Max Russel

Jeevan thank you very much. First thing I wanted to ask you is what motivated you to get involved in this project in the first place?

Jeevan Sanghera

So my family are Ugandan Asian, on my dad's side, and there's several different reasons why I wanted to do the project, primarily because my family are Ugandan Asian but also because I did history at university and I really had an interest in are Ugandan Asian history, particularly in connection with concepts of race, migration, gender, diaspora, and all of that, and I wrote my dissertation about the experiences of women in Uganda leading up to the expulsion and obviously I found that this project was going on, I think you contacted me actually, which was very coincidental that it was going on at the same time I guess the Ugandan expulsion’s 50th anniversary coincided as well, and so that was part of it, and also my grandad was quite ill with dementia at the time and he was the one who originally was in Uganda and I really got into the concept and discourses around memory and remembering, because obviously my grandad was losing his memory and there was a lot of things that I wanted to know about him that I didn't know and I probably will never know, so it spurred my interest in doing oral history and collecting memory and considering memory to make sure that maybe other people's grandparents memories and parent’s memories were recorded, because I'll never have that with my grandfather. But it's also triggered me to talk to my grandma and my dad as well about these histories and all our other family that lived in Uganda, and also other family members who had different migrations histories as well because it's important to remember, and I think there's a lot of layers to the Ugandan Asian expulsion that need to be understood through people's lived experiences as well, and obviously with age and different generations going essentially it's important to keep that information because it was such an important event and has a lot of ramifications in terms of mental health but also in terms of refugee law in this country. So broadly that is what spurred my enthusiasm about joining the project.

Max Russel

That's fantastic. I think you also touched on there the documenting of people's stories and that was something that when you attended the training day, if you would agree, you saw other people that were there present, that was also a passion behind other people there, is to have their family’s, but also their community’s, history recorded as those generations get older and no longer remember, or aren’t around in general. In terms of that, you have oral history experience with your own thesis, how was it attending a training day where the focus was oral history techniques? How was it meeting other people from a similar background, and also being a part of the project in that sense?

Jeevan Sanghera

I think it was really interesting because obviously a lot of my background in oral history is through university, attending lectures, reading endless endless journal articles about oral history methodologies, and I've never really had a workshop specifically, I've never really had someone actually talk through it. We had lectures but that was very much in a lecture context, whereas a workshop feels much more, I guess personal, you can ask questions and also the lectures I went to were very broad, they weren't particularly specifically aimed at Ugandan Asian history. And what was really important for me, and what I felt really grateful for, was that the space felt very comfortable, everyone had similar backgrounds and similar experiences and they grew up with similar stories from their family members and there's a sense of relatability amongst the group, and everyone had already had that sensitive approach to what this project was actually about, by understanding that there's a level of migration trauma and there's many layers of complexity to South Asian identity in all its forms, whether it's South Asian people who migrated from India or South Asians who migrated from other settler colonies, or whether they’re indent labourers, or economic migrants, to these spaces and I think that was a very good experience to be in that space, and to specifically look at how these complex forms of identities and people's different ideas about these complex forms of identity can affect how I view this whole process, because obviously I've done oral history but I don't know everything about it, and also people who maybe have never done it before might add something completely new that I would never think of, because it's very easy to get stuck in the books and stuck in a methodology, but lived experience really does change an approach and it does add a level of nuance to a research method and people's questions and people’s processes of thinking and their ideas and what they thought was important to ask was different amongst the whole group, and it gave more ideas for what to ask in interviews, and what lines of thought to follow in these interviews, which things to probe on, which things perhaps not probe on, and let someone’s silence resonate. So it was just a very enlightening experience, and it was interesting to hear all the different viewpoints and also to hear different people’s stories and people's own identities and how that affected how they got to partaking in the project as well.

Max Russel

I think those are some really good points. In terms of, you mentioned the interviews, so you did three interviews for the project, how was that in terms of were there similarities or differences that came through those three interviews that have sort of stuck with you in terms of maybe both the personal experiences the journeys and also maybe the relation to Uganda that those people have?

Jeevan Sanghera

I think what was very interesting was that all three interviews were very very very different, and there were different views expressed, there were different levels of attachment to Uganda expressed, some people said that they had a real tie to Uganda and they felt really connected to it and they want to go back, or they had gone back, some people felt maybe a sense of resentment towards Uganda and what happened, well not to Uganda as a space but to the political situation, and there were some people who said that it was the best thing that happened [leaving] and that they'd never go back to Uganda because they think their life here is much better, and I think it was said that it was a blessing essentially, and there was a lot of nuance and no ones’ opinions quite aligned on the surface, but I think there was a general level of an expression of disjuncture and displacement and a feeling of being pulled out of a comfortable situation as most of them had quite a well-off situation in Uganda, and then having to resettle and experience all of that in the UK was quite jarring as an experience, especially because most of them were very young when they moved. There were similarities and there were differences, I think you get that in the interviews through what people say, but in terms of the actual interview process itself they were all very different, which you will hear in the archive. Najma’s interview went very seamlessly and that was great whereas unfortunately Mayur’s interview, due to some kind of logistical issues we ended up having to do the interview in a Sainsbury’s café, so there's just loads of noise and that was quite jarring to hear whilst your interviewing someone, the clattering of dishes, so that added perhaps a layer of texture to the soundscape of the interview, it was quite comedic I guess in it's, obviously a serious topic, and then it had some interesting sound effects, and then Kalpana’s was online and I think it's interesting doing interviews online because you can't see the person, it's a different kind of interview I guess, but all three were really interesting people to talk to and they had a lot to say, and they had a lot of memories to share, and it was nice to talk to all of them and hear their different opinions on what happened, but also I think what was nice was they talked about the things that weren't just the expulsion but memory of living, and the day-to-day lifestyle, and they have memories of living in Uganda that are theirs and you can kind of imagine in their memory Uganda is generally seen as a paradise, and I've seen that across previous oral history interviews that I’ve done as well, and I think it's interesting how they almost always touch on the fact that as soon as they got off the plane in London somewhere they were absolutely freezing. But I think across all the interviews there were so many different layers and there was so much to unpack and that was really interesting, and also I was very grateful that they shared that information as well.

Max Russel

I think that's, from my perspective as well, one of the main things about this project is we wanted to not just focus on expulsion as you said, and I think that's all something you did with your own thesis is looking at the experience of women in Uganda pre-expulsion, because there were generations South Asians in East Africa. Too often in the past the history around this subject has just focused on the violent upheaval in 1972 and doesn’t really look at life, and as you said day-to-day life. So to add to that point how does, compared to your own family’s history, through those three interviews were there things that came out that resonated with what your family has also said about Uganda, or maybe also stuff that was actually quite different?

Jeevan Sanghera

So there was a lot of similarity I think in general, the feeling of expressing having to leave somewhere, and those feelings of loss, and that feeling of resentment and that feeling of upheaval is very much a common thread amongst the interviews I did for the project but also the conversations I’ve had with my family. I think the level of emotional expression perhaps is slightly different, obviously my family know me a lot more and we’ve had a lot of conversations for hours and hours on end, for years, and I think the depths of understanding of my own grandparents’ experience for example and my dad's experience that I have is obviously going to be a lot deeper and [they are] probably more comfortable expressing the more traumatic aspects and the more emotional trauma that they've held from all this upheaval, but also particularly through my grandmother's story because she left India to marry my granddad and moved to Uganda. Her experience was very different to, I think all the people I interviewed for the project were born in Uganda or moved [there] young, whereas she had several upheavals in her life which is a really traumatic thing to occur, especially because she moved to Uganda when she was in her late teens to get married and I think she was kind of freely able to express that, and I guess the level of what you talk about and the level of understanding changes when you know someone because there's certain things that you don't have to explain and then you don't get tired of having to talk about it too much. But what I thought really stood out to me, and I've heard this spoken about in previous interviews which I did for my dissertation, but I think it was Najma who spoke about this particularly, was this really nuanced understanding of Uganda and what happened in Uganda, she didn't express her experience in a resentful way towards Ugandan people, or towards what was going on in Uganda politically, because she really understood that there was a really really complicated racial system in Uganda that really did not benefit black people at all, and that kind of tripartite system where South Asians are already ambiguously positioned in that tripartite racial system, they're already the middling kind of people, and obviously there's a class based, potentially caste and religious based aspect to that, that needs to be considered as well, it's not just race that was the issue, there’s intersecting social positionalities that need to be considered. But what was really important was that she recognised that the expulsion was not just something that happened out of the blue and it wasn't just people being resentful because South Asians had money or it wasn't like blah blah blah, all the different reasons you come across, it was partially because South Asians were part of an exploitative racial system, and I think that really stood out because what that does is take into account the fact that, yes you have indentured labourers that are being taken into this colonial society, but then in the long term they have benefited while still being an exploited labour force, and then you have economic migrants who again become an exploitative force, I think Ugandan Asians owned 90% of Uganda's wealth before the expulsion, it was a really high percentage I can’t remember the exact percentage, but I think that level of nuance was very interesting and that was one of the key standout things, and it didn't come across in all the interviews. I think a lot of people held different opinions about why the expulsion happened, and it is a complex situation, but personally having accessed all the information that I have I really do think that that kind of racial system is very poignant to take into consideration when considering what happened, and when doing research on Ugandan Asians, but it also doesn't mean that their experiences of trauma and the expulsion shouldn't be taken into account, there's layers, and I think that was a very poignant and standout movement that was not perhaps expressed in every interview, but also people's experiences, it's really understandable why the expulsion and resentment about it is very prominent in people’s minds. I think that was interesting as you have these threads that go in different directions across all of these interviews and you get different opinions and that's I guess what the point of this project is, that everyone has their own opinion to express and their own experiences to express and I think that's really valuable to get that, especially from people who lived through the expulsion themselves, but also can express how the quotidian life pre-expulsion kind of lead into that.

Max Russel

I think those are brilliant points about what comes across in these interviews, and as you said the very nuanced and layered issues that were present there and still have to be explored more. Finally adding to that then, what would you say in terms of this history as a whole, Ugandan Asian history, the experience, how do you think we move forward with it in terms of how it’s studied, but also in how it’s shared? What do you see as the next step that’s important to make this history public and well known?

Jeevan Sanghera

That’s a very good question because as a historian I'm very aware that history is in an existential crisis at the moment, well always has been, about how to disseminate information and what it means. I think in terms of it’s importance Uganda Asian history has a lot to say about colonisation, obviously that's a very big topic at the moment and it should be, it needs to be considered as part of how colonisation has shaped spaces, how it’s shaped diaspora, how it’s shaped movement, migration, the ramifications of colonisation, and how that created really really unstable political systems and unstable societies whereby people's kind of positionality was both rigidly categorised and incredibly tenuous at the same time. Essentially it could be a case study for all sorts of things, racism, class systems, gender systems, it could be looking at caste in Uganda and also how race and caste intertwined and became a new social system and how that relates to Indian social systems broadly, not just Indian but South Asian social systems as well, it's got a lot of layers. There's so much [for] postcolonial theory, postcolonial studies, and also colonial studies [that could benefit from studying it], because I guess it still relates to settler colonialism as well ,and there's so much that it can add. Not no attention, but not enough attention has been paid to it, and I found this through my dissertation where it was really hard to find scholarship that was not just about the expulsion, or not just about resettlement in Britain. I think the history of Uganda before the expulsion is really important as well, and I think how that shapes the expulsion and all the discourse around that is really important, and Idi Amin about how that occurred, but also I think it is really important to understand that what happened after the expulsion in Uganda was also terrible and also needs to be understood, because that affected a lot of black Ugandans, and also these are not mutually exclusive events, they are very much intertwined and it will influence scholarship on that as well, and modern economics, and how South Asians that have gone back to Uganda still have a pretty big monopoly on the financial workings of the country. So in terms of the importance it's far raining, there's so many different things, you could write 1000 PhDs on it, and I want to write a PhD on it but I have absolutely no clue which way I want to go about it.

So I now work in heritage, so I'm very much in the public history side of things, and it's really hard to kind of figure out exactly how best to disseminate information especially around topics of colonisation, empire, relating to indentured labour, because there's so much backlash against it, there's so much you have to deal with, so many things that you have to overcome, barrier wise, to get these things across. There's a lot of public funding that you might have to rely on that might not necessarily be given to people who are telling stories or telling narratives that acknowledge what actually happened, instead of trying to skirt over it ,but in terms of such histories I think it's really important that they're as accessible as possible. So obviously a lot of the interviews from this project have gone up online as podcasts, but they're also in archives. So archives are often inaccessible for people, you have to travel to them or you don't know what's where, and if you don't know how to use an archive it’s inhabiting, but Spotify [and] podcast apps are so much easier for people to access. Obviously that still relies on some kind technological literacy, or you know there's other issues like digital poverty. I think as well the events we had [Ugandan Asians – A Living History] at the migration museum, and there’s traveling events, we had the exhibitions in Leicester and Peterborough, I think that's really great because it's a physical space that's accessible to people across the country that might not have access to online archives or online information in the same way, it livens up things because you can physically see what happened and you can perhaps read stories that are displayed. So yeah in summary I think it's cool that these exist and I think it's a great way to kind of broaden accessibility to the history of Uganda Asians.

Max Russel

I mean I completely agree, I think a multimedia approach to it really allows for different levels and emotions and stories to come through. Thank you very much for those reflections and your time, and for being part of this project.

Jeevan Sanghera

Thank you so much for having me on the project as well. It's been really, I don't know quiet the right way to phrase it, it's been a very interesting experience, obviously through talking to people, but also I think it's really nice to have met a lot of people who have Uganda Asian roots, because there's not a ton of people still about that remember these histories or know of these histories, and it's nice that people are now talking about it, and sharing it, and talking about their memories, and their families, and yeah hopefully more intergenerational familial conversations will be going on because of it as well.