Meera Syal: ‘The government is like a typical Asian parent. Art is seen as a waste of time’

Dame Meera Syal is not interested in being a “national treasure”. The term is one that the 65-year-old actor, writer, comedian and singer balks at when we meet. “I'm really wary of the moniker because, actually, it doesn't help my career,” she says. “In some ways, it pushes you into some kind of ‘off you go to a retirement home!’ basket, which I hate.”

Perhaps the more appropriate term to address her by is “auntie”, the respectful name one gives to older women in south Asian culture (whether you’re related or not). It often comes with connotations of gossiping elders raising their eyebrows and offering unasked-for advice, which is perhaps why Vigilauntie is the title of Syal’s new book, offering moving reminiscences and life lessons from an extremely atypical, pioneering British-Indian auntie.

Sitting across from Syal, with her familiar kohl-lined eyes and halo of wavy hair, it’s impossible not to remember my parents quoting catchphrases from sketch show Goodness Gracious Me to each other and guffawing. Syal’s work has been a fixture in British culture, from the beautiful specificity of her first film, 1993’s Bhaji on the Beach, to the gritty humour of her novels spotlighting south Asian womanhood, via a surreal Gareth Gates cover of Spirit in the Sky, replete with ad libs from her lascivious character Granny Kumar (“Were we all on drugs?” she cackles at the mention of the latter. “What happened there?”).

That someone was making our stories heard on such a big scale – was making jokes in which we weren’t the punchline, and offering immigrants a language for our experiences – felt extraordinary to me growing up. Not least because of the aunties (and uncles) doubling down on the misogynistic notion that being a “good Indian girl” was finding a husband rather than living your own life, with their perpetual cries of “what will people think?”. In the book, the judgmental aunties take on the function of a quasi-Greek chorus.

“Those women were so seminal in my whole life,” Syal says, putting her half-eaten, tinfoil-wrapped sandwich back into her bag to focus properly – it’s lunchtime at the Lyric theatre, where she’s meeting me mid-rehearsals for Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children. “They were both my role models and my warnings. They were scary, some of them, and repressive, and I grew up fearing them because I knew I was not the kind of good Indian girl that a typical auntie would approve of. I did all the wrong things: I was mouthy, I was a tomboy, I liked English literature, I wanted to be an actor … Then I got divorced.”

Inspired by one of her heroines, Nora Ephron, the wonderfully candid memoir takes us through Syal’s life, offering lessons alongside glorious anecdotes (like the disastrous result of rushing to meet her childhood crush Donny Osmond backstage after filming her beloved talk show The Kumars at No. 42). “I had to ask myself: ‘Why would anyone want to pick up this book’?” she laughs. “And I think the thing that most people are interested in is how somebody like me, from my background, got to do what I got to do at a time where there was no one else like me, where I had no role models, where there was no map ... What do you do when you're a misfit who has no map?”

Each chapter is titled with a memorable quote from a part of her life: “Darling, you were marvellous!” (said by a white TV commissioner, congratulating her on a role in an all-south-Asian National Theatre production she hadn’t actually been in), or the incredible “Is that a British passport in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” (said by Syal to a prospective husband in Delhi while weighing the possibility of an arranged marriage, trying on some level to be a good Indian girl in spite of her non-traditional career path). 

With characteristic warmth, Syal recounts life in her Punjabi household in the West Midlands (Essington and, later, Bloxwich). She tells the story of her first time on stage, called up as a volunteer during Dick Whittington at Stoke theatre and immediately thrilled at the feeling. Her parents were supportive of her desire to act (even if the aunties and uncles weren’t), but studying English and drama at Manchester University made the obstacles – not having gone to drama school, the lack of prominent visibility for any south Asian actors, especially women – all too clear. Syal exorcised her frustrations in a one-woman show, 1983’s One of Us, intended as a swansong for her acting dreams before she went into teaching; instead, it would change everything, when a prize at the National Student Drama Festival got her a slot at Edinburgh where, in turn, a director from the Royal Court saw her and offered her a three-year contract. 

“If I'd sat around and waited for someone to give me the break, it wouldn't have happened. I had no thought that [One of Us] would lead to anything, that it would further my career, nothing, nothing. I just had to do it.” It was a valuable lesson in creativity, she adds: “That pulse of ‘I have to say this in an authentic way’ is your life force.”

Theatre work suited Syal. The idea of colourblind casting was longstanding in many companies, and it meant that she cut her teeth on juicy, non-typecast roles before eventually coming to our screens. While working as a performer-writer for groundbreaking Black British sketch show The Real McCoy, she crossed paths with script editor Anil Gupta. They began to discuss whether such a show could be made for British Asians – the resultant meeting with BBC producer Jon Plowman is recalled in Vigilauntie in a chapter titled: “An Asian comedy sketch show? Are they funny?”

Originally titled Peter Sellers Is Dead in a nod to the white English actor’s penchant for Indian roles, Goodness Gracious Me (another Sellers reference) eventually came to fruition after various stops and starts – a live show and a Radio 4 series, culminating in the TV show starring Syal, Nina Wadia, Kulvinder Ghir and Syal’s eventual second husband, Sanjeev Bhaskar. In one of my favourite sketches, “Indian Broadcasting Corporation”, a white man is treated as the diversity hire, begging the sniggering all-Indian commissioning team for basic respect for ethnic minority programming. It’s brilliantly biting satire, though it’s equally a little deflating that it still feels relevant nearly 30 years later.

“I mean, this is the virtue of doing a memoir,” she says. “Whenever you get depressed about the state of things, like ‘why isn't it happening quicker?’, you do go, well: ‘Look at how it was when I started.’” She points to internationally respected actors like Himesh Patel and Riz Ahmed, who aren’t just having to play typecast South Asian characters – and whose fame would have been unthinkable when Syal was starting out.

It’s telling, though, that actors like Patel and Ahmed had to go to the US before being taken seriously as stars in their home country. “I always find it quite sad,” she says. “I feel like it started here, that diaspora flowering and humour, and the Americans just whisked past us.” Syal says she’s been asked to write a screenplay every year for the last decade but none of them have been greenlit; putting money behind the stories of Brown women is ultimately not deemed a sound commercial investment.

The perceived commercial viability of art is becoming more and more of an issue, she says, with funding slashed year on year. “The government is like a typical Asian parent,” she scoffs. “Art is seen as a waste of time.” She clarifies that she doesn’t just mean Burnham’s new premiership, but the leadership of the past 20 years, recalling the bizarre 2020 government-backed advert which suggested a ballet dancer should retrain in cyber. “That is definitely what an uncle would say!” she laughs before slyly smiling and seamlessly switching to a Punjabi accent: “‘Don't be a ballerina, darling, be a doctor.’”

She empathises with where those ways of thinking must have come from, though. “The controlling behaviour, the fear of the future, you must become a doctor, you must marry that person,” she says, “[it] all comes from that root of: our lives can be turned upside-down and taken away from us in the blink of an eye by a lawyer who's never been to India, sitting in an office in London, drawing a line with a stroke of his pen.”

It’s why Syal accepted her various honours from the Order of British Empire, in spite of her own reticence around “national treasure” labels and colonial legacies – the year she was offered her MBE was the same year she was taking her father back to the Lahore house he and his family had fled during Partition. But her parents’ reaction to her being offered the medal was what made her accept it. “For them, it was so symbolic that the sacrifice had been worth it, the journey had been worth it. There was some kind of – not revenge, but some acknowledgement of what had been taken away.” 

Vigilauntie is Syal’s opportunity to archive some of those undertold histories: the realities of Partition, homesick immigrants trying to build anew in the face of the National Front, the racist murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar, the Southall Uprising, trade unionist Jayaben Desai. “That's [all] British history,” she says, “It's not Asian history. It's British history.”

Telling those histories feels especially important as the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Reform and Restore Britain builds. Syal has been reminded of what life was like in the 70s – and how they made it through. “I think storytellers are actually really important in times like this, because if you can reach people emotionally and through their empathy, it tends to stick and have more of an effect.” She sighs: “I don't know. I have to believe that because that's what I do for a living ... That's why I choose the roles I do – I'm not a politician, but those choices that I make, I always think: ‘Let them see a Brown woman do this.’ Is that going to change some minds?”

This might be why Dame Meera considers Anita and Me her proudest achievement so far (“apart from, obviously, my children”). Her first novel, about a young Brown girl in a village like Essington, is now part of the GCSE English literature curriculum. It means there are study guides teaching British children the context of south Asian immigration into this country. “Knowing that kids in school were going to be learning about Partition and Enoch Powell and the first wave of immigrants,” she says, “That’s really what I wanted. I just wanted people to know why we're here and why we matter.”

Vigilauntie: A Memoir – Innit? is published by Hachette (RRP £22; buy it at a discount at the Nerve Bookshop)

The Children runs until 3 October at the Lyric Hammersmith, London W6