As the US was gearing up for a deeply divisive midterm election on November 6, the New York stage witnessed two performances that took a leaf from the British colonial experience, drawing huge audiences and raising questions about the economic and cultural viability of postcolonial art across the Indian subcontinent.
British dance maestro Akram Khan’s production XENOS had its American première on November 1 at the Rose Theater, Jazz at the Lincoln Center. On November 3, Swedish companies Folkoperan and Cirkus Cirkör jointly presented composer Philip Glass’s iconic homage to Mahatma Gandhi, the opera Satyagraha , at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater. Khan’s subject is the faceless Indian soldier who was one among the 1.5 million people shipped to hostile lands during World War I, to fight for his British coloniser. The fighting makes him lose his country, then his dance, then himself.
The props on set — swing, chairs, pillows — are tied to ropes, which are pulled from behind the stage in a swift and seamless motion, sucking the gathering into an abyss of darkness. Light is shone on the baked, ochre earth and the beats of the dholak (percussion) give way to the piercing cackle of gunfire. Behind, in an elevated chamber, musicians provide fuel to the promise of Prometheus, the character from Greek mythology who died with the knowledge that humans eventually live to destroy themselves. Khan’s soldier knows this too.
XENOS marries the free flow of chakkars (pirouettes) to the ostensibly higher art of stillness. Khan’s vision for this performance is a frenetic ghoulish hell spawned by xenophobia — a constant othering, which has been a social reality throughout India’s experience of colonisation, and is resurfacing as we aggressively seek to eliminate the xenos among us.
The Greek word, which can interestingly mean both stranger and guest, is the state of being of Khan’s character X. He’s a xenos in his country, xenos in his dance, xenos in his body.
The Raj, ‘on which the sun never set’, has severed its ties with the European Union, which was spawned as a reparation for years of antagonism and infighting.
Thousands in Pakistan are thirsty for the blood of a working-class Christian woman on charged with blasphemy. The courts exonerated her. The mob won’t. All this is xenos.
Towards the end of the performance, a tough, rusty gramophone appears on stage. Khan attaches it to an abseiling rope, and it hurtles out names of Indian soldiers who died in WWI. Khan contorts, twitches and turns to the rhythm of the hurried clicking of the keys and the ding and slide of the carriage return. He sporadically breaks into a salute. Neurosis is the second name of xenos .
The ghostly gramophone then metamorphoses into a flashlight, gleaming onto Khan’s desolate and convulsing body and, in another moment, glaring into the eyes of the audience, at once suspending the distance between the stage and its witnesses.
It is at this moment that we are invited to fight this battle alongside Khan — this battle which is not war, but “the end of the world”.
When Khan choreographed and performed the hymn Abide with Me , sung by Emeli Sandé, at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, the world witnessed the free and fiery blend of Indian classical Kathak and contemporary dance — something that he has effortlessly used for 30 years to turn the stage into his battleground.
Khan later explored Hindu mythology with the London-based master artist Anish Kapoor through his production Kaash , and adapted Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy’s polemic about farmers in India into the gritty and soil-bound Ma . In XENOS , he again merges subcontinental spirit and technique with contemporary flourish, bringing to the fore a long-forgotten sliver of Indian history. His Desh saw him grapple with issues of identity and homecoming — an ode to his ancestral country of Bangladesh, his Indian dance masters and his immigrant father, who made a living selling Indian food in Wimbledon.
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S atyagraha , on the other hand, opens with the dilemma of Arjuna in the Kurukshetra of the epic Mahabharata . He is stricken with pity for his adversaries and his ancestors, but he has to fight the righteous war. Arjuna is Gandhi and Gandhi is Arjuna. Arjuna’s dilemma is Gandhi’s dilemma. The battlefield is of both Kurukshetra and South Africa. Duty demands action from both.
The acrobats start to fly and thus begins the show’s visual spectacle, cushioned by the rhythmic distensions of Glass’s signature music. The orchestra, conducted by Matthew Wood, is trimmed but holds sway as the sopranos soar and the aerialists plummet — their fluid movements hold you in rapture as the non-linear narrative spans thousands of years.
Shlokas from the Bhagavad Gita are chanted and, for over two-and-a-half hours, this marriage of the opera and Sanskrit and circus remains holy — a marriage that only Cirkus Cirkör could pull off. It is the flag-bearer of contemporary circus in Scandinavia, and a pioneer of storytelling through physical theatrics. Who else would dare show Gandhi the soprano alongside Gandhi the acrobat, and tell a story so vivid that you shed tears and sing along mindlessly, trying to decipher the heavily accented Sanskrit pronunciations.
Satyagraha ’s use of the tightrope, the see-saw and the aerial silk serves as an apt metaphor for Gandhi, who from tradition brings the very seed of satyagraha (non-violent resistance) and sows it in the hearts and minds of his followers, from Martin Luther King Jr to Malala Yousafzai. The opera closes with a giant charkha spinning yarn while being suspended in the air. Gandhi feeds it, his associates and followers turn it, and yards and yards of yarn lace the historical theatre in Brooklyn.
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Khan’s soldiers were made to leave their country to fight for the British. Gandhi’s fellow Indians in South Africa were similarly shipped from home and turned into bonded labour for the profit of their colonial masters. It is this lack of agency that runs through the heart of both performances.
One cannot help but wonder why such seminal works about our colonial experience are increasingly produced outside the Indian subcontinent. Sure, there is a nazm (a genre of Urdu poetry) here or a novel there, a feature film, a short story... but hardly anything ambitious that has shaped the canon of our postcolonial redemption.
A lack of physical infrastructure and financial backing is certainly a major impediment for us, while institution-building has been a cornerstone of Western societies. Commercial imperatives and a fraught cultural milieu have also resulted in the gradual erosion of excellence and rigour in our artistic works. However, isn’t some degree of collective amnesia of our colonial experience also at play here?
When we do address our struggle against colonial suppression through our art, we remain, for the most part, restricted to stereotypes — virile freedom fighters, conniving traitors, helpless women, voluptuous dancers. With the exception of some serious works in film ( Lagaan , Rang De Basanti ), when we try to creatively re-tell our colonial history, we end up producing ₹300-crore VFX-fests like Thugs of Hindostan .
Then, there is also this urge to produce works that are rudimentary and instructive, very textbookish. A work of art can be a history lesson, of course, but is an artist obliged to be a historian? Our criticism of historical drama also seldom goes beyond fact-checks and sensitivities towards partisan narratives.
A lack of theatre infrastructure and the steep cost of tickets also explain why artistes like Khan and Glass have rarely brought their art to the subcontinent, targeting instead the sprawling diaspora. Massive philanthropic support and an overall awareness of the arts and culture economy bolster the viability of such performances in art hubs like New York. Satyagraha , for instance, was made possible through hefty donations by the Rohit and Katharine Desai Family Foundation, while The Joelson Foundation and the Harkness Foundation of Dance, among others supported XENOS . The last great epic on India’s colonial history, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi , was made possible by generous State funding from then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — a whopping $10 million channelled through the National Film Development Corporation of India.
The shows of Khan and Glass have both been enabled by environments far removed from the Indian subcontinent, yet both have important lessons for us. XENOS is a diagnosis of our ills. Satyagraha is the cure.
Soumya Shankar is adjunct professor of journalism at Stony Brook University and a reporting fellow at the investigative unit of ABC News; Ali Raj is a reporting fellow at Columbia Journalism Investigations and a culture writer from Karachi, Pakistan