In 2025-6, I will be funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to complete my monograph entitled Performing Gardens: Land, planting, and colonialism in places of leisure. This book is under contract with Springer, as part of the “Performing Landscapes” series, edited by Deirdre Heddon and Sally Mackey.
The book concerns performance – live events of intended ‘showing’ – through and in garden spaces, in India and in Britain. It is concerned with how these events engage with the natural world, and questions of power and ownership of land. It will bring ecocriticism together with performance, imperial and garden histories at, or in relation to site. I will be discussing a series of case studies, ranging from the beginning of British colonialism in India, to post independence. My case studies are chosen to reflect the unusually interdependent, though discrepant and unequal histories of Britain and India, and concern activities from courtly ritual to stage plays.
The image above is chosen because the backdrop is Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, although you could be forgiven for thinking it is an Indian palace from this perspective, since it displays the orientalism of late eighteenth century England. The dance piece was Pravaas, performed by Akademi for Without Walls, Brighton Festival, in 2023. It’s not that good a photo – you will find much better on their site – but in these moments (the work moved between sites) it represents a meeting of cultures through performance in a garden space, and it was a piece about land and migration, based on the displacement of communities in the Ganges delta.
There’s also a sense of leaning across, in this image, hoping to touch hands. The project is one that hopes to do so, while acknowledging that I am largely standing on the Southwest corner of England, and that from here, many things are beyond my reach.
This book project draws together threads from a number of funded projects as well as work that has been bubbling under for some years (see ‘unfunded, hobbyist research’). You can see some of the previous work under the ‘Performing Gardens’ category.