Talk at Azim Premji University - By Jisha Menon, Assistant Professor of Drama at Stanford University

Azim Premji University will be organizing a talk on the topic "Theatre, Community and Nation: the Mimetic Imagination of Ritwik Ghatak" on Thursday, August 30, 2012 from 3.45 pm at Azim Premji University, 10th Floor, Auditorium, Pixel A, PESSE Campus, Hosur Road, Electronic City. The talk is open to all. The key speaker will be Jisha Menon, Assistant Professor of Drama at Stanford University.

About the topic

What is the work of theatre in the making of community and nation? By looking at Ritwik Ghatak's 1961 film Komal Gandhar, this talk considers the ways in which theatre engenders a creative space for sociality in the wake of the sub continental partition. Ghatak uses the frame of theatre to suggest that it is not in withdrawal from society but rather in artistic sociality and political solidarity that the work of poesis must be undertaken.

Jisha Menon is Assistant Professor of Drama at Stanford University. Her forthcoming book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition is published by Cambridge University Press.