The perception that human identity does not demand a singular confinement came to me quite powerfully from the ancient classics. Think of Vasantasena, the heroine of Shudraka’s Mricchakatika (‘The Little Clay Cart’) from around the fourth century – a radical and subversive play that offers several distinct, but important, themes. One of them was the need to see a person as having many identities – this was an idea that helped me to resist the imposition of a single, overwhelming identity based on religion or community (including focusing only on Hindu–Muslim divisions), which was becoming more
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