Context: Daljit Nagra and ‘Singh Song



Context: Daljit Nagra and ‘Singh Song!’

Daljit Nagra (1966–)

Daljit Nagra was born in London in 1966 of Punjabi Indian parents. He has been widely acclaimed as one of the most exciting poetic voices of his generation for his collection Look We Have Coming to Dover! which won the prestigious Forward poetry prize in 2007. His poetry is vividly concerned with the experiences of ‘Asian-ness’: racism, arranged marriages, corner shops and faith.

However, he is clearly in between two cultures – ‘my identity is in flux’ he once commented, and ‘Britishness’ is also a central theme in his work. Nagra says of his poetry that he tends to use traditionally ‘English’ poetic forms, but ‘what’s speaking on the page is quite brown. I like the idea of this splurge of…darkness’.

Of his first collection, he suggests that it is ‘obsessed with Asian-ness’ because ‘there hasn’t been a lot of successful poetry about the Indian working classes’. He also says that he could have chosen to describe the Indian community in ‘half a dozen poems or…sod it, and go all out. The most Indian way I could think of was to do monologues and voices’. These monologues and voices are particularly powerful.

Nagra moved to Sheffield as a teenager where his family experienced racist attacks and repeated burglaries of their cornershop. He was also targeted for his ‘southern’ accent. He initially planned a career in medicine, but decided to study English at university, much to his parents’ confusion: ‘You already speak English,’ his mother said.

After becoming an English teacher, Nagra turned to writing poetry in his thirties, and counts Milton, Browning and Blake among his poetic influences. Nagra wants ultimately to be regarded as a British poet rather than an Asian one: ‘Whatever else, the tool I am using is the British language. I was born here, I grew up here.’

‘Singh Song!’

The bittersweet story of the carefree, careless shopkeeper in ‘Singh Song!’ is told in the first person through a carefully crafted idiolect. At first glance, the voice appears almost comically imitative, like a Goodness Gracious Me parody, but closer reading reveals its subtlety – more of a celebration of this distinctive speech, than a simple stereotype.

This foregrounding of unheard or rarely heard voices is one of Nagra’s key ambitions, and he often uses a hybrid, accented language which imitates the English spoken by Indian immigrants whose first language is Punjabi, sometimes called ‘Punglish’.

‘Singh Song!’ is, like many of his monologues, concerned with the themes of racism, belonging, alienation and assimilation, but in some ways it is also a romantic urban love poem. Nagra’s humorous verse plots the passionate sensuality of the shopkeeper and his wife against the ‘concrete-cool’ precinct setting, where they ‘stare past di half-price window signs’ and look at the moon.

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Bibliography

guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jan/18/poetry.race

en.wiki/Daljit_Nagra

books/2007/03/daljit-nagra-dover-poem-indian

bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2005/09/29/071005_nagra_punglish_feature.shtml





poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=10587

guardian.co.uk/books/2007/feb/04/poetry.features

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