Of broken promises and failed nations: Tipu Sultan at the Lahore Fort

Abstract

In 2015, I wrote a play, Tiger of Mysore, on Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1750–99). The play has had three runs since. This article situates a distinct audience response (in what was a site-specific performance) within the larger backdrop of postcolonial nationalism in Pakistan. The study is guided by two questions: one, what was it about the performance that resulted in a varied reader/audience response? Two, in what ways did the site inscribe itself on the performance, and how did the performance write itself on the site? What I argue is that while the site itself was/is rich in evoking nostalgia for a supposedly glorious past, its expressive potential was intensified by the play in the context of Pakistan’s (dismal) performance as a nation state since 1947. While existing scholarship has analysed the nation state as an existential fantasy, Pakistan is more precarious owing to the state’s lack of connection to the territory it came to inhabit, and the aloofness of its ethnic minorities towards the idea of Pakistan. This compels the Pakistani state to define itself in oppositional terms to India, in an effort to deflect attention from its own failures. But the deflection is never complete and the people (who do partake of the Pakistan idea) are drawn in tandem to the broken promise of the country, as witnessed in the site-specific performance.