Stanford professor Jisha Menon explores Wagah as a theater of nationalism.
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SAN FRANCISCO: The ceremonious lowering of flags at the Wagah border that divides India and Pakistan is a spectacle that attracts thousands of spectators. Dubbed “carefully choreographed contempt,” the formidable soldiers of either side mirror each other’s intimidating routine, charging the passions of the crowd into a patriotic frenzy. Calls of “Jai Hind” and “Pakistan Zindabad” reverberate in the air.
Jisha Menon’s new book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition, highlights the theatrical aspect of the border ceremony, the pageantry, and the instilled patriotism. The writer, an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University, determines that “Wagah becomes a theatre of nationalism.” Citing this example, she elucidates that concepts of “an imagined community” and “nationalism” can be fostered through embodied performances.
Menon’s first book, which she co-edited with Patrick Anderson, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, is a collection of essays that explores the correlation of violence and performance in modern geopolitics. The essays examine the role of diverse media forms in today’s hotbeds, from Korea and South Africa to India and Israel.
In The Performance of Nationalism, Menon uses the lens of performance to analyze the world-making, or world-shattering power of performative acts. The author’s realm of performatives is vast. It includes varied media forms, performance art, photography and cinema; street theater and regional folk theater; political rhetoric, rallies and even national logos and symbols. Through the works of filmmakers such as Ritwik Ghatak, M.S. Sathyu and M.K. Raina, she explores the underlying relationship between India and Pakistan since the Partition of the subcontinent. Here she evokes a metaphor of fraternal twins separated at birth. Studying the artistic representations of Partition from the 1960 to 2010, she observes that these narrations are not merely reflections of the past, but inscribe in them stories one wants to convey of the present. Menon compels the reader to reimagine enforced ideals of identity and community.
Menon turns to literary devices like “mimesis” to determine whether a positive shift in the narrative of performatives can change the course of discourse among and between the citizens of both nations. The term mimesis carries a wide range of meanings that include imitation, representation, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self. Considering Partition through its aesthetic representations offers a sensuous understanding of the events, enabling a bigger-picture perspective through contemplation.
Menon concludes that performance arts move the viewer beyond his or her domestic sphere to an emotionally charged sphere of kinship. Aesthetic pleasure is derived not only from dramatic action but from a sense of shared witnessing. Rather than privatizing grief, acts of collective witnessing offer a ground to generate a powerful sense of solidarity.
An alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Menon has a PhD in drama from Stanford University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of religion and secularity, gender and nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization. Menon’s articles and reviews have been published in Modern Drama, Feminist Review, and Theatre Journal.
In an exclusive interview, Menon talks about her book, gender and nationalism, among other topics. Here are edited excerpts:
How did the idea of a book based on Partition germinate?
The idea of the book germinated in the wake of the demolition of Babri Masjid. I was performing in a play, Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions, soon after that. The play was set in 1992-93, and I played the role of a woman whose experience of the Partition violence persisted even decades after the event and colored her relations with Muslims she subsequently encountered. I started thinking of the tenacity of that founding trauma and the ways in which it continues to mold religious relations within the subcontinent. The book had its first life as my PhD dissertation.
What were your resources for the research of the book?
I looked primarily at cultural archives – films, plays, state rituals etc. I focused on performances in particular to consider how bodies carry stories.
The book expounds that the trauma of Partition, euphemistically called “the exchange of populations” – in which 15 million people were displaced, roughly 2 million massacred and 83,000 women raped – remains deeply embedded in the psyche of the nation. The specter of Partition resurfaces in every religious tension that has sparked in post-Independent India, be it the 1984 Sikh pogroms, the Babri Masjid demolition or the Godhra pogroms.
Why do you feel that the memory of Partition continues to shape the relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs today?
For those who experienced the vicissitudes of the Partition, it was a life-altering event. The magnitude and intensity of its disruptive effects were immense. It was a very violent founding moment of the nation, one that was silenced in order to circulate the narrative of India’s non-violent path to freedom. The disavowal of that trauma and the refusal to witness and acknowledge the extreme ruptures it produced in the lives of so many continues to manifest itself in both spectacular and banal, everyday acts of hostility.
Do you believe future generations will also grapple with the tenacious hold of partition?
The coming generations do not have the visceral or immediate experiences or memories of the Partition. Of course they are the bearers of the stories that they have heard from previous generations. There is the possibility of breaking out from the weight of anger and hostility that has accumulated over generations. This will require greater cultural contact, more non-state, people to people encounters across the border.
Your research interests lie at the intersection of gender and nationalism. How does gender play a role in nationalism?
Gender plays a crucial role in nationalist projects. Consider, for instance, the ubiquitous trope of Mother India. Often the nation itself is imagined as mother who requires protection from her able-bodied sons. This imagery of woman as a repository of national or community value then perpetuates acts of violence against women. Violating the woman becomes a way of defiling the purity of the enemy nation or community. This is one way of understanding the preponderance of war rapes as a means to infiltrate and violate the “honor” of the enemy whether that be a national, or religious communities.
How does mimesis help initiate the process of better world-making?
I’m interested in thinking about the ways in which imitation, both on stage and off stage, molds ideas of selfhood and community. The book asks whether mimetic practices force us to see relations of kinship and resemblance rather than reified identity positions. Mimesis, the way that I use the concept in my book, shuttles between aesthetic mimesis and social mimesis. I draw from scholars such as [Emmanuel] Levinas, [Michael] Taussig and [Judith] Butler to argue that recovering mimetic social relations allows us to see the ways in which subjects are composed of traces of otherness. So rather than think in terms of intractable oppositionality we are able to see the affinity and kinship we share with others rather than hostility.
What do you hope to accomplish through this book?
The book hopes to make us rethink our habitual reflexes of organizing political antagonism through the lens of identity politics. It makes a case for recovering mimetic modes of thinking that stresses semblance, kinship and in the process unsettles fixed notions of us and them, of sameness and difference.
What are your future projects?
I’m currently in India working on a second monograph on the ruptures produced by neoliberal globalization in the erstwhile somnolent city of Bangalore in South India. The book considers the work of the city’s urban avant-garde to examine their critiques and interventions into the project of world-class city-making in Bangalore.
You are involved in theater, teaching, and writing. Which of these is your greatest passion?
I love all three! I don’t see them as distinct spheres of activity. I feel very privileged and lucky to be able to work at Stanford, where my brilliant students push me to do the best kind of teaching that I possibly could; my colleagues and peers are models of superlative scholarship. I find teaching in a department that is committed to art making, in addition to theorizing about art, extremely energizing. The real hope is not to segment these activities into separate spheres but see them coming together to push a new, vibrant model of creative scholarship and critical art practice that offers fresh ways of thinking about our rapidly changing world.