Performing the «miasma» of Indian Partition. Terror and romance in Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line

Abstract

Originally performed at London Hampstead Theatre on 3 December 2013, Howard Brenton’s Drawing the Line dramatizes the Partition of India in two distinct nation-states after the Independence in a lush production that highlights personal conflicts and deflates the genocidal implications of the event that changed the future of the Subcontinent. The essay situates Drawing the Line in the context of Brenton’s lifelong engagement with historical theatre and reflects upon the aesthetic and political significance of the marginal role assigned to violence in the drama. It argues that the play performs a postcolonial discourse on South-Asian history, in which cosmopolitan notions of Britishness, Anglo-Indian relations, and colonial rule are interrogated through an ambiguous dramatic irony that, while deploring British ineptitude in handling the Partition process, in fact represents Partition as a colossal tangle of public and private complicities which mitigates the Raj’s responsibilities and tacitly subscribes to a consolatory determinism.