Between Page and Stage. Meera Syal in British Asian Culture

The article focuses on significant moments of Meera Syal’s career as both an actress and a writer and argues that her performance of a gendered and ethnic identity is a key element of her work . It emerges as a response to an overall lack of images of Asians, as well as to a very limited range of roles available to British Asian women. Since the mid-1980s Syal has contributed to enlarge the scope of representation of Asian women on stage and screen by offering a multiplicity of roles that could capture the plurality of their experiences, while also reflecting on the possibilities opened up to herself as an actress of Asian parentage in Britain. Similarly the protean, transformative quality of acting has influenced her writing and both acting and writing have been deeply instrumental to the process on which she has embarked of self-fashioning a female identity that intersects questions of ethnicity, cultural translation and typecasting.