Meera Syal, the comic novelist who turned a Midlands childhood into a classroom classic

Meera Syal

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	June 27, 1961 Wolverhampton, England
Occupation	Writer
Known for	Doctor Strange, Paddington 2, Alice Through the Looking Glass
Awards	Betty Trask · Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

When Meera Syal was trying to get the sketch show that became Goodness Gracious Me off the ground, the idea met a discouraging question: “an Asian comedy show? Are Asians funny?” It is one of the chance remarks around which she has built Vigilauntie, the memoir Weidenfeld & Nicolson published at the start of September, each one a turning point in her life. Another, from her mother and her aunties, gives the book its running joke: “don’t sit with your legs apart!”

The memoir has arrived in a crowded autumn. Syal spent September and early October at the Lyric Hammersmith as Hazel, a retired nuclear scientist rationing electricity in a cottage by an exclusion zone, in a tenth-anniversary revival of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children. Reviewing it for London Theatre, Anya Ryan wrote of “a brilliant, as ever, Meera Syal”. This week she turns up on American screens in Phony, Nick Paley’s Hulu series, as Sharla, a private investigator living on the edge of town who believes in “alternative knowledge”. The New Year Honours had already made her a Dame, for services to literature, drama and charity.

For many British readers, Syal is the author of a single book they first met at school. Anita and Me, published in 1996, is set in Tollington, an invented mining village in the Midlands at the end of the 1960s, and narrated by Meena Kumar, a British Indian girl with Punjabi parents. Meena idolises Anita Rutter, the older English girl next door, and, asked what she wants to be when she grows up, answers “blonde”. The novel won a Betty Trask Award and became a GCSE set text for the AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC exam boards, so a generation of English teenagers has written essays on it.

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Much of it is borrowed from life. Syal was born Feroza Syal in Wolverhampton on 27 June 1961, to Punjabi parents who had come to Britain from New Delhi, and grew up in Essington, a Staffordshire mining village a few miles to the north, where hers was the only Asian family. In a 2003 BBC interview she called the novel semi-autobiographical. Scholars have since read it alongside To Kill a Mockingbird: the critic Graeme Dunphy titled a 2004 essay in Neophilologus “Meena’s Mockingbird: From Harper Lee to Meera Syal”, and Syal herself picked Harper Lee’s novel when Radio 4’s Front Row asked her for a work of art she loved.

She got to the novel by way of the stage. At Manchester University, where she took a double first in English and drama, she co-wrote a one-woman play with Jackie Shapiro, One of Us, about a West Midlands girl who runs away from home to become an actress. Syal played all fifteen parts. It won prizes at the National Student Drama Festival and in Edinburgh, and the Royal Court offered her a contract.

Screenwriting came next. Her script for Bhaji on the Beach (1993), Gurinder Chadha’s first feature, sends a group of Punjabi women of different generations on a day trip to the Blackpool Illuminations. It reads like a sketch for the fiction that followed: in her books the comedy is a way into difficult family material, the women are rarely as dutiful as they look, and the community is drawn from the inside, with affection and without much sentiment.

Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999) turned that eye on adulthood. Tania, Sunita and Chila, friends since childhood and now in their thirties, are each at a crossroads: Sunita stuck with two children and a job that does not satisfy her, Tania the career woman who has left her family behind, Chila about to marry Deepak, a man with a long list of former girlfriends that includes Tania. Syal adapted it herself as a three-part BBC drama in 2005. She also wrote the screenplay for the 2002 film of Anita and Me, directed by Metin Hüseyin, and gave herself the small part of Auntie Shaila.

Sixteen years separate that second novel from the third, and the gap says something about how she has worked. Between them came Goodness Gracious Me, which she co-wrote and performed first on radio and then on BBC Two, Granny Kumar in the International Emmy-winning The Kumars at No. 42 alongside Sanjeev Bhaskar, whom she married in 2005, script work on the Andrew Lloyd Webber and A. R. Rahman musical Bombay Dreams, and a stage career running from Shakespeare’s Beatrice to Miss Hannigan in Annie. The House of Hidden Mothers (2015) is her most openly serious novel: Shyama, a divorcee in her forties whose IVF treatment has failed, turns with her younger partner, Toby, to a surrogate in India, and the book gives equal weight to Mala, the village woman who carries the child and who sees the arrangement as a way out of her own life. The Christian Science Monitor called it “fast paced, character rich”.

She was made an MBE in 1997, a CBE in 2015 for services to drama and literature, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2017, and she received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2023. Anita and Me has also kept growing on stage: Tanika Gupta’s adaptation opened at Birmingham Rep in October 2015, moved to the Theatre Royal Stratford East and toured the UK in 2017.

Vigilauntie goes back to the ground that novel fictionalised. It covers the Midlands childhood, her grandfather’s attempts to arrange her marriage, motherhood, and the way the partition of India in 1947 shaped her parents and the generation that followed them. The broadcaster Anita Anand, in the publisher’s endorsements, writes that it “earns its place alongside Anita and Me as an essential chapter in her extraordinary life’s work”, and Jameela Jamil writes: “Meera is the reason I was ever able to imagine myself in comedy.” Thirty years after Meena Kumar said she wanted to be blonde, her author has written that story again, this time in her own name.

Tags: novelists, writers, Meera Syal, Anita and Me, Gurinder Chadha, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

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