"Fundamentalism not unique to Islam"

Our largest neighbour Indonesia is going through a period of dynamic, unpredictable and largely disheartening change--which could have a larger impact on Australia than we can yet imagine. And one of the most detailed and compassionate accounts come from an India-born, Washington-based journalist, Sadanand Dhume in his first book, My Friend the Fanatic.

Dhume discussed his book with Australian author, Linda Jaivin in the atmospheric, brick-lined Richard Wherrett Studio in the Sydney theatre last week, as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival 2008. Following the Bali bombings in October 2002, Dhume travelled across Indonesia with Herry Nurdi, managing editor of fundamentalist mouthpiece Sabili, who hero-worships Osama bin Laden.

"Herry is not a fanatic," said Dhume, however. "The title is misleading. He writes awfully bigoted things, but this is a career choice for him--he is more like a Monday to Friday fanatic. Fanatics are not curious, but Herry is very curious," he said.

To illustrate his point, Dhume talked about his visit to a purportedly moderate Islamic school in Gontor, near Ponorogo in east Java. "The students were forbidden to watch the most famous local dance," explained Dhume. "They were not taught Jihad, but they were taught to be very sceptical of any other cultural influence."

Though triggered by the Bali bombings, My Friend the Fanatic, really explores these slow transformations taking place in Indonesia, until then home to a cultural diversity of Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim faith. In his prologue, Dhume writes about Islam, a relatively recent import to the Indonesia, preceded by a millennium and a half of Hinduism & Buddhism, along with decades of Dutch influence to add.

The literal, harsh interpretation of the faith comes from a powerful minority, he believes. "Islam is a young faith, and with the rise of petro-dollars, some of the world's richest places are supporting the fundamentalist form--and Indonesia is vulnerable to this."

'…the carnage in Bali was only the most visible expression of a much larger churning.' writes Dhume in his prologue. "We are obsessed with terrorism, but more worrying are the changes in day to day life--such as asking women to cover up--that Islamic fundamentalists are bringing in Indonesia," he said at the festival.

Aborigines don't understand white law, report says

I just read this and just found it so appalling! I had to share it:

By Tara Ravens

DARWIN, May 28 AAP - More than 90 per cent of people in Arnhem Land do not understand basic legal concepts, with many Aborigines under the impression that white society is "lawless", a new report has found.

This has resulted in wrongful imprisonment and "massive confusion", with some communities still unaware that rape is considered illegal, says Richard Trudgen, CEO of the Aboriginal Resource and Development Services (ARDS).

In a report titled An Absence of Mutual Respect, researchers spoke to Yolngu people from a cross-section of the community, including interpreters, locals and community leaders.

They were quizzed on the 30 most commonly used English legal words such as bail, commit, arrest, charge and guilty.

The ARDS report found 95 per cent of Yolngu people were unable to correctly identify their meaning.

Only 17 per cent of responses from language professionals were correct while 90 per cent of community leaders, such as ATSIC members, school teachers and council representatives, had no understanding of the terms at all.

Ninety-seven per cent of Yolngu people born after 1967 fell into the lowest category of understanding.

"This research found that many Aboriginal people from Arnhem Land had little comprehension of what was happening in the legal system," Mr Trudgen said.

"This still leads to many outcomes that are unjust and can also be a factor in some people getting into further trouble."

Many elders also believe it is one of the main reasons for increased crime on Aboriginal communities."

Mr Trudgen said the results explained the stark over-representation of Aborigines in territory prisons - currently over 80 per cent - and why increasing numbers of young males were falling foul of the law after moving to large urban centres.

"People thought that pleading guilty actually got them through the court quickly and they didn't go to jail," he said.

"There is massive confusion out there about white fella law point blank."

In conclusion, the report found many Aborigines were disempowered when it came to dealing with the legal system, and it recommended communication programs to bridge the gap.

It said Aboriginal people often thought they were functioning within a lawless society because "they don't understand it so they see it as lawless".

This can lead to "quite devastating consequences", said Mr Trudgen, who referred to the case of an elder who had asked him if rape was illegal.

"When I said yes, he told me `none of our young people know that'.

"This is 2008. When are we going to have an emergency response into communication in these communities?"

Researchers also interviewed some people in prison.

"When they realised what the term guilty meant they were able to identify some of the things that they were convicted of that they never had anything to do with," Mr Trudgen said.

Rooting and uprooting in Unaccustomed Earth

Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
Bloomsbury, $29.95

After Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake, you know what to expect from Jhumpa Lahiri—simple yet poetic prose, characters haunted by isolation, dislocation, regret, insecurity, unarticulated love and an overbearing sense of loss.

It would be simplistic to say her latest collection of eight stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is about the migrant experience. Though her characters are repeatedly Bengali migrants in America, the stories are really about the dislodgement of the security her characters develop in relationships or in their current situations, and then find crumbling.

In the title story, Ruma, builds a successful career, working fifty-four hour weeks, earning six figures—only to give it up and move to Seattle for marriage and children, much like her own mother. “Growing up, her mother’s example—moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household—had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now.”

As her father questions her choices, she feels her mother would have understood her decision—and this seems to forge a bond that did not exist, in her mother’s lifetime. As Ruma learns about her father’s interest in another woman, I find myself, despite my usually liberal ideologies, questioning if I would be comfortable if one of my parents were to “move on” after the death of the other.

In my favourite story, Hell-Heaven, a Bengali-American daughter, constantly at war with her mother in her childhood, gets a glimpse into her mother’s sacrifices and tormenting passion for the Bengali student Pranab, when her own relationship collapses. Her mother’s scepticism of the American girl who marries Pranab touchingly reveals the notion of “the other” that all migrants develop for the natives of their new land. “She will leave him,” her mother declared after their engagement. How many times have you made a judgment about the laid back, over-spending and casually drinking Australian?

Only Goodness is about a sister, crumbling under the guilt of introducing her younger brother during their casual adolescent games, to alcohol—to which he is now completely enslaved.

The last three stories, in the second section titled "Hema and Kaushik" follow the two protagonists as they meet and part and meet again, at significant stages in their life. Kaushik and Hema’s parents forge a friendship based on the fact that they come from the same city in India. They would have had little in common if they had met in their home town, yet in the new land, they were close friends. When Kaushik’s family leaves for Bombay, only to return a few years later, Hema’s parents see this as a failure—at home and abroad.

Living together again, the differences in the two families get even more acute: Hema’s parents find that “Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had.” —while they had remained staunchly Indian, even after years in America.

In the next story, Year’s End, Lahiri touches upon the loss of a parent again, as Kaushik has lost his mother to Cancer, and must accept as his father’s new bride, whose presence is accentuated by ever such slight changes in the home decor. “She (Kaushik’s mother) had never allowed a cloth to cover the table, but now there was one...”

Finally, in Going Ashore, Hema, now a Latin professor, meets Kaushik, now a war photographer, who is constantly travelling across the world to cover terrible events. Both are in transition—Kaushik, leaving his ’on the move job’ for an editorial desk job in Hong Kong and Hema on her final holiday, before she goes to India to marry a man she barely knows. Here they share their lives, dreams and nightmares and discover their own rootlessness “I’ve never belonged to any place that way,” says Hema. Kaushik laughed, “You’re complaining to the wrong person.”

The stories then, are really about finding, losing and rediscovering your roots. On the surface they could just be geographical roots, but as Lahiri steps closer, deeper into each character’s soul, the stories are about transitions—Rumas who have lived in the same town all their life could face the dilemma of accepting a father moving on into another relationship. And Hemas everywhere, must often chose between a romance of passions and a marriage of convenience.

Lahiri traverses the emotional upheavals of her characters, leaving you questioning your own choices, raising ghosts from your own past, and unsettling every personal tragedy—big or small—you may have safely hidden away from yourself from a long time ago, in your own subconscious.

Indian art participates in a cross-cultural dialogue

The curator of the Biennale of Sydney 2008 (BoS 2008) admits she has a special place for Indian artists in her heart. "Indian contemporary artists are much better many others," says Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, also the chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli, Italy. "There has been Indian representation in the Biennale before," she says. "However, this Biennale showcases Indian art more than ever before, perhaps because of my own understanding of the meanings and long relationship with the Indian art community."

Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Sharmila Samant, Ranbir Kaleka and Bari Kumar are the Indian representatives this year. However, Christov-Bakargiev refuses to identify art by nationality in this Biennale.

"There have been some excellent international exhibitions that have showcased Indian contemporary art, like the Edge of Desire. Even the Venice Biennale hosted an Indian pavilion a few years ago—but it was not part of the Biennale itself," she says. "It is necessary to break those boundaries that are not necessarily productive and look beyond national identification. This is perhaps the second phase (of the recognition of Indian art in the international art world)."

Curatorially, Christov-Bakargiev has located Indian art within an international context. So Nalini Malani's new installation will interact with Australian history, showing inside a disused military bunker on Sydney's Cockatoo Island. "Cockatoo Island was once a convict prison, then a ship yard and was later abandoned in the early 80s. Malani's shadow and light installation is like a projection of the ghosts of the past and maybe the future," saysChristov-Bakargiev.

Similarly, Sharmila Samant's new installation, Against the Grain, though local in its use of signifiers, addresses a global problem. The installation of a 1000 rice husk snakes comments on the tragedy brought onto the farming community with the advent of genetically modified grain. In the last week of the Biennale, the rice snakes will be auctioned, with proceeds going to the farmers. "There is thus also the notion of recycling art," says Christov-Bakargiev.

To create a dialogue between artists, she has placed Bari Kumar's video, Army of Forgotten Souls (2005), a poetic celebration of the rickshaw, next to Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913). "Duchamp's wheel was a critique of the consumer culture on the rise at that time. I wanted to compare this work of the past with a work from the present, where Kumar comments on the death of the rickshaw with the advent of globalisation," says Christov-Bakargiev.

Her call for cross-cultural dialogue is not new. When Peter Nagy, director of Nature Morte, brought Jitish Kallat's Rikshawpolis series to Sydney, he asked, "Exactly how 'Indian' do you want Indian contemporary art to be? How many local signifiers or ethnic references do you need, to recodnise a work of art as Indian?" The Biennale seems to answer his question—art speaks the language of the world.

Whiter than the White

Unimagined
A Muslim Boy Meets the West
Imran Ahmad
Aurum Press, $19.95

What would you expect from a book, in which the author's note of dedicating the work to his father, as well as the acknowledgements make you laugh? Yes, Imran Ahmad's first book, Unimagined is funny—a self deprecating memoir of growing up as a Pakistani immigrant in London.

And I am afraid of getting into any form of serious analyses of his work—one unsuspecting reviewer has casually been reprimanded for her serious take on the book on Ahmad's website: "Lighten up A—, it's a funny book."

The book, described as part Bend It Like Beckham, part Adrian Mole, begins in Karachi with the 'Bonnie Baby' contest, where Ahmad dressed to look suave like James Bond, is denied the first prize, which not coincidentally goes to the organiser's daughter. "I began my lifelong struggle against corruption and injustice" writes Ahmad. And struggle he does—whether with learning to knot a tie or dealing with getting itchy under nylon trousers.

Yet, young Ahmad has one unwavering ambition—becoming the perfect English gentleman, with a perfect BBC accent, and always immaculately dressed with shirt pristinely ironed and hair neatly combed. "They may be white, but I become whiter than white, quintessentially English," he declares.

The book continues with a series of vivid memories of simple everyday, petty events, which cumulatively make for a highly enjoyable read, fulfilling our deepest voyeuristic needs. Each reader may find a part of themselves in Ahmad's journey from early success in a school quiz; and entry into a posh Grammar School; uncertainty as he seeks to fulfil his parents wishes of seeing him become a doctor, though he enjoys the arts; and a constant lack of luck with the girls.

There are of course the serious bits—their first home in London is a bed-sit, a part of a house that is rented out with shared use of bathroom and kitchen, not because of the lack of money, but because few English were willing to rent out to 'coloureds'. Ahmed recalls being racially bullied in school, and even that moment of epiphany of every migrant identity, when he is caught copying the prayer moves of other Pakistani boy at a mosque—"I am a foreigner in white, English Society, and don't seem to fit into Pakistani Society either," thinks Ahmad.

Yet, never does he speak in the rage or pathos of a victim of racial slur. In fact he acknowledges that his life's successes are far beyond what his parents could have imagined for him when they moved to London--thus the title, Unimagined.

And though post 9/11, it may seem predictable, some of his most interesting insights are from his attempts at finding logic in religious belief. He talks about the logical teachings of Islam—pork is forbidden because in the third world, it often brought disease. This may often sound like a propaganda for the British Muslims for Secular Democracy organisation, of which he is a trustee—but frankly, I am all for secular propaganda.

Along with the teething problems of every child, Unimagined is thus also the tale of Ahmad's reconciliation of his belief in the Islamic notion of Allah as the only God. He comes second in an exam which focuses on Christ's teachings, without attending a single class—the stories are common between the two religions. And he eventually even changes his mind about India despite Indo-Pak wars, after watching the even-handed treatment Hinduism, Christianity and Islam in Amar Akbar Anthony: "Maybe India isn't such a bad country after all," he concludes.

Battling the fundamentalist

The Solitude of Emperors
By David Davidar
Weidenfield & Nicolsons, $32.95


There are certain moments of our collective memory that for some of us leave no personal memories, as we are swamped by visuals on television, and words in the press. I have little or rather no recollection of my personal experience of the Bombay riots of 1993, as a 10-year-old. When I think of that period, I am rather filled with images from documentaries, and newspaper articles I read much later in my life.

Yet others are compelled to articulate their emotions, a single voice of the individual, within the multitude of the hysterical cries of the many mass media. David Davidar is one of them. His second book, The Solitude of Emperors, follows a young journalist in Bombay (now, Mumbai) as he witnesses the horrifying violence and then becomes embroiled in a battle against the forces of fundamentalism. He will discuss the book at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May this year.

Was it daunting to write about an event more than a decade and a half after it actually happened, and has since been extensively addressed in feature films, documentaries and books, I ask him. “It was important to me personally to speak up,” says Davidar in an email interview. “I wanted to write about the Bombay riots because every take on it brings something new to the discussion. I think the more people there are who bear witness to such events, the less likely it is that such events will recur—or maybe I’m being hopelessly naïve.”

Communal riots spread across India after Hindu fundamentalists destroyed a hitherto relatively unknown mosque in Ayodhya, which they claimed was built on Rama Janmabhoomi—the birthplace of the Hindu idol, Rama. The riots, quite unexpectedly, spread to Bombay, where Muslims were systematically murdered, and a series of bomb blasts, brought the city of dreams to a standstill.

The protagonist of The Soltitude of Emperors, Vijay, takes up a journalist’s job in Bombay, simply to escape the small town world of his parents in South India. During the riots, he seeks out some violence, for his big story—an eye witness account of the riots—that he dreams will perhaps earn him an award. What he sees in the back streets of Bombay, haunts him forever. Davidar describes the bloody scene with calculated gory details to shake armchair supporters of communal violence out of their complacency. “Sometimes people who foment religious strife don’t see the actual human cost—often very close to home. ,” says Davidar.

To recuperate from the shock of seeing this violence up close, Vijay’s employer, Mr. Sorabjee, sends him to a small tea town in the Nilgiri mountains. The description of Meham, the fictitious hill station where the rest of the story continues, is opulent unlike the cursory impressions of Bombay that Davidar gives in his book. It is as if the slower pace of life in Meham, gives the author more time to capture the sights, sounds and smells of his environ.

Here Vijay meets Noah, who lives in the local cemetery and quotes Pessoa, Cavafy and Rimbaud, but is ostracised by the local elite obsessed with little more than growing their prize fuschias. However, even this seemingly peaceful small town doesn’t escape sectarian politics. Rajan, who once escaped his traumatised youth in Meham, now a successful businessman in Bombay, is back in town to seek some revenge—his tool, the spectacular shrine called The Tower of God.

Rajan, the shrine, and the unemployed poor who he effectively seeks to deploy for his personal revenge, is really a microcosm of the larger picture of sectarian politics in India. Charismatic politicians, mobilise poor, unemployed men, by giving them a cause, and a visible enemy to fighthis while really only fulfilling their own purpose.

Vijay’s interview with Rajan, is the portrayal of the psyche of these religious fundamentalists—of the madness that drives them, the personal wars that fuels their hatred, which can manipulate all logic into a passion that can destroy a nation.

Equally strong, is the voice of wisdom, peace and reason—in the form of Mr. Sorabjee’s manuscript for school children called, The Soltitude of Emperors—which Vijay reads as he battles sectarian politics in Meham. This mauscript celebrates, albeit in a very simplistic way, three secular men who shaped India in the past—Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi.

Davidar essentially draws up, thus, a war of the good vs. the evil, the secular vs. the fundamentalist. Characters are really predictable—Rajan with his personal tragedies, Mr. Sorabjee, the ageing idealist, and even Noah, with his quintessentially Indian ‘chalta hai’ attitude, who is finally reformed out of his complacency into taking action. .

The Soltitude of Emperors, much like its namesake manuscript about Ashoka, Akbar and Gandhi in the story, is meant more as an introduction on sectarian violence for teenagers, rather than a layered study of the religious politics of India.