Redefining Belonging: A Q&A with Sonny Singh

For readers in southern Arizona: the film discussed below, From Here, will be showing in Ajo on April 14 at the Ajo Plaza Rec Room at 7 p.m., in Tucson at the Loft Theatre on April 15 at 2 p.m., and in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona University on April 17 at 4 p.m. Click here for other screenings in New York, California, and in Europe.

Redefining Belonging: A Q&A with Sonny Singh

The Sikh musician and educator speaks about how children of immigrants respond with creativity, activism, and spiritual practice to an oppressive immigration regime.

There is the breaking news on the border. And there is the everyday grind and long-term impact the border has on people that rarely gets a mention in the media. The moving, eloquent documentary film From Here follows four children of immigrants for 10 years, capturing the racism and xenophobia that so often accompanies exclusionary and oppressive immigration systems in both the United States and Europe.

From Here also captures how these protagonists, like Sonny Singh, whom I interview below, have responded with creativity and activism to this and have, as the film’s website puts it, redefined belonging. Sonny is a musician with the band Red Baraat. In 2022 he released a solo album called Chardi Kala—in which he returns to the Sikh devotional music of his childhood (which we discuss at length below). Sonny has also spent decades working as a popular educator on justice issues. This is a written excerpt of a longer interview I did with Sonny that will appear next week in a podcast. So stay tuned for more.

What was your role in From Here?

Christina [Antonakos-Wallace], the director, and other collaborators tried to document a lot of key moments in in the work that I was doing musically, politically, organizing-wise—personally as well, the struggles that I was going through—and telling my story in that way. Christina [had an idea to in 2008] tell the stories of children of immigrants who are challenging narratives of xenophobia, nationalism, white supremacy, not only in the U.S. but also in Germany. So the film documents two of us here in New York City, where I live, and have been living for the last almost 20 years, and two in Berlin. I was immediately drawn to that sort of transnational framing. … These systems that we’re up against, of division and militarized borders and exclusion, are really global phenomena.

What was the story the film told about you?

It was a story of a young Sikh musician in the United States, claiming that space on stages and asserting my identity in that way. But also it’s a story of a lot of organizing and advocacy and education work I have done in the Sikh community in New York. …

The work that I did with the Sikh Coalition, for the couple of years I was there, focused on youth organizing around the issue of racist bullying and harassment in schools. And so you see a lot of these young people in the film telling their stories, engaging in conversation with me, and their stories are my stories, too, because racist bullying deeply shaped my childhood growing up as a turban-wearing Sikh in Charlotte, North Carolina, long before 9/11. These issues are nothing new. And so it was deeply personal work for me.

So we go back and forth from the advocacy and organizing work I was doing with these young people, and then sharing some of my own reflections and stories to the camera of my own experiences as a child, but also as an adult, because at that time—and still to some extent but especially during the time of the early years she was filming between like 2008 to 2012–13—the amount of racism I was experiencing just on an interpersonal level in New York City was very, very high, almost daily at times.

Yes, there was that part in the film where I think she even captured a man walking past you and saying something very racist.

He called us pieces of S-H-I-T [spelling out the word]. I’m not sure if we’re allowed to curse here. So I’ll leave it at that.

One sense I got from From Here was the omnipresence of the border. We didn’t physically see the international boundary in the film, and yet its oppressiveness is felt throughout. Sonny, I know in your case that you lived for a while in southern Arizona, so you know about the borderlands as well. When you think about the border—and take an expansive view of it—what is it that you think? What does it mean to you?

Generally, the border makes me feel icky. It makes me feel angry. We feel the border in the film, even though we don’t see it, because it relates to all sorts of manifestations of racism and white supremacy and xenophobia that just exist in our society on an ideological and cultural and a policy level even when we’re nowhere near the border.

But as somebody who came of age in Arizona—I lived in Phoenix for middle school and high school, and Tucson in college—I also see the border as this place of possibility on a cultural level and a political level. La frontera is such a fascinating place to live and to grow and to organize, and I was so deeply inspired by and shaped by a lot of the organizing that was happening around the border to challenge these sorts of racist, hateful, divisive impositions of the border, and see it more as a place of possibility.

When I go back just a generation, both sides of my family were born on what now is the Pakistan side of the border between India and Pakistan, a border that didn’t exist before 1947, when India and Pakistan got their independence from the British Empire, and this very artificial border was cut right in the middle of Punjab, which made both sides of my family refugees and caused one of the biggest mass migrations in human history in that short a period of time. There were hundreds of thousands of people killed on both sides, with Sikhs and Hindus fleeing West Punjab into East Punjab, and below into India and Muslims from East Punjab and other parts of India fleeing into Pakistan. Just a horrifying divide and conquer—an artificial border created really ultimately by the British. That’s how those lines were drawn.

Thinking about our discussion about the border and all that it entails, was music a solace to you?

Yeah, definitely. I think, growing up as somebody who experienced a lot of pretty overt racism and bigotry, I think music saved my life in many ways. To have that outlet to channel my emotions. I’m a trumpet player and a singer primarily, and I’ve been doing both of those things since I was a child, and I think that honestly did help me stay grounded in those toughest of times, and very much still now.

It’s absolutely a solace. It’s where I process my emotions. It’s my therapy for myself. It’s my meditation practice. It’s my spiritual practice. I happen to come from a spiritual community where music is pretty central. So that was in me from even before I started going to school I was already exposed to music as a spiritual practice, which for me is ultimately about how do we stay grounded and connected in this really fucked-up world. And find the strength within us, as individuals and collectively, to change this fucked-up world into something that is more just and liberatory for all of us. Somewhere where you cannot just survive, but thrive. Blowing air through my trumpet, that resonance, has always been a really important part of how I get through it.

Chardi Kala, the name of your new album, means “ever-rising spirit.” You have also mentioned that in the Sikh tradition, there’s no division between the spiritual and the political, and that the political act of fighting for justice for every single person is a divine act. Hearing you say that in another interview not only touched me, but it inspired a sort of a radical imagination on my part. I wonder, how do you apply it to the border and immigration conversation we’ve been having?

I think my new album was a lifetime in the works, in a way, because as a child, my first musical outlet was playing Sikh devotional music, or Kirtan, as we call it, and I never really explored that tradition or revisited it as a so-called professional musician, which I supposedly am now, and so I think this was seeping beneath the surface for a long time. And you know, a few years back, a couple of years into the Trump administration and we’re seeing more and more sort of far-right and fascistic leaders being elected around the world, like Bolsonaro, Duterte and Modi. And it was feeling a sort of desperation and hopelessness that I found myself returning to a lot of the Kirtan I learned as a kid, and I dug in a little bit more into the into the meanings and translations of a lot of these verses that were written 4, 5, 600 years ago, and felt their presence today. Because these issues are actually nothing new, and our people, my ancestors, have been trying to make sense of it and change it for a long time.

And that’s largely why the Sikh community exists. So-called Sikhism as a faith community exists because it was not only a spiritual movement when it started, you know, back in the late 1400s, but it was also a political revolution. It was a denunciation of all forms of oppression and tyranny, and really a calling out of all the hypocrisy done in the name of so-called God. Done in the name of the various terms that people refer to the divine as, God being one of those names.

In South Asia, for example, caste oppression is so insidious, so old, and so the Sikh movement was born as an anti-caste revolution. Because, you know, the caste system is something that attempts to say that a few people are on a much higher level than everybody else, and if you’re born a Dalit, you will be a Dalit for your whole life, a so-called untouchable. You’re like a complete outcast, and that’s your karma, right? That’s because God said so. And Guru Nanak, who is the founder of the Sikh faith, and those who came to be known as Sikhs were like, “This makes no sense.” The divine is in all of us, and that’s not just an idea, that’s a call to action, right? So if the divine is in all of us, I’m gonna do everything in my power. I’m going to dedicate my life to ensuring that you’re not exploited, to make sure you’re treated with respect and dignity. And so that’s a spiritual mandate, right?

So, in that sense, fighting for justice and liberation, as you were saying, it’s an act of worship for us. Sitting and meditating and reflecting is great. Some Sikhs do that as well. But that’s to keep ourselves grounded so we can continue to fight for justice and liberation. Like, we have to act in this world and make it a more just place. And so I think my ancestors were on that trajectory hundreds of years ago, and it’s been a really important process for me to dig back into this tradition.

In a more serious way with my new album called Chardi Kala, and that idea, as you mentioned, is this idea of ever-rising spirits. So that’s a practice deeply held in our community, that sometimes I think it’s kind of oversimplified as just optimism or being happy all the time.

I think what it more is, is steadfast determination, holding our heads up high in the face of all kinds of challenges. Even in the darkest of times, we have to believe things can be better, and we have to be that change. We have to embody that spirit, that upward chardi kala spirit, just even in the way that we walk through the world, even the way that we carry ourselves. So we can begin to imagine the world that we are trying to fight for. That, to me, is the mandate for all the work I do.

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