LONDON: British Indian actor and screenwriter Meera Syal, famed for writing “Bhaji on the Beach” and co-writing and starring in the British Asian TV comedy “Goodness Gracious Me”, has revealed that an older Asian actor had tried to rape her, when she was in her 20s, in London.
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The 65-year-old, made a dame in the 2026 New Year Honours list, told the Sunday Times that back in the 1980s, when she was struggling to find acting work and was singing in a jazz band in Covent Garden, applying for waitressing jobs, about to give up and go back to the West Midlands, an Asian actor she knew invited her “to a gathering” at his house in London, saying he was friends with casting directors. When she arrived, there was just one person, a musician, who swiftly left, leaving her alone with the unnamed older Asian man. She stayed for dinner, feeling it would be impolite not to do so, and after dinner, mid-conversation he “pounced on her and tried to rape her”.
Then he tried to make small talk but she left and took a cab to her friend’s place, where she was staying, and did not tell anyone what happened, she said. She did not report it to police as it was the 1980s and the thought of putting her Punjabi parents, who had moved to the UK from Delhi, through a criminal trial was too much. “This is the first time I’ve spoken about this publicly,” she said ahead of her memoir “Vigilauntie: A Memoir — Innit?” being released in India. The book also delves into her Hindu and Sikh parents’ lives in India and Partition.
The assault inspired the strong female characters she created in “Goodness Gracious Me”, a 1990s comedy that poked fun at British Indians and at British society, spurring “a real embracing of multicultural Britain”. “How times have changed,” she said. “It feels like we are back in the Seventies.”
