Not my circus, not my monkeys. On August 15, 1947, when India was partitioned, leaving nearly a million dead and 15 million displaced across a divided Punjab and Bengal, the general reaction in the relatively distant south was one of indifference. Though the entire Indian subcontinent of roughly three hundred and fifty million people collectively dreamt of a different future and rallied for an independent nation, when it did arrive, it came with unimaginable human tragedy that made it look like a pyrrhic victory.
South India had its own territorial issues to deal with. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and P C Menon had the gargantuan task of negotiating terms with the 550 princely states to join the Indian Union. The state of Hyderabad proved to be particularly problematic. Its ruler, Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, played Pakistan and India only to declare that Hyderabad would be an independent nation.
With these provincial and by no means minor difficulties that the birthing of the nation had to face, the south’s population remained oblivious to a greater tragedy that was taking place along the Punjab and Bengal borders. Ironically, it was still the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, that delivered the news of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims massacring each other. Throughout history, ignored mainly by invading armies but encumbered by warring local kingdoms, the South Indians felt it was not really their problem; they had other things to worry about.
On the 75th anniversary of the partition of India, I decided to write a play about the event for the Omnibus Theatre in London. It was a demanding and critical task to represent the lives of thousands who were estranged by the partition, some never to meet again. The foremost task at hand was to be educated on the history surrounding the event. This was the easy part. As a South Indian, I, too, through generations, had viewed it as a remote and somewhat sequestered event where I could not breach the sanctity of its tragic memory. Other comparisons with modern predicaments, such as cultural appropriation, came to mind. Who owns history? Am I the right person to write this? Do I have the right to usurp others’ difficult pasts? I only say this because my writing credentials on a subject matter outside my ethnicity have previously been questioned.
But upon further scrutiny, I realised this was nothing but an excuse and possibly a bad case of wokeism. I even had to fight the vague impression that I was an imposter sympathiser. This wasn’t my circus, and those weren’t my monkeys. When this problem was swiftly dealt with by the director, the talented Nidhi Krishna (also a South Indian), who told me to stop procrastinating and start delivering, I agreed; after all, I wasn’t writing a vaudeville on the topic, which would and should have thrown me into a moral conundrum. But I set forth my unnegotiable terms. The play, a two-hander about the friendship between a Hindu and a Muslim torn apart by the partition, had to be played by a Pakistani and an Indian. Nidhi agreed and found actors. The third entity in the play is a ‘Trojan Horse,’ an object that appears in the character’s later lives in Pakistan and India, provoking and encouraging reconciliation. I readily agreed when Nidhi suggested that a dancer could represent this object.
I wrote the play, and the actors began their rehearsals. Recruiting the dancer was proving to be a challenge, but Nidhi remained positive. Then misfortune struck. For professional reasons, Adil Akram could not complete his rehearsals. We had one more rehearsal to go before the staging. Well, this is a message. I told Nidhi that we South Indians don’t own this. But the resolute Nidhi would not give up. She had found another actor and a dancer. I was, of course, relieved until I realised that both were from Chennai. This is as far from the India-Pakistan border as it could get. But we recognised that truthfulness doesn’t come from ancestry, caste, or belief, and a person’s or a people’s grief and history cannot and shouldn’t be screened from a professedly different or unaffected part of society. Ravikumar Venkatachalam, Hemant Parekh, Geetha Sridhar, and Nidhi Krishna did a wonderful and wholehearted job of embodying a segment of history that continues to impact us all.
(The writer is a journalist. He was a recipient of the Guardian Intl Development Journalism Award for reporting on northern Kenya’s drought. He is part of the BBC Writers Room Programme.)