Scripted Heritage in Improvised Spaces—Tamil School Plays as Mnemonic Socialisation and Placemaking in Diaspora

On makeshift stages across London, students from a Tamil Saturday school reenact myths and stories from Sri Lanka. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research across the city, I show how these school plays move difficult and painful cultural memories from the edge of visibility into the public realm. Performed at the Museum of London, Trafalgar Square, temples and the Houses of Parliament, they expand where Tamil cultural heritage belongs. The plays reveal how memories suppressed in Sri Lanka find new public articulations in the UK. The article considers the difficulties of sharing memories of violence with children as an aesthetic and pedagogical problem (Daniel 1996, Jeganathan 2020). As expressions of postmemory in migration, school plays offer oblique forms of remembering violent pasts remotely. Through carefully worded scripts devised by their parents, the plays provide a reflective and embodied process by which children become custodians of their cultural heritage, transforming intergenerational memories of collective trauma into meaningful lessons that enable young people to act in this world.