US-based theatre art expert preserving tales of Partition

Amritsar, March 16

The violence during the Partition in 1947 has been the subject of interest for many scholars, researchers and artists.

Among them is Kathleen Mulligan, a US-based theatre arts expert and Fulbright scholar, who has been working to preserve the stories of the Partition in 1947 by putting them into a piece of theatre. Kathleen, who is currently in Amritsar, working on a theatre project, “Preserving the Vanishing Stories of Partition”, in collaboration with Khalsa College’s Department of Theatre, was part of the Y20 consultation meet hosted at the GNDU.

Her project involves documenting the stories of survivors of the Partition, by interviewing them and turning them into brief monologues that will be staged as a production. “A series of these five-minute monologues will be staged as form of devised theatre production. Growing up in the USA, I knew nothing about the Partition of India, which was a big historical event in the world history. And when I found out about it, I thought that we have to preserve these stories before these people are gone forever, as people, we interviewed, are already in their 90s. There are a lot of efforts to preserve these stories,” she said.