A brand new play will debut in London in September in recognition of the 75 years because the partition of India.
‘Silence’ will play on the Donmar Warehouse in London from 1-17 September earlier than shifting to the Tara Theatre on 20 September, and is an adaptation of journalist Kavita Puri’s e book ‘Partition Voices: Untold British Tales’.
In 1947, the British Empire divided British India into India and Pakistan. Puri’s e book featured interviews with British individuals who skilled partition 75 years in the past.
A brand new play for previous voices
In Silence, communal storytelling presents the shared historical past of Brits who lived by the ultimate days of the British Raj when hundreds of thousands of individuals have been violently uprooted in one of many largest migrations in human historical past.
As many years move and partition strikes additional again into historical past, Silence’s director Abdul Shayek speaks to Euronews, reflecting on why theatre is such a invaluable technique to evoke the previous to recent audiences.
“It permits an viewers to take a look at issues from the attitude of those that are on stage,” Shayek says. “In essence, moving into different folks's sneakers and seeing it from that perspective.”
“With the ability to current a narrative about partition utilizing theatre permits us to try this, which I feel has a big impact as a result of usually once we discuss of partition it’s one thing of a historic second. We frequently disassociate ourselves from it. We are saying it isn't one thing that has an impression or has any relevance to me.”
“We completely are speaking about us and right this moment and the way this second in historical past connects and has formed our modern world in our modern Britain,” Shayek says.
The legacy of a colonial previous
The significance of bringing the tales of partition to a British stage is very heightened by a reluctance for a lot of Brits to reconcile India’s historical past as a part of British historical past.
The separation of the British Empire from the UK right this moment is an schooling blind-spot, suggests Professor Gurminder Okay Bhambra, a postcolonial and decolonial research professional on the College of Sussex.
“If we take into consideration the historical past or the way in which through which Britain is represented throughout the media, it is as if Britain exists as a separate entity. And the extent to which Empire is talked about, it is as if Britain, the nation, had an empire, which is separate from it,” Bhambra says.
One of many main themes Silence explores is the lasting impression the British Empire’s choices had on the fashionable world right this moment.
The British Empire confronted instability after the Second World Struggle and rising independence actions in a lot of its colonies led to partition. However as a substitute of making a unified India, as advocated by leaders similar to Mahatma Gandhi on the time, the area was break up into distinct states for the Muslim and Hindu populations.
The ensuing migration of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to India resulted in an estimated 2 million deaths.
India's historical past is a part of Britain's historical past
Bhambra additionally factors out that the severance of India from the British Empire contributed to Indians and Pakistanis, even when that they had British passports, not feeling welcome within the UK.
“We did not come to Britain from the skin. We got here to Britain from the within. And but, every thing about the way in which through which my education, the media, every thing taught me that I am an immigrant,” Bhambra says.
“There's part of British society which regularly solely thinks about partition from a really colonial perspective however understanding the lived expertise and the tales of those that lived by that second provides us one other entry level to that second in historical past,” Shayek notes.
“I feel the inventive arts in educating the legacy of independence is so essential. We’re not taught about partition in faculties.”
“I'm of Bangladeshi heritage. I used to be born in Bangladesh and the truth that I solely actually began to get my head round what occurred and the way I got here to be a Bangladeshi till I used to be in my mid to late twenties is sort of problematic,” Shayek says.
‘Silence’ is on the Donmar Warehouse Theatre, London from 1 September to 17 September and on the Tara Theatre, London from 21 September to 1 October.
Post a Comment