There is, Meera Syal says, a big Indian wife-swapping circle in Guildford. “I know someone who was part of it,” she deadpans, snacking on Bombay mix. “Car keys in a bowl, all that business. The whole thing imploded because one of the couples fell in love with each other, and you’re not supposed to do that – you’re just supposed to have a shag.”
Her delivery is flawless, casually pitched to make my eyebrows jump at the image of suburban Asian swinging. “These are people who go to [the temple],” she mimes a namaste, “and bow at their parents’ feet. That’s what I’m saying!” She shakes her head. “The stories.”
Syal has tons of them, has made her career on writing and performing them. “Every time you sit down [in Asian families],” she explains, “and someone opens their mouth, 100 Bollywood films’ worth of lives fall out.” Except that while Syal has invited the Guardian to her house, which is a smart five-bedroom semi in Highgate flooded with light and accented in junk-shop Indian swag, she has warned beforehand that her personal life – marriage, kids, family – is off limits.
And for the first part of our interview, at least, it is: Syal is regal, composed, smart – careful to give little away, but with a lot of quiet charm. Her childhood, however, remains an open book: we’re meeting, in part, because her semi-autobiographical 1996 novel, Anita and Me, has been adapted for the stage. She remains happy to talk nostalgically about that first, pretty well-documented part of her life spent inhaling books from her local library in the small Black Country town of Bloxwich. Is she guilty of romanticising the experience? “Well, they say, show me a child at seven and I’ll show you the woman,” she jokes.
All that fevered bookishness led directly to the second bit: writing and acting her way out of smalltown stereotype to become one of the first and most famous of her generation of British Asians to impact mainstream culture. It’s almost easy to forget, given that she now occupies a cosy space on the cultural wallpaper of modern Britain, but between Goodness Gracious Me, Bombay Dreams and Anita and Me, Syal was a real pioneer; she co-created one of the BBC’s landmark sketch shows, wrote the first Bollywood musical staged in the West End and Broadway, and had her work included in the the GCSE English syllabus.
“I found the study guide on [Anita and Me] mindblowing,” she says. “Really emotional. Part of it is about the history of us coming here, about migration in the 60s, about partition. There are kids who will be learning that and know our history.” Didn’t she get taught about empire in school? “No! If we learned anything about India, it was about poor brown people being swept away by floods, or: ‘Look how marvellous the Raj is, and the mess Indians have made since.’”
When I arrive, Sanjeev Bhaskar is smoking on the doorstep, a posh wool coat over his PJs and slippers. The couple worked together on Goodness Gracious Me (1996-2001) and Emmy-winning The Kumars at No 42 (2001-2004), but only got together in 2003 (“on a plane to Australia; it was a long flight,” their longstanding joke goes), and married in 2005. Syal’s first marriage ended in 2001, her 22-year-old daughter is now making her own way in the arts, and she and Bhaskar also have a nine-year-old son. Syal says she cordons off that part of her life to preserve her sanity. “The more you talk and the more you give away,” she says, “the more people see you as a personality. When that happens, you don’t get the work you want.”
And if you go by the work – which includes three novels, several original screenplays, memorable leads at the RSC and National Theatre – you might suspect that Syal was teetering on the brink of national treasure-dom. Add the fact that she has picked up an MBE, CBE and went to Prince Charles’s wedding to Camilla, and you could be convinced that she is a fully paid-up member of the establishment. “Oh, because I haven’t been asked that before,” she says, close to eyerolling.
But for all that, and the certain status she enjoys, she claims it’s still an uphill struggle. “Just because we are working, it doesn’t mean we’ve all got there,” she says. Does she mean fame, acclaim or celebrity? “Oh, I don’t feel I’m particularly on that circuit. Really, I know I’m not – I go to the very occasional red-carpet thing, and the photographers take a picture out of obligation rather than salivating.” She is, she says, fine with that. She claims she doesn’t get recognised, she doesn’t get stopped in the street. “The worst possible scenario is that you’re famous and you don’t work.”
But for a long while, Syal was hugely famous. Sometime around 1997, having led the first wave of British Asian talent to infiltrate arts, culture and the media, she was at the forefront of a movement where it was (almost) considered cool and exciting to have south Asian heritage. Culturally, it was a blink-and-you’d-missed-it moment: the Goodness Gracious Me gang had their catchphrases ringing out in playgrounds, Talvin Singh won the Mercury Music award, and the Blue Note in Hoxton Square hosted Anokha, a packed-out Monday club night then at the bleeding edge.
Like Britpop, I suggest, it sounds as if there were probably a lot of good parties at the time, but not a lot of internal agreement on what the “scene” actually meant or was. There’s a pause while she weighs it up. I tell her that among younger Asian artists or actors, fairly or not, a creeping sense emerged that while Syal’s generation smashed the doors down, they also pulled the handle behind them.
“I’m flattered people think we have that much power, frankly.” she says, drily. “What door? The same door we’ve been banging on? Why do they think we have the influence to shut it?” She starts munching on the biscuits she has laid out. “I’m sad they think the door’s shut, because certainly, we definitely feel with GGM … we still felt it changed a lot of people’s perceptions. I think we’re still puzzled as to why we as a group weren’t kept together or nurtured, or asked to do other things in the way that so many other successful sketch-show groups have. Because we certainly could have gone on like The Comic Strip and Harry and Paul.” The show has returned with its original cast for two specials in recent years, the last one broadcast this summer as part of the BBC’s India season, with at least one well-aimed jab at the postcolonial telly obsession with Indian railways.
When, later on, she is having her photos taken, I ask Syal what the worst part of her job is and she smiles, cheekbones bobbing, until I realise that it is me. Interviews. “It wasn’t like that before,” she says between the flashbulb clicking, “but because of social media, because of people poring over every single little thing you say, there is no interview that isn’t manufactured any more because there’s no truth.
“Say, when you’re asked about diversity and why Goodness Gracious Me didn’t go on, I want to answer honestly, but I’m also aware that everyone who will ever employ me will read this fugging article and I’m continually aware I’m treading this line between wanting to say the truth and being supportive of other people fighting, but also thinking: ‘Wow, I’ve been doing this for 30 years and people are going to think I’m always wanting to talk about [race] and I’m honestly not. I wish I had the work and the work would speak for me. That’s what I wish.”
Syal has just had her third, well-reviewed and evocative novel – The House of Hidden Mothers – signed up for a TV series and the stage production of Anita And Me is touring Birmingham and London. But she is candid about having an empty diary – a bit-part in an ITV drama, a touch of filming in Prague for a BBC show she has just come back from.
“I haven’t got any other work coming up – I have no idea what I’m doing next year,” she says. “Your boundaries change though,” she says, chin in hand, leaning over her black kitchen island. I assume she just means that her ambitions become bigger each time she checklists off one fulfilled dream or another: once you write your coming-of-age classic, you want to make the film. Once you make the film ... well, so on and so forth. “No,” says Syal. It’s the opposite. “In my 20s, I thought: ‘Maybe I could win an Oscar – that’s a possibility.’” She stops. “In my 30s, I thought: ‘I could probably win a Bafta, I think, if I really work hard and get the right kind of role.’” Another dramatic pause. “Then, in my 40s, I thought: ‘I’d really like that job.’ Your boundaries change. Everyone, when they’re young, wants the world and thinks they’ll get the world. The industry will tell you different actually. Certainly at this age.”
There is a scratchy, frustrated tension towards the end of our chat – it is not quite how I had planned it. While Syal has spent most of the interview downplaying her career, and is bored by the burden of representation, the truth is that she and her work matter a hell of a lot. It is not until the photos are done and my time is up that she gives me a second look and puts the kettle on again. Unsurprisingly, it is only once we shake off the stiffness of “the interview” and make casual conversation that the stories weevil out: family responsibilities tangling with career ambition, being propositioned by slimy media types, being stitched up “once or twice” in the past. “That’s where being Hindu comes in useful,” she says of the last one. “Hey, that’s your karma not mine, you carry that with you.”
Syal is particularly interested in “the duality of south Asian women”. She wants to make a documentary exploring how, on the one hand, they are deified as “goddesses, in a mother-fixated culture” and at the same time, deal with “a reality of female infanticide, dowry deaths, acid attacks”. It is something she has touched on, less dramatically, in Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee. In that novel, one of the characters Syal depicts is “a high-achieving, media babe” who goes from busting balls at work to coming home to a traditional multi-generational family setup. Again, she admits, there is a touch of semi-autobiography involved. “How do we get there?” She asks. “How are we dealing with it now, that duality of what a ‘good’ Indian woman does, when actually that’s a male construct. That’s what I’m interested in.”
Syal has talked before about fulfilling the duty of a good Indian girl: no boyfriends as a teenager, a double first in English from Manchester when she graduated. What was her rebellion?
“I don’t remember a particular moment. When you have really sweet and understanding parents, it’s quite hard to rebel in any kind of spectacular way. Any time you push another barrier, the first one being: ‘I don’t want to be a doctor’; the second one being: ‘I’m doing English and Drama’; the third one being: ‘I’m going to be an actor now’; the fourth one being: ‘I’m getting divorced’ – none of those hurdles or barriers were ever met with anything other than some pain, some disappointment but always: ‘OK, we are with you.’”
Given our shared cultural shorthand, we end up talking about the expectations of marriage for Punjabi women. Syal is patient when I wobble answering her questions about my own life. At one point she kindly rests her hand on my bundled fist. “My first marriage was semi-arranged,” she says, in empathy. “I mean, I chose him, we’re still really good friends and I don’t regret it because we had some good years and an amazing daughter. I’m sure there were whispers and gossip – I think I was the first Asian woman in our circle to get divorced.” She sing-songs a mock Punjabi aunty accent to make me laugh. “But, of course, now everybody is doing it, I’ve started a trend.”
Anita and Me is at Theatre Royal Stratford East, 29 Oct to 21 Nov. stratfordeast.com
• This article was amended on 26 October 2015 to remove a professional detail at the request of the interviewee.
