Trident Moon, a fictionalized portrayal of events set during the Partition of India and Pakistan, centres on nine women and one man who are trapped inside a truck travelling between the two newly-formed nations. Back row, from the left: Afroza Banu, Michelle Mohammed, Anusree Roy, Prerna Nehta, Zorana Sadiq, and Imali Prerera. Sahiba Arora, front left, and Sehar Bhojani appear in Trident Moon.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Partition, the historic division of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan in 1947, is a part of the unspoken history of many South Asian families. The word encapsulates the horrors that followed when British colonizers left the region, demarcating boundaries that divided people along with the land, as millions grabbed whatever belongings they could and embarked on a great migration – between India and Pakistan; including East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Although the devastation left an indelible mark on the national consciousness of the former colonies, it’s not typically a topic of dinnertime conversation.
For award-winning writer and actor Anusree Roy, the Partition has always been a part of life – especially as a child growing up in Kolkata. It’s a theme she explored in one of her earlier plays, Letters to My Grandma, before writing the more ambitious Trident Moon, which opened at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto on March 4.
A fictionalized portrayal of events set during the Partition, Trident Moon centres on nine women and one man, trapped inside a truck, hurtling between newly formed nations. Although locations aren’t specified, for people who know their Bangla, it’s evident the passage is from Bangladesh to India – a history not commonly told in Partition narratives that often focus on the split of India and Pakistan. The 90-minute play follows the group as they negotiate their past lives and set out for an uncertain future.
Review: Trident Moon depicts a harrowing slice of India’s past
Raised in a big family of nine including her grandparents, the Second World War and the Partition were constant themes of conversation, says Roy.
“It was always about the judho,” she says, using the Bangla word for war. “I grew up with it as part of my skin, so it was never separate for me. It was my Amma’s (paternal grandmother) stories because she survived World War II. And her stories of what happened in 1942 were almost mixed in with Partition. Sometimes you couldn’t separate it – like, which judho?”
Roy’s father’s side of the family were from Kolkata, and her mother’s side came from Dhaka. Her maternal grandmother’s stories centred on leaving Dhaka with the shutters of their store open, with the belief that they would go back. Her paternal grandmother, meanwhile, talked about the china left behind in cabinets of their Kolkata home, or the gold they buried, also with the expectation that they would return.
Almost eight decades later, nothing could have prepared Roy and her husband Ryan Tiwari for their recent evacuation from the L.A. fires, she says. They had moved from Vancouver to Los Angeles in March, 2024, and didn’t have family or many friends in the city except for fellow Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch. As they were driving away from the fire, Roy realized she’d left precious belongings behind.
“But the fire was eight minutes away,” she says. “The first words out of my mouth to Hannah were, ‘I left my wedding gold in the apartment.’” Roy managed to go back when it was safe to do so to retrieve an essential medication, and her gold. “It was surreal,” she says of the experience.
Just over a decade ago, Kelly Thornton, who was then the artistic director of Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre, commissioned Roy to “write something really big and grand,” says Roy. It’s not an offer usually made in the theatre world, so she immediately agreed. At the time, the image of a bunch of abducted women during Partition and her grandmothers’ stories were on her mind. She spent close to a year at the Toronto Reference Library, researching everything she could find about the time period: “Mine was oral history, right?” Roy says, referring to what she had learned of Partition from her family. “As we know, it’s different than history books because winners of history get to tell the history books. But I still wanted to do due diligence.”
The process gave Roy several threads to pull on. Her research brought up stories about kidnapped women who were returned, who sometimes didn’t want to go back or others who were not welcomed back. Personal stories, including one about her paternal grandmother being stuck on the bottom level of a ship, barricading a door with a chair to protect herself and a cousin from an intruder, also resonated. Roy simply started typing the stories that were coming to her – as if by divine gift.
The result was a 80-page play, which was in development with Nightwood Theatre for a few years, but Nightwood wanted to make changes to it. For Roy, however, the stories that had come to her were sacrosanct. In 2016, Roy’s agent submitted the play to Finborough Theatre in London, England, which commissioned the play’s world premiere. Trident Moon is one of her most workshopped plays, Roy adds. But with a 10-person cast, it’s also a substantial investment for any Canadian theatre company to take on.
“For 11 years, the play was on a shelf,” she says. There were reservations about the play’s budget until Crow’s Theatre artistic director Chris Abraham and National Arts Centre artistic director Nina Lee Aquino reached out to her in 2023. They wanted to stage the play as it stood, although Roy ended up making minor adjustments to her original script.
Trident Moon is deliberately scant on details, says Roy. It operates on the idea of rumours and misinformation. While the play reflects historical tactics of the British rulers, it could also hold true for what’s happening today geopolitically.
“This play is, of course, about the past,” Roy says. “But it’s about the present. It’s almost a premonition for the future. It’s almost a call to action. A call of caution. We’re in such a tumultuous political climate. The impact it’s having on women and children still, women’s bodies still, right? So there’s an unfortunate relevance,” she says.
Roy hopes that audiences watching Trident Moon will leave the theatre with empathy for the characters and their narrative arc. Today, there may be questions about the decisions made back then, in the fog of war. But it’s important to remember that people were often trying their best.
“War changes people,” she says. “People were forced to make decisions … because they were trying to survive.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to state that East Pakistan is now Bangladesh. Incorrect information appeared in an earlier version.