Akshita’s Dream

Presented by: Ryan Rotella

Warning

Mentions of violence/disturbing imagery

Summary of Akshita’s Dream

She wakes up an early/mid 1900s Indian house with a porch and open, green courtyard in the middle of it. Lots of plants. Marble floors. Giggling and running.

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She is at a bazaar in India (then consisted of both India and Pakistan), reminiscent of her grandfather’s city, Lahore

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She saw everyone dressed in white (traditional garb of Sikhs) and the market abounding with vibrant colors. She knew the smell even while not smelling it of an active market with food, spices, and herbs. Sitars playing.

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She ran into a scary old lady with large red bindi on her forehead and ran back to her room.

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Summary of Akshita’s Dream, pt. 2

At some point, flames engulf the market. Bodies lie everywhere, all the people from before are now dead. War. Dystopia. Nothing but rubble all around.

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From Akshita’s POV, she sees one of her ancestors crushed under a cement disk that came from the sky. He has hand under it as if protecting the family from an incoming strike.

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The man under the disk matches a photograph of a real-life ancestor of Akshita’s family.

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Historical Context

• Before British colonization, modern “India” and “Pakistan” were a large area of many states, divided by many ethnicities��
• By the mid-late 1700s, Britain began to colonize these areas via commerce and its navy (see: The East India Company), establishing rule over a collection of “princely states”�

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• Eventually by 1947, Indians had slowly gained independence through rebellions, protests, and reform

Source: Britannica

The Partition

“Britain’s Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act on July 18, 1947. It ordered that the dominions of India and Pakistan be demarcated by midnight of August 14–15, 1947, and that the assets of the world’s largest empire—which had been integrated in countless ways for more than a century—be divided within a single month.

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Racing the deadline, the Boundary Commission, appointed by Mountbatten, worked desperately to partition Punjab and Bengal in such a way as to leave the maximum practical number of Muslims to the west of the former’s new boundary and to the east of the latter’s.

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It consisted of four members from the Congress Party and four from the Muslim League and was chaired by Cyril Radcliffe—who had never before been to India. With little agreement between the parties and the deadline looming, Radcliffe made the final determination of the borders. The new boundary, which was called the Radcliffe Line, satisfied no one and infuriated everyone.”

Source: Britannica

Indian soldiers walking through the debris of a building in the Chowk Bijli Wala area of Amristar, Punjab, during unrest following the partition.

Architecture

Post-Partition

Pre-Partition (as designed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali)

Color Palette

Post-Partition

Pre-Partition

More brown than orange

Central Figure

From Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955)

Food for Thought

Diagonal Series, 1972,

Tyeb Mehta