Mistaken… Annie Besant in India

By Rukhsana Ahmad

Explores the incredible story of Annie Besant’s relationship with India and the boy who went on to become one of India’s greatest teachers and thinkers – Krishnamurti.

1916: India is simmering with discontent against the Raj. Enter English proto-feminist Annie Besant, notorious at home for the match-girls’ strike, political, charismatic. In India she finds a new family and a new cause.

Gandhi hails her as the leader of the Congress Party after she courts imprisonment for promoting Indian Home Rule. She admires him – but can rulers ever befriend the ruled?

Can Annie’s great love affair with India last? … or is she mistaken in her beliefs, politics and adoptions?

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rukhsana Ahmad‘s stage plays include: Song For Sanctuary, The Gate-Keeper’s Wife, Black Shalwar, River On Fire (shortlist Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2002), The Man Who Refused to be God, Last Chance and Partners in Crime.

Radio plays and adaptations include: Song for a Sanctuary (CRE award, runner-up), An Urnful of Ashes, The Errant Gene, Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman At Point Zero, Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea (shortlist CRE and Writers’ Guild Award for best adaptation), R.K Narayan’s The Guide and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps For Lost Lovers.

She also wrote for Westway and helped to create Pyaar Ka Passort for BBC World Service Trust. Her fiction includes a novel; The Hope Chest (Virago) and several short stories have been published internationally. Her translations from Urdu include We Sinful Women, and Altaf Fatima’s novel, The One Who Did Not Ask. Currently she is working on Letting Go, a new play for Pursued by a Bear, and an adaptation for the BBC of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781910798768

Book preview

Front cover image, Peter Ruhe

Rukhsana Ahmad

She has consistently written and adapted plays for the stage and BBC Radio, achieving distinction in both. Stage plays include: Song for a Sanctuary, The Gate-Keeper’s Wife, Black Shalwar, River on Fire, (shortlist Susan Smith Blackburn Prize 2002) The Man who refused to be God, Last Chance and Partners in Crime. Radio plays and adaptations include: Song for a Sanctuary (CRE award, runner-up), An Urnful of Ashes, The Errant Gene, Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (shortlist CRE Award and Writers’ Guild Award for best adaptation), R. K. Narayan’s The Guide and Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers. She also wrote for Westway and helped to create Pyaar ka Passort for BBC World Service Trust.

Her fiction includes: a novel The Hope Chest (Virago) and several short stories have been published internationally. Her translations from Urdu include: We Sinful Women, and Altaf Fatima’s novel, The One who did not ask. Currently, she is working on Letting Go, a new play for Pursued by a Bear, and an adaptation for the BBC of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Rukhsana is also an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund and Chair of SALIDAA (South Asian Arts and Literature in the Diaspora Archive).

Also by the author:

‘Song For A Sanctuary’ in the collection Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers’

ed. Kadija George

ISBN 978-0-9515877-2-0

£12.99

Available from all good bookshops

Vayu Naidu Company logo

presents

Mistaken…

Annie Besant in India

by

Rukhsana Ahmad

Aurora Metro logoambookslogo - words only (002)

First published in the UK in 2007 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.

67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham, MIDDLESEX, TW1 4HX.

www.aurorametro.com [e-mail]

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Mistaken… Annie Besant in India: © copyright 2007 Rukhsana Ahmad

Cover photo (of Annie Besant with Gandhi) courtesy of Peter Ruhe / GandhiServe Foundation

Production Peter Fullagar

With thanks to: Aidan Jenkins and Jenny Campbell

Permission for the use of any copyright music mentioned in the text must be agreed in advance with the Performing Rights Society, Live Music Centre: Tel. [phone].

All rights in this play are strictly reserved. Applications for a licence to present performances including professional, amateur, recitation, lecturing, public reading, broadcasting, television and translation into foreign languages should be made before rehearsals begin, to:

MBA Literary Agency, 62 Grafton Way, LONDON, W1T 5DW.

In accordance with Section 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the author asserts her moral rights to be identified as the author of the above work.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBNs

978-0-9551566-9-4 (paperback)

978-1-910798-76-8 (ebook)

Contents

Foreword by Dr Vayu Naidu

Production Team

Chronology of Annie Besant

The play: Mistaken

Act I

Act II

Author's Note

More from Aurora Metro

Foreword

Dr Vayu Naidu

Storyteller & Artistic Director, Vayu Naidu Company

Mistaken… Annie Besant in India by Rukhsana Ahmad tells us the story of a woman of epic stature, not solely by information about her from public accounts. This play was born from a genuine interest in Annie Besant who reformed ways of thinking and working for women in factories in England and believed passionately in Home Rule and the renaissance in education that she founded in India. Through the play and the device of storytelling, the writer and director have enabled us to explore the psychological and sociological moments driving Annie Besant, Krishnamurti, and M.K. Gandhi that shaped a dominant arc of the subcontinent’s history. And, it is not in isolation. The enduring relationship between the British and the Subcontinent’s cultures continue to evolve within the diaspora. This play is also a diasporic expression of the impact of that colonial experience as a shared and collective memory. Ahmad, through her documented metaphor of the adoption in this play, subtly unravels the inextricable ties between the coloniser and colonised, not necessarily defined by ethnicity, and the final price of freedom. Chris Banfield has dextrously woven archival material with his inter-cultural methods as director for this production. In commissioning and producing this play, I am privileged in working with a creative team whose origins from Pakistan, Britain, and India pool together in remembering a hero who was airbrushed from history while shaping a legacy that makes for a multidimensional society in the here and the now.

What better occasion to celebrate 60 years of Independence than by stretching theatre conventions and creating new heritages!

Vayu Naidu’s career has covered many fields including teaching, writing and performance, both as a solo artist and with musicians and dancers. In 2001 she founded Vayu Naidu Company, to promote storytelling as theatre, with a signature style combining text, music and dance. Its inaugural production was South, which she wrote and performed together with musician Orphy Robinson and three dancers in a UK national tour directed by Chris Banfield (2003). Other productions include Future Perfect, a collaboration with director/composer Judith Weir; and Nothing but the Salt (2005), written by Vayu and combining live ‘cello with storytelling and video.

Vayu is on the advisory committee of Black Regional Initiative of Theatre at Arts Council England and chairs the Sustained Theatre Archiving group. From 2001 – 2004 she was Arts and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at The University of Kent at Canterbury’s Drama Department, and then Lecturer there until June 2006. In 2007 she was awarded a SEEDA Art Plus development award and also an award from Collide as a BME artist, to develop her new work Bhakti and Blues.

Her playwriting work includes: There Comes a Karma, When and Guess Who’s Coming to Christmas?