Meera Syal MBE (born Feeroza Syal on 27 June 1961) is an Indo-British comedienne, writer, playwright, singer, journalist, producer and actress. She rose to prominence as one of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and became one of the UK's best-known Indian personalities portraying Sanjeev's grandmother, Ummi, in The Kumars at No. 42.
She was awarded the MBE in the New Year's Honours List of 1997 and in 2003 was listed in The Observer as one of the fifty funniest acts in British comedy.
Syal starred in the eleventh series of Holby City as Consultant Tara Sodi and has also appeared in the fifth series of Doctor Who.
Her Punjabi-born parents came to England from New Delhi. She was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire and grew up in Essington, a mining village a few miles to the north. She attended Queen Mary's High School in nearby Walsall.
Syal won the National Student Drama Award for writing One of Us while studying English and Drama at Manchester University. She won the Betty Trask Award for her first book Anita and Me and the Media Personality of the Year award at the Commission for Racial Equality's annual Race in the Media awards in 2000. Syal wrote the screenplay for the 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach. She was one of the team who wrote and performed in the BBC comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me (1996-2001), originally on radio and then on television.
She achieved a number one record with Gareth Gates and her co-stars from The Kumars at No. 42 with Spirit in the Sky, the Comic Relief single. She also sang Then He Kissed Me (composed by Biddu) with the famous pop star from Pakistan Nazia Hassan. Nazia, Syal and Bidddu also came up with the girl band named "Saffron" in 1988. She was given the Nazia Hassan Foundation award in 2003. In October 2008 she starred in the BBC2 sitcom Beautiful People.
In June 2003 she appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs programme with a selection of music by Nitin Sawhney, Madan Bala Sindhu, Joni Mitchell, Pizzicato Five, Sukhwinder Singh, Louis Armstrong and others. The luxury she chose to ease her life as a castaway was a piano. As a journalist she writes occasionally for The Guardian.
In 2009, a new series of Beautiful People was broadcast, Meera played Aunty Hayley. In the same year she guest starred in 'Minder' and starred in the film 'Mad, Sad & Bad'. In Oct/Nov she began filming two episodes of Doctor Who alongside new Doctor Matt Smith.
In 2010, she played Shirley Valentine in a one woman show at the Trafalgar Studios. In the same year she played Nasreen Chroudhry in two episodes of "Doctor Who" alongside Matt Smith.
In 2004 she took part in one episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, which investigated her family history. Her parents are an exception as they married for love after a secret seven year relationship, going against the Indian tradition of arranged marriage. One of her parents is Hindu and the other a Sikh, but their parents embraced their son-in-law. Syal was apparently surprised to discover both her grandfathers had actively campaigned against British rule and presence in India: one was a communist journalist; the other was a Punjab protestor, who was imprisoned and tortured in the Golden Temple after protesting.
In January 2005, Syal married her frequent collaborator, Sanjeev Bhaskar, who plays her grandson in The Kumars At No. 42; the marriage ceremony took place in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Their baby, a boy named Shaan, was born at the Portland Hospital on 2 December 2005. Syal has a daughter called Chameli from her former marriage to journalist Shekhar Bhatia. Her brother is investigative journalist Rajeev Syal.
In February 2009, Syal was one of a number of British entertainers who signed an open letter printed in The Times protesting about the persecution of Bahá'ís in Iran.
Her book Anita and Me has found its way onto school and university English syllabuses both in Britain and abroad. Scholarly literature on it includes:
Rocío G. Davis, "India in Britain: Myths of Childhood in Meera Syal's Anita and Me", in Fernando Galván & Mercedes Bengoechea (ed.), On Writing (and) Race in Contemporary Britain, Universidad de Alcalá 1999, 139-46.
Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce "Invisible Cities: Being and Creativity in Meera Syal’s Anita and Me and Ben Okri’s Astonishing the Gods", in Philip Laplace and Éric Tabuteau (eds), Cities on the Margin/ On the Margin of Cities: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary British and Irish Fiction, Besançon: Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, 2003: 113—30.
Graeme Dunphy, "Meena's Mockingbird: From Harper Lee to Meera Syal", in Neophilologus 88, 2004, 637-59.
