Home and Away: Notions of In-betweenness in Tanika Gupta’s The Waiting Room

Abstract

When faced with feisty Priya, heroine of Tanika Gupta's The Waiting Room, one cannot help but feel that ghosts on the stage have come a long way since Hamlet's gloomy father. Gupta's unlikely ghostly heroine dominates the play and all the characters in it, breaking a great many traditions as the plot develops. This article argues that Gupta's play presents a mode of cultural in-betweenness, offering alternatives to dichotomous pairs such as biography/fiction, East/West, life/death and tradition/modernity. In-betweenness as used and presented by Gupta serves as a means to criticise and reduce the ethnically limited reception and perception of British-Asian women's writers today.

"Well, I’ve been ranting and raving about this for years: (...) they put you in a box. You don’t call Tom Stoppard a Czech writer or Harold Pinter a white Jewish writer, so why do we have to be called either women writers or Asian writers? For years I had been resisting writing plays that are only about Asian people, and writing plays about arranged marriages and all the rest of the clichés. I think that if you are a writer you should be allowed to write whatever you want" (Gupta in Sierz 266).