The award-winning composer Nitin Sawhney believes the racist bullying he received at school in Rochester in Kent has driven his creative impulse.
As Lauren Laverne’s castaway on Sunday on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Sawhney explains he was deliberately kept away from music at the Sir Joseph Williamson Mathematical School by a teacher. “I don’t want to go into it too much, but there was one particular teacher who banned me from the school music room for six years after he found I was playing a classical Indian raga on the piano in the practice room.”
The teacher asked the young Sawhney where the sheet music for the piece was and when Sawhney replied that there was none, he told him it could not then be music and ordered him out.
Describing the endemic racism he routinely faced, the award-winning musician tells Laverne that the National Front regularly leafleted his school gates and that he was once “followed home by a guy in a van shouting out racist abuse at me”.
The musician has since talked over these “pretty crazy” experiences with a therapist. “I was attacked physically and verbally almost on a daily basis for quite a while when I was very young and so there is a part of me that has a bit of loathing for the person I was. I felt that person was a bit weak and pathetic and even now trying to get past those feelings is hard. But that negativity, that feeling of shame, actually drove quite a lot of my creativity at the time. I wanted to not feel that way.”
Sawhney has previously turned down the offer of an Order of the British Empire, he said, because of his objections both to the Labour government’s actions in the Iraq war and to the historical associations of the word “empire”. But he has since accepted a CBE. He explained his reasoning to Laverne: “When I was offered the OBE my dad had asked if I would take it for his birthday and I said no. Then he passed away but the letter offering a CBE came on his birthday. I am into signs and so I thought, I am going to take it. I want it to acknowledge my immigrant past.
“It is obviously an honour and a privilege for me to be offered anything, but it was that word “empire” that I had a problem with – and still have.”
Sawhney chooses the music of Debussy, Joni Mitchell and of his fellow film score composer Ennio Morricone among the eight designated tracks for his desert island stay.