7 - ‘Binglishing’ the stage: a generation of Asian theatre in England

Summary

Binglish: ‘black English’, ‘being English’, ‘beastly English’, ‘bastardly English’, ‘be English’ … all these nuances are implicit in this term for that particular negotiation between English and Indian languages and sensibilities that is under way in contemporary England. It is within such negotiation that I believe Asian theatre needs to be sited and understood.

Asian theatre in England – as a distinct body of work – is of relatively recent vintage. The main impetus for the movement stems from the first mass migration by Asians from Kenya between January and February 1968. It is this migration which led to the emergence of the homogenising term ‘Asian’, a term which was used increasingly to lump Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Kenyan-Indian and other diasporic migrants of Indian sub-continental origin under one catch-all word. While Asian presence in England is considerably older, Kenyan-Asians, unlike their cousins from the Indian sub-continent, were predominantly more middle class and relatively more integrated into the metro-politan economy. Kenya did not achieve independence until 1964 and so education, commerce and the polity were more closely influenced by Britain. Senior school examinations, for example, were conducted by the Cambridge Educational Board, with the result that school curricula closely resembled those in force in the ‘mother country’.Equally, there was an emulation in Kenyan-Asian society of the range of professional and amateur theatre activity under way in England. Indeed, to a large extent, the forms of theatre activity in Kenya were essentially derivative of English popular theatre.