Diving: using fiction narrative and intermedial assemblage to understand family histories in colonial India between 1933-1947

This practice-based research project investigates how narrative fiction, using intermedial and narratological methodologies, can be constructed in such as way as to reflect upon and understand the power relations generated within a colonial family at a particular moment in the British colonial past in India between 1933-47.
My research practice, Diving, presents a series of multimedia assemblages, which recount a fictional story viewed from multiple perspectives and are played out by different dramatic characters, informed and inferred from scholarly research on domestic servants and other cultural sources, such as childhood colonial memoirs, films and literature. Some of these fictional characters, such as the colonists’ daughter, Wendy, are based on my own personal family archive. For other characters, such the ayah or nanny, Ayisha, a first-hand account is almost invisible in the historiography and archive.
Diving utilises three configurations that allow the possibility to explore and amplify a multiplicity of narratives in order to uncover, in an open-ended mode of viewer reception, both different histories and, in part, hidden histories. The resulting partial and fragmented narrative nonetheless speaks to a research method that tries to decentre the dominant colonial discourse and perspective. These configurations comprise firstly, a theatrical performance combining live acting with a video projection featuring a mix of live footage from the performance and pre-recorded sequences; secondly, a single-channel film that includes multi-perspective split-screen video sequences; and thirdly, two multi-channel moving image installations for gallery exhibitions.
As a method of enquiry, the process of experimenting with and testing out these three different configurations of the intermedial assemblages that frame the fictionalisation of the colonial family story set in India at the cusp of independence, has allowed for different readings by the audience, and different voices and experiences to be represented. My enquiry is underpinned by the theoretical framework of Monika Fludernik’s ‘natural narratology’, an experiential approach to the narrativisation of media, which incorporates the exploration of the subjective experiences of characters within fictional drama.