Anita Rani interview: ‘I've always felt I'm on the outside looking in'
When Anita Rani was growing up in Bradford in the 1980s, a few miles from the village of Haworth, the Brontë sisters were ever-present. At her all-girls' primary school, a print of Branwell Brontë 's portrait of his sisters – the only group painting of them that exists – was on display.
'My teachers were very proud of wanting to educate young girls about the Brontës,' says Rani. 'We were spoon-fed the Brontës. Their story always felt personal to me, growing up in the same part of the world – but I wasn't expecting to want to get a Brontë tattoo by the end of this.'
By 'this', Rani, 47, is referring to her Sky Arts documentary The Brontës by Anita Rani: Sisters of Disruption. The presenter's name in the title isn't by accident or vainglory – the film is partly biographical, exploring the parallels between Rani's upbringing and that of the Brontës, and her growing personal connection to her 'feminist heroes'.
As a child, she would roam the same moors as the trio, and felt a shared sense of frustration, dislocation, yearning and, most pertinently, rage. 'People think of them as twee sisters, sitting around knitting and crocheting. But they were angry,' says Rani. The 'disruption' in the title isn't accidental, either – the siblings wanted to change the world around them; as does Rani.
The film sees the Countryfile and Woman's Hour presenter returning to her West Yorkshire roots, visiting her parents' old textile factory in Bradford, reacquainting herself with the moors of her youth, and ticking off a few things from the Brontë superfan bucket list – including having a moment at the very window that (most probably) was the inspiration for Wuthering Heights' most famous scene.
In conversations with a band of female academics, Rani explores everything from the 'whitewashing' of Heathcliff to Charlotte's crusade to reclaim the sisters' authorial identities, and how Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is helping women today who are escaping domestic violence.
Throughout the film is the thread of Rani's own life. Speaking from her home in Hackney, London, she says that as a teenage Brontë fan, she didn't yet see the connection. 'I read Wuthering Heights and I loved it. I fancied Heathcliff. The mood, the tone, the gothic nature – as a moody, angsty teenage girl, living in that landscape, it just sat very comfortably with me. I didn't want to read about arranged marriages or finding Mr Right, I wanted wild women running across the moors, falling in love with men they weren't supposed to. And Jane Eyre. I really connected to this story of a woman who wanted to live her own life, be more independent.'
Rani was born in 1977 in Bradford, to Bal and Lucky, Punjabi Indian immigrants who had had an arranged marriage and met for the first time at Heathrow airport. The pair started a clothes manufacturing business and poured their heart and soul into it, before losing it during the economic downturn of the 1990s.
Until the business closed, Rani and her brother, Kuldeep, would spend every evening after school in the factory. Rani can see a parallel between her father and the Brontë patriarch, the Anglican minister Patrick Brontë, who himself saw the value of educating his daughters.
'My dad was four when he moved to Britain from India, so he's a real Yorkshireman. He and my mother wanted us to have the opportunities that they didn't, have adventures, live life. And education for a lot of migrant communities is the way to increase your social standing. Patrick didn't conform, he was more open-minded about young women. And I was always aware that my dad was different to other Indian dads, at least back then. He took me to the pub when I was 15, taught me to play pool. My mum was horrified: 'What will this girl turn into?' But I don't think I'd be working in TV if my dad hadn't done that. It's an important social skill.'
Despite her forward-thinking parents, Rani still felt the 'big looming mass' of pressure that forced families to conform. 'Growing up as a South Asian woman, there was a lot of expectation put on me, a lot of conditioning to behave a certain way. I didn't want to do any of it. Very early on, I recognised that boys had it much easier than girls. And it was always the women who would treat the boys differently – women are often the flag-bearers for the patriarchy. There's an environment that tries to keep women in their place. I remember as a child wishing that I was a boy.'
The Brontë sisters would sympathise. At a Rani family gathering, an aunt was singing the praises of a potential bride for one of the young men of the family. She was perfect, said the aunt, 'she didn't say anything'. Rani is the first woman in her family who did not have an arranged marriage, wedding Bhupinder Rehal in 2009. 'And I'm divorced now, so I am a complete pariah,' she jokes.
A seismic moment in her life was her 2015 episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, in which she learnt the horrific fate of her female ancestors during the Partition of India. Many women in the Punjab 'chose' death, including Rani's grandfather's first wife, who threw herself down a well rather than let herself be 'taken' by Muslim soldiers. 'Something snapped inside me,' says Rani. 'It was a moment of realisation – I was the first woman of my lineage to have a choice and a voice. When I read about Partition, I realised that these women were not far from those I grew up with. Their lives, their lack of choice is what makes it important for me to share my story. To take ownership of the shame.'
In the film, Rani is visibly moved when speaking to Professor Katy Mullin, an academic who works with a domestic-abuse charity in Bradford that uses The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to discuss coercive control with women who have left, or are looking to leave, abusive relationships. The protagonist, Helen Graham, has left her abusive husband and taken their son, and the novel scandalised and unnerved contemporary society.
'Anne was the quietest [of the sisters], but she was the one who knew why she was writing,' says Rani. 'She knew exactly why, and she wanted it to impact women.' While it is remarkable that a novel from 1848 can help women in desperate situations now, is it not depressing that the issues that the Brontës railed against are still as pertinent? 'It doesn't depress me,' says Rani, 'because I've known about it all my life. I felt delighted that these women existed 200 years ago, that they were talking about it, that they had this sense of urgency. I know the sort of drive within them that it would have taken to write these stories.'
There is a sense with Sisters of Disruption that Rani is reconciling a side of her identity – the outdoors-loving, 'misfit' teenager who grew up in a British-Punjabi family and was the only Asian girl at her school. When she read Wuthering Heights, it 'never occurred' to Rani that Heathcliff was white. In the novel, the brooding outsider is described as a 'dark-skinned gipsy' and his provenance is still debated today. 'I just thought, 'Oh, OK, maybe he looks a bit like me.' And maybe that's another reason I connected with him.'
As the documentary points out, screen adaptations have tended to 'whitewash' Heathcliff (Timothy Dalton, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy are among the actors to have played him), with only Andrea Arnold's 2011 version featuring a black actor, James Howson. Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation caused a stir for appointing the pale-skinned Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, something only made more controversial by the comments of the film's casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, on the subject: 'It's just a book.'
In 2023, Rani published her first novel, Baby Does a Runner, about a British-South Asian woman who leaves her life behind to discover her roots in India. Did she have the Brontës at her shoulder as she wrote? 'I wish. It's definitely a book where I am saying something, where I am joining the dots of my own life. I wanted to write about a character that I don't feel exists elsewhere, the flawed British-South Asian everywoman. I feel now that my next novel might channel a bit more of them.'
Having battled against pigeonholing, Rani was delighted to break through another barrier to host this arts documentary. 'I've always tried to avoid being put in a box. I've had some brilliant projects, but there's always more. It'd be nice to get a little music-radio show.'
Having revealed in the film her teenage love for the NME, perhaps a producer at 6 Music should give her a call? 'I'm a huge fan of 6 Music. So, who knows? I can just keep ploughing away. But at the same time, I let the universe bring it to me now, like it did with this film. Every different project I do changes people's perception a little bit.'
And that tattoo? 'Yeah, I still think I'll get it.' What will it say? 'It might say, 'Sister of disruption'.'
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