The early 1900s - dramatic beginnings and “exotic” imports

The development of South Asian theatre in Britain reflects the wider sociological dynamics of South Asian diaspora and migration to the Mother Country. While in the eighteenth century maritime journeys to and from the subcontinent had brought to the British shores “ayahs, lascars and princes” – to quote Rozina Visram – by the nineteenth century street players and visiting dance companies had become the exotic entertainers respectively in town centres and London West End theatre houses. At the same time, groups of theatre amateurs (mostly students and professionals) produced work that drew both from Indian and European theatre traditions. Among them was the Indian Art and Dramatic Society, (on 4 November 1915 the group presented the Grand Performance in Aid of the Wounded Indian Troops at the Town Hall in Chiswick with a mixed cast of Indian and white British performers), and the Indian Players, whose production of Niranjan Pal’s The Goddess had an all-Indian cast “speaking in accentual English”, as the programme of the show states. Such an interest in exploring similarities and connections between the European and South Asian subcontinent anticipated the research of later theatre groups, which emerged in the 1970s mostly in London and the Midlands.

Politics and theatre – the years after WW2

The years after the war witnessed an increase of political activity within the various South Asian communities settled in Britain. At the same time, organisations of self-help and support, often set up in conjunction with white liberals and radical activists, provided a space for social activities and various forms of entertainment. By 1945 – the year in which Asians, Africans and West Indians living in Britain united in a Subject People’s Conference and in the later Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester – nearly all associations in Britain were leaning towards a common front for the colonial independence of their countries of origin and international black struggles. In particular, the many Indian leagues and workers associations, which after Indian independence started to concentrate their efforts for the improvement of their living conditions in Britain, were pivotal in bonding their people’s struggles to those of other African and Caribbean groups. Within such organisations different forms of entertainment also started to thrive – in the case of the India League it was the newly emerging Indian film industry. Conceived initially as what Dilip Hiro termed “the spearhead of the Indian independence lobby”, after 1947 it focused its activity on easing the relationship between Indian and British people by the distribution of films imported from India. As the Asian population grew, so did the amount of imports and the number of cinema halls built in the country, which in turn prepared the ground for the Bollywood explosion following in the next decades.

At that time white leftist theatre companies showed an increasing interest to include in their repertoire African, Caribbean and Asian plays. Unity Theatre, a radical, left wing company founded in 1936 with a distinctive communist and anti-imperialist agenda, was one of them. Their production of the documentary drama India Speaks , by Mulk Raj Anand in 1943, featured a cast composed entirely by South Asian people living in Britain – a rather remarkable step in the light of the casting policies followed by the majority of theatre houses at the time.

The language theatre movement

In the early 1960s an increasing number of community theatre groups started to perform in original languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati. Plays directly imported from the original countries were produced for South Asian audiences throughout Britain. These included the Maharashtrian Theatre Group and the Asian Artists Association in London, The East-West Community Theatre Group in Birmingham, and a number of other small groups especially active in the East Midlands.

Drawing-room comedies, melodramas and thrillers, whose dialogues were often interwoven with songs and dances started to be represented in a number of community halls. These genres generally tended to reinforce values and customs imported from home which institutional funding bodies considered less worthy of support than the plays produced by English speaking groups.

What institutions seemed to overlook was the cultural trait d’union that these forms of entertainment aimed to offer both to the older and younger generations. Tendencies towards a homogenising cultural policy alienated non-English speaking audiences from the arts and reinforced a feeling of isolation already experienced in work places, schools and other public sectors. It also prevented the younger generations from establishing a creative contact with South Asian languages, only spoken at home and rarely experienced in an artistic context. At that time no institutional effort was made to popularise community events because of such linguistic boundaries. However, as in the case of Mushairas , the Urdu poetry readings very popular within the Pakistani communities, it appears that differences could be bridged through the use of non-verbal mediums such as music and the performing abilities of the readers, stimulating a creative approach for English only-speaking audiences to diverse cultures and histories.