Archive for the 'Culture' Category

Zia Mohyeddin and Amitabh Bachchan in Bombay

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on March 7, 2010
in Books, Culture, India and Pakistan
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Aakar Patel in The News:

Last month, we had the opportunity to listen to Zia Mohyeddin. He had been invited here as part of the Aman ki Asha programme that Jang and the Times of India have organised. It’s an excellent initiative because in the absence of trade, and given that we can hardly agree on anything else, culture is the one thing we can share comfortably.

A few years ago I had read about Mohyeddin’s famous annual recitations in Pakistan. A friend from Lahore then sent three compact discs of his performances recorded at what I think were functions of Pakistani-Americans.

The recordings included an irreverent one about different Pakistani communities and their cultural traits. There was one funny story about Chinioti traders. There was also a smoothly delivered dialogue in English between man and God about the nature of woman. I had read about Mohyeddin’s readings of Ghalib’s letters, but those were not included in the recordings.

These were the sort of things I had wanted to listen to from Mohyeddin. I read that Mohyeddin had revived the more traditional style of reciting Urdu poetry. This had been eclipsed 50 years ago by the hammy style of Z A Bokhari, brother of humorist Patras. I looked forward to understanding what that meant.

The event was at the Bandra fort, built by the Portuguese in 1640, and overlooking the Mahim bay. The fort has been restored partly, from funds provided by actress and legislator Shabana Azmi, and an amphitheatre has been built in it where cultural events are frequently held. More:

In light of Nalanda

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on March 4, 2010
in Culture, Education and Heritage
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Modern-day Nalanda / Photo: Namit Arora

The ruins of one of Asia’s great centres of learning still inspire travellers. Namit Arora in Himal Southasian:

Nalanda University arose in the early fifth century, during the reign of Kumara Gupta, though references to precursor sites associated with teaching and learning go back another thousand years, to the time of the Buddha and Mahavira. Between Xuanzang and Yi Jing, we have a compelling portrait of the university’s curriculum, the life of the monks, the buildings and the general features of the community.

Nalanda was more like a school of higher learning than an undergraduate college. Prospective students had to be at least 20 years old, and submit to an oral exam for university entrance. They had to demonstrate deep familiarity with a host of subjects, and with old and new works in many fields. Only around a quarter of prospective students were admitted, and even they were promptly humbled by the calibre of their teachers and co-students. When Xuanzang visited Nalanda, there were 8500 students and 1500 teachers in 108 residential monasteries, which often had two or more floors. Excavations have revealed exquisitely carved temples and a row of ten monasteries of oblong red bricks directly across from a row of stupas in brick and plaster. Rooms typically had chairs, wood blocks, small mats and utensils stored in wall niches. Yi Jing approvingly wrote that each year before the monsoon, the best rooms were awarded to the eldest members in the community.

Some of the best teachers not only taught but also composed treatises and commentaries, much as Xuanzang himself did later in life. Many acquired great fame, and a Nalanda education held serious cachet among the public. Teachers lived among the students in the monasteries, common features of which included a podium for lectures, a communal brick oven, bathrooms and a water well (often in octagonal cross-section, supposedly inspired by the Eightfold Path, one of the Buddha’s central teachings). Water clocks guided daily routines, and gongs were used to signal the start and end of events, services and ceremonies. “There are more than ten great pools near the Nalanda monastery,” wrote Yi Jing. “Every morning a ghanti is sounded to remind the monks of the bathing-hour.” For their daily exercise, the monks went for walks in mid-mornings or late afternoons. Their dinner typically included bean soup with butter, rice and vegetables, perhaps also ghee, honey, sugar or a seasonal fruit such as mango. More:

God and the gospel of globalisation

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on March 4, 2010
in Culture, Economy, India and Society
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Against all hope, secularism remains a myth. Meera Nanda in Himal Southasian. Meera Nanda’s most recent book is “The God Market: How globalization is making India more Hindu (2010)”.

Asha Dangol / Himal Southasian

The defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s general elections last year was greeted with relief by secularists and democrats everywhere. Not entirely unreasonably: they read the fact that the BJP lost a solid 3.4 percent of its previous poll share as evidence that Indian voters had rejected the majoritarian politics of Hindu pride and prejudice, peddled by the BJP and the rest of the Sangh Parivar. The general consensus is that the ideology of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has lost its appeal among the urban youth and middle classes – that secularism has won and “God has left politics,” to borrow the elegant title of a recent essay by Delhi journalist Hartosh Singh Bal. Market reforms and globalisation emerge as the stars of this saga. Both the friends and critics of the BJP agree that it is the fervour for making money in India’s roaring economy that doused the flames of Hindu nationalism from the hearts of the middle classes. But that is not all. The ‘free’ market, we are told by a section of influential Dalit intellectuals, will not only free India from the menace of communal violence, but will also lift the curse of caste oppression. It is fair to say that the gospel of globalisation is gaining ground in India.

The story about how the markets defeated the BJP goes as follows. Hindutva appealed to the middle classes and youth back in the bad-old-days of the 1980s and 1990s, when these groups were feeling beleaguered and angry due to the failures of Nehruvian socialism and ‘pseudo-secularism’, which, in their view, gave undue preference to Muslim and Christian minorities. But in the nearly two decades of economic liberalisation and foreign investments that began in the early 1990s, India has witnessed a great burst of economic growth. As a result, the Hindu middle classes are angry no more. Far from feeling beleaguered and discriminated against, they have become more cosmopolitan, more self-confident, and more willing to take on global challenges and seek out global opportunities. Indeed, so confident is the Great Indian Middle Class that it has claimed the 21st century as India’s Century. And so the critics ask: What use can such forward-looking people possibly have for the past glories of Hinduism, about which the stodgy old men in khaki shorts keep harping? This story has found great favour among the self-proclaimed Friends of the BJP, who want the party to drop Hindutva altogether, or at least to make it sound less communal, and emerge as a ‘normal’ pro-market, pro-defence, anti-‘minority-appeasement’, right-of-centre party. More:

The blight of Hindustan

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on March 3, 2010
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Namit Arora at Shunya’s Notes:

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—in the sense that the subgroups were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas: the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshtriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four varnas appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda, and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society.

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy, turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The principle of hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahminical ‘knowledge’. More:

Mystical form of Islam suits Sufis in Pakistan

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on February 26, 2010
in Culture, Faith, Politics, Religion and Terrorism
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Sabrina Tavernise from Lahore in The New York Times:

It is Sufism, a mystical form of Islam brought into South Asia by wandering thinkers who spread the religion east from the Arabian Peninsula. They carried a message of equality that was deeply appealing to indigenous societies riven by caste and poverty. To this day, Sufi shrines stand out in Islam for allowing women free access.

In modern times, Pakistan’s Sufis have been challenged by a stricter form of Islam that dominates in Saudi Arabia. That orthodox, often political Islam was encouraged in Pakistan in the 1980s by the American-supported dictator, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Since then, the fundamentalists’ aggressive stance has tended to eclipse that of their moderate kin, whose shrines and processions have become targets in the war here.

But if last week’s stomping, twirling, singing, drumming kaleidoscope of a crowd is any indication, Sufism still has a powerful appeal. More:

M.F. Husain gets Qatar nationality

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on February 25, 2010
in Art, Culture, India, Religion and Society
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A section of the page from The Hindu website. The caption reads: "The black-and-white line drawing eminent artist M.F. Husain shared with The Hindu. Though this exemplar of secular art did not apply for it, he was conferred citizenship by Qatar."

N. Ram in The Hindu:

M.F. Husain, India’s greatest and most celebrated artist, has been conferred Qatar nationality – something that is very rarely given. The artist gave me this news from Dubai early Wednesday morning by reading out the few lines he had written on a black-and-white line drawing that he released to The Hindu.

“Honoured by Qatar nationality” but deeply saddened by his enforced exile and the need now to give up the citizenship of the land of his birth, which he has lovingly and secularly celebrated in his art covering a period of over seven decades. India does not allow dual citizenship, even though it has instituted the category of the ‘Overseas Indian Citizen.’ Mr. Husain will no doubt seek to acquire OIC status after completing the due procedures.

It is important to note that Mr. Husain did not apply for Qatar nationality and that it was conferred upon him at the instance of the modernising emirate’s ruling family. More:

Also in The Hindu: Art under fire by Chitra Padmanabhan

When Jewish women were the leading ladies of Indian cinema

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on February 24, 2010
in Culture, Entertainment, India and Movies
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Above, Nadira a.k.a. Florence Ezekiel in Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420.

From Tablet, an online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture (via Ultrabrown):

Rose Ezra. Ruby Myers. Farhat Ezekiel Nadira. From the earliest years of Bollywood, these and other Jewish actresses garnered starring roles. And while they may have looked somewhat exotic to moviegoers, they came from Baghdadi Jewish families who had been living in India for decades. Reporter Eric Molinsky speaks to film scholars, as well as friends and relatives of these once-beloved but now mostly forgotten stars of Indian cinema, to find out how they became the “go-to girls” for leading female roles in the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond.

Click here to listen to fascinating lecture.

The wedding sleuth

Published
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on February 21, 2010
in Culture, India and Society
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An AP report from New Delhi:

Ajit Singh knows about the lies people tell.

He has followed them through the littered, mildewed mazes of New Delhi’s middle class neighborhoods. He has photographed them as they leave their lovers’ apartments. He hears them exaggerate their salaries and hide their illnesses.

A thin man in an ill-fitting suit, Singh works out of a crowded office around the corner from a muffler shop. An incense stick burns behind his desk. A sign in slightly fractured English warns the staff: ”Walls Has Ears And Eyes Too. BE ALERT.”

Singh has spent years honing his skills: disguise, surveillance, misdirection. With just a few minutes’ notice, he can deploy teams nearly anywhere across the country.

Because in modern India, where centuries of arranged marriages are being replaced by unions based on love, emotion and anonymous Internet introductions, where would a wedding be without a private detective? More:

50 reasons NOT to marry a Bengali man

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on February 7, 2010
in Culture, India and Society
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From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

10. They expect women to serve them at the dinner table. At least she should be urging him on to the right bowls.

11. They expect the women will carry the dirty dishes to the sink, clear the table and put away the remnants in the right containers.

12. If they do put the food away, the fridge looks like a battlefield, with several things dismembered, dismantled and oozing liquids. In any case, they would never clean the refrigerator. Ditto for the cooking gas.

13. When they are drunk they invoke Robi Thakur. Then they tend to go for the cosmic, namely, Debabrata’s rendition of Akash bhora surjo tara, after which they have dinner.

14. But then when they are sober why are they still discussing Sachin Tendulkar versus Sourav Ganguly, and backing Dada to win?

15. In public, they admire Nandita Das. In secret, they want to be Salman Khan.

16. Rare is the Bengali man who looks good in a formal suit. He stops midway into it. He looks square. Or round. But proud. If you ask him why, he is likely to say that intellect is inversely proportional to height in his part of the world. He can be smug, very smug. More:

And, 50 reasons not to marry a Bengali woman

45. She tries too hard not to look Bengali. She will never have the Punjabi oomph, or the south Indian sensuality. But she will persist in trying. What’s more, she will tell you with a big smile that so and so storewallah thought she was a Punjabi today. Contradict at your own risk!

44. Like the accomplished women of Pride and Prejudice, they all sing Rabindrasangeet and Nazrulgeeti, dance, paint and recite poetry. God help you if she takes her talent seriously.

43. She will never get along with your mother. It is a matter of principle.

42. They will pet and spoil their husbands like overgrown babies and then they’ll ask you not to be a mamma’s boy. The truth is they’d rather you be a “wifey’s pet”.

41. They hate being second to your mother but are still far too controlled by their own mothers.

40. They remove gift wrappers for hours and then preserve the paper under the mattress. If she had her way, she would keep the sellotape too.

39. She won’t leave a single mirror free of stick-on bindis. More:

To which Anvar Alikhan in Outlook adds some more:

1) She will give you a silly pet name (Oltu, Poltu, etc); 2) She will buy you a monkey cap and bed socks for winter; 3) She will feed you Hilsa, which is a unique experience, like trying to eat barbed wire through a mouthful of fish mousse:4) She will throw away your precious World War II movie collection, and replace it with her own collection of Tarkovsky films…More:

 

Mrs Malik

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on February 1, 2010
in Culture, India, Pakistan, People, Religion and Society
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How Pakistan-born Mushaal Mullick fell in love with Kashmiri militant-turned-separatist leader Yasin Malik. From Open:

Mushaal is the kind of face the cameraman would pick up in a packed cricket stadium. She is the sort of girl who would keep as souvenirs the cinema tickets of her first-ever date. She is a girl in whose purse you’d find a mirror, a comb and, perhaps, lip salve. She likes Phil Collins and Shakira, and in poetry her taste varies from Rumi to Sylvia Plath. She is, you’d say if you ever met her, full of life. She has a teenage intensity, if there is any such thing. She writes the way she speaks, and like most youngsters, likes to be on Facebook, adding friends so frantically you would think she is on an undercover mission to make the Facebook server collapse. She writes ‘you’ as ‘u’ and makes careless mistakes such as referring to her school principal as ‘principle’ in emails. The 24-year-old Mushaal was in Delhi recently, with her husband, former militant and now Kashmir’s prominent separatist leader, 43-year-old Yasin Malik. “You could write that Yasin is an Aries and I am a Scorpio,” she told me. And, before I could react, she blurted, “Oh, forget it! It will look so childish.” More:

[Image: Mushaal Mullick website]

Understanding Afghan tribes

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on February 1, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Culture, Society and Terrorism
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From The New York Times:

The other Swastika

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on February 1, 2010
in Culture, Faith and Religion
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Usha Alexander at 3quarksdaily:

When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.

I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide. More:

To ward off evil, Zardari kills one black goat a day

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on January 28, 2010
in Culture, Leaders and Pakistan
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From Dawn:

A black goat is slaughtered almost daily to ward off ‘evil eyes’ and protect President Asif Ali Zardari from ‘black magic’. Does this, and the use of camel and goat milk, make the beleaguered president appear to be a superstitious man?

Well, not to his spokesman. “It has been an old practice of Mr Zardari to offer Sadqa (animal sacrifice). He has been doing this for a long time,” spokesman Farhatullah Babar told Dawn on Tuesday. More:

The Afghan leader’s hat

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on January 27, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Culture, Design, Fashion, Leaders and Politics
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From the New York Times:

Known as a karakul hat, and made of the pelt of fetal or newborn lambs of the karakul breed of sheep, traditionally it was something worn by Tajiks and Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan. When Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun from the turban-wearing south, took office in 2002, the karakul hat was part of his attempt to devise a wardrobe that was Afghan rather than ethnic or regional.

It was a move widely praised at the time, in Afghanistan and abroad. The American designer Tom Ford called the Afghan president “the chicest man on the planet.” Afghans looking for national symbols after decades of ethnic strife inspired a brisk trade in the hats, made of lambskins from Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and fashioned by Kabul’s hatters, whose shops lined both sides of Shah-e-do Shamshera Wali Road.

Now, a tainted presidential election later, and with efforts to make a truly multiethnic government foundering, the sheen is off the shimmery fur headwear.

Young men no longer wear it; Mr. Karzai’s opponent in the aborted election runoff, Abdullah Abdullah, a northerner, preferred a hatless suit-and-tie ensemble. All but 12 of the hatters shops have closed on Shamshera Road, also famous for its shrine covered in pigeons. Those remaining say they are lucky to sell a hat a day. More:

The present state of the gods and goddesses in South Asia

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on January 26, 2010
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Ashis Nandy in Manushi:

Some years ago, in the city of Bombay, a young Muslim playwright wrote and staged a play that had gods — Hindu gods and goddesses — as major characters. Such plays are not uncommon in India; some would say that they are all too common. This one also included gods and goddesses who were heroic, grand, scheming and comical. This provoked not the audience but Hindu nationalists, particularly the Hindu Mahasabha, a spent political force for a long time, in Bombay. This city is now being dominated by a more powerful Hindu nationalist formation, the Shiv Sena.

It is doubtful if those who claimed they had been provoked were really provoked. It is more likely that they pretended to be offended and precipitated an incident to make their political presence felt. After all, such plays have been written in India since time immemorial. Vikram Savarkar of Hindu Mahasabha — a grandson of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), the non-believing father of Hindu nationalism who thoughtfully gifted South Asia the concept of Hindutva — organised a demonstration in front of the theatre where the play was being staged, caught hold of the playwright, and threatened to lynch him. Ultimately Savarkar’s gang forced the writer to bow down and touch Savarkar’s feet, to apologise for writing the play. The humiliation of the young playwright was complete; it was duly photographed and published in newspapers and news magazines. More:

The dupatta: More than a covering

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on January 25, 2010
in Culture and Pakistan
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Aamna Haider Isani in Dawn:

Interestingly, in the early years after Partition, the dupatta’s symbolism was more national than religious. For example, the uniform of the Pakistan Women’s National Guard that was formed during the Kashmir War included a dupatta. ‘Since Pakistan was a Muslim state, the dupatta was naturally part of the uniform. However, it was just a sash across the torso…a starched V-shaped dupatta,’ recalls former Sergeant Abeeda Abidi in an interview with the Citizens Archive of Pakistan. Clearly, this sash was meant to be more of a comment than a covering.

The years that followed saw leaders such as Fatima Jinnah and Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan enter politics. Unlike their female predecessors in the armed forces, these women made public appearances with their heads covered with a dupatta, which was deciphered as a symbol of modesty. Since they had set the trend, women who stepped into politics in subsequent decades were expected to follow suit.

In 1966, the uniform for the PIA airhostesses, designed by Paris-based fashion sensation Pierre Cardin, also included scarf-like dupattas over graceful tunics. In this incarnation, the dupatta was viewed more as an attractive accessory than a symbol of Muslim womanhood.

Although a dupatta has always been part of the attire of female politicians of this predominantly Muslim state since the beginning, trends among the masses have been slightly different. It was only in the late 1950s that the dupatta became an integral part of the urban-middle-class woman’s outfit. Before then, some women wore burqas and chadors. But younger women who were looking for some form of covering increasingly opted for dupattas as they proved to be a less stringent alternative. More:

[Image: Dawn]

In an Indian city, moral police diktat: no lingerie ads

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on January 21, 2010
in Culture, India, Politics and Society
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A story in The Times of India says activists of a right-wing Hindu outfit are parading the streets of Bhopal asking storekeepers to “tear down hoardings advertising lingerie and cover up mannequins showcasing women’s undergarments.” The storekeepers are being told ‘‘not to display lingerie in public.’’

‘‘Your mannequins should wear sarees, not underwear. From now on, keep all undergarments inside. Show it to the customer when he or she asks for it. Five days from now if undergarments are still hanging outside, we will light a bonfire of the lingerie,’’ threatened the leader of the group.

Bhopal is about 350 km (six-hour drive) from Khajuraho, the temple city famous for erotic sculptures.

The New Expatriate

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on January 12, 2010
in Culture, India and Society
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Meet the 21st century heirs to the pucca sahibs, angrezi mems, and boxwallahs, haters and half-haters alike. Lakshmi Chaudhry in Open:

The International Frat Boy of Revelry: A subspecies of The Corporate Expat, this is a young man on a mission: to travel far, climb high, and pahrtay!

Most likely to be found: getting drunk and trying to get it on in the company of his expat bros and pretty young Indian things who seem to have mistaken him for Tom Cruise with an expense account.

Most likely to think: An Indian girl will want to marry him the moment they have sex. And if she doesn’t, it’s only because her parents won’t let her do so.

The Neo-colonial Memsahib: Once the privilege of white women in corsets, complaining about the heat, dust and the help (also: pollution, natives, food, filth) has gone multi-culti thanks to the global workplace, offering corporate wives of all ages, race and nationality the equal opportunity to play the ‘gori memsahib’.

Most likely to be found: bemoaning the vicissitudes of Indian life at coffee klatches and happy hours in five-star locales, while their driver waits in the parking lot.

Most likely to think: Basic human decency is an exclusively Western trait. As in, look what good care I take of my dog/maid/child unlike those uncaring, brutish Indians. More:

Zoobi Doobi

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on January 11, 2010
in Culture, Entertainment, India, Movies and Music
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From the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots:

Children of Hindu, Muslim immigrants in US drawn to hard rock

Published
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on January 10, 2010
in Culture and Society
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From the Washington Post:

Artwork from the Punjab state of India decorates the Ray family home. A Johann Sebastian Bach statue sits on a piano. But in the basement — cluttered with wires, old concert fliers and drawings — Arjun Ray, 25, is fighting distortion from his electric guitar.

For this son of Indian immigrants, trained in classical violin and raised on traditional Punjab music, getting his three Pakistani American bandmates in sync is the goal on this cold New England evening. Their band, the Kominas, is trying to record a punk rock version of the classic Bollywood song, “Choli Ke Peeche” (“Behind the Blouse”).

“Yeah,” said Shahjehan Khan, 26, one of the band’s guitarists, “there are a lot of contradictions going on here.”

Deep in the woods of this colonial town boils a kind of revolutionary movement. From the basement of this middle-class home tucked in the woods west of Boston, the Kominas have helped launched a small but growing South Asian and Middle Eastern punk rock movement that is attracting children of Muslim and Hindu immigrants. It also is drawing scorn from some traditional Muslims who say their political, hard-edged music is “haraam,” or forbidden. More:

Art, power and single women in Pakistan

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on January 10, 2010
in Art, Culture and Pakistan
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In Karachi, the men might buy the art, but it’s women — many single and young — who control the market. H.M. Naqvi at GlobalPost:

Karachi: Defying the global downturn in art and perhaps common sense, another gallery opened in Karachi last month, the second in three weeks. Both are run by women.

More intriguing than the dynamics of the market is the fact that the entire Pakistani art scene is run by women, single women.

Sumbul Khan is a spritely thirtysomething of vaguely Pathan extraction. She returned to Karachi several years ago after completing a masters in art history in the United States. After teaching art history and theory, she pitched a program on art in Urdu to Indus TV, the first independent channel in Pakistan. After the program was aired, the head of Indus TV, the legendary Ghazanfar Ali, asked her if she was interested in setting up a gallery in a cove of vacant rooms within the premises of MTV Pakistan (owned, in part, by Indus TV). Khan readily agreed. She named it Poppy Seed. More:

Waziristan: The last frontier

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on January 8, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Conflict, Culture, Pakistan, Politics and Terrorism
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From The Economist:

“YOU should enjoy this,” said a Pushtun from Waziristan, the most remote and radicalised of the tribal areas in North-West Pakistan that border Afghanistan, as he proffered a bottle of Scottish whisky. It was an excellent Sutherland single-malt; but the man was referring to the bottle’s more recent provenance, not its pedigree.

He had been given it by a fellow Waziristani working for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. This spy had received the illegal grog from an American CIA officer. Your correspondent’s friend returned homewards, Scotch in hand, driven by another Waziristani, who is also employed as a fixer by al-Qaeda.

Waziristan, home to 800,000 tribal Pushtuns, is a complicated place. It is the hinge that joins Pakistan and Afghanistan, geographically and strategically. Split into two administrative units, North and South Waziristan, it is largely run by the Taliban, with foreign jihadists among them. If Islamist terror has a headquarters, it is probably Waziristan.

For terrorists, its attraction is its fierce independence. More:

Love that crossed borders, religion, cut short by tragedy

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on January 8, 2010
in Culture, India, Pakistan, Politics and Society
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From the Indian Express:

Phagwara, India: She is a Punjabi Brahmin girl from Phagwara, he was a Pakistani Muslim. They met in Dubai, fell in love and married. They then decided to get married according to Hindu rituals as well.

On New Year’s Day, he collapsed in the bathroom of her family home and died. The body was sent across the Wagah border yesterday. She was denied a visa to travel to Pakistan. Had he been alive, their Hindu wedding would have been tomorrow.

Priyanka Sharma of Urban Estate, Phagwara and Muhammad Tariq Hussain of Baramwala village in district Ladhara, Pakistan, had spent the last days of 2009 distributing invitation cards to friends and relatives for the January 8 wedding. Sangeet was on January 6, and Jaago the day after. “Tariq was very excited,” said Priyanka. More

Mumbai Parsis divided on intermarriage

Published
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on January 7, 2010
in Culture, India and Society
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From GlobalPost:

Mumbai: A group of about a dozen young Parsi professionals gather around a table at the Parsi Gymkhana or social club at Marine Lines in Mumbai. They drink Pepsis and snack on toast topped with akuri, a spicy mixture of scrambled eggs and tomatoes, as they wait for others to arrive.

“What’s up, homies?” says 23-year-old Peshotan Kapadia as he makes his entrance. Sporting a goatee, jeans and T-shirt, Kapadia — like the rest of the group — looks like a typical modern young adult.

But despite the modern scene, the group’s underlying purpose is a reflection of their traditional beliefs: to foster marriage between young Parsis.

The group, Zoroastrian Youth for the Next Generation (ZYNG), was launched in mid-December and aims to provide social, cultural and employment opportunities for young people in their community. Zoroastrianism is the religion that the cultural group Parsis follow. More:

A passage in Kolkata

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on January 3, 2010
in Culture, Heritage and India
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Kolkata’s Park Street is the most iconic road in India. Jaideep Mazumdar in Open:

It is a road like no other. Its origins as ‘Road to Old Burial Grounds’, nearly 250 years ago, were ignoble indeed. Haunted by ‘thugs and rascals’ and used mainly by hearses and carriages carrying the bereaved, this road in Calcutta metamorphosed by the turn of the last century into South Asia’s prime ‘good life’ destination, before hitting turbulence in the late 1960s. Now, it is a ‘sarani’ (lane). Steeped in memories, Park Street’s plebeian present haunts it, and is something the street and its stakeholders desperately want to shake off. Few other streets in the world have perhaps changed character so dramatically over two-and-a-half centuries as Park Street-turned-Mother Teresa Sarani has. Neon signs are still aglow and an empty table would be scarce at all the 25-odd restaurants and pubs there on any evening, but Park Street is no longer the destination it was. It’s just a thoroughfare. Though, to be fair, one that still manages to entice, even if not as forcefully as it used to.

It is a road like no other: it is a corridor that connects British-era Calcutta—with its grand colonial structures—with the more recent and rundown Kolkata. Driving down Park Street from west to east is like witnessing the city’s transition from its magnificent past to its proletarian present: the glittering shop fronts in the grand old mansions slowly give way to smaller establishments in decrepit structures. The fine restaurants make way for pavement food stalls and biryani outlets and, ultimately, the road reaches Park Circus area in which are nestled unsightly slums. More:

Spiritual awakening

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on January 1, 2010
in Books, Culture, Faith, India, Religion and Society
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William Dalrymple in the New Statesman:

On a foggy winter’s night in November 1998, Om Singh, a young landowner from Rajasthan, was riding his Enfield Bullet back home after winning a local election near Jodhpur, when he misjudged a turning and hit a tree. He was killed instantly. As a memorial, his father fixed the motorbike to a stand, raised on a concrete plinth under the shelter of a small canopy, near the site of the crash.

“We were a little surprised when people started reporting miracles near the bike,” Om’s uncle Shaitan Singh told me on my last visit. “Om was no saint, and people say he had had a drink or two before his crash. In fact, there was no indication whatsoever during his life that he was a deity. He just loved his horses and his motorbike. But since his death a lot of people have had their wishes fulfilled here – particularly women who want children. For them, he has become very powerful. They sit on the bike, make offerings to Om Singh-ji, and it is said that flowers drop into their laps. Nine months later they have sons. Every day people see him. He comes to many people in their dreams.”

“How did it all begin?” I asked. We were in the middle of a surging throng: crowds of red-turbaned and brightly sari-ed villagers gathered around the bike, the women queuing patiently to straddle its seat and ring the bell on the canopy. Nearby, two drummers were loudly banging dholaks, while chai-shop owners made tea and paan for the pilgrims. Other stalls sold plaques, postcards and statues of Om Singh and his motorbike. Pieces of cloth were tied to branches all over the tree and gold flags flapped in the desert wind. Everywhere buses and trucks were disgorging pilgrims coming to visit Rajasthan’s newest shrine. More:

Rice

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on December 26, 2009
in Culture, Food and India
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Jhumpa Lahiri in the New Yorker:

My father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job, cataloguing books for a university library. He drinks two glasses of water first thing in the morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his teeth. “Winging it” is not a term that comes to mind in describing my father. When he’s driving to new places, he does not enjoy getting lost.

In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. It is my father who knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj—the Bengali word for “estimate”—accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will. More:

Honour killing

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on December 19, 2009
in Crime, Culture and Society
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Jagdeesh Singh’s sister was murdered by her in-laws for daring to seek a divorce. But, he tells Jerome Taylor of The Independent, it is a crime his community would prefer to ignore:

Surjit Kaur, the victim

Surjit Kaur, the victim

Jagdeesh Singh wants to get straight to the point. “There is this very distinctive and self-incriminating silence within communities that have a history of ‘honour’ killings,” he says. “The so-called community leaders, the influential religious groups and the local language newspapers remain deafeningly silent when these killings happen. But that silence makes them just as guilty as the people who kill in the name of honour.”

Talk like this has made Mr Singh a deeply controversial character within the suburbs of west London where he and many of Britain’s 400,000-plus Sikhs have made their homes.

Many younger people regard him as a devout and tireless Sikh who is unafraid of speaking out against the more parochial traditions of Punjabi culture that they often find themselves struggling against. Others, particularly the more conservative and older elements, look on the 39-year-old as a troublemaker who needlessly provokes controversy by shining an unwelcome spotlight on things that should not be aired in public. More:

[Photo: World Sikh News]

The Thangmi myth of origins

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on December 13, 2009
in Culture, Heritage, India, Nepal and Science
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Dr Mark Turin in the Independent. Dr Turin is a linguistic anthropologist specialised in the Himalayas:

In the beginning, there was only water. The gods held a meeting to decide how to develop this vast expanse. First they created a type of small insect, but these insects couldn’t find a place to live since there was only water and no solid land. Consequently, the gods created fish which could live in the water. The insects took to living on the fins of the fish, which stuck far enough out of the water to allow the insects to breathe. The insects collected river grass and mixed it with mud in order to build dwellings on the fins of the fish in each of the four directions: south, west, north, and east.

Then a lotus flower arose spontaneously out of the water, with the god Vishnu seated in the middle. Out of the four directions of the lotus flower came an army of ants. The ants killed all of the fish-dwelling insects and destroyed their houses. The ants took the mud that the insects had used for their dwellings and left, gathering another species of grass as they went. They mixed this with the mud to construct new houses. Then the snake deities arose. It was still dark, so the sun was created. More:

Also in the Independent:

The beckoning silence: Why half of the world’s languages are in serious danger of dying out

In a small office room in the back of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology – a place in which you almost expect Harrison Ford to walk around the corner at any moment, fedora on head, whip in hand – Turin looks over the contents of a box that arrived earlier in the morning from India. “[The receptionists] are quite used to getting these boxes now,” says the 36-year-old anthropologist, who is based at the university. Inside the box, which is covered in dozens of rupee postage stamps, are DVDs representing hours of chants, songs, poems and literature from a tiny Indian community that is desperate for its language to have a voice and be included in Turin’s venture.

For many of these communities, the oral tradition is at the heart of their culture. The stories they tell are creative works as well as communicative. Unlike the languages with celebrated written traditions, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, few indigenous communities – from the Kallawaya tribe in Bolivia and the Maka in Paraguay to the Siberian language of Chulym, to India’s Arunachal Pradesh state Aka group and the Australian Aboriginal Amurdag community – have recorded their own languages or ever had them recorded. Until now. Turin launched the World Oral Literature Project earlier this year with an aim to document and make accessible endangered languages before they disappear without trace. More:

Click here for the Digital Himalaya Project and here for Himalayan Languages Project.

To see and hear recordings of the Thangmi in Nepal, click here.

Helpful tips if visiting the U.S.

Published
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on December 12, 2009
in Culture and Sport
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A sample from eDiplomat:

  • The only proper answers to the greetings “How do you do?” “How are you?” or “How are you doing?” are “Fine,” “Great,” or “Very well, thank you.” This is not a request for information about your well-being; it is simply a pleasantry.
  • Americans are generally uncomfortable with same-sex touching, especially between males.
  • Americans smile a great deal, even at strangers. They like to have their smiles returned.
  • Men and women will sit with legs crossed at the ankles or knees, or one ankle crossed on the knee.
  • Americans are often uncomfortable with silence. Silence is avoided in social or business meetings.
  • Never begin eating until everyone is served and your hosts have begun. Offer food or drink to others before helping yourself. Serve all women at the table first.

Click here to read the full list of cultural etiquette tips.

And here for the list of dos and don’ts when visiting India.

An example, “When an Indian smiles and jerks his/her head backward — a gesture that looks somewhat like a Western “no” — or moves his head in a figure 8, this means “yes.”