British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History (with accompanying DVD) ed. by Graham Ley, Sarah Dadswell, and: Critical Essays on British South Asian Theatre ed. by Graham Ley, Sarah Dadswell (review)

One of the highlights of the rock music press in the 1970s was the “Rock Family Trees” drawn by the journalist Pete Frame. These were “who do you think you are?” genealogies of rock bands such as Deep Purple or the Velvet Underground, and traced the music careers of various band members in meticulous and obsessive detail: who had played with whom, when they had joined this and that band, together with a pithy sentence on their contribution to the genre. Most could be traced back to obscure pub bands that had started out playing Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf covers.

Reading British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History and its companion volume Critical Essays on British South Asian Theatre feels like being sucked into the British South Asian theatre Family Tree. Names of actors, directors and writers, dates of productions and company manifestos swim before the eyes. The DVD accompanying the first volume adds an even richer visual dimension of snippets of archive film, show programmes, photo stills and so on.

The shared beginning for many of these individuals and companies was Tara Arts in Wandsworth, south-west London. Led by the radicalised Jatinder Verma (an Indian of East African origin), Tara Arts was propelled into existence as the cultural response to the 1976 racist murder in Southall, west London of teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar. “For us, ‘culture’ is the prime medium of expression. To truly appreciate our position here in British society is to give life to our cultural heritage. This means reacting to the National Front and others like them” (Documented History 15). So politics was there right at the beginning, as was the impatient energy of the younger generation kicking against what they saw as the passivity and “back home” nostalgic vision of the older generation of South Asians – although now may be the time to reassess that particular dynamic.

Tara Arts were followed by the west-London Hounslow Arts Cooperative (HAC) which seems to have been influenced by a combination of the militancy of Punk Rock and the political resistance of the Southall Youth Movement which had emerged in the aftermath of Chaggar ’s murder. “Because of the influence of punk we wanted it to be . . . much more open in the sense of being a challenge, but also a challenge to the authority within our own communities” (Documented History 57). Two companies led by women emerge out of the period of the late 1980s and early 1990s with the founding of Tamasha (1989) and Kali (1991). Tamasha, run by Kristine Landon-Smith and Sudha Bhuchar, turned the artistic gaze back to the sub-continent with its inaugural production of Mulk Raj Anand’s 1935 lyrical novel Untouchable (written in English). Kali’s first production Song for a Sanctuary, taking a violent event in an Asian women’s refuge as its subject material, had originally been commissioned by the radical feminist theatre company Monstrous Regiment.

These two books do all of us interested in the evolution of British theatre a valuable service by documenting the histories of companies that no longer exist. These include Actors Unlimited, a brave endeavour launched in 1981 dedicated to multi-racial and multi-cultural theatre, the British Asian Theatre Company set up in Hackney, east London, in 1982 to produce plays about social issues facing Asians in Britain, and the Asian Cooperative Theatre (1983), the fruit of a typically ambitious intervention into the theatrical arena by high profile political and cultural activist Farrukh Dhondy. Only in the past two decades have there developed permanent companies outside London. Peshkar began life in 1991 as a community-based...