AS A playwright, Tanika Gupta has the power very subtly to influence people’s perceptions on a wide range of issues. Take, for example, how she has been able to depict Queen Victoria as quite a progressive and liberal monarch in her play, The Empress. It clearly held the audience when it was staged at the Hammersmith Lyric in October last year. At one point, Victoria is visibly angry when her lady in waiting, Lady Sarah, refers disparagingly to Abdul Karim, whom the Queen has promoted to the position of her confidant, her “Munshi”. The Royal household is not pleased with Karim’s exalted position, reflected in Lady Sarah’s complaint: “They say you show undue favour to your Indian servant, Abdul Karim.” The Queen is enraged by Lady Sarah’s remark: “He is not a servant, please never refer to Abdul as such. He is our teacher.” Tanika’s CV says: “Over the past 25 years Tanika has written over 25 stage plays that have been produced in major theatres across the UK. She has written 30 radio plays for the BBC and several original television dramas, as well as scripts for EastEnders, Grange Hill and The Bill. She has taught drama and run workshops in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Cuba, India, USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Argentina, Chile and across the UK.” She was born on December 1, 1963, in Chiswick, west London, and grew up steeped in the arts. There was no question of her parents telling her to get a proper job. Her mother and her father, Gairika and Tapan Gupta – both have now passed away – set up the Tagoreans, a society aimed at spreading the best of Bengali culture after the couple arrived in London from Calcutta in 1961.
She remembered she was partly shaped by Oxford where she read modern history: “For me, Oxford in the mid-1980s was a very politicising one. Thatcher was the prime minister, the miners’ strike was happening, Greenham Common was down the road and Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned by the apartheid regime. Of course, I went on many demonstrations, attended amazing speeches and rallies, and lapped up the beauty of the city. Oxford University was a little alienating – there were very few people of colour unless they were wealthy diplomats’ children. It was very male and Boris Johnson was in my year. So you can imagine the privilege, entitlement and embedded racism of the place. However, I met some great people, had a wonderful history tutor in Prof Jane Garnett, and learnt a lot – mainly not to be intimidated by the establishment. Oh yes, and I met my husband (David Archer) there.” Tanika’s first play, Voices in the Wind, written for BBC radio in the early 1990s, was about her great-uncle’s execution by the British. Dinesh Chandra Gupta, the youngest brother of Tanika’s paternal grandfather, Dr Pritish Gupta, was only 19 when he went to the gallows at Alipore Central Jail on July 7, 1931, for the assassination of Colonel N S Simpson, the inspector general of prisons, inside the Writers’ Building in Calcutta.
Offered an MBE (Member of The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for “services to drama” in 2008, Tanika did struggle initially “with whether to accept because of the word, ‘Empire’ ”. At the investiture at Buckingham Palace, she told the Queen about a playwright’s life but did not reveal she was working on something to do with her ancestor, Victoria, Empress of India. What happened to Tanika’s great-uncle was adapted for the stage in 2018 in Lions and Tigers, which won her the £10,000 James Tait Black Prize for Drama. Many British Asians in the theatre world have Tanika to thank for creating work for them. “For example, in 2023 I had four plays produced – The Empress at the RSC, Great Expectations at Manchester Royal Exchange and two productions of my version of A Doll’s House,” Tanika told GG2 Power List.
“Totting up, that means in 2023 my plays employed 44 actors, some of whom were black or white, but most were south Asian. On top of that, there were the wonderful stage managers, designers, musicians, choreographers, lighting and sound designers and, of course, directors. It takes a big team to put on a play but none of it is possible without the play script at the beginning.” She has written not only about the empire but about many other subjects. “I have been writing for a few decades now and a lot of my plays have been contemporary plays. My play White Boy at the National Youth Theatre was about knife crime, Gladiator Games at Stratford East Theatre was about the racist murder of Zahid Mubarek in Feltham young offender institution in 2000, Sugar Mummies at the Royal Court Theatre was about sex tourism in Jamaica, and Inside Out was about women in the criminal justice system. The more recent plays, The Empress, Great Expectations and Lions and Tigers, do indeed deal with the legacy of British imperialism and I have spent a lot of time in the British Library researching and looking up primary sources.
” She has mixed feelings when asked about diversity. “I feel like it still has a long way to go, though it has got better than when I first started out,” she said. “There is still a lack of recognition of British south Asian plays and writers. Most of the major theatres have barely produced any plays by south Asian writers – that is, new plays written by living writers. And south Asian plays are rarely recognised for rewards and prizes. For example, in the most recent Stage top 100 important people in British theatre, there were only two mentioned, which feels like a bit of an erasure of our contribution. The appointment of Indhu Rubasingham as director of the National Theatre is a wonderful appointment and gives us all hope.” Tanika is being modest. She has inspired many aspiring young Asian playwrights, men and women.
