Mahmood FAROOQUI

Educated at one of India’s top school and Colleges, on meritorious scholarships, and then at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge as a Rhodes Scholar, I brought my academic training to bear on reviving an Art form which sits at the interstices of performance and literature, and where my knowledge of history provided a good grounding to contest cultural amnesia and refashion a performance form. While I have dabbled in cinema and have written award winning books I am best known for my performances, and now for writing the texts of my performance. This is a form where scholarship, theatre, performance, and entertainment come together to form a new kind of narrative. A knowledgeable, even scholarly, performative narrative like the one I have re invented allows public dialogue on contentious issues, such as the Partition of India, India’s sedition laws, Muslim scholars of the Mahabharata, which has no parallels with anything else in the world. This is a world where Arts, entertainment, popular culture, scholarship, and revisionist work comes together as a whole reflecting and meeting my eclectic interests and accomplishments. I can make radical comments, or bring radical new scholarship, to mainstream audiences in a style where substance and form fuse into one single whole in the body of the performer.