Sewa died recently and his daughter Kiran asked me to say something at the Barsi she organised for him at the Gurua Nanak Gurwara in Tong Road, Leeds, UK, on 13.10.2024. With her permission, I’m posting here the written version of my talk. (At the podium, I cut it short.) Sewa was one of the people who helped me to shape my politics and my writing, and, as I say here, he inspired me . . .
Hello everyone. Thanks very much, Inder. We’ve been friends for a long time and I know the whole Kalsi family are grateful to you for hosting this important event today. He has a lasso nearby so he can haul me off if I go beyond my allotted five minutes.
And may I offer a special thanks to Kiran for organising us all, and for giving me the honour of saying a few words about her dear father, my friend and yours, Dr Sewa Singh Kalsi.
When we met on Friday to talk about what I might say today, Kiran dropped into the conversation that her Dad’s name, Sewa, meant “selfless service” in Punjabi. Of course most you knew that, but this ignorant Englishman didn’t, and it made me wonder if there was an etymological link between the English word “service” and the Punjabi word sewa. And of course there is: Professor Google tells me it’s exactly the same word in Sanskrit, and as we all know, English is an Indo-European language, so here we are, at once recognising that we are all one people, connected by DNA and by language.
I make this point because Sewa was all about connecting. He built bridges, where others built barriers. He brought us together, where others tried to divide us.
I first met him in about 1973. I was a 23 year old research student doubling up as secretary to the Chapeltown Community Association. I think some of you might recall the good old days when Leeds City Council could afford to run a community education service. Youth clubs. Remember them? Community Centres, remember them? The council published a directory of community organisations for every part of the city. I was new to Chapeltown and I remember marvelling at how many organisations there were in my neighbourhood.
One of them was the Indian Workers Association. And there was Sewa’s name, address and phone number as the Secretary to the IWA’s branch in Leeds. The Chapeltown Community Association was genuinely multi-cultural but it didn’t involve the leaders of the many and various national and religious organisations. So I wrote to them all asking if I could meet with them to talk about the work we were doing in the Community Association. I only got a few replies, and Sewa’s was the warmest. He said he was too busy to take part in our Association but he made it clear that he liked what it was doing — we campaigned for better housing, for proper play areas, for cleaner streets and so on — and he would stay in touch.
He also told me about the Indian Workers’ Association. Younger people won’t realise how hard it was in those days for white people to get to know anything about the lives and achievements of the so-called Commonwealth Immigrants. You had to meet people in person to really learn. I’d heard of the IWA, and Sewa enlightened me much further.
He told me he had been in the Communist Party and he was committed to ensuring that working people of Indian heritage were properly organised at work, inside the trade unions, linking up with white workers, to ensure that everyone, of all skin colours, got a better deal. Of course he prioritised the needs of the people from India, but it was all about making connections with people from all the other nations of the world, and especially with the white workers who — let’s be honest about this — too often rejected the alliances that people like Sewa were trying to build.
And I’m sure that it’s thanks to Sewa that the Indian Workers’ Association found their way into a 1972 parliamentary report on “race relations” in Leeds, which included reference to the killing of the British-Nigerian David Oluwale in 1971. The IWA said they could see the implications for all black and brown people of this racist murder by two Leeds police officers. They lined up alongside the Leeds United Caribbean Association and the Pakistani Workers’ Association in discussing the meaning of this momentous murder.
Sewa was also building bridges with leading figures in the city of Leeds. He was a pioneer in ensuring that the Sikhs were engaged across the whole of the city. He was an active member of the Community Relations Council, and I bet he was there at its outset in 1970. I’m sure he would have been an early member of the much more radical Campaign Against Racial Discrimination which started a Leeds branch, led by his friend the redoubtable Maureen Baker, in the mid-1960s.
Throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s he took part in the various liaison bodies that the city council set up, and he was a pioneer in the interfaith organisation called Concord, founded in 1986. There’s a lovely profile, with a superb photo of this handsome man and his beautiful wife Hardeep, in this excellent book about Concord, edited by his friend, the Reverend Trevor Bates. Sewa became the chair of Concord in 1999.
Speaking of books, there’s an important one by a man who rejoices in the name DeWitt John about the IWA which I devoured — Sewa might well have told me about it. (You had to be a bit of a lefty nerd to track down books like that, but I was that kind of person then, and I still am.)
Everyone here knows lots more than I do about Sikhism than I do, and you know that Sewa is an internationally respected authority on Sikhi. He has two books about the Leeds Sikhs and Sikhi in general from which I have benefited immensely. This one here is the book of his Doctorate at Leeds University, published in 1992.
I contacted him again around this point because I was about to re-start the doctorate I’d been pretending to do in 1973 when I first met him. Sewa’s meticulous research in Leeds and Bradford made it possible for me to accurately record the Sikhs in my book about Chapeltown, and to explain something of the contribution they have made to that neighbourhood and to the city.
His Sikhism book, first published in 1999 and again in 2007, has had a huge circulation and it is an absolutely essential read for anyone who wants to understand the essence of this great world religion.
In conclusion, I just want to read two bits from that book because they beautifully summarise exactly what I think Sewa has bequeathed to all of us here — and to the much wider world. They demonstrate that his religion and his politics merged seamlessly into one.
Sewa says this on p.29 of this invaluable book:
‘According to Sikh teachings, a Sikh is not a passive spectator in this world; he/she is expected to be an active participant in the drama of human affairs. The concept of Dharmsala implies faith in the oneness of God and the equality of humankind.’
And just to show how far ahead of the game Sikhism has been, Sewa says this on p.36:
‘Guru Nakak . . . condemned the differential treatment of women, preaching instead for the equality of the sexes.’
I think we can agree that Sewa was a great man, a kind man, a servant to his community and a servant to humanity as a whole, a pioneer who never stopped building bridges and making the world a better place. He inspired me in 1973 and he continues to inspire me now.
Thank you.
Max Farrar/ Leeds, UK/16.10.24
References:
DeWitt John (1969) Indian Workers’ Associations of Britain, London: Institute of Race Relations.
HMSO (1972) Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration Session 1971-2 Police/Immigrant RelationsI, Minutes of Evidence 17.2.1972, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, HC 471-1, London.
Sewa Singh Kalsi (1992) The Evolution of a Sikh Community in Britain: Religion and social change among the Sikhs of Leeds and Bradford, University of Leeds Department of Theology and Religious Studies.
Sewa Singh Kalsi (2007) Sikhism, London: Bravo Books Ltd.
Max Farrar (2002) The Struggle for "Community” in a British Multi-Ethnic Inner City Area – Paradise in the Making. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press.
Trevor Bates (ed.) (2016) A Leeds Interfaith Story, 1946-2016, Leeds: Concord Interfaith Fellowship.