I was honored this week to be asked to introduce dramatist and lifelong theatre practitioner Vijay Padaki when he was honored by a group of his former business students from the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore. They organized the event to recognize his recent Lifetime Achievement Award presented to him by ASSITEJ, a global network of children’s theatre practitioners, at their annual Congress which was held this year in Havana, Cuba.
Transcript of my spoken remarks:
A wise person once wrote, “A man often finds his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.” Put differently, life is full of surprises and unexplored paths inviting you in new directions.
Vijay Padaki
In 1979 while I was a 12-year-old growing up in southwestern Virginia, Vijay Padaki was teaching Organizational Behavior at IIM-B. Who would have thought that Vijay, in addition to his background in management and psychology, was also actively involved in running, and in continually growing, the Bangalore Little Theatre, which has now been going strong for more than 60 years. It is Bangalore’s oldest nonprofit theatre.
I have never met a wiser, more astute, more dedicated theatre artist than Vijay Padaki.Mine and Vijay’s paths first crossed in 2012 thanks to the power of the worldwide web, when he reached out to me about my playTesla’s Letters.
I’m thrilled to share that my article “Nil Darpan: How a Mistakenly Published Play Helped Force Labour Reforms in British India” has been published in the rigorously peer-reviewed UK-based journal Race & Class which is produced in cooperation with the Institute of Race Relations.
Don’t be fooled by the title of my article. I promise an informative, thoroughly researched yet entertaining, engaging, darkly comic yarn complete with a plot twist ending involving Indian film director Abhijit Chowdhury. Many thanks to journal Editor Jenny Bourne and Deputy Editor Sophia Siddiqui for their keen eyes and for letting me keep the f-word.
From the journal’s website…
Race & Class, “a journal on racism, empire and globalisation…is a refereed, ISI-ranked publication, the foremost English language journal on racism and imperialism in the world today. For three decades it has established a reputation for the breadth of its analysis, its global outlook and its multidisciplinary approach.”
“One of the few scholarly quarterlies that bridges the gap between the academic and the ghetto.” Guardian, UK
“Combines scholarship, insight and sympathy for the hopes and problems of the poor and oppressed people throughout the world. It is an achievement as significant as it is rare.” Noam Chomsky
Abstract: In 1860s India, Bengali playwright Dinabandhu Mitra wrote the play Nil Darpan (Indigo Mirror), an exposé of violent abuses committed against Indian farm workers by powerful British indigo dealers. With help from a Christian missionary, the play was translated into English and shared with the office of Bengal’s Lieutenant-Governor, Sir John Peter Grant.
Grant approved a few copies to be printed to share with colleagues; instead, hundreds were mistakenly printed and distributed to Parliament members in England, outraging and embarrassing the British Raj. But would the amusing debacle help bring positive change to Indian labourers?
The events of the Nil Darpan controversy are well-known to historians but have often been mythologised and misrepresented. The author provides a unique perspective on the events by comparing and contrasting the news media’s coverage of the Nil Darpan controversy, and Bengali theatre and film artists’ reactions to it, using his own findings from Indian, UK and US newspapers of the era ranging from 1859 to 1917. This article is based on his lecture given at the annual Fulbright Association Conference in October 2023 held in Denver, Colorado.
The article begins below:
Crisis
During the period of British rule of the majority of India, Calcutta was, for most of Britain’s reign, the nation’s capital. Kolkata, as it is called today, situated in Bengal on the banks of the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges, is now thecapital of the Indian state of West Bengal. As the capital of British India, much of the anti-British sentiment that was expressed here by Bengalis set the tone for the rest of the country through Bengalis’ arts and politics. This includes patriotic,therefore implicitly anti-British, songs and plays.
Some native Bengali children, mostly boys at first, attended Christian missionary schools and colleges, where they learnt about, and were influenced by, western playwrights, especially UK playwrights, whose plays were crafted using a traditional five-act plot structure, ranging from Shakespeare to Shaw.
But what about outside of Calcutta in the rest of Bengal? As you might imagine, the land was chiefly rural and therefore chiefly agricultural. During the nineteenth century, a major cash crop in Bengal was indigo, the plant from which blue dye is made, and from which blue clothing was manufactured. Indigo imported from India made blue clothing highly fashionable, and England now had… You can finish reading the full article here. Note that it is currently Restricted Access, meaning you need to log into your university account through the Race & Class website to view it.
I had such a blast today giving a Zoom presentation, along with Drexel’s Associate Director of Global Partnerships Young-Min Park, to Drexel University faculty and administrators about my Fulbright experiences, how I approached the application, and resources for them tobegin their own Fulbright journeys. Great way to start the weekend!
So glad that things like this are finally happening. A dream come true. Been working on “Project Bring Abhijit Chowdhury to Drexel” since 2019. I’d invite you all but it’s only for our Westphal Film & TV students. Abhijit, Drexel University’s first Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, will be screening the first 3 episodes of his (writer-director) hit streaming seriesAstey Ladies!, known in some Indian markets as Salon de Paris, followed by a Q&A moderated by yours truly.
I wasn’t surprised, and was very happy that the Fulbright Association asked all of the speakers at the annual conference in Denver, Colorado to open their talks with a land acknowledgement. There’s my first slide and here are my opening remarks:
When I was 21, I learned that my great-grandmother on my biological father’s side was a full-blooded Cherokee [which I first discussed publicly and proudly in my autobiographical theatrical performance The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy in 2004]. I was always interested in history, so I knew something about the Cherokee but my learning of this hidden part of my heritage made me more passionate to learn as much as I could about my newly found ancestry. I was born and raised in southwestern Virginia but I was living in New York City at the time. When I would go up to friends and say, “I just found out I’m part Cherokee,” they would vaguely say, “Oh, so like, are you from Oklahoma? Are you an Okie?”
I’d say, “No, genius. The Cherokee out west were marched there at gunpoint from the East Coast. It was called the Trail of Tears. Thousands died on the march. A small group managed to stay behind by rapidly assimilating in order to keep their homes. That meant adopting Christianity and dressing like white people. They’re called the Eastern Band of Cherokee and their descendants, my ancestors, are still there today.”
So I feel the need, the joy, the honor, of saying, as clumsy it as it might come out, that this land we’re on today in Denver used to belong to the Arapaho people and Cheyenne people, and it had been theirs for a very long time. The trouble started when the European side of my ancestry showed up looking for gold in the 1850s and everything quickly went to hell for these nations.
You’ll never guess what ultimately happened: they were forcibly relocated out of Colorado. Another Trail of Tears.
I ask that you ponder that and take a little time sometime to learn, as I’m always learning, more of that history, and maybe even more of the First Nations history of wherever in the US you call home.
