Sangita Dosanjh - INDIA TO DERBY: Reflections on one man's journey

Derby Book Festival has teamed up with the Society of Authors, Derby Libraries and Derbyshire Library Service to organise a series of talks by local authors in libraries across the city and county in June with more planned in the autumn. 

The extraordinary story of an ordinary man is a detailed biography by Sangita Dosanjh of her father’s life. Leaving his village, Dosanjh Kalan, Jullundur, India, arrived at Derby Railway station on 26 April 1954. He was twenty-three years old. This move could be compared to stepping out of a time machine, being propelled forward, and landing on an alien planet. Through telling her father’s story, Sangita realised this was the story of many thousands of young men of working age leaving India and Pakistan in the 1950s and arriving in Britain to take up work, mainly in the iron foundries. All this a direct consequence of the end of the Second World War and two hundred years of British rule.