Towards cultural literacy

Jatinder Verma

Speech marking Tara's 30th anniversary, Arts Theatre. 11 June 2007


30 years ago, five young men – lawyers Sunil Saggar and Ovais Kadri, accountant Vijay Shaunak, scientist Praveen Bahl and myself – launched Tara Arts with an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s anti-war play, Sacrifice. The production was born out of anger, fear and curiosity – the mixture of emotions that were our response to the racist murder of a young boy living in Southall, 17-year old Gurdip Singh Chaggar, on a hot July day in 1976.

The reason for our anger was obvious, and for our fear – Chaggar’s brutal and random death was a vicious message to us of how fragile our lives were in a Britain shaping itself to a new reality of multiple cultures jostling for public space against each other. Our curiosity was born of the same spirit that had guided me, as a newly-arrived 14-year old, to explore the entire length of the London Underground in a single day: how do you travel – to work or for leisure – under ground? Was London’s underbelly a clue to its over-ground reality? In producing Sacrifice at the BAC in August 1977, we pinned our colours to the creation of a dialogue between the under- and over-ground worlds of Britain. For we were all too aware of ourselves as the little-known aliens, as one of the several minorities who were scarcely heard or seen in public spaces. An awareness enshrined in the title of Naseem Khan’s seminal 1976 report to the Arts Council - The Arts that Britain Ignores.

How things have changed! 30 years later, no one can seriously claim that Asian, Black and other ‘minority’ Arts are ignored. The work of touring theatre companies like Yellow Earth, Talawa, Nitro, Tiata Fahodzi, Kali, Tamasha, Rifco as well as ours, amongst many others, has established a multiplicity of cultures inextricably woven into the fabric of contemporary British theatre. A host of writers, directors and performers have emerged to grace every corner of British theatre, television, radio and film.

The emergence of this new sensibility in British theatre – where a multiplicity of new voices is the latest topsoil to enrich the two thousand year old sediment that is British culture (at least, since the Romans started to build their amphitheatres here) - is just one part of the past three momentous decades. The post-War idealism to build a brave new world – an idealism that was still palpable to us in the ‘70s despite the racist bitterness – has given way to a more individualised and uncertain sense of the future. The celebration of multiculturalism that Britain began to awaken to towards the end of the 20th century, seems whimsical in the wake of the July 7th bombings. Like many of us on that day, I was horrified. I felt betrayed: was this the end-result of the multiculturalism that we had struggled for since 1977? The clear answer is No. But for many now, multiculturalism seems to have been a mistake – a misguided, if not craven, accession to the sensibilities of foreigners to Britain. 

I grew up in a city in Africa where each day I went from Punjabi to English to Swahili and never once thought to question these tastes swirling around my tongue. For me, the story of Tara in these past three decades has been one of trying to recover that ease of childhood journeying back and forth, when I plaited the couplets of Valmiki with the sounds of the night-time Ngoma and the equally strange verse of Shakespeare. This interweaving of cultures fed my burgeoning sense of myself. For me this is the essence of multiculturalism – to have no passports to the imagination. Where cultures are not exclusion zones, barring entry except on high days and holidays, the annual countrywide melas and the carnivals, but gateways to other experiences that illuminate the heart.

Yasmin comes from this same world and in her brave and poignant play, which you are about to see, she explores the brutality of cultural exclusion zones. With her unswerving inability to speak anything but the truth, she illuminates the Shakespearean dimension of the stranger – who is extravagant, brutal, seductive, foolish, tragic... and above all, human.  

Multiculturalism as an idea is now under attack, often by those who have not worked out what it meant, let alone what it entailed. We are now being asked to bypass multiculturalism for a specious notion of Britishness. This is, to my mind, an utterly hollow exercise. It is a narrowing of the possibilities that the past three decades have suggested, despite events like the killing of young Gurdip Singh Chaggar or the bombings of 7th July. The possibilities which meant that while I would support India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka any day against England in cricket, I could with equal fervour support Manchester United against any football club in the world! The tide of multiculturalism cannot be confined by foisting a Britishness on us. The relentless pace of globalisation is displacing masses of people to all parts of the world, and so disparate stories will swirl and bump up against each other, irrespective of strictures from the guardians of purity.

The challenges ahead posed by multiculturalism remain immense: there are no dedicated theatre buildings pushing forth the ethics and aesthetics of multiculturalism. In all areas of the infrastructure of theatre – writers, performers, designers, administrators, publicists, critics - the representation of Asian, Black and other ‘minority’ practitioners remains either small or inconsistent, despite the enormous investments of the past three decades. Arguably, public investment could even be contributing to an emerging sense of two cultures: Art versus the Culturally Diverse Art. But that is not an argument for lessening public investment.

If we are to avoid a schism developing within the Arts, it seems to me that we need to take on board Stuart Hall’s plea for ‘cultural literacy’. We remain, as a nation, wedded to the idea of the Other, the Stranger, the Foreigner, as a blob – separate from ‘us’ - without class, faith, political orientation, or regional ethnicity. I read yesterday of an initiative to reach Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Muslim communities in Bradford. Is Muslim a new nationality? Or is this an example of blob-thinking – of cultural illiteracy? Is culture a sector specific, specialist area of activity, full of arcane mysteries, or can anyone join in? Surely cultural literacy is not so difficult to achieve – our national poet has furnished us with the idea, through the words he gives to Shylock: ‘If you cut us, do we not bleed?’ Since we’re all human, then surely we must all – across the imaginary barriers of culture – possess similar attributes of class, faith, political orientation and regional ethnicity. By these particularities we appreciate the specific humanities of our characters and love them for all their faults. Avoid these particularities and our characters remain blobs – fodder for the lazy and the reactionary. Government, far from reducing public investment in the Arts in the run up to the Olympics, should, on the contrary, be investing further in the promotion of such cultural literacy if the Olympic ideal – of a multitude of cultures engaged in a single endeavour - is to take root.

Our season of work this year – from Yasmin’s Nowhere to Belong to the Tempest, from Slavery to When the Lights Went Out, from work in the Studio to Trafalgar Square – seeks to extend cultural literacy by confronting clichéd notions of what an ‘Asian’ theatre company such as Tara should be producing. Theatre is for all, or it is for none. No passports – that is Tara’s clarion call for the future of multicultural theatre.

Jatinder Verma

11 June 2007