Before the 1970s, most South Asians who immigrated to Australia were related to the colonial labour trade, or racialised, and institutionally or legally discriminated against.
But that is not true of South Asians who immigrated to Australia after that decade, because the state adopted a multicultural policy in the 1970s to manage the super-diversity of ‘scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differ-entiated and legally stratified immigrants’ (Vertovec 2007: 1024). Australia abandoned the White Australia policy and enacted the Australian Citizenship Act in 1973 to make Asians eligible for citizenship (De Lepervanche 1984: 72–74).
Hegemonic multiculturalism became the essential state-led strategy and the ‘culturalist response to deal with the threat of political instability in the face of transforming demographics’ (Lo 2006: 16), and the discourse of racism shifted towards promoting ethnicity and multiculturalism. However, two Australias exist: ‘the multicultural heartland of Sydney and Melbourne’ and the rest of Australia, severely lacking in ethnic diversity (Birrell and Rapson 2002: 11). Despite the official state policy, therefore, white society at large initially culturally subjugated the South Asian immigrant communities, ‘othered’ them, and kept them apart as individualised communities-in-the-making.
In the absence of propinquity, renewable cultural factors have the potential to bind cultures (Vahed 2007) through the practice of interculturalism – cross-cultural and sym- pathetic negotiation, dialogue, and interaction between different cultures from below (Wood et al. 2006). The practice of interculturalism is not an end in itself, however, but an ongoing process of immersion that can be deep if managed with nurture, care, respect, and sensitivity. Exchanges between cultures are premised on reciprocity, but these are rarely equal (Bharucha 2000), at least at the beginning. Postcolonial, multicultural Australia has been the hub of migratory flows, and it has a history of racial discrimination; the political and aesthetic dimensions of intercultural practices should be looked into, but not through the usual binaries such as east–west or local–global (Rogers 2014) or through exotic forms of interculturalism that rely on a literal sense of geographical and racial otherness and of the uniqueness and authenticity of local culture (Chaudhuri 1991, Fischer-Lichte 1996). Instead, intercultural practices should be understood as fluid and as reflecting cultural mobility within and across national borders.
A cultural politics of intercultural negotiation constantly shifts and modifies itself by developing dialogue and critique. This cultural politics is the terrain of transforming and emerging culture. To analyse the contextualisation and the politics of practice, we should focus on this cultural politics case by case, being mindful of site-specific variations (Bhar-ucha 2004, Rogers 2014).
The location of identity or subject position in the new society is more important for a diaspora than subjectivity (Hall 2000), but the politics of cultural ‘location’ has been ignored by the research into the South Asian diaspora in Australia since it is ostensibly ‘Multicultural’ (Sarwal 2017: 4).
To briefly compare the location of the South Asian diaspora in Australia to another context, a new transnational theatre project emerging in Berlin, Germany is giving voice to the often-unheard stories of migrants at the margins of globalisation.
Langhoff (2012) uses the term ‘post-migrant’ theatre to refer to the identity politics of second- or third-generation German citizens born in Germany whose parents on one side or both are immigrants. Post-migrant theatre problematises an already diversified plural and cosmopolitan (and ‘Multicultural’) society. Through intercultural practices, post-migrant music, theatre, and opera performances contribute to a more self- reflexive stance towards the construction of a community (Verstraete 2013). However there are potential pitfalls of drawing similarities between different diaspora commu-nities and comparing their diverse experiences across the spatial-cultural-temporal context. For example, in the German context, post-migrants have a more evolved and consolidated identity due to generations of acculturation and integration into the German society. Their politics work at a more subtle cultural level.
Whereas, in the JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 3 case of South Asians in Australia, it is a pan-ethnic identity in the initial stages of its emergence through cultural expressions, and has many associated political, economic, and social issues to deal with. Therefore, time and context make a crucial difference, along with the specific cultural and identity issues of the group involved. Nevertheless, theatre is not only a venue for artistic creation and aesthetic experience; it is also a key site for the construction of critical, political, and theoretical interventions in the public discourse on migration and otherness (Tinius 2016). Therefore, at some level, we can carefully draw similarities between various migrant situations and their cultural expressions to forward an analytical argument.
Analysing the relationship of the South Asian diaspora in Australia with theatrical and dramaturgical performance compels us to think of the theatre as something that is enacted, not merely espoused; learning through doing, not just being; and a continual process, not a product (McMahon 2007: 111). In the past decade, the South Asian thea-trical traditions have moved from colonial complicity (Chatterjee 2007) to the medium of anti-colonial resistance and artistic autonomy (Mee 2008, Bhatia 2008). The new creative expressions that can be seen in the theatre of the South Asian diaspora in Australia emerged out of the patterns of migration caused by a variety of reasons during colonial and postcolonial times. Diaspora theatre is no more an appendage of the homeland (Bose 2009); it has grown beyond Bollywood and Broadway to come of its own and facilitate the identity formation and acculturation of the diaspora, and its unique recreational and affective power has helped to create community consciousness among migrants.
Theatrical performances should be understood as ‘social remittances’ (Levitt 1998), or reciprocal cultural flows between the homeland and the diaspora, constituted of ideas, behaviours, social capital, narratives, and discourses continually being adapted and creo-lised. Theatrical performances transcend borders, yet maintain cultural identities, reinforce connections, and also form new links and re-create community bonds (Looser 2012). The intercultural and cross-cultural lived experiences of the South Asian diaspora in Australia are reflected in their theatre practice. Here, we consider the case of Nautanki in Sydney.
In Sydney, Australia, Nautanki and its theatre festival enable a space for the playing out of a cultural politics for artistic activities both everyday (mundane) and spectacular.
Its audience comprises migrants and post-migrants; so, Nautanki strives not to dis-tinguish between their cultures or emphasise either identity or assimilation. Rather, it emphasises a reinvention of intercultural, cosmopolitan, and progressive subject for-mation through the practice of theatre in a novel and dynamic context.
Nautanki, therefore, has a dual task: create a cultural representation of the South Asian community – otherwise visible in the multicultural public sphere, but absent from the Anglo-American proscenium,3 by bringing them together – and bridge the gap between the South Asian community and the rest of Australian society. To build this bridge, Nautanki attempts artful practices and empathetic intercultural and cross-cul-tural deliberation that can bring transformation in subjectivity and identity by synthesis- ing ideas and mutual learning, a process culturally contested and negotiated. These are not separate tasks, however, or sequential ones, and Nautanki tries to achieve this sym-metrically through its theatrical events and practices.
Cross-cultural theatre necessitates performance works that negotiate cultural differ-ences temporally and spatially (Lo and Gilbert 2002). The ‘cross’ in the term ‘cross-
4 A. ROY CHOWDHURY AND A. A. R. KHAN
cultural’ is not only about traversing but also about cross-breeding/mixing and contra dicting elements and processes (Dollimore 1991: 288). Cross-cultural negotiation and cultural in-between-ness and hybridity are pronounced in its narrative content and aesthetic forms, and it plays to a wider audience (Lo and Gilbert 2002: 34). Cultural and aesthetic communication by Nautanki creates a ‘South Asian’ community – an imagined community with no single country or culture – connected through cultural and migratory flows of ‘social remittances’. Memories, nostalgia, migratory experiences, and resemblances between various South Asian cultures create, unite, and represent in Australia a South Asian community that is equally Australian in every sense – a hybrid, pastiche, and collage that emerges outside of the South Asian cartographic location – by investing it with new meanings through intercultural espousals as well as novel adaptations.
Diaspora theatres developed in particular contexts enabled by their possibilities and constrained by their limitations. In gauging their successes and failures, diaspora theatres should not be compared with the theatres of South Asian cultural stalwarts and thespians, travelling theatre groups, or dramatists who are exceptional performers.
Rather, diaspora theatres should be understood through their ‘everyday creative acts’ and as a cultural politics. Banerji (2020) studies the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival, 2018 (held at New Brunswick, New Jersey, US) and critically evaluates the works of scholars (Dharwadker 2003, Chatterjee 2008) to demonstrate how the Festival has become a space for the South Asian diaspora communities in the US to assert and claim cultural citizenship. The Festival should be analysed as an act and claim of ‘creative citizenship’ in the adopted homeland. Cultural citizenship calls for ‘flexible citizens’ who can easily navigate the intercultural and transcultural world that we inhabit today (Miller 2007). We analyse Nautanki and the theatre festival in Sydney in a similar vei.
