Over the top

By Sophia Furber

Dancing Kathak in London

Image: Meenakshi Payal, flickr

Mahalakshmi Vidya Bhavan, a Hindu temple in London suburbia, is an unassuming white building that sits on top of a hill, next to an Anglican church. Apart from the red and yellow flags on the roof, there is little to suggest that this building is a temple; for it not only serves as a place of worship for the south London Hindu community, but also as a hub of education, providing classes in Hindi, Sanskrit, yoga and kathak, an ancient north Indian dance form.

Every Saturday morning, the temple comes alive with chants of ‘ta-thei-thei-tat-a-thei-thei-tat’, with rhythmic stampings to these chants and the subsequent jingle of ghungrus, dancing bells tied around the ankles. This is the sound of a dozen of us, from a range of different ages and backgrounds, getting together to learn the basics of kathak, such as tatkar, rhythmic compositions involving turns, stamps and claps; and a gat bhav, a stylised walk narrating, usually, a religious story. One of the popular themes, which we are learning to depict as well, is about Krishna teasing Radha – a theme referenced countless times in Bollywood dance sequences. Not surprisingly then, it was a scene in a Bollywood movie, Dil to Pagal Hain – where Madhuri Dixit’s character breaks into an impromptu kathak sequence to Shah Rukh Khan’s drumbeats from the corner of a dance studio – that introduced me to kathak. After dancing contemporary routines for several years, and after dabbling in Nepali folk and bollywood dances during a stint working in Nepal, I decided to take up kathak on my return to London. Little did I realise that I had set myself up for bashed knees, a lot of confusion, and something of an adventure.

Kathak has developed a loyal following in London, both within the diaspora and outside. Major arts centres like South Bank and Sadlers’ Wells regularly feature this Indian classical dance in their programme rosters. In fact, initially the Mahalakshi temple had intended the class to be for children only. The strong interest from the Southasian community and from a few dance-lovers outside it, of which I am one, meant that it extended the lessons to adults as well. An evidence of kathak’s international presence is our own teacher, Maria Scialdone, originally from Italy, who trained in kathak in both India and London.

In recent years, in the London dance scene, kathak has been enjoying a profile higher than ever before, thanks largely to the Akram Khan Dance Company which blends contemporary dance styles with that of Southasian classical ones. Akram Khan, a British dancer of Bangladeshi descent, was trained in kathak, from the age of seven, before he studied contemporary dance. Khan is not the only one to experiment with fusing kathak with other styles though. The Sonia Sabri Company has evolved its own distinctive blend of hip-hop and kathak, which they call ‘urban kathak’.

Not all dancers are enthusiastic about the idea of fusion however. One Mumbai-based practitioner described it as ‘a dead end’ and a waste of time’. Nonetheless, there seems to be a great deal of openness in London to exploring the possibilities that this hybridisation presents.

When taking up any Indian classical dance class in London, not just kathak, there are a lot of cultural differences for non-Southasian dance students to adapt to, one of which is the student-teacher relationship. Dance teachers are revered in India; talking back to a teacher or in class is heavily discouraged. Even for those of us who have been shouted at for not standing up straight, or have had their bottoms slapped by ballet teachers, the approach of Indian classical dance teachers can come as a shock. ‘They are a lot stricter,’ Scialdone, my teacher, says of the Indian dance teachers. ‘There is also a tendency to give you a huge amount of new material all at once, which can be quite intimidating. This does allow you to test your limits, though.’

This propensity to throw more material at the new student than they can absorb is a common complaint among Westerners learning Southasian dance or musical instruments. The ‘shock and awe’ tactics that many teachers use are intended to stretch the student’s ability, but to the uninitiated, this approach to learning can seem baffling. One friend, an accomplished musician, who is learning to play the bansuri (flute) once said that his teacher always brushed off his pleas for more explanation with a curt reply: ‘just listen to me and follow, you’ll pick it up.’

With Scialdone as our teacher, we at the Mahalakshmi temple are a little luckier. As she says, there is more to kathak than just getting the steps right: ‘You definitely need to have a strong technique, and the ability to be spontaneous. The other important thing is your abhinaya, your expression. To an extent this is something that can be learned, but a lot of it is to do with innate ability.’

Kathak can be a difficult dance form to learn, and I have certainly had moments of confusion and times when I wish I were in bed just like my friends. However, the feeling of satisfaction when I finally get to grips with a tricky combination of steps makes it worthwhile. And when I get dizzy from practicing spins, Manju, a grandmother and, in her time, an accomplished kathak dancer, mentions that when she was a little girl, she could do 100 spins in one go. A talented tabla player, Manju, often delights us with her impromptu sways to our tatkars and gat bhavs. It is because of these small pleasures that I always come away from the Mahalakshmi temple feeling that I have had more than just a dance lesson.

By Amit Julka

Photo: foreignpolicy.com

Years ago, when I was staying in Kolkata, I used to enjoy having long conversations with my driver Khan. I was learning Urdu at that time, and Khan would often help me out on this regard. As time passed, the nature of our conversations went beyond the confines of Urdu, and we would talk about politics, religion and everything else under the sun. One day, as our discussion veered towards India’s Muslim community and all of a sudden, Khan’s expression became more serious, and he said “Problem yeh hai ke hum musalmaan apne bacchon ko padhaate nahin, sirf khilaate rehte hain” (The problem is that we focus not on educating our children, but on feeding them).

It was quite heartening to see that here was this average Javed, hardly educated himself, but who seemed to possess more common sense than the community’s self appointed leaders. And Khan is not the only enlightened soul out there. About a year ago, I met an auto-rickshaw driver Waseem who told me how he wanted his daughters to pursue graduation, in spite of family pressure to do otherwise. It is common practice amongst many to point to the success of Khans in Bollywood and Sania Mirza in tennis to prove India’s success in accommodating its minorities. Their achievements notwithstanding, I think it is the average Muslim on the street, like Wasim and Khan who will prove to be the catalysts for change in India’s Muslim community.

Tired of BJP’s propaganda, and Congress’s hollow proclamations of secularism, it is reassuring that India’s Muslims have finally begun to take matters into their own hands. For instance, in Bihar, organisations such as Bihar Anjuman have decided to take matters into their own hands by spurring the community onto a path of constructive action. On its homepage , it urges community to take responsibility into their own hands and strive to use their talents to the fullest. Another such initiative is the Rahmani 30, an institute set up to train poor but talented Muslim students for the prestigious IIT JEE (the entrance examination for securing admission to India’s premier engineering institutes, the IITs). A brainchild of Maulana Wali Rahmani and Abhyanand, a senior police officer in Bihar, it is one of the many subterranean changes which are taking place in the community.

However, much needs to be done, and there is still a long way to go. As pointed out by the Sachar report, India’s Muslims, and especially those belonging to the Indo Gangetic plain still face a variety of obstacles, which hampers their integration with the country’s mainstream. To give a small example, there is no state-sponsored Urdu medium school in Uttar Pradesh, a province home to about 40 million Urdu-speaking Muslims. Not only is this a gross injustice, but it is also against the Constitution. Although much hue and cry is raised about the issue of reservation, it is much easier, and certainly less controversial to make small incremental changes which can go a long way in ensuring that the community feels that it too has a stake, and a role to play in building the country’s future.

All said and done, it still baffles me that how we can ignore a community 170 million strong, larger than most nations. Surely, the ground is ripe for a million more Rahmani 30s and Anjumans. After all, the canvas that is India can’t be painted without all its constituent colours; Saffron, Blue, White and Green.

By Surabhi Pudasaini

The idea of organic conversations and collaborations across Southasian borders is a warm and fuzzy one. The reality, however, is far colder, with such exchanges uncommon. (more…)

A fake bin Laden provides some laughs along with a sharp comment on the “war on terror”, the media, and US policy on Afghanistan.

By Laxmi Murthy

A spoof about the US ‘war on terror’, the Pakistani desperation to emigrate and a satirical take on the media’s obsession with ‘Breaking News’ could go badly wrong in hands that excel in slapstick or melodrama. But right from the disclaimer about resemblance to any person living or dead being purely ‘coincidental’, director Abhishek Sharma pulls it off, tongue firmly in cheek. The pun in the title which could be read as ‘Without you, Laden’, or ‘Your bin Laden’. Onward, smart acting and witty dialogues effortlessly steer the film through potential minefields, quite literally. (more…)

–Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi

I eat god,
I drink god,
I sleep on god…

It is the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival and Girish Karnad, who is supposed to give the keynote lecture, along with heavyweights like Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., are missing in action. They are possibly lost in the Delhi fog, or the traffic, or maybe they didn’t even depart their home cities and countries in the first place. The roads, you know, says one of the organizers. Apparently this is a good enough explanation and the crowd asks no questions and asks for no explanations—we start off the day with a remarkably serene and unhurried shift to readings of Kabir instead. The day is beautiful, the sky is blue, there are long runners in pink, yellow and orange fabrics above our head and two dhol-players are causing a tremendous ruckus and making us all feel invigorated. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is on stage and goes from Kabir to Arun Kolatkar with effortless ease. And that is why, instead of a lecture on “Entertaining India”, we are listening to a lovely poem that eats god and sleeps on god and talks about how the poet hopes his mother-in-law (plus all his other in-laws) would drop dead so he could be alone with his lover.

So starts the day. I have never heard of Arun Kolatkar but I am ready, at the end of the reading, to run out and buy his book. The bookstore is full of books by the authors who are present at the event, but first a writer should look around and check out the people who are present—a colorful assortment of women and men dressed in drop-dead gorgeous Indian fabrics, and where the Westerners look rather plain and pale unless they invested in some Indian fabrics and trinkets. No doubt the place is teeming with literary celebs—the problem with spotting them is that everyone looks the part, right down to little girls who carry their books around like devoted readers and writers. I spot is a group of local Jaipurians who are looking at the schedule with deep concentration. I savor this scene for a while—locals immersed deeply in their own literary event.

Then a minute later I realize why people are concentrating so hard on the schedule—basically, half the speakers are absent, there has been a drastic change of plans and nothing is going according to schedule. The people who have arrived early are asked to be on panels, and before long I find myself listening to Vikram Chandra (scheduled to present on the last day) talking about his latest book about the underworld, as well as the banality of evil. He talks about criminals and murderers that he met. The most horrific thing that he came to learn, he said, was that most people who did these terrible things were ordinary people like you and me. They were not monsters. They were religious, god fearing men who kept shrines at the back of their homes, and yet they were able to commit horrific acts that the ones that occurred during Partition. “The frightening thing is to realize that the people who are murderers and criminals are not so different from us,” he said.  “There’s two degree of separation between criminals and people in the audience.” I had met Vickram Chandra when he was teaching at the Breadloaf Conference in 2002. I noticed that eight years in the United States seem to have trained him to become more charitable to the world than condition of the rest of the world allowed for.

Claire Tomalin (scheduled to speak on Saturday) gave her talk on Jane Austen promptly and with joy. There is nothing more delightful than a Jane Austen scholar who loves the writer and treats her with the greatest respect. Claire talked about the conditions of Austen’s life—her poverty, her lack of money, her lack of publishing success, her ten years of depression and being unable to write—all of which added up to a literary phenomenon. Austen talked about taboo topics that other writers didn’t touch, she said. Tomalin gave her talk with humor and intelligence, and the audience responded in kind. Jane Austen appeared to be required reading for women in India, from the questions—half of the questioners also insisted that Claire MUST see “Bride and Prejudice”, which was the final word on the book. Claire insisted, politely but firmly, that she did not see these adaptations. ““Bride and Prejudice” made me realize a lot of things I hadn’t learnt from the book,” gushed one reader enthusiastically. I belched. One reader, however, did add an interesting tidbid—Austen’s horrid Mrs.Norris had been reincarnated as a cat in Harry Potter.

Then we went on to see Geoff Dyer and Amit Chowdari, moderated by Amitav Kumar, talk about “Visible Cities”. Geoff talked about his latest book on Venice and Benaras, and read a short chapter about a monkey who steals a man’s sunglasses in Varanashi and holds it hostage, while the man tries to get it back from him by bribing him with bananas. All would have been well and good and we’d have thought it was just a good piece of comedy if he’d not read about how the monkey could “evolve” (be careful with that word, writers!) as a species if he gave back the sunglasses, and if he didn’t, he’d always be a monkey. Then he talked about “history”, just a line or two but enough for an audience member to wonder if he didn’t know, as a smart man of the twenty-first century, how colonial culture categorized Third World peoples as “monkeys”…Hmmm… this bit of monkeying around was possibly smart of him, or maybe it wasn’t. Not in a tent full of people who are too aware of post-colonial criticism. Amit Chowdari read about Calcutta—a beautiful and evocative piece. Then he referred to Susan Sontag’s “Under the Sign of Saturn,” and how Walter Benjamin had talked about how he was a man born under this sign, therefore he never finished any of his projects, and this was the line she’s picked up and written her essay on. A literary throwaway aside, kind of like strolling through the streets of an old city as a flaneur.

The afternoon ended in the front lawn with the delightful Mr. Alexander Mc.Call Smith talking about his “#1 Detective Agency” and how he came up with this idea. He and William Dalrymple, who was interviewing him, had a good laugh at the expense of the Scots, who apparently indignantly protested the ten thousand pounds allocated by the Scottish government for the festival—the money, suggested the critics, could have been better spent on fighting illiteracy in Scotland. “There are actually Scottish secret agents out there in the audience, dressed in kilts, trying to keep track of this money. They think we don’t see them, but we do,” chucked the writer, as he burst out in a fit of laughter.

Sushma Joshi blogs at www.sushma.blogspot.com and www.sushmasfiction.blogspot.com