr Rupy: Tinned pheasant, tinned partridge. And it was a company called Gamble and Co that was doing this. And they were bought by Crosse & Blackwell.
Satnam Sanghera: Ah.
Dr Rupy: Crosse & Blackwell, which is still around today, they became massive as a result of this. Their slogan was, the name that is known to the ends of the earth.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, wow.
Dr Rupy: So this Crosse & Blackwell tinned food went around the world. Then something happened in 1857, which is a date I've already mentioned, the Indian Mutiny, the Indian rebellion. That's when empire went, changed. Suddenly, the British didn't trust the Indians or frankly any brown people. It became very racist, the British Empire. And as part of that, eating English food became part of that racial superiority. So even if you're in India, you're eating as much British food as you can. So people were eating tinned fish, bacon, foie gras again, tinned asparagus, tinned cheese.
Satnam Sanghera: Tinned cheese?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, tinned tomato and turtle soup. This is what I looked up this morning.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, wow.
Dr Rupy: Tinned bacon and kidneys, tinned cherries, tinned strawberries. And tinned food became synonymous for British people with home, even though the stuff in the tins was often foreign. So it was sometimes it was stuff like Scandinavian reindeer tongues.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, wow.
Dr Rupy: French sardines, marmalade made with Spanish oranges. And yet, the British people thought it reminded them of home.
Satnam Sanghera: It was British. Wow.
Dr Rupy: And this bizarre thing happened where because the colonizers were eating tinned food, the indigenous people started aspiring to it, the middle classes.
Satnam Sanghera: Okay.
Dr Rupy: Started thinking tinned food was classy, even though they had access to really fresh, unprocessed food. And there's this great story about the British middle classes in British Honduras, you know, who started eating tinned game and tinned shellfish, even though they had access to really amazing fresh fish.
Satnam Sanghera: Wow.
Dr Rupy: And they would make desserts out of, uh, tinned cassava granules. Is it tapioca?
Satnam Sanghera: Okay, yeah, tapioca. Yeah.
Dr Rupy: So they started making desserts out of this, these processed cassava granules, even though there was fresh cassava growing in their gardens.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: Because tinned food became a sign of having made it.
Satnam Sanghera: Isn't that an amazing parallel to today? Because that's exactly what's happening in places like China and India as the influence of hyper-processed foods, like you mentioned McDonald's, Starbucks, all that kind of stuff, moves into those countries, the middle classes aspire to that crap food.
Dr Rupy: As we did as kids.
Satnam Sanghera: As we did, yeah, exactly. Yeah, definitely. Fish fingers and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, that's just like an amazing parallel and the psychology of people.
Dr Rupy: Also, you've got to think about the role that marketing plays because, you know, asparagus isn't being marketed in a mass market way. But Crosse & Blackwell are spending a lot of money. The tea companies are spending a fortune. They're inventing modern advertising because it's a mass market, it's probably the first mass market product, tea. But how can indigenous drinks and indigenous food, the stuff your parents are growing in the farm, how does that compete? So kids are seeing this advertising and they want it.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: And actually, maybe people want it on mass in places like India.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah. It reminds me of that, um, iconic advert of the, uh, the aliens and they're made out of tin and then they're they're going wild over the sort of mashed potato.
Dr Rupy: Oh, Smash.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, that's it. Yeah.
Dr Rupy: You're showing your age. You're 10 years younger than me. I remember those adverts very well.
Satnam Sanghera: Smash makes mash or something like that.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Crazy. And it's it's an aspirational advertising campaign, I guess, you know, to to to have these sort of processed elements be seen as better than the fresh.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I remember my mum when she said she was making a curry, it was this very difficult to eat, I don't know if your mum ever did this, thing that you had when you were very sick.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I remember my mum would give me Indian food to take as a pack lunch at school. I would then sell it to my friends and buy chips. And my brothers and sisters, they would love school dinners.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: They loved that, they loved smash.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: And those desserts. When we actually I would go home and have my mum's food. And now the way I feel has completely changed and I can't control myself around my mum's food.
Satnam Sanghera: Uh-huh.
Dr Rupy: I just, every day is a cheat day at my mum's. It's like, it's bloody delicious. It's more delicious than anything else in my life.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: And I've gone full circle, right?
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you cook now?
Dr Rupy: I don't cook much. I'm not very, I think I'm an average cook. I used to cook a lot as a kid actually.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, yeah.
Dr Rupy: My mum would encourage me. My sisters would, they got taught home economics. I would cook desserts with them. And then I kind of stopped. I cook with my girlfriend now. She is absolutely terrible cook. She won't mind. I mean, she literally can't cook an egg. Last week I taught her how to cook a stir fry. She's 36. She's never ever cooked a stir fry.
Satnam Sanghera: She won't mind you saying that.
Dr Rupy: No, she won't mind. And also, she wrote it down as I was telling her. I was like, you really don't need to write this down. It's just put some oil in, throw everything in. It's a stir fry. You stir fry it. And she was like, let me write this down. And she had like a side of A4 at the end of it. It's really sweet. Um, yeah, she's brought out the worst in me. So, um, but yeah, I mean, I try to eat really healthily. You've got me into protein bowls.
Satnam Sanghera: Okay, yeah.
Dr Rupy: There's actually an amazing place near me called Remedy Kitchen.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, right.
Dr Rupy: And they make amazing protein bowls.
Satnam Sanghera: Nice, nice.
Dr Rupy: So every day, like, the thing about salads is they're not big enough for me. They make really big ones with beetroot and carrots and jalapenos and really tasty.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: And that's the secret. You've got to make it taste good.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, 100%. Yeah. You can't have like, uh, a healthy diet without it being flavourful and enjoyable. Like you've got to be consistent.
Dr Rupy: And filling.
Satnam Sanghera: And filling. Yeah. And those those big sort of like protein bowls, diversity bowls, like those are actually what you want to be having every single day. Like at least one of those would do. It's better than a multivitamin. It's better than, you know, the the sort of like fatty diets. Like just stick to the basics and it can be quite cheap as well.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. So I'll eat, I'll eat like five in a row, five meals in a row. And then I'll have a massive curry from my mum. So it's probably highly dysfunctional.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: Um, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Let's talk about, um, I want to talk about sauce actually. Um, Worcestershire sauce.
Dr Rupy: Oh, yeah. You know what, you can say it. I struggle to say it.
Satnam Sanghera: Worcestershire sauce. It's a Worcestershire sauce.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: I think so.
Dr Rupy: It's a classic example of a very British food that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for empire.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: The ingredients are all from empire. There's a story that actually it's the recipe of a former governor of Bengal, but actually you can't.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's hard to ratify, isn't it?
Dr Rupy: I can't find the history for that. But yeah, these are ingredients. Equally with HP sauce.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: The I think the main ingredients are molasses.
Satnam Sanghera: Tamarind.
Dr Rupy: Tamarind, molasses, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Came from around the world, from empire, right?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: But also it goes further than that because obviously one of the foods associated with India is chilies. India didn't have chilies. I think or potatoes. These are things that come from South America, right?
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: So actually, people go on about cultural appropriation. When it comes to food, all culture is appropriation.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: It's all taken from other places.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: You know, and we wouldn't have our modern cuisine if it wasn't for colonization in general.
Dr Rupy: Do you think that is something that people latch on to to to almost shame other people's cultures? I I see this, I witness it a lot on, you know, line where people are generally quite shouty and they like to be sort of the person on the right side of history or they they believe themselves to be more virtuous than others. And I think that's where you get a bit of antagonism for people who feel that their national identity is being attacked. And so they overindex on, you know, the the pride element or the.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, this is the other side of the argument where on the left, people think that all anything associated with colonialism is bad. So, you know, Starbucks stocking chai tea is evil colonialism. I'm with people complaining about the phrase chai tea because that's like saying tea tea or naan bread or bacon bacon. You know, it's nonsensical. But this chai tea is a product of cultural appropriation. And not everything associated with colonialism is bad. To decolonize the world is impossible. It's like taking the the butter out of a baked paratha. You know what I mean? You can't do it. Colonialism is who we are.
Dr Rupy: I appreciate that analogy.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, it just came off the top of my head. Um, it's it's who we are. You can't take out colonialism, you know, and it wasn't always bad. Sikhs fought in their hundreds of thousands for the British Empire against the Nazis. Was that bad? I'd say, I wouldn't say their sacrifice was in vain. It was full of tragedy because they were themselves colonized. It's really complicated. I feel that as the guy who comes along and says it's really complicated, everyone hates me because the people on the right hate me who want to glorify empire and the people on the left hate me who want to say colonialism was nothing but evil. So I just get shit from both sides.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: But that's the truth. I'm afraid to say.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Opposite things can be true at the same time.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: History, imperial history was incredibly complicated.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. How do you, how do you cope with that? Because you know, you've talked, you've talked previously about mental health issues within your own family. You've obviously experienced racism as you were growing up.
Satnam Sanghera: Not much, but occasionally, yeah.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, well, I mean, I I remember watching that documentary where you and your brother were talking about how you were chased down the road by a bunch of national. It was quite a lot. You know, and I think we we tend to dampen it in, you know, in later years and we don't really realise just how much trauma you'd probably be holding.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, I don't see myself as a victim of racism. I think I've done well generally in life. I think Britain is a lovely place to grow up if you're multicultural, if that's the word. But you know, I had a massive ramp up in the abuse I get when I started writing about empire. And initially, I didn't really dwell on it because working in a very macho industry, in journalism, everyone gets abuse. And then I started posting some of the letters and the abuse online. And actually it was other people that made me realise it wasn't acceptable and it wasn't normal. The first thing was William Dalrymple, the historian of India, he gave an interview where he said, oh yeah, by the way, I've been writing about the same stuff as Satnam for 30 years. I've never had a single letter of the abusive kind that Satnam gets every single day. And that made me realise, oh my God, actually, I get a lot. And I started remarking on how I was scared of opening letters because they might contain shit or death threats. And I realised that's not normal. And then Penguin started asking me if I was okay. And actually it's that weird thing is when someone asks you if you're okay, that makes you realise actually, I'm not okay. I've not been okay for a while. And actually the constant racial abuse, the people shouting at me at events, and actually also just knowing there's people out there who are going to make the most cynical interpretation of what you're going to say, the most skeptical possible interpretation of what you say. And I've been very careful all the time. And that leaves you feeling weird. And I realised it was, it's like with everything, some days it's fine. Some days I think it's hilarious and I'll just retweet stuff and I'll post funny, what I think are funny letters. Some days it really gets to you and you're scared and you're actually in fear. And yeah, that's the way it goes. It's not fair because actually, you know, I'm going out my way to be nuanced and balanced. I spend my life quoting people I disagree with. But then people don't read the book. All they see is someone criticizing history, which is a daft idea because you're not doing that. You're just analyzing history. History is argument. History is complicated. But because of this culture war idea that you need to be proud of British history in order to be British, you know, people like me just get nothing but abuse. And you know, Twitter is pretty much unusable for me.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: I don't know if you, you stay off Twitter, don't you?
Dr Rupy: I stay off Twitter.
Satnam Sanghera: Also, you stay away from this subject. You're a clever man.
Dr Rupy: Well, I mean, the fact that we're diving into this conversation today, albeit we are keeping it focused on food, is an admission of A, we do need to have more of these conversations because I think the origin of food, the origin of words, the origin, the the backgrounds that we all have and that needs to be appreciated, particularly in the wave of a lot more, um, at least a lot more racism that I see online, um, even though, you know, the actual, um, lived experience of people has probably improved a lot, um, especially from, you know, your generation, my parents' generation. Um, but yeah, in general, I do try to stick with playing with vegetables and talking to people about how they can improve their health.
Satnam Sanghera: I don't blame you.
Dr Rupy: When I say I haven't had much racism, I guess I'm thinking about my career and you know, when I was at the Financial Times, I only had one racist email in about eight years.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, wow.
Dr Rupy: And I told my boss, he was so furious. He he found out who the person was, rang the chairman of the company and said, what are you going to do about this racist employee?
Satnam Sanghera: Wow.
Dr Rupy: And now, I probably get hundreds of racist messages a week.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: And like, I'll write about wind farms on the Times and there'll be racist abuse under that column.
Satnam Sanghera: Really?
Dr Rupy: And I realised, I was dealing with that particular column and there's someone being particularly evil. And so I had to get in touch with my colleague to delete it. It turned out this guy had done it before, then I had to talk about how to get him banned. Then I was like, oh, should we get him banned? Because he came back and then just radicalizes these people. It turned into a two-hour conversation. And I was like, you know what, actually my white colleagues aren't having to spend two hours of their Monday morning having to deal with this. And it's that famous line about racism. The point of racism is to stop you doing your work. It's a famous person said that. I can't remember who said it.
Satnam Sanghera: Okay.
Dr Rupy: I think it might have been Toni Morrison. It's to stop you doing your work. You know, I can't write my, I can't just get on with my writing because I'm having to deal with quite serious racist abuse and threats on me. David Olusoga, the historian of, you know, of Britain and writes about slavery and does TV work, he has a bodyguard.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: Why does he have a bodyguard? He's doing his job. He's doing nothing but truthful, nuanced work. But that's what happens to people if they're right on this.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah. Well, it's, I mean, in the face of so much constant backlash, it's amazing that you continue to do your work. And I and I guess that leads to the question of why is this, obviously this is an important subject, but it's got to be ever so more important for you to tolerate that abuse and that antagonism for you to push on and and you know, do another book that's that's coming out in the next couple of months. Why is it so important to you?
Dr Rupy: I think it's essential history. We need to understand it as a country because we're dysfunctional. Because the rest of the world is talking about this history and we're still having this monologue about whether British Empire is good or bad. And for Empire World, I've been around the world. I went to Barbados, India, Mauritius, and they have very healthy conversations about the British Empire and its legacies. We then go to these places and we're, we don't know what's going on. It's really embarrassing. You know, like the royals going to Barbados, that disastrous, well, they're going to, they went to the Caribbean, that disastrous royal trip to the Caribbean. They didn't do anything different to what they always do. But suddenly what they did looked really out of touch. And I think that's what we risk looking like as a nation. We look out of touch. At a time where because of Brexit, we're having to redefine our relationship with the world, it's probably good for us to remember what happened the last time we colonized a quarter of the planet. Because the world remembers.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: And so there's a disconnect between what the world knows and what we think happened.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: So that's why I feel like I've got to carry on. But I'm not that brave. I mean, I've I've stopped doing adult events this year, so just to avoid the abuse. I guess I'm going to be doing quite a lot of public events for Empire World in the new year. And you know, this should be an exciting time because Empireland did really well. And you know, this is a big book. But you know, there's not much excitement. There's a lot of the meetings are about security and protecting my mental health. And there's not much joy. But I think I've found ways around avoiding the worst of it. Small things like avoiding certain places and people and not making the tickets too cheap. Making it too cheap for people to come and shout at me.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: Yeah.
Satnam Sanghera: Well, I think you underplay just how brave you are, first off. Um, and I think the fact that you are having to have these meetings about security and mental health and how you're going to cope, you know, it shows how much of an endeavor this is for you. And I I appreciate it because you're not just educating me and you've sat down here for over an hour talking to us about it. You're educating thousands of other people, hundreds of thousands, hopefully kids who are getting this into their curriculum. It's very much needed. I really wish I had that book when I was growing up.
Dr Rupy: Oh, it's nice of you to say. I wish I had it. So I get this real feeling when I'm talking to kids. I'm excited they have this information, but also I'm jealous. I'm like, why did no one tell me? It's like, I sat through, you probably did too, I sat through dozens of remembrance day services. In racially diverse parts of Britain, no one ever mentioned that Sikhs, that black people, Asian people fought in their millions in both World Wars and died. Why did no one mention it? It's like this bizarre blind spot. And then I think in the late 90s, Bernard Manning went on Mrs. Merton show and BBC Two and said, famously, he said, there were no Pakis at Dunkirk. That was the narrative. And he was right in the sense that Pakistan didn't exist then, but there were, there were Indians at Dunkirk.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah, yeah.
Dr Rupy: And then you have someone like Laurence Fox becoming famous because he's angry about a Sikh in a, in the 1914, the film.
Satnam Sanghera: No, 1917.
Dr Rupy: It's 1917, sorry. Yeah, yeah. It's like, there were Sikhs there. He's built his whole career on this lie.
Satnam Sanghera: Yeah.
Dr Rupy: I think he vaguely apologized, but that's how ignorant we are of this history. And that's why we really got to carry on talking about it.
Satnam Sanghera: Definitely. Well, look, I I mentioned this to you before, I really want to do a supper club with you here. We can have a conversation over food, talking about food. And we'll make sure the ticket prices are nice and high, so we won't get any hecklers.
Dr Rupy: I don't think that, well, we should serve curry, so that the most racist people won't want to come. Make the food really spicy so they suffer if they do come.
Satnam Sanghera: Oh, that's awesome. Honestly, thank you so much. This is wonderful.
Dr Rupy: It's a pleasure to be on this podcast. I'm a big fan.
Satnam Sanghera: Brilliant. Me too. Me too, man. I I I really appreciate your your bravery, your books, and I want to try and spread your message as much as possible.
Dr Rupy: Thank you.
Satnam Sanghera: It's nice to meet a fellow Punjabi as well. I wasn't sure if we'd do the high five thing or not. We've got there in the end.
Dr Rupy: Awesome.
