KRISHNENDU MAJUMDAR was elected to one of the most important jobs in the arts world in June 2020 – chairman of Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts).
This organisation, set up in 1947 by a group that included David Lean and Laurence Olivier, hosts the Bafta awards, which attract some of the biggest stars from Hollywood and provides a pointer to likely winners at the Oscars.
Majumdar, at 47 its youngest chairman for 36 years and the first non-white person to hold the post in the entire 75-year history of Bafta, is determined to bring about much needed diversity during his three-year term.
For example, he has warned British production companies that they won’t be eligible to win Bafta’s glittering prizes unless they can demonstrate diversity either in front or behind the camera. By diversity, he means race, of course. But he also wants to include women, as well as people with disabilities and of all genders.
The areas over which Bafta has jurisdiction are films, television and gaming. The last is huge and becoming bigger.
Majumdar, who was born and brought up in Wales, says that when he was growing up and considering a career in the creative industries, he couldn’t look up to any role models –“no one looked like me”.
Films and television, he adds, are vitally important in shaping public perceptions.
“Movies are really inspirational,” he says. “They’re mass entertainment. But they’re also an important art form. I would say that television has taken over probably as the most dominant cultural force. And in terms of long form storytelling, television drama has taken over from the novel even – I think Salman Rushdie said that as well.”
Perhaps he has the BBC’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s six-part A Suitable Boy or the Charles Sobhraj eight-part drama about a serial killer, The Serpent, in mind when he explains:
“It’s sometimes difficult to tell a story in just 60 minutes. Whereas if you’ve got four or six or eight episodes, you can delve more deeply into a story.”
All this makes it all the more important to have diversity on screen.
“You need to reflect society,” he insists. “When I was growing up, there were hardly any Asians. And it’s not just ethnicity. It’s the role of women in TV in the past. You’d look on TV and all the doctors were men. A lot of the writers on TV were men, and they just defaulted to writing their characters as men. So it’s really important that on television, there’s representation, including disability, not just ethnicity, which, obviously is hugely important.”
He argues the change in television has to be driven from the top. “The people who commission drama – the gatekeepers, the people in positions of power – have a responsibility to make sure that the work they are commissioning, funding and promoting, is diverse. The actors are one part of it. They can’t get the actors unless the stories are there. The writers, the producers, the directors, the commissioners, the people who fund it, must believe in having diversity. It’s the people at the top of all industries who need to change because if you have people at the very top table, then things happen.”
He recognises shaking up television is “going to be difficult but I do feel that there’s been a real sea change in terms of what’s going on at the moment”.
He realises some will resist Bafta’s initiatives because “any change will mean some people have to relinquish their place. I want inclusion. I don’t want to exclude anybody at all. So it’s not about excluding white people. It’s just about making sure that the playing field is more level. I don’t want people to get jobs just because of the colour of their skin. That’s not right. But there has been systemic structural racism in society in all industries, whether it’s the legal profession, the media, or business. That has to change.”
The reality often is that producers running Asian TV companies find it hard to get work when competing against white counterparts, who once worked for the BBC but left to set up their own firms and can benefit from the old boy’s network.
Majumdar responds: “It’s human nature. You tend to work with people that you’re comfortable with or you know can deliver. With some new people, there will be questions, ‘Will they be able to deliver, particularly in scripted work which is very expensive?’ The budgets are very high, and there aren’t hundreds and hundreds of programmes commissioned in certain genres like drama or comedy. So there’s a limited amount of programmes to go around. And obviously, there are too many producers. So these are very difficult decisions. But I do think change is happening, and if I can help engender and move that change along, that’s great.”
Majumdar has long been part of Bafta and risen up the ranks over 17 years.
In his personal life, he is a TV producer and director. His company, Me+You Productions, won an Emmy for co-creating Hoff The Record, a British television comedy show starring David Hasselhoff. It follows a mockumentary fly-on-the-wall format with Hasselhoff playing a fictionalised version of himself in the autumn of his career, relocating to the UK to seek new opportunities.
He has been chair of Bafta’s learning and new talent committee (2006-2010), chair of the television committee (2015-2019), deputy chair before being elected chair and a member of the board of trustees for nine years.
He has been a long-time supporter of greater diversity on and off screen throughout his career and has also been on the Board of Directors UK and also on the PACT (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television) council.
He is extending Bafta’s 8,000-strong membership by a thousand from “under-represented groups”, such as Asians, and also warning film production companies that they have to meet tough new diversity targets. In all, Bafta has announced 120 changes, which Majumdar describes as “just the first phase, just the start of change”.
He is confident he has the support of all his colleagues at Bafta.
“Yes, absolutely. We’re looking at holistic structural cultural change that will last long beyond me. And also, it’s not just me who’s doing this.
“There are lots of allies within Bafta and in the industry – and not all of them are black or Asian – who believe in what we’re trying to do. A lot of people before me have worked on this agenda. I have been the face of this change recently, but it’s been a long time coming.
“The pandemic has intensified everything. George Floyd’s death was absolutely tragic. But there have been hundreds of black men who’ve been murdered by the police and the state. But the pandemic has made people, trapped at home, people watching the news, focus on what was going on. People woke up to this systemic structural inequality in a way that’s not happened since the civil rights movement. What’s great is lots of white people are standing up – they’re not turning away from what has happened to minority people. I do think something significant is happening at the moment.”
There have been many influences which have shaped Majumdar, prominent among them his late father, Dr Rupendra Kumar Majumdar, a GP who worked for the NHS for 40 years and impressed with his work ethic. His mother, Jharna, who worked as a community link worker and helped Bangladeshi women with interpreting and other services, for example, looked after her two sons and was notable for her compassion.
“She’s very warm and a great communicator. Both of them had a big impact.”
When Majumdar was named GG2 “Man of the Year” on February 25, 2021, he said he was sure his father would have been proud of him. His father, like his mother, came from a Bengali family in Calcutta. After graduating from Calcutta National Medical College & Hospital, his father sailed by ship from Bombay in 1962. It docked in Liverpool, the city where Rupendra Majumdar would spend the next few years repeating his studies because Indian medical degrees were not recognised in those days.
In 1966, he went back to get married. This was also the time when Indian doctors found it difficult to get jobs in London and other big cities and so were forced to seek employment in the remoter parts of the UK.
The Majumdar family made their lives in Wales – happily, it turned out.
Krishnendu Majumdar – he doesn’t mind being called “Krish” but draws the line at “Chris” – was born in Church Village, 10 miles north-west of Cardiff. “For the first three years, we lived in the Rhonda Valley,” he says.
“We moved to a little village called Groesfaen where my mum still lives.”
Majumdar, who has lived in London for the past 20 years, and his elder brother, Saumendra, take it in turns to visit her.
He remembers that as a GP, his father was always busy running a one-man surgery. Over the years, the Majumdars became embedded in the local community. There were some 200 Indian doctors in the area who would hold a reunion once a year in a hotel with their families. Among Dr Majumdar’s Bengali friends was the father of the comedian Paul Sinha – the two had been contemporaries as medical students in Calcutta.
Referring to the BBC series about a doctor and his wife in a South Wales mining village, starring Sanjeev Bhasker and Ayesha Dharker, Majumdar says: “The Indian doctor was very similar to my dad’s experience. My father and my mother looked after lots of lots of people, and had an extraordinary relationship with the local community.”
After a lifetime of dedicated service to his patients, Dr Majumdar passed away, aged 86, on 15 February 2017. His son made a pilgrimage to India with his father’s ashes.
Majundar’s love of the arts developed when he attended the Cathedral School Llandaff, a co-educational independent school where he was one of the few Indian boys. His initial love was for theatre. At 14, in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun about the conflict Atahuallpa Inca and Francisco Pizarro, he played the latter. Then, he played Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Both at school and at Bristol University, where he read English and drama, he acted in Did Edward Albee’s 1958 play, The Zoo Story.
He was then involved in a couple of productions with the National Youth Theatre and spent eight years getting to know the arts world at the Edinburgh Festival. This was followed by a broadcast journalism postgraduate course at the Cardiff School of Journalism. In London, he was theatre critic for LBC on Julia Somerville’s programme. But the switch to television did not occur until he had worked as an ITN news trainee after Cardiff, followed by a BBC production training scheme. The latter enabled him to be assistant director on a production of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit.
Emotionally, having played the sport at school, he supports Wales at rugby and India at cricket. He knows he is a mixture of being Welsh and Bengali, though deep down, he senses instinctively that “I am always going to be Indian, that’s who I am”.
As far as Bafta is concerned, he says: “I want to see that our academy is open for all and supports members regardless of their socio-economic background, race, sexuality, disability or gender. I’m really optimistic about this moment – something big is happening. And I feel we can really change the whole industry, the whole game. What I’m going to do is call on the industry to step up.”