Brotherhood of the Boat
01/18/2010 · Mansi Shah
Brother Marvin — Jahaji Bhai
The indentureship and the slavery
Bind together two races in unity (Achcha dosti)
There was no more Mother Africa
No more Mother India, just Mother Trini (Jananbhoomi)
My Bahut Ajah planted sugarcane
Down in the Caroni plain
Ramlogan, Basdeo, Prakash and I, Jahaji Bhai
Brotherhood of the boat, Jahaji Bhai
Brotherhood of the boat, Jahaji Bhai
High Desert Curry
01/02/2010 · Mansi Shah
California’s deserts are full of weirdo acid-fried hippies that relocated from various parts of the US to take sound baths in geodesic domes, make land art and be spiritually reawakened through Mentalphysics. Who would’ve thought that the most delicious curry pizza/Indian food would be found here, of all the other logical places where it could be found. Dine in. Take out. And Indian Food. Like the sign says… WOW.
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Sam’s Pizza
61380 29 Palms Hwy, Ste 13
Joshua Tree, CA 92252
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler: The Museum of Non Participation
09/20/2009 · Mansi Shah
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler conceived The Museum of Non Participation in 2007 when, during the Pakistani Lawyers movement in Islamabad, they viewed the protests and subsequent state violence from a window in The National Art Gallery.
Since then they have pursued ideas connected to their position that day – through conversation, images, activities and narratives following strands of dialogue to different people, places and contexts.
Working over an eighteen month period with street vendors, Urdu translators, architects, estate agents, housing activists, lawyers, hairdressers, filmmakers, wedding photographers, newspaper printers, artists and writers, they have played out different manifestations of The Museum of Non Participation.
The project first appeared as an English/Urdu language class in September 2008. The free class, still ongoing, invites English and Urdu speakers to exchange conversational language under the guidance and mediation of Hasan Navid. It has become a space for cultural and linguistic exchange travelling from the Oxford House community centre in Bethnal Green to an invited space behind Yaseen’s Hairdressers on the Bethnal Green Road and recently to a public performance at the Guernica room in the Whitechapel Gallery.
Hosted by artist collective VASL, Mirza and Butler returned to Karachi for a second time in December 2008, where they occupied a space at the Pakistani Arts Council; this open space became a location to work through ideas with (non) participants and a base from which they conducted interventions outside in the streets of the city. They distributed newspapers as packaging for food sold by the tandoor walla’s, presented performance interventions at Sunday Bazaar, and worked with sign writers to produce text banners and wall paintings that demarcated the Museum as a pop-up institution, announcing a new way of moving through and looking at the city: in a city with almost no museums, the city itself becomes the museum.
The scars of colonialism, partition and subsequent post colonialist ventures of improvement run deep in Karachi. Representations of Pakistan by Western media portray a rogue state suffering from conflict, extremism, natural disasters and sporadic martial law, made more fearsome by its nuclear status. The Museum of Non Participation seeks to discover the patterns and realities of everyday life and to find other languages and other voices.
The project has variously taken the form of film, an Urdu/English language exchange, street interventions, a radio show and performances. On 20 September 2009 a newspaper publication featuring some of the different voices and interpretations of the title will be distributed across the UK as a supplement of The Daily Jang – the international newspaper from Pakistan’s oldest and largest media group.
This newspaper precedes the official ‘launch’ of The Museum of Non Participation, a month-long festival which will bring together the multiple faces of the project in a programme of film screenings, talks, discussions, Urdu poetry, and performance.
The Museum of Non Participation raises questions about resistance and the choice and consequence of action vs inaction. The strictures of conflict, class and monetary divisions within a globalised world provoke engagement with the problems of participating or not participating in such a system, whether in Karachi, London or elsewhere; The Museum of Non Participation examines how our lives in one space have implications on the other.
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September 25 – October 25, 2009
Yaseen’s, 277 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 6AH
Open Tuesday – Saturday, 1 – 8PM
Sunday 1 – 6PM, Closed Mondays
Free Entry
Retracing roots, creating identity
05/16/2009 · Mansi Shah
(via Harsh)
Neera Kapur-Dromson, a fourth-generation Kenyan of Indian origin, has wrestled with kindred issues of identity, roots, cultural clashes and self-creation as long as she can remember.
An Odissi dancer, who was born and bred in Kenya, Kapur-Dromson was puzzled to find that despite living in Kenya for over 100 years, Indians were almost non-existent in histories of the east African country. In memoirs and biographies, like those of Karen Blixen (of the ‘Out of Africa’ fame) or Elspeth Huxley’s books, the Indian is shown just as a worker, sans family or individuality, an invisible nameless being. This disturbed her and goaded her on a long-winded trip into the memory of four generations and three countries. This inner voyage crystallised in her first book, From Jhelum to Tana, entwining personal history with defining historical events in Kenya that impacted on the lives of Indians living in that country.
In this conversation with Manish Chand, Kapur-Dromson speaks about the mingling of Indian and Kenyan cultures and languages, the contribution of the Indian diaspora in awakening political consciousness among Africans and the need for Kenyans to move beyond Bollywood and clichés to understand Indians and their culture better. “It is important for people to know where and what backgrounds they come from,” she says in this interview.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q) How did you put together this narrative of four generations of your family in Kenya? Were there any written records that helped you write this book?
A) I read many books on and about Kenya – all kinds of books, both historical and narrative. I found little mention of the lives and times of Indians in Kenya. I was a little bothered at first as even in my own family, I did not find any written records. No diaries, with the exception of one or two of my grandmother who started writing late in her life… so I did not have access to immediate firsthand information. However, I talked to a lot of people, especially the older ones who still remember stories narrated to them or what they themselves witnessed. Some people absolutely refused to part with the information…why talk of old times, they asked me. Let these be buried. With others, information differed each time. However, my mother has been a mine of information. The book then became an absolute priority as I felt that if I don’t do it now, even more will be lost. Amadou Hampate Ba, a very important African writer once wrote, “In Africa when an old man dies, it is as if a library has burnt…” so you can imagine the urgency of the task.
Much of the history written about Kenya was, for a long time, from the Western, mainly the British point of view. And in these documents, the Indian way of life is quite negligible. Even in memoirs and biographical books, or novels, like those of Karen Blixen (of the ‘Out of Africa’ fame) or Elspeth Huxley’s books, the Indian is shown just as a worker, without family or individuality, an invisible nameless being. The socio-cultural profile had been entirely ignored. That disturbed me. Another good reason for writing this book, I was persuaded. This information gap had to be bridged.
Fortunately, historians like Dana April Seidenberg and Cynthia Salvadori, socio-political writers like Dharam and Yashpal Ghai, and now writers, journalists and activists like Pheroze Nowrojee, Rasna Warah, Zarina Patel and Zahid Rajan, Salim Lone – all residing in Nairobi – have made contributions to correct our history in Kenya.
However, little has been written about lives of ordinary Indians. That is why I have written a story about simple people living in this part of the diaspora, about their day-to-day lives.
Rajasthani Banjara
04/30/2009 · Mansi Shah
Scenes from Tony Gatlif’s Latcho Drom (1993):
Latcho Drom, also known as Safe Journey, is the second film in Gatlif’s trilogy about the Romani (Gypsy) people. The Romani are an ethnic group that presently live in the Central European states and the Balkan peninsula but linguistic and genetic evidence shows their Indo-Aryan origins. The roots of the Romani language being ancient Punjabi and originating from the modern Indian state of Rajasthan.
Latcho Drom follows Les Princes (1983) and precedes Gadjo Dilo (1997).
The Turban Tide
04/02/2009 · Mansi Shah
Desi Thugz
03/18/2009 · Mansi Shah
“DeSi Fo LyF”