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.

Global Demonstration 30th January

Binayak Sen, on christmas eve last year was sentenced to life imprisonment on flimsy evidence (mostly a planted letter, hearsay evidence; find more here) for spreading ‘disaffection’ towards the state. Section 124A of the Indian penal Code mandates an absolute unconditional love for the state. Beware, you may be charged with sedition under Indian law (a section that has outlived the British Raj who introduced it) if you express any feeling that falls an inch short of devoted love and adulation. Critiquing state practices of land grabbing, tribal dispossession, inadequate (read no) rehabilitation, extrajudicial killing, torture and the  curious phenomenon of salwa judum fit the bill of falling out of love with the state. In other words, ‘disaffection’. Notwithstanding what the Father of the Nation boldly proclaimed almost 90 years ago–that sedition was the highest duty of a citizen, not many in the state machinery and corporate media seem to share the same sentiment. Close to a century, colonialism has taken its roots in India. Last year, in  what was an unbelievable show of unbridled love for the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party demanded that Arundhati Roy and others who shared the stage with her in a Seminar in New Delhi on Kashmir, be charged with sedition. Roy famously remarked that Kashmir was never an integral part of India, a sentiment echoed by thousand other Kashmiris. The frenzy that erupted has few parallels in the history of media circus in the country. The net tightens around Roy thundered a channel. Arundhati Roy’s ’seditious’ speech, echoed others.

With Binayak Sen, the media has been kinder. However the witch hunt by the State has filled up the gaps of unkindness not contributed by the media. Shortly after Sen’s sentence, his wife was slammed with an FIR, which was, after insistence by the Union Home Ministry (which in turn acted only after rights groups took up the matter) dropped.

Today, the Free Binayak Sen Campaign has taken the world by storm, demanding the immediate release of Sen and protesting against his unjust sentence. Demonstrations in front of the Indian Consulates in London, New York, San Francisco, Vancouver, Washington and a growing Facebook campaign prove that the campaign has come here to stay. A hopelessly romantic assertion is– here at the ground of the tireless protests and the long marches, democracy rings the strongest, the values embedded in the Constitution stands the tallest; the chants of ‘free democracy’, ‘we are all binayak sen’, ring sharper than all the media frenzy of hunting down civil liberties and fundamental rights to life and freedom. Egypt, anyone?

For more information:

http://www.freebinayaksen.org/

Reporting on Southasia in German prints focuses mainly on the ongoing war and conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By Gabriele Köhler

The Reichstag building in Berlin, Germany

Germany is blessed with a rich print media landscape: numerous multi-paged dailies – some of which are read across the nation – and several political weeklies. The culture is one of investigative and in-depth journalism, and readers often become followers of a particular flamboyant political commentator. As in other countries in Europe, each newspaper has its particular political slant. At the same time, the media are the platform for opinionated public discourse. For example, on divisive topics, the weekly Die Zeit has developed a format of its own: it will often publish two – as opposed to one – lengthy editorials filling its entire front page, editorials which diametrically contradict each other, arguing the pro and contra, respectively, on a particular stance – a sort of a Hegelian approach in search of the synthesis view. The sports pages have extensive editorials on the politics and economics of games. During the FIFA World Cup matches last summer, the sociology of football as a global sport, and the psychology of each match made for page-length articles before and after each game.

Overall, the focus of the print media is on domestic politics, economy and social trends – domestic mainly in the sense of Germany. Where it affects German policymaking, domestic policy discussion is led by decisions (to be) shaped in Brussels. The remaining newspaper space is shared between the US, China and the rest of the world, in that order.

So, what does Southasia look like from Germany? Is it understood as a region that, like Europe, is trying to forge a common identity? To what extent are Southasia’s path-breaking social policies – the microcredit schemes, the public works, the social security, the right to food discussions, the universal school meal programmes, the right to information, the affirmative action efforts – reflected in German prints? These policies could conceivably be of interest to Germany, seeing that it too is seeking to re-design its poverty and social assistance programmes, create jobs and incomes for the chronically unemployed and underemployed, and find ways to ensure that the 10 percent of Germany’s children who grow up under the national poverty line have a proper meal every day.

Judging by a random and unsystematic reading of selected German newspapers – such as the large dailies Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and the weekly Die Zeit, – Southasia seems to have collapsed into two war- and crisis-ravaged countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Southasia

Granted, Bangladesh is covered from time to time in connection with reports on the despotic work conditions in factories supplying garments to German clothing outlets. The strikes by women workers in Dhaka for fairer wages were reported extensively. India appears occasionally, mainly when there are Maoist attacks. Nepal, despite its historic challenge of building an independent, rights-based republic, has made it in German newspapers once in the past six months, only to report on Prime Minister Nepal stepping down from the government in June. Since then, no follow-up as to where the governmental or constitutional processes stand has been done. Sri Lanka – now that the horrifying war is over – does not appear to merit any reporting. Bhutan is relegated to the tourism section, featured as an idyllic destination for travellers seeking high, beautiful mountains and deep Buddhist meditation. While the political divisions and dysfunctions in the other Southasian countries are reported in some detail, Bhutan enjoys a mystique image. There is never a mention of the expulsion of Lhotsampa that began about twenty years ago.

Roots of biases and prejudices

The interest in Afghanistan is fed by the fact that Germany is politically involved and highly exposed there. The German government chaired the Bonn process after the end of the Taliban regime. German soldiers are stationed in Kundus, Afghanistan, and the current German centre-and-neoliberal coalition government, in office since autumn 2009, has had the courage to admit that there is a war going on in Afghanistan – earlier governments had defined the situation rather vaguely as a conflict. This has a lot to do with German history. After the fall of Hitler fascism and imperialism, Germany had committed to never send soldiers outside of German territory again. The Constitution was amended only a few years back, to enable German forces to become a part of NATO military interventions.

The articles on Afghanistan are (understandably) primarily concerned with the safety of German troops, and on a second plane, then with the justification of the engagement of the ISAF forces there. The airstrike in Kundus last year, when the German command called in an American fighter plane that bombed and killed many civilians, is in the news often. And the Afghan survivors of the air strike are taking the German government to court.

The Taliban movement is the second topic of the numerous pieces on Afghanistan. Its genesis: the ideological support in parts of the population. There are newspaper debates on for and against intervention in Afghanistan, and on military versus cultural and developmental engagement. There are also soul searching articles on how to reach the population.

Some of the discourse is driven by domestic security considerations. For example, Joshka Fischer, former Foreign Minister and former head of the progressive (and originally pacifist) Green Party, asked in a recent editorial whether it would be wise to pull out of Afghanistan. Wise for whom? For Germany. The article was not about how the international community might best assist the vulnerable and the poor in Afghanistan and ensure their human rights, such as their right to food, education, and employment. It was about how the “West” could assure its own safety and security.

The reporting on Pakistan in the past months has been driven by the Indus flooding disaster. There is sympathy with the ordeals of the poorest segments of the Pakistan population, struck by the horrendous flooding. But this is always paired with a critique of corruption, government mismanagement, and the fear of fundamentalism. That the Islamist NGOs were the speediest to respond to the crisis is a big worry.

Die Zeit is somewhat more diversified. These past few months have seen a serial on poverty and the middle classes in India, including the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education adopted this year. The Indian government’s effort to issue identity cards is discussed in some detail with a combination of awe at the size of the endeavour – 1.2 billion people – and the fact that Germany itself is conducting a census in 2011. Right now, this decision on census faces considerable opposition as Germans fear that the state is intruding in their private sphere, and amassing information that is none of its business. A background piece prepared by a senior member of a research institute analysed the Afghanistan challenge as one revolving around the need for development and employment.

Occasional insights

The most insightful writing on South Asia comes from Zeit correspondent Ulrich Ladurner, who is the only writer to view the region from inside and expose the biases, prejudices and self-interest of German discourse on Afghanistan and Pakistan. ‘They don’t know how to do democracy’ is the headline in which he sarcastically mimics German public opinion on an article analysing how Europe is betraying the human rights of the Afghan population, and blaming Afghans for what he sees as the destructive impact of the West’s misguided militarist approach to the region (Ulrich Ladurner, ZEIT, 23 September).

And indeed, some reporting on South Asia compares the Afghanistan and Pakistan situations with that of post-war Germany: the human rights challenges, the total physical destruction, the lack of political and social cohesion. As an example, one interesting article calls for a Marshall Plan for Pakistan to combine disaster relief and post-flood reconstruction with nation building (Andreas Zielcke, SZ, 22 August). Such reference to the post-war Marshall plan perhaps offers one explanation for the press’s focus on the conflict-ravaged countries. Despite all its economic success, the horrors of World War II – the genocide against the Jewish citizens, against the Roma, against political opposition, the deaths of millions of civilians and soldiers, the huge exodus of displaced persons, as well as the destruction of the country itself – remain etched into public memory. And possibly, this is why the media relate so selectively to the countries in Southasia.

Gabriele Köhler is a development economist based in Munich, Germany.

Last week, one heard about the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s (PTA) decision to impose a partial ban on The Baloch Hal, the first and only online newspaper that tells the story of Balochistan to the rest of Pakistan and the world-at-large. The reason for the ban, according to the PTA, was that The Baloch Hal published ‘anti-Pakistan material’. As expected, this vague claim remains unsubstantiated.
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By Najeebullah Hazem

Afghanistan has historically been called the ‘crossroads of Asia’. It has credibly met the obligation of the nickname throughout centuries and has witnessed the path of hundreds of caravans laden with commercial goods headed towards countries on either end of the Silk Route.

Apart from the exchange of goods, these caravans also facilitated exposure to the widely-differing cultures of the countries through which they traveled. So if on the one hand, spices from India were sold in Italy, and Chinese silk adorned the dwellers of the castles and the courts of Europe, Europeans got a glimpse of oriental philosophies and religions, works of art and ways of life . In turn, traditions from Europe were brought to the people of the East. All of this, however, was in the past.

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