Speakers: Aparna Mahiyaria, University of Exeter
Chair: Dickens Leonard, Department of HUSS, IIT Delhi
Title: To Live is to Fight: Memory, Performance, and the Making of
Jhandapur as Political Site
Abstract: This talk will revisit the 1989 attack on the Delhi based theatre
group Jana Natya Manch's street theatre performance _Halla Bol!_ in
Jhandapur to explore how performance, memory, and political organising
intersect in the making of space. The talk will explore how Janam's
annual return to the site resists the singularity of
'site-specificity' and instead builds a durational relationship with
place. Jhandapur becomes not just a site of mourning but one of
mobilisation—where performance is a political act that sustains
memory and affirms working-class solidarity. The talk will reflect on
how such spaces resist forgetting, and how theatre can constitute a
living monument through presence and repetition.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Aparna Mahiyaria is a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter.
Her research is fundamentally driven by how performance practices emerge
from and intervene in their political contexts, and by the relationship
between theatre and efficacious political organising. She completed her
PhD in Drama at the University of Exeter in 2020, addressing these
questions through an examination of street theatre in Delhi. Her work on
street theatre and the right-wing, class, and solidarity has appeared in
journals such as _Critical Stages_ and _Studies in Theatre and
Performance_. In the past, she has worked with the Indian Cultural
Forum, a New Delhi-based organisation that platforms local and
international debates on politics and culture. Her current project
investigates how theatre practitioners in India navigate legality and
legal institutions, and how encounters between theatre and law shape the
creative-political landscape of contemporary performance.