The Man who would be English!

Once upon a time in the 70s in Sheffield, 15-year-old Daljit Nagra would work at his father’s grocery shop by the day and pen song lyrics at night.

British-Asian poet Daljit Nagra holds fort on identity and other crises with humour

Once upon a time in the 70s in Sheffield, 15-year-old Daljit Nagra would work at his father’s grocery shop by the day and pen song lyrics at night. Inspired by The Beatles, The Kinks and The Clash, the British-Punjabi boy wrote songs about being economically disadvantaged, a subject far removed from the poems he would eventually write fifteen years later. In India to tour with his award-winning first collection of poems Look We Have Coming To Dover! (Tranquebar, Rs 150), Nagra speaks enthusiastically about growing up in England, being Punjabi, being a school teacher and above all, being a poet.

“My father worked in a crockery factory and my mother at a hospital in the laundry department. I studied in the local school and didn’t read my first poem till I was in my late teens,” says Nagra, 41, who acknowledges William Blake for his first brush with poetry. Growing up in a predominantly white neighbourhood required Nagra and his elder brother to be smart, to escape getting attacked by local goons. “I was the OK kid, I had white friends and I managed to fit in. I played football, it makes you more acceptable,” says Nagra, who led a double life as the Indian son at home and the White boy outside, till he left to study English at the University of London at the age of 21.

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While reading the works of Shakespeare and Milton, Nagra noticed how the course did not include a single brown-skinned or coloured author or poet. “I felt that there was nobody speaking for me. I began writing my verses more out of a need to tell the history of a people, and to tell it the way it happened” says Nagra.

Look We Have Coming To Dover! became the first ever collection of poems to be picked up by Britain’s most renowned poetry publishers, Faber and Faber after the title poem won the Forward Prize for best individual poem in 2004, an event that made Nagra a house-hold name across Britain. In his 31 poems, Nagra writes of the British-Punjabi experience in English, Punglish and Punjabi-accented English taking the reader along a riotous ride through themes dealing with racism, identity, alienation, poems that range from laugh-out-loud to quiet and sombre.

Meet the Punjabi mother of In a White Town, who “No one ever looked without looking again/ at the pink kameez and balloon’d bottoms”; and the giddy shopkeeper in Singh Song! above whom “high heel tap di ground/ as my vife on di web is playing wid di mouse”, characters who Nagra calls family.

Now as an English teacher for the sixth form at a Jewish school in West London, Nagra takes classes twice a week since poetry has allowed him to make a living out of it. His students are fans of the “Nagrameister”, Nagra humbly acknowledges so. “Poetry is healthy in Britain, a poorer cousin of the novel in terms of advances and prize money, but it is possible for a published poet to do readings, performances and earn a fair bit,” adds Nagra. Once an under-confident closet poet, today Nagra performs his poetry for charity readings and schools, switching accents and mannerisms with ease. And though poets will never pocket as much as a Booker prize winner, Nagra is sure of a growing audience who appreciates verse.