Sepia Mutiny

Caught in Carrie's Web

If you are in Los Angeles and looking for something to do this weekend, might I suggest getting caught in Carrie’s Web.

Written and performed by Shyamala Moorty [of Post Natyam Collective], directed by DâLo with video by Sangita Shresthova. Carrie, a body-conscious, high heel-loving spider is spinning out new moves when she inadvertently snares a young human woman whoâs dealing with a terrible family secret. A fantastical web of entanglement is woven with classical and contemporary Indian dance and theater.[indiacurrents]

I had the chance to check out the play a few weeks ago and was mesmerized by how a one person play was able to interweave issues of South Asian culture, sexuality, domestic violence and dance expression so eloquently. To develop her script, Shyamala worked closely with the local domestic violence group NISWA. At the show I attended, several young South Asian teen girls from NISWA that Shyamala had worked with on her script were in the audience.

In 1991, NISWA opened a “helpline” to provide counseling support and resource referrals…In addition, NISWA established a shelter for Muslim battered women in 1996. Since then, the shelter has housed many women and their children, providing them with counseling, and job placement.[niswa]

Carrie’s web takes us between three different threads. The narrator is the eight legged uber-sexy super-dramatic spider, Carrie. Carrie introduces us to the teen angst ridden desi girl whose life revolves around talking to her best friend on a blue tooth, and watching Sex and the City episodes. All the while she struggles with her identity, dating, and living in a troubled home. The play is peppered throughout with modernized Indian dancing — expressing bicultural feelings through bicultural dancing quite beautifully. Shaymala and D’Lo were able to create a story with Carrie’s Web that is authentic to the conflicts with growing up as a Desi-American girl.

Tickets are still available for Friday night’s show and both shows on Sunday.

TeAda presents “Carrie’s Web”

Created and performed by Shyamala Moorty

Directed by D’lo

July 2, 3, and 5 Thursday-Friday, 8:30pm Sunday, 2pm and 7pm

Miles Playhouse, 1130 Lincoln Blvd. Santa Monica, CA

Tickets to both shows on Sunday, July 5th are two for one for Sepia Mutiny readers. Simply use passcode “hulahoop” or “spiderwebs” when purchasing tickets online, over the phone (310.998.8765), or in person and get $10 tickets!

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

Vinay Lal, "The Other Indians"

A few months ago, in the middle of the Sonal Shah controversy, I wrote a blog post criticizing Vijay Prashadâs The Karma of Brown Folk as a somewhat inadequate historical account of the Indian-American community. The example I focused on was the “Yankee Hindutva” chapter, which I thought was unbalanced and prone to cast aspersions rather than actually illuminate the topic at hand. But other chapters in Prashadâs book have similar problems: Prashadâs book is more a critique of the “desi” community in the U.S. than it is an introduction to it: we are too bourgeois (the “model minority” myth), too racist (i.e., against African-Americans), and too religious.

We finally have a better introductory book on the history of the South Asian American community, Vinay Lalâs The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (see an earlier post on Vinay Lal by Abhi here). Lalâs book covers some of the same topics as Prashad’s Karma but is much more heavily factual and closely researched -â itâs a work of history rather than a political polemic â- and itâs rich with useful and well-sourced statistics. If I were to ask students to read something about the history of South Asians in the U.S., say, in conjunction with a segment of a course relating to Indian immigrant fiction, I would probably assign this book.

In lieu of a comprehensive review, below are a few highlights and interesting tidbits from The Other Indians that I picked up on: Elihu Yale, early Immigration/Legal issues, Religion, and the old terminology question.

Elihu Yale

Lal’s chapter on the early American relationship with India was interesting to me, specifically the account of Elihu Yale (i.e., the Yale who gave Yale University its name):

Well before Indians first began to arrive in some numbers in the United States a little before 1900, trade had brough the products of âEast Indiaâ âtea, spices, silk, muslin, opiumâto New England homes. Salem owed its greatness to the commerce with the East … It is the âmagnificent Oriental plunderâ accumulated by Elihu Yale in India, who served as a lowly clerk in the East India Companyâs offices before he rose to assume charge of the Madras Presidency, that lifted a New England college founded in 1676 from the doldrums and prompted its founders to rename the college in honor of the wealthy donor. As a young boy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, later to be known as the âSage of Concordâ and the leader of a group of writers and thinkers who would be characterized as the âTranscendentalists,â often visited Bostonâs âIndia Wharfâ which had by his time becomethe leading center of trade with China and India. Emerson confided to his journal in 1836 that everything in âthis eraâ had been made âsubservientâ to âTrade,â and âOn us the most picturesque contrasts are crowded. We have the beautiful costume of the Hindoo and the Turk in our streets.â (Lal, 8)

I have sometimes wondered whether folks at Yale today ever stop to think about the colonial legacy of Elihu Yale. (Is there anyone reading this who went to Yale, who’s looked into it?)

The Dark Years: Bhagat Singh Thind, 1920-1940

I also found Lalâs account of the legal history of Indian-American citizens following the Asian Exclusion Act informative. After allowing a first wave of immigrants from India around the turn of the century, U.S. immigration authorities started to tighten restrictions on Indian immigrants by 1910, rejecting more and more applicants, in part because of fears about the Ghadr movement, and in part because of rising general xenophobia about immigrants from Asia. Still, prior to 1923, many Indians could get around racial restrictions by claiming to be âCaucasian.â In 1923, this was reversed, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Bhagat Singh Thind needed to be âde-naturalizedâ:

In early 1923, the Supreme Court heard on appeal from the Immigration Bureau the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, whose application for naturalization had been granted in the face of the Bureauâs opposition. Thind, a Caucasian of âhigh-caste Hinduâ stock âof full Indian blood,â enterd the U.S. through Seattle in 1912, enrolled as a student at Berkeley in 1913, and was one of a handful of Indians who fought in World War I under the U.S. army… . Thindâs lawyers rested their case on the two-fold argument that, on the anthropological evidence, north Indians were Aryans and thus Caucasians, and, secondly, by judicial precedent Caucasians were to be construed as whites. Justice Sutherland took the contrary view: in the âunderstanding of the common man,â … âwhiteâ clearly denoted a person of European origins. âIt may be true,â wrote Sutherland, âthat the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable profound differences between them today.â The âAryan theoryâ had been ârejected by most, if not all, modern writers on the subject of ethnology,â and the word âCaucasian,â Sutherland argued, âis in scarcely better repute.â (Lal, 37-38)

Funny that Judge Sutherland, in 1923, was casting doubt on the Aryan invasion theory even then. (Isnât it strange that some people still want to believe itâs true, even today?)

Another surprise in Lalâs account is of the years subsequent to the Thind case: despite the fact that the U.S. had decided it could de-naturalize Indian immigrants who had achieved citizenship, in practice, it happened to very few people. A lawyer named Sakharam Ganesh Pandit, who was a naturalized U.S. citizen, successfully went to the Supreme Court in 1927, to defend his naturalization as valid, and after that de-naturalization was quite rare. The real impact of the Asian Exclusion Act and the Thind case was that Indians no longer immigrated to the U.S., and many who had already settled here decided to leave. According to the U.S. census, there were 8000 Indians in California in 1917, but only 1,476 by 1940 (Lal, 40). Throughout the entire country, there were only 2,045 self-identified Indians present in the U.S. in 1940. (Just forty years later, in 1980, the Census recorded 387,223 Indians in the U.S., and that number has of course jumped again in both 1990 and 2000.)

Religion: Hindu Temple Architecture

I also learned from Lalâs treatment of religion as it is practiced by Indian Americans. He does not ignore some of the radical religious groups, like the VHP-A. But he doesnât obsess over them either, and he makes space for a detailed account of the complexities of Hinduism as it is actually practiced in the U.S. by ordinary people. He has, for instance, interesting details on houses of worship, referring to some of the new temples that have been built with strict adherence to architecture stipulated the Shilpa Sastras, as well as the more syncretic temples that are structured very differently than they would be in India. I thought the following was interesting, along these lines:

A large metropolitan center such as Los Angeles is home to a Murugan temple, at least two Radha Krishna temples, a Kali Mandir, a Devi Mandir, a Sanatan Dharma Mandir, a Lakshmi Narayan Mandir, a Sri Venkateswara temple, and close to a dozen other temples. The nondescript Valley Hindu Temple of Northridge, where a sizable Indian community has developed over the last two decades, is representative of the other, nonsectarian tradition of Hindu temples in the United States, insofar as the temple houses a diverse array of deitiesâShiva, Ram, Krishna, Durga, Lakshmi, to name a fewâand welcomes Hindus in the diaspora of all persuasions. It has sometimes been suggested that Hindus in the diaspora may be less attentive to distinctions which hold sway in India, such as those between north and south, Vaishnavites and Saivites, and so on. Whether this is partly on account of their own minority status in the U.S. is an interesting and yet unresolved question. Whether this phenomenon is as distinct as is sometimes argued is also questionable. While images of both Vishnu and Shiva are not usually housed under one roof in Hindu temples in India, and the mythological works known as the Puranasâwhere the history, genealogy, and worship of these gods is articulatedâare exceedingly sectarian, the Puranas are less exclusive than is commonly argued. Thus, a Vaishnava Purana usually elevates Vishnu as the supreme God but still has ample room for Shiva; a Saivite Purana inverses the order. A Devi Purana, dedicated to the Goddess, will similarly render secondary the male Gods. (Lal, 73-74)

I wonder if any readers who have been to different temples around the U.S. (and perhaps also in India) might have any comments on temple construction in the U.S. vs. India. (It might seem like an obscure topic, but actually I think architecture of houses of worship says a lot about the way people practice their faiths.)

The Old Terminology Problem: Desi, South Asian, etc.

Though I think very highly of Lalâs book, his discussion of terminology did raise some questions for me at certain points. Lal eschews the word âdesi,â and settles on âIndian-American,â and explains carefully why heâs doing so. I canât reproduce all of Lalâs arguments along these lines, but the following paragraph stood out to me as an interesting (though not necessarily compelling) critique of âdesiâ:

Though there is no gainsaying the fact that many proponents of the term âdesiâ similarly seek to invoke its widest and most pluralistic meanings, calling forth the shared lives of many South Asians, the term operates on many different and disjunctive registers. As I have often been reminded by an old friend from Jaisalmer, in Western Rajasthan, words such as âcountryâ mean quite different things to people from metropolitan centers and those who earn their livelihoods in Indiaâs tens of thousands of villages and smaller towns. When my friend chances to remark âHamare desh me aisa hota haiâ (âThis is how it happens in our countryâ), by desh he clearly means his part of the country. The observation invokes not so much the nation in the abstract, much less Bharat, but rather a frame of mind and a set of habits. The word âdesiâ also calls to mind home-grown products: thus, for example, no that liberalization has opened the Indian market to a whole array of foreign goods, including Western/hybrid varieties of fruits and vegetables, one hears often of the contrast between foreign vegetables and those branded âdesiââthe latter being small and (in common belief) much more palatable to the taste than foreign varieties. There is, it appears to me, something unsettling and certainly odd about the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of the word âdesiâ are precisely those diasporic Indians who, in many ways, have least claim to the word and its multiple inheritances, considering their location in metropolitan centers of thought and their immense distance from local and vernacular knowledge systems. For these reasons among many, I have, except in a few particular instances, eschewed the word âdesiâ when speaking of Indian Americans. (Lal, xi)

I understand Lalâs reasoning, though I donât think itâs necessarily always a mark against “desi” that many people who use the term are diasporic, and perhaps less connected to South Asian culture. I don’t think the variations in the way “desi” (and videsi and pardesi) is used within northern India necessarily make the diasporic deployment of it less true within their context. Language can change.

Later, Lal also addresses the term “South Asian American,” and introduces some concerns about it that will be familiar to readers of the endless debates over terminology that have taken place on this blog over the years (to wit: the problem of tokenizing or ignoring âsmallerâ countries in South Asia; the fact that few people outside of secular/progressive communities would actually identify themselves primarily as âSouth Asianâ; the confusion of South Asia with Southeast Asia; the difficulties of limiting South Asia geographically, with Afghanistan on the west and Burma on the east, etc.).

[Incidentally, I also addressed the terminology question in this published essay.]

Again, while the problems with the term “South Asian” (or “South Asian American”) are real, they are not insurmountable, and Lalâs reasons for electing not to use the term were not entirely convincing to me. In the end, he seems to settle on “Indian American” because, “it appears to me to best do justice to those people who are the subject of this book.” In effect, it seems to me that Lal may have decided for practical reasons to focus primarily on immigrants from India in particular as the subject of his book, and some of his arguments about the problems with the term âSouth Asianâ (or âSouth Asian Americanâ) might be beside the point.

That said, The Other Indians is a great read and a very helpful book overall.

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

Meetup Manhattan

Guess what? Ennis and I are going to hang out and we want you to come.

When: 5-7 p.m. Sunday, July 5 Where: Leela Lounge

Come one, come all. Lurkers, commenters, friends, associates…

There will be a special surprise attendee.

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

How the Sri Lankan Civil War was Won

I'll admit to not following the recently concluded Sri Lankan civil war very closely but other SM bloggers have been. Still, I found this interview with noted Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan quite enlightening about many aspects of the conflict. Kaplan is noted for his relatively unorthodox approach to understanding conflict and in discussing Sri Lanka, he comes out swinging -

MJT: So you just got back from Sri Lanka. What did you see there? What did you learn?

Kaplan: The biggest takeaway fact about the Sri Lankan war that's over now is that the Chinese won. And the Chinese won because over the last few years, because of the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. and other Western countries have cut all military aid. We cut them off just as they were starting to win. The Chinese filled the gaps and kept them flush with weapons and, more importantly, with ammunition, with fire-fighting radar, all kinds of equipment. The assault rifles that Sri Lankan soldiers carry at road blocks throughout Colombo are T-56 Chinese knockoffs of AK-47s. They look like AK-47s, but they're not.
What are the Chinese getting out of this?

They're building a deep water port and bunkering facility for their warships and merchant fleet in Hambantota, in southern Sri Lanka. And they're doing all sorts of other building on the island.
Now, why did the Chinese want Sri Lanka? Because Sri Lanka is strategically located. The main sea lines of communication between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, and between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. It's part of China's plan to construct a string of pearls - ports that they don't own, but which they can use for their warships all across the Indian Ocean.
Sri Lanka defeated, more or less completely, a 26 year-long insurgency. They killed the leader and the leader's son. But there are no takeaway lessons for the West here. The Sri Lankan government did it by silencing the media, which meant capturing the most prominent media critic of the government and killing him painfully. And they made sure all the other journalists knew about it.

Kaplan has travelled far and wide and drops some interesting comparisons / contrasts between the Tamil Tigers and other international groups and how this shaped the conflict -

..The Tamil Tigers had human shields by the tens of thousands, not just by the dozens and hundreds like Al Qaeda. They put people between themselves and the government and say "you have to kill all the people to get to us." So the government obliged them. The government killed thousands of civilians...The U.N. is investigating whether as many as 20,000 civilians have been killed during the last few months.
..It was the only insurgent terrorist outfit that had a navy and air force...They had a few planes that they used for bombing missions over Colombo... Not even Hezbollah has either of those, and Hezbollah is the most sophisticated Islamist terrorist group in the world.

I've read a few of Kaplan's past works and many of his pieces line up with thinkers like Samuel Huntington, Thomas Barnett & others who were quick to criticize Francis Fukuyama's almost idyllic "End of History" view of international relations. Rather than a peaceful "new world order" as the end of the cold war ushers in a new, UN-brokered, social democratic paradise, Kaplan instead sees a "back to the 18th century" map.

In many parts of this world - particularly its most violent corners - he & others argue that old skool considerations like ethnic identity trump nationality, economics, and ideology in creating conflict fault lines down to even the smallest tribal/neighborhood scale. The "End of History" may be true for the first world, but elsewhere it's still being written based on a very old, and unfortunately deeply human calculus. And thus, far from being a modern invention, "total war" often becomes the default M.O. when your opponent's bloodline matters more than his ideology.

Update: VV points out an excellent, full length article by Kaplan on this topic - here. Asked what lessons Sri Lanka could hold for the US's counterinsurgency efforts, Kaplan notes (tongue in cheek) -

Bad media coverage is hurting morale and giving succor to the enemy? Just kill the journalists. That's what the Sri Lankan authorities did. Precisely because insurgencies are unconventional, there are no easy-to-follow infantry advances and retreats, so the media holds the power to shape a narrative for the public. Aware of the need for a compliant media to aid the war effort, the Sri Lankan government struck fear into the ranks of journalists. There were hundreds of disappearances of top opinion leaders.
"Murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty," wrote journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga in a self-penned obituary that anticipated his own assassination in early 2009. Sources told me that he was killed by having iron rods with sharp points driven through his skull.
...So is there any lesson here? Only a chilling one. The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is. The Sri Lankan government made no progress against the insurgents for nearly a quarter century, until they turned to extreme and unsavory methods. Could they have won without terrorizing the media and killing large numbers of civilians? Perhaps, but probably not without help from the Chinese, who, in addition to their military aid, gave the Sri Lankan government diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council.

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

Progress!

Finally, the law has changed. Congrats to at the activists in India that made it happen! Our hats off to you.

In a landmark ruling Thursday that could usher in an era of greater freedom for gay men and lesbians in India, New Delhi’s highest court decriminalized homosexuality.

“Discrimination is antithesis of equality,” the judges of the Delhi High Court wrote in a 105-page decision that is the first in India to directly guarantee rights for gay people. “It is the recognition of equality which will foster dignity of every individual,” the decision said.

Homosexuality has been illegal in India since 1861, when British rulers codified a law prohibiting “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” [Link]

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

A Little on Gauhar Jaan; and Remix vs. Original?

I was doing some research this morning on an unrelated topic, when I randomly came across the name Gauhar Jaan, one of the great recording artists in India from the first years of the 20th century. Gauhar Jaan is thought to have sung on the very first recording of a song ever made in India, in 1902. Here is what she sang:

Get this widget

Track details

eSnips Social DNA

It’s a kind of Hindustani classical song called a “khayal,” sung, I gather, in Raag Jogiya. At the end of it she says, famously, “My name is Gauhar Jan!”

Who was Gauhar Jaan? Her background, from what I’ve been able to find on the internet, seems remarkable:

Gauhar Jaan was born as Angelina Yeoward in 1873 in Patna, to William Robert Yeoward, an Armenian Jew working as an engineer in dry ice factory at Azamgarh, near Banaras, who married a Jewish Armenian lady, Allen Victoria Hemming around 1870. Victoria was born and brought up in India, and trained in music and dance.

Within a few years in 1879, the marriage ended, causing hardships to both mother and daughter, who later migrated to Banaras in 1881, with a Muslim nobleman, ‘Khursheed’, who appreciated Victoria’s music more than her husband.

Later, Victoria, converted to Islam and changed Angelina’s name to ‘Gauhar Jaan’ and hers to ‘Malka Jaan’. (link)

Through her mother, who depended on the patronage of wealthy Muslim noblemen (I’m presuming she may have been a Tawaif), Gauhar Jaan got training from the best classical music masters in Calcutta at the time. By 1896, she was a star performer in Calcutta, which is how she was able to charge Rs. 3000 in 1902 to have her voice on the first audio recording of an Indian song ever made. Later, Gauhar Jaan became a star all over India. She performed in Madras in 1910, and even performed for King George V when he visited India. She died of natural causes as the palace musician of the Maharajah of Mysore in 1930. (There is a fuller bio of Gauhar Jaan here, at the Tribune. Also, see this profile of Gauhar Jaan.)

Another song Gauhar Jaan was famous for was “Ras ke bhare tore nain,” which I think many readers will find familiar for reasons that will become apparent below.

Here is a somewhat more recent version of “Ras ke bhare tore nain,” sung by Hira Devi Mishra (from the 1982 film “Gaman”):

I’m finding the Hindi (Braj Basha?) a little hard to follow, so if anyone wants to help with translation, it would be appreciated. Now, compare that song with the Midival Punditz’ “Fabric,” a drum n bass remix used by Mira Nair in Monsoon Wedding. The Punditz use Hira Devi Mishra’s voice from the track above as a sample:

The neighborhood where she films those crazy wires is in Old Delhi — the area around Jama Masjid. Nair also did her first, student film in that neighborhood (the film was her thesis at Harvard; it was a short, eighteen-minute documentary called “Jama Masjid Street Journal”).

Which would you prefer to listen to in traffic on a rainy day, the Hira Devi Mishra “Ras ke bhare,” or the Midival Punditz’ “Fabric”?

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

Sea of Poppies: A Review

Amitav Ghoshâs Sea of Poppies is a remarkable novel, complex and challenging enough to test even the most experienced reader and historian, but relatable and powerful enough to touch someone who solely appreciates a great story. Dickensian in its scope and power, the story follows riveting characters from all origins as they navigate the complex contours of 1830âs opium-ridden India, a land where the weight of history lies heavily, yet identities are transformed overnight.

Warning: Some plot details are included! If you are going to read the book (which you should), read the rest of the review afterwards

The heroine we are first introduced to is Deeti, the hardened wife of an opium worker and loving mother of a young daughter, who is completely ordinary in every way, except for her ability to see âvisions.â With this character development, it might seem as though the book is taking a typical turn into the exotic world of rural India, with its spirits and spooky romance, but this is far from the case. Deetiâs journey is the most real experience that can be written about, a journey where she leaves home, finds love, becomes a leader, fights evil, and as a village woman, rises to the most extraordinary heights in a novel that also includes a dashing and good-hearted American sailor, a caring oxcart rider, various sketchy seamen, a dorky young French orphan, a Chinese opium addict, and an Indian raja.

The list of characters might make it seem as though the author is trying too hard to include everyone, as many good authors (think Herman Wouk in the Winds of War) are sometimes guilty of doing, but the author leaves you with the (correct) impression that the nature of 19th century India was a land of many identities and origins, of complex personalities and changing ideas that added layers and dimensions to identities. Ah Fatt might be a disheveled Chinese opium addict, but he is also the son of a great businessman from Bombay. The power of Ghoshâs storytelling is evident in the development of Fattâs friendship with the Raja of Rashkali, who both are able to make a genuine friendship and find themselves only once they are both convicts.

All of these charactersâ lives intertwine on the Ibis, a ship carrying wretchedly treated migrant laborers and convicts to Mauritius. The sea is really where Ghosh is at his best â his knowledge of the Indian seas and seamen at the time, the life and language of the âlascars,â the motley and diverse sailing crews of 19th century Asia, and the journey down India to the âBlack Waters,â all show a staggering depth of historical research and a unique skill of subtly and unobtrusively using this research in fiction. Ghosh is the rare writer to write about colonial India without resorting to easily typecast roles or storylines; he understands that colonial India was not a clear spectrum of âgood and evil,â but rather of complex allegiances and personalities, unseen evil and hidden heroes.

Whether when a marriage takes place in the âdabusa,â the cramped ship hold, the deep insecurities of a cruel sailor are revealed, or a humiliated husband vows to return to his wife and son, Ghosh writes with such a stunning clarity and understanding of the human spirit that the reader relishes every moment of the book, reveling in the peaks, valleys, and sheer power of the human experience. Just as there is a little of Sydney Carton and Madame Defarge in all of us, readers will discover that there is a little Deeti and Zachary Reid, a little Paulette and Munia, a little Jodu and Serang Ali, in every one of them.

This book is certainly one of the best written on colonial India, fiction or nonfiction, but perhaps the greatest imprint of this novel transcends its setting. Near the end of the novel, there is a moment in which an issue of race and identity comes to the forefront. Ghosh writes

âThat the essence of this transformation should inhere in a single word â all of this spoke more to the delirium of the world than to the perversity of those who had to make their way in it.â

And perhaps it is our delirium that would make us identify this as a great âIndianâ novel, for it is clear that a story this extraordinary could happen anywhere.

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

"Is this real? Perhaps": The Best DVD Blurb Ever

The other day, my wife and her parents picked up a film called “Hum Phirr Mileinge” (sic) from our local Indian store, apparently without reading the blurb on the back.

Just to be clear, I have not altered the following in any way. I just ran it through the scanner, compressed it a little so as not to crash the site, and posted it for you:

If you’re having trouble reading it, never fear; the text is plagiarized verbatim from a Oneindia.in web review. And here is a short excerpt in case you’re too lazy to click:

To put it bluntly, Hum Phirr Mileinge is archaic and outdated. You actually pinch yourself while watching this one. Is this real? Perhaps, director Manish Goel is completely clueless about the kind of cinema being made these days. The direction is unbelievably weak and so is the writing. Frankly, nothing works in this film, except for a couple of tuneful songs [Sandesh Shandilya], which, sadly, show up even if there’s no situation.

Remember, they are trying to sell DVDs with this blurb!

My question for you is this: how do you think this happened? A DVD printing/label company operator phoning it in, or intentional subversion?

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

RIP Michael Jackson

Tonight, some of us in the bunker are feeling a bit shell shocked by the news of Michael Jackson’s death. Rajni in particular is taking it quite hard. She was a huge fan and had spent years learning to moonwalk which is actually pretty hard for a monkey.

There was a lot of love for Michael Jackson across South Asia, leading to things like this (~~Kollywood~~ Tollywood) restaging of one of MJ’s greatest music videos:

And we’ve shared this Bhanga/Breakdancing mashup version of Thriller (set to Tigerstyle’s Nachna Onda Nei) before:

MJ’s influence went far deeper than just desi copies of Thriller. There’s also this great video by Prabhu Deva, known as “India’s Michael Jackson,” whose choreography pays clear homage to Jackson without being literal about it:

And lastly, here are some clips from Jackson’s 1996 trip to Bombay, organized by Raj Thackeray just a few years after Jackson weathered the first major child abuse scandal and became hooked on drugs:

My favorite Michael Jackson songs are actually from back in the days of the Jackson Five, before he started hitting the fair and lovely, while he still had his proud African nose and a Sai Baba Fro.

Jackson was an amazing dancer and singer, a genius really, albeit a deeply troubled one. I make no excuses for the crimes I believe he committed, and I remain troubled by the kind of person he became. But in my mind and in my heart, there’s room for both. I can praise for his amazing talent and acknowledge the joy he brought while still acknowledging the rest of it. It’s just tonight, it’s the good stuff that I miss. RIP Michael. I hope you’ve found some peace at last.

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link

"Intellectually Black and Socially South Asian": Michael Muhammad Knight

Michael Muhammad Knight, who had a pretty rough childhood in upstate New York, converted to Islam as a teenager. He came from an Irish Catholic background, but partly under the influence of Malcolm X and black nationalist Islam, and partly simply as a result of his own idiosyncratic spiritual leanings, he took the Shahadah at age 16, and changed his name to Mikail Muhammad. He traveled to Pakistan to study Islam at the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, under the guidance of Muslim intellectuals he first knew in the U.S. With a convertâs enthusiasm and zeal, he was as a teenager on a course to militancy â- perhaps not so different from John Walker Lindh (he acknowledges some similarities to Lindh at one point in his memoir, Blue-Eyed Devil). But Knight soon became disillusioned with that life and the rigidity of the teachings he was being exposed to, specifically as it seemed to inculcate a negativity in himself he didn’t like.

When Knight returned to the U.S. after a year in Pakistan, he continued to identify as a Muslim, but with a dimension of non-conformist punk rock theatricality. Starting in the early 2000s, Knight became a fixture at Muslim American conferences like ISNA, where he posed himself as a dissenting, outsider kind of figure, next to the well-groomed second-generation Muslim-Americans from Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds.

Also, starting around 2003, Knight started circulating a photocopied version of a novel he had written about an imagined community of Muslim punks in Buffalo, New York, called “The Taqwacores” (“Taqwa” can be translated as “God-Consciousness” or “piety” in Arabic). Eventually the book would be formally printed, most recently by an established independent publishing house called Soft Skull Press. Since 2004 Knight has become a bit of a publishing machine, putting out several other books. A documentary has been made about the Islamic punk movement his book helped inspire, and a feature-length film version of “The Taqwacores” is in post-production.

Whatâs interesting about Knightâs story for our purposes is the role South Asian Americans play in his books, especially Bangladeshis and Pakistani Americans. At one point early in “Blue-Eyed Devil” (and I canât find the exact passage for some reason), he describes his engagement with Islam in America as “intellectually black and socially South Asian,” and the phrase has stuck with me.

Blue-Eyed Devil

Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey Through Islamic America began as a series of columns Knight wrote for the website Muslim WakeUp! between 2003 and 2005. Some chapters are personal accounts of hanging out (and sometimes hooking up) with Bangladeshi American girls he meets in environments like ISNA. These chapters alternate with travel experiences and encounters, all loosely structured around resolving the identity of the figure who inspired the founding of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s, a figure known as W.D. Fard (or sometimes Wallace Fard Muhammad).

One of the major threads in Blue-Eyed Devil is the thesis, which Knight investigates at length, that this pioneering figure in black Islamic theology, W.D. Fard, may have actually been from South Asia, rather than the Middle East, as was originally thought. There is at least some evidence uncovered by Knight and others (none of it overwhelming) that Fard may have come from India via Fiji. After 1934, Fard disappeared for awhile, and officially no one knows what happened to him. However, the successor to Elijah Muhammed in the black Muslim community in the U.S., Warith Deen Muhammed, claimed that Fard re-appeared as a “Pakistani” Imam in the Bay Area named Muhammed Abdullah starting around 1959, and died in 1976.

The prospect of W.D. Fard as a South Asian immigrant is a thesis not so much proved as explored in Blue-Eyed Devil. But it presents an interesting image: this founding figure in black nationalist Islam may not have been of African, but South Asian, descent.

Knightâs narrative involves contemporary desis to a considerable extent. One passage, which gives a strong indication of Knightâs complex relationship to South Asian American peers, is in a section where he talks about going to a Muslim Summer Camp in the U.S.:

Often Iâd try to boost my Muslim cred by wearing the right kind of hat but only ended up looking like a crazy convert with something to prove. Which I was, of course. I had taken a decent religion and made it real crazy, crazier than any of the good normal kids at my Islamic summer camp back in Rochester. All those desi teenagers would go out between lunch and Zuhr to play basketball or soccer or man-hunt and Iâd sit in the office pouring through Bukhari with the imams telling me that it was okay to go outside and play, that even Prophet Muhammad enjoyed sports. I had soon read enough to teach kids my own age who had been raised with Islam around them all their lives. I remember one summer-camp afternoon when all the kids sat in a circle in the mosque and the imams asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said that I wanted to be an imam or an alim and assumed that everyone else would say the same thing, but one after another it was all doctor, engineer, computer programmer. It blew me away; I thought we all wanted to live in mosques and read the Qurâan all day. (3)

Michael Knightâs approach to Islam often seems contradictory, not just slightly, but intensely. As a young man, he studied Islamic theology obsessively, and tried to shape his life to follow a pretty rigid interpretation of that theology. But thereâs also a punk, anarchist, and non-conformist side of his personality which canât help but rise to the surface. The two sides of himself seem to battle one another in the pages of his books, and he neither turns away from Islam (as the non-conformist side of himself might require), nor does he finally suppress all of his own rebellious tendencies under the banner of an undivided, respectable approach to Islam. Instead, you see passages like the following, again from Blue-Eyed Devil:

ISNA speaks for the Islam of Uplifting Hygiene: a vision of smiling professionals in cotton white hijabs, community-minded role models, politically moderate doctors, teenagers who keep their genitals clean and a perfectly sound way of life that all Americans will inevitably flock towards, or at least concede an enlightened admiration. In paying my $100 registration fee online I had to click âAgreeâ on the term that if any member of a group caused a disturbance, my whole group would leave. I had no group. “Judgment of term âdisturbance,â” it said, will be determined solely by ISNA officials.” The conventionâs official website also provided a list of behaviors for Muslims to avoid and discourage while at McCormick Place: things like fuhsh (âindecency, obscenity, atrocity and abominationâ), fuhsha (âshameless deeds, adultery, fornication and whoredomâ), munkar (âignorance, detestable behavior and reprehensible actionâ) and bagha (ârebelliousness, outrageousness and wrongdoingâ). I figured that in my time at ISNA Iâd have no problem hitting each at least once. My friend Sara told me that while ISNA usually had cool programs, it could often become a big hook-up place for horny young Muslims. ‘I guess theyâre not all there for speeches and stuff,’ she said. (8)

Knight almost seems to take pride in first, knowing the Arabic terms for what is forbidden at an Islamic event, and then deliberately flouting those rules. (If itâs haram, itâs sexy.) A committed individualist (that is to say, a liberal) would reject the institution as a whole, or at least argue for a “progressive,” softened version of the institution, while a devout Muslim might do his or her best to follow the rules as given. But Michael Muhammad Knight seems happy being in both places at once: he prefers the most conservative version of Islam, specifically because itâs more thrilling to disobey it.

Admittedly, some of the people who figure in Michael Knightâs story as friends do call him on his idiosyncratic approach to the Muslim community in the U.S., leading to a fair amount of internal debate within the books themselves. A revealing example might be the following passage:

Then I imagined a voice in my head that sounded like Khalidaâs telling me, ‘Itâs not about being white or not white, Mikail… youâre in no shape to tell the story of American Muslims because you think that only weirdos are worth writing about, you and your Wally Fordsâ’

I donât know why it sounded like Khalida in my head, maybe Khalidaâs just my conscience but I knew that she was rightâbecause I couldnât bum all over the country sleeping in my car or sleeping on Greyhound buses for the sake of writing on lame Progressive Muslims and I donât know that I could if I wanted to. Give me Noble Drew Ali with a Cherokee feather in his turban, selling Moorish Healing Oil for fifteen cents a bottleâand W.D. Fard in his mug shot looking like he could slit your throat with a thought (83)

Indeed, Knight is mainly interested in the weirdos and marginal figures in American Islam, people who are in some way like himself. He finds the new, respectable authority figures in the Muslim community â- people like Ibrahim Hooper and Asma Gull Hasan -â insufferable.

Taqwacores

I didnât really enjoy reading “The Taqwacores,” certainly not as much as the two memoirs, Impossible Man and Blue-Eyed Devil. In large part the book just seemed too abrasive and gratuitously provocative, though I recognize that it wouldnât be âpunkâ if the writing was too pretty and well-considered. The protagonist, Yusef Ali, is supposed to be a Pakistani-American interested in both conservative Islam and punk rock, but the novel isnât really convincing on that score. Thereâs no real acknowledgment of Yusef Aliâs family, and very little discussion of Pakistan itself. Though most of its main characters are from South Asian backgrounds, it seems like “The Taqwacores” subsumes that part of their social identity to “Islam.”

Still, there are some great dialogues, which might have been inspired by Knightâs conversations with immigrant and second-gen Muslims at various conventions and summer camps. Below is part of a dialogue between Yusef and a white convert named Lynn, who has been struggling with her identification as a Muslim after being given grief by orthodox Muslims about her lifestyle:

The conversation paused for us to take a few bites of our respective slices. ‘You know,’ I mentioned after swallowing, ‘I imagine itâs a lot easier for you.’

âWhat is?â she replied with her mouth full.

âSeparating the good stuff from the bad. You werenât raised in a Muslim family so you can just take things on your own terms. For me itâs hard because I got all this tuff in one big lump package. Some of itâs worthwhile guidance that I would like to hold on to for the rest of my life, some is just culture thatâs a part of who I am and then thereâs a lot of traditional things that I canât understand and I donât know why people follow them, but they always have. I think thatâs why you have something to your Islam that I donât have.â

âWhat do you mean?â she asked with half-smile of pleasant surprise.

âI canât separate spirituality from my family, my heritage, my identity as a South Asian; itâs inextricably connected. You reject an aspect of one, to some extent youâre rejecting all of them.â

âYeah, my family didnât seem too disappointed when I started celebrating Christmas again.â

âYou celebrate Christmas?â

âJust with my family. It has nothing to do with religion.â

âWell, it is Christ-mas.â

âNo, no itâs not. Itâs see-my-family-that-I-donât-ever-see-mas.â

âOh.â

âBut who cares anyway, right? Itâs like Attar said, âforget what is and is not Islam.â (86-87)

The novel is a young personâs book â- at its core, it seems to be about how the protagonistâs sexual coming of age comes into conflict with his religious beliefs. The book has a series of graphic sexual encounters and a general uncensored sexual candidness thatâs likely to turn off some readers (especially, one thinks, the conservative Muslims to whom it seems to be addressed).

But most of all, itâs the novelâs conclusion, which involves a graphic sex act performed by a woman in a Burqa in a public place, that is likely to be shocking to many readers. When the film of “The Taqwacores” comes out later this year, I wouldnât be surprised if there is a pretty major controversy, specifically relating to that scene… (Iâm told the filmmakers are fully expecting that controversy to occur. There may be more from other SM bloggers on this in weeks to come.)

Overall, I think readers will find Knightâs books to be worth their time, especially the two memoirs written by Knight in maturity, Blue-Eyed Devil and Impossible Man. Impossible Man is a highly compelling conversion narrative, which includes both the rise as well as the decline of Knightâs religious fervor (and, oh yeah, a couple of chapters about wrestling). Blue-Eyed Devil is more of a road narrative, focusing on Knightâs engagement with African American interpretations of Islam, including the NOI, the 5% Nation of Gods and Earths, as well as the movement of black Islamic communities towards orthodox Sunni Islam after the death of Elijah Muhammed.

Who linked:

T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k link