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An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/

The Diversity and Recognition Hub ‘Diasporas’

2015

At the Interface

Discovering Diaspora:

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Edited by

Tine Vekemans and Natasha Miletic

Inter-Disciplinary Press

Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2015 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/ The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087 ISBN: 978-1-84888-356-7 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2015. First Edition.

Transnational Connections and Religious Development in 109 the Jain Diaspora through an Exploration of the e-Diaspora

Tine Vekemans #OFW: Social Media and Public Discourse Regarding 121

Overseas Filipino Workers Dana R. Herrera Part IV Exploring Diaspora through Literature From Ballarat to Surry Hills: Literature, Architecture and 131

Irish Diaspora in Australia Angeline O’Neill John MacKenzie’s ‘Georgetown Memories’: Re-Imagining 141

Home and Homeland Kristen Smith Chutnification of Asian ‘Masala’ in British Asian Diaspora 151

and the Myth of Trishanku Mrunal Chavda The Stories We Tell: Drifting and Linking in 167

Dionne Brand’s Prose Eshe Mercer-James The Camera Obscura Motif in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction: 177 New Identities ‘Revealed’ in Transit Ahmed Mulla Fictional Representations of Contemporary Diasporas: The Case 187

of the Invisible Diasporic Women of Chimamanda Adichie Claudio Braga and Glaucia R. Gonçalves Gender Ideologies and Diasporic Identity in Monica Ali’s 197

Brick Lane and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake Elizabeth Jackson

Chutnification of Asian ‘Masala’ in British Asian Diaspora and the Myth of Trishanku

Mrunal Chavda

Abstract The present chapter aims to contribute to the critical discourse of British Asian identity. The British Asian identity is often termed as colonial as well as postcolonial by scholars in the field. The four-year project funded by AHRC at the Department of Drama, University of Exeter has documented the history of the British Asian Theatre. The project provided critical insights into the theatre productions. However, my readings of scholarly published material and my own critical investigation during my research project at the Department of Drama, University of Exeter, raised some vital questions. Such as what remains ‘Asian’ in British Asians and what ‘Britishness’ is gain (if at all), how to map their identity based on their value systems (if any) and what kind of language British Asian theatre practitioners employ to refer to their diasporic Indian identity. I wish to open this matter to a wider audience and seek to address different interpretations along with my own explanations of the serious debate of the Indian Diaspora in England by analysing two theatre productions. The question of political identity in the present discourse remains debatable and I seek to break in a new dimension to it by bringing in the mythology-based understanding of British Asian identity as reflected in British South Asian theatre.

Key Words: British Asian, Indian diaspora, binglish, identity, migration.

*****

1. Introduction British Asian theatre is a well-researched theatre movement which started

around the 1970s in the UK. Scholars have examined British Asian theatre practices. Taking into consideration studies on identity, culture and location, this paper aims to understand the issue of British Asian identity from the Hindu mythological framework in order to explain the diasporic identity in the UK.

2. Migration Roots and Routes

Recently, the culture secretary, Mr Sajid Javid said in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph:

People also say, when immigrants do come to Britain, that they should come to work, and make a contribution and that they should also respect our way of life, and I agree with all of that. It means things like trying to learn English.1

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Further, he also told,

I think it’s perfectly reasonable for British people to say “look, if you’re going to settle in Britain and make it your home you should learn the language of the country and you should respect its laws and its culture”.2

He also spoke about Sharia law and expressed his concerns about the plot by

Muslim radicals to ‘Islamise’ state run schools in Birmingham.3 The news report began with Mr. Javid as the son of Pakistani immigrants and ended with a label naming him an ‘Asian male’ in the cabinet. The news report appeared in the ‘Political’ section and the reporter should have been very much aware of these labels. Such labelling is the subject of my paper. The label ‘Asian’, ‘South Asian’ and ‘British Asian’ are very highly charged, contested, historically overloaded terms. Amrit Wilson (1978) in Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain cited the inadequacy of the term ‘Asian’ considering the diversity of the region in every sphere of life. Keeping the scope of the paper in mind, I limit my discussion on the migration from India (pre-Independent) to East-Africa (a British colony) and then the ‘forced’ migration to the UK as shown in the image below:

Image 1: British Asian Diaspora Roots and Routes © 2014. Courtesy of Mrunal Chavda

As shown in the image above, these migrants have been travelling from one

place to other. These migrants have been considered ‘tourists’ in their ancestral homes in Asia or Africa and ‘immigrants’ in their settled homes in the UK. The

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term ‘Asian’ and possibly ‘Asianness’ could be well-explained using Vayu Naidu’s expansion of Asian diversity in relation to British Asian theatre:

Indian subcontinent-pre-1947 India, then India, Pakistan, from 1971 Bangladesh, from 1970 East Africa (predominantly Uganda, Kenya, subsequently from South Africa as well), Nepal from 1980, Sri Lanka. Languages (literary and dialect): Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Pushtu, Mirpuri, Hindu, Syleti, Bangla, Singhalese, Tamil, and Telugu. Faith (each with celebrated festival/rituals/processions): Sikh, Hindu, Muslims, Christian, Buddhist, Humanist, non-Conformist, Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy, Vedanta. Art interest: popular film in regional languages; participatory music, dance, comedy and thrillers among Gujarati and Bengali communities; and classical Indian music, dance and contemporary work of (South India) Bharata Natyam and (north India) Kathak as ensemble, British Asian theatre if it is in venue within proximity.4

Migrating is like being in an ‘unknown’ ‘weird’ ‘forest’ where ‘there are new

rules of the game to learn and there are pitfalls’ with ‘joyous adventures but all of it is a crucible in which you discover who you are and what you are’.5 This is what Javid reiterated as a British Pakistani Culture Secretary.

Javid and Verma raised the issue of identity, preserving ‘home’ and adapting to ‘host’ culture. The term ‘host’ should also be seen in light of the racial discrimination against Asians in the early 1960s. Racial discrimination galvanized Asian youth movements across the UK, and 17 year-old Sikh Gurdeep Singh Chaggar’s murder on 4 June 1976 evoked Verma to start Tara Arts with Rabindranath Tagore’s Sacrifice in 1977 which was later on followed by Tamasha Theatre Company, Kali Theatre, and RIFCO.6 For migrants, it was not ‘a question of losing our culture, and it’s building a new living one.’7 Dadswell (2009) acknowledges the ‘rich tradition of Asian theatre entertainers in the UK’ dating back to 1812. Language theatres8 was one of the ways through which ‘British’ and ‘Asian’ culture came to be performed by Asian communities resulting into a ‘settled’ culture. Griffin observes,

The cultural identity that diverse Asian communities have carved out of themselves in Britain during the 1990s is both prominent and distinct from Black British cultural identities and operates across somewhat different cultural terrain.9

The ‘settled’ culture was more or less a hybrid of British and Asian. Sylvie

articulates such hybridity in the play Calcutta Kosher.10

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You know, I think my identity keeps changing. When we were sent to school in England I wanted to fit in, but I never did. I looked different, I sounded different. Then I went to America and it started all over again. When people ask me where I’m from, I say I was born in Calcutta to a Jewish family. ‘So you’re Indian?’ Well, not 100%. ‘But you were born in India?’ Yeah. ‘And you’re Jewish?’ Yes, ‘But you’re American as well?’11

Such vexed questions of identity could remind us, perhaps, that the migrant is

not part of ‘host’ societies and therefore theatre provides a ‘dialogue’, ‘the act of looking at the other’ ‘with a particular axis of memory’ rooted in the past and informed by the present.12 Similarly, Tanika Gupta, labelled ‘British Bangladeshi Asian’ female playwright, was adamant to overcome this ‘being torn in between two cultures’. However, she inevitably ended up portraying characters in search of their roots. Such confused identity crisis possibly forces British Asian theatre in the binary of mainstream/alternatives13 and in ‘cultural margins’.14 Griffin, complicating it further, politicises the issue by using the phrase ‘constitutive subjects of a changing Britain’15 for those who were born in Britain and whose work should be seen as ‘part of British theatre’.16 The term ‘subject’ could be meant here as a member of a state other than its ruler, especially one owing allegiance to a monarch or other supreme leader. However, practitioners do not consider themselves ‘Asian’ as in various discursive labels or ‘subjects’, as defined by Griffin. Griffin also recognises that ‘contemporary British culture has been differently shaped by Black and Asian influences’17 such as West Indian carnivals, Asian melas and Bollywood musicals along with Indian curry.

Taking into account the complexity of British Asian theatre as described above, this paper concentrates on what constitutes ‘British’ and ‘Asian’ in order to understand the complex British Asian identity, using a Hindu myth. The turning of the label ‘Black Asian’ to ‘British South Asian’ theatre marks an important phase in the debate. However, Dadswell (2009) questioned what ‘would constitute a British Asian production’.18 Parv Bancil, one of the playwrights labelled as British Asian, observes the contradictory depiction of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Asianness’ that prevails in the minds of funding body members:

they watched a play about three disaffected British Asian boys looking for a way out of a deadened town. The characters spoke like me and my friends: a concoction of cockney slag, Jamaican patios, and Punjabi. Like most kids from that part of the world they swore, smoked cigarettes and played hip-hop. By the interval most of the councillors and the mayors left in disgust; we received a letter from them complaining that ‘we had let our parents and our own culture down.19

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It is also interesting to read Hanief Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia central character, Karim’s dilemma,

I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were having emerged from two old histories… perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored.20

Griffin (2003) points to ‘cultural signatures’ of Asianness through the use of fretwork screens, characters wearing traditional dresses… hand gestures that are associated with greetings or worship, along with non-English languages.21 Such presence is ‘British and not British, diasporic and not diasporic, showing a culture both of exile and belonging, and of neither’.22 Ley constructively puts British Asians into the ‘third space’, an in-between space which could be echoed in Bhabha, Brah and Mishra’s concept of diaspora space. Ley situates this space in Sudesh Mishra’s ‘third space’, of the border/hyphen which ‘lies between British and Asian in British Asian theatre’.23 Therefore, it is evident that the scholarship has found the label ‘British’ and ‘Asian’ problematic in terms of theatre and identity. Within these problematic debates, I attempt to analyse two case studies in the light of the Hindu myth of Trishanku.

According to the Indian mythology, Trishanku, who was first called Satyavrata, decided to perform a great sacrifice which would enable him to ascend bodily to heaven. The sage Visvamitra assisted him in this effort. But in heaven Indra barred his entry, and Trishanku was hurled back earthward from the celestial abode of the gods. Visvamitra in rage started creating new constellations and new forms of life and became a threat to the work of Brahma. A compromise was reached between Brahma and Visvamitra, and Trishanku was made immortal by arresting his downward fall midway between heaven and Earth. Since then he has been hanging up above the Earth. I try to relate the state of Trishanku with the British Asian identity which is pushed and pulled at the same time from their roots and their selected routes. British Asian identity could be understood with reference to British Asian theatrical performances. I have selected two recent productions: Satinder Chohan’s Kabbadi Kabbadi Kabbadi 24 and Tanika Gupta’s Wah25! Wah! Girls!. With these two plays as case studies, this paper seeks to understand whether the Hindu myth could be applied to British Asian migrants or not.

3. Case Study 1: Satinder Chohan’s Kabbadi Kabbadi Kabbadi

Satinder Chohan’s father’s migration route comes from Punjab, India as opposed to the East African migrants who arrived in 1950s and 1960s. Chohan was born in Southall, London in 1971 and thus became the only British-born family member. Her first play, Zameen (2005) explores Indian farmers’ plight against the

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Bollywoodised India as represented on British stage which is ‘clean, colour coordinated and cute and where everyone is singing and dancing’26. She investigates the issue of belonging and the socially constructed economic English class structure within the Asian community arising out of the collision of cultures between East and West in the ‘modern world order’27 against the backdrop of two historic Olympic events in 1936 and 2012.

The play is divided into two halves, i.e. 1936 and 2012, and centres on the game, politics, and love. Shera, the rich Asian businessperson, Eshwar, an illegal immigrant, and Azadeh, a ghost dominate the play in 2012. Eshwar and Azadeh are ‘disadvantaged, and their place in Britain is to serve’ 28 as Sajid Javid was quoted earlier regarding migrant population and their contribution to the economy. Eshwar’s grandfather, Fauji, fought and died for the British Raj in a war in Waziristan at the North West Frontier. Shera’s grandfather, Pavankumar, won a gold medal for the British Raj in the game in Berlin Olympics in 1936. Reflecting on this historical event, Eshwar complains:

The family, after he died...I’d turn that medal over in my hand. Wonder why Pardada got stuck in Waziristan. Wonder why Baba (grandfather) and Bapu (father) got stuck in the village. Shera’s Pardada went to Berlin, won gold. His Baba and Bapu came to England, setting up businesses. His family are so rich now, they could buy all of Despur. It’ll be years before I can build a Kothi even a quarter the size of his in the village. Pardada gave the British his life. For what? A Silver medal? Not even gold? 29

Such a complaint by an Asian illegal immigrant living in Britain is shaped by the oppressive nature adopted by Shera who has embraced Western individualism and English class30 structure by economic standards while distancing himself from Asian community, its cultural heritage and values. The third generation migrant like Shera’s identity raises questions as it depends on issues such as origin, upbringing and atmosphere. Such complex duality rooted in ‘British’ social and English class structure with Punjabi swearing could be related to Bhabha or Hall’s concept of hybridity and discourse of racial mixing however Shera’s identity perhaps professes a different perception of his identity more or less ‘in-between space’.31

Shera born in England to Punjabi parents but his thinking is heavily influenced by English class structure which is enriched by his economic exploitation by illegal migrants. Shera’s ‘empire’ employs illegal migrants based on ‘forgeries’ [forged documents].32 Eshwar and Azadeh are the opposite of Shera: they identify themselves strongly with their ‘home’ country as they are still illegal migrants but they aspire for a legal status. Shera called them ‘freshies’ because they ‘are fresh off the boats… We’re city people now. British. We’ve settled here. You lot still

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have your accents and your hand eating, crossed legged, plastic bottle arse wiping village ways’.33 Such ‘a real hierarchy’ amongst British Asians needs a separate socio-economic analysis that lies beyond the scope of this paper. Seen from this point of view, British Asians in the play are torn between Asian and English cultural and economic background and identity. Brah succinctly identified the tensions between ‘Asian British’ and ‘British Asian’ identity. She further commented that ‘Asians accepted their stay in the country with increasing awareness of ethnocentric nature of the English curriculum and racialized practices, and therefore took to proactively teaching their children about Asian background, history and religion.’34

4. Case Study 2: Wah! Wah! Girls

Tanika Gupta’s Wah! Wah! Girls (2012) brought up issues such as racial, intergenerational conflicts and identity. Born in Chiswick, Britain in 1963 to an artistic migrant Hindu Bengali family from Dhaka, who were descendants of young Bengali revolutionary Dinesh Gupta, who was hanged by British in Alipore Central Jail (Kolkata) on July 7 1931, Gupta was imbued with a strong sense of British and Indian and at the same time neither of them.

In The Country Wife (2004), she writes about third generation immigrants and their place in hybrid urban culture.35 A similar concept of hybridity is expressed in Fragile Land, another of Gupta’s plays. Gupta occasionally writes about British Asian migrant experience using Bollywood song and dance numbers to highlight the issues aforementioned. Commenting on Wah! Wah! Girls on her blog, Yusuf (2012) remarks upon the British Asian migrant experience as presented in the production,

…down the road from Soraya’s dance club, Mansoor’s shop is vandalized; Sita has to balance her ambitions with her conservative family’s notions of ‘honour’; characters watch their backs as young men in hoodies menacingly stalk the streets.36

Set in Stratford East (London), the play deals with the life events of three

generations, bringing out multicultural and multi-ethnic existence that causes conflicts between Cal, Afro-Caribbean, Pavel, a Polish manual worker and Mansoor. Such multi-layered existence reflects the ‘fusion of contemporary London life’.37 Mansoor, Asian migrant and Soraya’s father, struggled for a better life in the UK and is nostalgic about the homeland; the memory kathak dancer Soraya has of her homeland is smeared; Kabir, Soraya’s son, born in the UK, is unable to cope with Soraya’s past and his present.

Mansoor sold Soraya to Sameenabibi with whom Soraya grew up as a young courtesan. As a courtesan she fell in love with Tariq who rejected her love and in a struggle she killed him. She fled to the UK and started teaching Asian girls the

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kathak or mujra style of dancing. Taking up this task of teaching kathak could represent a strong tradition rooted in her past which she could not adapt according to the changing times. Kabir has proposed to revamp the ‘old fashioned’ mujra club ‘in a more business-like way’ ‘to make a profit’ in a recession by diversifying it with Bollywood. Kabir’s love and affection for Sita, an Asian runaway girl from Leeds, is also due to Sita’s Bollywood style dance. Sita’s ‘choli ke piche kya’-dance suggests sexuality ‘too suggestive’ 38 and she attempt to do ‘something new, something different’ against the traditional kathak or Bollywood dance. As she states: ‘We can build on the old and make something new. But I’m just expressing who I am.’39 Macrocosmically, Soraya could not allow Sita’s ‘Bollywood Bullshit’40 interference in her traditional kathak dancing which resounds her independence. Microscopically, Soraya’s only cultural asset seems her traditional41 kathak dance. In this way, Sita challenged Soraya’s core existence with her fusion of contemporary body style, Bollywood dance and kathak. Therefore, Soraya asked Sita to leave her house.

In Soraya’s case, identity (‘British’ or ‘Asian’) is a phenomenon which developed under the impact of different factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Soraya and Sita’s intergenerational and tradition vs. Bollywoodised modernity conflicts raise the issue of their ‘otherness’ as the influential factor for their problems within British Asian community. In Sita and Soraya’s situations, ‘otherness’ is a category based on the definite stereotypes developed in relation to certain nationality, ethnic groups and races.42 Bhabha’s perception of identity as a product of ethnicity could be broadly applied to Soraya, an Islamic female and Sita, a Hindu female. Their adapting to each other’s cultures and concepts, ways and means, evolves and could not be located in the framework of ‘hybridity’.

Janet Steele, artistic director of Kali Theatre and Parv Bancil, playwright, have denied that Bollywood represents British Asian diaspora as these films show highly myopic economic lenses, colour coordinated life and glittering saris. British Asian lives are not a utopian fantasy world where everyone is singing and dancing; the narratives prevalent in Bollywood do not represent British Asian community experiences in England. It is interesting to note that British Asian theatre practitioners do not agree on representation of British Asian identity as shown in Bollywoodised theatre productions such as Wah! Wah! Girls (2012), Kanjoos (2013) and Bollywood Cinderella (2011). These are considered successful productions; however, these stories could not help to define what British Asian identity is. Satinder Chohan, Sharmila Chohan and Akash Odedara, the new generation of British Asian theatre practitioners, could not identify themselves either with English or Indian. Hardeep Singh Kohli (2011)43, Graham Huggan (2003) and Jerri Daboo (2005) have seen this usage of Bollywood and through this the media commodification of Asian culture. Whether Bollywood, in itself also a product of hybrid practices, has become a way of expressing British Asian identity needs a fuller investigation.

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5. Conclusion Thus, Gupta and Chohan’s characters are ‘in-between’, neither ‘British’ nor

‘Asian’. They are caught in between two worlds, negating their belonging to either location or identity. This condition of living in-between ‘home’ (that is ancestral roots in India) and settled ‘imaginary homelands’ (that is the UK) could be cited as the state of Trishanku.44 These characters are in-between, they could not leave behind their ‘home’ nor can they settle fully in their new home and its respective cultures. This in-betweenness can be called the state of Trishanku, which is (forced or chosen) displaced from both the places. This state of lying in-between could remind what Rath referred as heaven45 which seems a self-conscious and self-made prison in a more compromised culture. In such a state, British Asian theatre practitioners’ acceptance or rejection of the ‘British Asian’ label might be debateable. However, their Trishanku state allows them to attempt to add a flavour of ‘Bollywood’, ‘home/settled’ theatrical practices, mixed stories of ‘here’ and ‘there’ by the process of ‘chutnification’; to produce theatre more tangy, more flavoured, exciting and perhaps overseeing the psychological pendulum consciously spanning their dual worlds like Trishanku, not belonging ‘here’ in England nor ‘there’ in India.

Notes

1 Tim Ross, ‘Immigrants Must Learn to Be British, Says Asian Tory’, Viewed 17 May 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10838710/Immigrants-must-learn-to-be-British-says-Asian-Tory.html 2 Ibid. 3 Jihan Zakarriya argued in her paper at the conference that the Greek Muslims in Italy and Greece are portrayed by European media as ‘uncivilised criminals’ or ‘terrorists’. This could be an interesting and provocative study from humanitarian perspective focusing on the Muslim diaspora in different parts of the world. 4 Vayu Naidu, ‘Call-Response: Migration as Metaphor in Theatre’, Contemporary Indian Theatre 19.2 (2009): 230. 5 Graham Ley, ‘Theatre of Migration and the Search for a Multicultural Aesthetic: Twenty Years of Tara Arts: Jatinder Verma in an Interview with Prof Graham Ley’, New Theatre Quarterly XIII.52 (1997): 358. 6 Reduced Indian Film Company founded by Artistic Director, Pravesh Kumar. 7 Jatinder Verma 1987a, cited in Dominic Hingorani, British Asian Theatre: Dramaturgy, Process and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2010), 35. 8 Chandrika Patel, ‘British-Based South Asian Language Theatres’, British South Asian Theatre: A Documented History, ed. Graham Ley and Sarah Dadswell (Exeter: University of Exeter, 2012), 1-12.

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9 Gabriele Griffin, Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15. 10 A play-production by Kali theatre in 2004. 11Hingorani, British Asian Theatre, 133. 12 Ley, ‘Theatre of Migration’, 355. 13 Dimple Godiwala, Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Blackand Asian Theatres (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2006). 14 Griffin, Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights, 234. 15 Ibid., 237 16 Ibid., 3. 17 Ibid., 10-11. 18 Sarah Dadswell, ‘What Is this Thing Called British Asian Theatre?’ Contemporary Theatre Review 19.2 (2009): 222. 19 Hingorani, British Asian Theatre, 171. 20 Hanief Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 3. 21 Griffin, Contemporary Black and Asian Women Playwrights, 22-24. 22 Colin Chamber, Black and Asian Theatre in Britain (London: Routledge, 2011), 2. 23 Graham Ley, ‘Diaspora Space, the Regions, and British Asian Theatre.’, New Theatre Quarterly 27.107 (2011): 216-218. 24 Kabbadi is a game played in South Asia. The game involves terms such as ‘home’, ‘territory’, ‘defenders’, and ‘raiders’. In terms of migration, these terms play a vital role for complicating issues of identity. 25 In Hindi and Urdu languages, the expression ‘Wah’ is used to appreciate the work of art. 26 Sunayana Panda, ‘Zameen (Land): An Indian Village Comes to the West End.’ Viewed on 20 July 2013, http://www.confluence.org.uk/2009/01/18/zameen-land-an-indian-village-comes-to-the-west-end. 27 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) 171. 28 BBC, ‘Short History of Immigration.’ Viewed 20 April 2014, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/uk/2002/race/short_history_of_immigration.stm. 29 Kabbadi Kabbadi. By Satinder Chohan. Directed by Helena Bell. Kali Theatre, Arcola Theatre, London, December 7, 2012. 30 The British nation in the words of George Orwell as ‘the most class ridden country under the sun’. George Orwell, ‘England Your England.’, Viewed on 25 March 2013 http://orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_eye. 31 Bhabha, Location, 4. 32 Chohan, Production script. 33 Ibid.,

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34 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (New York and London: Routeldge, 1996), 35. 35 Catherine Coussens, ‘Updating the Restoration Libertine in Tanika Gupta’s Contemporary Adaptation of William Wycherley’s “The Country Wife”.’ Journal of Arts and Sciences, 12,(2009), 65. 36 Huma Yusuf, Britain Meets Bollywood: The Wah! Wah! Girls Glitter at LSE’s Peacock Theatre (2012), Viewed on 29 June 2013, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/indiaatlse/2012/06/18/britain-meets-bollywood-the-wah-wah-girls-glitter-at-lses-peacock-theatre. 37 Wah! Wah! Girls. By Tanika Gupta. Directed by Helena Rice. Kneehigh Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, September 29, 2012. 38 Wah! Wah! Girls. 39 Ibid., 40 Ibid., 41 Such Asian values attached to marriage and love reflected through her song ‘Don’t Fall for Love’ in Tanika Gupta’s production. 42 Bhabha, Location, 1994. 43 Kohli, Hardeep Singh. 2012. An Interview with Kohli (26 October). 44 Benjamin Walker, Hindu World: An Encylopeadic Survey of Hinduism. Volume 2 (California. University of California, 1968), 522-523. 45 Scholars such as Kapadia, Rath, and Das and Singh have profoundly found an echo in dichotomies such as majority-minority, citizen-foreigner, and original-hybrid.

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Mrunal Chavda

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