Penned in the Margins

Three stories and legacies of the British in India interweave in this powerful new play by poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose (Kalagora). In 1932 occupied Bengal, a young woman, Pritilata Waddedar, prepares to lead a team of revolutionaries to attack a whites-only club in Chittagong.

Decades later, Shyamal Chatterjee, an aspiring intellectual born in post-independence Kolkata is called a ‘brown sahib’ by his friends for his love of all things British but as he contemplates the past, he begins to question his own identity. In 2017, Ananda Chatterjee has returned from London on the news of his father’s death, haunted by ghosts from India’s past and from his own. Bose’s powerful new play questions how far someone would go to resist oppression and what would they choose to remember, and to forget.