![]() Sanghera describes his own journey in making sense of the imperial past, which began in 2019 when he visited Punjab-where his family is from-while making a documentary for the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar, where British forces killed hundreds of Indians gathered in a city park. Confronting this past is crucial to contending constructively with the United Kingdom’s public history, racism, relations with Europe, pandemic management, and more. Sanghera sardonically proposes an “Empire Day 2.0”-an update to the pro-empire holiday that was part of the British calendar from 1902 to 1958-to promote awareness about an imperial past that continues to elude British consciousness, despite the innumerable quotidian ways in which it infuses the country’s language, economics, food, state institutions, demography (including Sanghera’s very existence as a Sikh Briton), and more. ![]() ![]() But as the British journalist Sathnam Sanghera drives home in his new book, Empireland, widespread ignorance about the past has made coming to terms with it exceedingly difficult. ![]()
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