THEATRE OF INDIAN DIASPORA IN THE TRANSNATIONAL SPACE: READING TANIKA GUPTA’S PLAYS SANCTUARY AND FRAGILE LAND

Abstract [English]

Theatre is a significant cultural production with a degree of performativity entrusted in a particular social context. This article examines the attribution of identity and hybridity upon theatre of Indian diaspora in Tanika Gupta’s Plays Sanctuary and Fragile Land (2003). Drawing upon the concept of diasporic space (Brah), hybridity (Bhabha) and transnational social field the article analyses the negotiation of second-generation British-South Asian subjective entity within the multicultural landscape of UK. It largely interrogates the metanarratives around the reception and production of political, economic and social traits, providing a separate space to an individual playwright where a free flow of dialogue can exist with its uniqueness. Gupta’s Sanctuary explores the bureaucratic violence and contingency of cross-cultural solidarity among the asylum-seeking mass, who believe in hopeful reconfiguration of home and belonging.  Further, Fragile Land foregrounds the narrative in inter-generational conflict, oppression of gender, and fractured effect of hybridity, as the characters in the play are forced to choses between competing national and cultural affiliation.     Thus, the juxtaposing of these two narratives the paper argues that here diaspora emphasises the strong and continuous cross-border linkages, delimiting the imaginary home while allowing migration to brighten the hope of transnational ties. The identity formation for migrant groups, in the case of diaspora, focuses on the collective identity based on their culture of origin. Transnationalism, on the other hand, strictly focuses on the mobility of the people, and based on that, their identities are constructed. This paper tries to understand the transnational engagement of migrants in analysing theatre productions and, thereby, the performance of the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom. Tanika Gupta’s Sanctuary and Fragile Land records the obliterated transnational self into the hybrid conjunction of the second-generation immigrants but still casts a necessary dilemma of caste, religion, social formation and another such aspects.