The South Asian Theatre Festival aims to remind South Asian diaspora audiences in Sydney of their progressive and liberal roots; stir a sense of identity, community participation, and responsibility towards Australian society, of which they are a part now; and bring about a cultural dynamism. The Festival also works to enhance the multicultural ethos of Parramatta. A grant from the Department of Multicultural New South Wales and the Parramatta City Council helped Nautanki organise the first Festival in 2016 at Riverside. Nautanki has held its Festival at Riverside Theatres in Parramatta every year since then.
In 2016, tickets were sold on a pay-as-you-please basis11 so that audiences from all strata of society could participate. Three plays were staged in each day in 2016, one each from Bangla, Tamil, and Marathi literature – representative of the various linguistic communities from India living in Sydney. In 2017, however, the Festival was truly pan– South Asian – Gujarati, Sinhala, and Urdu plays were staged. In 2018, shows were held in Fijian-Hindi, Punjabi, and Kannada. More than 170 audiences participated in each of these years in the festival, and the news of this Festival spread to more than 10,000 Individuals.
The fourth Festival was held in 2019. Three plays were enacted –The Education of Miss Asia, in Sinhala and English, by Sydney Kolam Maduwa; the Tamil Penn (Woman) by Sydney Nadaga Priya; and the Bangla Debi Sarpamasta (The Serpent-Headed Goddess) by Aangik Theatre, Sydney. The Education of Miss Asia is an intriguing play about a young lady from Sri Lanka who is catapulted from a lower middle-class family background into the world of glitz and glamour of a beauty contest. She luckily won regional titles, from Sri Lanka to Calcutta, and is now waiting for the Miss World contest. In the process, she is getting trained by a Calcutta (now Kolkata) professor to enhance her intellectual and emotional capabilities, on which she will be judged as well. As she gets this training, her inner introspective capability emerges, and she realises the farce and postcolonial tragedy of beauty contests.
The performances were brilliant, and it shows the eternal travel and movement of the migrants from one place to another to demonstrate and be judged for their talent and capabilities, only to realise the futility of proving themselves by the standards of the people who subjugated them, which is but an extension of that mentality and servitude. It has dialogues like ‘‘I was also a lover boy once, in my own vegetarian way, of course!’ that show the cultural hybridity located at the heart of postcolonial existence in a hilarious but meaningful way. The audience enjoyed the performance immensely.
Whereas, Penn is a drama about the complexities of urban life and how a family handles it. The clichéd phrase ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’ has become synonymous with problems in relationships based on the tendencies of each gender. In this whimsical premise of the play, all men live on Mars and all women on Venus! Once they got together, they respected each other’s differences until one day everybody woke up and completely forgot that they had once come from different planets, resulting in unrealistic expectations and confusion on both sides, causing frustration. It reflects the angst of ‘migrant’ families to deal with and think about place,space, and human relations in new urban and multicultural settings, such as Australia. Debi Sarpamasta, on the other hand, is a play that takes place in the fictitious Bengali principality of Shinghagar at a time when the East India Company is strengthening its hold in India. The young king Lokendra Pratap tries to appease the British Resident by giving him a jewel-encrusted necklace adorning the local deity Debi Sarpamasta, the snake-headed goddess. The priests, desperate to protect themselves, convince the tribe that his daughter is the goddess incarnate. Seven years pass, and the King findsthe priest’s daughter Gouri in the forest and falls in love with her. Gouri agrees, but political complications start scheming, and Gouri is caught in a love triangle.
The story connects you to the folk and rural culture of Bengal and its tryst with the statecraft, as well as colonial and imperial ambitions. Here colloquial and modern dia- lects, languages, and songs are used to give a mythical rendition of the rural life and story of a young girl. It takes the audience back and connects them to the long-forgotten roots of their non-migrant and culturally rooted ancestors. The performance is outstand- ing with the use and proper design of the stage and costumes, which made the audience melancholic and connected to a long-forgotten past and its contemporary metaphorical rendition.
All the three plays depicted frictions and hybridity of culture across time and space.
Performances were stunning. In all these shows, the audience response has been phe- nomenally enthusiastic, and after the show, they had a dialogue and deliberations with the actors and directors and engaged with them actively to understand and discuss the layers of meaning of multicultural migrant lives and their depiction, which created an interactional, carnivalesque, and intercultural atmosphere.
Around 60–65 per cent of the audience were Australian citizens and 30 per cent Per- manent Residents. The rest were citizens of various South Asian countries, and a few from outside South Asia. About 70 per cent of the audience were aged above 36; the Fes- tival probably attracts economically established audiences over 35 who have leisure time and a longing for culture. However, at least 20–25 per cent of the audience were in the 19–35 age groups, demonstrating that the younger generation too is interested in the Fes- tival. Nautanki and the Festival have raised theatre audiences by 20–25 per cent. Over 70 per cent of the audience watched all the plays, demonstrating the intercultural inclusive- ness that Nautanki promotes and bearing out Neel’s belief:12 ‘theatre has its own language, and that it can communicate with multilingual and multicultural audiences in a seamless manner’. Nautanki now pitches itself as ‘a Western Sydney–based organi- sation that works for cultural development, community participation education, and training and works with the ‘culturally and linguistically diverse community (CalD), refugees and migrants, leading to social inclusion’. Around 99 per cent of the respondents agreed that the South Asian Theatre Festival is an important initiative. Around 70–80 per cent held that it has definitely changed the cul- tural landscape of Sydney, and about 10 per cent felt that it is too early to say but agreed that it is a brilliant initiative. Most of the audience members we interviewed enjoyed not JOURNAL OF INTERCULTURAL STUDIES 9 only the plays at the Festival but also its carnivalesque and intercultural atmosphere. They rejuvenated community relations, and they met people of different communities, held discussions and deliberations with new acquaintances, and formed new relation- ships. Most respondents felt that to become even more inclusive and make the Festival more intercultural in its dialogue, Nautanki should involve non-Indian and Australian performers and include more languages and communities. Hosting more styles of thea- trical performances would make the shows more inclusive and participatory and, there- fore, more intercultural in its appeal. Fortunately, participation from the members of other communities is increasing over the years. An Australian white individual, Andrew, who attended the festival with his Indian friend, says ‘it is the dramas; their story lines and presentations are so authentic, and they talk about the daily life, friend- ship, love, and struggle of our friends and their families from all over South Asia, now living in Australia, which I have seen from so close that I have loved to relive these experi- ences’. Andrew mentioned that he attended South Asian theatre performances before, and he plans to bring his family and friends to see this in the future.13 The audience thinks that Nautanki’s skill at managing time shows their professional and organised nature. They think that the Festival provides ‘thoughtful entertainment’. By uniting com- munities, Nautanki is lifting its profile and image. Many said that as members of the ‘South Asian’ community they felt proud to be able to contribute in culturally meaningful ways to the society at large. Many exclusively mentioned that they want more white and coloured (not South Asian) audiences to participate in these events so that actors and audiences can come to know and learn from each other and deliberate in an empathetic and stress-free cultural environment. Sebastian, who comes from a Chilean-Australian family, came with their Nigerian-Australian friends and friends from India, all of whom were students at the University of Sydney. Sebastian said that ‘they are attracted to the intimate storylines and narratives on community lives, the emotions and affects expressed for near and dear ones, which they find are very similar to the Latin American and African cultures, which intrigues them’.Slightly more than two decades ago, Aparna Dharwadker (1998) very aptly noted the near absence of the traditions of drama and theatre among the Indian diaspora communities. In the British context, authors such as Hanif Kureishi and Farrukh Dhondy have produced a considerable number of plays, but they are better known for their work in other genres and cannot be strongly associated with diaspora theatre. In the North American context, immigrant theatre has represented issues of multiculturalism, ethnic diversity, and colour, but it has eclipsed playwrights of Indian origin (at the cost of other migrant groups such East Asian and Afro-Caribbean). Even when South Asian theatre and playwrights are mentioned, poetry, short fiction, and novels are given precedence. In addition, migration brings about a double-edged experience of loss and of recovery of home that is easier to write about than to perform (Dharwadker 1998). Considering this depressing situation in the global South Asian migrant theatre-scape, the popularity that Nautanki has achieved in a few years is laudable.
Source: ‘South Asian’ Diaspora Theatre in Sydney: Cultural
Politics of the Proscenium and Transforming the
Mise-En-Scène
By
Arnab Roy Chowdhury & Ahmed Abidur Razzaque Khan
Notes on contributors
Arnab Roy Chowdhury is an Assistant Professor in the school of sociology at the HSE University, Moscow, in the Russian Federation. Prior to this he was an Assistant Professor in the Public Policy and Management Group at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC).
He received his PhD in Sociology from the National University of Singapore (NUS). His research and teaching interests include Postcolonial & Subaltern Studies, Cultural Sociology, Forced Migration and Refugee Studies, Social Movements Studies, Ethnicity and Nationalism, and Natural Resources Extraction and Labour.
Ahmed Abidur Razzaque Khan, alias Ahmed Abid is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of General Education Department (GED) at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).
He did his Ph.D. in Human Rights, Society, and Multi–level Governance from the Western
Sydney University, Australia. He has more than fifteen years’ experience in academic and development work around Asia and the Pacific. His research disciplines focus on – Cultural Studies, Documentary Film, New and Alternative Media, Migration, Refugees and Labour Trafficking and Subaltern Narrative, and Postcolonial Studies.
email: abidur.razzaque@ulab.edu.bd.
