Transadaptation and Bollywoodisation in Tanika Gupta’s Hobson’s Choice and Wah! Wah! Girls

Abstract

Tanika Gupta's varied work as a playwright encompasses transadaptation in a range of forms. This article will focus on two of her plays, Hobson's Choice (2003/2019) and Wah! Wah! Girls (2012), exploring the ways in which she depicts representations of South Asian communities in Britain in different ways. Hobson's Choice reworks the original 1916 play to being set among the Bengali community working in the rag trade in Salford. The play focuses on the father of the family, Hari Hobson, who runs a clothing factory and lives with his three daughters. The 2019 reworking of the play changes the setting to a Ugandan Asian family in Manchester in 1987. Wah! Wah! Girls is set in East London, having been commissioned as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Focusing on a mujra-style dancing club and the different communities surrounding it, the play includes transadaptations of well-known dance routines from Bollywood films integrated into the action, playing on nostalgia and familiarity for South Asian communities, as well as offering a picture of contemporary multicultural London. Both plays, in different ways, use transadaptation of setting and form to examine what it means to be British and Asian in different contexts, and this article will analyse whether this is successful in creating a meaningful interrogation of the experience of British South Asians on stage.