Happy Birthday Jatinder Verma
It’s the director Jatinder Verma’s birthday today. This blog is based on the entry I wrote for him in the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Theatre Directors (ed. Maria M. Delgado and Simon Williams). Happy Birthday Jatinder!
Jatinder Verma
The director and activist Jatinder Verma is best known as Artistic Director for 42 years of Tara Arts (now Tara Theatre), the company he co-founded to produce cross-cultural theatre. He was born to Indian parents in Dar-es-Salaam in 1954, and educated in Nairobi before moving to London in 1968 as part of the migration to the UK of south Asian people in Kenya who had retained British citizenship following the country’s declaration of independence in 1963. Verma’s family settled in Wandsworth, south London at the height of racist attacks against post-colonial migration to the UK that were led by figures such as Enoch Powell. After school, Verma read History at the University of York (1973-76), immediately followed by an MA in Area Studies at the University of Sussex. During his studies, the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar in Southall, west London convinced Verma to commit to a cultural intervention on behalf of the British Asian community, which led to the creation of Tara Arts. For the company’s first production, in 1977, Verma chose Rabindranath Tagore’s 1913 play Sacrifice, which he staged at the Battersea Arts Centre. In 1982, Tara Arts became the first British Asian-led theatre company to receive core funding from the Arts Council.
Verma’s early work at Tara was strongly shaped by south Asian aesthetics, and he went on to direct prominent Indian plays such as Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana (1985), The Little Clay Cart (1992), and Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like a Man (1997). Nonetheless, Verma has never presented himself as a south Asian artist in any pure or confining sense. During the 1980s, he was instrumental in establishing the Black Theatre Forum’s annual Black Theatre Seasons in the West End, directing, for example, Tewodros, by the Ethiopian playwright Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, in 1987. He has also developed a deep interest in the non-Anglophone European canon, directing The Government Inspector (1988), Danton’s Death (1989), his own adaptation of Tartuffe (1990) at the National Theatre (becoming the first director of colour to be employed there)*, The Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1994), and an Indian version of The Miser (2012), which he adapted with Hardeep Singh Kohli. Verma’s practice of fusing south Asian forms and European texts has often been described as ‘Binglish’, and he has consistently emphasised the importance to his work of ‘connecting worlds’. This optimistic, multicultural response to the racist violence that characterised Verma’s youth in the UK was exemplified by Tara’s 2002 Journey to the West Trilogy, which marked the company’s 25th anniversary.
In spite of the unmistakably global vision of his work, Verma’s theatre has also been committedly local: his trademark fusion of south Asian and European cultural forms has articulated some of the cross-cultural dynamics that characterised not only his post-colonial formation, but also the area of south west London in which he both went to school and has spent almost all his working life. After opening a new home for Tara Arts in Earlsfield in 2016, Verma was awarded an MBE for services to diversity in the arts in 2017, and in 2019 announced that he would be stepping down as the company’s AD to pursue his own projects.
*I’m told that this truism of recent theatre history may not, in fact, be true. If you happen to know one way or another, please drop me a line.
