Chiming with the background music — Prof. Virinder S. Kalra

Virinder S. Kalra is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. The three main areas of Prof. Kalra’s research are: racism and ethnicity in relation to popular culture and policy; theoretical engagements with diaspora and postcolonialism; and popular culture in South Asia. Prof. Kalra has made significant and consistent impact in these arenas, influencing and shaping academic and public debate. The co-authored book Diaspora and Hybridity is a critical intervention in debates in cultural studies in relation to conceptualizing two key ways of understanding identity and migration. This theoretical perspective has been most effectively utilized in pioneering work Prof. Kalra carried out on British Asian musical cultures. This interest in the performative aspect of cultural identity is also central to his latest book looking at music and religion (Sacred and Secular Musics, Bloomsbury Press). In this text, Prof. Kalra engages a postcolonial analysis with the field of ethnomusicology, forwarding the role of the native musician as the interpreter and conveyor of religious texts. This inverts the normative accounts of musicians in South Asia which place them at the bottom of the social hierarchy and also of religious hierarchy in which texts are given a superordinate role. The wide range of Prof. Kalra’s academic work is underpinned by an account of processes of resistance through the gambit of cultural and political organising. Adopting a Gramscian framework that takes the imbrications of culture and politics as point of departure, the multiple sites that Prof. Kalra has researched on share a concern for people’s organising in the context of social cleavages along the lines of race, gender, class, caste and nation.

Key themes that emerge are the fluid and contextual aspects of identity formation, the blurring of the professional and personal in academia, temporality, and the vagaries of self-narrativization.

SD: Who is Virinder Singh Kalra?

VSK: Oh, well you see, that’s just you being a philosopher! I’m whoever I am depending on the day and the time of month. I mean, I can’t answer that question. I’m a sociologist. Give me context. Do you mean ‘who is the academic? Who’s the sociologist’? What’s the… I can’t answer an ontological question. I’m not a philosopher. So that’s the answer to that question!

SD: That’s all good! OK, so how would you describe yourself in terms of your identity on this day?

VSK: Identities are fluid. I describe it like Stuart Hall; it’s all contextual. I don’t think there’s a core answer. My academic identity… again, even my academic identity shifts depending on what my role is and what I’m doing at a particular moment. So right now my academic identity is ‘researcher’, because I’m doing a major fellowship. If you’d asked me two years ago, my academic identity was ‘head of department’. I’m think I’m actually too much of a sociologist or cultural studies person to… I don’t think we have an essence. We are always in the making. We’re always making identity. And it’s always relational. It’s so bloody boring, I sound like a lecturer! So those questions for me don’t carry a huge amount of meaning beyond how I might feel on a particular day. So I can answer them, but I would have to put this huge caveat bracket around them. But I’d rather you ask a better question, sorry!

SD: It’s OK, that’s fantastic!

VSK: Ask a question which I could answer in an easier, or more reasonable manner, I suppose.

SD: So maybe you could you tell me what made you take decide to take part in this study?

VSK: That’s a really good question, and I think it’s interesting how parts of our heritage, in a diaspora context, impact upon decision making; how we make decisions, or how we come to be where we are. So I suppose I was curious to see how you were going to elicit that; how one might make that connection between what we might call our heritage and where we’re at. I’m curious to see how you’re going to get me to get to reflections, which I’m kind of interested in myself. That’s why I’m interested in seeing what your questions are, which I’m curious about. And I am curious about the answers myself, so I’m not just putting this on you. I’m not just reversing the gaze. So yeah, I’m interested in that question. Not just for myself, but I think it’s an interesting question.

SD: What does your Panjabi diasporic heritage mean to you?

VSK: Well, that’s where I find this an interesting question. Because I think if I was a sociologist in the 1970s, and of course, there have been lots of Sikh Panjabi sociologists in the 1970s, Parminder’s (Bhachu) one of them who survived through, but many disappeared. You should talk to this friend of mine, Karamjeet, who did a masters at Warwick. He’s not an academic, though. But he’s a very interesting character, because he should have been academic. So there’s a whole generation of people who disappeared, and I think that my cohort get into academia because there’s the cultural turn in the 1980s, with post-structuralism, so biography becomes quite important. Mainly because of feminist epistemology. We started saying that knowledge is constructed through our interventions in the social world, and so in that way I think that my entire academic work has been about my heritage: Sikh, Brummie, whatever. Multiple identities. The space opened up in the 80s and early 90s for people to take seriously where they were coming from, and to think about it in terms of social consequences, or sociologically. So yeah, as an abstract form, I think that’s really important.

In terms of my personal journey, I come from a family that’s quite religious in the formal sense of religion. You know, my father wore a turban. I’m not a revert. I didn’t grow my hair just in the 1980s or anything like that, and so obviously it’s been a really important part of my understanding of the social world, as a minority, if you see what I’m saying? So my understanding, my sociological work is all driven by that. It’s all driven by, well, at least in Britain, it’s all driven by this understanding of being a minority, of not fitting into a crowd. Or standing out in a crowd, and not in very positive ways, right? So it’s a problem that arises.

So for me, Sociology or academia was a way of trying to understand this problem. Like ‘why do people treat you… why am I treated differently, when I don’t feel particularly different from people around me’? Or ‘why is it that people get treated differently? By the way they look’? So for me, it’s [minority status in Britain] really foundational to my intellectual quest. The above are quite personal problems, which relate to ‘why don’t I get treated very well’? Or, ‘why are people calling me paki in the streets’? Or ‘why do I get beaten up’? Or ‘why is there everyday violence around my appearance’?

So for me, it’s really deep within, why I started academia, why I got involved in thinking that this was the place where I could find the answers. I mean, I did a Chemistry degree!

SD: Wow.

VSK: Yeah, so I kind of completely followed the parental advice around what you’re ‘supposed’ to do. But then I changed, basically because these questions [above] were still quite prominent for me. So in that way it’s really important historically; it was just really important for me. My identity is really important in relationship to the question of why I’m an academic or sociologist.

SD: In your research, you’ve continued to focus on both sides of contemporary Panjab, in terms of music, culture and so on. When I mention the word ‘Panjab’, or ‘Panjabi’, what connotations does that bring to mind for you?

VSK: My first my response to you was really about one strand of my work, which was around racism and anti-racism. And that’s quite a negative strand, right? In the sense that it’s a reaction and response to being produced in a certain kind of way. So the other part of that response, if you like, is a sort of quest for identity. A search for who you are, right? So in that search for who I am, or who I was, that’s the other strand of my intellectual academic work. Which obviously then takes me back to Panjab, basically. The very funny thing for me is that my father was a Panjabi writer, and very active in Britain in the promotion of Panjabi, because he was a Panjabi language teacher. So there was a lot of Panjabi in the household, but he was also deeply communal. He came through partition, really didn’t like Muslims, I mean he had lots of Muslim people as friends and so on, but it was the category that he really didn’t like. And there’s a big contradiction here, because Panjabi is mostly spoken by Muslims, and the biggest part of Panjab is in Pakistan. And we are from that part of South Asia. My family, and my father, were born in Lyallpur, which is now Faisalabad, which is in Pakistan. So in 1990 I went to Pakistan as part of a delegation, and that was a real revelation in terms of the many contradictions at work.

So the other strand of my work is really a much more abstracted question, if you see what I’m saying? It’s not like I have a personal connection to Panjab really, other than family. I don’t have any material connections with East or West Panjab. It’s very much this quest, right? For me that was the big conundrum. So with the language and religion mix, that’s been an ongoing issue [of interest] for me. That thread of my work is much more recent, because even with multiple visits and living in Panjab for two periods (1995–96 and 2008–10) it takes a long time to understand another place, another culture, another country, and working across the Indo-Pak border is not easy. The resonance of the discourse is that in Lahore [as a Sikh] you’re a minority, and you just cross the border, and in Amritsar you’re a majority. Which just keeps on reinforcing how contextual identity is to me, right? Lahore is only 40 kilometres from Amritsar, but if you wear a turban you are so differently received in both places. They’re only just 40 kilometres apart, and everyone is from the same ‘culture’, if you want to call it that. And yet, what is Sikh in Lahore, and what is Sikh in Amritsar? They’re literally different worlds. So what is stable about this identity formation outside of the contextual? So the reason I am academically quite strongly opposed to the question of ‘who you are’ is because of that. Once you start moving, the context almost completely, entirely, determines who you are, relationally. I do buy the idea that some people believe in the soul, some believe in a kind of human essence, and if you do then you can move beyond context, but I don’t have that as a base for how I articulate the world, if you see what I’m saying?

SD: Absolutely.

VSK: So that’s why I couldn’t really answer your first question. Intellectually I find that kind of (essentialising of) identity talk highly problematic.

SD: Could you elaborate on the problematic nature of that (reification and essentialising of identity)?

VSK: ‘Hindustan’! ‘Khalistan’! I mean, it’s pretty… It’s not even an elaboration! So going back to that strand regarding the problem around language and religion, and the way in which there’s a conflation of the two, that’s the work I’ve done for the past 15 years. Really looking at those conflations, and then arguing that these are underpinned by gender and caste; that there’s a gender-caste matrix to religious enunciation. And so this moves quite away from people’s individual faith, if you like. Their own relationship with God, or whatever. That’s pretty much the motivation for the work I’ve done.

SD: In that course of enquiry when you’ve noticed that gender and caste have such a major influence upon religious practices and identity formation etc., in terms of your personal journey, to what extent do you understand Sikhi in your particular context? And to what extent do you practise ‘it’?

VSK: So I mean everything you’ve said so far requires so much unpacking, because I don’t quite know what the Sikh faith ‘is’. Do you mean ritual practice? No, I don’t really have ritual practice. Do I engage with the tradition in terms of kirtan, music and poetry of the sacred texts? Absolutely. Intellectually? Absolutely. Spiritually? I don’t know. Socially? Maybe less than I used to. So I just want to break it down in different ways for you. As an academic, how discrete is our everyday life from our actual academic practices? Given my generation, it’s not very discrete. We always thought of this as a vocation. So everything you’re interested in, everything you’re doing, kind of becomes part of what you’re researching, thinking about, or engaging with.

I think as I’ve gotten older I’m much more interested in the textual part of the Sikh tradition and how that can inform an intellectual project. And that’s the kind of stuff that Balbinder Bhogal does, and Arvind [Mandair] does, so I lean on those guys for that. But I’m always conscious of how socially distant that work is from the lived reality of Sikh/Panjabi life here.

And so my reflections have changed quite a lot. Because I would articulate, and this might be controversial, that actually your caste and your gender determine what your Sikh faith or practice is. And I wouldn’t just say this was a Sikh thing. I would say this is applies to Muslims, Christians, etc., that those two things actually overdetermine how you can enter ritual practice. So for example, women can’t perform kirtan in the Harmandir Sahib. There are still gurdwaras that don’t allow certain castes, or they’ll have to enter from a separate entrance, or have separate food spaces. So for me, that’s now how I approach this. I can re-read my own sociality, in my family, in relationship to caste. Which, when you’re younger, of course you never do, right? ‘These are just uncle’s with turbans’! So I can tell your caste from your surname, right? You should be able to tell my caste from my surname, if you’re interested in what my Sikh background is, right? I can tell a million things from your surname, which is terrible, you may argue, but 90% I’ll be right! I could say quite a lot about your life, quite a lot about your Sikhness by your surname, and where you were brought up, right? So now, what kind of sociality is this? What kind of world is this, where you have a Ramgharia gurdwara, you have a Singh Sabha gurdwara… Do you see what I’m saying?

As I’ve grown older, actually no, just thought more about this with age, when you say something like Sikh faith, or Sikhi, I’m always a bit ‘mmm, I’m not sure what you mean’. I could do a textual thing, I’m enough of a textualist. But if you want to talk to me about community, well then it really breaks down into these socialities through caste and gender. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s pretty much all casted, essentially, and it’s quite a horrible gaze in many ways because you think ‘oh, this is just really socially regressive’. But it’s there. So when people say: ‘Sikhism is opposed to caste’ and ‘the Gurus said this about gender equality’, I’m like, ‘well, yeah, great idea, but not great implementation!’ So for me, that’s the kind of work that I now do.

The border work helps, because these social processes are across the religious categories. And again, that’s really hard for people to understand. That ‘oh, what are you saying? Are you saying Hindu Panjabis and Muslim Panjabis are all the same?’ No. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that the processes, that their sociality, also breaks down around gender and caste. In different ways, not in the same ways. So I’m not losing specificity, I’m just saying that these are the underlying structural forms that underpin where you sit on a on a scale, if you like.

This is why I disaggregate my academic work, from where I’m at in relationship to this tradition. Where I’m at now and where I was at in 1993 are just miles apart. I’m very different intellectually from where I was. In 1992 my central problem was [the conflation] of language and religion. Now in 2022, my problem is basically gender and caste. And I’m almost totally removed from any one of those particular religious traditions. I don’t really feel that connected to a ritual or spiritual tradition. As I said, now I’m very intellectually interested in some of the texts, but I’m not then interested in the ritual practices. You know, I don’t really care much about the Akal Takht, or what Sikhs are up to in terms of everyday politics. I’m not so interested in that anymore, which I might have been 15 years ago. So there you go, that was a long way to answer that!

SD: Brilliant. It’s a lot of ground to cover, of course. You articulated earlier in terms of when you were younger, feeling like the ‘other’, in terms of the UK, right? You then articulated how your identity is obviously contextual, and changes from Amritsar to Lahore. You also noted how you’re not connected with a gurdwara or the ‘community’, or particular religious organisation. It brings to mind Edward Said’s notion of constant exile. Thinking of the German notion of heimat, where is ‘home’ for you?

VSK: I mean in Britain now Rishi Sunak is Prime Minister. Everyday racism, street racism, even for someone who looks like me, is not terribly high. I live in Handsworth Wood. The street language here is Panjabi. You know, I’m a professor, I’m middle class, so I don’t find the social situation particularly conflictual here in the UK. I don’t find it particularly conflictual in India or Pakistan anymore, either. I think that’s to do with class, and all that kind of stuff. So the idea of a home, a single kind of home is… I’ve got two kids, right? So I have to do things around family, and even that idea I think is very loose, so I don’t feel any less at home here than I do in Lahore or in Amritsar. I mean the air is breathable here, though! Now, I don’t feel any particular conflict, geographically in terms of the UK. I could live in any of these places. I mean I had a really good recent trip to India, but that was mainly because of the people I met.

I suppose I know what you mean, I know what you’re really asking, but I can’t quite… I suppose now, I think it’s really important to think in terms of time. So that what we think about identity isn’t just ontologically, but also temporally; that there is just such a strong temporal dimension to identity. I find it hard to answer the home question. Because I could have answered this question really well about 15 years ago, in terms of diasporic rootlessness and all that, but I don’t feel that anymore. I think Edward Said’s probably incorrect, now. I think, well, you just root yourself in any particular context, and we do it really quickly. Human beings have this remarkable capacity to just adjust, right? And then you re-accommodate whatever your problems are with the adjustment, you integrate them into a new narrative form.

I mean, I now live in the house in which I was brought up, having not lived here for 30 years. I’ve got neighbours my age who stayed right through, and I kind of think ‘hmm, so I’m back. I’ve had all this life experience and these guys are still here’. We’ll still talk about the weather and such. So there’s no problem in relating to the present, even though my life experience and my neighbours’ are so massively, massively different. So I could have had a better answer on this 15 years ago, but right now, I don’t even feel ‘home’ is an important category anymore. Maybe at some point I would have thought, ‘no, it’s a really important category’, but not anymore.

SD: I’ve picked up on temporality as a key theme. In terms of adaptability, pragmatism, and making a home where you are, having switched from Chemistry, did you find the tools you were looking for when you entered the world of sociology?

VSK: No, not really. I did a Masters in Anthropology at SOAS, and that was really helpful. So when I was there I got PhD funding. It was much more of a drift, and much less of a plan. It was just like ‘oh, what am I going to do now? I need to do something’! So yeah, it was much more of a drift into academia rather than a plan, thinking ‘oh, this could be my career’, or ‘this is what I’m going to do’, or ‘this is my passion’ particularly. Yeah, it was classic sociologist; you just find yourself in a particular place at a certain time. Obviously after you do a PhD, you want to get an academic job, and I wanted to get one at the time, but I wasn’t necessarily so committed to the whole academic ‘thing’.

I did community work and I come out of quite an activist background, and now that feels so far away, such that I don’t like using the language. But yeah, I was quite involved in the anti-racist movement in the 80s, that’s how I know Gurnam (Singh), because he was very involved in those things, and so we have a certain political history that we share. So academia for me was more of a vehicle for just carrying on with that kind of work in the anti-racist movement. It wasn’t the intellectual problems that I had. I didn’t see intellectual pursuits as the resolution. I thought we should have a better society. So my solution to that wasn’t immediately saying ‘oh, I need to go to books’! My solution was that ‘we need to stop racism’, or ‘we need to stop the police beating people up’, and things like that. So I was always more practically oriented during my early years as an academic. I was quite practically oriented, and I did quite a lot of policy work as well. I worked in policy for some years. So I’m just reflecting on the intellectual work, I’m not reflecting on my life really; my life was much busier, doing many things. Even though at that point this had started happening, now there’s such a now strong career path in academia that you don’t really get much time to do other things that you might want to do, even as a PhD student. There’s all this professionalisation going on. When we were PhD students there was none of this. So now you have to see your supervisor once a month. I think I used to see him once a term or something, or just whenever something came up. And we didn’t have offices. We were very much left on our own. And of course, that was bad. As I can say now, if you want people to learn or teach, you have to teach them. But it was also much freer. We just did what we wanted to do, practically. For example, I lived mostly in India for a year! I did all sorts of things that one shouldn’t have, which would now be impossible to do if you’re a PhD student.

So I don’t think I was resolving my problems through academic learning. But now I can reflect and say it was helping, that I was using my academic work to think through and write stuff out. But that wasn’t the motivation. The motivation was ‘oh, I have to do something because my parents will be annoyed, and I’m just dossing about’! Which I could have done for a few more years. But it’s the migrant mentality that seeps in to every nook and cranny. They make you work! They don’t understand if you’re not working, and just sitting around reading and thinking.

SD: It doesn’t ‘look’ like work, yeah.

VSK: Yeah. So I also think that the migrant thing, being the children of migrants, is really important. I don’t have that migrant thing [with my children] of ‘you have to get a job, you have to do the sciences, you have to become an accountant’. You know? Well I say I don’t have that, but my daughters may disagree. Yet a lot of my peers do still have that migrant thing of ‘you’ve got to make sure your kids are in financially secure professions’. So this I think is really powerful, and ties in with this caricature of Sikhi in terms of work ethic: ‘kirat karo’ (earn an honest living). That I find quite interesting now, when I see my peers, not academics, but you know people around here, where their kids are still going into these professions: doctor, engineer, that kind of stuff. So I find these curious amalgams really interesting, where all religions become cultural enablers.

So I could easily say to you, ‘yeah, it’s actually because I come from a gursikh (observant Sikh) family, that ‘kam karo’ (work), you know, ‘kirat karo’, work hard, you’ve got a textual tradition, ‘sant sipahi’ (warrior-saint). I could totally tell that story. I mean, that’s a really nice narrative you can take off the shelf and say ‘here, actually this is who I am. That’s your sociology’. And that’s very new. That’s a very new way of narrativizing. That’s interesting for me, intellectually. But again, it’s what I see. And that’s of course, from my point of view, nothing to do with anything. That’s you just have this migrant mentality: insecure, want to do well.

So your project actually is part of that. It’s like you’re interested in Sikhi, but you could do the same project and say ‘tell me about your migration story’, and ‘what’s your relationship like with your parents as migrants’, or ‘what’s this idea of the entrepreneurial self’? But what we’ve got is this new cultural tag, if you see what I’m saying? I mean religion is dominant for minorities, but yeah it’s interesting, because I would articulate it in those kinds of terms [migration], to be honest, more than any particular… and I as I said, I come from a non-revivalist family. I don’t come from a family who from before 1984 were moneh (Sikhs who have cut their hair) and hard drinkers, then suddenly became religious. I don’t come from that kind of background. I come from a very stable, moderate, whatever you want to call it, background. So for me, Sikhi is my background music. It’s kind of always there. But it’s not something where I could pinpoint its prominence. But it’s totally there. It’s the background. But background music is nice, in some ways.

SD: So when you started out in academia, in 40 years you’ve seen a development from Sivanandan’s political blackness, via Stuart Hall’s new ethnicities, when maybe in ten years’ time someone will be doing a study of jats born in a particular era who went on to study, say, English? I can understand your reservations about such an enquiry in terms of constant subdivisions…

VSK: No, no, stop. That’s not what I’m saying. That’s not what I’m saying at all! I’m saying that there are certain modes that become dominant, and so I’m not saying there’s a danger in that mode becoming dominant, I’m just saying that it’s interesting what narratives become available to us.

SD: Right, OK.

VSK: So political blackness was a narrative that became available to certain people. I’m not judging here. I’m not saying, ‘oh that was great. We were all together’. No. It was all fractionalised, too. It was exactly the same sociality in many ways, it was just that we had this particular narrative which we could dip into. So now we have this particular one, and in ten years’ time I don’t think it’ll change. I don’t think we’ll have someone saying ‘talk to me about your caste identity’, because I don’t think that will ever become available. Do you see what I’m saying? I think there are always dominant narratives that become available through a real mixture of circumstances, but it’s also historical. It’s also about what works. What is most able to mobilise and work? So political blackness was quite a minor narrative, but it was riding on the back of anti-colonialism, the Left etc. You know there were social processes at work.

Religion now is kind of culture for us here. So I don’t see any other cultural form being able to do that work, if you see what I’m saying? I don’t. I think all of those caste groups exist anyway, but I don’t think they can do the kind of public work, because that requires institutions, right? I mean I might be wrong. But I don’t see it doing that kind of public work. Because the religious identities were all there alongside political blackness. The gurdwaras were still there. The mosques were still there. Everything was still going on. But that wasn’t the form by which mobilisation took place. Now of course Sikhi does mobilise a lot, but who knows what’s going to happen to these 200 gurdwaras over the next 30 years? I don’t think that’s fixed, but I do think this identity will carry on in Britain, as it has for the Jews and Catholics.

I don’t see what other choices people have to be honest. So like once you marry out of your caste, or socially reproduce outside of your caste, your caste doesn’t become sufficient. Whereas your religion can carry on one more generation, right? Similarly if you marry someone from another background, like 25% of Indian marriages are ethnically mixed. And then it might be that those children, for them, that’ll be just something that they remember from their grandparents. I mean Irish Catholics are the best example. Seven-eight million of them in this country, you wouldn’t know! Because they’re so integrated in the mainstream. Yet if you scratch at a Catholic, they will tell you about their history. So I kind of see that route for actually all the religions, but for Sikhism and Hinduism more prominently initially, just because of Islam’s pace in the global order. So again, you see how much temporality I’m doing? Because that’s actually how I’m really now starting to reflect on this sort of stuff. These temporal shifts are really interesting, and what survives and what disappears is really interesting for me to look at. Sorry I stopped you, I know you were in the middle of asking a question, but I did have to stop you there because I just wanted to say that it doesn’t quite work like that, I don’t think.

SD: I mean you have the benefit of wisdom of forty years in the game here, haven’t you? To be able to reflect on movements and processes that have come and gone.

VSK: Yeah. And so from the anti-racist and political blackness aspect, I recognise it. But then I also recognise that whilst I was doing political blackness, at that point my dad was in the gurdwara being a full on Sikh in his Panjabi gurdwaras. His engagement was entirely parallel to mine, yet it was completely public, and it was overlapping. He knew exactly what I was doing. He kind of understood what world I was in. I, maybe, less understood his world. So it’s about what has become more available as a narrative, what’s become more prominent? So when I started in academia, it’s post (Salman) Rushdie, it’s post 1984, so religion is quite prominent already. It’s just not the vehicle that I was mobilising on, but lots of other people were doing that.

SD: Going back to that time again, what did your loved ones and wider family make of your decision to enter academia? Did you work between your chemistry degree and your Masters in anthropology?

VSK: Yeah. I know they were happy when I did a Masters, but maybe they wouldn’t have been if I’d just carried on being a community worker and all that kind of stuff. You know my dad was a teacher. I’ve got educated parents. So being in the Academy was fine. They didn’t quite understand what I was doing, or understand anything that I’d written, but it was fine. So there wasn’t a conflict around going into academia. In fact, it was a relief for them I think, that I decided to do something with my life.

SD: Is there anything else you’d like to add or clarify at this stage before we wrap up?

VSK: No, no. It’s been helpful to me, so thanks for inviting me to talk. Because in a way, I didn’t respond to you initially because I thought ‘what am I going to say to you’? And I think, probably, I’m right. I don’t have much to say to you because I can’t. So what I do want to say is that this narrative doesn’t really help me understand the problems that… but, as I did somewhere in the middle of this conversation… that narrative can do it. It’s just not doing it for me, right? Like I said, I can very easily narrate my life through Sikhi. Pretty easy. It’s not an issue for me. It’s quite a strong, powerful discourse which will explain quite a lot, yeah? But I think now I find it hard to do. If you see what I’m saying?

And that’s why I didn’t respond to your first question. Because in a way, I don’t want to delegitimize that narrative. It’s there. It’s even there for me. I can tell that story and mostly say, ‘yeah, that works’. So that’s what I want to say to you. That in a way, I could have answered all your questions really differently, and it would have been pretty accurate, given our multiple subjectivities, right? I could have given you a subjectivity. I could have told you about the background music, and I kind of thought today I would have been able to talk about it, but I haven’t. So yeah, in a way see how useful this interview is. I won’t be offended if you don’t use it.

SD: No, I love it! I’m definitely going to use it.

VSK: My thought was, I would have talked more about this biography, but I didn’t, which is interesting.