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 D’Lo 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 who’s 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]

A few months ago, in the middle of the Sonal Shah controversy, I wrote a blog post criticizing Vijay Prashad’s 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 Prashad’s book have similar problems: Prashad’s 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 Lal’s The Other Indians: A Political and Cultural History of South Asians in America (see an earlier post on Vinay Lal by Abhi here). Lal’s book covers some of the same topics as Prashad’s Karma but is much more heavily factual and closely researched -– it’s a work of history rather than a political polemic –- and it’s 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.

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.

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?

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]

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:

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.

Amitav Ghosh’s 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 1830’s 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 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?

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:

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 convert’s enthusiasm and zeal, he was as a teenager on a course to militancy –- 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.

What’s interesting about Knight’s 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 can’t 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.

On a more positive note.... City Journal has a review of a fantastic new book chronicling the untold education successes in the 3rd world - "The Beautiful Tree".

University of Newcastle professor James Tooley journeyed to Hyderabad, India in early 2000 at the behest of the World Bank, to study private schools there. Or, more specifically, to study familiar private schools--that is, those that served the children of middle-class and wealthy families.

But while on a sightseeing excursion to the city's teeming slums, Tooley observed something peculiar: private schools were just as prevalent in these struggling areas as in the nicer neighborhoods. Everywhere he spotted hand-painted signs advertising locally run educational enterprises. "Why," he wondered, "had no one I'd worked with in India told me about them?"

The reason no one had "told him about them" was because these private schools were non-chartered, private enterprises operating under the government's radar -- aka "unrecognized institutions." Instead of the sometimes hundreds of dollars charged by yuppy private schools, these unrecognized institutions often charged as little as $1-$2 per child per month.

I suppose before we get into any other details about these schools, question #1 is - "so how good are they?" And it turns out they are astonishly good -

Aharay! What a waste of perfectly good achar…

The X-ray equipment used by TSA airport security in Columbus could not detect what was inside a sealed canister in a bag being inspected around 7 p.m. Tuesday. [wlwt]

A brown woman? A suspicious package? Airport security to the rescue!

The container was labeled “baby food,” but authorities say security personnel became suspicious when the woman who owned the suitcase claimed the canister held pickles. [kansascity]

There’s only one thing to do.

The fire department bomb squad removed the item from the airport and detonated it, discovering the mangoes.

No one was hurt. Flights and other airport operations were not interrupted.[wlwt]

There are two things I love to this story. First, I wonder where this woman was going that she absolutely had to pack mango achar in her luggage. Where ever it was, she just absolutely could not leave home without the essential mango pickle to take with her. Secondly, I find it hilarious that they detonated the canister of achar. I imagine flying tangy orange sauce exploding all over the members of the bomb squad and pieces of mango getting stuck in their hair. Couldn’t they have just uncapped the jar and tasted it instead?

Desi, please.

…Maria.

As soon as word of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s adulterous affair with an Argentinian mystery woman hit the streets, Indian American gubernatorial candidate Nikki Randhawa-Haley pulled any association with him off of her website. Sanford who? Never heard of him. Did you check under the bus?

Hmmm, just a week ago some were intimating how close a professional relationship the two had:

Since there’s no question who S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford is backing for governor 2010, the only real suspense left is this: at what point does First Lady Jenny Sanford start getting jealous?

Seriously, Sanford’s abiding affection for third-term Lexington Representative Nikki Haley continues to manifest itself, as the governor blasted out an e-mail to several thousand of his closest friends this morning telling them Haley was “worth getting to know.” [Link]

Doubtless many readers saw the recent article in the New York Times, profiling Katherine Russell Rich, author most recently of a book called Dreaming in Hindi — a memoir of a year spent in Rajasthan, learning Hindi.

Something about the article in the Times bugged me, starting with the following passage:

One store owner insists in English that she is not actually speaking Hindi; when Ms. Rich explains, in Hindi, that she studied the language for some time in Rajasthan, he retorts, in English, “They don’t speak Hindi in Rajasthan.” (This happens not to be true.)

When Ms. Rich returned to New York from abroad, she spontaneously spoke Hindi to a friend of a friend. “He told me that when I spoke Hindi to him, it was like a body blow,” Ms. Rich said. “I think to Indians, sometimes it feels like I’m eavesdropping on a private conversation, like I’m breaking the fourth wall.” (link)

Wait, couldn’t it also be that the people Rich has been accosting, taxi drivers and convenience store clerks, might simply find this persistent American annoying, and have refused to speak Hindi with her mainly to make her go away? Lady, I’m sorry if your being in New York means your newly-acquired Hindi is going to start getting rusty. But I got a job to do, and that involves speaking English to patrons as I sell them stuff, not teaching you how to pronounce “lajawab” correctly. Next in line, please?

The question has to be asked: why does Katherine Russell Rich want to learn to speak Hindi? Is it to communicate with Hindi speakers while living in India? That would be a perfectly fine reason, indeed, an admirable one. But I suspect that sadly her real desire was to a) get paid for writing a book where she can talk all about her Hindi lessons and her impressions of Rajasthan, only to b) promptly move back to Manhattan, where she’ll irk Hindi speaking New Yorkers with her persistent demands that they speak Hindi with her?

Another annoyance in the article is the presumption that people refuse to acknowledge a white woman who speaks Hindi because we desis like to gossip about Americans in our secret language:

To some people from India, Ms. Rich learned, it is insulting to be addressed in anything other than English, a language of the privileged. And for some immigrants, domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim. (link)

I really don’t know where the author of the article got this idea. (Why not ask an actual Indian, Hindi-speaker before making the speculative statement that “domain over a language unfamiliar to most Americans must feel like one of the few riches they can claim”?)

Finally, there is the obligatory dis on second-generation, “heritage” students who take Hindi classes at their universities:

“A lot of Indians who were born here or moved here when they were very small want to rediscover the language,” he said. (Ms. Rich said that she had overlapped with such students at New York University, and that many were already proficient in the language, less interested in their heritage and more interested in an easy A.) (link)

I’ll have you know, Ms. Rich, that most second gen, Indian-American college students do not take Hindi for this reason. I myself took Hindi at Cornell, and my professor gave me a “B” in intermediate Hindi (I deserved it, but it still smarts: certainly not an “easy A”).

In fact, most Indian-American college students actually take Hindi to meet, and flirt with, other Indian-American college students. So there.

As many of you, I have been completely and totally engrossed by the uprising in Iran. Even while hiking in the Rockies this weekend I was refreshing Huffington and the Daily Dish on my smartphone for any small tidbit of new information (I usually roll my eyes at people who take their cell phones hiking, so this was a big deal for me).

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Whenever revolution occurs a number of commonalities are observed. First among them, both the participants and observers look for a historical analogy. They say that “this is just like the [insert famous rebellion here].” This step is crucial because history is a river and it is much easier to play your part when you believe that you are a parcel of its inexorable flow and not a fish swimming against the current. This knowledge also makes it easier to accept the loss of loved ones. Although perhaps only slightly easier. This has all happened before. Gandhi—>MLK—>some how end up leading to Mousavi in the eyes of many. How true it is won’t matter until much later. Second, when revolution occurs it is the actions of individuals that shape the arc of the final story. The opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was no liberal. An Iran under him might have been only slightly different than the one under Ahmadinejad. More than likely though we will never know what the “old Mousavi” would have done in office. That person is gone, having been transformed by the wave upon which he now rides to an unknown shore. He, and the student organizers that are silently shepherding the movement through word-of-mouth have cast their die, much as the founding fathers in our own revolution. I love this one quote by Benjamin Harrison of Virginia to Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts right before our Declaration of Independence:

“I will have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.” [Link]

There is an old adage that says “Men make history,” not events. In this uprising I believe it will the women who make history. Iran has many women like these, and many more individual stories will arise:

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?”one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”… [Link]