Playwright Anusree Roy on what history books leave out about the 1947 Partition of India

25:30What history books leave out about the 1947 Partition

When Anusree Roy was commissioned to write a large-scale play for Nightwood Theatre just over a decade ago, she turned to prayer for ideas.

"I had this vision of a lineup of women," Roy says in an interview with Q's Tom Power. "Every day I would sit down and I would just write what I saw, and I heard and I visualized and I prayed. And then a story emerged, and it was women in a speeding truck."

Though she wasn't quite sure what this meant at first, she eventually settled on writing a story revolving around the Partition of India in 1947, when the country was divided by the British government into what are now known as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, causing one of the largest mass migrations in history.

Partition was the breaking point of religious tension between Muslims and Hindus that had been simmering for decades due to policies implemented by the British government to keep communities divided.

Roy's play Trident Moon centres this conflict, following three Muslim women who have been abducted by three Hindu women, all of them trapped in the back of a truck making its way to the new Hindu-only India. As others join them on board, it becomes a tense race against time as they cross the now-divided country to reach their destination.

There's no post-trauma. We're inside the trauma.- Anusree Roy

Going into writing the play, Roy didn't know very much about the details of Partition other than a few stories she had picked up from her family. She began her research at the Toronto Reference Library, but quickly found that each book said exactly the same thing: Hindus and Muslims hated each other.

She decided to look into oral stories instead — it turns out people's stances weren't as cut-and-dried as the history books made them out to be.

"It would go like this: they would go, 'We hate Hindus, [but] this one Hindu neighbour saved my life,'" Roy says. "Or, 'The Muslims, don't trust them. Don't trust a Muslim. Except the shopkeeper allowed me to hide and he was a good Muslim brother to me. He was a Muslim brother to me, and I'll die for him.'"

Trident Moon manages to navigate the grey area of these relationships without actually focusing on emotion. In the manuscript for the play, Roy indicated that monologues should be delivered without any sentiment. The writing isn't intended to reflect on Partition or explore its living legacy; her characters are solely living in that moment, since there's no time for feelings when they're just trying to make it out alive.

"When my grandmother used to tell me stories, she never talked about how she was feeling inside of what was happening — she just talked about wanting to survive," Roy says. "The survival is happening inside that truck. We're going to feel later. There's no post-trauma. We're inside the trauma."

Now living in Los Angeles, Roy was one of more than 100,000 people forced to evacuate their homes due to recent wildfires, which has given her a new perspective on the play since she first wrote it.

Though it doesn't compare to Partition, she says the experience did make her reflect on how terrifying it can feel to leave everything you know behind. Separated from her husband and knowing the fires were just minutes away, Roy forgot her medication, her wedding gold and other important possessions.

"A taste it left in my mouth was that overnight fleeing, with the only thing you're wearing or whatever you can shove in a suitcase, is nauseating. I never want to experience that again."

There are other aspects of the play that Roy sees as being relevant in present-day society, like how it's up to future generations to keep these stories alive, so history is not repeated.

"I can see this play actually happening in the future," she tells Power. "These things happening to women like this, and having to flee … that's actually not a very shocking reality. None of my grandparents are here anymore. My parents hold on to their memory, but after that, it's just up to us, what we tell, what we do with these stories."

Roy wrote and stars in Trident Moon, which runs until March 30 at Crow's Theatre in Toronto, and then from April 2 to 12 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

The full interview with Anusree Roy is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Anusree Roy produced by Cora Nijhawan.