A SCOTTISH playwright has revealed how their latest production was inspired by a desire to get audiences to recognise the war crimes being committed in Gaza – by drawing parallels with Britain’s actions nearly 170 years ago.
Niall Moorjani’s Kanpur: 1857 heads to the Edinburgh Fringe later this week and tells the story of the Britain Empire's brutal reprisal after the Indian Rebellion, known in India as the First War of Independence.
After a mutiny in Meerut on May 10, 1857, the revolt spread across parts of the country under the rule of the British East India Company.
The empire’s retaliation was merciless: 6000 British were killed, but it is believed the subsequent crackdown resulted in the deaths of around 800,000 Indians.
Moorjani, who was born in Arbroath and raised in Dundee, told the Sunday National they wanted to speak up about the genocide in [[Gaza]] and saw the similarities in Britain’s brutal repression of the rebellion.
But it was a chance encounter at Edinburgh Castle that crystallised their vision. Outside the medieval fort, there is a monument featuring an elephant, commemorating Scottish soldiers killed in the campaign.
They said: “It stands outside our castle, probably our most famous landmark; there’s this monument which has an elephant on it and if you don’t know about it, you don’t know. I had no idea until I stumbled across it and I was like, ‘Why is there an elephant there?’”
Moorjani said they were struck by “the parallels of a colonial oppressor collectively punishing a group of people on the back of violent resistance”, adding: “I think that deepening of historical understanding and the fact that this isn’t new, this is a really old story; all of those things combined together to make me want to write something and make something about it.”
Moorjani said they’d learnt the story of the Indian Rebellion in university and it “got under my skin in a really deep way”.
They were also moved by the Black Lives Matter movement which reached a fever pitch after the murder of George Floyd – a black man murdered by a white police officer in 2020 – which forced them to reckon with the “racism I grew up with and our role as Scots in colonial history that we’re not very good at acknowledging or educating ourselves about”, Moorjani said.
Moorjani said that their work as a storyteller and writer gave them the tools to “further raise awareness of British-Indian history, especially from a Scottish perspective”.
Their play, co-directed with Jonathan Oldfield, features an Indian rebel strapped to a cannon who is forced to answer for the “crimes of Kanpur” – an important British garrison at the time of the time of the rebellion which fell to the Indians only to be retaken by imperial forces.
Moorjani said this conceit allowed them to get inside the head of the British forces, helping to shine a light on the imperial mindset.
“This character really fascinated me, this guy who genuinely believes doing something right and doing something good,” they said.
“He genuinely believes he’s on the right side of history and putting across all of these colonial views – what an amazing way to satirise and interrogate, in a reverse, meta sense, colonial theory and the ideas that underpin colonial hierarchy.”
Kanpur: 1857 runs from July 30 to August 24 – excluding August 12 and 13 – at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh at 3.40pm. For more information, including ticket prices, visit pleasance.co.uk
