Making sense on a tightrope — Dr. Sunny Dhillon
Dr. Sunny Dhillon is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU), Lincoln, UK. He is the interviewer and editor of this project. Sunny spent five years as a Learning Developer at the University of Leeds (2019–2021), as well as at BGU (2016–2018), where he also worked as a Visiting Tutor in the Theology, Ethics and Society department. Sunny conducted his doctoral research through the Philosophy department at Cardiff University, focussing upon the concept of Utopia. Owing to his background in Philosophy, combined with Academic Literacies, he is well placed to help students critically investigate the ostensibly virtuous practice(s) of formal education.
Sunny’s research interests include Critical Theory (The Frankfurt School), Nietzsche, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Utopia, Philosophy of Education and Academic Literacies. His current research projects include the role of transgressive humour, game play, and the mythical archetype of the Trickster within Higher Education practices.
Key themes below include caste, feeding those in need, and radical Leftist thought.
‘My problem is that I only engage in theoretical navel gazing’, I lament. ‘I don’t believe there’s a clear-cut distinction between theoretical research, and empirical research’, sagely muses my colleague Julian.[1] ‘Perhaps just chat to some academics whose work you’re interested in, around a strand of enquiry that connects you all’? That sounds do-able, even to me as someone who’s only ever published theoretical inquiries in the fields of critical theory and aesthetics. I take Julian’s suggestion and let it simmer. I remember reading engaging texts based on a series of interviews around a central theme: George Yancy’s (1998) African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations, Susan Blackmore’s (2005) Conversations on Consciousness, and Nikesh Shukla’s (2017) Good Immigrant come most readily to mind.
A couple of months after meeting Julian it comes to me: ‘Sikhi! Panjabis! What motivates others from the diaspora to enter in the Arts, Humanities or Social Sciences? In my experience, no one in our diasporic community really ever encourages us to enter these fields. Or do they? I’m sure there are some interesting stories to be discovered’. But before I share those stories, permit me to share my own to better outline my motivations and suitability to lead this project.
Beginnings
My parents are from a mixed-caste, love marriage; in effect, not arranged by families based on mutual caste, class etc. In London 1983, that is not the norm amongst the Sikh-Panjabi communities. My mum’s father, a hard-working Ramgharia carpenter, has not long committed suicide. My maternal grandmother has been sectioned to a psychiatric ward. She passes away when my mum is pregnant with me, in 1984. Epigenetics and theories about how what happens in the womb informs us later in life helps explain a lot of my neuroses. My mum is never accepted by my dad’s Jat family, especially by her mother-in-law.
Born in Southall, 1985, I’m named after the Marlon Brando of Bollywood, Dharmendra Singh Deol. That’s my dad’s pick. Like many South Asians growing up in West London in the 70s and 80s, he finds sanctuary in the cinema. This is where the Panjabi Jat defeats the enemy and wins the affection of his heart’s desire, usually through a mixture of serenading and toxic masculinity. But it’s 1985, Brando is very yesterday, and Al Pacino is the new kid on the block. So, I’m nicknamed ‘Sunny’, after Dharmendra’s own son, who’s the Bollywood Pacino. Cared for during my parents’ working hours by my paternal grandparents, both of whom speak no English, but a mixture of Panjabi and Swahili, English is a foreign tongue until I enter school aged 5. I wet myself on my first day. I don’t know how to ask for the bathroom in English. My mum puts bright blue stickers all over the house: ‘door’, ‘window’, ‘table’. The colonisation of my mother tongue begins in earnest.
‘Why do you anglicise your name, Sunny? Are you trying to hide your real origin?’, asks Jiani, my Chinese co-worker at the University of Leeds, 2019. ‘Um, you know, I never saw it that way before! It’s actually what all my loved ones call me. I only ever got called Dharmender by school teachers and on parents’ evening by my folks’. But before I adopt Sunny as my preferred professional name in 2014, I am known during my university education as ‘Dhillon’.
Before I become Dhillon, I traverse life growing up as a second-generation Panjabi Sikh boy in Southall.[2] I’m in an ethnic majority there, but after my parents’ divorce I move between rural, predominantly Caucasian Gloucester where my mum and younger sister reside, and Southall. I thus have a West Country twang to my accent, and don’t use ‘innit’ for emphasis. Raised by a collective of my paternal grandparents, chacha, chachi, and dad, my language is a mixture of English, Panjabi, and Swahili — for my dad’s family are among the small percentage of Jats who migrated to Kenya from Panjab in the mid twentieth century. A move that is, as one of the interviews muses,[3] likely due to a mixture of poverty and a sense of adventure. Something that my thaia later confirms.
Sikh religious practices, with an emphasis on the Christianised elements of Sikhi reworked as taxonomically codable religion, are prevalent throughout my adolescence. Guru Nanak, in the ever-present Sobha Singh image, is a depiction of God incarnate, much like Jesus is in my Anglican Church of England schooling in Gloucester. My illiterate grandmother, who daily goes to the gurdwara at 3am to help prepare langar teaches me to cover my head, bow to the image of Guru Nanak and to repeat the mool mantar while bobbing back and forth and counting my repetitions on a mala. It relaxes me. I’m ‘doing my prayers’.
Travels
After my secondary schooling and further education, I’m unsure about pursuing HE, and so travel alone to Mexico to volunteer in a school for three months. I speak no Spanish, but pick it up. I work with locals, and socialise with a hotchpotch of locals and upper-middle class English, Scandinavian and North American volunteers, all of whom are white and from nominally Christian backgrounds. On my travels I meet a fellow Dhillon, who’s emigrated from Panjab and has a family who are heavily involved in the 3HO organisation. Returning to the UK, I synthesise these experiences with employment in the world of finance in the City of London, working with mainly Continental Europeans. I also attend residential ‘Sikh Camps’ in East London, and learn, alongside Sikhs of mainly my age from all over the UK, about our ancestral history, how the Indian state ‘hates us’, how ‘we’re warriors’, and should walk with our heads held high in all facets of civic society. An army man, Jagraj, comes to recruit.[4] His pitch is emotionally rebuffed by a young woman who speaks out against the British invasion of Iraq, and how as Sikhs we shouldn’t be partaking in the military, police, or any other organisations charged with forcefully actioning the injunctions of parliament. She’s mocked. I think she’s passionate about her beliefs, but misguided. This is years before I read Foucault. I think about her often, and where she is now. She was so courageous and articulate.
I learn and unlearn much through those camps. The main takeaway is that Sikhi is a rather open book, not constrained by edicts from up on high like in the Abrahamic traditions I’ve learned about throughout my formal schooling. Enacting my charitable drives, I lead the organisation of a Sikh Soup Run, carrying urns of tea and packed sandwiches for the homeless around the Charing Cross region of London. Ever since those early days of helping my grandma in the gurdwara, I recognise the value of feeding others, without expectation. Some receiving the food expect a sermon, or literature about converting and accepting Nanak as their saviour. ‘Just tea and a sarnie. Stay warm’, I reply.
Disillusioned by life in the city, I find myself speculatively applying for, and receiving acceptance to, a BA Spanish degree at Cardiff University. I have neither the grades nor previous experience, but a personal email to the admissions tutor suffices. It’s here, in Wales, where Dylan is a common first name, that ‘Dhillon’ is born. It works, at least phonetically, for the locals, and my majority white, British course mates.[5]
Dhillon
During my time at Cardiff I expand my horizons. After an intercalary year, again volunteering in Latin America, this time in Nicaragua, and then studying for a semester in Spain, I become increasingly politicised in a normative and philosophical sense. ‘Anarquismo o muerte’ (‘Anarchism or death’) graffiti all over my Spanish placement town of Ciudad Real appals me. I always choose the ‘muerte’. But conversations with fellow students from across Europe, as well as travelling across the country, broaden my horizons.
I return to the UK politically awakened, with greater confidence and nous. I break up with my Sikh-Panjabi partner, who whilst in some ways is progressive and radical (she’s heavily involved in the creative arts, for example), on the other hand deeply socially conservative — she can’t possibly tell her father and brother that she is dating me as my different caste identity would bring issues. Not by design, but by my changed disposition, I’m more outward facing, and drawn to dating outside of my own communities.
But my primary new found love is radical left wing thought, and, in particular, the history of Catalonia. I write a research project on why the Cuban Revolution has been a success. I study European Cinema and Fiction modules, I learn more about the Mexican Revolution(s), and foster my understanding of the Zapatistas, and the legacy they draw upon. I undertake a joint honours module that provides perspectives that help me to make better sense of my lived reality: C21st European Intellectual Thought. Going from Nietzsche to Habermas, I’m enraptured. Nietzsche, Foucault, The Frankfurt School. These thinkers are what I’ve been unknowingly hungering after for my whole adult life. They give me the tools to break down hitherto accepted givens. Anarquismo o muerte? Anarquismo, por favor. Three years after my BA, I return to Catalonia to live and work on a farm run by an anarcho-syndicalist. I mix with Utopian Studies circles. I digest Gustav Landauer and Ernst Bloch, as I seek to find the Principle of Hope in all that I encounter.
I go on to do a MA Ethics and Social Philosophy, also at Cardiff, which has a unique department in that it convivially bridges the Analytic — Continental divide. It’s three weeks in and I’m thinking of dropping out to teach English abroad. I’m out of my depth. Other students from a Philosophy undergraduate background are making ‘in’ jokes. I feel like an outsider in so many ways. And then, in what I set up to be my final class, there’s a breakthrough moment. The seminar lead, who’ll go onto become my long-suffering PhD supervisor, Dr. Andrew Edgar, is discussing interwar Germany via the lens of Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of our Times. The debate centres on an urban/rural divide. I make what I feel is a salient point about the sociological factors that led to the success of Nazism in its propaganda campaign across Germany. My point is rebuffed by one of the ‘in’ jokers of the group. Andrew defends my point, I feel emboldened. That defining moment gives me the confidence to continue with the MA. I write a dissertation on why for Nietzsche ‘language fails to render the cosmic symbolism of music’. Overflowing with questions and ideas, I’m compelled to undertake a PhD.
During my doctorate, I meet the person who’ll go on to become my wife. She’s a Bahamian studying Law in the UK. We bond over our othering. She remarks on how she was never ‘black’ until she entered the UK. We get married March, 2014, in Nassau, The Bahamas. I relocate there and work for a food charity. The langar thing never leaves me. It’s what later inspires my interest in the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Club. On our honeymoon in Cuba, my romanticism and hope in communism is tempered. We have a rollercoaster trip, and are received with a combination of warmth, apathy and disdain. It’s very unsettling, as having dreams and illusions shattered invariably is.
My marriage doesn’t work out. Not possessing any religious faith or meta-narrative to fall back on, I fall into a deep depression. My typical recourse to yoga and vipassana meditation are not helping. In desperation, I go off to the Peruvian mountains to undertake a course of mescaline, Ayahuasca, and tobacco infused cleansing rituals. Returning to the UK shell shocked, but embarking on a process of shamanic healing, more psychedelics are in order. Firstly, through Kambo, and then a meeting with Iboga. It gives me clarity and inner peace for a period of 50 days, unlike anything I’ve experienced prior or since. Like all things, it’s impermanent, and I juggle myriad complex feelings thereafter, but having experienced a window of open-ended possibilities.
Suitability
What deems me suitable to lead this project? I’m a diasporic Panjabi Sikh, who undertook a BA Spanish, and then MA and PhD in Continental Philosophy. I’ve worked at five universities in the UK, and am currently a lecturer in Education Studies, at Bishop Grosseteste University, a Cathedral Group institution in Lincoln, UK. I’m the only Panjabi Sikh on the faculty. It’s often like this. I’m not a practising Sikh in any religious sense. I value my Panjabi heritage, and find that it provides a cultural fund of knowledge that often sustains me. At the intersection of the Middle East, South and East Asia, the Panjab has been fertile ground (pun intended) for all manner of social revolutions. From the ‘Sikh Empire’ of Ranjit Singh, to the anti-colonial Anarchism of atheist Bhagat Singh, it’s a land that Tigerstyle’s (2008) album title wonderfully encapsulates: Mystics, Martyrs & Maharajas. Am I essentialising and romanticising? Of course. But much of the music, culture and contradictions continue to fascinate me, even from afar.
Writing this introduction is a sense-making exercise. I now better understand why I embark on this project. I write this, and undertake the interviews, not for any metric, employment obligation or financial gain, but to better make sense of self, through dialogue with others, hoping it affords the participants the same possibility. I’m fascinated by the stories the participants share as to why they entered these disciplines. Is it for financial gain? Unlikely. Is it for familial and peer recognition? Again, probably not. Is it to become part of mainstream academia? Perhaps. I have my hunches. More than anything, I think it’ll have something to do with their desire to make better sense of themselves, their social milieu, and how to possibly enact socially progressive change. As Cornel West puts it in the context of being an African-American Philosopher in the USA, this is a tightrope act.[6]
I’ve not done research interviews before. My intellectual interlocutors are, invariably, deceased German men. My MA and PhD theses involve living with Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Working with real live people, even through the medium of Microsoft Teams, involves processing and negotiating complex emotions on the spot. It requires patience, attention, and focus, in a way that is different to reading Adorno’s Negative Dialectics!
As I undertake the interviews, I think they go well, in the sense that the contributors are generous with their time and narratives. The questions seem sufficiently open, and no one seems to take offence at anything that’s taking place. There are some prickly moments, but these serve to sharpen the discussions and lead them down fruitful avenues. ‘I’m so glad someone’s bitten the bullet and actually done this’, one of the participants tells me. I didn’t realise there was such an appetite for this kind of research.
During the course of the conversations, as a mona[7] I’m increasingly conscious of my appearance. When I’m 8, living in Gloucester against my wishes, exiled from my wider paternal family in Southall, I want to keep my hair and wear a top knot. My grandma, who whenever I’m in Southall go to the gurdwara with at 3am every Saturday to help prepare langar, is persuaded by my parents to talk me out of it for fear of my personal safety. This is a time in the UK in the mid-1990s when Sikh boys who keep their hair are still bullied for their appearance to such a degree that it leads Vijay Singh to hang himself. He is 13.
As a child learning about the massacres, state and civic violence against this relatively small community leaves me wanting to stand up and be counted, at least in appearance. As an adult I don’t partake in the community. I don’t tick the ‘Sikh’ box on any census or application form. I don’t wear a kara (the least most agnostic Sikhs do). I don’t celebrate any of the festivals. I go the gurdwara only for familial necessities, even then not contributing to the golak on principle. Recently, during a friend’s wedding, I felt the walls of the darbar closing in on me and had to leave. This is quite the opposite of a later contributor’s affective feelings when in a similar setting.
What qualifies me to be an empathetic, engaged and worthy interviewer and lead for this project, especially when interviewing fellow Sikh-Panjabis who I’ve never met before, and whose work I’ve only engaged with alongside my core research interests? The point of convergence is a shared heritage, and that we’ve all chosen to pursue an interest in disciplines that often aren’t presented to us as worthy options when growing up.
But we’re also not a monolith. The Western gaze has problematically simplified Sikhi into a religious category. A faith based practice and world philosophy, Sikhi is pluriversal in scope, and non-dogmatic.[8] Various renderings of Sikhi are explored during the interviews, one of which is with an academic who actually did their PhD on different expressions of Sikhi in the UK in the mid noughties.[9]
The participants, whilst maybe use descriptors such as Sikh and/or Panjabi to varying degrees, all have, like myself, that diasporic heritage as point of convergence. That’s a small hook onto which we can hang our chunnis. Similar to Yancy’s 17 Conversations, in which the participants are grouped under the widely accommodating title of ‘African-American Philosophers’. The participants here are similar grouped under a wide title of ‘Sikh Scholars in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences’. Similar to Yancy’s, this is a text about a group of peoples’ experiences, drawing upon a collective fund of knowledge in processing and contributing to the spaces they’ve chosen to — be it by design or accident — inhabit.
Endnotes
[1] Julian Stern, Professor of Education and Religion, Bishop Grosseteste University.
[2] Note the self-selected order.
[3] Prof. Parminder K. Bhachu.
[4] He later becomes a prolific speaker in the wider Sikh community, before dying in 2017, aged 38 of pancreatic cancer.
[5] The Panjabi is much more ‘Tilloh’.
[6] West, C. (2008). Hope on a tightrope: words and wisdom. Hay House Inc.
[7] A Sikh who doesn’t keep their hair as per the five Ks. Curiously all but one of my male and non-binary participants keep a turban and beard. The participant who doesn’t reveals that they used to until recently.
[8] Mandair, A. S. (2022). Sikh Philosophy. Bloomsbury.
[9] Dr. Opinderjit K. Takhar.
