Parting shots
Photo of Renu Brindle and Sujaya Dasgupta by Manuel Harlan
Daniel Nelson
Shakespeare’s 10 “history plays” are part of Britain’s school syllabus: the 1947 Partition of India isn’t. It should be.
Britain oversaw the split, which sparked one of the largest migrations the world has ever seen.
About 12 million people are estimated to have swapped homes as a result of the line drawn rapidly by a British lawyer who had never before visited the subcontinent. Between 200,000 and two million died. Perhaps 750,000 women were abducted and raped.
Some of the survivors later made their way to Britain - a classic example of “We’re here because you were there”. Many never spoke - even to their children - about the upheavals and atrocities they witnessed. (Jews who escaped the NAZI pogroms and death camps similarly often chose to repress their memories rather than inflict them on their children, or couldn’t find the words to adequately capture the enormity of the horror.)
Inevitably, the dam finally broke and the memories came spilling out, in articles, books, plays and radio and TV programmes. Silence at the Donmar Warehouse and Tara Theatre, is adapted from Kavita Puri’s book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, one of the first works to spotlight the cataclysmic eruption of the subcontinent through the eyes of people who are now British.
It’s 100 minutes, simply but effectively staged, movingly acted by a cast of six. The thread on which the experiences are hung is of a British Asian journalist trying to “sell” the idea of interviewing British survivors of Partition to small-minded British colleagues and the journalist’s subsequent attempts to break the omerta stifling the memories. It’s a cliched device but provides a chance to shoehorn-in a potted geopolitical history of the break-up of India and the apportioning of blame.
The journalist’s own father snaps at her when she asks about his past, and it’s as sure as anything in this world that at the end of the play he will finally give in and tell his tale. It’s predictable, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s the stories of the events of three-quarters of a century ago that matter. And what stories they are: viscerally shocking and tragic, sickeningly misogynistic and violent, mostly in the name of god, but heroic, too, as neighbour protects neighbour.
It’s bearable because it’s important to remember and reflect, and because although it’s hard to fathom “old friends in the morning wanting me dead in the afternoon” there’s also room for humour, love and humanity. And for the awareness of at least a minority of people - for example, that the British divide and rule policies which contributed to the disaster are continued by successor governments in India and Pakistan: “We are still being pitched against each other.”
* Silence is at the Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, Seven Dials, WC2, until 17 September, and at Tara Theatre, 356 Garratt Lane, Earlsfield, SW18, on 22 September-1 October. Info: Donmar: £10-£55; 3282 3808/ https://www.donmarwarehouse.com. Tara: £15-£20; taratheatre.com/ 8333 4457/ info@taratheatre.com
+ There were 1,451,862 people of Indian origin in the UK, according to the 2011 census, 1,174,983 from Pakistan, and 451,529 from Bangladesh