It is the run-up to that disgraceful period of British modern history, the partition of India, that forms the landscape to Guleraana Mir and afshan d’souza-lodhi’s play of friendship and separation.
The Santi and Naz of the title are two girls who live carefree in the same northern Indian village. They are best friends, their difference of religion—Santi is Sikh and Naz Muslim—an irrelevance, as they play, swim and dream of grown-up lives spent socialising on the verandas of each other’s bungalows.
As they move into adolescence, Santi is the academically brighter of the two and encourages Naz to study, whilst Naz is a joker who shows Santi how to flick her hair flirtily when she forms a crush on the goodlooking Rahul.
In this tender story, the girls have to grow up fast as political events provoke discord and division. In a time and place where “no one likes little girls who think”, they pick up prejudice and anxiety from what they each hear at home, and whilst they struggle together to make sense of savage acts of violence that mar their previously untroubled lives, they are divided by them.
There are some wonderfully touching moments as Naz realises her love for Santi extends beyond friendship and episodes of upset for the girls when Santi realises Rahul’s role in the local unrest, and Naz has to face an arranged marriage with Nadim, which will see her taken by him to Rawalpindi, soon to be in Pakistan.
Aiyana Bartlett and Farah Ashraf give charming performances as Santi and Naz growing into young women, and direction from Madelaine Moore doesn’t rush between the non-linear episodes that go to make up a heartfelt portrayal of their coming of age.
Mir and d’souza-lodhi’s play bites off a handful off topics and in 70 minutes doesn’t allow sufficient breadth to work through all the themes effectively.
More for exposition than naturalism, the play has the girls entertain themselves imitating the leaders of the opposing factions, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten. It’s entertaining enough but fails to deliver sufficiently the historical context which, thanks to a long-lived, biased approach to teaching English history, has left partition commonly poorly understood.
More successfully, although in small ways, the play presents Santi and Naz’s village as a microcosm for the country, it being impossible to encapsulate the magnitude of violence and dispossession wrought by partition in this setting.
In the same way, the girls are any and all of the young women negotiating adulthood in this turbulent period, working out who they are whilst having to negotiate upheavals that will reshape their world. Bartlett and Ashraf deserve no small credit for delivering the emotional depth of such a legacy.