Nokshi Kotha - Woven Words

“Nokshi Kotha” (নকঁশি কথা) which translates to “woven words”. This is the working title of my international theatre collaboration with Bottala (https://bottala.com) which I would like to further develop.

In Bangladesh I was able to undertake fieldwork with my collaborators collecting stories from families of migrant workers from a low socio-economic demographic. Bangladesh is a major contributor to the global population of non-professional migrant workers especially in Arab countries, USA, and Singapore-Malaysia-Australia. (11% of the global market in Asia-Pacific countries). The specific stories of these migrant workers are subsumed under the overarching discourse of immigrants and refugees.

I have collected more than 5 hours of audio recordings as well as documents from my fieldwork. I still meet virtually with my team in Bangladesh every 6 weeks structuring a narrative out of the collected materials. I aim to work to further develop this narrative into a tangible form as a writing for the stage. An Australian component needs to be plugged into the narrative:

There is a wider significance to “Nokshi Kotha” linked to the partition of India 75 years ago. Bangladesh was then known as East Pakistan until its independence in 1971. The stories I collected have cultural and socio-political origins in this wider narrative. I created a radio documentary on this topic for ABC-RN in 2022 (see link section). Further work will be the next step in weaving the threads of this narrative together.

This will be a joint presentation along with migrant scholar Ahmed Abid, PhD.

[https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/the-history-listen/partition-children-india-pakistan-independence/14138638]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkjMLnBVWms]