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

In Search of a Mulk  Mrs. Violet Smith was a second generation immigrant to Calcutta from Armenia. During WW1, her parents fled to India, and finally settled in Calcutta. They started Fairlawn hotel there. But, it reached its heyday when the hotel fell in the hands of Mrs. Smith. Gradually, Fairlawn developed into an Anglo-Indian cultural hub. Many world famous celebrities like Indian film star Shashi Kapoor, poet Gunter Grass, or Geoffrey Kendal, the eminent theatre personality, fell in love with Fairlawn. This is surely for the special ‘old world charm’ of the place, and the love of Mrs. Smith. Immense was her vitality. Even in her 90s, she lived life like a teenager! In this film about her beloved hotel, the film captures her celebrations of life. At the start, it tells of the Armenian migration, but soon it becomes the search of Mrs. Smith’s parents, Mrs. Smith herself, her guests, all. Fairlawn has always remained a focal point in their search. The film is full of the anecdotes of the eminent guests at the hotel. Embed Video 

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

Founded in 2012, Nautanki Theatre has brought to life cultural storytelling in a South Asian Theatre.. They present thoughtful and immersive experiences to Australian stages, with a focus on a sense of belonging, understanding and introspection in their performances. More than just a not-for-profit performing arts organisation, Nautanki is an artistic platform for South Asian talent, uniting creatives and offering them the opportunity to showcase unique creative skills. What sets South Asian theatre apart from Western traditions is its deep integration of music, dance, vibrant visual aesthetics, and heightened emotional storytelling. Rooted in classical forms like Kathakali, Nautanki (from which the company takes its name), and folk theatre, South Asian performances often blur the lines between the sacred and the secular, the mythical and the real. The storytelling is layered with symbolism, poetic language, and a deep connection to collective memory—creating a uniquely immersive experience that resonates beyond the stage. Nautanki Theatre is a vibrant example of how diaspora communities preserve and celebrate their cultural identity through the performing arts. By staging powerful, contemporary stories rooted in South Asian experiences, Nautanki Theatre not only entertains but also fosters dialogue on migration, identity, belonging, and multiculturalism In a diverse society like Australia, theatre groups like Nautanki play a crucial role in promoting empathy, representation, and cultural continuity. Diaspora theatre bridges generations, challenges stereotypes, and keeps cultural narratives alive in new lands. It creates a space where migrant voices are not only heard but celebrated—inviting local audiences to step into stories that are deeply human, yet uniquely South Asian. Diaspora theatre like Nautanki is vital—it bridges generations, challenges stereotypes, and keeps cultural narratives alive in new lands. It creates a space where migrant voices are heard, and where local audiences gain insight into the richly layered experiences of immigrant communities. In a diverse society like Australia, such artistic expressions play a crucial role in promoting empathy, representation, and cultural continuity.