Suraiya is a Country is a performance project rooted in intimate oral histories, inspired by the artist’s late grandmother Suraiya. Drawing from recorded conversations with elders, it weaves personal and political narratives—of Partition, migration, love, and resilience—through dance, text, and voice. The audience selects stories via a “lucky draw,” each triggering a dance response that brings these memories to life. The work is based on the idea that the body is not only an archive of individual and intergenerational histories, but also a tool to receive difficult information, an interface of nuance, and a site of integration and embodiment. It challenges hegemonic histories, embracing multiplicity and vulnerability, while creating a living archive that reveals how our shared reality is constructed—one story, one body, at a time.

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Director’s Note

In June 2021, I lost my grandmother, Suraiya, to Covid-19. Three years earlier, without quite knowing why, I had begun recording our conversations. She spoke of her three marriages, of being a Muslim woman in a Hindu-majority country, of raising children, of cooking, of beloved grandchildren and Bangla soap operas. Her stories held humour, grief, anger, joy — and within them, the living pulse of history.

Suraiya had witnessed first-hand India’s independence, Partition, the Naxal movement, communism in Bengal, and the rise of the Hindu right. Her memories wove together personal and political histories in a way that revealed the everyday textures of larger upheavals. From gossip about film stars to trying ganja with her son’s friends, from domestic relationships to the trauma of migration, her anecdotes carried both intimacy and sharp social critique.

Listening back to her recordings, I realized how much is lost when the voices of elders disappear. Their stories reveal hierarchies of caste, class, religion, gender, and colonial hangovers, while also offering unexpected humour and resistance. These accounts remind us that history is never a single narrative; it is messy, layered, and deeply human.

This impulse shaped my ongoing project. Since 2022, I have been gathering stories from elders between the ages of 60 and 94, across different linguistic, religious, caste, and class backgrounds. Each story is a fragment, one of many possible truths. Together, they form a river of memory, contradiction, and resilience — a living archive of a country in flux.

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Context

We are living in a time when India’s secular fabric is under attack. Partition histories are being erased, press freedom curtailed, artists silenced, and a homogenous “Hindu Rashtra” narrative imposed. Like many citizens, I feel enraged, exhausted, and afraid.

In this climate, turning to elders’ voices is both intimate and radical. Their stories resist erasure by offering multiplicity. They remind us that our culture is not a monolith, but a constellation of lived experiences. By holding contradictions and nuances, these voices resist the flattening force of propaganda and dominant narratives.