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| DEVIL WOMAN: Ila Arun as Bilquis Bibi Pic by Robert Day |
All the world’s a stage as Tamasha turns 21
The actress Ila Arun has been playing the lead role of a tyrannical mother in The House of Bilquis Bibi, the latest offering from the Tamasha Theatre Company staged at the prestigious Hampstead Theatre Club in north London.
The play is an adaptation of Frederico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba but translocated from Spain to modern day Pakistan.
Armed with a fearsome silver stick, Bilquis is the dark, dictatorial widow who rules over her five unmarried daughters in a household seething with sexual tension.
“You know Ila reminds me of Hrithik Roshan’s evil nurse (Maham Anga) in Jodhaa Akbar,” I said to Sudha Bhuchar, who adapted Lorca’s play.
Sudha smiled sweetly. “That’s because Ila was the one who played the nurse in Jodhaa Akbar.”
In real life, Ila turned out to be charming but as an actress she appears to have cornered the market in devil women.
That a play set in Pakistan with an all female Asian cast should be staged in the heart of cultural Hampstead is an indication of how much England has changed since Tamasha was set up in 1989 by Sudha and her co-artistic director Kristine Landon-Smith.
Tamasha made its debut with a stage adaptation of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable.
Since then I have not missed any of Tamasha’s plays which have included Ayub Khan-Din’s landmark East is East, later turned into a movie starring Om Puri as Pakistani immigrant “George Khan”.
Om Puri also stars in the just completed sequel, West is West, as does Ila as George’s abandoned first wife in Pakistan.
Since its inception, Tamasha has performed very creditably in nurturing young actors and actresses from the Indian and Pakistani communities, encouraging new writers, attracting non-white audiences and making Asian theatre a vibrant part of the mainstream.
England will see many changes in another 21 years but I am confident Tamasha will still be there — which is remarkable considering it was set up to stage only one play.
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| MAN AND MACHINE: Daljit Jagait shows off a Jaguar XKR |
Jagait’s Jaguar
Within a couple of years, there should be a Jaguar showroom in Calcutta to add to the ones which have opened in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi.
Even now, the latest models available in the UK — the XF, the XK and the XJ — can be bought in India for between Rs 59 lakh and Rs 1.10 crore. The cars cost twice as much as they do in the UK because of the 110 per cent import tax.
I got to road test the comfortable and surprisingly easy to drive XF and the XK recently at the Silverstone race track, “home of British motor sport”, where journalists were invited to experience Jaguar’s current range.
Present at Silverstone was Daljit Jagait, Jaguar’s VIP relations manager who bears an additional responsibility as head of the firm’s “cross-cultural sales and marketing department”.
Daljit, aged 45 and UK-born and bred, intends coaxing wealthy Indians out of their traditional Mercedes, Roll-Royce and Bentley buying patterns.
Jaguar, marking its 75th anniversary this year, is famed for its excellent engineering. But Daljit’s job would become much easier if celebrities in India were seen endorsing this most English of brands. Ideally, he would like product placement in Bollywood blockbusters and for Jaguars to be seen being valet parked at exclusive Indian parties in London.
Daljit, 12 years with the company, left Silverstone in Jaguar’s flagship XJ.
“My version costs £61,000,” he said, adding loyally, “My surname, Jagait, is similar to Jaguar.”
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Vote goat
Harrods, the “top people’s store” in London’s Knightsbridge, is to start selling goat meat from next month.
Hitherto, goat meat, for which the British haven’t quite developed a taste, was available only through selected ethnic outlets.
Harrods will gets it supply from Stoke Mill Farm in idyllic Dorset where the owner, Anthea Bay, keeps a herd of 100 friendly “Boer goats” — a bred which originated in South Africa.
Anthea’s “Gourmet Goats” will retail at Harrods for £19.95 (Rs 1,462) a kilo.
For that kind of money, says my brother-in-law who pays Rs 280 a kilo in Dotto Bagan Mor in north Calcutta, he could “take home a whole goat”.
Harrods, which will display goat meat in its wonderful Food Halls, has discovered that goat meat contains less fat than either beef or lamb and that it has become “the new darling” at such fashionable restaurants as Scarpetta and Convivio in New York and Pied á Terre, Fifteen and St John in London.
Top chef Valentine Warner, who urges customers to “Vote Goat!”, enthuses: “Goat meat is truly delicious. The UK has been exceptionally slow to catch on to this wondrous meat, enjoyed the world over.”
Bengali celebrity chef Udit Sarkhel reckons “Kosha Mangsho takes some beating”.
Mallika Basu, author of Miss Masala, a cookery book, agrees that goat meat is “mouth wateringly tender whether used in curries like the Kosha Mangsho or our famous Dum Biryanis. At £20 a kilo in Harrods, it will be a steep alternative to other meats for most of us. But here’s hoping the more mass market stores pick up on the trend and run with it.”
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Club Indian
Independence Day was celebrated at the Indian Gymkhana Club in Osterley, west London, last Sunday in an unexpectedly expansive manner.
After the High Commissioner Nalin Surie had raised the flag and a well-dressed crowd of 2,000-4,000 Indians listened to Pratibha Patil’s address, the whole affair blossomed into a major mela with complimentary khichdi (Gujarati section) and chicken biryani (Punjabi section).
Next year’s party will be even bigger and better, we are promised.
May be we all missed a part of Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” speech: “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to…hot jalebis!”
Book watch
One of the pleasures of English life is being able to browse in second hand bookshops.
At the three-month-old Book Warehouse by the British Museum, I picked up Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West (reduced from £17.99 to £5.99).
By the time I walked out 30 minutes later, I added to my pile of the great unread by also buying Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles; Tehmina Durrani’s My Feudal Lord; Graham Greene’s A Life in Letters; Duncan McLaren’s Looking for Enid: The Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton; and The Old Boys’ Network, A Headmaster’s Diaries, by John Rae, whom I had known when he was headmaster of Westminster School.
The total came to £26, illustrating that book buying is a chronic medical condition resistant to antibiotics.
Tittle tattle
A book dealing partly with the 1943 Bengal famine, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee (Basic Books; £18.99), has received a friendly review from former Daily Telegraph editor Sir Max Hastings.
But he takes issue with her imaginative suggestion that “British agents might have been responsible for the 1945 plane crash that killed nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose”.
Hastings argues: “British enthusiasm to eliminate Bose was not in doubt, but there is no evidence to suggest that they were smart enough to sabotage his aircraft on the far side of Asia.”
