’Being an outsider made me creative,’ Professor Syal tells audience

Meera Syal

Meera Syal told an audience of students that feeling like an ‘outsider’ growing up in an Indian family in the West Midlands led to her following her career path in the creative arts.

Professor Syal, the playwright, actress and writer, was speaking at her inaugural lecture on 15 November as Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, based at St Catherine's College and Oxford University.

She told the audience that she will enlist Oxford students to help her prepare for her first leading Shakespeare role, as Beatrice in Much Ado with the Royal Shakespeare Company next summer.

Professor Syal spoke about her life as a first generation immigrant and growing up as part of the only Indian family in her hometown in the West Midlands. She said: ‘Kids would come over and rub my skin and say, 'does it come off?'' Professor Syal said 'that feeling of wanting to tell the stories that made me feel I belonged' was her creative force. She would act differently when with her parents and family and with her friends – '(so) it's no surprise I became an actor,' she said. Professor Syal said that being an outsider helped her creativity and allowed her to look at things in the bigger picture.

On being offered the position of Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, Professor Syal joked: 'My parents rang everybody in India just to shout down the phone, 'Hello? Meera's going to be a professor... No, you don't know me.'

The lecture was titled 'Actor? We thought you said doctor' - so-called because this was her uncle's reaction when she told him her drama ambitions.

Professor Syal was part of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and became one of the UK's best-known Indian personalities in The Kumars at No. 42. She authored two novels, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee and Anita and Me, both of which were adapted for the screen. She wrote the acclaimed screenplay Bhaji on the Beach. Anita and Me was based on her own childhood experiences, she told the audience.