BY HOOK OR BY CROOK: Narindar Kaur at the Leicester Square premiere of Asoka in a desperately revealing mood

One Indian artist who climbed dizzy heights, both literally and metaphorically, in 2001 was painter Balraj Khanna. In November, his great work of art, Astral Dance, which he had painted on a 42 ft by 26 ft safety curtain-supposedly the biggest public painting ever executed in Britain-was unveiled at the Birmingham Hippodrome. Khanna, who admits he suffers from vertigo, had to spend weeks perched atop tall scaffolding applying countless tins of acrylic on to the hessian-covered steel safety curtain. The formal unveiling of his masterpiece was suitably dramatic. To the stirring music of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the curtain was unfurled, revealing the bright orange and red colours Khanna had used to signify the creation of the universe. From the assembled audience, there were gasps of admiration.

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Khanna won the commission in a nationwide competition. He has lived in Britain for 40 years, and is respected for, among other things, his championing of the Kalighat School of Painting. Now, he feels he has not only carved a niche for himself in the mainstream but also made a bid for immortality. "My painting will last a 100 years," he predicts.

Overall, the Asian arts and entertainment scene in Britain in 2001 was dominated by the influence of Bollywood. To be sure, a few homegrown feature films were made but the problem, as always, has been one of finding distributors. Into this category falls Ahmed Jamal's Mad Dogs, a black science fiction comedy which he took to the Cannes Film Festival. There are high hopes for two independent films, shot in 2001, which await release in 2002.

One is Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham, a tale of a soccer crazy Asian girl in Southall starring Parminder Nagra, a young Asian actress discovered and nurtured by the Tamasha Theatre Company. If David Beckham, the England soccer captain who is said to be sympathetic to the idea of women's football, decides to give the film a publicity boost, there is a chance it will attract a non-Asian audience.

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The other film is Jeremy Wooding's Bollywood Queen, an Indian girl-meets English boy love story set in London's East End. Its star is Preeya Kalidas, a 21-year-old whose songs in Bollywood Queen, are sung in "playback"-probably the first time this technique has been used in a film made in Britain-by ghazal singer Najma Akhtar. Kalidas has also landed the role of the female lead in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. Bombay Dreams, which is expected to premier in June 2002.

Ultimately, what will determine the future of British Asian arts will be the quality of its writers. British publishing houses are more inclined to find new authors in India and in the Indian diaspora either in the US or in Canada. An exception was Cauvery Madhavan, whose novel, Paddy Indian, about an Indian doctor and an Irish girl, is set in Ireland. It took a small publishing house, Black Amber, which aims to give expression to British Asian talent, to publish her.

IMMORTAL REMAINS: Painter Balraj Khanna, who believes his work of art, Astral Dance, will last a hundred years

A number of theatre companies, among them the Hammersmith Lyric, the Bush in Shepherd's Green, the Leicester Haymarket and the Birmingham Rep have been encouraging Asian writers, directors and plays as part of a policy to promote cultural diversity. So far, though, no one has quite matched the quality of Ayub Khan-Din's East is East, a play which was turned into an internationally acclaimed film.

What is encouraging is that the second generation British Asians are making the effort to see plays or even queuing to get into comedy nights. This certainly bodes well for the future since, by contrast, the first generation of Indian and Pakistani immigrants steered clear of theatre which was seen essentially as a white preoccupation.

Although the quality of writing in the majority of Asian plays left much to be desired, it was still possible to find the odd one which surprised with its freshness. One such was Unsung Lullaby, written by Ronny Jhutti, a young actor. The play, which was performed in the basement of a London pub, deserved a wider audience.

"I would be really flattered if I were to be called the 'Asha Bhosle of Britain'. Like her, I like being experimental." Najma Akhtar, Singer (left, with Preeya Kalidas to her right)

There is now no shortage of role models for young Asians. Comedy has been a boom area because of the excellent early work done on television by the cast of Goodness Gracious Me. But the time has come to move on and cast the net wider in the search for new material. Being funny is a notoriously difficult business, and the Goodness Gracious Me team's over reliance on a particularly earthy brand of Punjabi humour, including an occasional descent into lavatory jokes, suggests its day is done.

Sanjeev Bhaskar is a talented and versatile actor but he has not enhanced his reputation by fronting the TV comedy series, The Kumars at No 42. British Asians are still a long way from producing something as sophisticated and genuinely funny as, say, Yes, Minister.

"The Irish are like Indians-they have this thing about family." Cauvery Madhavan, Writer

There were bright spots, though. Jeff Mirza has become much more skilled in working with the material he himself writes. But the real stir was caused by the arrival of Shazia Mirza, Britain's first stand-up Muslim comedienne. As a sociological phenomenon, her routines indicated that Asians, Muslims included, were confident enough to be able to poke fun at themselves. "My name is Shazia Mirza-at least, that's what it says on my pilot's licence," is a joke which took a certain amount of courage to deliver given the extreme sensitivities over the New York terrorist outrages. She might go farther if she extends her range.

Although it is the ambition of every pop singer to appear on Top of the Pops and hit number one in the UK charts, progress at making it big in the mainstream has been so slow that some artists, such as Sophiya Choudry, are now cultivating the more receptive market in India rather than struggle in Britain. From all accounts, the band, Stereo Nation, was warmly received in Pakistan. One musician who enjoyed positive coverage in the mainstream British press is the classical guitarist, Nitin Sawhney.

Although the Asian population of Britain totals about 2.5 million, the existence of more than a dozen Indian TV channels, including Zee and Star, is evidence enough that the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are not meeting their needs. On the few occasions when an Asian does get into a mainstream show, as happened with Narindar Kaur in Big Brother, the individual is overnight transformed into a "celebrity". At the Leicester Square premiere of Shah Rukh Khan's Asoka, she dressed in as revealing a manner as she could muster, hoping to catch the eye of the producers from Mumbai. But though several Bollywood films were shot in Britain-Pyaar, Ishq aur Mohabbat, Yadeein, and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G)-the cast and crew came almost exclusively from India. In a sense, 2001 was the year of Bollywood because the support of traditional Asian audiences ensured that Indian films routinely got into the mainstream UK Top Ten, with K3G getting to number three, a record.

Although a crossover film eluded Bollywood, a pointer to the future- that is, Indo-British collaboration- was provided by Aamir Khan's Lagaan, an outstanding movie which employed a dozen British actors, including Paul Blackthorne and Rachel Shelley. The link to Bollywood provided tamasha with another winner in its English-language musical, Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral, which was based on the hit movie, Hum Aapke Hain Koun! First staged in 1998, the musical was revived not once but twice in 2001, thereby establishing its lead actors, Mala Ghedia and Pushpinder Chani, who played Nisha and Prem, as potential stars of the future. A set designer, Edward Greenfield, did the Bollywood-style poster for the musical, probably the first time an Englishman has been given such a commission.

Two books-Lucky Dissanayake's Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema and Nasreen Munni Kabir's Bollywood: The India Cinema Story-were valuable additions to what still remains scarce literature on the Indian film industry. What Bollywood has done is further encourage press and marketing, perhaps the fastest growing sector of the British Asian arts and entertainment sector. For every practitioner, there are usually five young women keen to promote the product. Their skills are needed to sell everything from films made by Indians in America (Ismail Merchant's The Mystic Masseur; American Desi; American Chai) to exhibitions from Bombay (Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at Tate Modern). In the Indian firmament, a star is not a star unless it burns brightly in London. If 2001 proved anything, it is that London has now consolidated its position as the centre of the Indian world.