FFor goddesses, changing appearances is of course not a problem. Especially not for Kali, the multi-armed, blue-skinned woman, who in Mithu Sanyal’s novel “Identitti” also shows a downright joke. Now Kali has landed on the stage: already in November 2021, half a year after the publication of the novel, at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf and now, in a production by Salome Dastmalchi, at the Staatstheater Darmstadt.
Mithu Sanyal will be there for the premiere – of course. The cultural scientist and publicist from Düsseldorf, born in 1971, has already traveled a great deal and come a long way with her first novel. Shortlisted for the German Book Prize, Ernst Bloch Prize, Ruhr Literature Prize: The story about the student Nivedita, like Sanyal herself the daughter of a Polish mother and an Indian father, and her esteemed professor Saraswati has become a bestseller. The fact that Saraswati turns out to be white triggers the scandal in which Nivedita also has to position herself. It is a novel that the public likes, that is amusing to read and at the same time, strengthened by theory, deals with the current questions of identity politics and postcolonialism. That was a coup. Quite apart from the fact that with the goddess Kali, a fantastic element, with tweets and blog posts, our multimedia world plays a major role in the novel.