ABSTRACT
How do futuristic theatrical performances in India work within and against the notion of cyclical time to reimagine the figure of the “Indian woman”? In C Sharp C Blunt (2013), a one-woman play set in a near future in India, a singing app called Shilpa interacts with the audience and confronts them about the normalization of sexual assaults against women in India. Shilpa has inherited the trauma of the actress and singer who respectively provided their likeness and voice for the app. The play moves in loops, as Shilpa often malfunctions due to uncontainable rage associated with the traumatic memories of her human voice. The cyborg in India, whose beginning and updates are in this instance marked by utterance of lines from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”, re-envisions Haraway’s idea of the cyborg specifically for the cultural and political milieu of contemporary India. In this chapter, Sheetala Bhat proposes a concept called interruptional relations to theorize the cyborg’s multidirectional resistances and relations that constantly and productively interrupt each other in the feminist future that the play envisions. At the time of writing, in which Hindu nationalism governs India with the ahistorical ideology of a pure Hindu past while employing Western technology for intense surveillance of dissent, revisiting C Sharp C Blunt enables a rethinking of feminist resistance and reclamation of futuristic technology and Hindu conceptions of cyclical time.
