Interview: Mohit Mathur Asks “Are you Even Indian?”

Mohit Mathur’s Are You Even Indian? follows a British-born Indian woman and an Indian-born man who fall in love, then discover they mean quite different things by “home”. Shaped by community workshops in Leicester, Wolverhampton and Birmingham, the show comes to Riverside Studios this November. Red Bus Londinium asked Mohit where the title’s question first came from, and what the people in those workshop rooms changed.

Red Bus: The title is a question that both of your homes seem to ask. Who is asking it in the show, and who was the first person to ask it of you?

Mohit Mathur: Surprisingly, the first person to ask me was a drama school friend who wasn’t Indian but from African heritage. They wanted to know how I felt when a white person wears a saari or a bindi.

I realised I didn’t have the answer they expected. Growing up in India, I saw things like cultural appropriation very differently, we called it celebration of our culture.

For people born and raised here, it’s a different story. Many of them grew up having their culture ignored or mocked. They hid parts of who they were and apologised for them as children. Now they watch that same culture being celebrated, sold, and sometimes fetishised. Prada selling sandals that looked exactly like Kolhapuri chappals from India. A dupatta went viral online as a “Scandinavian scarf”. Yoga is now a Western wellness industry.

So when you’ve spent your childhood hiding something, and then the world suddenly finds it fashionable, you will feel very differently about it than I do.

That gap is what I didn’t understand, and that’s why I wanted to make the show.

I also noticed something about myself. The South Asian community here often expects me to be in Indian spaces, with Indian friends. But when I left India, I wanted to be more Western or integrate.

And then Diwali comes around, and I realise I don’t have Indian friends to celebrate with. I feel guilty, as if I’ve let something go that I was supposed to hold on to. Wherever I stand, I end up feeling I should apologise for who I am.

That’s where the question came from. In the show, it’s asked by the couple themselves: a British-born Indian woman and an Indian-born man. They love each other, but each one has a different idea of what being Indian means. So they end up asking it of each other, and of themselves.

Red Bus: You held workshops and conversations about “home” with community members in Leicester and Wolverhampton. Was there something someone said in those rooms that changed what the couple argue about on stage?

Mohit Mathur: Absolutely. Those workshops were eye-opening. As a writer, I only have the Indian perspective and lived experience. The workshops gave me something I couldn’t get on my own: a few hours with British South Asians and first generation migrants from South Asian countries in the room, talking about what home means to them. What makes them feel at home here, and how it feels when they go back.

Their stories went straight into the piece.

In Leicester, one person told us that when they visit family in India, their relatives won’t let them buy vegetables from the street vendor because the moment they open their mouth, their accent in Hindi or Gujarati gives them away, and the price goes up. In the UK they’re seen as Indian. In India they’re seen as foreigners.

Leicester is also where I learned how big Goodness Gracious Me was for people growing up South Asian in Britain. I had never heard of it. For many people in that room, it was the first time they saw themselves on British TV.

In Wolverhampton, I heard the word “freshie”. It’s what British South Asians call people who have just arrived from South Asia, short for “fresh off the boat”. I am the “freshie”. Hearing that word from the community I’m writing about changed how I saw the man in the show, and how the woman might see him.

Wolverhampton also gave us the conversation about sound. Parents there talked about a soft “d” sound in our languages that doesn’t exist in English. They were very particular that their children could say it properly. For them it wasn’t just pronunciation. It was a piece of home living on in their child’s mouth.

Others went the opposite way. They chose English names for their children, so white people wouldn’t struggle to say them.

That tension fed directly into some of the couple’s arguments in the show.

Red Bus: You wrote and choreographed the piece, and the press release mentions wedding dances alongside the Bollywood jokes. How do you decide when a moment belongs to the dance rather than the dialogue, and is there something the movement can say that the words cannot?

Mohit Mathur: I wrote and choreographed the piece, but I can’t take credit for deciding when a moment belongs to the dance. That came out of my collaboration with our director, Leigh Toney.

I’m from India, and where I come from, when we run out of words, we dance. Weddings, festivals, family gatherings: dance is how we celebrate, how we flirt, how we say what’s too big or too awkward to say out loud. So my instinct as a maker was always to reach for movement.

But that instinct needed shaping. Not every dance has to carry meaning. Bollywood has the item number, a burst of pure joy and spectacle with very little at stake, and that pleasure is part of our culture. At the same time, I didn’t want the show to become a string of songs with a story squeezed in between. And I didn’t want the opposite either, where every movement is so loaded with symbolism that the joy disappears.

Finding that balance was the real work.

Leigh has worked on large-scale productions like Life of Pi, and she brought a sharp dramaturgical eye into the room. Whenever I added a dance, she would ask: What is this movement telling us? Where are we in this moment? Can we actually see it happening?

Those questions changed how I thought about the piece. Dance stopped being something the characters break into and became the thread that holds the story together. The Bollywood moments are still there, and they arrive where you hope they will. But now hopefully they earn their place.

As for what movement can say that words can’t, I think it’s everything that happens between two people that never gets spoken. The daily routine, silences, looks, building of resentment.

In our show, that’s where the movement takes over, leaping through time.

Red Bus: The show begins with a meet-cute and plans for a future, then the cracks appear. How do you keep an audience laughing and warm towards the couple while the questions get harder, such as what language their child will speak?

Mohit Mathur: I think the comedy is already there in real life. Couples usually fight about small things that carry the big things inside them.

Take the Life in the UK test. To stay in this country, you have to know answers like how tall the London Eye is. It’s absurd, and audiences laugh. But underneath the joke is a serious question: who decides what makes you belong somewhere?

The same goes for the child. When our couple argue about whether to raise their baby the Indian way or the Western way, it often comes down to something as simple as which lullaby to sing. A Hindi lori or Twinkle Twinkle Little Star? It sounds funny. But what they’re really asking is what they want their child to carry with them.

That’s the space the show lives in. The hard questions slip in through ordinary life, and they come out as light moments. The audience laughs because they recognise themselves, their parents, their own relationships.

Red Bus: The show has travelled from Riverside Studios’ Bitesize Festival to Brighton Fringe, and now to Bedford, Enfield, Leicester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton and back to Riverside. Have you noticed audiences responding differently from place to place, and what do you hope a person who has been told they are “not Indian enough” feels when they leave?

Mohit Mathur: The show started as an experiment. I had written a few scenes and wanted to test them in front of a live audience, to see whether the concept worked. I asked our director, Leigh, if we could try them at Riverside’s Bitesize Festival, just to see if they connected.

They did. I still have a clear picture of three Bangladeshi women who came to see it. After the show they hugged us, in tears. They told us they saw so much of themselves in the piece. They were British, and their parents had raised them to be English. Now they wanted to connect with their Bangladeshi heritage, but they had no family left back there to connect with. And they didn’t know how to raise their own children between two cultures.

That moment told me there was something real in this piece, and that I had to develop it. So we went deeper, did R&D earlier this year with support from Arts Council England, and then took it to Brighton Fringe.

In Brighton, people kept coming out of the show saying they needed a moment to reflect before they could find their words. What surprised me was who was saying it. A South African woman told us this was her family’s story too. Her children were born here, and she kept asking herself what being South African would even mean to them. A Lithuanian woman wrote to us afterwards about the same dilemma: do you raise your children to be more British, or more Lithuanian?

So what I’ve noticed isn’t so much a difference between places. It’s that the question travels. The show is about an Indian couple, but the dilemma belongs to anyone who has built a life between two homes. I’m curious to see what new conversations Leicester, Wolverhampton and the other venues will bring.

As for someone who has been told they’re not Indian or Indian enough, I hope they see themselves in these characters and feel less alone.

BOOKing DETAILS

Are You Even Indian?
Riverside Studios, Crisp Road, Hammersmith, London W6 9RL
Tuesday 17 to Sunday 29 November 2026
Running time: 60 minutes
Tickets and performance times: https://riversidestudios.co.uk/whats-on/SR-are-you-even-indian/

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