Exit interview: ‘Theatre is diverse by its very nature’

The vexed lifeblood of modern diversity is racism. The empire on which the sun never set is the direct precursor of diversity in Britain so it is perhaps not so coincidental then that Tara Arts began its story with a death – that of 17-year-old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, who was murdered by a racist in Southall in July 1976. I wept at the news with friends who later helped found Tara. Ours was a visceral cry to seize the public stage, just as many of our young compatriots were seizing the streets in cities in protests around the country.

And then in 1977 Naseem Khan’s report, 'The Arts Britain Ignores' gave shape to our cry by challenging the Arts Council, amongst others, to recognise the new cultural reality emerging in Britain. 

Colour and race combine to suggest the current generation are not content with mere representation

The rest, as they say, is history. Not only did Tara manage to attract funding, but with a plenitude of other artists and companies of colour we ensured that minority arts/ethnic arts/Black and Asian arts/diverse arts – whatever the ever-shifting labels may be – could no longer be ignored. Together, with a name inspired by a cab company, Tara formed a bricks-and-mortar institution with its own theatre. I am leaving Tara knowing it is the only Asian-led and owned theatre building in the country. Perched on the embankment of a railway line, the theatre is architecturally designed to present a sensibility of connecting worlds; where antique Indian doors open on to a stage floor made of earth from Devon. Its very fabric supports “multiculturality” – that brilliant word coined by John Morton in the BBC’s comic series Twenty Twelve. 

Culture is key

The key word in “multiculturality” is culture. It seems to me that ‘culture’ has become synonymous with ‘colour’ – the overtly different Other on our streets. Equally ‘diversity’, while it is an intellectually appropriate term to describe the multiplicity of identities in our society today, is viscerally equated with colour and sometimes faith, particularly Islam. 

If we really are living in a post-colonial era, how much of my black, Asian or minority ethnic imagination – my stories, my histories, my songs – live in the hearts of my fellow whites?

My friends and I assumed when we founded Tara that ours might prove to be the last generation of ‘dual-cultures’, the first generation of migrants who had an emotional culture from outside these shores and that those who followed would be entirely ‘British’ in culture, sans other languages and mores. We have been proved wrong, in no small part due to racism and the resilience of faith. It is hardly surprising then to note the rapidly increasing movement for de-colonising the curriculum in higher education and vocational sectors, not excluding drama schools, that has taken hold amongst the youth today. Colour and race combine to suggest the current generation are not content with mere representation. It is not enough to have people of colour in drama schools and theatres – they demand more space for the multiplicity of identities they inhabit. 

Diversity of aesthetics

Base facts persist in confounding the notion that diversity is an accepted cultural norm. To take one example, in the last NPO round, Arts Council England support for BAME-led companies amounted to just 2% of total national funding. This at a time when, according to the last census, Britain’s BAME population was at least 15% and higher still in metropolitan areas such as London, where it’s over 40%. Who are the people who make decisions on funding? Who sets the curricula in drama schools? Who decides what is produced on stage? These remain urgent questions if diversity is step beyond the realms of the political and social and into the aesthetic. 

One of the ironies of colonialism is that the colonised were imbued a dual culture – Shakespeare as well as Kalidasa, to take the example of two classical authors. This was how the coloniser White existed in the imagination of the colonised Black. Growing up in colonial Africa, I never talked to a white person until I came to Britain. Yet I spoke English as well as Hindi, loved the Odyssey as much as the Mahabharata, the Bible and the Gita. If we really are living in a post-colonial era, how much of my black, asian or minority ethnic imagination – my stories, my histories, my songs – live in the hearts of my fellow whites? Failing to address this challenge, I fear, will lead us to instituting a new form of colonialism in the decades ahead.

Multicultrality and theatre

Over the past four decades, I have been party to meeting the challenges of multiculturality. From debates between cross-cultural and integrated casting to regional voices versus received pronunciation, concerns about representation and equality of opportunity, we have all been grappling with how best to fashion homes out of our theatres. Today, as it was in the 1970s, there is a need for theatres to act as cradles for stories that connect our disparate selves and connect worlds of difference – to quote the poet Rabindranath Tagore to resist society being “broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls”. Tagore’s sentiment, written at a time when India was seeking its independence from Britain, is a plea that is surely apt as Britain loosens its links with Europe.

There is undoubtedly today a greater degree of representation across many parts of the theatre industry. Colour-blind or integrated casting has become a norm to an extent inconceivable when Naseem Khan wrote her report. Of equal note – at least in London – are the number of theatres led by artistic directors of colour. Plays by writers of colour also grace many of our theatres now.

This reinforces my sense that theatre, by its very nature, is diverse – mixing literature, music, dance, painting, architecture and the interplay of light and darkness to create the most magnificent hybrid (or bastardised) artforms. It also has led me to re-evaluate the word “exotic”. Having grown up to regard it as a pejorative and a hangover from an imperial past that reduces all foreign cultures to the realms of the bizarre and colourful Other, I have over the years learnt how central it is to theatre. Of course we love the exotic, because it is precisely the world, situation or character that is different, foreign and exotic to the one we know that draws us to theatre in the first place. Theatre allows us to engage with the bewildering Other and to be provoked into seeing ourselves differently.

With the increasing representation of diversity on our stages, perhaps the challenge of diversity is over? I step away from Tara with a sense of privilege to have led the company during these momentous decades. I have been reminded of what this sense of privilege means by the words of the recent Rugby World Cup-winning South African team captain Siya Kolisi: “hope is not something you say in a beautiful tweet … it is not our responsibility as players to create that hope, it is our privilege.” 

Jatinder Verma is a theatre producer, activist and the outgoing Artistic Director of Tara Arts.
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