Telling Tales of The Parting

This post is in reference to the play The Parting, written by Salil Singh & Anurag Wadehra, produced by Enacte Arts and Noorani Dance 

The Parting: The Play

August 1947. The Partition of India and Pakistan. 15 million people displaced. 2 million dead.
A provocative and compelling theatrical performance woven from innumerable true life accounts blending theatre, dance, music and multimedia.

The play is inspired by true stories from witnesses of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. It premiered in January 2018 at Z-Space in San Francisco; and based on popular reception, was performed at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, California, in March 2018.  The Parting was produced by EnActe Arts and Noorani Dance, written by Salil Singh and Anurag Wadehra. The original production was directed by Salil Singh and the San Jose production by Vinita Sud Belani and Farah Yasmeen Shaikh, both with an original score composed by Raaginder Singh Momi and visual design by David Murakami.

The Parting [preview]

History & Discussion 

An hour-long discussion on the Partition project, with surviving witnesses, citizen historians, and the creative team on The Partition of India: Telling Tales of the Parting

Recorded at: Talks At Google

The Stories of The Parting

“The human history of partition has a lesser status than the political history.”

Urvashi Butalia

Telling the history of the people, and not of the politicians: this was our mantra for the play.

Over the course of the past seventy years, there has emerged a grand narrative of the Partition of British India as told in the history books. It focuses on leaders like Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel and Mountbatten, and elaborates their visions of nation states and empires built on differing ideologies. This telling of the history devolves quickly into conflicts of personalities and policies among these men. It is dangerous and naive for it encourages us to either root for the leaders as heroes or deride them as villains. Often, this version glorifies the struggle for independence from the British but pays lip service to the toll paid by the millions who were killed or uprooted in the process. Even less is explored of why the country had to be partitioned and specifically, how this parting affected the millions of people living in relative peace in distant villages.

The Partition wasn’t a case of malicious intent that we can attribute to a few intransigent leaders. As Nehru implied [1], they were tired men who could not reconcile their differences to share power among themselves. Tragically, as August 1947 loomed and all hope of political settlement faded, there was a slow dissolution of the British colonial state with no clear operational plan to inform, guide or protect millions of people who were to be affected by such a cataclysmic event. Confusion, disbelief and shock were the dominant sentiments among the masses.

In remote villages and different communities, how did the people experience the partition? What were their perceptions and experiences? How did they react to the cascade of events?

We chose to center the play on these questions and tell stories of the people who lived through the event.  The play is based on a combination of such stories: some imagined from the plight of the millions of refugees, a few ripped from the headlines of the era that went on to become legends in modern times and some that were retrieved from scholarly research and oral histories of survivors. These stories are not meant to be literal reenactments of true events. Yet, they are all based on the real and lived experiences of millions.

We did not choose these tales for their horror or shock, although every story touches upon the atrocities committed by all sides. Instead, we selected them to showcase a broad spectrum of experiences - from the repugnant to the redeeming -  as shared by the different communities. In telling these tales, our aim was to highlight the humanity we all lost - and occasionally redeemed - through such experiences. And most of all, we selected these stories to ask a few questions that lay at the fault lines of Partition: Why did this happen? How did we turn on our neighbors? Can this ever happen again? Today, with Partition a forgotten memory for most people, such questions remain unasked and unanswered at our peril.

The narrative of the play focuses on the fate of a few families and individuals who escape in harrowing circumstances across the border, while their neighborhoods disintegrate into civil war after living peacefully for hundreds of years. We follow the characters over time to show the price of human conflict. The narrator of the play, Mamta, is a fictional character whose journey stands for the experiences of thousands of women who lost their loved ones - and whose lives and bodies bore the brunt of violence from all sides.  

Here are the synopses and the origins of a few stories in The Parting.

The Tale of the Bookmark

We adapted the story of Hamid, a child who escaped to Pakistan with his family, from an anecdote we encountered in researching survivor tales. Years later, Hamid cherishes a feather bookmark, the only object he escaped with, as a precious memory of his childhood.

The Tale of the Limb Fitter

Another true and poignant story is that of Ghulam Ali, a limb-fitter in the British army, who was trapped between two new nations and to be accepted anywhere, was required to prove his loyalties to each side. This was an all too common occurrence among refugees whose citizenship remained fluid despite each nation’s intention to fix it. We discovered this story through a delightful episode of Urdu oral storytelling performance called Dastangoi. The source of this story is the nonfiction scholarly book The Long Partition by Vazira Zamindar, who retrieved Ghulam Ali from the oblivion of bureaucratic papers.

The Tale of Boota and Zainab  

The main story of the play is of star-crossed lovers Boota and Zainab. It is a true story that was covered extensively by newspapers in its time. I discovered this story many decades ago in the footnote of a book Freedom at Midnight. Even today, it is contested by communities on both sides - each claiming its own version over the years. Boota Singh was a Sikh farmer who gave shelter to a Muslim woman Zainab and over the years started a family with her. Later, Zainab was forcibly separated from her child and husband and sent back to Pakistan. How Boota crossed religious and political borders in an attempt to reunite his family has taken the form of a modern day legend and been adapted for film on more than one occasion [2].

For the play, we extended this story beyond the star-crossed lovers to show how Boota and Zainab started their family from two divided communities during Partition and slowly built a life from the ruins. In our play, Zainab is a strong woman who is wronged twice by the two nations that are, ironically, bent on protecting her honor.  

Zainab was forcibly sent back to Pakistan when the two countries created programs to exchange the women that had been abducted by each side and return them to their families. This was done to restore the honor of the two communities. Many women were sent back even though they had created a new life, and even when they did not wish to return due to the stigma attached. This Abducted Persons Recovery & Restoration Bill remained in effect until 1956.

Finally, we chose to close this story with the daughter of Zainab and Boota to raise the question of identity: who is a child born across nations and religions, and what is to become of her?

The Tale of Lal Chand and Bahadur Khan

This is a fictitious story of two neighboring families - one Hindu, another Muslim - who have lived together for centuries in Lahore. After Partition, as Lal Chand is forced to flee Pakistan, he has to decide whether to entrust his property and assets to his Muslim neighbor Bahadur Khan. There are thousands of true stories of such neighbors - Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs - living in same villages for centuries who had to make these fateful decisions in their flight to escape. There were neighbors who protected, honored, rescued and, in many cases, saved properties and assets of others for decades. And there were many others, sadly, who betrayed, savaged and looted their neighbors. The question we wished to raise with this story is: how does a lifetime of trust between two neighbors fall apart? And can it ever be restored?

The story of Lal Chand and Bahadur Khan was inspired by the narratives captured by Urvashi Butalia in her seminal work on Partition The Other Side of Silence. In an article on Partition and Memory, Butalia narrates the incident of a Sikh survivor who comes to regret his lack of trust for his Muslim neighbors and decades later, returns to his village seeking to better understand and perhaps redeem his acts.

The Tale of Veerji and Kuljot

Violence towards women had a special significance during Partition, as each community was sensitive to defending the honor of its women. Thousands of women either killed themselves or were killed by their own communities to save them from the shame of being violated. Conversely, women of opposing communities were defiled in especially heinous ways to dishonor the other side. This is a sensitive subject and we chose to address this indirectly through the fictitious story of a brother who is eager to save the honor of his sister. This story is based on a short discourse Total Eclipse by Anurag Wadehra on the significance of honor and sacrifice in Partition.

Beyond this tale, we chose to bring to life the poem Majboor [Forced] by Amrita Pritam in a novel way. It’s a seminal poem on the price paid by displaced women for the independence of two nations.