Unimaginable Communities: Identities in Traffic in Rukhsana Ahmad's Black Shalwar

The homeland is not waiting back there for the new ethnics to rediscover it. There is a past to be learned about, but the past is now seen, and has to be grasped as history, as something that has to be told. It is narrated. It is grasped through memory. It is grasped through desire. It is grasped through reconstruction. It is not just a fact that has been waiting to ground our identities.

—Stuart Hall 38

In March 1999, ten months after the nuclear testing in India and Pakistan and two months before the Kargil conflict poised the two nations at the brink of a nuclear war, Kali Theatre Company produced Black Shalwar. Rukhsana Ahmad's dramatic adaptation of Saadat Hasan Manto's short story, "Kali Shalwar," opened at the Oval House Theatre in London on 4 March 1999. The play emerged at a global political moment that signalled the growing power of a virile, martial, and chauvinist brand of nationalism in the Indian subcontinent. It also signalled increasing violence against non-European minorities within the U.K. Black Shalwar, directed by Helena Uren, reflects upon interethnic love and betrayal at a historic juncture, marked by mounting aggression towards minorities in India as well as Britain. Ahmad explores how the porous bodies of prostitutes confound the ontological purities of ethnic identities and allow the co-mingling of religious differences. The ambivalent sense of betrayal that pervades the inter-ethnic relationship in Black Shalwar allegorizes the treatment of minorities and the crisis of secularism and multiculturalism in both the Indian subcontinent and England.

This article argues that Kali Theatre Company's Black Shalwar offers a powerful critique of the abjections upon which the coherence of the nation is founded. Here, the nation's "ob-scene," those off-stage or in the wings of the political imaginary of the Indian as well as the British nation-stage, denounce the obscene, divisive rhetoric and policies of the political parties in power. Kali does not invoke India, as Stuart Hall suggests, as a "fact that has been waiting to ground our identities" (38). Rather, Kali's project is to return its British audiences to the moment of decolonization and reflect upon the postcolonial inequities that mark both India and Britain in its treatment of its racial and ethnic minorities. In this way, the play foregrounds the centrality of the figure of the minority within discourses of secularism and multiculturalism. Further, the trope of traffic highlights the constant negotiations that move us out of cultural binarisms and locate these traffickings within the continuities and interruptions in both India's crisis of secularism and Britain's quandary of multiculturalism.

Black Shalwar first appeared as part of a double bill in Kali's Love Comes in at the Window. The evening also featured Anu Kumar's The Ecstasy, a play that uses the same cast of players to explore interracial and same-sex desire. Both plays intervened in notions of bourgeois heteronormativity; while the first play dealt with questions of homosexual desire, the second explored the relationship among heterosexual prostitutes. This essay draws upon Black Shalwar to consider the positioning of minorities in both multicultural and secular discourses in England and India.

British-Pakistani Rukhsana Ahmad and British-Indian Rita Wolf founded Kali Theatre in 1990 in London. The scant media attention provided the murder of a Sikh woman in London inspired Ahmad and Wolf to explore alternative channels for disseminating awareness of the gender violence perpetrated within intimate spaces in their community. Balwant Kaur was murdered by her husband, in front of their children, as penalty for fleeing to a women's' refuge. Shocked by the apathetic response this event generated in the mainstream media, ostensibly because the victim was a member of a non-European minority, Wolf and Ahmad decided to come together to offer a forum for disenfranchised minorities within London. They imaginatively articulated their political activism in their re-telling of this event in Song for a Sanctuary. Theatre was the means for Ahmad and Wolf to forge a communal British-Asian feminist consciousness...