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Theorizations on the subversive potential of memory to resurrect and recover lost history have been a central preoccupation for the poststructuralist as well as the postcolonial theorists alike. Judith Butler, in her groundbreaking work entitled Gender Trouble: Feminism and The Subversion of Identity contends gender to be a performance while looking at performativity as a “repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization.”(Butler xv) Such a performance facilitates the endorsement of specific brands of identity. Memory, with its cognitive apparatus and discursive extensions, like gender, is a performative category that informs and refashions human subjectivity. The simultaneity of remembering, forgetting and strategically dismembering experiences involve a complex mechanism that is the domain of neuroscience as much as it is a cultural phenomenon. As an immediate site of memory, the trope of the body, then, becomes a crucial marker that determines acts of remembrance and forgetting. Using contemporary scholarship from a wide range of disciplines, this paper will endeavor to map memory as a performative category as it relates to the larger ideological project of re(producing) identities in the context of Kaushal Oza’s The Miniaturist of Junagadh (2021) and Srijit Mukherji’s Forget Me Not ( 2021) from the Ray anthology.

When it comes to scholarship on various aspects of Indian theatre, there is still a lot of work that remains to be done. One such area is the colonial theatre of old Calcutta during the nineteenth century. Modernity in the theatre arrived in India with the British and the English theatres of the time influenced the growth and development of Bengali and Indian theatre later. This brief paper examines the history of two playhouses of English theatre around the middle of the nineteenth century—the Chowringhee Theatre and the Sans Souci Theatre, and recounts how Mrs Esther Leach almost single-handedly led the scene and established the Sans Souci theatre. This article glimpses at the performance culture of the time and wishes to rekindle interest in the theatres of a bygone era in order to better understand the history and politics of theatre.