Tag: Jinnah

This theater review was originally published on The South Asian Idea in May 2012. I am posting it here because Partition remains an ever-relevant topic on BP. Secondly, it may help give a better sense of my center-left Pakistani perspective.

As the lights come up at the beginning of “A Tryst with Destiny”, a screen projects news footage of communal riots in India. We see clips from the 2002 carnage in Gujarat, protests in Indian-administered Kashmir, and an interview with Jaswant Singh in which he lays the major responsibility for the Partition of British India on Nehru and the Indian National Congress. As these news clips fade out, Gandhi and Nehru step on stage and begin discussing their roles in Partition. From the outset, the play asks the audience to reflect on the question: Was the Partition of India worth the bloodshed that accompanied it? What price did India have to pay for Independence?

“A Tryst with Destiny”, performed at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Lansburgh Theatre in Washington DC, was written by Amita Deepak Jha, a locally-based psychiatrist and medical researcher. The play was Jha’s first venture into playwriting as well as direction. In her “Director’s Note”, Jha notes that her decision to write the play came out of her psychiatric work. She writes: “As a psychiatrist, I help people make sense of their history and how it impacts their present. I deeply believe we as humans carry not only our individual history but also our social, political, cultural, the history of our communities and nationalities in us. It is important that we think and question our biases, prejudices, and deeply righteous beliefs of others and their motives and actions, before we embark on the blame game, creating conflicts and making wars.” As reflected in this vision, “Tryst” is an ambitious attempt to present a balanced account of more than two decades of negotiations and struggles that led to the freedom of India and the division of the subcontinent.

Partition is a deeply emotional issue for South Asians and different groups will have different interpretations of what led to it and whether it was a positive or negative outcome. “Tryst” does an excellent job of demonstrating that Partition was far from inevitable. On the contrary, there were multiple times over two decades where opportunities for compromise were squandered, sometimes by the Congress and other times by the Muslim League. Chief among these missed opportunities was the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, which was perhaps  the last chance for an agreement that would have led to freedom for a united India. Continue reading “A Tryst with Destiny”: Reflections on the Partition of India