Theatre to make you think

Expect no easy answers in the double-bill of timeless, yet timely theatre by the Alex Buzo Company





If a white Aussie, clad in a t-shirt bearing the Australian flag were to stop you in a dimly-lit street corner, what would your first thought be? One late evening, outside a city construction site, when Norm asks him for a light, Ahmed hesitates—a shadow, a fear crosses his face.

"This isn't India, mate, you're in Sydney," Norm tells Ahmed. "No Bombay Stranglers around here."

They are characters from Australian playwright Alex Buzo’s play, Norm and Ahmed, which premiered in 1968. The first local Australian production to bring the Asian perspective to stage has now been brought back to stage by his daughter, and Founder-Director of the Alex Buzo Company, Emma Buzo.

She has also commissioned contemporary playwright Alana Valentine, to respond to this Australian classic with a companion piece – Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah: Soft Revolution. Both plays are showing in a double-bill at the Seymour Theatre Centre until August 29.
Norm and Ahmed, a 45-minute dialogue between the two characters, displays some taut writing। Norm begins to befriend Ahmed, slowly winning his confidence, yet momentarily displaying racist, nationalistic opinions.

“A bloke at work said he didn’t see the point of bringing a whole lot of boongs out here. Excuse the term, Ahmed…”

A piece of graffiti in the backdrop for the play is threateningly foretelling of the relationship between Norm and Ahmed: “We grew here, you flew here”

The audience is always on the edge: Is Norm a violent racist, or just an old widower looking for a little harmless conversation? Are they going to part as friends, having learned a little about the “other” community? Can the native and the immigrant bridge the chasms created by change? Can the struggle between the conservatism and radicalism, between reason and belief ever be won?

The shocking climax of Norm and Ahmed triggered a censorship battle in the 70‘s, bringing the emerging Australian theatre scene on the front page of media। The point of contention was the final line, "F॥king boong!". The actors and director were arrested for use of obscene language in a public space. It was the penultimate word that was considered offensive – not “boong”, as one might imagine.

“Fairly soon after it was banned in three Australian states at the time of its premiere 40 years ago, the authorities could not contend with the play’s popularity,” says Emma Buzo। “It quickly became an Australian classic and has been studied in schools and universities around Australia ever since.” Norm and Ahmed is now part of prescribed text for the NSW HSC (2010-2012). “It has also received countless productions in Australia, Malaysia and India,” she adds.

Laurence Coy is brilliant as the middle-aged ocker, Norm—slipping in the occasional “boong”, recalling his days in the Vietnam War with violent re-enactments, while encouraging Ahmed to make his life in Australia। Craig Meneaud is perfect as the immaculate, soft-spoken, yet opinionated Pakistani student, Ahmed. Although eager to avoid causing offence, he does however hesitantly give his honest opinion if asked.

The ever shifting, friend-foe struggle between Norm and Ahmed is timeless। Emma Buzo reveals that minimal changes were made to the original script to situate it appropriately for audiences today. “The character of Norm was originally a World War Two veteran. This production sets the action in the present and makes Norm a Vietnam veteran. This time, Ahmed carries a backpack instead of a briefcase as per the original script,” she says. “Very few words had to be changed for it to sit comfortably in the present day.”

The play is also extremely timely, in an eerie twist of fact imitating fiction, with the recent reports of racist attacks on Indian students. “I commissioned a play to respond to Norm and Ahmed because it is perhaps more relevant now than when it premiered in 1968,” says Buzo.

Its companion piece, Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah, is just as timely, but strongly situated in the present, with its references to google, and the moment that altered the Muslim identity—9/11। Again uncannily timed to the ban over the burkha in France, the story follows a young science student who wants to put on the hijab.

“I commissioned Alana Valentine... after she told me a captivating story about the opposition a young Afghani Australian Muslim woman faced from her own family about her decision to wear the headscarf,” writes Emma Buzo in the production notes। “We don’t often hear of diversity within an ethnic community,” she adds.

Shafana, inspired by Makiz Ansari from Affinity Intercultural Foundation, launches into a struggle of religious faith and political belief with her beloved Aunt Sarrinah.
Her aunt’s story is familiar to many immigrants। A well placed engineer, back home in Afghanistan, Sarrinah has settled for a job in a factory, and is studying to get her qualification recognised in Australia.

The cheerful woman of wit and humour at the start of the play, slowly unravels her deepest fears when Shafana insists on an outward display of her faith। Camilla Ah Kin, as Sarrinah, carefully unveils the confident Afghani-Australian: slowly disintegrating under the haunting memories of escape from Afghanistan. You cannot move on from your past sometimes—it lingers, waiting for a single moment of vulnerability.

Sheridan Harbridge exudes the enthusiasm of a young, passionate and sincere Shafana—she has understood, discovered her religion। And now, even the gravest of objections—restrictions in her social interactions and her career progression—seem petty.

Shafana fumbles, folds and unfolds the scarf, caught between her own convictions and the fears of her aunt—the one person whose judgement she trusts the most। Will Shafana put on the scarf? Will our society see the young girl, the scientist under the hijab? Or will she remain forever burdened by the socio-political symbols attributed to the headscarf?

As the director, Aarne Neeme writes in the production notes, “Good theatre doesn’t provide solutions; it speculates – leaving the answers for the audience।”

For further information, please see www।alexbuzo।com।au

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.