Wednesday February 25, 2009
Breaking barriers
By S. INDRAMALAR
British comedian-actor Sanjeev Bhaskar talks fondly about playing King Arthur on stage and his sitcom Mumbai Calling.
IT would seem that after 10 long years in British entertainment, Sanjeev Bhaskar has finally succeeded in breaking the very stereotypes he has lampooned in both his hit comedy series Goodness Gracious Me (1998-2000) and The Kumars at No.42 (2001-2006): the misconceptions about ethnic Indians.
Although Sanjeev Bhaskar recently played King Arthur in a West End musical, he still feels that ethnic actors in Britain still don’t have it easy. Just last year, Bhaskar was cast as King Arthur in the Monty Python musical comedy Spamalot at the West End.
“You are right, it is the most un-Indian character I can ever imagine playing!” says Bhaskar in a recent telephone interview from London.
“But,” he continues, “as I have told everyone here, it is historically accurate ... and if you look very, very deeply, you will find that King Arthur was in fact Indian!
“It was very exciting for me, playing King Arthur. I was very, very scared at first. You know, it was a West End play and I had never done a musical before or sang or danced on stage. In fact, I don’t think I have ever sung or danced sober, let alone on stage.
“And (I was scared) also because it was a Monty Python musical and I was very influenced by the Monty Python films and all their TV shows.
“I did it for six months — for the first month, I was just terrified and then after that I just loved it. I discovered the joy of singing. It is a joyous thing to sing ... unless of course people say ‘stop singing!’ ”
A spin-off from the popular film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Spamalot was created by the Monty Python comedians, who are well known for their no-holds-barred satire, and it has been described by critics as being a “merciless parody” of the Arthurian legend.
The musical comedy has garnered a huge celebrity audience, including members of the British royalty, rock stars, soap stars and super models, since it first went on stage in 2006.
Born and raised in West London, Bhaskar, 45, experienced racism at school and at one point in his sixth form all but two of 150 students reportedly refused to talk to or sit with him.
While things weren’t so harsh in the entertainment industry, progress was slow. His hit show, Goodness Gracious Me, was turned down by numerous TV producers and was finally accepted by BBC Radio in 1996, before finally finding its way to television two years later.
Are things any different a decade later? “Actually, it’s not much easier (for ethnic actors in Britain). Part of the problem is that you have English or white English middle-class writers who still don’t have that much contact or understanding of other cultures.
“So, the easiest thing is to write about what they feel is the accepted stereotype of a particular culture.
“It tends to be slightly lazy writing when people do that, especially in this day and age of communication and the Internet, where it is not too hard to find out (things about different cultures).
“I think, until there are more Asian producers, directors and writers, things will not change much. It has gotten better, but (only with more Asians involved) that’s when there will be a dramatic change,” he says.
Among his latest TV projects is Mumbai Calling, a situation comedy about the workers of a call centre where Britain has outsourced its mundane day-to-day problems to a team of tech-savvy Indian university graduates in downtown Mumbai.
Bhaskar plays Kenny Gupta, a British-born Indian who is sent to Mumbai to run the centre, much to his displeasure. Gupta and his general manager/assistant Dev Rajaha (Nitin Ganatra) have to deal with the day-to-day challenges of the call centre workers — a task that is fraught with problems because of the duo’s incompetence.
The sitcom was shot in entirely in Mumbai, and with the exception of Bhaskar, Ganatra and Daisy Beaumont (who plays Gupta’s superior), the rest of the cast are Indian actors.
Bhaskar commented that the Western view of Indian call centre workers rules out the possibility of them being smart, intelligent graduates who have been thrust into impossible situations.
“One of the misconceptions is that these call centres are taking jobs away from the British and giving them to uneducated, stupid people who have probably only just learnt to use the telephone.
“Now, we know it’s very different. In fact, these call centre employees have to be better because they are, for one thing, not speaking in their mother tongue and have to research the foreign country and culture of the people they are accepting calls from.
“I wanted to capture the more positive view of the operatives and suggest that it’s the situation that’s absurd, not really the people on either side,” he explains.
The character of Gupta, adds Bhaskar, is also a lot more complicated than it seems.
“Kenny Gupta is lost. He has been described as a fish out of water (coming from London to manage the centre).
“He is an Indian and he looks like an Indian, and so the sense of being an outsider is more interesting because he looks like everyone else around him,” he says.
Apart from starring in the sitcom, Bhaskar also shares writing credits and even directs several episodes.
In real life, Bhaskar is quite unlike his character. Though born abroad, he has relatives in India and became acquainted with his parents’ motherland while he was still a child.
“I am fortunate that I went to India when I was a child ... we visited family so we basically moved from one flat in West London to one in Delhi.
“But because of that and because I speak the language – I speak two Indian languages – I don’t feel so much like an outsider compared to some of my friends who are also British-born Indians.
“Many of them go to India but cannot stand the heat or don’t speak the language and don’t like the spices or the food or mangoes!
“I certainly understand how Kenny must feel. For a lot of Asians who are born and brought up in the United States, Britain or Europe, going back to the land of ancestry is not as easy or straightforward as people think it is.
“There is a level of complexity which can be tragic or funny. For me, it is always more interesting to look at the funny side.
With comedy, you can mock certain attitudes or stereotypes and get away with it.”
Now that his run as King Arthur has ended and Mumbai Calling is playing, Bhaskar is content to sit back and enjoy some time with his three-year-old son, Shaan.
“He is at an age where he is discovering what his father does for a living. He saw me on stage as King Arthur, so now he believes that when I leave the house I am going to the stage to ride a horse and sing a song,” says Bhaskar, who is married to actress Meera Syal (whom he worked with on Goodness Gracious Me and also The Kumars at No.42 in which she played his character’s grandmother!).
He has also some new projects up his sleeve.
“I would love to do some more of The Kumars. I have been thinking about maybe restarting it. Since we stopped the show, we started making some seriously famous friends and I am now thinking how I can take advantage of them.
“Also, if I can convince Meera to put the teeth in again as the grandmother, then we’ll do it. It was a very warm show and it was nice doing it.”
Until then, it’s Mumbai calling.
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