Pratibha Parmar

1967–present

Pratibha Parmar was born in 1955 to Indian parents. Her family moved to the UK from Nairobi, Kenya in the 1960s. She studied at Bradford University and moved to the University of Birmingham for her postgraduate studies, during which time she became a member of the prominent Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The Centre was a hub for several other key twentieth-century thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby and Paul Gilroy. In 1982 the Centre published a book on racism in Britain in the 1970s entitled The Empire Strikes Back; Parmar contributed to this, and she would continue to examine racial politics in the UK in both academic and creative ways moving forward. Yet academia did not satisfy Parmar’s aspirations as an activist, and she became sceptical about the scope of the impact of her PhD thesis compared with the possibilities of far wider audiences she could reach through film and media.

Much of Parmar’s early work as a filmmaker was centred around representing the South Asian presence and experience in Britain. She quickly became part of a vibrant Black Arts Movement in the 1980s and 1990s which engaged with issues around race relations and identity through the arts. Coming from an immigrant family herself, her work also gives a voice to diasporic communities. A seminal moment came in 1987, the year she was making her short film Sari Red (released in 1988). The film dealt with the fatal racist attack on an Indian woman, Kalbinder Kaur Hayre, in 1985. Outraged at the tragedy and sensitive to the fact that, as a woman of South Asian descent herself, she could have been in the same position, Parmar made the film in her honour.

Parmar also self-identifies as gay, and she was using her art at this time to contribute to the feminist movement and to resist discrimination against queer identity. Importantly, in the 1980s she was part of a movement beginning to challenge white or ‘imperial’ feminism, and specifically the exclusion of lesbians of colour from feminist groups. Parmar produced the film Khush in 1991, and the title appropriately comes from an Urdu word meaning pleasure. It was an example of an early artistic response to the need for representation surrounding the South Asian gay community across three sites: India, Britain and the US. In a similar light, her work also sought to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic which began around 1981, and the homophobic nature of the rhetoric around the crisis in the UK.

In the 1990s Parmar gained further exposure through broadcasts on Channel 4, one of the main services in UK television at that time. For instance, her Channel 4 documentary Double the Trouble, Twice the Fun (1992) featured stories about members of the LGBT community with disabilities, allowing her to foreground messages about intersectionality in public consciousness. It was presented by Firdaus Kanga, a Mumbai-born performer and writer who moved to London in the 1990s. Parmar has since cited increased editorial control as the reason for her move away from Channel 4 and towards further independence as a filmmaker. A theme that remains constant in Parmar’s portfolio is dissecting Asian life in Britain and the impact it has had on shaping ‘Britishness’. Her films The Colour of Britain (1994), Brimful of Asia (1999) and Nina’s Heavenly Delights (2006), which focused on Scotland and multiculturalism, spotlighted Indian, South Asian and broader migrant influences in the UK.

Another aspect of her catalogue as a filmmaker has been to probe the lives and careers of feminist figures, such as Angela Davis, Alice Walker and Andrea Dworkin. Most famously, she created a documentary with Walker (writer of The Color Purple) raising awareness of female genital mutilation, called Warrior Marks (1993); again, the documentary is an example of how her activism has long influenced her artistic collaborations and productions. In 2023–4, Parmar’s work was shown at Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt! exhibition, showcasing her use of art to navigate political and social injustices. She has been the recipient of numerous awards. Her work also takes her to the US, for example, as visiting artist and visiting professor at colleges such as Stanford University.