Adapting British Asian Women’s Stories: Tanika Gupta’s Anita and Me

Abstract

Abstract Tanika Gupta’s engagement with the works of contemporary bicultural writers invigorates her longstanding project of “staging the intercultural” (Gupta and Sierz 38). This essay discusses the ways in which the author juxtaposes her voice with that of Meera Syal who, since the 1980 s, has helped to shape the burgeoning field of British Asian women’s writing, while also establishing a distinct British Asian presence in the media. Similar to Gupta’s own writing, Syal has addressed cultural hybridity in her work and exposed the faultlines within British society, thus bringing into the open a racialized sense of the nation that is embedded in the entanglement of its colonial and postcolonial history. This article discusses Gupta’s appropriation of Anita and Me (2015) as a significant contribution to consolidating an Asian British women’s writing tradition that through transmedial and intertextual strategies favours legacy and canon formation. By dramatizing Syal’s coming-of-age novel Anita and Me, originally published in 1996, Gupta expands this work beyond both its original narrative form and its context of publication. She infuses it with an afterlife that sheds new light on the novel, while strengthening its relevance for contemporary cross-cultural audiences.