The Ohio State University Sikh Student Association Brings To You KULTAR’S MIME ( FOR FREE)
“In 1984, bloody violence was visited upon the Sikh community in India after the news that the then Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, had been assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Sarbpreet Singh, a Sikh and a community activist in the Greater Boston area wrote a poem titled “Kultar’s Mime” in 1990. Drawing on various sources and inspirations, such as the poem ‘In The City Of Slaughter’ by Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and verses from Bhai Gurdas, a 16th century Sikh poet, Singh wrote the poem to express his own reaction to the horrific violence of 1984. He named the poem “Kultar’s Mime” after a character he read about in anthropologist Veena Das’ book on the carnage survivors in Delhi.
Shall we go to Delhi then?
Seeking justice? Or revenge?
Will we rant? Will we rave?
Will we peer in every grave?
The play itself unfolds with an outer frame-story with the actual actors, who are part of a fictional artist collective called Applejus, reminiscing about and laboring under the memory of the Jewish pogrom in the city of Kishinev in the Russian empire in 1903, wanting to honor the victims in some way. Then one of them produces the Black Book – a chronicle of the atrocities during the 1984 massacres (the actual title of the book being, “Who are the Guilty”) – and circulates it among the others. This prompts the decision to go to Delhi – to learn of the horrors of 1984 on their own and to embrace the pain of a different community so far removed from them in many ways” SUMMARY EXCEPT BY: Umang Kumar
March 31 @ 7p Independence Hall 1923 Neil Ave RSVP for your FREE TICKETS: Kultarsmimecolumbus.eventbrite.com
