The Boy with the Topknot

About the book

The Boy with the Topknot is Sathnam Sanghera's 2008 memoir of growing up as the son of Punjabi Sikh immigrants in Wolverhampton, England. It is the story of a childhood shaped by family secrets, and of the day he learned, in his mid-twenties, that his father and his eldest sister had been living with schizophrenia, a fact nobody had ever told him.

The book was first published in 2008 by Viking under the title If You Don't Know Me by Now. A year later Penguin republished it in paperback as The Boy with the Topknot, the title under which it became widely known. It was Sanghera's first book, written after he left his job at the Financial Times, moved back to Wolverhampton and spent about two years interviewing his family to piece together their history.

The memoir moves between two worlds: the Wolverhampton of his 1980s childhood and the London of his adult life as a journalist. The tension between them, and the secrets that connected them, is what drives the book.

What is the topknot in the title?

The topknot is the joora, the knot in which a young Sikh boy's uncut hair is tied on top of the head. The book opens in 1979, when Sanghera is three years old, with his mother combing his hair each morning and tying it up before school.

At fourteen, without telling his mother, he went to a hairdresser's and had the topknot cut off. The haircut is the book's central image: a private act of rebellion, a break with the visible sign of his Sikh upbringing, and the start of the double life he would lead as a teenager and young man, Punjabi at home and something else outside it.

Years later, the title takes on a second meaning. The boy with the topknot is also the boy who knew nothing about his own family, whose parents kept their hardest truths from him until he was old enough to ask.

The secret at the heart of the book

In his mid-twenties Sanghera learned that his father, Jagjit, had schizophrenia. The illness had shaped his whole childhood, but no one had ever named it to him. His father could be violent, and his mother bore the worst of it, while the family blamed her, claiming she had put a curse on him.

His mother, Surjit, is at the heart of the book. She had been brought to Britain as a teenager in 1969 to marry Jagjit, and soon realised he was mentally ill, though no one around him recognised it. Once he was stabilised on medication he became the kind, gentle man Sanghera knows, but he was unable to work. Surjit worked as a seamstress at home and then in a factory, supporting the family and raising four children.

Later Sanghera realised his eldest sister, Puli, had schizophrenia too. He has said his mother cried while she told her story, and he cried while he wrote it, and that she feels vindicated because people now know what happened after she was blamed for so long.

The book also reports what Sanghera learned about schizophrenia itself, through interviews with doctors and experts, and takes on the myths that surround mental illness in South Asian families, where it is often hidden rather than discussed.

A double life in London

Sanghera was born in Wolverhampton in 1976, to parents who had emigrated from Punjab in 1968. He went to Wolverhampton Grammar School, then to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a first-class degree in English in 1998. He joined the Financial Times the same year and stayed until 2006, moving to The Times in 2007.

In London he led what he calls a secret double life: white girlfriends his family knew nothing about, and a reluctance to accept an arranged marriage. The memoir is frank about the guilt and the comedy of that split, and about how little his two worlds understood each other.

That honesty is part of why the book struck a chord. Readers wrote to him in their hundreds, many saying it was the first time they had read about mental illness in a British Asian family, and about the pressure to keep up appearances at any cost.

ਲੇਖਕ

Sathnam Sanghera is a British author and journalist of Punjabi Sikh heritage. The Boy with the Topknot was his first book. He went on to write the novel Marriage Material (2013), set among Wolverhampton's Punjabi community, and the history books Empireland (2021), Stolen History (2023) and Empireworld (2024).

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2016. He writes for The Times, where he has been a columnist and feature writer since 2007.

Reception and legacy

The memoir was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2008 and for the PEN/Ackerley Prize in 2009, and won the Mind Book of the Year award in 2009. The author and memoirist Blake Morrison called it "a real one-off".

Not everyone welcomed it. Some in the community said Sanghera had brought shame on the community or betrayed the Sikh religion by writing about his family so openly. The book has also drawn criticism, including from writer Kavita Bhanot, for framing the cutting of the topknot as an escape into assimilation. The argument over the book is part of its legacy: it forced a conversation about mental illness, family secrets and identity that many British Asian families had avoided.

In 2017 the BBC turned the memoir into a 90-minute single drama for BBC Two, broadcast on 13 November 2017. Directed by Lynsey Miller and adapted by Mick Ford, it starred Sacha Dhawan as Sanghera, with Anupam Kher as his father and Deepti Naval as his mother. The Guardian and The Telegraph each gave the film three stars out of five, and Anupam Kher was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 2018 BAFTA Television Awards. The film won the Diversify TV Excellence Award, Best TV Programme at the 2018 Asian Media Awards and Best Single Drama at the RTS Midlands Awards.