In the middle of a big project, it’s easy to lose the forest through the trees. In the past few months, I’ve embarked on two big projects simultaneously that fed into one another in ways I wasn’t conscious of until they were over. It’s strange that I didn’t see the connections: both were about South Asian art in some way, and both took over my life until nothing was left in my brain. But, as I told myself when I was in the thick of things, both meant something, in some way, even if to nobody but myself.

The first project was my Senior Honors Thesis, which I’ve just completed. I’d been working on it since July of 2021 with the wild ambition to tackle an entire genre of literature: South Asian American Young Adult novels. I studied questions of representation, visibility, and identity through three recent releases in the genre. It was the first opportunity I’d gotten in my entire four years at college to devote serious academic interest and methodology towards the things I do for fun anyway. It was an affirmation of something it took me forever to learn: that my background, my literature, my voice, were all worthy of sincere academic study. The only good and worthwhile literature didn’t originate from the West, and I could spend an entire year producing a 70-page document that decried that notion on every page. Liberating, terrifying, and absolutely worth every difficulty.

Teen Vogue’s banner, “11 Books Featuring South Asian Characters to Read in 2021”

The second project was called Pali. It was Stanford’s Theater department’s Winter Quarter Mainstage show, and was also my first foray into theater and performing arts. Fluent as I am in literary arts, the prospect of displaying something was entirely new to me. I didn’t act in the play, but I was doing a variety of behind the scenes work – under the title of Dramaturg – since around the same time I started my thesis in July of 2021. The play was about a young Hindu child, Pali, who gets separated from his parents in the madness of the 1947 Partition migration and then adopted by a kindly Muslim couple. The child thus grows up transcending the boundaries of religion, national lines, and culture.

Aside from some research to determine whether something was historically accurate or an anachronism, my biggest contribution to the stage show came in the form of an extensive pre-show dramaturgical display intended to familiarize the Stanford audience with what the 1947 Partition was. It involved posters explaining the historical context, compilations of interviews with survivors courtesy of The 1947 Partition Archive, and a live Carnatic music piece performed by friends. (The video of the performance and my display is available freely online!)

Fundamentally, both projects took a stance on South Asian art and South Asian performance. In my thesis, I analyzed what it meant to perform as a South Asian in America; with the play, I got to see people create that exact meaning. The strength of the play came from its multivalent conception of identity; the strength of my thesis came from thinking critically about that exact multivalence. In other words, I analyzed what I performed, simultaneously.

Conversations with the directors of Pali generated questions with far-reaching implications for me. How do we, removed by 75 years from the horrors of the event, depict and display it without slipping into an essentializing, sensational, disingenuous narrative? As privileged Stanford students – me without any family background to Partition either – with the explicit intention to tell a story of trauma to an audience that knows nothing about it, how do we justify our creative choices? How can we be sure that they are intentional and generous and in no way essentializing? And can we? In curating an exhibit, are we not making dozens of creative choices that unintentionally elide narratives we would be better off telling?

Here is a choice we made with the context of the play (which takes place along the Punjab border): we did not showcase any narratives of Partition survivors who migrated along the Bangladesh/West Bengal line. We felt it would detract from the world of the play to expand it so rapidly for an unaware audience, and in doing so, we lost millions of stories. Here is another choice we made: I only speak English and passable Hindi, and thus those were the only stories we showcased. These aren’t fundamentally incorrect choices, but they knowingly erase equally important narratives that don’t fit the very narrow bill demanded of a 5-minute long exhibit.

What are the consequences of erasing important narratives? Well, my thesis could tell you. There is an extant tradition of diasporic creatives producing tropey narratives of the motherland because that is often what sells in a Western market. More than the marketability, such essentialized narratives continue to be produced because diasporic authors feel pressured to prove their South Asianness and so fill their prose with relatable symbols of the culture that can feel banal and lacking in truth. In attempting to represent an entire population, diasporic authors can fall into the trap of representing nothing. Every narrative of and from South Asia is important, but the ones that the prevailing landscape of literature elides are the ones that don’t pander to Western audiences to be both relatable and exotic. This may be because they aren’t “South Asian enough” or the opposite.

I don’t know if our play’s audience harbored those criticisms – that it wasn’t or was too South Asian. Maybe they just viewed it as what it was: a story of a lost child. That’s certainly what I took away from the three books I analyzed in my senior thesis. They are all about South Asian identity and they all try to represent some narrative of South Asians, but when it comes down to it, they are just stories of lost children working to be less lost.

And maybe that’s why both projects spoke to me so much. We have all been those children. Not in those exact situations, surely, but lost, unsure where to go, surrounded by authority and adulthood and not quite trusting any of it. Wanting to find our own way.

On the cusp of college graduation, signaling my entry into adulthood, it’s odd that both my projects are based so strongly in childhood, in whimsy, in feelings, in humor. In many ways, they are unserious pursuits – so how revolutionary it is that I and my teams have applied serious practice to them. There is power in taking something seriously, especially in a conservative academic context, especially as the daughter of immigrants, especially when I get to do a project where I am the arbiter of every decision. In the middle of a big project, it was hard to keep all that in mind, but now, I realize the value of the work in the middle of all the other art out there.

To write your own editorial piece for our blog email us your original piece. It can be about anything! If we love it, we’ll run it.

Submit to our Blog