@JOAT: Yeah, but he is referring to British-Indians and I think he is right. The United States has an entirely different set of values in that respect from the UK.

what values are they?? that all british asians are sluts?

The United States has an entirely different set of values in that respect from the UK.

The whole play is based on something completely unrealistic. that his beautiful virgin bride remains just that. Six weeks later, the whole family start to panic. A British-Indian pair of lovers today wouldn’t be virgins on their wedding night.

But there are all these non desi folks in the audience (who were laughing their heads off) and I was a little overwhelmed at the reinforcing of all the stereotypes that exist about Indian culture. Oye. I know it’s supposed to be entertainment but it grated from time to time. The whiskey, the clueless interfering but oh well meaning parents. And the living at home after marriage business.

I’d like to address this however…

The whole play is based on something completely unrealistic.

that his beautiful virgin bride remains just that.

Six weeks later, the whole family start to panic. A British-Indian pair of lovers today wouldn’t be virgins on their wedding night.

This is very real for a lot of young early 20s kids married in India and quite likely in this scenario. I have cousins who didn’t consumate their marriages till weeks later who either had physical or mental difficulties they had to get over and get to know a stranger before having sex with him nevermind do it with a house full of people sleeping around them.

And I also know plenty of friends here in the US, born and raised, who married early, after college, who were still virgins. Sure they fooled around but they were virgins when they married. I find nothing unrealistic about that notion.

There was a uk TV drama called http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/B/britz/text

Last year that got allot of media attention. From the reaction from Muslim friends was why is every image with Islam on the telly, has a link to terrorism. It is indeed sad because here was an opportunity to show the faith in another light. UK politicians keep harping on about how Muslim leaders should do more to unite communities, but television and media are the most powerful tool at the moment. Would it have been revolutionary or a break through? No, but it would have been something.

It ticks all the multicultural boxes for the National Theatre. A little slice of working class Indian life, look at the saris in the middle of industrial northern England, etc etc etc

Ayub Khan Din’s appeal is easy to see. Take the bawdy humour and comedy of Hanif Kureishi’s early work, add insights into family, race, love, and everything else, shake it around in a bucket, and you get “Bend it Like East is Rafta”.

What I found interesting about the play was the choice Khan-Din made in making the family Hindu-Punjabi Indian, rather than Muslim Pakistani. The town in which the play is set, Bolton, has very few Indians, and is overwhelmingly Pakistani, in terms of the make up of the South Asian community. Khan-Din himself comes from a mixed-race Pakistani Muslim background.

I think it could be something to do with not having to deal with all of the baggage and expectations that a play about Pakistani Muslims set in the north of England would have to deal with, all the questions about the growth of religious extremism, the place of “Islam in the modern world”, a long drawn out disquisition on the position of Muslim women.

Making the protagonists Hindu takes away those expectations, allows him to focus on the family and romantic dynamics and comedy, the cultural playfulness, the witty observations about South Asian family life without the suffocating expectation of ‘BEING A COMMENT ON ISLAM’ and ‘ABOUT BEING A MUSLIM TODAY’

Khan-Din has no responsibility to address those subjects if he doesn’t want to. And it is sad that he may have felt the need to make a decision on the background of the family depicted in order to follow his muse and by-pass those expectations. I have a sense that the outside burdens that come with being a Muslim writer in the UK can be asphyxiating at times. And I find that a little sad.

Either way, the affection, curiosity, affinity and tenderness that a writer of Pakistani Muslim background feels for Indian culture and characters is an underlying and very sweet subtext that I took from this play.

Yup, the play is for the most part a straight adaptation of the original with a few updates or Asian bits added here and there as colour, rather than as a starting point to delve any deeper into the life of the Asian community in the UK (which is what East is East does).

What was more interesting to me at the time was the fact that I was one of the very few South Asians in the audience. I was surrounded by a sea of middle aged, middle class, European faces all loving the show and giggling the whole way – although there were points where I was the only person laughing.