What is it about the term ‘Alchemy’ that immediately throws the mind into a gymnasium of ideas and possibilities?
A laconic email from my editor read: ‘l would like you to absorb as much of this as possible’. l opened the attachment and studied the program. lt referred to a five-day festival taking place at Southbank Centre (from here as SBC) under the banner of ‘ALCHEMY’ a festival celebrating innovative, classical and contemporary artists from lndia, UK and South Asia.

Co-curated by Jude Kelly (SBC Artistic Director), and Gauri Sharma Tripathi (SBC Artist in Residence, Kathak Dancer and Choreographer) the festival offered a presentation of ‘art that was lndian in origin or influence’ through exploring ‘perceptions of what lndian culture is or can be’ together with a promise of: food, fashion, film, music, dance, poetry, exhibition, fierce argument, intensity, provocation, pleasure and not necessarily in that order.
l admit to an immediate response of both intrigue and a tad confusion. Even amongst the empathetic and generous expanse of SBC was it really going to be possible to co-ordinate into any coherent sort of scheme: thirty-two events including four debates, under one roof, over five days?
The festival programme is too lengthy to give credit to each event l managed to attend (only nine in all), but l would like to mention a few of the events that had a considerable impact on me: Nihal’s Desi Live, a night of Bhangra artists coming together with dancers and DJs (l saw four generations of lndian families enjoying that great night together!). The Teak Project, a trio of lndian and Jazz fusion; intelligent, subtle, innovative. Chandralekha Shakira – Fire/Desire, an alchemical wedding fusing Classical lndian music with yoga, ritual ‘hasta mudras’ (hand gestures) and martial arts in a modern celebration of the body.
The under-current of Alchemy was The Southall Story. One of its creators, Kuljit Bhamra, is definitely an Alchemist of the Arts. Bhamra is a pioneer of de-mystifying and de-constructing, laying bare the roots of ancient, classical and modern musical systems whilst always placing cultural integrity as his foundation (or philosophical) stone. His laboratories are both the recording studio and the stage. He finds ways to let the abstract world of music become a tangible whole, enter into and meld with the world of social realism and platforms of 20c mass music entertainment. Bhamra is an expert of cultural filtration, distillation, synthesis, experimentation and fusion using every ingredient and route that an alchemical process can offer. l am beginning to think there is an element of magic to him.

THE DISCUSSION

Now for a discussion held between myself and Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of SBC and whose brain-child the festival was.

DM: You started Debate 1 ‘lndia: Global Powerhouse?’ saying that…’ln order to further our cultural knowledge and relationship with lndia we first needed to admit our ignorances’. You stated that your physical relationship with the country was only 16 months old and that came about by travelling on the ‘Tata Jagrita Yatra’ train. Were the seeds of Alchemy actually drawn from that experience and why was the journey such an inspiration to you?

JK: l think the seeds of Alchemy were b4 that. The Festival of Britain, which is what Southbank Centre (from here SBC) is created from, has an extraordinary history. lt was a post-war determination to make the imagination count and the idea that art and creativity is something that is absolutely part of everybody’s human spirit and should be for everyone. Half of the people who made the Festival of Britain happen were refugees, and arguably there was no way that British culture could be so complex and have such mosaic qualities unless it had been effected by many, many different relationships with artists, and from right around the world.
When l came to SBC there was already a tradition here of South Asian dance but l felt that it didn’t reflect certain things for me. l had worked for 12 years in Leeds and what l knew from the communities in Bradford, for example, was that amongst the communities there were young, modern artists and audiences who had a very interesting relationship with their parent’s and grand-parent’s country, but they themselves saw themselves as British-Asian. So l became aware that although the culture at SBC in many art forms was quite rich, that this South Asian dance, which was classical, couldn’t in any way reflect everything that there was on offer. l then asked Gauri Sharma Tripathi, the Kathak dancer, to become artist-in-residence here. She contains both that commitment to the tradition of something which is hundreds of years old, and at the same time she is a modern, working woman. lt was her husband, Shashank, who was creating the Jagrita Yatra train journey. They asked me to go on it and with 400 young lndian students who were looking at their country, seeing it in all its reds, for the first time really.
The reason why it effected me so much was because seeing lndia for over 18 days, crossing the entire country and seeing…it wasn’t so much the wealth verses the poverty, because that is something you see in other countries too and also because it’s something you are very aware of from documentaries etc, but it was this amazing thing of Time. Some images that were from the earliest point of human history…women in quarries breaking rocks with their bare hands and carrying rocks on their heads; and then within two hours you can be somewhere where the most modern technology is happening with the greatest global transfer, and l thought…“To have a country where all this is happening in parallel time is amazing!”
Then there was the quality of tolerance that l experienced in lndia. First of all people living alongside many different kinds of views and feelings and life-styles…not just tolerating it but somehow letting it all be part of the same story.
l found that fascinating.

DM: Did you leave lndia with any clear notions as to why it might be that such a spectrum of culture, religion and language can live reasonably peacefully together? Did you get any essence of what being ‘lndian’ actually is?
This is a question that appeared again and again throughout Alchemy, through the debates, the performances…both modern and old.

JK: Well for every statement one person would make, somebody would contradict it l am sure, but my feeling was that this sense of History that is part of the lndian understanding and that produces a tolerance l think. Because if you feel you are part of a civilization where the traditions of culture and thought are still preserved, and yet at the same time that can live side by side with great modern stride, that is an incredibly sophisticated place psychologically to live in.

DM: Tata sponsored the Jagrita Yatra. The panel discussions of Entrepreneurs contained ways of finding solutions to challenges faced by the country and were very much a key aspect of the train journey. What did you come away with feeling about the collective energy and optimism of the 400 young people?

JK: Well first of all l think they had a life changing experience because they really were forced to consider: How do you use your own personal and professional talent and knowledge for the betterment of humanity? How do you do that? Are you going to do it or are you not going to do it? And l think that journey forced them to realize that there’s a choice; and if you don’t make the choice to support fellow humans then you at least need to know that that’s not what you are doing… that you are just living your own life. l think that young people need idealism. They can be idealistic and we need to do as much as possible, all over the world, to help them be idealistic. The other thing that happened was that they were able to look at people and businesses who were role models and be quite critical about whether or not they thought they were fulfilling their ideology, the rhetoric, and was that all good? lt was radicalizing them.
l gave a couple of lectures about the Role of Women and the Leadership of Women. Some observations were made about whether or not the young men and women on the train were actually thinking about the role of Women in society. lt was quite invigorating all round. The other thing that struck me was how much they couldn’t look towards conventional politics to solve any of the problems of lndia.
DM: lf an individual is given an opportunity to come out of their inner world and make a mark outside of it then that gives them freedom and empowers them.
To me that seemed very much what was happening on the Tata Jagrita Yatra train, where they were looking at successful social entrepreneurship and how that can be applied to both the individual and people collectively, en mass.

JK: They were, but they were also empowering the young people to feel… “You’re not here to be awe-struck, you’re here to critique, to make change and you’re here to lead the future”.
The reason why l had the young people on the platform about ‘lnter-generation’ is because they are experts at being young. Nobody who is older can be an expert at being younger!

DM: What l gathered very much from Alchemy was that there are these ancient strands of culture that are still so inter-connected with today’s lndia, and that whatever happens they are always going to be able to co-exist.
How did you begin to think that Alchemy would be able to look at the social and cultural complexities of lndia in contexts that could give a clear, coherent story? What were the early seeds; how were they formed; who designed what the actual bedrock of the festival was going to be?

JK: lf you look at culture in this country in a sense like this: You are performing Baroque music, Elizabethan madrigals one night and on the same night but in another space you are performing Patti Smith. You’ll have the greatest contemporary writers and poets but you’ll also be discussing the work of the Impressionists or looking at Sanskrit writing. The idea that Shakespeare lives for example, alongside the Arctic Monkeys in society, obviously this is true of lndia as well.
l was uncomfortable with the idea that lndian culture in this country wasn’t being expressed as that slice of time, from the past right through to the present. Unless you express it in that way you are not able to represent or think about the culture or the society, because we carry our history with us, and we carry our ancestor’s history with us, even if we don’t always know that. So my beginning thought about Alchemy was that the same sense of respect and the kind of mystery of how we are our own time machines…because we’re all time machines, for example: lf you look at a musical instrument; a cello or a tabla, that instrument has been played right from when it was first invented through to the way that it is being played now. So where as now it might be being played alongside a DJ, originally and still, it is being played in the desert. lt wasn’t that l was excited about putting that side by side, l just felt that that is what the reality of culture actually is, and not to allow that to happen means that you are denying audiences to experience what lndian culture is really like…where all these things are laid out side by side.
l then asked a number of people to come round a table with me, organisations and individuals who are fascinated by different aspects of lndian culture; for example organisations who specialize in classical lndian dance at the same table as someone like Nihal who specializes in contemporary lndian music. They initially found that quite weird because they don’t actually talk to each other very much. They think of themselves as doing quite different things.
My feeling was…”You’re not doing different things…you’re doing the same things but from different perspectives and using different aspects of culture”.
From the audience point of view it’s…”We will be curious about all of it!”

DM: One of the intriguing questions that came out of Debate 1 (lndia: Global Powerhouse?) was whether or not the people of lndia and people of lndian origin are now having to re-constitute what being ‘lndian’ actually amounts to albeit is.
At the foundations of Alchemy is big the question of Diaspora and the two-way concourse that is the impact of globalization on lndia and how lndian culture is affecting the rest of the world?
You related an observation you had once made whilst travelling across America; that there appeared to be a collusion amongst the different peoples there to feel a certain kind of ‘Americanism’ about themselves. l wondered if the same might apply to lndia, because during this debate (Debate 1), there didn’t seem to be any particular cohesion amongst the panellists about that subject. For example: a panel raised question (Hardeep Singh Kohli)) asked: ‘Whether lndia actually did exist before the Raj?’ and another panellist (Bidisha), responded with: “Architecturally and culturally, through language and learning it did”.

To my mind there is no ‘new’ lndia, there is however, the effects of globalization, mixed race relationships, co-educations, creative fusions etc.
l’m curious as to how you considered you would be able to pull off a festival that was quite risky at times, highly eclectic, daring, always exciting and with a collection of important and very interesting debates. One of the most enjoyable aspects of it was to see different generations of people really enjoying each other’s company.

JK: Yes, that’s what life should feel like and that’s what cultures can do because in a way the most exciting thing is to feel like a community and in a community all kinds of different tastes and ages and attitudes can abide by each other and l wanted that to be what Alchemy was like. l wanted to do two things: to give respect to the complexity of lndian culture… even if this is just a tiny snapshot of it, and l wanted to urge on the idea that unless we have a really interesting and dynamic dialogue between artists: British, lndian, lndian-British artists, we won’t be getting the best out of a relationship which has a Raj history… yes, a difficult one, but since there was one and since there are so many lndian families and diaspora families who live in this country, what a fantastic opportunity to know a lot more about each other. But also, and at its other level, SBC belongs to those people as much as it belongs to anybody else in this country, and not to express that culture in this vivid way l think is wrong.

DM: lnteresting in that the SBC is only 60 years old; the independence of lndia is 62 years old; Pakistan is 63 years old… there is a confluence!

JK: Exactly, and SBC’s progressive history matches the idea that we want to have conversations with the world and the way that the world really is and not how we want to conceive it to be.

DM: l think one of the most interesting things that emerged out of Alchemy was the sense of both individual and collective identities and space. Space (personal and collective) was talked about a lot, not so much in a political context but because culture became all empowering. Was that one of the main premise for your eclecticism?

JK: Yes, and one of the things that happens from not giving hierarchy i.e. by saying “this kind of art is more important than another kind of art” you take away a lot of ‘attitude’ and l think it made people happier. They felt excited by being on the same platform as each other and that opened up conversations then about Art, because it accepted the idea that everybody there was a creative artist. Some of the artists were attached to those traditions that have been going on for several hundreds of years and some were artists that were exploring very new forms, but you quickly realize that these are the same thing. No classic tradition lasts without change and influence, also a respect to the past and an acceptance of the future; this is how Art stays alive. l think it was lovely just to have artists of different kinds talking about their creative needs…together.

DM: One of the discussions during Debate 1 talked about how the rest of the world is now looking towards lndia for ideas about how to deal with issues that, after a thousand years of Democracy (in the West) we are still trying to clean up our act, political corruption for example, and l thought that was a very healthy strand about Alchemy, that people weren’t frightened of taking risks and that people from all different backgrounds and professions and sometimes with very different points of view, were talking to each other. That seemed very much to be some of the shades of what Alchemy was about.

JK: Yes, and again l think it’s about that unless you see the world as something that is joined together by many (different) things, one thing influencing another, then you are partially blind. One of the reasons why l say that lndia is such an extraordinary place is because it accommodates all these different things and all in the same space. There seems to be much less segregation of age, type, poverty, wealth…it lives together side by side.

DM: That reminds me of a remark a panellist on Debate 1 made (Hardeep Singh Kohli): that ‘pluralism is actually embedded in the DNA of lndian people!’.

You later mentioned your concern with the apparent…‘potential to ditch culture because of modernizing’ and that ‘the drive for Modernity was in some ways causing people to think that: ‘Art can come later after we’ve modernized’, which l agree is a frightening prospect.

JK: l think a very common thing about Modernity is that one of the things most relevant to use is the sense of identity which abides in culture. Sometimes we adopt the idea that culture is a luxury that we put on at the end. Whereas with people who seem to have absolutely nothing, but what they do have and what can’t be taken away from them is their music; their sense of colour and design; their sense of Art.

DM: Absolutely, and l remember something else that came out of one of the debates was that culture in lndia actually comes even before numeracy.

JK: Yes, and if you loose that, if you forget or don’t honour it, then you really will loose the very qualities that has and will make lndia an influence that the rest of the world can look to.

DM: What is your take on this: that the hold that Religion has, right across the board and on all caste levels, is slowing diminishing in lndia? You spent 18 days with 400 incredibly vibrant, optimistic, intelligent, young people…was Religion spoken about?

JK: No, hardly at all. l felt l was in a country where Religion was held lightly, Spirituality was a given but not Religion. There was a strong sense of the Spirit and a connection to Spirituality.

DM: Do you think that leads you to the potential for Alchemy 2011 to talk about Art, Culture, Religion and Spirituality?

JK: Yes, and Science also, because finally underneath culture is a philosophical bed around how as humans we seek meaning, the lack of meaning, and our relationship with being-ness.

DM: Our relationship with thought and the continuation of thought.

JK: Yes, and l think examining that is part of what l would like Alchemy 2011 to do.

DM: Another dimension l’d like to throw in for 2011 is ‘oral tradition’ which is a huge part of lndian culture. Are you going to take that on board?

JK: Yes. l think there are two different issues here, one is the sort of professionalized story-telling which some marvellous lndian artists are doing. Then there’s the issue of whether you try to draw out a less formalized version of that, if you like the actual story telling oral tradition that comes out of tribal, village and family life. How do we do that?

DM: ‘At the crossroads of expansionist culture’… is how lndia was described during one of the debates, and you responded by saying that you felt …”lf possible, a level of control needs to be practised by not exercising all the powers that (expansionism) could have”.
The subtlety of expansionism; global flash-points; micro-finance, all these subjects were coming out of the debates whilst at the same time being juxtaposed with cultural developments, which l thought was fascinating.

DM: Could you say something about the partners who were involved with the Alchemy Festival.

JK: For 2010 l set about working deliberately with lots of partners in this country and in 2011 l’m going to expand it to work with a lot more partners in lndia. For 2009 l had a fan of experts who have all got their own communities, their own obsessions and expertise. l wanted them to feel that the legacy of Alchemy was that they had new relationships and new partners. l think that’s very exciting, l enjoyed that. And also… l need to be educated, because l don’t know a lot in depth of what all the partners knew about. l can see Alchemy in the future being a meeting place with lots of new people to network and explore things. The British Council were great, they really wanted to work with me on this in terms of connecting up artists and artist’s projects in the UK and lndia, and l think they did that is a really marvellous way. They were very unobtrusive, and not at all institutionalized or corporate, on the contrary, they were very knowledgeable about artist’s processes and that has worked very well.

DM: The team of co-curators for Alchemy; who selected them and why?
You worked closely with Kuljit Bhamra, Gauri Sharma Tripathi and Nihal.

JK: l selected them because they are all intelligent, sophisticated, humorous people who are in themselves open and curious. l didn’t want people who would say…’”Well this is my vision and this is what we’re going to do!”.
l liked the idea that these people were fascinated by other people’s ideas.

DM: The Southall Story had a compassion about it that l have never actually experienced before; the way that it became a physical labyrinth within the lower level of SBC was fantastic. There was a touch of genius about it. Multi-media, installation, live performances, story telling…the place came alive. lt was something of a genesis.

JK: Kuljit and Shakira had come and spoken to me about Southall Story actually before Alchemy and l thought…”ln the way that Brixton is a phenomenal world space, how do you honour a neighbourhood and realize what a neighbourhood is historically”? l think it was a stroke of genius in the way that you could completely identify with it. The compassion actually came out of the fact that it was saying…
‘This is all about humans; what humans are doing and how they make a life’.

THE SOUTHALL STORY

Southall Story was a celebration of the diverse suburb of Southall (situated in the West London Borough of Ealing) affectionately known to its local residents as ‘Little lndia’. Originally a cluster of local farms, the parish of Southall came about in 1864. The advent of the lndustrial Revolution brought about the opening of the Grand Junction Canal followed by the Great Western Railway who established a halt in Southall in 1839. lndustries soon began to replace farming and when Heathrow (Airport) opened in 1946 during the influx of post second world war immigration it soon became one of the largest employers of Southall’s new settlers. Drawing then from its long history of social and political activism to the dynamic emergence of Bhangra music, the milieu of Southall was re-constructed in the lower ground level of SBC, transforming the space into a labyrinth of real life stories through music, archive film and photography, story telling, audio interviews, living room and bedroom installations as well as a market area with material sourced from Southall traders that evoked the sights, smells and sounds of walking down The Broadway, the beating heart of Southall. An audio-video-photographic tour guided you from the entrance where you were first greeted by a station sign translated into Punjabi, then onto the exterior of the first public house to accept lndian rupees and the Glassy Junction lit up with a giant cut out of a Bhangra dancer. Further down the street were the Himalaya Palace Cinema (now a heritage listed building) a fusing of Chinese inspired architecture with a Bollywood film billboard well-known restaurants, an elaborately decorated Pakistani bus (situated for the period of the festival outside the RFH) and an active slice of the largest Asian market in London… all landmarks of the Broadway. The atmosphere was tremendous. The cross-cultural mix continued with Southall’s diverse places of worship: Christian churches, Muslim mosques, Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras. A symphony of international dialects and music, vivid colours and textures, pungent aromas…the impact on the senses grew with intensity, and for those who have yet to step foot into Southall, probably even more so than to the familiar and its residents. This was a unique and memorable event.

‘A bustling street theatre, part English high street but mostly Delhi Jalandhur bazaar, captures Southall’s prevailing mood along its pulsating culture, the Broadway’…’where African-Caribbean, Somalis, Eastern Europeans, the lrish, Welsh and English are entwined with a predominantly Asian population. Woven with the mettle of migrant myths, dreams and realities cut from the flowing fabric of Asian culture by pioneers using tools and physical surrounds of the West…’ (Satinder Kaur Chohan, ‘Home from Home. A Photographic Journey through Little lndia’,1999).

A LIVING LEGEND

Trawling through every detail on offer l came to one particular photograph of a woman that immediately transfixed me. Underneath the title read: ’Mohinder Kaur Bhamra’, Barb Junger, Singer/song-writer.
Married in Kenya, Kaur came to Britain in the early 1960s and settled in Southall with her family. Already qualified in Giana (the study of Sikh scriptures) Kaur was to become the first-ever Asian woman in Southall to perform musically in public. Her influence single-handedly changed attitudes for women to be accepted onto the dance floor (otherwise dominated entirely by men) and therefore changing the social-cultural, physical performance space forever. Together with her musical sons Kuljit (tabla), Satpaul (Mandlin) and Amaparl (accordian) Kaur pioneered a new type of entertainment at Punjabi wedding reception parties that in turn became the basis of the modern day Bhangra scene. With a strong interest in tradition and connecting with top lndia-based artists and recording studios, Kaur’s hallmark remains as quality of lyric and cultural integrity. Having successfully negotiated some of the most difficult social territories and provoked real social change within her broader community, Kaur has retained respect in both religious and secular contexts.

PEOPLE

The exhibition was an opportunity to learn and reflect on many levels including how the peaceful cultural mix of Southall had been stirred by social friction on several occasions and how as a community, issues of race were brought to national attention; how the protests spurred on a British Asian cultural revolution (poetry, literature, music, dance, film, theatre and cinema) and the formation and workings of social activist organizations such as The Monitoring Group and Southall Black Sisters.

BANDS, BEATS AND BEGINNINGS

‘The world wouldn’t be the same today if it wasn’t for Southall.’
(Kuljit Bhamra).

A brilliant de-construction of the fragmented histories of a music scene and how the definition of Bhangra has shifted over the four decades from the 1960s to the present day; how musicians were continually inspiring and influencing each other across the lndian diaspora; how music events such as Rights Against Racism signalled major cultural and political shifts in British society; the landmark music journal - Ghazal & Beat; the highlights and legacies of various popular artists instrumental in the development of contemporary British music; the cross-fertilization with the Western pop mainstream; Bhangra’s transmutation, reinvention and influences on music produced in lndia and Bollywood films; the growth of Southall’s music production companies, shops and record labels; the emergence of the Bhangra club, Rap/Re-mix and MC phenomena.

FILM AND VIDEO MAKING

Fillm has existed in Southall since the 1920s and has been central to the work of many film makers, playwrights and screen writers
Southall Film Studios produced over 65 films between 1925 and 1958 and was a constant source of employment for many local residents. Cinema goers came from all over the country to enjoy Hindi movies at the Century Cinema. Later came Bollywood films at the Himalaya palace’s three screens. The advent of video in the 70s; the cultural revolution of Black and Asian film groups and film makers following the urban up-risings of the 1970s and 80s, film makers ssssuch as Gurinder Chadha, Shakila Maan, Colin Prescod and Faroukh Dhondy went on to become international names.

There was an opportunity to see: ‘A Town Under Siege’- a film on Southall, focusing on how the Southall community organized resistance against racist and fascist attacks between 1976 and 1981. The close of the festival was a jam packed screening in the Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall of ‘Sholay’, one of the highest grossing Bollywood films in lndian cinema.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF ASIAN YOUTH

Established in 1971 in Southall to provide a support network for Asian youth groups in Britain and from 1977 around the UK and founded the Asian Youth Festival that later evolved into a week festival held at SBC and later the Commonwealth lnstitute. NAAY made important challenges to Arts Council funding policies on ‘ethic and community arts’.

THE SOUTHALL STORY LIVE

A packed house enjoyed a fantastic hour long celebration hosted by the Southall film maker Gurinder Chadha, featuring live music and performances from local Southall dancers, drummers and musicians.

The Southall Story was conceived and curated by Kuljit Bjamra, MBE (Musician, Producer, Composer) together with Shakila Maan (Film maker, Southall Black Sisters). The team was joined by Kathy Woolley (SBC) and Ammy Phull (Photographer).

THE FOUR DEBATES:

1)lndia: Global Powerhouse?
2)The Nation’s Favourite Dish.
3) Location, Dislocation, Fusion, Confusion.
4) lnter-generational Journeys.

Festival highlights included:

THE MUSIC OF A.R.RAHMAN (7 April) – London Philharmonic Orchestra perform Academy Award-winning composer’s best known works including Slumdog Millionaire, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Bollywood classics
A MUSICAL EVENING WITH THE GREWAL FAMILY (11 April) – From the hit C4 series The Family
NIHAL: DESI LIVE (8 April) – Radio 1 DJ presents live performances by the biggest names in UK Bhangra
RAJ: RELOAD (10 April) – mini festival featuring Mother India 21st Century Remix
THE SOUTHALL STORY (7 April – 11 May) – immersive street-scape, evoking sights and sounds of London’s ‘Little India’
CHANDRALEKHA & GUNDECHA BROTHERS (11 April) – UK Premiere of last piece created by legendary founder of Indian modern dance
FREE SCREENING of the classic Bollywood film Sholay to close the festival

It has been observed that the ANC – led South Africa government is yet to honour Valliamah, whose grave was found in the Braamfontein cemetery not far from where President Mandela unveiled a memorial stone to Enoch Santonga, composer of the South African national anthem, Nkosi Sikelele’ Afrika.

According to historian Uma Mesthri, “the exclusive political focus and neglect of social history has given rise to a situation where only a small fraction of the Indian population has been acknowledged”. As women did not play a formal role in the Indian political organizations at least until the late 1930’s, their presence in history books and in collective memories remains noticeably absent. Added to this, the widely prevalent image of the Indian woman as being a passive and traditionally subservient dependent supported the general non-acknowledgment of her valuable contributions.

Behind the scenes, however, were numerous unsung heroines who are deserving of recognition and honour.

Political Beginnings is an attempt to highlight their activities and place on record their contributions to the larger struggle. It is also an attempt to trace the development of South African women of Indian origin over a period of first, second and third generation from indenture to democracy. How have they evolved and how have they contributed to the country of their forefather’s adoption? How do they view themselves in terms of their ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, class and linguistic identities? Did their political affiliations affect their racial identities? These are some of the questions that have been explored through a series of interviews of various personalities in all walks of life.

Although Indian women have always played an important role in the social and communal life of their country, much of their work in the households and in their families, in propping up their men and children, has been unobtrusive and unrecognized. It was Gandhi the revolutionary leader who brought a dramatic change in the role and status of Indian women in South Africa and in India when at his bidding they came out in large numbers from the shelters of their homes to play their part in the struggle for freedom of their respective countries. Indian women first entered the struggle in 1913 by way of an open invitation from officials of the Satyagraha Association to join their men in retaliation to the Searle judgment which invalidated all non- Christian marriages. Through this judicial stroke, all Hindu, Muslim and Zoroastrian marriages were declared null and void. This meant that all married Indian women in South Africa were reduced to the status of concubines whilst their progeny were classified illegitimate and deprived of all their rights of inheritance, property, assets and legal claims.

Understandably, the cause was a hugely emotive one on the grounds of the social and moral implications for Indian families- the very honour of India’s womanhood had been insulted. There were other festering issues at stake which added to the toxic strain. The onerous permit system and cumbersome immigration law, for example, prohibited Indians from moving between provinces. Labourers earnestly sought the abolition of the £3 tax, which greatly affected them and their ability to earn meaningful livelihoods.

But it was the ruling and its imposition of additional legal disabilities which started the storm of protest. Indian women were roused in great numbers to join Gandhi’s incipient passive resistance campaign. In uncharacteristically strident behaviour, they began to relinquish their traditional roles as homemakers. And in doing so, they startled contemporary observers.

This was also the year in which, in other acts of rebellion, the mass resistance of African and Coloured women of the Orange Free State against passes began. The first to join were mainly Tamil-speaking women from Tolstoy Farm in the Transvaal¹[1]. With babies in their arms they sought arrest despite the risks of imprisonment and physical hardship involved in such participation. Close behind them followed the mainly Gujarati women of Phoenix Settlement.

In the struggle that followed, the women played a glorious part. A batch of women from Tolstoy Farm crossed the border into Natal in defiance of the immigration law. When left unhindered by the authorities, they went as instructed by Gandhi to the mines and urged the indentured labourers to down tools. This succeeded in inducing some 3000 to 4000 miners in the Newcastle area to go on strike. On 23 September 1913, according to plan, 16 women were arrested for crossing the border and entering the Transvaal without permits. They were tried and sentenced to three months imprisonment with hard labour in the Pietermaritzburg jail.

Among the group were Kasturba Gandhi, two of her close relatives living in the Phoenix settlement, Kashi Chaganlal Gandhi and Santok Maganlal Gandhi, as well as Jayakunvar Mehta, the daughter of a close friend of Gandhi. These events stirred the heart of the Indian community, both in South Africa as well as back in India. Even by contemporary standards, the women’s bravery was exemplary. In jail they were harassed, poorly treated and abused. Their food was of the worst type and their dietary taboos- sacrosanct to Hindus, Muslims and Parsis- were largely ignored. Many grew ill in the

process and one brave teenager died of fever a few days after her release on 22 February 1914. Gandhi recalls her thus in his book, Satyagraha in South Africa:

“How can I forget her? Valliamma R Munuswami Mudliar was a young girl of Johannesburg, only sixteen years of age. She was confined to bed when I saw her. As she was a tall girl her emaciated body was a terrible thing to behold.”

Recalling his conversation with her he recounts:

“Valliamma, you do not repent of having gone to jail?” I asked.

“Repent? I am even now ready to jail again if I am arrested”, she said.

“But what if it results in your death?” I pursued.

“I do not mind it. Who would not love to die for one’s motherland?” was her reply.

The contributions of these brave women have to be seen in the context of the historical and social period in which they lived. Set against this backdrop their struggle takes on an even greater importance. That these women resisters helped to transform the Satyagraha into a powerful mass resistance movement in which in the region of 10,000 people from a small community went to prison, and 60 000 workers went on strike in what was described as the largest general strike in the country at the time, is remarkable. The major demands on which the Satyagraha struggle had been waged were conceded to the Indians, thus declaring the campaign a victory. The role that women played in this intervention was one that not only was a source of great pride to the community, but as Gandhi notes in his record of the movement, to the independence movement in India itself, which was moved “to its very depths.²[2]” Thus, the intervention may be interpreted as a victory for women generally.

Years later, in commenting about the situations both in India and South Africa, Jawaharlal Nehru observed about on the role of Indian women in the struggle: “It was Gandhiji who brought a dramatic change among our women, when on his bidding (both in India and South Africa) they came out in large numbers from the shelter of their homes to take their part in the struggle for freedom. Once the old shackles were removed, it was no longer possible to replace them in the same way.”

As we shall see, however, this positivism was more appropriate in respect of the Indian nationalistic movement than its South African social resistance counterpart in the first half of the twentieth century. For as inspiring as the 1913 campaign was from a female participation aspect was, it did not prove to be the seed of a particularly fast-growing sapling. The legacy of first generation Indian women, it seemed, was of issue-based rather a sustained social activism and a part in the wider arena of non-White rights. According to sociologist Cheryl Walker in her book³[3], “though the participation of women in the 1913 passive resistance campaign set a precedent for later years, unlike the contemporary struggle by African women against passes in the Free State it did not lead to any attempts to organize women as a group on a more long term basis. Once the offending Supreme Court ruling was overturned, Indian women, it would appear, retreated into obscurity of their homes again.” And on their subsequent participation over the following three decades: “Although much informal support went on behind the scenes for the political activities of their husbands and families, Indian women rarely… led the vanguard in the resistance movement. Then as now, they tended to wait for permission and approval from fathers, brothers, sons and husbands before making any decisions about political matters.”

Indeed, between this and the immediate post war period of the late 1940’s, rarely did married women affiliate with political organizations independent of their husbands. It seemed that the South African female was not yet ready to return to the frontline of battle. To be sure, their next form of active participation is only to be found during the Indian passive resistance campaign of 1946 – 1948.

The reasons for this general malaise must take into account the status of women generally in society at the time and particularly within the Indian community. Unlike their counterparts in India which produced a sizable number of women in the struggle against British rule, South Africans were hampered and slackened in their progress in the world of work and politics through a traditional code of conduct that clearly defined roles for men and women restricting free social mingling outside of the home. This did not exist to the same extent in India, certainly not among the political and economic elite of Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Allahabad. So one could plausibly surmise that the substantial activities and achievements in the independence movement of Sarojini Naidu, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, her mother Swarup Rani and Padmaja Naidu would not have been realised to the same extent were these women to have been transplanted to the South African context.

In the immediate post-war period, however, as India (after many failed starts and false dawns under the returned Gandhi) readied itself for full independence from Britain, his South African heirs in the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congress, Monty Naicker and Yusuf Dadoo respectively, ignited the first continuous and determined mass movement against repressive laws which had kept non-Whites as effective second-class citizens. Under the charismatic and eloquent duo, membership of the NIC, essentially nascent since Gandhi’s day, rose from a few hundred to 35,000 by 1947⁴[4]. The campaign, begun the previous year, was in response to the South African Party’s introduction of the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill, which severely restricted the rights of Indians to own or occupy land to only the most marginal and uneconomical areas. Additionally, this was combined with the imposition that Indian concerns were only to be represented in parliament by three European Members of the House of Assembly.

The resistance campaign, under the umbrella organisation South African Indian Congress, effectively internationalised the struggle onto a world platform. Newly independent India in 1947 recalled her High Commissioner and a severely chastened President Smuts lost a great deal of his prestige at the United Nations. And a new, second generation of women renewed the earlier political pledges of their Satyagraha mothers and gave utterance to their fears and aspirations of their new, and even more hardened, society.

The advent of the Second World War had brought in its wake more dynamic changes in the political landscape which, in turn, had encouraged participation of a small group of emancipated women into leadership positions within the ranks of the movement. The most prominent woman in the South African Indian Congress in the 1940s was Dr K Goonam, a medical practitioner who was appointed its Vice President in a very short time, thus broadening the base of Indian women’s participation in organizational politics. In October 1946, three women were elected to the Transvaal Indian Congress executive committee. They were Zainab Asvat, Mrs P.K Naidoo and Suriakala Patel. Asvat, in fact, was one of the first Indian activists to be placed under house arrest in the 1940’s. Elsewhere In Natal, Dr Goonam began to play a more prominent role in the Congress forgoing links with women activists in the Congress Party of South Africa (CPSA) and in the ANC. In 1950, in a move towards creating solidarity between Indians and Africans, she appeared on the platform at an African women’s anti – pass meeting in Durban and pledged the support of Indian women in the fight against passes.

Her unbroken record of involvement in politics spanning a period of over 50 years ranged from active campaigning, to being imprisoned 18 times for her Passive Resistance activities, to dodging the security police and being forced into exile for many years. In 1990, she returned to her home in Durban where she practiced medicine until her death in 1998.

An examination of the historical records of Muslim women’s involvement in the freedom struggle, for instance, additionally brings to the fore the names of Zora Meer, Fatima Meer and Amina Cachalia (sister of Zainab Asvat). The Guardian newspaper spoke of a growing political consciousness of Indian working class women in Natal when reporting on an illiterate mother of five, Mrs L Govender, who took the lead in organizing local women against the black market in food.

Addressing a gathering of about 800 women at the Avalon cinema in Durban in June 1946, Zainab Asvat, who had been arrested the previous night and released later, unwavering in purpose ignited the fervour of the crowd thus:

“Let us pledge that we shall continue the task which we have undertaken. We have sown the seed of our struggle; let it not perish; let us water it with our heart’s blood; let us pledge: Long live resistance!”

Speaking in Tamil, Veeramah Pather, who had taken part in the initial Satyagraha campaign at the time of Gandhi, said that though individuals would disappear from the mortal scene, the struggle would go on. Speaking in Urdu, Khatija Mayat urged all Indian women to heed the call of the Transvaal and the Natal Indian Congress to support the battle against the Ghetto Act⁵[5].

The Indian people were virtually at war with the South African Government, declared Dr K Goonam. Cissy Gool of Cape Town stated:

“South Africa is witnessing the real begins of a national struggle which is still in its infancy. Therefore, I plead to the women to come out boldly, because without them, our struggle will be weakened.”

In response to these calls, hundreds of men, women and even children went to prison. In turn their determination in the face of brutal assaults spurred the community, thus swelling the ranks of volunteers. From the point of view of its effect on Indian women, the Passive Resistance Campaign was an important politicizing event.

Another stalwart of the struggle inspired by earlier veteran activists like Asvat was Fatima Meer, a sociologist who was repeatedly banned for a period of nine years, imprisoned for short periods of time and harassed by the security police. Prior to her banning she was instrumental in the formation of the Women’s Federation of South Africa, a national coalition of Black and White women in protest against pass-laws for African women. An active member of the South African Indian Congress and later the Natal Indian Congress, her political life blazed a trail of unbroken defiance against a racist regime.

The Indian community in South Africa has much to thank their womenfolk for the valuable and crucial role that they played towards the liberation of their people. In relinquishing their traditional role to don the mantle of resistance, they sacrificed their material comforts for a higher order principle so succinctly captured in the words of the great Valliamah- “Who would not want to die for one’s own motherland?”

The proud heritage of the Indian community has unfortunately been muffled and silenced by a lack of exposure arising from prejudice and cultural chauvinism. It is time to restore to the consciousness of all South Africans, the importance of the Indian struggle against apartheid and more particularly to smash the widely held stereotype of Indian women as passive dependents with no mind of their own. The role of Indian women in the struggle for freedom ought to be a great inspiration to the future generations. This is my attempt at doing so.

Dr.Devi Rajab is a leading South African journalist and can be reached at :rajab@cybertek.co.za

Aldwych, London WC2B 4NA

Dear High Commissioner,
Respectful greetings.
I read your comments with much interest at the Republic Day celebrations at BV Bhavan, London.
Here are some of your key remarks::
A. Our fundamental policies and the state of our country are sound
B. We are determined to sustain a high growth rate of our economy while at the same time ensuring equity and social justice.
C. We remain a flourishing plural democracy.

[Judge Mota Singh, another speaker, added that India’s success was “due to the practice of democracy and religious tolerance…” “India was on the way to becoming a superpower.“]

As a British citizen and close observer of developments on the Indian sub-continent, I believe these remarks are rather sweeping and not quite supported by the facts. If, as you say, the state of the country is sound, we should, after over 60 years of independence, find
- an improved status (income, education and health) among ordinary Indian citizens;
- an improved state of the infrastructure and the environment.

Britain is not only more diverse than ever before but that diversity itself is growing more diverse. Today, identities are more complex and fluid than they used to be, reflecting shifting interests and allegiances. For those of us interested in equality, this new situation presents some difficult challenges. While inequality and discrimination manifest themselves along all-too-familiar lines (for example, racial or sexuality, minorities remain targets of much discrimination), identity-based campaigns seem dated.

In an age of super-diversity, where people do not identify around single identities and feel conflicted allegiance (if any allegiance at all) to pre-defined groups, activism around particular ‘strands’ seems irrelevant to many people and may not even be that effective in addressing the true causes of inequality. Even the very categorisations that we often rely on (for example ‘black’, ‘Asian’, ‘gay’ or ‘disabled’) no longer seem to be able to tell us much about who people are, what lives they lead, who they identify with or what services they need from government and society. And the tick-box approach to identity seems to be missing out on growing numbers of people who fall outside or across standard classifications, as some of our interviewees told us.

This paper* explores these issues and challenges, in order to provoke a useful discussion about how policies and practice around equalities can better respond to our contemporary super-diversity and the new politics of identity that it brings.
Background

The two of us met on the Diversity Board of Places for People, the large and innovative housing association and property-developer. The task of that Board is to debate what the organisation’s mission, ‘Creating neighbourhoods of choice’, means in relation to the diversity of the organisation’s actual and potential customers. We shared a growing concern that many of the issues and campaigns that we saw within our own areas of expertise and experience (gay issues for Simon and race and immigration issues for Danny) seemed a little dated and out of touch. We both sensed that young people were identifying with different issues and mobilising in different ways than those who led social movements around race, sexuality, gender and so on were aware of. We were both also frustrated by the fact that, despite the creation of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, we still saw a lot of flag-waving by various ‘strands’ calling for greater attention to their own issue.

As one expert we interviewed told us:

I think one of the outcomes of the way that local politics has been played…and to a certain extent national politics…is to encourage special interest groups to sort of pit against each other in a way, even in terms of competing for funding from local authorities. So if you’re looking for funding you can do that through being a Sikh organisation or a Muslim organisation… in some ways those lines have become much more rigid and delineated than previously.

Finally, we also sensed an important moment in bringing about a ‘post-strand’ principle and framework that could guide equality policies and practice in the 21st century. All this was brought home when we realised how frustrating it was that despite all this progress in understanding and promoting diversity, Keeran, Danny’s son (born in Britain to a Sri Lankan-born Australian father and a Afro-Trinidadian mother) does not have a box to tick in the Census (see Box 1) or any other administrative forms. Keeran and the 6000 or so other people of mixed Asian and Black heritage in the UK have to tick the ‘Other’ box, a dispassionate rejection flowing from the rather bizarre recognition of only a set number of ethnic categories.

Above all, our conversations led us to a shared frustration of how the ‘tick-box’ approach to categorising people is unwieldy, because it is too generalised, and often meaningless. It has no finger on the pulse of how life is actually lived, whether it is about sexuality, ethnicity or any other form of capturing diversity.
Box 1. Boxed in: how Census 2001 captured ethnicity
What is your ethnic group?

Choose ONE section from A to E, then tick the appropriate box to indicate your cultural background.

A White

British Irish Any other White background (please write in)

B Mixed

White and Black Caribbean White and Black African White and Asian

Any other Mixed background (please write in)

C Asian or Asian British

Indian Pakistani Bangladeshi Any other Asian background (please write in)

D Black or Black British

Caribbean African Any other Black background (please write in)

E Chinese or other ethnic group

Chinese Any other (please write in)

Source: Census 2001 – Office for National Statistics

Box ends
The strand-based approach

Britain has been having a long liberal moment since that weedy but highly significant character in the story, the first Race Relations Act in 1965, signified our aspiration to dismantle prejudice against minorities. The law and the framework for the arguments against prejudice and discrimination ever since have been based on what we now call the six ‘strands’:

• Gender

• Race

• Disability

• Sexuality

• Faith and belief

• Age.

Group identity has been at the core of this approach. Attempts have been made to tackle disadvantage in ways based on the notion that the members of these groups are all disadvantaged, that their life chances and opportunities are overwhelmingly affected by their race, age, sexuality and so on.

This paper comes from the standpoint that this is clearly not true any more. Discrimination might be an everyday event, but it is no longer an all-day event. We can celebrate progress. And building on it, there should be three wider aims for the future: to recognise and harness diversity, create equality and challenge discrimination. So the question will be whether Britain can now go forward with an approach that more closely matches the experience of people’s day-to-day lives and achievements and responds to their more complex feelings of identity as well as dealing with their experience of prejudice. This approach will also enable government, local authorities and others to focus on where there is real disadvantage and not just fire money via the strands in the general direction of issues in the hope that some of it finds its target and solves the problem.

In all spheres of public and private life in the last decade there have been scores of examples where opportunities have opened up and there are very significant achievements by what South Africans would call Previously Disadvantaged Individuals. Systematic political blackmail has given way to gay cabinet Ministers, people with disabilities and learning difficulties living independent lives in a way that would have been unimaginable just 10 or 15 years ago, and there are significant numbers of black and Asian actors, peers and people in business, at all levels.

Identity

So how homogeneous (and equally disadvantaged) are the members of those groups now after so many years of palpable progress in certain areas? We have chosen to ask this question through the prism of identity. Plainly put, how much does it tell you about somebody to know they are ‘black’, ‘disabled’, ‘gay’ and so on? How much does it help in tailoring public services to their individual need? How much does it tell a private sector company designing a product about their consumer habits? How much will the bald Census data tell us about the reality of our population? Perhaps only that (setting aside the Jedi) we have millions of people who are simply designated ‘other’ because they do not fit the bureaucratic categories of identity.

In this paper, we ask to what extent an analysis based on groups is now adequate to the task. We want to suggest that they are an insufficient tool in the context of a society characterised by super-diversity and much more complex personal identities that are also more publicly expressed.

We believe that a more sophisticated approach will (a) more accurately promote diversity, (b) help to achieve equality and (c) counter discrimination. We need to understand when and in what circumstances it makes sense to consider someone as part of a group; when their individual identity and needs and aspirations transcend that; and thirdly we need to look at the data from any community or organisation and ask, ‘who is really disadvantaged here’?

There are moments when group experience and identity is indeed the dominant force in people’s lives. When we are discriminated against, whatever the multi-layered experience we may have of our own identity in life, we know we are part of that group. This is the fist-in-the-face moment. Prejudice is so unintelligent that it sees us as all the same. And we respond in kind. As Hannah Arendt wrote:

One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people… is that you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or a Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself at all.

So at the outset we would want to reaffirm that inequality clearly remains a blot on our society and that certain groups of people appear to suffer more greatly from inequality than others in certain contexts. There is clearly persistent bias. This paper simply asks whether we are being as clever as we should be in identifying and tackling the inequality and discrimination that exists in British society.

Prejudice is almost always based on cruel reductionism; human beings are squeezed into rigid stereotypes. Though well intentioned, the orthodox tick-box approach to equalities also risks reductionism. In its crudest applications, diversity and equality policies stop seeing people for who they are and start seeing them instead as categories or, worse still, contributors to quotas.

. The ‘tick-box’ approach to categorising people is unwieldy.

The complexity of what is going on in terms of identity in contemporary Britain is staggering. If we take, for example, one of the most important but least well-understood aspects of identity at the moment – what it means to be Muslim in this country – it seems we run a serious risk of simplifying things.

Making simplistic assumptions about who identifies as a Muslim or why they do is dangerous. One recent report on engaging with Muslim youth highlights the complexity of identity formation and expression within specific communities of young Muslims. Not only are most young Muslims preoccupied with the same concerns as other British youth (for example getting on the property ladder, job stability, educational attainment) and are worried by universal concerns about parental expectations, but they also have ‘a strong desire to define their own distinct sense of belonging and identity which accepts multiple identities and engages with being part of British society’.

Our aim in this paper is to provoke a discussion about whether the orthodox approach to identity and equalities is sufficient to address the real inequality that exists in British society. It plugs into the moods and modes of young Britons. Although we do not try to come up with detailed policy prescriptions, our thoughts are designed to help public bodies in the UK recognise and harness diversity, create equality and challenge discrimination in a way based on the new reality of Britain and in a form that will be more effective than relying on old understandings.

Research methodology

This is not a paper informed by extensive research: it is based on years of our own experiences as activists and students of identity politics, and our observations about the changes we see around us. Nevertheless, to ground some of these experiences and observations, we reviewed recent academic literature on, and journalistic coverage of, the issues that interested us, and we also conducted some primary research.

We ran discussion groups with young people of different backgrounds to explore how identity is constructed and expressed. Two groups were held in London and one in Hove, East Sussex, in March 2009. All of the groups were made up of members of the public who were ‘politically engaged’ – for example, those who are interested in politics or take part in some form of political activity. Screener questions drawn from the Hansard Society’s Audit of Political Engagement (Hansard Society 2008) were used to ensure that all participants were at least moderately politically engaged. We felt this was useful so that all participants in our group had some basic level of awareness of politics and had a good chance of having some form of political identity.

Groups were mixed sex, mostly aged under 35 and included ethnic minorities, people from different regional and social backgrounds, and gay and lesbian people. It was not our intention to represent each and all of the identity ‘strands’ in such a small piece of qualitative research. Rather we aimed to explore identity-related issues with a range of politically-engaged younger Britons.

.Super-diverse Britain

Britain is more diverse than ever before. We say this not because we want to quote some glib statistic about how many languages are spoken in London (300-plus at last count, by the way), but because increasing diversity calls into question some of the orthodox assumptions that our equalities frameworks build on. We believe that Britain is ‘super-diverse’ not only because of the increasingly diverse make-up of the population (as a result, for example, of increasingly diverse immigrant flows, but also because all Britons, especially younger ones, are expressing their identities in increasingly diverse ways.)

We believe that this super-diversity presents a fundamental challenge to the way we categorise people. And if the groupings that we often use (black, Christian, gay, and so on) to identify people who are disadvantaged or being discriminated against are not sound, then the whole process of promoting equality is undermined.

Ethnic groups

A good place to start is with the categorisation of ethnic groups. There are, of course, valid reasons why we should collect information on ethnicity but we believe that categorising the entire population in just 16 or so groupings hides more than it reveals.

Ethnic categories such as ‘black African’ hide such huge differences that it begs the question of why the grouping is even useful even at the most basic level. If you divide this group by country of birth, you see that the differences between constituent groups are staggering. For example, overall some 66 per cent of black African-born people in the UK were employed in 2005/06 but Ghanaian-born and Nigerian-born people had an employment rate of 80 and 76 per cent respectively while Somalia-born people had a rate of around 20 per cent. Knowing the overall black African employment rate would tell one very little about what was going on in Somali-born or Ghanaian-born communities.

This is not to say that using a person’s country of birth is a good or better way of categorising people. Where they came from may also not tell us very much. Within any particular group from a given country, there are likely to be distinctions around ethnicity, religious affiliation and practice, language, regional and local identities in places of origin, kinship, clan affiliation, political affiliations, and other criteria of collective belonging. Indeed, it would seem foolish to say treat all Sri Lankan-born people as if they were a meaningful whole given the importance of ethnic, religious, linguistic and regional differences in that country.

Even if we take the ethnic groupings at face value, we still find that there are important trends that will mean that more and more people will fall between the crude classifications. The question of how to classify people of ‘mixed’ ethnic heritage has plagued data collectors for decades. Only in 1991 was ‘mixed’ even introduced as a Census category (before this it was assumed that people would tick a box relating to one of their parents’ or ancestors’ category) and only in 2001 was this category broadened out to include different types of mixing. Yet, given the growth in the numbers of mixed people, particularly among the younger generation, we will see a substantial growth in the proportion of Britons who are ‘mixed’ (see Table below).

Britain’s growing ethnic diversity

Source: 1991 and 2001 data are for England and Wales and from Censuses; 2008 data are for England, Wales and Scotland from Platt (2009); 2020 projections are for UK and from Rees (2006).

As at the last Census around 9 per cent of children were living in families that contain mixed or multiple ethnic heritages . Yet society seems to treat ethnic identities as if they are clearly bounded, static and meaningful, and public bodies insist on a tick-box classification of ethnicity..

Our interviewees were almost unanimous on this. One of the key issues about the use of tick-boxes or labels was that it depersonalised or in some other way compromised the person involved. The point was made that, in fact, a group of friends may use labels or categorisations within the groups, but this was done with the knowledge and (presumably) tacit consent of the individual involved.

In summary, we have raised questions about the value of just using formal ‘strands’ in establishing diversity, equality and fighting discrimination. Strand-based or identity-based thinking and mobilisation has played an important role in relation to discrimination and been an important factor in promoting equalities in recent decades in the UK. But this sort of approach alone will not allow us to capture or respond to the diversity of people’s lifestyles and aspirations in the 21st century. We have to find a balance in social policy between the individual and the group, and understand when we are answering the needs of each. Put simply, as The Prisoner said, ‘I am not a number’.

Simon Fanshawe is a broadcaster, writer and award-winning comedian and Chair of the Council of the University of Sussex.

Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is Director of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Between 2004 and 2008 he was head of the migration and equalities team, and, latterly, Deputy Director at the Institute for Public Policy Research.

* Abridged from the original.

Presenting this play in the UK made sense because its purpose was to show a slice of life in contemporary India, a view most people here may not have seen in its unvarnished version. It gave a glimpse of all the complexities of modern Indian society, as it adjusts to the tech-savvy lifestyle of the young. It did not however answer the many questions that arose in the viewer’s mind as one by one the scenes unfolded. Can the system of arranged marriages survive in a changed world? Can the Indian family continue to be as close-knit as it used to be if each one has a parallel life that he doesn’t share with the rest? How long would it take before the Indian family too gets fractured as in the West? True to its title, it was a collection of pictures that were not necessarily connected to each other in a straightforward narrative structure.

The play is set in Dharwad in Karnataka, and is about the Nadkarni family which is made up of the parents and their three grown up children: two daughters and a son. The family is preparing for the wedding of Vidula, the younger daughter, an occasion which has had the older daughter come down from Australia where she had settled after marriage. The fate of the brother is also being decided, as during the same period the Sirurs are trying their best to put pressure on him to marry their daughter while he is in a relationship with another girl. Before the play ends we know that eventually he does succumb to the temptations they are holding out. The first part of the play portrays the external relationships of an average family and it is in the second half that the dark secrets come tumbling out. And as is the case with most middle-class families, the maid is a part of the household and partakes of their joys and sorrows.

The new face of India may come as a surprise to some. In contrast to the way marriages used to be arranged when a man and a woman did not see each other until the wedding ceremony had begun, the prospective bride and groom today have the opportunity not only to introduce themselves to each other but also to have a private conversation in a place outside their homes where their family members are not present. The brother’s relationship with a Christian girl seems to be an open secret. That he talks to her in the presence of his family members on his mobile phone shows he is not particularly interested in hiding it. Such liaisons would have been frowned upon by an earlier generation. Vidula, like all young girls has a life in cyberspace even though she lives in a place which is not a major metropolitan city of India. Another revelation is how Indian women are ready to make sacrifices in their personal life to get ahead professionally and find themselves often at the head of organisations, as in the case of the television producer who is the brother’s employer. It is nothing new now for a man to work for a woman boss and to play up to her. India lives with one foot in the past and the other in the future. In fact, the values of the different generations exist side by side.

Much of the credit for the success of this play must go to Lillete Dubey who has not only directed the play but also played the role of the mother of the bride. Her flawless performance did not at any point betray the anxiety she must have had as the director on the opening night in London. Surely there must have been moments when, just as she was getting under the skin of her character, she must have simultaneously worried about technical details, timings and costume changes in a location where they were performing the play for the first time. Making intelligent use of the intimate stage space at Watermans to define the different areas where the scenes take place, she created the illusion of endless movement in a play which is basically set in the living-room of a middle class family or in other places where the characters do little more than sit and talk.

As if under a spell, the audience was transported for a couple of hours to modern India, and it was largely due to the acting skills of the entire cast who could lend that touch of authenticity to the characters they were playing. Special mention must be made of Raaghav Chanana who played the prospective groom from the United States. Even though he had never set foot in America he managed to get the accent just right. He said with a smile, after the show, that he asked a friend who had lived for a while in the States to read out his lines several times until he himself could repeat it with the exact twang.

This is Girish Karnad’s only play set in contemporary India - all the others take place in the mythological or historic past. But Karnad is very much a part of the contemporary cinema scene and so this is really not unfamiliar territory to him. His familiarity with the milieu gives him insights into the way the minds of the characters work. We see this in the portrayal of the maid’s relationship with her mistress, the sense of alienation of the father, and the bitterness of the elder sister who feels she was not given her fair share of affection.

He also brings out the various nuances in the character of Vidula’s brother, who while being one of the younger members of the family is also the man of the house, attending to all duties.

If the high points of the work came from the writer, perhaps the weak spots also came from him. The way the play moves back and forth in time left some in the audience quite confused. Also, the scene in the internet café was too brief compared to the entire length of the play to make the point that Vidula was indeed leading a distinctly double life. There was a feeling that among the many issues raised some were not touched deeply enough and this gave the impression that the play was moving in many directions at the same time.

The length of the play seemed not to weigh too much thanks to good humour in plenty, coming mainly from the true to life portrayals; yes, people could recognise their own families in the one they were seeing on the stage. But there were also many worrying questions that emerged that clearly keeps this play outside the pale of comedy. The end, although somewhat abrupt, had a clever touch when the maid asked the age-old Indian question “Can you keep a grown-up daughter forever at home?” while in the background we hear a TV presenter referring to the modern reality of a woman who had gone to the USA as a wife but returned disillusioned, possibly abused and ill-treated.

As the lights go off on that ominous note we are left with a question. Will Vidula find happiness? Her two siblings have already told her that if things turn out badly she should not hesitate to come back. The voice of the father warning everyone that marriage is a gamble keeps echoing in one’s mind even after the play is over. And perhaps he is the one who has the last word.

That Girish Karnad chose to write a new play, and so many actors connected with films and television gave their time and energy to it, shows that theatre is alive and kicking in India. English language theatre particularly has had a hard time surviving the stiff competition from popular entertainment in the electronic media. The more it succeeds at home the more likely it is that London will be included in international tours and circuits. That can only come as good news to spectators in the UK. Language not being a barrier, Indian plays performed in English can be understood and enjoyed by everyone.

Sunayana Panda, an MA in English and American Literature from Annamalai University, India, is a freelance journalist, theatre actress and director.

Like Kuru and Pandava pennants on either side
of the Mahabharata. She asserts: The Charioteer’s
driver, Krishna, is like—think of a Humvee owner

Taking his friends on a Friday night spin
in Bangalore saying, “I am God.” Parsing
an ancient text, and quipping, I should know

Having spent several summer breaks
in India, in households where only women
teach the Gita to children; I will translate

In these women’s syntax. Our uplifted hands
Krishna’s benedictions. Are there no agendas?
How can there be? I’m scholar, objective outsider.

In a winter evening, nothing moves on the river.
Stars converse in Morse, in the wounding silence
of ancient Indian theory on making music

In the puncturing of Euro-American myths
on myths, Indian navy divers in the Gujarat Sea
are photographing an underwater city

Surfacing Dowarka utensils for carbon-dating.
In the controlled pause for questions
no one questions Mahabharathology’s new science.

Ford’s blue egg hatching
another fusion. The freight train’s horn
awakening a new year’s slumber
dissolved in the Carolina wrens’ chirps.

Once you’re in lefty
it is left and left and left
until your tenancy’s over. Who slept
in what room, how you redecorate
bush immaterial except to the woman

whose ancestors served in factories
plucked cotton on plantations
bore the brunt of a one-eyed recording—
you are viewed by your car:
a lowly Ford, Bavarian Motor Works
or Japanese Kaizen sipping gasoline

so the myth goes once you’re in you’re in
and it is left and left and left
and when you’re exiting right
into those very books you once condemned.