With focus on literature produced in pre and post Independence India, the exhibition explores various attempts to forge connections between readers and writers beyond the purview of the state and the logic of the market through the medium of DIY print. TheIndian literature is contextualised with reference to material from a wide range of archives, produced using a variety of low-tech printing and duplication processes.

The exhibition includes material from Asia Art Archive; Bruce Castle Museum’s Gestetner archives; pamphlets from the British Library’s collection of publications proscribed in colonial India; literature collected by Ram Dutt Tripathi, a former BBC journalist who was imprisoned during the Indian Emergency of 1975-77, and now digitised by the University of Goettingen’s Long Emergency project; little magazines edited by the poet and translator, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and other publications from UCL’s collections of small press and samizdat literature, and an animated facsimile by Raqs Media Collective. 

The exhibition emerges from Pragya’s research on the media censorship in India during the colonial period and internal Emergency, and wider interest in print history and experimental literature. 

Exhibition: Crafting Subversion: DIY and Decolonial Print

Curated by Dr Pragya Dhital

Date: 28 April 2022 – 3 September 2022

Time: 10:30 AM-5:00 PM

Venue: Brunei Gallery, SOAS University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

The Father and the Assassin – written by Anupama Chandrashekhar directed by Indhu Rubasingham and acted by Shubham Saraf with others including Ayesha Dharkar opened on the massive revolving stage of the Olivier at the National Theatre to rave reviews from across the press spectrum from  The Guardian  to Time Out .  Presented as an investigation into the life of Gandhi’s assassin, the play falls short of an empathetic psychological portrait. 

I must admit that with my Gandhian sympathies, I was afraid to see the play, fearing to endorse the rousing Hindutva support for Godse.  However, there was no denying my extreme curiosity about the play and its take on the assassination.  Finally, a week before the play’s closing, I picked up the courage to see it.  The house was packed with not a seat remaining and I felt at home with the racial mix in the audience, reflecting the mix amongst the actors.  Shubham Sarraf opened the play with an intimate conversation with his post-colonial, post-Brexit audience, effortlessly combining his role as narrator and protagonist.  I was now open to empathising with the oppressed child searching for and revenging himself on a father figure, as analysed by Ashish Nandy (2015, 1990 [1980]).

Saraf begins the narrative by talking of Godse’s childhood, progressing to age 11, when he recognises himself as male.  At this point Anupama stages a fictional encounter with Gandhi, the play’s dialogue becomes explicitly political.  The usual arguments about Gandhi’s responsibility for partition and the horrors of independence take over.  The play write speaks to the current right-wing mood in India and plays to their complaints about Gandhi, using them and leaning on Godse’s own justifications presented as his court room speech.  Both hold Gandhi responsible for the ills of partition and justifying his murder to assuage the ‘Hurt’.  The play relies on a good mix of fictionalised facts to suggest conversations with Gandhi and other Gandhians.  However, they remain on the surface of Gandhism and cannot lead us to an in-depth political conversation nor an in-depth psychological conversation.  The play was a sad missed opportunity to complicate the assassination and humanise the person of Nathu/Nathuram. Instead the rising of Godse’s own self-glorifying persona panders to the current political dispensation without upsetting differing political convictions.  One must congratulate the National Theatre for inserting themselves into the Indian political scene and boldly stepping up to a post-colonial role for British theatre.

References:

Nandy, Ashis. 2010. “Coming Home: Religion, Mass Violence, and the Exiled and Secret Selves of a Citizen-Killer.” Public Culture 22 (1): 127–47. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=bas&AN=BAS492991&site=eds-live.

Nandy, Ashish. 1990. “The Final Encounter: The politics of the Assassination of Gandhi”, in At the edge of psychology: Essays in politics and culture (Paperback edition.) Delhi ; Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan culminated with the capture of Kabul on the 15^th of August 2021. The Taliban now control more territory than when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Their takeover has reignited fears among the country’s Hazara community about a return to the brutalities of the 1990s.  

The Hazaras’ history in Afghanistan has been tumultuous. They were formerly autonomous in central Afghanistan, an area also known as Hazarajat. However, this drastically changed in the late 1800s when the King (Emir) at the time, Abdur Rahman Khan, declared a jihad, holy war, against the Hazaras in order to consolidate his power. The war was justified on the grounds that Hazaras were ‘infidels’ due to their beliefs as Shia Muslims in a predominately Sunni state. However, the dominant historiographical sources surrounding this event do not accurately capture the ground realities that led to the community’s subjugation. Prior to the insurrection of Hazarajat there had been multiple instances of rape against Hazara women by the King’s soldiers. Instead of reassuring community leaders who met with the King, Hazaras were imprisoned and had their weapons confiscated. This in turn enraged the community and cemented the foundations for a strain in relations between Hazaras and Abdur Rahman. The war which then ensued saw countless Hazaras killed, with 65% of the community massacred, according to Hazara oral history. Many Hazara women were also raped during the war, and some of those who could not flee to neighbouring Iran and British India, were captured and kept as slaves. After the war Hazaras were at bottom of the country’s social hierarchy, in part due to their religious beliefs, but also due to their ethnicity.

Most of the available literature on the Hazaras refers to the community as being of Mongol heritage, having arrived in the region in the 13^th Century. However, some Hazaras claim that they are of Turkic-Mongol heritage and have been present in the region for much longer, while others claim that Hazaras are indigenous to central Afghanistan. Despite these different heritage claims, the community’s distinct appearance set them apart from the vast majority of Afghan society and adds another layer to the discrimination and subjugation that the community has endured. This in turn lead to the manifestation of an internalised self-loathing among the community in th 20^th Century, with some Hazaras choosing to label themselves as Tajiks as means to prevent discrimination and ridicule.

The 1990s marked another dark period in the history of the Hazaras. After the civil war which ravaged the country, during the early years of the decade, the Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996. During this period many Afghans suffered. Under Taliban rule women were banned from going to school or studying, banned from working and banned from leaving the house without a male chaperone. Hindus and Sikhs were forced to pay a special tax and had to publicly identify themselves with yellow patches on their clothing. Ethnic Hazara were labelled as ‘infidels’ and Mullah Niazi, a Taliban governor in the north of the country, famously proclaimed that Hazaras must either convert to Sunni Islam or leave the country, otherwise they will be killed. Hazaras were also brutally massacred during this time. Several thousand Hazara civilians were killed in the city of Mazar-e Sharif over the course of several days. Hazara civilians were also massacred in Bamiyan province in 2001. The United Nations found mass graves in Bamiyan in 2002, which locals say were the result of one of the last massacre by the Taliban against the community in 2001, before they were ousted. 2001 was also the year that Bamiyan garnered international media attention, when two ancient statues of the Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.    

The Buddha statues of Bamiyan, referred to as Salsal and Shahmama in Hazara folklore, had been a fixture of the region’s landscape since the 6^th Century. Most news articles about the destruction of the statues state that they were removed by the Taliban on the orders of Mullah Omar, as they were perceived as idols, and this was done in order to bolster his supposed Islamic credentials. However, many Hazaras dispute that this was the real motivation as the why statues were destroyed. Some claim that the destruction of the statues was ethnically motivated as the statues proved their historical connection to central Afghanistan, and claim that the statues physical features matched their own[1]. However, the Taliban’s wanton destruction was short lived, as six months after the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, the Twin Towers fell, which marked a new chapter in Afghanistan’s history.

On the 7^th of October 2001 a new phase of the war in Afghanistan began, ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. President George W Bush, in his quest to bring the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks to justice, instigated a war that lasted almost twenty years. The NATO mission in Afghanistan marked the end of Taliban rule and in the same year the Bonn Conference took place in Germany, in order to establish a new Afghan head of state and implement a process of democratisation in the country. However, the Taliban were not invited to participate in the conference, although as we all know, less than twenty years after the Bonn Conference, the US initiated dialogue with the group in Doha, in 2018. From 2001 onwards the conditions for Hazaras in Afghanistan also changed. The situation for the community vastly improved in terms of access to education, as well as in public sector recruitment. Since 2001 it is Hazara youth who topped the national university entrance exam, known as the kankor. Civic gains and accomplishments among the Hazara community since 2001 are now ample. Examples of well-known Hazara accomplishments in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban include sportsman Rohullah Nikpai winning the country’s first ever Olympic medal at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Dr Sima Samar being the first Chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and singer Zahra Elham becoming the first female contestant to win the popular national music TV talent show ‘Afghan Star’ in the show’s 14-year history (in March 2019). Hazara visibility greatly increased in post-2001 Afghanistan and in the 2014 unity government, Hazara politician Muhammad Mohaqiq held a senior role, as second deputy of the chief executive.

Despite the educational opportunities presented to Hazaras since the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the better socio-economic status of Hazaras in urban centres in recent years, attacks on Hazaras in Afghanistan also increased during this new phase of the war. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Eligibility Guidelines for Assessing the International Protection needs of Asylum-Seekers from Afghanistan published in August 2018 noted that Hazaras have been killed at the hands of the Taliban, ISIS and Anti–Government Elements. In 2016, over one-hundredHazaras were killed in attacks for which ISIS claimed responsibility[2], and in 2017 there were multiple attacks on Shia Mosques and on Shia religious processions[3], as well as growing attacks in the Dasht-e Barchi neighbourhood of west Kabul, a predominately Hazara district. Since 2016 there have been multiple attacks against Hazaras in west Kabul, including at tuition centres, sports venues, wedding halls, hospitals and Mosques.

Just before the capture of Kabul, in July of this year, the Taliban massacred Hazara men in Ghazni province, which Amnesty International would later report was a massacre[4]. The situation for Hazaras in Afghanistan in 2021 under Taliban rule looks bleak. Only three days after the fall of Kabul the Taliban destroyed the statue of Abdul Ali Mazari a pivotal Hazara political leader who was killed by the group in 1995. The Taliban killed over a dozen Hazaras in Daikundi province at the end of August and are currently also forcibly displacing Hazaras from their homes in Daikundi. While in October of this year Hazara civilians were killed in attacks in Mosques in Kunduz and Kandahar. The new Taliban government does not have a single Hazara minister, which not only means that there is no Hazara representation in the new government, but also no Shia representation either. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum also released a statement that saying Hazaras face ‘…a risk of crimes against humanity or even genocide’[5]. Consequently, the return to Taliban rule in Afghanistan not only undermines the gains of Hazaras in the last twenty years but marks the start of more repression of a historically marginalised community.   

This article was first published in German for the iz3w magazine in October 2021.

Rabia Latif Khan is a Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She recently completed her doctoral degree on Hazara ethnic consciousness from SOAS. She also holds an LLM in Human Rights from SOAS.

[1] See: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=7039902.

[2] For information on attacks on Hazaras in Afghanistan see: www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39031000.  

[3] For news articles on attacks on Shia religious spaces in Afghanistan see:

1) www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/world/asia/mosque-kabul-attack.html.

2) www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-afghanistan-shiites-20171021-story.html.

3) www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/28/blast-afghan-news-agency-kabul-kills-dozens.

[4] See: www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/08/afghanistan-taliban-responsible-for-brutal-massacre-of-hazara-men-new-investigation/.

[5] See: https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museum-statement-on-the-hazara. 

Since 1979, with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Afghans had formed the third-largest displaced people in the world, behind the Syrians and Venezuelans in the last four decades. There are still 2.2 million Afghan refugees living in neighbouring countries. With the fall of the Taliban after the US-led war in 2001, many Afghans returned, hoping to rebuild their nation. In June 2002, I flew from Dubai to Kabul, when the first Loya Jirga or the Grand Council (mass national gathering of representatives from the various ethnic, religious, and tribal communities in Afghanistan) were meeting to decide the country’s future. Most of the in-flight Afghan passengers were living in various countries for years. When the pilot announced that the flight had entered the Afghan airspace, the returnees clapped while bursting into joyful tears. I could immediately feel the pain of my fellow passengers, their long physical and emotional separation and simultaneously the excitement of returning to their homeland — a first-hand experience that will be etched in my mind forever. 

As the recent news of the Taliban taking control of Afghanistan came in, television and social media were filled with stories of desperate Afghans trying to leave their country. Within a week of Kabul falling into Taliban hands, such news no longer felt impersonal. Talking to my friends, former colleagues, and acquaintances in Afghanistan, I grappled with individual narratives of fleeing and evacuation. Two young Afghans, whom I have known for years reached out with replies to my anxious queries about their well-being and that of families. One lives in Washington DC, where he pursued higher studies after working for the Afghan government for a few years. He anxiously called to move his two brothers holding government jobs and their parents as NGO workers to any country. After a couple of weeks, he informed me that his family could reach Paris with help from a few friends and he was now waiting to take them to the USA. 

Another message came from a young friend living in Canada who was caught in Kabul after the Taliban marched into the capital. Within a week, he and his two brothers were fortunately evacuated by the Canadian military. But they had to leave behind their ageing parents in Kabul, amidst the looming chaos of violent, harsh and uncertain rules of the Taliban. These personal messages of appeal, seeking a way out despite family estrangement, are in sharp contrast to hopeful Afghans returning united from Pakistan and Iran, nearly two decades ago. The current overtake by Talibans has fuelled skepticism among the Afghan returnees, deeply entrenched in a collective memory of fear of the Taliban’s brutal legacy between 1996 and 2001. Despite the ongoing Taliban promises of a more inclusive transition of power, the ethnic divisions from within sustain the ground reality of uncertain times and another surge in refugee exodus. As I write in the light of several fragmented personal messages, I am haunted by the days of empty ghost villages in the harsh mountain terrains where peace and hope seem ever so distant.

Photos were taken by Nazes Afroz, Afghanistan 2002.

Nazes Afroz is the former Executive Editor for the South and Central Asia region of the BBC World Service. He is currently based in Delhi, doing his own independent writing and photography projects. 

SSAI Sanglaap’s webinar A Game of Power: West Bengal Assembly Elections, was held with eight speakers in two related panel discussions before the result was declared this week. The Indian State of Bengal located in the vulnerable ‘borderland’ region of South Asia, is a hotspot for communal tensions and violence following the legacy of Partition and Decolonisation. Violence was building up ahead of the high-octane eight-phase West Bengal Assembly polls — a target state for the ruling majority BJP that has steadily progressed in Eastern India. 

South Asia’s national elections are known for their high pitch drama, emotional investment, demonstration of wealth, internecine conflict among contesting political parties, and competition between an array of new promises. The recent Assembly elections (April/May) in the Indian states brings into sharper focus regional powers opposing the majoritarian BJP as the ruling parliamentary party. States have control over agriculture – a burning question today, industrial employment, health, education, public order, and State public services. Hence, policies at the sub-national level impact national implementation, relations with neighbours and ultimately foreign policy – neglected areas in micro election analysis and literature on diplomacy. Within the electoral context, Bengal’s geopolitical position is crucial for the Central government relations with Bangladesh and its ambitious maritime interest to constrain China in the Indian Ocean Region and Indo-Pacific. Bengal also serves as the gateway to the North East and strategic routes in North Bengal connecting to the Silk route. The election shows the tensions brewing in the state and the Eastern Himalayan region due to leaps in BJP’s vote shares and capture of 77/292 Assembly seats ending in post-poll indiscriminate violence. While the granular data on electoral behaviour is emerging, the SSAI webinar on the pre-election analysis pointed to the impossibility of predicting a neat outcome. The triumphant results of the Bengal elections brought euphoria and relief to the ruling All India Trinamool Congress and for its leader, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee that proves the uncertain and volatile nature of the emerging federal politics.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) CPI (M) ruled the state for over three decades until the current Trinamool Congress won a majority in 2011, the year of Change/ Parivartan marking a decade long rule and returned to power in May 2021 with a two-thirds majority. The TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee has been sworn in as the Chief Minister of the State for the third consecutive time winning with 213 seats and 47.94 per cent in vote share. For the first time since India’s independence, Bengal Assembly will see the BJP (substantial growth with 38.13 per cent vote share) as the main opposition, with the regional Congress Party and the CPI (M) completely eroded.

Before the election, Mohammed Salim, former Member of Parliament and member of the CPI (M) Polit Bureau, spoke at the webinar about repositioning the Left with emerging regional alliances. The CPI (M) Congress alliance has been unprecedented except for pre-electoral seat understanding in 2016. Salim points to the critical aspects of grassroots and street-level participation, culture and ethos underlying a counter-narrative of the Third front, easily overlooked in the media reporting on mainly polarised political campaigns. Post-poll, the realigned Left enthusiasm received a heavy blow and has been criticised for opportunistic alliances without much groundwork by both veteran and emerging campaigners.

Prof Sekhar Bandyopadhyay commented on the ideological repositioning of caste-based identity in Bengal elections. Historically, long periods of stability in the post-Partition decades of Communist rule kept caste as a socio-economic marker of identity outside communal politics. Currently, it is gaining strength among migrants from Bangladesh who crossed over after few years of the Bengal Partition. New legislation on Indian citizenship underpinning the politics of hope has influenced the flexible political allegiance of lower caste groups and their electoral behaviour. The poll results in North Bengal reveal the divided communal response endorsing, on the one hand, the ruling TMC’s opposition to the legislation, and on the other hand, the fear of those seeking protection from Central government promises.

Prof Maitreesh Ghatak (LSE Economics) views the shift in political narrative from growth to Mamata Banerjee’s thrust on social protection schemes that potentially swelled the support of floating voters – a campaign feature emerging as the solid foundation for gendered politics in state-level opposition. West Bengal’s election campaign has been tuned to high pitch personality politics, offering the scope to challenge the patriarchal leadership.

Dr Indrajit Roy (York) gave the larger picture of Bengal’s strained relations with the majoritarian BJP led Central government systematically pushing for the 21st century, Akhand Bharat. Such a project unified under one-party rule bears regional significance in the wider Indo-Pacific and Bangladesh borders. Bengal’s ethnonationalism bypasses critical issues like the ecological hazards of the deltaic region, Rohingya refugees in the Indo-Bangladesh border that influence anti-immigration sentiments on both sides of the border. 

Dr Subir Sinha (SOAS) talks of Bengal’s hyper-nationalism and the unpredictable response to Hindutva constituting the election’s momentum narrative that privileges identity politics over any development drive or urgency. The election results boost the populist perception of Bengal’s exceptionalism and rising expectations of liberal reforms from TMC’s anti-communal stances.

The second part of the webinar focuses on grassroots responses to sectarian politics, the crisis of Bengal’s liberalism, minority questions and those emerging in the borderlands concerning China’s regional influence. Shahnawaz Ali Raihan, Epsita Halder and Ambar Kumar Ghosh comment on the nature of contentious federalism and regional identity highlighted by the election-winning slogan “Bengal chooses its own daughter’.

Overall, the discussants point to the critical and violent phase of regional coalition building and myriad media responses to India’s electoral politics. 

As I reminisce the Ph.D. fieldwork trip to New Delhi, the earliest memory that comes to mind is social activist Aruna Roy telling me about how she and her colleagues were described as “urban Naxals” by a right-wing Hindi language publication in Rajasthan. That term was originally used by the filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri in his 2018 book, which became wildly popular as a label for any left-leaning intellectual or activist who was critical of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The publication also cast an accusatory net over the users of India’s Right to Information Act, describing them as trouble-makers having ‘Naxalite’ intentions.

Naxalites are left-wing extremists who employ violent means to overthrow the state. But Roy, a prominent figure in India’s right to information movement, has long held that laws such as the RTI Act, 2005 would help eliminate extremist tendencies among disgruntled social groups by giving them a chance to meaningfully participate in governance.

I had just begun field research on the subject of India’s right to information movement back then, and it was evident that the political climate in the country was no longer conducive to rights-based activism after the BJP had returned to power for a second term in May 2019.

In October 2020, India observed the 15th anniversary of the passage of the Right to Information Act, 2005 amidst concerns regarding the shrinking space for dissent. Advocates of the transparency law were increasingly finding themselves threatened by government action under one pretext or the other. In August 2019, when citizens protested against the hasty amendments made to the RTI Act, I was witness to how a group of citizens led by transparency activists in Delhi were rounded up by the police when they tried to submit a petition to the President containing 5000 opposing signatures, pleading him not to give assent to the amendments.

A day before I returned to London in October, one of the transparency activists I interviewed in Delhi, told me that she and a few of her activist friends were questioned by the Delhi Police for participating in the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests in February.

In December 2019, the Indian Parliament passed the CAA law, which strikes at the root of India’s secular identity, by making religion a basis for granting citizenship. The activist along with other opponents organised a Mahila Ekta Yatra (women’s solidarity march) and visited different Muslim neighbourhoods in Delhi to express solidarity with the protests. The women read out the preamble of the Constitution, which declares India to be a sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic, promising equality to all citizens under the law. The Delhi Police, in one of the charge sheets filed on the 2020 Delhi riots, has framed the Mahila yatra, among those held guilty of inciting communal violence in North-East Delhi.  The police has subsequently stonewalled several right to information queries on its riots probe.

One may well ask, why the targeting of a few prominent activists should concern the Indian right to information movement, at large? The answer lies in the fact that the RTI Act was passed on the basis of the fundamental rights guaranteed to citizens in the Constitution. On October 12, the day India commemorates ‘RTI Day’, an online meeting of activists and campaigners from across the country organised by the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI), became an occasion for highlighting the increasing threat to freedom of speech and expression simultaneously threatening the people’s right to information as well. After all, both the rights flow out of Article 19 of the Constitution. The RTI Act was enacted to empower the ordinary citizen to ask questions of the conduct of those running the affairs of the government. But as the space for dissent shrinks, the concern was who would dare to question the government now? Using the RTI law in India comes with an element of risk, as hundreds of users have been attacked or even killed for exposing corruption or other wrongdoing.

Harsh Mander, a former bureaucrat, who quit the Indian civil services after witnessing the Godhra riots in Gujarat, spoke at the NCPRI meeting about how the Indian government was criminalising dissent by using the sedition law and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) against protesters. A founding member of the NCPRI and a veteran of India’s right to information movement, Mander is one of the activists named in the Delhi riots charge sheet for addressing an anti-CAA meeting. He decried the manner in which the government has actively withheld information from the public of late. Referring to the instance of how the government dodged a question in Parliament on the death of migrants and jobs lost during the COVID-19 lockdown, Mander observed that this was an antithesis of Section 4 of the RTI Act, which obliges the government to make mandatory disclosures in the larger public interest.

Another blow to the right to information movement comes from the amendment to the FCRA [Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act] in 2020, which restricts public officials and NGOs from raising foreign donations. An RTI activist, affiliated with an international NGO, privately told me that the FCRA amendment could jeopardise the NGO’s functioning, as most of their funding came from foreign sources. In September, Amnesty International’s India office shut shop after being accused of raising foreign funding illegally inciting fear among other organisations engaged in similar work.

Despite these discouraging developments what stands out in the end is the unwavering enthusiasm exhibited by ordinary Indians in exercising their right to know. Venkatesh Nayak, head of the Access to Information programme at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, said that since the RTI Act was passed in 2005, over 30 million queries have been filed under the law. In 2018-19, Indian citizens filed over 1.3 million information requests, which was significantly higher than the appeals registered in previous years. If anything, the robust use of the law is an indicator that no matter how hard the government tries, the spirit of public inquiry cannot be suppressed.

[Vidya Venkat is a post-fieldwork PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. Her thesis is tentatively titled ‘India’s Democratic Revolution: Right to Information and the anti-corruption discourse’.]

Gorringe writes the account covering Manch UK’s Meet the Artist digital series held during the critical period of the pandemic lockdown.

South Asian Dance in the Pre-Digital Era

Looking at a timeline within the last forty years, it is possible to evoke a different world of South Asian dance experience in the UK that could be disparate, lonesome, and left to unforeseen circumstances. Magdalen Gorringe reflects on five migrating women artists of Manch UK — Sujata Banerjee, Nilima Devi, Sanjeevini Dutta, Piali Ray and Bisakha Sarker, who together have been instrumental in putting South Asian dance on the British culture map and making it part of the British consciousness. Their stories emerge from the period of pre-British South Asian dance organisations (formal) and are characterised by professional relations developed during the pre-internet, social media, and YouTube era. In the current context, where one can locate any number of classical Indian dancers at the click of a few computer keys, it is perhaps hard to recall how much this facility has reshaped the world of South Asian dance. The lack of social media tools reinforced the loneliness of five dancers, who left their home and a life brimming with dance, music and performance to find a niche and reshape a dance career in the quiet suburban life of 1970s Britain.

Sujata Banerjee

Sujata Banerjee MBE, is the artistic director of the Sujata Banerjee Dance Company and has led pioneering collaborative productions with classical dancers and artists of the diverse genre. She is an influential figure in the South Asian Arts industry having been the Chair of ISTD Dance Indian Classical Dance Faculty as well as being recognised and awarded the One Dance UK’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Dance Education.Sujata Banerjee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbxgaOHcyf0

Nilima Devi

Nilima Devi MBE is the artistic director of Centre of In Indian Classical Dance and a leading exponent of Kathak in the UK, a dancer, choreographer and teacher originally from India who has firmly established a professional reputation in the West. She has choreographed and performed beautiful creative choreographies like Kathak Katha, Beethovan’s piano concerto no1, The Ugly Duckling, Triangle, Kathak Double Bill, Rainbow, Flaming Feet (Kathak dance and music with Irish dance and music), Against the tide, Brahmari, Images and Urjah.
Link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIvgJMy4QEA

Sanjeevini Dutta

Sanjeevini Dutta trained in Odissi with Shri Shankar Behera in Bombay and London is a performer, educator, curator, publisher and a spokesperson for classical arts. Currently, she is the director of Kadam Dance and the editor of the website www.pulseconnects.com
Link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmxysXbn3eA

Piali Ray

Piali Ray: An eminent Bharatanatyam and Uday Shankar style dancer, choreographer and teacher and the Director of Sampad Arts, a leading national agency for the development of South Asian arts. Link- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIMmxj-bt2s&t=18s

Bisakha Sarkar

Bisakha Sarkar: Bisakha Sarker MBE – dancer, producer, choreographer, researcher, educationalist, critic, writer and video maker. Artistic Director of Chaturangan, Bisakha’s innovative work over the decades has brought her much acclaim, challenging many traditional cultural boundaries along the way. Link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsD9FuSVZPc

Migrating into New Terrain

‘When I came here, I realized that nobody understood what I was saying if I said, ‘I do the Uday Shankar style of Indian dance’. They did not understand and had not heard the name. That was until I went to join the dance choir for Laban dancers. Of all the people, Lisa Ullman came to join me at the breakfast table, and she asked me, ‘So how is Uday Shankar?’. She had met the dada in Dartington. That was the first time my two worlds came together – my world in the UK and my dance world in India.’

This poignant anecdote from Bisakha Sarker encapsulates the early experience of migration for the five artists I reflect on here. Lacking today’s commonplaces of Facebook and LinkedIn, these dancers relied for their connections on travel and luck. The story of how Bisakha first met her ‘dance partner’ Sanjeevini, by attending a party at Sanjeevini’s thanks to a mutual friend, photographer Ray Clarke, in today’s world seems almost quaint. Sanjeevini Dutta, her imagination fired by a childhood in which she had enjoyed classical music outside the Pearl Mosque in moonlight, arrived from Bombay (as it was then) to a ‘very dull’ suburban London. Piali Ray arrived from Kolkata, a city in which she had been performing with several dance groups, including the Uday Shankar Culture Centre group to Birmingham which was very ‘quiet in the evenings. After six, everything just closed down’. Sujata Banerjee, a young mother in an unknown country, came across Pushkala Gopal and learnt about Akademi (then Academy of Indian Dance) through a convoluted journey involving a workshop, a youth dance performance and then as director of Youth Dance England, Linda Jasper. She describes attending a rehearsal of Academy’s Return of Spring and realizing ‘What! People dance here! There are so many people!’ — as surprise revelation and a chance encounter of a brave new world.

In 1972, Mathoor Krishnamurthi had established the Bhavan Centre in London and by 1979, Tara Rajkumar had established the Academy, but in other parts of Britain, there was nothing. Nilima Devi recalls: In Leicester she started teaching ‘at the back of our house’ because there were no established facilities for classes. Piali Ray, arriving in Birmingham where there was ‘nothing like’ an Academy or a Bhavan, discovered in the humiliation and confusion of, for example, going into a school and not even being sure ‘where she could sit’, an acute awareness that ‘there was a lot to do’ and a determination to ‘at least begin to do something’ to meet this ‘much needed requirement’. As she observes, ‘…that’s how Sampad happened.’

It was a time of questions, of trying, as Piali recalls, ‘to understand how this country was working, where we were, how do we fit in, how does our culture, our music and dance fit into this society?’ Sanjeevini worked with Bisakha, ‘really trying to analyse what it was in our dance form – it was a classical form, it requires years of training’ to decide ‘how you could ‘take elements from it and make it something interactive for young people?’ These artists were assisted in their investigations by the enlightened policy in place at that time (pioneered in part by the great Peter Brinson) of encouraging dance in communities through employing dance animateurs. The first animateur posts ‘were established between 1976 and1979, but numbers accelerated during the 1980s as Arts Councils, Regional Arts Associations and local authorities invested in animateur posts in their areas’ (Stevens and Jasper, forthcoming). In 1992, it was estimated that there were more than 250 animateurs.

Nilima and Piali initially job-shared an animateur role in the East Midlands; Sanjeevini and Sujata shared a role in the Eastern region, while Bisakha took up a post in Liverpool. The work of Piali and Nilima meant co-operation and as Nilima puts it, ‘dance was buzzing in Leicester’ — so much so that they were able to launch a successful ‘trainee animateur programme’. One of the graduates of this scheme was Smita Vadnerkar who now does a lot for South Asian dance through the group Nupur Arts. Sanjeevini and Sujata used their initial animateur roles to launch Kadam, with all this has meant for the sector, including Summer schools additional to those offered by the Bhavan (subsequently taken on by Milapfest) and rehousing the sector magazine, Pulse when its founding organisation (ADiTi) folded. Meanwhile for Piali, her animateur work served as a ‘research and development’ period for her later work with Sampad. Nilima’s work led her to emulate the practise of ballet companies in picking up young talent from schools – and the training she offered to these and other young people led to the nurturing of young kathak dancers Aakaash Odedra, Kesha Raithathah and Meera Patel. Sanjeevini’s early and consistent work in Bedfordshire schools developed Odissi dancer, Katie Ryan. As Bisakha reflects, ‘the animateur movement took me to [a place where] …there is no division between audience and people — you can really feel that you are connecting.’ Blurring the physical division even more, Sujata (in salwar kameez and ‘bindi’) recollects her emotional enthusiasm being inspired by her new-found knowledge of anatomy and physiology through studying Sports Science at Brunel. She admired the beautiful balance of goalkeeper’s David James’ warm-ups by screaming in the packed football stadium ‘His legs! His legs! Look at his legs!’. Her accompanying son perhaps did not understand this intentional observation and avoided going to football matches with her thereafter.

The concluding thought on the body and art of the dancer, comes from Sanjeevini who also reflects on age: ‘The dancer may grow old, but the dance never does. The beauty of classical dance is that it comes back again and again, it sustains, it survives, it gives us strength to carry on. And I hope to be able to pass it on to the next generation.’ Through various reflections of the travelling dancer it is evident that continuing the dance, in its form and content has been a source of hope and ambitious labour of love. Their testimony here reveal how the achievements of each of these five strong women and inspirational artists were shaped by travel into a new terrain, friendship and adaptations that coalesced to leave distinguished footprints of creativity in the pre-digital age.

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Magdalen Gorringe is a Bharatanatyam dancer and academic. Gorringe started learning Bharatanatyam growing up as a child in India. She completed her arangetram in 1999 under Sri Prakash Yaddagudde at the Bhavan Centre, London. She is currently on a Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship at the University of Roehampton for a PhD thesis on The Professionalisation of Classical Indian Dance Forms in Britain.

Had heard that every cloud has a silver lining! Aligarh Muslim University, and especially its Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences, had never been technologically savvy. Most of its Faculty, as well as its students, have always been very conservative and laid back not only in their approach to life but also at adapting to the ways of the modern world. We have always been quite proud of our “traditions” and simple ways. “Smart Classrooms” to us generally meant a room equipped with a projector placed on a table facing a screen. Even where a piece of full equipment with the entire gamut of paraphernalia has been installed, it is sheltered under lock and key and generally preserved for the future generations!

So when this particular academic year-long breaks occurred, first due to the anti-CAA agitations and then the outbreak of the worldwide pandemic due to Covid-19, there was much apprehension as to the future of the students. But the lead taken by AMU Faculty and Students has been beyond all expectations. Let me say that what would have been ordinary in some other world-class institutions, appeared innovative here.

Within a week of the lockdown being announced, some teachers were busy downloading the Zoom application and inviting their students to join in. Soon, by word of mouth, the message spread, and many Departments – English, Linguistics, History, Economics etc were on the Zoom interacting with their students. Some even graduated from teaching to moderating discussions and roping in “experts” from other institutions to guide the discussions. Some chose the open access forums instead of Zoom. They started live hour-long sessions on YouTube, received queries on WhatsApp or Messenger and answered following the lectures, thus making room for individual attention to student needs. Some started tailoring the themes of their lectures according to requests and feedback. I initiated a series of YouTube Live lectures on a contemporary theme: religion and the attitudes of the sovereigns of Medieval India that sparked interest at a time when all eyes fell on authority and pandemic responsibilities.

All these sessions were shared on various WhatsApp groups and in no time, history-related topics rapidly grew out of Facebook accounts that no longer fitted into the populist perspectives but experts faced up to the new social media’s The History Learner, contents of which generated a number of critical blogs. The teachers of each course formed their groups for giving out assignments and collection. AMU is currently on the verge of assessing students via digital platforms.

The pandemic lockdown has, therefore, accelerated the use of modern technology as a teaching and learning tool but without dedicated time to assess either the consequences or limits of applying technology on the ground. The assessment of student works is significantly compromised due to the dismal speed of the internet and its reach in the far-flung rural and mofussil areas where many students live and had to return. Perhaps their campus-based learning is further hindered by rising unemployment, confinement and/or parent’s inability to pay for education. Secondly, high-priced and fast-speed technology disempowers students from poor backgrounds. Lastly, there are particular familial conditions in institutions as Aligarh, where students are first or second generations into any formal education. They are not at par economically, educationally and intellectually to easily adapt to the technology-driven methods of learning that seem the new normality in educational institutions like DU or the IIT’s. AMU in lockdown is changing but is also an example of how an automatic switchover to technology as the solution to life in confinement might be far from reality due to inherent inequalities in social transformation.

Amid Covid-19 pandemic, Professor Richard Grove left us too early. Grove was a trailblazer and maverick who worked across archives in the British Empire to develop a fresh understanding of imperial science and environmentalism that developed out of colonial foot soldiers exploring natural phenomena in the colonies. The science of El Nino and environmentalism he argued, developed at the edge of empires and not in metropolitan quarters of continental Europe. His doctoral thesis from Cambridge published under the intellectually original and thought-provoking topic, in title Green Imperialism in 1995, opened new windows on our shared past. Grove straddled across the Indian Ocean world and the Pacific to establish a historically grounded elucidation of El Nino events that were new to humanities and historical scholarship during the 1990s.

Besides being an erudite researcher, he established a network of scholars who gave a fresh impetus to environmental history as a discipline in the global south. He initiated the transdisciplinary collaboration with atmospheric scientists, paleo-ecologists, botanists, geographers, historians among scholastic peers to understand climate change, forest fire, El Nino, drought, and other challenging environmental issues of our time in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Grove thus pioneered the field of Environmental History in the global South and left an indomitable legacy. His work Green Imperialism recentred the significance of the Empire’s periphery towards understanding the birth of environmentalism. For this contribution, he was recognised by his peers as a ‘romantic’, and his ground-breaking work had a deep impact in academia.

I had a chance encounter with the polymath as a graduate researcher during his visit to Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2005. He came to attend a conference and launch the book of his colleague in the Centre for the Studies in Science Policy. During the conference, he conscientiously took notes and was absorbed in deep thinking asking enlightening questions. He was attentive to details and exploring uncharted territories in his persuasive presentations and talks. Later in life when I came to teach at Sussex, I made several sojourns to his home in Lewes. For the past year before the lockdown, I absorbed a lot about his path-breaking academic adventures and personal life while interacting with (his wife and historian of South Asia) Vinita Damodaran and son Edwin. During one such visit to his home in Lewes in 2019, we watched the BBC documentary on El Nino (later compiled as a monograph jointly by George Adamson under the title El Nino in World history) that showcased a pioneering study of weather extremes as a developing historical idea governing climate change arguments. Thus, Grove’s ambitious life work on the ‘millennial history of the El Nino’ — a study of the climate crisis in different socio-cultural contexts did the groundwork of the much-discussed role of ‘environmental humanities’ in contemporary global environmental change scholarship. Thinking of the environment ahead of his time, he collected data painstakingly from different archives small and big and was reinventing the discipline. He functioned dexterously as an ‘activist academic’ and championed the cause of the underprivileged and marginalised.

From my numerous interactions with Grove and his family, I came to realise that he had a heart of gold and went beyond his capacity to help colleagues, friends and even strangers. On one occasion, Grove helped a man who was stranded at an airport and had no ticket to return home. Grove bought him a ticket and did not expect anything in return. He was a light-hearted person who assisted people in need, particularly his peers — financially and intellectually. His generosity and simplicity towards life were part of his magnanimity. Thus, he pioneered not only in academic research but was an exemplar in private life through philanthropy.

An interesting part of Grove’s character as an intellectual was his consistent resistance to establishment and bureaucracy. He dreamt of a free society where knowledge could be shared without barriers and across borders. He was continually active in resistance movements and inspired many to take up environmental history which was a nascent discipline during the 1980s and 90s across South Asia, Africa and little islands in Asia and the Caribbean. He believed in collegiality and established south-south network with scholars, researchers and academic institutions to establish a collaborative scholarship that gave voice to academic outputs from these regions. The launch of the journal Environment and History published by White Horse Press was an initiative in this direction taken a quarter-century ago. He established the Centre for World Environmental History at Sussex University and championed many other initiatives with his colleagues in South Asia and across the globe. He also established collaborative networks with Indian universities and in Australia. While serving as an ARC Discovery Fellowship Research Chair Professor at Australian National University, he met with a perilous road accident in Australia just months after I met him in New Delhi in 2006. This incident kept him permanently incapacitated to work.

As an environmental activist and maverick, Grove was less drawn to tenured academic positions, and remained a firm believer in field research. His collaborative enterprise and intellectual acumen challenged the frontiers of environmental history; his original works bear the mark of a scholar humanist. His loss has left a deep void in academia, but his scholarly legacy will continue by expanding the domain of environmental history as a discipline.

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 Dr Debojyoti Das is a SOAS alumnus and Global Research Associate at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the book titled The Politics of Swidden Farming: Environment and Development in Eastern India (2018).

by Dr Sanjukta Ghosh (SSAI)

Faced with the pandemic, and likened to a war-like situation, the present scenario takes us back to the dialogues on mental health started a century ago in the trenches of the First World War. Not only did the flu affect healthy bodies in 1918, but the war-wounded soldiers also turned to regular music sessions for stabilising their mental health. Mental health is viewed in the media as the frontier of struggle in the post-COVID-19 decades of the 21st century. The pandemic has, consequently, advanced the societal and cultural conversations on mental health, removing the taboo and discrimination associated with the victim’s candid expressions. The event co-chaired by the founding Director of Sangeet Foundation, for example, brought out the personal anguish of coming to terms with the diagnosis of a close family member, who incidentally benefitted from drumming as a musical activity. Although music and mental health remain an open conversation and subject to conjectures, many artists working on the principle of music as a universal panacea are viewing their roles in the wider context of professional functionality.

Bickram Ghosh is renowned for his experimental music and has a fan following among the youth in India, known globally for his command over the state-of-the-art fusion. He reflects on his ability to navigate the indigenous percussion instrument of Tabla with an acquired sense of rhythm supremely charged with cosmic synergies.

The cyclic nature of the Indian tala linked to the rotation of the earth is known to be macro-cosmic, but he turns to the microcosmic rhythm, looking more closely to the familiar patterns of the pulse and heartbeats. Knowledge about the physical micro rhythm and its consciousness is part and parcel of the human evolution, as we see in the responses of a new-born baby. This natural proclivity means we can adapt rhythm more effectively in daily lives and through interpersonal communication. Bickram Ghosh talks at length on the language of the tabla as an effective aid to understand the pace and speed around us. Using the mechanism of storytelling, he turns to the repetitious nature of oral cultures of the world that has informed the practices of a percussionist. The language of percussion breaks down barriers, teaches us the force of modulation and accent for effective and affective communication.

The language of drumming is onomatopoeic — the sound echoes the sense. Speaking of the syllables of drumming, Bickram is reminded of the childhood stories that attracted him to the tabla. In the conversation, one gets a glimpse of the Indian household, where the daily language of joy is imbued with rhythmic qualities. The deployment of stories in Bickram’s tabla tukda is imaginative and creative; the idiom suiting the Indian milieu draws upon the analogy of the non-human in folk and mythical imaginaries. Through the medium of familiar storytelling in the Tabla tukdas, a wholly immersive world can be constructed which is liberated from an agenda-based communication. He says, ‘Words judge but tabla language has no agenda’. Attracted to the fluid tabla language, Vikram creates the vocabulary of a soundscape which is intrinsically connected to people’s sense of nostalgia, memory, high energy, and long-term synergies of a community.

Drawn to English literature and the contemporary turn to prosody, Vikram’s percussion is attentive to tone for impactful sensory interventions. As music is about frequencies and playing with percussion rhythm, he sees the route into the parts of the emotional brain – happiness points to vibrate on. Relating to the cyclic nature of the Indian tala, he points to the importance of rhythmic language, phonetic changes, and frequency of sound as tools to detach from the fractional self, and as means of union with the universal cosmic rhythm. Such a projection of the soundscape, evident from his works such as Dance of Shiva, he can connect his tabla to a larger vision. Dance of Shiva exemplifies the transition from the technical and localising potential of rhythm to the ramifications of music. Music is seen as a portal to help mental health, whereby the musician is simply the conduit but the consumer needs to understand how the mechanics of body and mind can work with the rhythms the musician creates and disseminates.

Live stream video:

https://youtu.be/aevYDHhpY_o

In this lively conversation, Bickram Ghosh reminiscences music recording in the UK with George Harrison, childhood music scene in Kolkata, and delves into the creation of the Dance of Shiva and the recording of The Ultimate Performer. Awarded the second-highest civilian award Banga Bhushan (West Bengal, India), Pt Bickram Ghosh is a globally acclaimed percussionist and New-age star known for his experimental music. Born to a family of highly acclaimed musicians — the son and disciple of the great tabla maestro Pandit Shankar Ghosh and classical vocalist Vidushi Smt Sanjukta Ghosh, his Carnatic training came from Pt S Sekhar. Bickram has an impressive array of recordings of over a hundred, fourteen Hindi and Bengali scoring, documentaries, television and acting in five films and has fulfilled ambassadorial roles. He is a versatile artist who has performed with distinguished Hindustani and Carnatic classical artists such as Pt Ravi Shankar for eleven years, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Pt. Shivkumar Sharma and has a following among the country’s youth as a pioneer in new-age experimental music.