Young, Sikh and Proud: A story about modern Britain.

What my religious brother taught me about people and politics

You can watch Young, Sikh and Proud on BBC iPlayer until 28th January - another week. Here’s the trailer.

The story of Jagraj Singh is a story about modern multi-cultural and multi-faith Britain. It’s about the search for identity and belonging in this country. His country.

In a short space of time, this 38-year-old man with a turban and flowing beard had become a highly influential Sikh leader, largely through YouTube.  He was getting invited to speak all over the world. Some of my friends started watching his videos. People started messaging me to praise him. Watching his meteoric rise in realtime was an odd experience because Jagraj Singh was my younger brother. We looked nothing alike. People couldn't believe we were related.

Initially, I couldn't believe it either. This young lad, who shared a room with me in a small council flat, who taught me about hip-hop and cool clothes as a teenager, who graduated from Oxford University and then joined the British Army as an officer, had become an inspiration to others? Why did he become so religious? And why did he started teaching his faith? What did he find there he couldn't elsewhere?

Jagraj Singh died in July 2017 from stomach cancer. When I got an opportunity to make a film about us, called Young, Sikh and Proud, I wanted to explore these questions. But in the process I got a little bit more than I bargained for.

There are three layers to the story I wanted to tell. I couldn't get it all on TV so this is the explainer.

First, Young, Sikh and Proud is the story of two brothers: the first generation of Sikhs and Asians born and raised in Britain, who took very different paths. These paths reflected many others during that time. However, what my brother did was special and different in important ways.

This is also a story about British Sikhs. My brother and I had clashed quite publicly over a big controversy over interfaith weddings. That raised more questions in the media: were Sikhs becoming intolerant? What was going on within the community? I wanted to address those fears.

I think the third layer of discussion is about this country. Why have so many British-born-and-raised Sikhs, and Muslims, turned to their faith in a largely secular liberal society? Had modern Britain failed them? Are we destined for more clashes between liberals and the religious as some fear?

As I started exploring my brother’s journey and these questions during the film, I realised the villain in this story was me. I had been arrogant and close-minded, stereotyped others and misunderstood my own brother. But I also learned something valuable about people, community and politics.

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Two Brothers

Some of my favourite memories of my brother are from weddings. Our parents are from Punjab, India, and Panjabis love throwing big wedding parties with lots of drinking and dancing, especially to Bhangra – a modernised version of Panjabi wedding music. There was a time, aged 16 or 17, when my brother got so outrageously drunk he threw up inside the hall, behind where we were sitting. It wasn't disgusting as it was funny. There was this unsaid sexist rule in our family that the boys could drink openly while the girls had to be less obvious about it.

Less than a decade later we came back to the same hall for another wedding and my brother, now a fully fledged Sikh, solemnly told us we were wrong to be dancing and drinking. We ignored him and carried on. A decade later, another wedding at the same hall, he didn't preach at anyone. He had become more at ease with himself and others. Like everyone else, he was constantly evolving.

My brother and I are the children of Indian Sikh immigrants. Our parents drummed in us the need to focus on education and be successful in this new land they called home. I studied Economics at Brunel so I could become a stockbroker, he went to study PPE at Oxford University.

But our search for identity at university took us into unexpected directions.

Jagraj was a party animal even before he got there. He wasn't religious and didn't wear a turban then. During his first year at university he went out drinking and partying with abandon. So much so that my mother started to worry. His grades were slipping. His tutors weren't so sure he could continue. Out of desperation she pushed him to go to a Sikh camp. Maybe he'd learn some discipline, she thought.

Jagraj came back an entirely changed man.

He started wearing a turban and growing a beard. He hunkered down and gained discipline. He graduated from Oxford and joined the British Army. The world was his oyster. But the Army wasn't happy about Sikhs who refused to trim their beards and my brother left a few years later. And then, to everyone’s surprise, he gave it all up to teach Sikhism through YouTube. As his channel grew he started getting invites to speak in other countries. When he ran fund-raising drives to sustain his work, money poured in from all over the world.

Going to university in the mid-90s as a British Asian was a simultaneously liberating and confusing experience. Those of us who lived away from home had freedom like never before. You could hang out with the opposite sex! Plan a movie night. Get drunk all night! I loved it. But all of us were also stumbling around looking for our tribe. Who were we? British? Asians? A mix? What did that mean? No one had a definitive answer. But everyone was being pulled in different directions.

I gravitated towards this new hybrid culture being created at clubs, outdoor festivals (melas) and other events. New music stars like Apache Indian, B21, Bally Sagoo and Rishi Rich were being born every week. Goodness Gracious Me was on TV. Films like Bend it Like Beckham and East is East were being released. It felt like the dawn of a new cultural era. Clubbing became a booming business. Six days a week there would be multiple Bhangra club-nights heaving with Asians across the country. Warehouse clubs like 'Bagleys' (Kings Cross, London) would attract up to 4,000 people from all over the country, with Bhangra artists headlining. I still remember the 50,000 watt speakers and the crush of people. Our identity crisis had created a hybrid mix of British and Asian cultures. I felt like I wanted to write about and cover all of this. In short, that’s how I ended up in journalism.

A fairly accurate representation of British Asian clubbing

Whereas I had found my tribe in this new cultural identity as a British Asian, my brother had firmly become a British Sikh. He wasn't alone in this quest either. At universities across Britain, thousands of Sikhs and Muslims (and later, Hindus) were also turning to their faith in their own for identity and belonging. This parallel world existed side-by-side. I saw friends go from being ravers to the religious, and vice versa. Most did both. Everyone was trying to figure it out.

Both my brother and I wanted to redefine what it meant to be British, as a Sikh and an Asian. We wanted to help shape a new British identity.

Ironically, that also led us to clash against each other.

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Half a million British Sikhs

In 2012, an interfaith wedding ceremony at a Gurdwara in Swindon was disrupted by an outside gang of Sikh men who, according to the BBC, used threatening behaviour. That set a precedent. Soon the number of disruptions started escalating all over the country. Sikhs were threatening other Sikhs. Cars and windows were getting smashed. People were getting threats. It was getting ugly. In 2015 my mum got caught up in a disruption and the men threatened her. That is when I got angry and I started writing about them. Soon the national media started reporting on the disruptions, which had started making the whole Sikh community look like intolerant thugs, and the police finally started stepping in. 

Jagraj did not support wedding disruptions but he supported the principle behind them. He said this to a crowd:

The Anand Karaj is a (wedding) ceremony between two Sikhs, and the Guru. Two Sikhs, comitting to the Guru. Together. That is what the Anand Karaj is. You can’t have someone who is not a Sikh doing that. Why is that person bowing down to something they don’t accept? A Sikh can have an inter-faith marriage, but by UK law. You can’t have an inter-faith marriage, by the Gurdwara.

He wasn't wrong. The Sikh 'code of conduct' drawn up in the early 20th century stipulated that only a Sikh man and woman can get married by the traditional wedding ceremony. But this had largely been ignored for decades by Sikhs around the world. Why raise it now? Why in Britain?

When we live as minorities, we are more tempted to hang on to customs and traditions and take pride in our differences. (Jews, as a similar example, have worked hard as minorities to preserve traditions for over a thousand years). In fact, our history is full of stories of Sikhs being persecuted for looking different. Being a minority can also make people worry of being overly influenced by the dominant culture. This is where the desire for a purer interpretation of the faith, free of cultural influences, comes from.

So I understand the desire to protect traditions. But I disagreed for several reasons. Sikhs are going to continue marrying non-Sikhs; it's more inclusive to invite them into the community than turning them away. Some men even distributed leaflets claiming Sikh women were being brainwashed into marrying outside their community. I also rejected the idea that the only way to resolve this was through physical threats and disruptions.

Jagraj started to develop a compromise: a "course" for everyone taking part in the ceremony so they knew what was going on. But I had made a mistake by charging in, guns blazing, forcing everyone into a polarised debate that made compromise harder. He lashed out at me and we stopped talking. The episode didn't make me popular among Sikh activists. But I wasn't here for popularity. My job as a journalist is to shine light on tensions and changes in our communities. I'm not sorry for raising the controversy, though I could have raised it differently, because Sikhs are better off talking about them openly than letting a few hotheads dictate everything.

The interfaith weddings controversy illustrated how people in minority communities are pulled in different directions as they figure out how to fit in. British Jews, Muslims and Hindus have and will go through the same. We have an obligation to discuss these tensions openly and resolve them as part of creating a new British identity.

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67 Million Britons

The clash between my brother and I encapsulated the tension between religious people and secular liberals. We have differences over how we see the world, over ideas such as blasphemy, freedom to practice religion and free speech. During the film I met Sikhs who didn’t feel at home in Britain and wanted to live in an independent Sikh state. I also met others who were happy in the British Army and Police forces. I met Sikhs who saw their faith as "spiritual nourishment" and others felt it was an outlet for activism. They are just different journeys in the search for belonging and identity.

But are these journeys irreconcilable? Are more clashes inevitable?

This is why Jagraj Singh’s story is important I think. I wanted to show that his British identity shaped him throughout his life. Some Sikhs want to remember him only as a devout Sikh. But he was very much a British success story too. Jagraj doesn’t just become a Sikh and leave his Britishness behind. In fact it's central to his journey. He has the confidence to talk in public thanks to his Oxford education and British Army experience. He would not have become the person he did without going to Oxford or joining the Army. It was an integral part of his identity.

But there was something else I learned from my brother about the world. 

He came to the realisation that to help and change people he had to empower them not shame them. He had tried to shame us into not dancing at weddings and it didn’t work. He discussed Sikhism as a means to empower oneself, to improve as a human being. And he went further: you empowered yourself by being selfless in the service of others. A true Sikh helps other people, he would say.

A lot of preachers teach faith by shaming people. Many others teach faith by denigrating others - by giving their followers a sense of superiority. This is the stereotype we see of religious preachers.

But my brother wanted to empower people through Sikhism by encouraging them to serve others. Instead of offering them pride and arrogance he wanted to fill them with love for others. That is what set him apart from others. That is what made him such an inspiration and a pioneer.

Jagraj Singh showed that a faith identity did not have to be incompatible with others. More importantly, he showed how it could be a source of love and charity instead of divisiveness and conflict.

My greatest regret is that I only discovered this about him after he died.

You can watch Young, Sikh and Proud on BBC iPlayer until 28th January 2021 - another week.