Satinder Chohan is a playwright. After editing the arts and culture magazine, 2nd Generation, and the women of colour magazine Pride, she worked as a documentary researcher and assistant producer before writing her first play Zameen, about a cotton farming family in the Punjab. She was selected for an Emerging Writers’ residency at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and also completed a Writer’s Attachment at Hampstead Theatre, where she wrote Crossing the Line, about Somali pirates and British gap year students. In 2013 she received an ‘Adopt A Playwright Award’ for Mother India, about East-West surrogacy (now under commission with Tamasha Theatre and will be touring the UK in 2017). For Tamasha she is also currently Writer-in-Residence at the Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge, working on a play about young people and Assisted Reproductive Technologies.
1. Please tell me about your current position?
I’m a playwright currently working on a play called ‘Mother India’ about East-West surrogacy, set in an Indian fertility clinic. Yes, it’s sort of inspired by the gutsy film, which had me in tears as a kid at the Dominion Cinema in Southall. Also, I’m developing another play ‘1984’ about the struggle for Sikh independence in the UK and India and ‘Lotus Beauty’ about the lives of multigenerational women set in a suburban Asian beauty salon.
2. What are your proudest achievements?
My MA English Language and Literature from Yale in the US, writing plays despite a massive lack of writing confidence and helping to bring up my two nieces, one of whom is doing her Masters at Oxford and the other who graduated with an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute. Southall girls doing good!
3. What inspires you?
My family – the whole extended lot of them and also, my community both in Southall and the Punjabi/Asian community worldwide. I’ve met a lot of people who have been terribly disdainful about my hometown but let me declare it now, I’m immensely proud to be from Southall. Immigrant, working class, rootsy – it’s in the blood. You can take the girl out of Southall but you can’t take Southall out of the girl.
4. What has been the biggest obstacle in your career?
Me. Especially with my lack of confidence. Always getting in my own way. With a few plays under my belt, I’m finally learning to get out of the way.
5. Who has been the biggest influence on your career to date?
My grandparents and parents (and I guess, Guru Nanak by extension) – they taught me about respect, humility and hard work. In a world obsessed with image and money, I’m grateful for their lessons daily.
6. What is the best aspect about your current role?
Being creative and spending lots of time alone. I get to tell my own stories and create my own worlds, my own characters and love spending time in those imaginative spaces, with people of my own making, rather than those of the real world! Writing in bed beats the daily chicken pen commute to a routine office job too.
7. And the worst?
The pay. Because you make nothing financially from it and will be the butt of family ‘loser’ jokes forever. Writing truly is a labour of love. Only write if you love writing. Thankfully, it’s been the greatest love affair of my life. Single and almost 40, that’s something my parents, the masis and mamis aren’t entirely happy about.
8. What are your long term goals?
As well as writing for theatre, I’d like to write novels and films about Asian experiences too. Very different mediums but I grew up fully immersed in both, unlike theatre which I’ve only learnt about in recent years.
9. If you were Prime Minister, what one aspect would you change?
Privatisation/the marketization of everything - bodies, education and emotions included. I’d spend the defence budget fighting capitalism.
10. If you were marooned on a desert island, which historical figure would you like to spend your time with and why?
Buddha (or Guru Nanak). With all that meditating and appreciating the beauty of solitude, there might not be a whole lot of conversation but whenever there might be, it would be divine.
