ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will focus on a few manifestations of the Other within the larger communalization of politics and culture in India today. Without assuming the clarity of an evolved theory of communalism, I choose to speak through what Edward Said once described as ‘disorientations of direct encounters with the human’ (Said 1979: 93). It is through these disorientations, these violent shifts in space and time, that I would like to problematize how the Other gets internalized, questioned, and performed in contemporary theatre practice in India, along with its more glaring (and inexplicable) manifestations in public culture. Inevitably, I will seek refuge in fragments, because what I have to offer is no master narrative, but an assemblage of aberrations, enigmas, and moments of violence that I have encountered in a range of seemingly indiscriminate representations: improvisations in theatre; ‘defences of the fragment’ in the historiography of communalism; police reports on caste violence; excerpts from interviews by the survivors of Partition – in short, articulations of the communal unconscious at different levels of critical reflexivity and accountability.
