Tanika Gupta

Tanika Gupta was born in London to Bengali parents, Tapan and Gairika Gupta. In 1965 they set up the Tagoreans, a Bengali cultural organization in London. After studying at Oxford University, Tanika Gupta engaged in social work, working in a women’s refuge for South Asian women. She began writing plays in the early 1990s and formed part of the Asian Women Writers’ Collective, where she also met Meera Syal. During this time, she also started working as a script reader for the BBC.

Since 1996 Gupta has been a full-time writer, mainly for stage but she has also worked for television, radio and film. Across her career she has written over twenty-five plays for the stage, over thirty radio plays and scripts for long-running continuing dramas like the BBC’s EastEnders, Grange Hill and the police procedural The Bill. Her plays often focus on South Asian experiences. Her 2006 play Gladiator Games is a part-verbatim play about the killing of Zahid Mubarek in a racially motivated attack in Feltham Young Offenders Institution in 2000 and the public inquiry that followed. With Emma Rice she devised Wah! Wah! Girls for Kneehigh Theatre Company. For Birmingham Rep and Theatre Royal Stratford East she adapted Meera Syal’s Anita and Me. Lions and Tigers, directed by Pooja Ghai and part of the Globe Theatre’s Festival of Independence curated by Gupta, explores her great-uncle Dinesh Gupta’s anti-imperial activism. In The Empress (2013/2023), now part of the GCSE curriculum, Gupta weaves together the lives of ayahs, lascars and notable personalities Dadabhai Naoroji, Gandhi and Abdul Karim during the late nineteenth century. The play was inspired by Rozina Visram’s Ayahs, Lascars and Princes and received two productions by the RSC – one directed by Emma Rice and, in 2023, a revival by Pooja Ghai. Alongside original works, Gupta has adapted plays such as Hobson’s Choice and novels like Great Expectations into South Asian contexts.

For radio, Gupta has written dramatizations of A Passage to India, A Doll’s House and Pather Panchali, among others. In 2024 she collaborated with Meera Syal and Pooja Ghai on A Tupperware of Ashes. She has collaborated with many of the leading theatre companies in Britain, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, the National Theatre, Birmingham Rep, National Youth Theatre, Lyric Hammersmith, Royal Court, Edinburgh International Festival, Kneehigh Theatre Company, Sheffield Crucible, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Young Vic and Hampstead Theatre.

Tanika Gupta has also held positions as writer in residence at the National Theatre and Soho Theatre.