A Doll's House: triumphant journey from Denmark to Calcutta

What could a 19th century Norwegian man have to say about the life of a married Bengali woman during the British Raj?

It turns out that playwright Henrik Ibsen's universal themes questioning the traditional roles of men and women provide the opportunity for examining not only gender politics but British colonialism too.

Modern day British-Asian playwright Tanika Gupta's adaptation of Ibsen's 'A Doll's House' is a triumph. Together with the Lyric Theatre's new Artistic Director, Rachel O'Riordan, they re-locate Ibsen's play from a 1879 Norwegian town to Calcutta in the same year, then the capital of the British India.

Ibsen's Nora (wife of Torvald, mother of three, living out the ideal of the 19th-century wife) becomes Niru, a chirpy, husband-pleasing young Bengali wife married to English bureaucrat Tom. The play sees the unravelling of their lives leading Niru to question her situation and her own identity.

The whole cast shines - with Niru played by the dazzling actor Anjana Vasan who has many theatre, television and film credits (from Brexit: The Uncivil War (Channel 4) to Black Mirror (Netflix) and Disney's Cinderella too) and the towering Elliot Cowan as Tom also has a long list of previews credits including the current top BBC hit Peaky Blinders.

The stunning single-scene new setting is the internal courtyard of an Indian town house, complete with tree sprouting up through it's centre. It gave the sense of Niru's claustrophobic and enveloping world, trapped in her own doll's house. It was beautifully lit with the various doors off the courtyard providing useful entry and exit points.

The award-winning multi-instrumentalist composer was Arun Ghosh, who himself hovered above the action on a mezzanine verandah surrounded by the instruments which he delicately played, creating a tense backdrop at apt moments in the psychodrama.

Gupta chose to stick mostly to Ibsen's original script, making only a few alterations for the adaption. It's seems astonishing that in 1879 Ibsen portrayed such scandalous-for-the-time feminist sentiments.

In 2006, the centenary of Ibsen's death, A Doll's House held the distinction of being the world's most performed play that year showing - perhaps sadly, and inevitably - the enduring nature of the play's themes.

The Lyric provide a very useful 'education pack' (pdf) about the play and its adaptation.

A Doll's House, a new adaptation by Tanika Gupta, at the Lyric Theatre, London W6 0QL.

Viceroy's House: film about India-Pakistan 1947 partition

Really looking forward to 'Bend It Like Beckham' director Gurinder Chadha's next film, Viceroy's House, due out next year. It certainly has a cracking cast in Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Simon Callow, Om Puri and Huma Qureshi :

Gurinder Chadha's films are always a treat especially to second-gen onwards Brit-Asians such as myself though they certainly have a wider appeal.  I also happen to hail from the director's same West London suburb and from a Sikh-Punjabi background so her material particularly resonates with me and it's always interesting to see what she's homing in on. Every Punjabi family has a partition story - I'm curious to see how she handles hers and how she mediates it within the grammar of film-making and the demands of commercial cinema.

In a more recent interview from this month, this time an event at America's Clark University, we learn that:

"Chadha is currently in the post-production phase of her film, “Viceroy’s House,” which will be released in 2017. The film chronicles the British partition of India and Pakistan, and the intertwining of many cultural perspectives during a controversial time in South Asian history. “I was very clear that this is a film made by a British Punjabi; it’s very much that perspective,” said Chadha. “No Indian could have made it, and no Pakistani could have made it, and no white British could have made it.”

“Viceroy’s House” tells Chadha’s family history. “When I was growing up I had come to understand that partition happened because it was our fault — that we Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims couldn’t get on with each other,” Chadha recalled. “There was violence and the British had no option but to divide the country. … As a result I had somehow felt that the loss of a homeland was a result of my ancestors’ fault.” Chadha said that when archived historical documents eventually became public, she and her family learned the partition was a political act."

Read more from this event here.

Eltham for Exit in UK's EU Referendum 2016

On Thursday 23 June all eligible Brits trundled off to vote at their local church hall, school or in my case, portacabin, to place their 'X' against whether the UK should remain part of the EU. We all know how that ended:

Source: BBC

The actual date of the referendum had been known since 20 February 2016, the day PM David Cameron had announced it. Before that, it was on 22 January 2013 that he had gambled in announcing that if the Conservatives won the next 2015 election they would seek to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU and then give the British people the "simple choice" by the end of 2017 between staying in the EU under those terms or leaving the EU.

Source: BBC

It is commonly accepted that, rather than apolitical concerns about 'giving the people a choice', it was concerns about UKIP gaining ground and pressure from within the Tory party which had led Cameron to take this huge risk. It was this throw of the dice, which ironically may have helped him win the 2015 election, that ultimately led to his resignation announcement on 24 June 2016, the day after his referendum defeat.

I write two days after the referendum when I, along with the rest of a shocked country, am still taking in the results. Many of us who had to be up the day after EU Referendum Day blearily closed down our tablets at 12.30am that night, hearing that the 'Remains' seemed likely to win over the 'Brexiters' albeit by a small margin. Having inched ahead a couple of weeks earlier, the mood of the country had seemed to change after the terrible death of MP Jo Cox on 16 June. It wasn't a seismic change. Despite the outpouring of grief for this popular 'Remain' MP, one felt that people were still sticking to their positions. The Brexiters upped the ante on their anti-immigration rhetoric (Farage had unveiled his vile 'Breaking Point' poster on 16 June) and Turkey bogeyman dog-whistles, while Remain, well er... continued to stress the benefits to the UK economy.

When, even more bleary-eyed at 5.30am the next morning, I immediately reached for my smartphone and saw the shock result, I admit I uttered an F-word to my equally surprised (though always unflappable) husband who then knew it was serious because I rarely swear.

Turning on the BBC I saw Farage's triumphant speech claiming the result as a victory for "real people, for the ordinary people, for the decent people". When I tracked down the Greenwich borough results, it seems our borough was full of unreal, unordinary and indecent people. The overall borough result was 55.5% remain - 44.4% leave. However the breakdown of results for each of the 17 wards wasn't openly available - only via those attending the count on the night. (Next day update: ward results available now on Royal Greenwich website.)

Luckily @darryl1974 obtained the results (from @5tewartChristie) and they are posted on his 853 blog with excellent analysis.

 

All four Eltham wards voted leave, with only two others (Abbey Wood and Plumstead) doing the same. The 853 blog points out how Eltham has often behaved differently to the rest of the borough in elections - certainly Eltham has often the only wards returning Tory Councillors to the Council.

With Cameron's resignation, the way is clear for a more right-wing 'Brexit' government, set to be in place by the October Tory party conference, with the obvious top candidates being Boris Johnson and Michael Gove (leading Brexiters) and Theresa May (officially a Remainer, but a very quiet one...wonder why). No one has heard a word yet from Cameron's side-kick George Osborne.

Since then there's been talk of healing, building bridges and moving on - a lot of transformational journey metaphors. Anyone saying naughty things (i.e. having a heated go at the 'other side') is being outed and shamed on social media by presumably far more decent people. In some cases this is even extending to those expressing the view that the EU Referendum was really ultimately about immigration for many voters. Understandably many Brexiters are sensitive to charges of having run a xenophobic campaign, preferring instead to stress the democracy and sovereignty issues.

I've been thinking about the effect on one-time colleagues in higher education. I know that last Friday UK universities everywhere will have been focusing on the implications of our EU exit on their research funding, on their existing EU students and on their potential future EU students.Will EU students have 'overseas' status in future and, if so, will they still come? It was sobering to see the Times Higher Education's estimate of the "academic subjects most dependent on EU funding and now facing huge funding cuts":

This doesn't bode well for some of our south-east London universities, e.g. Goldsmiths and Greenwich, which offer these subjects.

Much analysis continues about the forthcoming EU exit negotiations, which PM the Tory membership will give us, whether the UK will break up and whether Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will face a coup and replacement. Perhaps to be ready for an election earlier than the Fixed Parliament Act- decreed 2020 date?

West meets East: from Eltham, England, to Punjab, India

So finally we are taking the children to visit India, the place from which my family hail, and from whence my parents emigrated to the UK in the early 1960s. It was in London that my brother and I were then born and where we have made our own lives.

My husband, however, is not from an Indian background, his family being born and bred south Londoners for generations. All these factors hare inevitably meant that our children's bi-culturality is a bit lop-sided. Despite the best implorings of my mother, my talking in Punjabi regularly to my children in an otherwise English setting just didn't happen. And so, after all these years of only hearing about India and being touched by Indian culture in a peripheral way, our children will finally get to see the place and meet some extended family. My husband has done this once before, 14 years ago, the year we were married when, with the eagerness of a newly-wed he foolishly agreed to meet more of the the in-laws.

I have been to India many times before I was married, though less so in the last couple of decades. Incongruously, my brother and I were even sent back for a few months of boarding school there, near Simla, in our primary school years, while my mother was in the UK. A madness that my mother soon changed her mind about, hence the short time there.

It was really at my mother's encouragement that we have set up this current trip. She still visits India frequently, having siblings and nephews/nieces there, and around 2002 she finally bought her own little house in the Punjabi new town of Chandigarh. Not getting any younger, she was very keen to show our kids 'her manor' and to show them off to family there. She and my brother will be traveling to India a week earlier and will meet us there.

The visit is most significant for me because of our children. It's that strange diasporic phenomena of having perhaps emotionally separated from your heritage country, and even having ambivalent feelings about it, yet despite this so wanting your children to have an attachment to it. An Irish acquaintance tells me that this is exactly his experience when taking his children back to Ireland for the first time. It's a strange crossroads of a time when all sorts of repressed emotions come to the fore, questions of identity and belonging, which perhaps you had not really appreciated before. But also looking back on my younger years and musing that, what may be generational differences within some families, in a diasporic family these also become interwoven with cultural differences between the different generations.

But back to the trip - we'll be visiting the northerly state of Punjab, which borders Pakistan of course, flying in to New Delhi and then basing ourselves in Chandigarh, at my mother's house. More of that later, but let me set the geographical scene...

So here's a map (click on images to enlarge) of the upper half of India, with its capital, New Delhi, in the north. Our time there will only touch the NW area of the vast land that is India, and within the state of Punjab.

This is the territory that our 12 day trip will cover, with the main places of staying/visiting marked out.

We've got this tentative itinerary planned, but this will very much depend on the pace, and the heat, that we and children can cope with once there:

Day 1

Sun: Overnight flight To New Delhi from Heathrow
(we've pushed the boat out and will be flying in Virgin's 'Premium Economy' class - here's the oh-so-important additional 'luxuries' you get, that mean you can look down on Economy, though still look 'up' to Upper Class - a bit like the 1960s sketch with Cleese and the Ronnies...I think a good linen tablecloth is always an essential... We decided that the kids could best cope with the 8-9 hrs flight if they slept overnight, especially as we still have the 5-6 hour drive to Chandigarh ahead once we land. Let's see how that works out...)

Day 2

Mon: Arrive at New Delhi
(to be met by the car which mum will have sent ahead - that should be interesting trying to find the driver in the busy airport...)

Drive, 5-6 hours to Chandigarh
This will be along the (in)famous Grand Trunk Road, one of Asia's oldest roads apparently, and much eulogized in various Punjabi songs - a bit like America''s 'Route 66'. We'll be stopping for lunch at one of the 'dhabas' (or roadside cafes) which Punjab is well-known for. 

Day 3 and 4
Tue and Wed: ​​Chandigarh
And so finally we will get to spend some time at my mother's place in Chandigarh. Known as the 'City Beautiful', Punjabis are very proud of having India's first 'planned city', as famously designed by Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier. He was commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, to build a city that would replace Lahore, the previous capital of the Punjab lost to newly created Pakistan after partition in 1947.

Day 5

Thurs : the village tour

Leave very early to travel to west Punjab by car (3.5hrs) to my mother's ancestral village home, and the villages of some nearby relatives (area around no. 3, Moga, on the map). My mother has very efficiently pre-informed various relatives about when we will be arriving at each of them and how long we will stay at each. This is to avoid, very wisely, the protracted insistence at each place on extended hospitality involving long elaborate meals. Stay overnight at cousin's house.

Day 6

Friday: travel to Amritsar

Leave after lunch for Amritsar (2.5hrs by car), the most northerly place we'll be visiting and only about 35 mins from the Pakistan border. This is the site, of course, of the so-called 'Golden Temple' or to give it its proper name, 'Sri Harmandir Sahib'. It is the holiest of places for Sikhs to visit, akin to a Sikh Vatican. It was in the UK news this February when archived papers revealed the hitherto unknown involved of the British government in the events of 1984 at the Temple - this was when the Indira Gandhi's government unleashed a violent attack on the Temple, killing many people (575 officially, more unofficially). Amritsar is also the site of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, in April 1919. That atrocity was depicted at length in Attenborough's Gandhi film.

We hope to visit both these places - one very beautiful, the other very poignant.

Amritsar is an iconic Punjabi city - steppeed in history, narrow cobbled lanes and famous for its food and 'chic/vintage traditional' fashion shopping,  We plan to stay overnight in a nice hotel, hopefully with swimming pool to give the kids some fun. We might also, if time, visit the Waggah border ceremony at dusk - famous for its nightly ritualistic and exaggerated 'closing of the gates' ceremony between the Indian and Pakistan border, as depicted on an episode of Michael Palin: "a masterly display of just how angry you can get without hitting anything!"

Day 7

Sat:

​​Early breakfast at Amritsar hotel, swim, pack, travel back to Chandigarh (4.5hrs)

Day 8, 9, 10

Sun, Mon, Tues: in ​​Chandigarh. On Sunday - celebrating Vaisaiki, the birth of the Sikh religion.

Day 11

Wed: ​Travel To Delhi

​​Check in to hotel, ​​explore Delhi​​ and celebrate daughter’s birthday, maybe at Connaught Place’s TGIF, to give her something familiar.

Day 12

Thurs: Delhi sightseeing

​​Breakfast in Delhi Hotel, b​rowse Chandi Chawk​​ ('moonlight place') an ancient shopping site, visit the 16th century Mogul Red Fort, ​cool off by the pool in the afternoon and ​explore the markets in the evening (hmm..bit ambitious this day)

Day 13

Fri: ​​hotel then fly home

Leave for Delhi airport and flight back home to UK.

And that, my friends, is the plan! Let's see how it works out. We're quite relaxed about changing things where we want to, and go with the flow, but you've got to have an aim, haven't you?

Our trip will have the added interest of a little election going on in India - the election of the 16th Prime Minister of independent India, by over 814 million citizens over six weeks of voting beginning 7 April. The front runner could unfortunately see India having its first non-secular leader, against the spirit of the constitution established by the first PM Nehru. 

Lots more I could write, but another time...so adios, ciao and namaste. We out.

'20 Years on after Stephen Lawrence's death': British Future debate in Eltham

David Lammy MP sitting on left; Deborah Mattinson standing

On Wednesday 27 March, British Future and Britain Thinks held a citizens’ jury and debate in Eltham, at Eltham's new Harris Academy (formerly Eltham Green school) "to help to ensure that local voices are heard during our national conversations about how Britain changed since 1993."
The panel included two backbencher MPs, Conservative MP Gavin Barwell and Labour MP David Lammy, as well as 'public attitudes specialist' Deborah Mattinson to discuss public attitudes and proposals from the workshop.

There was a thoughtful essay by way of preview to the event posted by Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future, here who co-incidentally has also lived in Eltham. "...Living in Eltham when the inquiry reported, I remember how the media coverage seemed to me to only capture part of the story. It was important to see justice done. But that should never depend on choosing whether to deny the existence of racism or stereotype white working-class communities instead...."

BBC 4's Today programme reported on the Eltham Harris Academy event the next morning - link to the 8 minute report by Mike Thomson here http://bbc.in/WRqnaE (starting at 2.44.30 secs in). There are also some tweets about the event by British Future at @britishfuture.
 
British Future have released this short video from the debate MPs http://bit.ly/ZBaSDV

Here's my quick notes from listening to the Today programme this morning:

....Stephen Lawrence's killing in 1993 is an unavoidable reference point in any conversation about race in Britain....the British Future event brought together two generations to discuss how much has changed in Eltham since the then (although attributed the Harris Academy to 'Greenwich' rather than Eltham)....

Deborah Mattinson moderated discussions of one group, 17-18 yr olds (?). Reporter refers to the 1999 MacPherson enquiry which found the police to be "institutionally racist" but says that "few believe that's true today". One of the young people says that "it's fear or ignorance rather than racism", that's how he likes to view things. Others believe the levels of racism in Eltham have been exaggerated and now there is more of a mix of races and cultures in Eltham which has helped improve the situation. There are references to a 'groundswell of youth who are disengaged from society'....

The 'top vote' on what to propose was for a need for 'more practical learning' - should be able to do things like 'plumbing' and not just 'geography'. Gavin Barwell MP promised to take this back to his 'boss' Michael Gove.

The report finishes by asking whether "this gathering will prove to be anything more than well-intentioned hot air?" Patrick Carswell (?) concludes "that's up to the residents of Eltham".

The Colonial Eye: British Empire images of the Punjab, India - free event

Curious about film footage of life in India during British rule? This is a quick mention of a fab and free event this weekend, of public archive footage of this period in India, especially focusing on Punjab.

In “From the Archives: The Colonial Eye: British Empire images of the Punjab, India 1912 – 1947” artist Tajender Sagoo “has curated a series of short films produced during the British rule of India with a focus on the Punjab. The screening will bring together public information and travelogue films found in British public archives and rarely seen on the big screen.

The public information films selected are examples of state propaganda used to form public opinion, a practise still prevalent today in regions such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, even in this era of digital media. The travelogues selected are personal observations of places and people. Screened together they form a visual essay of Punjab as written by its rulers and administrators.“

The screening is going to be followed by a panel discussion with “four specialists on South Asian film, popular culture and history discussing what the films can tell modern day viewers and taking questions from the audience.”
 
Given my own family’s Punjabi background, it would be interesting to know more about how the Raj viewed the Punjab during my grandparents' time. Even for a south Londonist, this sounds well worth crossing the river for.

This event takes place Sunday 19 February at 14.00 at the Pheonix Cinema, 52 High Road, East Finchley N2 9PJ. It's free but booking is essential (Box Office 020 8444 6789)

Eltham round-up

A quick round-up of some Eltham happenings which caught my eye:

BBC Radio London’s Eddie Nestor show came to town last week, 26 January. A 120 minute ‘Drivetime live’ radio programme was broadcast  from Middle Park Community Centre in Eltham “finding out how this south east London community has changed since Stephen Lawrence was murdered in 1993.” The show featured interviews with local Eltham MP, Clive Efford MP, Greenwich Borough Commander Richard Wood and talked to various locals who included Paul Webbewood, ex-Lib Dem councillor and local tweeter @Jackcabnory.  The range of views were to be found from:

- the area is changed and there’s no sense of community due to people from different cultures
- to testimony of racist behaviour,
- or of a community largely now harmonious and no different to others
- and to frustration with the ‘racist Eltham’ theme cropping up again.

According to views on twitter, some thought it was one-sided (Eddie’s ‘like a dog with a bone’) whilst others seemed more sanguine (‘Showing the gd side of Eltham’)
You can ‘listen again’ here for another few days only (is there a nifty way to download and keep these time-limited 'listen agains'?) 

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Elsewhere, but on a related theme, local councillor Nigel Fletcher reported that this motion was debated and passed unanimously at Greenwich Council last week (click to enlarge)

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Last Thursday, Eddie Nestor’s radio show started around the same time as ‘trespassers on the line’ at Eltham caused trains to back down the Charing Cross to Dartford line. At one point trains were held at New Cross while they turned off the power to investigate. My husband was held up in this. As one local tweeter put it:

“kels_1987 Kelly Fox
worst journey home thanks to some numpties that decided to walk along the tracks at rush hour...only in eltham!!!”

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Hilly at the the e-shootershill blog brought news that a public inquiry is be held on the 8th and 9th February into the proposal for Christ Church School to use common land on Eltham Common. She has a fab and detailed write here.


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Last weekend’s Guardian carried a jolly piece about some women who last September hiked and camped their way around London’s ‘capital ring’ in eight days. The piece details their stop-off in Eltham:

“Our destination for the first night was Oxleas Woods in Eltham, an ancient and magnificent expanse of nature moments from intensely urban life, populated with stunning native British trees (oak, silver birch, hornbeam, hazel and wild service).
Even though wild camping in London is technically illegal without permission, we weren't ready to test our stranger-charming skills yet. So after six hours of walking, we bedded down deep in the 8,000-year-old beauty of Oxleas Woods, lulled by the soundtrack of an all-night car park party and the A207 just minutes away.
A broken night, but we recharged with a mighty vegetarian full English at Oxleas Cafe (oxleawoodcafe.info), looking out over the North Downs, before heading off through the woods again. We spotted rose-ringed parakeets – now an exotic staple of London birdlife – and a green woodpecker, and discovered a curious mixture of major roads, royal palaces (Eltham) and lovely locals including Bob, who sold us some runner beans from his allotment for our supper.”


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The prodigious blog Tired of London had a lovely write up on the Tarn: “The Tarn, in Mottingham, is a small lake and nature reserve which once stood within the grounds of Eltham Lodge, a seventeenth century building which was itself once part of the grand estate of Eltham Palace.....”

This reminded me that I haven’t been here for years, and certainly not since some additions have been made, and must visit again soon with the kids.