An insider view of Islam in Australia

Once Were Radicals
By Irfan Yusuf
Published: Allen & Unwin, $26.99

The Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF), over the last couple of years, has been obliged to fulfil our burning desire to understand that ‘Muslim question’, to consume with frenzied vigour every word of wisdom that can help us grapple with 9/11.

In 2007, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s hysterical, anti-Muslim comments received standing ovations at SWF events, and oodles of column space in leading Australian newspapers.

In 2008, came the more balanced, yet light-hearted account of Imran Ahmad’s struggles of growing up Muslim in the UK in his memoir, Unimagined.

This year, the festival brought another insider’s view of Islam—Irfan Yusuf’s first book, Once Were Radicals, is about growing up Muslim in multi-cultural Australia.

Yusuf makes a telling comment about these ‘insider’ memoirs in his book: “What made Maryam Jameelah’s venom towards Jews so convincing was that she herself was once a Jew… She was an ‘insider’, a ‘native informant’…her words carried the same authority that the words of ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali are given when she makes equally outrageous and prejudicial remarks about Islam and Muslims.”

Instead, Once Were Radicals, draws our attention away from the minority of radical fascists (that we should admit, exist in all our religions) to offer a glimpse into the way the majority of moderate Muslims see themselves and their faith.

An Imam at Muslim youth camp talked Yusuf out of joining the jihad in Afghanistan. In one quite funny anecdote, another Imam teaches Yusuf and his friends that they could learn the true meaning of respect from a bikini-clad holidaymaker they encounter.

In a lecture, a visiting professor from Bangladesh, says that Australians have been most Islamic towards the Muslim immigrants by sharing what they most value—wealth, prosperity, just laws, education. “Australians understand the Prophet’s message even if they don’t believe in him.”

Yusuf makes another important point in his book about the many versions of Islam that exist in the world—reflected in the diversity of followers that he meets and befriends at Muslim youth camps and associations. In Australia alone, Muslims come from 60 different countries, he revealed at his recent talk at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF).

In his book, he mocks the casually, but offensively used phrases, ‘Islamo-fascist’ and ‘the Muslim question’. However, these blanket terms and attitudes towards Muslims seem to have taken hold of the public consciousness.

Sunil Badami, who moderated Yusuf’s talk at SWF, did not skip a heartbeat as he asked, why Muslim youth were blowing up buses, while Hindu and Sikh youth, despite facing similar racism did not. (When he wasn’t being downright offensive, Badami bumbled with factually incorrect questions—that Yusuf gleefully corrected with insolent remarks.)

It isn’t relevant that, in defense, Yusuf reminded Badami of the Croatian nationalist training camps that once operated in Australia, as well as the Khalistan movement. It is deploring that we ask moderate Muslims to defend their faith in the light of extremist acts.

Yusuf raised some pertinent questions about the Muslim identity at the SWF talk. “What does it mean to be a Muslim? That your great-great grandfather was a cameleer in Baluchistan? My idea of being a Muslim has evolved,” he said.

However, he admits in his book that his story is not as much about understanding the faith, as it was about finding his cultural identity and a sense of belonging as a second-generation immigrant. “Some kids experiment with music or art. Others do it with drugs. I did it with religion,” he says in the book.

And though much is made of Yusuf’s momentary desire to join the jihad in Afghanistan, he also often flirted with the idea of converting to Christianity. Besides, his worrying habit of asking his sisters and mother to wear the hijab, his approach to Islam was one of questioning—always confused by the many opposing and varied opinions that guided him.

Like most other South-Asians, Yusuf’s parents much preferred for him to spend his time studying to get into law school or medicine, than reading Islamic theological discussions. His father was weary of what he cynically describes as the Islamic industry—the network of mosques, Islamic organisations and halal butchers.

Meanwhile, his mother, though fascist about her young children learning about their religion, culture, and speak their language (albeit learned by watching laboriously long Bollywood films), when religion and education compete for Yusuf’s precious time, study would always win.

She pulls him out of the madrassa in Pakistan during a holiday, when she realises that the teacher believes in beating the Koran into children. She encouraged him to learn about other religions, knowing that her children would grow up and live in a multi-cultural country.

Yusuf’s recollections of an earlier Australia—when South Asian migration was still quite low—is quite revealing to new immigrants like myself. He remembers his visits to the only South Asian grocery store in Bondi. Even more telling are his memories of social gatherings reflecting the diversity of South Asians in Australia. As he grew older, there were more of his “own kind” in Sydney. The gatherings grew increasingly insular, and the Sindhi uncles slowly disappeared.

For a Muslim reader in Australia, perhaps there are many autobiographical elements in Yusuf’s tale. For the non-Muslim reader, like myself, the details about Islamic theologists, authors and movements were a little jarring, and the book could have done with some sharper editing.

Yet, reading this memoir, does give you an almost triumphant sense of relief—that despite our biased media, propagandist literature and religiously divided society, the voice of reason does find its way to youth like Yusuf.

The failed journalist’s revenge—fiction

When he couldn’t find the truth about Gen. Zia’s mysterious death as a journalist, Mohammed Hanif cooked up some entertaining yarns about it as a fiction writer


“When Zia died, the nation (Pakistan) was shocked—for about 15 minutes,” says author Mohammed Hanif. “Then there was dancing on the street.”

Hanif is referring to Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, dictatorial president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988, whose death is at the centre of his first book, A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

Hanif was in Australia recently as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival (SWF) and gave some interesting insights into the country that is seen as India’s nemesis and the breeding ground for the Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists.

“In Pakistani elections 1 year ago, the people voted for exactly what people in Sydney vote for—development, better health services, clean roads. Less than 5% voted for Islamist parties,” he says.

One of the greatest myths about the country is the idea of Pakistan as a ‘failed state’, he believes. “It is a lazy construction. What do you mean by a failed state? The trains run, planes take off, there are poor and rich people. Pakistan has problems—insurgencies, mini civil wars—it has dysfunctional bits. Developing countries have those problems, but it doesn’t add up to the doom and gloom that the media portray.”

Hanif recently moved back to Pakistan, after living in London for almost a decade, to find some major changes. “There are more mobile phones and traffic jams. There are more women in public places.”

“There is a new force in Pakistan,” he says. “The 24/7 media. Everything is scrutinised. Pakistan is today a noisy place—people say what they want to say. No longer are there the periods of long silences.”

The long period of silence did however exist during Gen. Zia’s tyrannical rule. And then it ended—quite suddenly, under mysterious circumstances. On August 17, 1988, the C-130 Hercules, Pak One, carrying him, a number of his senior army generals, as well as the then American ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, crashed minutes after take-off. With no investigation and no suspects, conspiracy theories of a planned assassination were rife.

“If random people can create theories, I thought, why can’t I,” says Hanif about his book which, instead of narrowing down suspects, only gleefully adds to the theories.

“An American ambassador who was in India at the time, recently contacted me via email about a non-fiction book he is writing about the event. The theories in his non-fiction book are way more bizarre than anything in my book!”

Hanif, currently the head of BBC’s Urdu service, as a young journalist at the time of the plane crash, tried to investigate the event, but without much luck. “The book is like a failed journalist’s revenge. If I can’t find the truth, I will fictionalise it,” he says. “There were so many conspiracy theories at the time, it was full off possibilities for a plot.”

The official documents that he referred to as part of research for the book, were not much help, he said. “ All the official records portrayed him as a fairly decent man. He used to give little trinkets like carpets to the diplomats he met. So when I asked them about Zia, they would say, ‘Oh he was nice to me’.”

When traditional sources turned out to be undependable, Hanif turned to the common Pakistani’s perception of Zia as his inspiration. “I looked at some of the cartoons by my cartoonist colleagues and what people on the streets of Pakistan said about him. When he was alive, there were a lot of rude jokes about him on the street—about his wife and his bedroom,” he said. “So my inspiration was no literary source, but rude jokes on the streets. I wanted to portray a man that the West adores, but people in his own country loathe.”

Zia, he agrees was a major force in talibanisation and the growing the hold of fundamental Islam in Pakistan. “Zia and his best friends in America had a major role. He was the front man in implementing the ideal of a good Muslim. He started that process,” says Hanif. “And we are still struggling with what he unleashed.”

However, Zia and his assassination is only one of the stories—or rather, the culmination of the other stories in the book. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is also the love story of Under Officer Ali Shigri. Through Shigri’s narrative, Hanif provides a glimpse into cadet life.

Hanif, who graduated from Pakistan Air Force Academy as Pilot Officer, denies there is any biographical element in Shigri’s character. “I knew about the texture of life and the rituals. But nothing exciting ever happened to me,” he says. “I was an outsider, who at the first opportunity would go into the library,” says Hanif, recollecting his time in the Academy. “But to those who are interested in marching up and down, the academy may not have been boring. ”

Shigri’s life of course is anything but boring. “I was so fascinated with him being in prison that I kept moving him from one prison to another, and more bizarre things keep happening to him each time,” he says.

Shigri’s adventures seem to have gone down well with readers as well as critics. “When you can buy pirated copies of a book on the streets of Pakistan, you know it is doing well. I have bought pirated copies of my book in Pakistan,” he says. A Case of Exploding Mangoes won him the best first book award at the recently announced 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize.

It was also long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. He talked about his experience with the Man Booker at the SWF: “The only reasonable response I got for being long-listed, came from a friend. He said, ‘If there are three judged on the booker panel, you must be pleased that at least three people have read your book’.”

I ask Hanif if there has been criticism of the book in Pakistan, as there is often in India about books that paint a self-deprecating picture of the country. “Pakistanis are never shy of criticising themselves—they don’t see it as a matter of national pride. The book has been a bestseller in India and Pakistan,” he says. As an afterthought he adds, “It is a little freaky—India and Pakistan don’t agree on anything.”

A journey through India – in poetry

Kerry Leves made a not-so-grand journey through India over two years, and then took over two decades to write about the phenomenal experience

Australian poet Kerry Leves paints impressionist images of India in his collection of poems, A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar. Seemingly disparate images of the multitude of India-s that exist, come together to form a singular, yet personal experience.

“When I look at my India poems now, it seems a bit like I tried to follow poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s formula – ‘to evoke things little by little to suggest a mood’,” says Leves. “The mood is multiple in India, the picture doesn’t settle, but at least in poetry you can attempt to bring out that multiplicity of moods.”

The book is nominated for the 2009 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards - Kenneth Slessor Prize for poetry. Leves will participate in an interactive performance as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival later this month.

The poems came out of Leves’ extensive travel through India from 1980 over two years—and it has taken him two decades to write them. Yet the experience of reading the poems is so immediate—India seems to have etched itself into Leves’ inner eye—“like a movie playing in my head, but with such intensity that there was no space to think of anything else,” he says about penning the poems.

When I ask Leves what made his want to go to India in the first place, his answer is much like his poems. There is no one single moment, but a range of delightful memories he traverses to create his story of India.

At 7, he was drawn to Jean Renoir’s Bengal in the film, The River. Then an Anglo-Indian family’s tales build up a sketch, while Indian children’s paintings from a UNESCO publication fill it up with bright, vivid colours.

Finally a preview of a film, Harry Black and the Tiger— “There was this shot of a woman with a water pitcher on her head, wearing a sari, walking down a dusty road, hot sunshine, jungle in the background. That image somehow clinched it in my head—I had to go to India.”

Even the Indian monsoon makes it into Leves’ story—at 16 he was on his way “to becoming a meteorology nut” and wanted to experience “the bursting of the monsoon” in Mumbai. There was also the requisite curiosity sparked by yoga classes and radio broadcasts about Hinduism and Buddhism.

Indian poet Keki N. Daruwala’s dark, rhapsodic poems about Varanasi and the Ganges added another layer. Leves, who refers to Daruwala in his book says, “The poems are almost preternaturally intense, evoking the river, the beggars, the holy men, the ghats. I fell in love with their harshness, their tenderness, their dissonant music.”

Yet, it was finally the late poet Vicki Viidikas, who Leves says “pitchforked” him into going to India. “You can read that ‘pitchfork’ image as Shiva’s trident, if you like!” he adds.

However, writing about India was quite not on his mind at the time when he finally did get to India. “When I flew to India I was too much in awe of the idea of the place to even think of writing about it. The heat, the blazing energy of the people, the crowdedness, and the simultaneity of everything – just walking down Chandni Chowk in Delhi was a kind of epic experience. Everything was in movement, nothing was still,” says Leves.

Neither were Leves and Viidikas quite still in those 2 years. Starting from Delhi they travelled up to Kulu Valley—in part the source of his poem Night Piece, Himachal Pradesh. Then across to Shimla—where Leves says he experienced déjà vu to the level of hallucination. “I seemed to be glimpsing ghosts of long-ago English people who’d once walked about on the cobblestones. And I knew where what had been—where the great hotels of the Raj period were, sight unseen. Some antique map seemed to be unrolling in my head.”

Travelling through Pushkar, Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal in Agra, Varanasi and Sarnath before going to Calcutta, then Puri, before finally resting for about five months in Gopalpur, in Orissa. “We preferred small towns to big cities,” says Leves. “We’d stay in a place, settle down, find places to live, set up our own kitchen, use the local market, and get to know the people.”

Then from the Nilgiri Hills they moved on to spend four months in Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu due to their interest in the mystic Ramana Maharshi.

India, where spirituality is 24/7, really exercised his hard-core western suspiciousness of all things religious says Leves. “From massive temple complexes like Tirupati, to little roadside shrines, to tiny shrine-like spaces in barber shops and chai shops and sweet stalls—at any hour of the day or night, someone is praying or meditating or chanting or making an offering to the Gods. That continuity—which is at once quite public and absolutely private—had the effect of “giving the mind an inward turn”, to use Ramana Maharshi’s expression.”

Though India did define Leves’ spirituality, he managed to stay away from the other most common draw card for western tourist—dope. “Being there was extraordinary enough—I didn’t want to smear the experience with the effect of some heavy drug,” he says.

But because he didn’t smoke dope with people, which at that time was a kind of universal social lubricant, Leves had to find other means of social interaction. So he turned his teenage hobby of fortune telling into palmistry for a social life, and also to make some money to support his Indian stay longer.

“I made a sign and set myself up outside the locals’ market and pretty soon I had a daily queue of clients. After that, everywhere we went in India, I was reading palms—I was working every day of the week,” recollects Leves.

“But when I went to Goa, there were all these rich westerners to read, and I got greedy and made some whopping mistakes, for which I was taken to task by representatives of the western community there! But having chastised me, they remained tolerant, and my approach to palm reading got a fraction saner. Even so, by the time we hit Mumbai, I was pretty much burnt-out.

The first poem in the collection is about Mumbai, and makes the only reference to Lata Mangeshkar in the entire book, other than the title. Yet Mangeshkar defines Leves’ very experience of writing about India.

Much like actors lip-synch to Mangeshkar’s voice, Leves’—a white male Anglo-Aussie, in the late the 1980s to the 2000s—and his poetry is only the playback of the traveller in India, living there between June 1980 and July 1982.

“That traveller’s existence has no material substance any more, just memory, and memory is notoriously unreliable,” he says. “A person takes a journey then writes about it - sounds simple, but it isn’t. Who started out on the journey? And who was it that came back? Which of those two did the writing, under the stroke of memory?”

He writes in one of his poems, ‘Travel defines us’ and the experience of travelling without an itinerary is a life changing one admits Leves. “The kind of travelling we did – open to adventure, going with things – came to seem somewhat impossible as the late 20^th and then the early 21^st century, changed the way we all live. So the book is my extremely modest contribution to the history of a bygone era.”

He initially tried to write about his experience in a journalistic format, however, neither their unplanned travels, nor the very nature of India suited the rigidity of prose says Leves. “When I was there, I kept struggling – and failing – to do journalistic prose. But in poetry you can suggest. There is so much going on in India that isn’t directly visible – so much is conveyed through gesture and attitude, through nuance. Everything happens fast and you have to be very alert to keep up with what is going on,” says Leves.

“A westerner in India, a stranger in a strange land, not doing it posh – this was a sensory, emotional, intellectual roller-coaster ride, and poetry seemed the right medium to convey the vividness of the experience, the surprises, and the multiple mini-narratives that disrupted the not-so-grand narrative of our journey.”

An immigrant tale of astronomical proportions

Immigrant stories are invigorating the theatres of New Zealand, says Jacob Rajan.

“The language of astrophysics is full of the language of fairy tale: Black Holes, White Dwarves and Red Giants,” says Jacob Rajan, a microbiologist turned writer and actor. Science, fantasy and the immigrant experience all come together in his latest play, The Candlestickmaker, which will show at CentreStage, a premier season of international performance presented by the Adelaide Festival Centre.

Produced under the banner of the New Zealand-based theatre company Indian Ink, the play follows a 19-year-old New Zealand Indian student off to discover his home land armed with the customary tourist guide, the Lonely Planet.

“Sunil is visiting India for the first time and arrives at his, once grand, ancestral home,” says Rajan. “He is clumsy, impressionable, prone to distraction and eager to please—a combination of traits that get him into a lot of trouble.”

Rajan’s adventures are all safely outside the prescribed itineraries of Lonely Planet—in fact they lead him to discover the mysteries of the universe. He is guided, instead, by his gloriously eccentric uncle Rohan, a rude and superstitious 300-hundred-year-old cook, a duck, and Nobel Laureate and the greatest mathematical astrophysicist of his generation, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar.

The play is indeed a tribute to Chandrasekhar—and the circumstances in which Rajan chanced upon his story is as much a happy coincidence as Sunil’s journey. “I was staying at my grandmother’s house in Kerala and for some reason she had a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. There was a small paragraph about Chandrasekhar and it intrigued me that I had never heard of him,” says Rajan.

“I was a science student before I got into acting. I’d heard of Openhiemer, Einstein, Rutherford - but not my own countryman. I did some more research when I got back to New Zealand and was struck by the man’s achievements and humility. I wanted to pay tribute to that and reflect on the nature of happiness.”

Among other interesting facts, Rajan learned during his research that Chandrasekhar was nicknamed ‘The Candlestickmaker’ by colleagues in America who couldn’t pronounce his name. “It struck me as a great title for a play. It has the sound of a fairy tale. It seemed like rich material to draw upon—how the forces that act upon stars and planets mirror the forces that act upon our lives.”

Interestingly, Rajan plays all the characters in this play with the aid of masks. He used masks in the company’s previous play Krishnan’s Dairy, which also showed at CentreStage in 2007.

“I played five characters using quick change masks that enabled me as a solo performer to create the illusion of dialogue on stage,” says Rajan about Krishnan’s Dairy, which is currently being adapted into a full length feature film.

While many actors would be at a loss confined in a mask, robbed of their main acting arsenal, the facial expression, Rajan revels in its theatricality. “It is precisely because the facial expressions are taken away that the character is liberated,” he says.

“Many actors, because of their reliance on facial expressions become talking heads on stage. With mask, the voice, the body and, of course, the eyes become the chief means of expression and that is so suited to theatre in engaging a live audience. Everything is slightly larger than life. The mask is an amplification of the face and, as a result, everything becomes amplified – the emotions, the soul and the truth. Humour is funnier and tragedy more profound – that is the allure.”

Though this use of masks to amplify emotion, may allude itself to the Indian mask traditions and the Rasa theories of Indian performance in some way, the masks that Indian Ink use are based in an Italian form. “Justin Lewis, my director, and I both trained in this form in Italy early on in our work together,” says Rajan.

In fact, it was the common love of masks that brought them together to co-found Indian Ink after they met quite by chance in 1996 while working on another show. “The name captures the spirit of our early shows which were strongly influenced by my viewpoint as an Indian New Zealander,” says Rajan.

He was born in Malaysia but both his parents are from Kerala. They immigrated to New Zealand in the 70s.

So I ask if there are any biographical elements in the 19-year old protagonist’s search for his roots in The Candlestickmaker. “I’d like to think that I was a little bit more sophisticated than Sunil, the central character of the play, but I must admit the clumsiness with which he deals with his culture and his adherence to The Lonely Planet guide book bore more than a passing resemblance to my own encounters back home.”

Indian Ink has already won two Fringe First Awards at the Edinburgh Festival as well as three production of the year awards in New Zealand and Rajan believes that it is the vibrancy of multicultural experiences and stories that is driving theatre in New Zealand today.

“In New Zealand we are bereft of ancient theatre traditions but, at the same time, we’re not shackled by them,” he says. “We pirate whatever we find useful or interesting. At its worst it is a bloodless imitation. At its best it is fresh and invigorating. We are a young nation of natives and immigrants and those voices are emerging in our theatres.”

Taking you to Sri Lanka in every bite

Peter Kuruvita’s new Sri Lankan cook book, is a delectable combination of recipes, memoir and travelogue.

Serendip, a former name for Sri Lanka, was coined by Horace Walpole from the fairytale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of,” he said of the tale.

Chef Peter Kuruvita’s first cookbook of traditional Sri Lankan food is also titled Serendip, My Sri Lankan Kitchen—and it is quite a book of discovery as well. “I feel that my brothers and I are these three princes and our discoveries and life experiences emulate the one which Horace Walpole wrote of,” says Kuruvita.

Kuruvita, an acclaimed chef at the Flying Fish restaurant in Sydney, was born in London to an Austrian mother and Sri Lankan father. After his first visit to Sri Lanka (a hilarious he recollects with the vivid recollections of a 4 and half year old in the book) he spent his childhood in Sri Lanka acquiring idyllic memories of family, fun and happy hours spent in the kitchen with his grandmother.

“My grandmother and I shared a very strong bond, not much was said but there was plenty of great quality time. The kitchen was the epicentre of our universe, every thing happened there and I was the honoured guest sitting wide eyed taking it all in,” he says.

His teenage years in Australia led to career as a chef that has taken him from Sydney to prestigious restaurants in London, the USA, Fiji, Lord Howe and Hayman Islands, Bali and back to Sydney. You can sample the fish curry from his book at the restaurant, and one of their biggest selling products is the brinjal pickle, also in the book.

Kuruvita travelled to various regions of the island nation in 2007-08, with his brother Phillip to source the recipes in this book. Yet, it was the treasure trove of his own grandmother’s kitchen in his ancestral home, in Dehiwala.

Kuruvita calls Serendip a book of “memories and recipes” and his writing really does evoke a sense of the strong family and kinship bonds he shared, while growing up in the ancestral home that he shared with 5 other children, his parents, two sets of uncles and aunties and his grand parents.

Equally evocative are the wonderful photographs—by his brother, Phillip and acclaimed photographer Alan Benson—of the people, the markets, the rice fields and of course the kitchens of Sri Lanka.

During his last visit, Kuruvita organised a major cook-off with the ladies of the Kuruvita dish and recollects how they all argued about every dish, just like the old time. “One of the beautiful things about all Sri Lankans and their food is that they can rarely agree on the details of any recipe,” he says. “Most are handed down through generations and each had its own very special preparation method and flavour. I hope that I have captured these recipes from my family’s kitchen, and I also hope to encourage other Sri Lankans living far from their ancestral homes to get back into their kitchens and share this rich and diverse culinary tradition with their families and friends.”

Offering Sri Lankan curries, traditional snacks, breads, sticky sweet treats, and recipes for curry powders, chutneys, sambas, pickles, even just browsing the book is a salivating experience. “These are from the taste buds of my Grandmother, aunties and father, they are flavours that will take any Sri Lanka home with one bite,” says Kuruvita.

For me personally, the best part of the book was the focus on the vegetarian curries—there is a fantastic range of them, considering Kuruvita’s grandmother was a vegetarian.

These vegetarian recipes use quite easily available ingredients, but in rather unconventional ways. I am quite tired of my own Gujarati recipe of bhindi masala, but Kuruvita’s ladies finger curry sounds easy enough to try one of these days.

Other recipes include a beetroot curry, cucumber curry, snake bean curry and even a pineapple curry. Kuruvita has his own favourites: “I have fond memories of my father in the Jardi, my grand mother in the breadfruit curry and my aunties in the beetroot and ladies fingers. My own are the combined flavours of a lunch packet, Ambul Thiyal, Dahl and Samba rice.”

The chutneys and powders that Kuruvita includes are also quite simple, and most ingredients will come from your Indian spice, masala dabba, but with a Sri Lankan twist.

Though Sri Lankan fare might sound similar to Indian—rather South Indian food we are quite familiar with, Kuruvita points of the difference. “South Indian food is a very big part of Sri Lankan cookery—where ever you go you can get snacks and more filling foods that are South Indian. This cuisine is more about a combination of 15-20 different spices, without the use of Garam Masala or Asafoetida,” he says.

The book however, is as much about food, as it is about travel, culture and family—and the process of writing it seems to have touched Kuruvita quite fundamentally. He says of his last visit, “Sri Lanka was on the brink of the mess it is in now when we left. It could have been the new Singapore, there was harmony and peace and all people got on. Times change and rather than looking back I would like to look forward and hope that the harmonious place that was the old Sri Lanka will return with equality between all the inhabitants of the Jewel of the Indian Ocean.”

Aboriginal Australian arts have the Indians enamoured

Durga Vishwanathan, is ensuring vast Australian landscapes fit into small Indian homes

Hypnotic combinations of lines and dots in myriad colours conveyed the stories of Australian animals, people and landscape to viewers in the Delhi recently.

However, it took some clever marketing on the part of Indian-Australian curator Durga Vishwanathan to ensure the success of the Desert Dreaming exhibition which showcased over 80 works by 43 artists from Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, Australia.

While the choice of 'master' artists as well as emerging artists, provided buyers a mix of price points, Vishwanathan, who is originally a Mumbai-girl, made another critical curatorial decision: “I must also say that I chose the works that I thought were generally small in size to fit in Indian homes, although Delhi houses are much larger than Mumbai flats.”

And the tactic seems to have worked—37 paintings were sold at the average price of AUD1,000, despite the economic slowdown. “Gallery dealers in Delhi did comment that the economic crisis has had an impact on the art market in India, as it has all over the world. We were very pleased with the results of the show in view that things have slowed down for everyone and the exhibition was only on for one week,” says Cecilia Alfonso, coordinator of the Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation.

Opening the exhibition, Australia’s High Commissioner to India, John McCarthy said, “India has a longstanding tradition for the art produced by its tribal and traditional communities and there is growing interest in Aboriginal art in India and around the world.”

It is easy to see why Aboriginal art with its distinctly bright colours, mesmerising use of symbols to convey ancient stories must resonate specially with Indians Yet trying to compare Indian tribal arts and aboriginal Australian art is quite futile say the curators.

“What intrigued me was that a lot of Indians especially from the 'art world' were trying to find similarities between Indian Aboriginal art and Australian Aboriginal art—specially the art from Bhopal, because they use dots too. But the main difference is that art from Bhopal is representational while this is abstract,” says Vishwananthan.

“Some of the artists who visited our exhibition saw a lot of similarities in the artworks displayed and their own work,” she adds. “A lot of people did think that there were lots of similarities between the aboriginal art and Indian tribal art. India is such a huge place with so many different styles as is Australian indigenous art. The style, colours, designs are very particular to a specific region in Australia too. It’s impossible to generalise,” says Alfonso.

So, along with the financial success, it was the opportunity of opening up the rather unknown world of Aboriginal Australia to Indians that this exhibition achieved. While urban Australian icons like the Sydney Opera House have replaced the otherwise eponymous Swiss Alps in many a recent Bollywood films few Indian tourists coming here take any time out to see the traditional arts, or the vast bush land of Australia.

However, when aboriginal Australia traveled to them, the Indians were enamored—they loved the vivid colours and uninhibited palette of the artworks, says Vishwananthan.

“The response of the Indian audience was extremely positive. They seemed to like the colour and the designs, and were intrigued by the way the paintings tell a story in a non representational way,” says Alfonso. “The audience was very reception and also curious, they asked lots and lots of questions about the art, stories, designs and use of colour.”

The stories and symbolism of these art works are after all extremely unique and interesting. The works in this particular exhibition are from the Yuendumu aboriginal community of Central Australia, along with some works from the Nyirripi community located 160km southwest of Yuendumu.

“All the stories in the paintings relate directly to the artists country, the animals, people and features of the landscapes,” says Alfonso.

As a desert community, in particular the waterholes, find an important place in these works. The seemingly abstract works actually represent the Aboriginal dreamtime—known as jukurrpa.

“All the stories are creation stories about events that took place a long time ago but which are equally applicable to society today,” explains Alfonso. The artists speak in a symbolic language—the layered circles can mean waterhole or meeting place, U shapes mean person, a male is usually next to spears and boomerangs, curved lines are flowing water, small lines are clouds and so on.

“These designs and symbols belong to the longest continuously surviving culture in the world to today,” adds Alfonso.Traditionally, the aboriginal people would dance the story and decorate their bodies with the same designs that they now transpose onto canvas.

They would also draw the designs on the sand as they told the stories or do ceremonial ground paintings. It is these designs that they now paint using modern materials.

“Aboriginal culture was oral, they had no written tradition. So they used song, dance and storytelling to pass down information from generation to generation—information which was vital for the Aboriginal people to survive in one of the harshest environments on earth,” says Alfonso.

“They needed to pass down knowledge about what animals were available to hunt where, what other foods were found in what places, most importantly, where the reliable water sources were. They were maps which showed you how to get from place to place, how to navigate across this vast land. The stories were repetitive as it made them easier to remember, told in a way similar to poetry, through songs.”

For instance, Magda Nakamarra Curtis’ Jamu Jamu Jukurrpa (Jamu Jamu Dreaming) represents the sand hills near Tjukurla, used during ceremonies, and as hunting ground for goannas, birds and small mammals.

Meanwhile, Bessie Nakamarra Sims’ Pamapardu Jukurrpa (Flying ant Dreaming) is a brilliant blue representation of the flying ants that build the large anthills found throughout Warlpiri country. These ants are collected and eaten, when they flee their old earth mounds lost to floods, to build new ones. Concentric circles are used to represent the mingkirri (earth mounds) and the dashes around the circles represent the pamapardu (flying ants).

Each jukurrpa can be depicted in numerous ways using varied colours and the Indian exhibition had various versions of the same jukurrpa too. “Traditionally the Aboriginal people in this area used natural ochres to paint the designs on their bodies,” says Alfonso.

“Warlukurlangu is one of the oldest art centres in Australia and the people here have been painting on modern mediums, ie canvas and linen since 1985 using modern acrylics.”The Warlukurlangu Artists’ Cooperative is totally aboriginal owned and the artists get 50% of the art revenues, while the remaining 50% goes towards wages and paying for materials and all costs associated with running this business. “In recent years we have been very successful at marketing the work and profits have been steered towards community projects,” says Alfonso.

Delhi—a city of fresh food, people and jugaad

Sophea Lerner captures the many auditory layers of our capital city, creating soundscapes as varied as Delhi itself.

“Delhi is many cities, and many ideas of what a city is, all layered over each other… a Mughal city, a colonial city, a city of villages, a globalised city, to name a few. There's a lot to think about and learn about and engage with here,” says sonic media artist and broadcaster Sophea Lerner.

The Sydney girl has been exploring these many aspects of our capital city, through sound and radio making practices as part of a research towards a Doctor of Creative Arts at University of Technology. She is in Delhi through an affiliation with the Sarai programme at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). Sarai is a platform for creative collaboration between researchers, practitioners and artists reflecting on contemporary urban spaces and cultures in South Asia.

“Urban spaces and processes are what really fascinate me… transit spaces and the sounds of movement around cities,” says Lerner. “Delhi is a city going through some big changes—not for the first time in its history. There are many cities in the world, which are undergoing dramatic changes, but the context of Sarai and a long string of coincidences led me to this one.”

The string of coincidences began when she met Monica Narula and Shuddabarata Sengupta from RAQS media collective (one of the initiators of the Sarai programme) at Alchemy—an international master class for new media artists and curators—at Brisbane Powerhouse in 2000. In 2006 Sarai invited Lerner for a two-month residency to work on project called Cybermohalla (run in collaboration with Ankur an alternative education project)

“I had a great time collaborating with people here and found Delhi a very stimulating place to be, so I wanted to do an extended period of creative research here and continue working with Sarai,” says Lerner. She went back in October 2006 to do the Sonic Arts Residency with Khoj workshop (an artist led, alternative space for experimentation) and has pretty much been there ever since.

“I work with sound and public spaces. I am interested in exploring how spaces are contested, claimed and re-imagined through sound,” says Lerner. And there is often a contest for space—in Delhi, as in other parts of India—between the government and administration, the burgeoning traffic and property development, the street-side hawkers and shanty dwellers. Lerner has captured some of these disputes in an auditory format for her projects.

Just after the Supreme Court decided to ban the cooking of food on the streets of Delhi, Snack City was a celebration of this street food. This open call-in based project was presented on a cart at the MediaWala Festival. It was the culmination of a two day workshop with local and international remote participants exploring the taste, smell, sound, culture and politics of street food.

This physical performance involved live calls, live remixes of pre-recorded calls from remote participants in Helsinki, Finland and live net calls from other places streamed live to a cart with speakers and cooking vessels which was moving around the festival venue.

“The technical set up was relatively complex, but it came together very quickly without a lot of planning because it was supported by human networks that have built up over many years through various collaborative projects and the foodradio_network,” says Lerner.

“Talking to street food vendors was the most interesting aspect for me,” recollects Lerner. “We spoke to a chaat-wala at Connaught Place who had been making chaat on that spot for 35 years and his father before him before the show—now he has disappeared.”

Besides exploring the appreciation of street food, Snack City was also a comment on the local specificity—the place that this food holds in the culture of Delhi. “In general Delhi-ites identify very strongly with the street food as an important element of the city's culture, something for which it is famous and which gives it an important part of the city’s character,” says Lerner.

Yet, like the many “Delhis”, there are many Delhi-wallas, and each has their own perception of the street food. “There is a real danger that this appreciation becomes merely nostalgic amongst middle classes. On the other hand, auto drivers we spoke to, for example, said if there was no street food, it would be hard for them to get a meal when they are out working,” says Lerner. “So it's part of a bigger picture of how street life works and who is participating in the life of the city.”

The other participants are those who live in shanty towns—commonly known as zopadpattis—often bulldozed down by the administration in the name of ‘beautification’, leaving them homeless.

Lerner’s other project, Where is Nangla Maanchi? (New Delhi, 2006-still in progress), an installation project for Khoj Sonic Arts ‘06 Residency, explores one such thriving community that disappeared under the bulldozer.
The project was undertaken as personal response to hearing the sounds at Nangla Maanchi basti on the west bank of the Yamuna both before and after the violent demolition of this community in mid 2006.

The title came from the experience of having to explain to autorickshaw drivers where I wanted them to drop me and trying to verbally put this place on the map when I was talking to people who didn't know where it was,” says Lerner.
The installation—an atmospheric set up of sounds and visuals, recreate the community that once was, and the ruins left behind today—even just looking at some visuals of the installation on a website gave me goose bumps.

As recordings of the before and after soundscape weave through each other, visitors are invited to step into the images of the site projected onto fabric drapes they can walk amongst. Bricks from the demolition site are presented alongside photographs of the spot where they fell. Torches are provided for personal examination of these material relics of a demolished locality as visitors listen to the voices of the former inhabitants and the vacated sonic panorama left behind.

Throughout the installation space, in English and Hindi, are some reflections and questions addressed to the viewer which attempt to situate the presence and absence of the locality in the memory of the city. “The people who lived there have moved on, but the city might still remember itself as it changes,” says Lerner.

“I was not in Delhi during the demolition—only some months before and some months after,” says Lerner, guiding us to nangla.freeflux.net, for documentation and discussion on the stories of Nangla and the demolition itself.
“The last time I went there before the demolition, when we did the street recordings, I had 20-30 kids crowding round me to take turns listening to the sounds of their own locality on my headphones.”

She describes her experiences upon return to find Nangla Maanchi demolished. “It provokes strong feeling when you go to a place and meet people and have a great time and then you come back and the place isn't there any more. It looks like a war zone with a sea of rubble. People’s personal things—notebooks, soft toys, a shoe—are sticking out of the wreckage.”

“All the houses, built up over 30 years that you passed before, where people were working and laughing, have been broken open so the blues and greens of the interiors you didn't see before are scattered with the sea of bricks. It is a very violent contrast. Going back to record felt like walking on a grave,” Lerner recollects.

Nangla Maanchi is of course among the many such communities that are often demolished, with little concern for the dwellers, their history, or even their future. “Some people see narrow streets, small houses, urban agriculture and food animals and it all goes into one basket in their head,” says Lerner.
For instance, just next door to Nangla Maanchi, Lerner tells us, is a small village called Nangla Gaon where people have lived for generations, moving from farming to dairy farming after their lands were submerged when the river moved in its plain. . “They have paperwork going back more than 150 years,” Lerner says.

“In November 2006, a few months after the dust had settled from the adjacent demolitions, their village was bulldozed following a handwritten, unsigned notice stuck to their mandir giving them a week to get out. They went to the court but the bulldozers came while a hearing was pending.”

Typical of Indian resilience, everyone was still living in their houses, Lerner found—but the houses had no walls or roofs any more. “They offered us hospitality and told us their story. We wrote a press release for them and were able to put them in touch with some journalists.”

Lerner hopes to show the installation not in a pristine gallery, but in the context of what is going to be built at the site next. “If I do get to make something at the site later, then that will simply be about acknowledging what was there before—that this community existed.”

Even with this very apparent humanist and activist streak in her, Lerner says she is not interested in making a general statement about the politics of slum clearance. “I wanted to make a work that addressed my personal experience of returning to a specific place after this very brutal series of events,” says Lerner. “I didn't set out to do something political and then go off to research the issues. The work I do here is a response to what is going on around me, to the place where I am. Is that political?”

“At this very moment I can hear several houses nearby being demolished or rebuilt - this is a direct result of changes in planning laws which allow an extra two floors in residential areas.” In fact, the house she currently lives in—a barsati—is slated for demolition as soon as the landlord saves up enough to rebuild. “Right now this is one of the last barsatis left in the colony. These changes in the planning laws are related to the same debates around the Delhi 'master plan' that led to the sealing drives and demolition drives.”

“These are not remote abstract political concepts - these are the day to day realities of a city being forcibly globalised in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games,” she says. “A few people are making a lot of money, a lot of people are losing livelihoods and/or homes, some things which work well in the city are being devalued and replaced by things which have already failed elsewhere. Some people call this progress.”

Besides, street vendors and slum dwellers, there is another victim of this progress—River Yamuna. Lerner collaborated with photographer and environmentalist, Ravi Agarwal on a piece for the international radio network La Radia through Free103.9 in New York when they ran with the theme, contamination.

Lerner did a live radio mix based on a recording she made with Agarwal by the river, combining his words with field recordings and sounds of dripping taps from her bathroom - which is of course connected to the river directly. There was also a live feed from her roof to situate the broadcast in time and place alongside other contributions from around the world.

“Delhi is a city with it's back to the river,” says Lerner. “Most inhabitants of the city have never walked close to it—never think about going there—never ever think about where their drinking water comes from or where their shit goes.”

“The river is actually very beautiful. You wouldn't want to swim in it or eat fish from it the way it is at the moment. But sitting on the bank behind Nangla Maanchi demolition site—with buffalos from neighbouring Nangla Gaon grazing next to you and looking across to the vegetables growing on the east bank—is like some kind of rural idyll tucked away in the middle of the city, complete with trees leaning over the water like some 19th century landscape painting—a surreal juxtaposition to the demolition site behind. The river is polluted but it's also beautiful.”

“There is always talk about cleaning it up but I sometimes think the main impetus there would be to make it look pretty so as to profitably redevelop the waterfront, as has happened in many cities around the world. The amount of food growing in and near the city is one of Delhi's big advantages as a place to live, it would be a real shame to see this all turned in buildings.”

Along with all the street food, it is this constant supply of fresh groceries that Lerner loves about living in Delhi. “I moved to India after working in Finland for 4-5 years, so I’d have to say that one of the big attractions here are the fresh vegetables—I now live 10 mins walk from the best vegetable market I have ever seen!”

“I also love the fact that for most little things that you need to achieve on a day to day basis you have to deal with people and not machines,” says Lerner. For instance, she much prefers the local kabariwala to the rebate machines in Helsinki.

“The kabariwala cycles past my house, and collects all my recycling and pays me for it. I don't have to carry it anywhere, and all the local kabariwalas have different cries that I enjoy hearing.” For those of us who moved to Sydney, for a better quality of life, we might find Lerner’s perspective surprising. “Things like good unprocessed food and the sociality of interacting with humans in your daily life are simple things which add a lot to quality of life.”

“I think one of my favorite things about living here is untranslatable—jugaad. It includes the idea of making do, hacking things together out of whatever is around, making objects and materials fulfil functions they were never intended for,” says Lerner. “That appeals to how I work, and every day I see things which inspire me in how someone has done something inventive with resources at hand, in order to make something work better. I think the DIY aesthetic has a strong resonance with a lot of Australian sound arts practices too, so I feel like this is a good place to make work,” says Lerner. “It also helps that there is the Lajpatrai electronics market - imagine dick smith crossed with Paddy's market and 10 times the size,” she laughs.

But there must be the worst bit about living in Delhi as well, I ask?
“I’ve found it hard to deal with the hierarchical nature of society here,” says Lerner. “Australia and Finland are both places with strong traditions of egalitarianism in how people behave towards each other. There are flaws in how those ideas work in practice but the ideas are there. Here the idea of hierarchy is very entrenched, and people in Delhi can get very hung up about status symbols. There is a pecking order and people want you to fit into it somewhere.”

“When the guy who is installing the internet connection at home makes polite conversation with the question 'Madam what caste are you?' I try to tell him that I’m not any caste, but I am unable to supply any answer that makes sense to him.”

For more information about Sophea’s work, visit http://phonebox.org/sophea

Sophea Lerner’s guide to eating in Delhi:

I asked Lerner if she had a favourite Delhi street food treat after her Snack City project—“Well that's an extremely tough question,” she said, unable to pick one, two or even just three.

Here is her personal guide to Delhi’s best street food.
There is a fried potato stall near Kashmeri Gate, which makes the best fried potatoes I have ever tasted. They have been making them for over 25 years, the secret is in their ghee.

I'm not a big fan of aloo tikkis, but there is a place on the corner of one gali which leads to the metro at Chandi Chowk that makes them perfectly crisp on the outside, perfectly soft inside and with a centre filling of spiced dal - that's pretty high on my list since I tried it recently.

The karela paratha in Parathewali Gali is an unusual combo that I really like.
But I think my favorite aloo paratha to date is from a local guy in Lila Ram market behind south extention where I stayed during the Khoj Residency.

My favorite egg rolls are from a stand in East Delhi at Madhu Vihar market. It got moved to different spots several times during the sealings but it's still there.
I don't have a great sweet tooth, but as seasonal specialities go, Daulat ki Chaat is top of the treats.