Presenter
Bhatia Nandi - University of Western Ontario, University of Western Ontario, London, CanadaPanel
71 – Early Modern and Modern Retellings: Texts, Theatre and PerformanceAbstract
Scholars and historians have long acknowledged literary and cultural texts as sites that document and bear witness to the 1947 Partition of India, its unprecedented human loss and refugee crisis, and the rise of new forms of nationalism. Partition’s profound impact on theatrical representations is visible in plays such as Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug (1953), which deploys the story of the Mahabharata to comment on Partition’s outcomes. This paper examines a corpus of plays – that either reference the Partition or foreground it as a central theme – to understand how the dramatization of Partition stories enables an analysis of its multiple meanings for varied audiences. Rahul Varma’s Trading Injuries (1993), Anushree Roy’s Letters to My Grandma (2010), Hanif Kureishi’s Borderline (1981) and Harwant Bains’ Blood (1989), written, produced, and performed in Canada and the UK, speak, on one level, to what Papiya Ghosh calls the emergence of “subcontinental majoritarianisms’ that have been “structured by Partition” (Partition and the South Asian Diaspora, 2007, 175). Yet they also propose understanding the implications of forced displacements, borderlines, and community formation in local and international contexts. I discuss how the plays’ thematic and aesthetic choices guide their stories and nudge readers and audiences to examine the subcontinental Partition within transnational and comparative frameworks.
