The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition by Jisha Menon (review)

In her new study, Jisha Menon explores lingual, sonic, visual, and kinesthetic representations of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan upon independence from British imperial rule. Her close readings point us to “quotidian partitions” that continue to bear on gendered bodies, border communities, and cultural industries. The rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalisms in both countries, economic and political rivalries between them, and continued disenfranchisement of minorities in both make this research deeply relevant. In this rigorous interrogation of national politics, her focus on aesthetics makes clear that we are hailed into national subjectivity through symbolic, affective, and sensuous modes (in addition to linguistic, textual, rational argumentation). Menon convincingly demonstrates the political power of aesthetics, and goes on to show that film, theatre, music, and literature potentially undo rigid formations of national identity.

Since 1947, the two countries have been vehemently differentiated through political, media, and religious discourses. This differentiation, Menon argues, continues to inflict violence on the psyches and bodies of the two nations and their peoples. Despite the incommensurability between India and Pakistan, when Menon attends to the aesthetics of differentiation, she reveals uncanny similitudes that unsettle sedimented distinctions. She documents a range of representational doubles that reveal similarity despite difference: twins drawn to separate life paths, soldiers goose-stepping opposite each other. Documenting these reflections in the mirror of partition, she gives new currency to mimesis as a useful performance analytic.

Drawing on diverse archives and methods, “Bordering on Drama” (chapter 2) is especially teachable for a performance studies classroom. Menon uses performance to think through the political posturing of Pakistan’s founding father, Jinnah, as he argues for a separate Muslim nation, poetry by W. H. Auden about the arbitrary drawing of the border, and the ritualized daily closing of the border at Wagah. A performance lens allows her to read Jinnah’s rhetoric as a tactical negotiation of colonial rule rather than sincere expressions of religious nationalism. Menon also employs performance as an ethnographic research method when she visits the border-closing ceremony. The author’s deeply descriptive account charts both the methodical curation of nationalist sentiment and various spontaneous improvisations that both bolster and undermine hegemonic politics.

Although it does not announce itself as a gender studies text, The Performance of Nationalism meditates on kinship, sexual violence, and gender inequality. Chapter 3 focuses on a trilogy of films by Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak; each film depicts siblings set on different life paths as a metaphor for the two nations. This trope of twins, especially orphaned twins, not only reflects the splitting of South Asian soil, but also the mass displacement of Muslims out of India and Hindus out of Pakistan. Ghatak’s partition trilogy often represents the twins as brother/sister siblings in order to discuss gender inequality. In each film, the extenuating circumstances of political crisis create opportunities for Hindu women characters to enter the public sphere (as performers, service workers, or sex workers), but their newfound mobility comes at the cost of respectability, family, or financial security. The male siblings do not experience such punitive measures.

Chapter 5 is a close reading of director Kirti Jain’s 2001 theatre piece Aur Kitne Tukde, a play that offers redress for the exclusion of women’s trauma in master narratives of partition. Jain’s adaptation of oral histories and short stories catalogs sexual violence against women done in the name of national differentiation. Menon’s description of the symbolic props, sonic elements, and narrative twists represents Jain’s play as a complex and critical restorying of women’s writing of partition. Coupled with Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence (2000), which provided some material for the play, this chapter would serve as an excellent text to teach the adaptation of nonfiction. Menon closes with a brief analysis of literary representations of sexual violence against men, reiterating that the physical body, and not just the...