New York’s Metropolitan Museum transforms Islamic wing

An essay on the refurbished “Islamic art” galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (published in the National)

During the past decade of fulminating and fretting, those of us who live in Europe and North America have become quite familiar with the term “the Islamic world”. Rarely do a few words try to say so much. The phrase scrapes by as a kind of shorthand, an easy way of fusing geography and sociology.

It allows us to speak in the singular about a great profusion of peoples and places. The “Islamic world” is not simply a space where 1.5 billion Muslims happen to live, but a space that can be understood in generalisations. We hear of the Islamic world almost always in reference to its political and social problems: the plight of democracy in the Islamic world, the crisis of women’s rights in the Islamic world, the rise of extremism in the Islamic world, and so forth.

The Brookings Institution, a leading Washington think-tank, maintains a division to study the thorny subject of “US relations with the Islamic world”. This broad remit still seems logical to many politicians and commentators – never mind the diversity of Muslim communities and countries across the globe, or the vastly different levels of religiosity and freedom from Indonesia to Somalia to Morocco.

Strangely, the “Islamic world” has no real counterpart in the 21st century. It is untenable now to speak of a “Christian world”, or a “Buddhist world”, or even a “Hindu world”. In each case, the adjective proves entirely insufficient, even misleading in understanding the noun – can millions of people be distilled to their faith? And yet the “Islamic world” has proved a more resilient concept, routinely invoked by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Some institutions are wary of the vagueness of this language. Eight years ago, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art closed the galleries then known as the “Islamic Wing” for renovation. They were reopened this November under a new name. Visitors now pour into the redesigned permanent collection of “Art from the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia”.

What the galleries’ new name has lost in brevity it gains in precision. There is safety in inelegant fact. A monolithic Islam does not loom over the exhibition. The collection’s numerous books, rugs, and pots – the holy trinity of much Middle Eastern and South Asian art – appear as representatives of particular periods and places, from early medieval Spain to Mughal South Asia. As you move through the various galleries, you travel from region to region, dynasty to dynasty. The emphasis here lies in the diversity and complexity within the cultural heritage of Islam. Navina Haidar, the curator of the collection, insists that the Islamic world is “not one world, but many; not another world, but our own”.

Anybody should want to claim the exquisite world of this exhibition as their own. To roam the galleries is to drift from wonder to wonder. A 12th-century incense burner from Seljuk Iran is shaped like a lion, engraved in fine filigree. When used, it would breathe smoke through its bronze teeth. Turn the corner and you come to a cavernous room filled only with carpets, each several centuries old. They tumble from ceiling to floor like waterfalls in imperious red and gold cascades. Elsewhere, an astrolabe from medieval Yemen demonstrates both aesthetic and scientific accomplishment, with inscriptions dancing over the careful gradations of the cosmos. The viewer can easily get lost in all the shimmering ornamentation. There need be no reason to immerse yourself in the collection apart from surrendering to its undeniable beauty.

Occupy everywhere

As the world watches, can the Wall Street protesters make enough noise? (Published in The Caravan, 1 November, 2011)

Most demonstrations are held with the conviction that they serve a cause far bigger than the sum of their parts. I have seen many examples of this faith in the United States: the three pro-Palestinian pensioners who every Sunday berated passers-by in my glacially indifferent college town; the meagre picket lines of union workers at a doomed New York City hospital, shivering under the nose of a giant inflatable rat. They were sustained by the hope that their demands would be met, but also by the belief that they represented something larger: that they were not a lonely few, that they stood for all colonised and oppressed peoples. Or that they went on strike to protect the dignity of all labour. Clutching worn placards and shouting tired slogans, did they ever wonder if their pious efforts had all the impact of trees falling in a silent, unknowable forest?

The current Occupy Wall Street protesters in the US have an indefatigable, brazen belief in their broad relevance. The optimism is electric, the excitement contagious in the regular assemblies, rallies, and marches that have captured public places and public attention. Occupy Wall Street activists see themselves as part of a historical moment of social unrest around the world. Themes of universality and ubiquity shade much of the movement’s rhetoric. “All day, all year, occupy everywhere,” goes one chant. “The whole world is watching,” insists another.

Somebody must be watching. Less then one month after the initial occupation of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street stirred a day of coordinated protests across continents. On 15 October, demonstrators flooded the streets of cities in the United States and Europe. In New York, they stormed the iconic Times Square. In London, they rallied in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. In cities in Spain and Greece, thousands flocked to central squares.

The protests borrow from an increasingly familiar global style of rebellion. Placards bearing the words “We are the 99%” (Occupy Wall Street’s defining slogan) appear in London, in Germany and elsewhere. Occupy Wall Street protesters compare their encampment in Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square in Cairo. Activists called 15 October a “global day of rage”, invoking a term often used during the Arab Spring. The “people’s mic” (a form of throaty Chinese whispers used to make up for the lack of a PA system, because New York City law requires a permit for “amplified sound” at demonstrations) is now a feature of gatherings in other countries, even when protesters have access to mics and loudspeakers. Methods and philosophies of organisation spread across borders. I sat in New York’s Washington Square Park in mid-October, watching protest organisers teach fresh-faced students the various protocols and hand-signals that comprise “direct democratic process”. The same gestures and procedures have been used across Europe in building ostensibly leaderless (“horizontal” and non-hierarchical” in the activist dialect) movements. Both the form and content of all these protests have gone viral, speeding around the globe in an age of hyper-communication.

But beyond talk of “memes” and “inter-connectivity”, the protesters feel tied together by shared circumstance. “The rapid spread of the protests,” Occupy Wall Street organisers announced on their website on 15 October, “is a grassroots response to the overwhelming inequalities perpetuated by the global financial system and transnational banks.” Though there are obvious differences between each national situation, many grievances are held in common: the rejection of the ideology of government austerity; the critique of the relative impunity afforded to the financial establishment; and the fatigue with sclerotic political systems.

If you go to Zuccotti Park and shuffle between the ad hoc cooking, sleeping and computing areas of the camp, you will invariably bump into a Dutch television crew or Japanese journalists or a team of Spanish radio reporters. The notion that “the whole world is watching” isn’t entirely fanciful. Such enthusiastic interest instils confidence in many activists involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Their cause has huge appeal. After all, people from around the world help the occupiers of Zuccotti Park in numerous ways, including by ordering them quantities of pizzas and Mexican tacos from local restaurants. (Thanks to credit cards and the Internet, the 21st century brings us the solidarity of the dialling finger and the take-out menu.)

The 99 per cent versus the One

At its simplest, the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement hopes to change American discourse on economic policy. (Published in The Hindu)

Nearly three years ago, Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election on the back of incredible popular mobilisation. In a country often bogged down in plodding party politics, there seemed to be something transcendent and epochal about his rise. Observers suggested that Mr. Obama did more than inspire voters; he energised a generational movement. This sense was no doubt aided by Mr. Obama’s charisma and the messianic rhetoric of his campaign. He called for “the audacity of hope” and promised that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

After three years of disillusionment, a more organic movement has taken root in the United States. The “Occupy Wall Street” protests began innocuously one month ago, but now claim public space and public attention. They reached new heights of spectacle on Saturday when thousands flooded Times Square in New York City as part of a wider “global day of rage” against the West’s stuttering economic systems.

The American protesters come from many of the groups who rallied to Mr. Obama in 2008: young people, students, urban middle classes, union members, the working poor, the underemployed, and the unemployed. Yet this time they are not hitched to the ascendance of one man. They denounce the growth of stark inequality and the erosion of social mobility in America. They decry what they see as the collusion of the state with corporate and financial interests. And they tap into the widely-shared belief that the bankers, speculators, and traders responsible for the economic recession have escaped it unscathed while leaving behind a vast hinterland of despair and struggle.

Mr. Obama’s campaign hyperbole returned to life in an unexpected way. Among the many striking signs I’ve seen around these protests, one placard at Zuccotti Park (the square in downtown Manhattan “occupied” by activists for the past month) reprised his old line: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” It was a rebuke to the President, not a pledge of fealty. For the newly galvanised left, those heady days of Obama-euphoria in 2008 seem terribly remote. The President and his party are not even auxiliary to the burgeoning movement. Its impetus doesn’t spring from the imperatives of electoral politics, but from a much more inchoate and deeper well of feeling in American society.

Post-2008

We can trace this anger to the hardships that descended on many Americans following the 2008 economic collapse. The ranks of the unemployed have swollen; jobs are harder to come by for both the under- and over-educated; students graduate with unpayable debts; once free-flowing credit has dried up; prudent savers have seen their pensions vanish into thin air; government austerity measures threaten public sector jobs and what remains of America’s social safety net. Protesters can summon an army of statistics to show how inequality in America has spiralled after three decades of intensifying deregulation (for instance, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, average incomes between 1979 and 2008 in the U.S. grew by over $10,000, but all that growth went to the richest 10 per cent of the country, while the incomes of the remaining 90 per cent effectively declined). Some activists replace the traditional slogans on their placards with economic charts, cluttering demonstrations with arrows and figures. It is perhaps fitting that the identity of this movement has coalesced around a number. Calling themselves the “99%,” the protesters assail a hypothetical “1%,” the rich elite that holds a country and its government in thrall.

The rawness and generality of this sentiment — aimed at financial institutions, corporations, the wealthy, and a supposedly complicit government — has convinced many critics that the protesters lack a coherent agenda: “What do these people want?” In fairness, it’s difficult to summarise the movement. I’ve heard suggestions that the U.S. is in the midst of its own “Anna Hazare moment,” but the comparison doesn’t hold water. “Occupy Wall Street” has no figurehead and only the faintest tracing of a leadership structure. Where Anna’s followers demanded concrete legislative action in the Jan Lokpal bill, “Occupy Wall Street” activists maintain a long, pious list of causes, from the reform of the financial system to stopping house foreclosures to ending U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This series of grievances in the “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” (the closest thing to a manifesto yet to emerge from the movement) can seem exhaustively idealistic or, worse, vague and impractical. But its role is not to serve as some blueprint for actual legislative reform. Instead, it allows the movement to remain open and inclusive to its growing number of sympathisers. While they frustrate the media and resist easy definition, the “Occupy Wall Street” protests continue to hit a nerve in an uncertain and depressed nation.

Memories from Ground Zero, Ten Years Apart

The rallies in New York City that hailed the killing of Osama bin Laden by American troops show how difficult it is to appropriately mark victory, writes Kanishk Tharoor (Published in the Telegraph)

The most ghostly place in New York City is its financial district. The neighbourhood empties by nightfall, drained of its grey legions of corporate workers. While the rest of Manhattan hums with activity late into the night, this district’s canyons of glass grow dark and silent. It can feel eerie walking here after hours, with the streets totally lifeless and the looming skyscrapers pressing in close. In the midst of this brooding monumentality, you find the glowing open wound of New York, a crater fenced off by cranes and tall, harsh lights: Ground Zero.

By the time I reached Ground Zero in the early hours of Monday morning, the normally empty streets echoed with raucous life. A crowd had descended on the site of the World Trade Center, jubilant with the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Men climbed trees and lampposts, spraying those below with champagne. Others mounted the shoulders of their friends to wave American flags, sing the national anthem, proclaim the singular greatness of the US army, and lead the throngs in chants, including “Obama 1, Osama 0!” and the insistent “U-S-A! U-S-A!,” as well as other less polite slogans. There was a crowing, tribal tone to the rally, akin to the celebrations of rabid football or cricket fans.

These scenes in New York — alongside similar exultation at the gates of the White House — were broadcast around the world as examples of the rough triumphalism with which Americans greeted bin Laden’s killing. Many people, both inside and outside the United States of America, questioned the spirit of these celebrations; on Monday, I appeared on a BBC World Service discussion programme in which many expressed dismay at the chest-thumping in New York and Washington, deeming it inappropriate and inflammatory. In light of the continuing turmoil spawned by the 9/11 attacks and the US “war on terror,” the critics said, surely it was undignified and wrong to delight so crudely in bin Laden’s assassination, regardless of his numerous sins and undoubted cruelty.

Though I generally agreed with this critique, I urged listeners not to read too much into the raw and crass reactions of the crowd, which mostly consisted of young, university-age students, many of them drunk. Moreover, there were not many people at Ground Zero when I was there, only hundreds, not thousands, in a city of millions. Yet journalists and camera crews in their dozens nibbled around the edges of the clump of revellers, inflating and sensationalizing what was not really that large a rally. Sadly, pictures of New Yorkers as they celebrated death have now become defining images of the local mood.

As a New Yorker myself, I can only hope such images are not truly representative. I, too, was uncomfortable amid the celebrations at Ground Zero. In small part, this was because even though I have lived in New York most of my life and consider it my home, I am not American, and therefore I am insensible to the fervour of that bellicose flag-waving. In larger part, I simply find it difficult to see joy in the indifferent face of violence and death.

Austerity Britain

(Published in The Caravan, 1 May, 2011)

AMONG MANY CUTS FORCED by the imminent loss of government funding, the BBC World Service discontinued the weekly programme Politics UK on 25 March. It was, in fairness, a grey, fusty show whose presenters turned over the mundane and the less mundane in British politics with gravelly equanimity. Listeners around the world will have to make do with bite-sized bits of British news, but one doubts that the programme’s disappearance is much mourned in Lagos or Lucknow. The sceptred isle is now well and truly an isle, its sceptre (despite the monstrous pomp of the royal nuptials) not nearly as weighty as it once was. In an age of economising, the World Service can no longer afford the luxurious 30 minutes once allotted to parochial discussions of alternative voting reform, child tax credits, incapacity benefits and the other issues that periodically ruffle Britain’s political class.

There is a clear symbolic shift in the suspension of the programme, over and beyond the exigencies of BBC beancounters. If the World Service—the very institution meant to project Britain to the world—deems Politics UK expendable, it suggests a recognition that the UK has diminished in the eyes (and ears) of a global audience. Even executives at the BBC believe that the internal concerns of Britain are of tepid interest to those beyond its shores.

Yet it is striking that just as British politics continue to slide from view, events within the country are bringing it in line with upheaval and tumult elsewhere. On 26 March (a day after Politics UK crackled to a quiet end), the UK saw its largest demonstration in nearly a decade. In a march organised by the country’s leading unions, an estimated 500,000 people took to the streets of London to protest the severe cuts planned by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

I was with the motley horde of students, workers, artisans, parents and babies that day, though I marched (or shuffled, such was the density of the crowd) through central London more out of sociological interest than conviction. By the standards of contemporary global dissent, it was a sedate, tidy affair. But media attention invariably focused on the actions on London high streets by small groups of anarchists and activists peripheral to the march (deeds that included plopping a massive replica of a Trojan horse on the middle of Oxford Circus, a vivid, albeit ambiguous, symbolic act).

The day marked an important moment in the defence of the British public sector, marrying the defiance of the union struggle in Wisconsin in the United States to the youthful exuberance of the Arab Spring. It also fit into a wider debate about the fate of Europe’s postwar “social democratic settlement”. Similar unrest has rocked countries across the recession-hit continent, including Greece (still the scene of protests, a year after riots ground the country to a halt); France (riots and student demonstrations in 2010); and Portugal, where a combination of left agitation and centre-right chicanery forced the resignation of the socialist prime minister in March. These conflicts cannot be understood simply as the friction between forces of the left and the right in European politics, since traditionally left-wing parties are often the ones in the awkward position of forcing “austerity” on their populations. At stake, in the view of many protesters, is the very identity of the European welfare state, with its delicate balance of rights and certainties, on the one hand, and market logic, on the other.

In Britain, which has left itself far more open to international market forces than much of the rest of the European Union, the battle lines are being drawn. Prime Minister David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, claim the cuts are necessary. They seek to trim the deficit of £150 billion and the national debt of over £1 trillion that was inherited from the former Labour government in 2010, in the wake of the deeply divisive “bailout” of Britain’s faltering banks. Cameron’s opponents condemn the cuts as “ideological”, as thrusting at the jugular of British social democracy.

“Buildings of glass, tile, and brick on a shared street”

As Europe struggles to accommodate pluralist democracies, it is necessary for countries elsewhere with minority populations to adopt a liberalism based on understanding, writes Kanishk Tharoor (Published in the Telegraph)

From Paris to Berlin and now to London, a grim consensus is emerging. David Cameron spoke this past weekend in Munich about the failure of “the doctrine of state multiculturalism” in the United Kingdom, suggesting that many British Muslims lead lives dangerously removed from the rest of society. His comments echo those of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, among others. The trouble of integrating Muslims, these leaders say, has stretched European liberal pluralism to its breaking point.

British critics of multiculturalism point to homegrown radicalism and Islamist violence (as evidenced by the July 2005 bombings), and to the notion that many Muslims do not share the same “values” as other Britons. They argue that the British state has encouraged Muslims to remain aloof from the mainstream, to fortify themselves in ghettos, and to refuse to accept modern democratic principles of individual rights and freedom of speech.

These symptoms of the multicultural malaise remain hotly debated and open to question. (One can quite rightly ask: Is Muslim piety antithetical to full participation in liberal, social democracy? How real is the threat of Islamist terrorism in Europe? Are the roots of terrorism not simply in radical ideology, but also in socio-economic conditions and foreign policy? and so forth). But what I found striking in the British prime minister’s comments was the inadequacy of the diagnosis. Has “multiculturalism” in Britain failed?

Part of the problem with Cameron’s speech was its vagueness, a bilious and blustering reliance on platitudes, soft on detail. The critique of “state multiculturalism” is disingenuous because it never clearly describes what it is against. It depends on the same “muddled thinking” derided by Cameron in Munich.

There are very few policies that can be seen as forming a British “doctrine of state multiculturalism”. Some measures — for instance, making “religious” discrimination as serious an offence as “racial” discrimination — are largely uncontroversial and eminently worth keeping. Others — like the funding of Muslim state schools — cannot be undone without seeming discriminatory, since Christian, Jewish and Sikh schools, and now even one Hindu school, receive significant public resources.

The only clear reform suggested by Cameron was the cutting of support for civil society groups like the Muslim Council of Britain. But the amount of public funds given to the MCB and its equivalents is as paltry as these groups’ ability to influence and shape British society. Such a minor move should hardly merit the sweeping tone of his speech.

“Multiculturalism” and “state multiculturalism”, as such, are straw men invoked for particular political aims. The multiculturalism described in official rhetoric and in the accompanying frenzied media debates does not reflect its granular, inescapable reality.

I lived for several years in the centre of a vibrant and scruffy neighbourhood in north London, where Muslim Turks and Kurds, immigrants from West Africa and the Caribbean, South Asian, white Polish and British people all brushed up against one another. The rowdy Irish pub where I went to watch the matches of the local football team —Arsenal — sits right next to a halal butcher shop and a domed mosque. As outlandish as this contrast may seem, when you live there it is perfectly natural, another swirl in the mosaic and filigree of British life. Critics of multiculturalism would have us see the mosque and the pub as antagonistic institutions rather than what they actually are: buildings of glass, tile and brick on a shared street.

Has English become Globish or is this gibberish?

With the British Empire long gone and American hegemony on the wane, English still straddles the globe. But triumphant talk of a world language is still babble, Kanishk Tharoor writes. (Published in The National on 22 July 2010)

The consummate imperialist Cecil Rhodes once quipped that to be born an Englishman “is to have won first prize in the lottery of life”. From under his pith helmet, the world indeed looked rosy for the English. The British Empire provided its lucky sons with incomparable heft, access and sense of purpose (not to mention earning potential). Those heady imperial days must seem remote for any observer of modern Britain. The country’s old industries rot under veils of rust, strife and mistrust tear at its social life, and its place in world politics has shrivelled commensurate to its size as an uncertain, middling power.

But at least one strand of the old boast remains true. While the empire has long gone, its language imperiously straddles the globe. A recent article in The Times reformulated Rhodes’ line: “To be born an English-speaker is to win one of the top prizes in life’s lottery.” Beneath its odour of smugness and self-satisfaction, this claim is undeniably true. English enables a kind of global life that no other modern language can match. Indeed, no other language in any period of history has ever come close to being so fully a medium for global communication. Latin may have bound the antique Mediterranean, French laced together European aristocratic life, and Sanskrit and Persian at different times united the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean, but none enjoyed the reach of English.

Thus, the English-speaker can travel the world safe in the knowledge that wherever he or she goes, the chances are good that English signs will greet her at the airport, English-speaking guides will offer their services and a smattering of English words will be understood even in the dustiest street. The recently concluded World Cup offers another example of English’s ubiquity. Despite its French acronym and origins, football’s governing body, FIFA, requires its coterie of international referees to speak English. So in one semi-final match, an Uzbek referee harangued (and was harangued by) Uruguayan and Dutch players in the only language they shared: English.

In the wake of the British empire, and even in the ostensible twilight of American hegemony, English remains the most international language. More than any other tongue, it offers the tantalising prospect of access to the world. This can be a disconcerting and vexing truth. Young-ju, the protagonist of the Korean film Please Teach Me English(2003), agonises over her inability to learn English and to wrestle her mouth around its alien syllables and diphthongs. She bristles at having to learn the language – why is it not enough to know Korean in Korea? – before being seduced onto the path of English fluency by, among other things, a dapper young man and a piglet that recognises the English alphabet.

According to Robert McCrum’s Globish, 350 million people in China alone are studying English. It is an astronomical figure when one considers there are almost as many people in the process of learning English in China as people around the world who speak Spanish. Current students of English may not be abetted by pedantic farm animals, but they likely share Young-ju’s motivation. She and many others want to be able to function in an outward-facing language, embracing the broader possibilities of a “globalised” world knit together by commerce and information.

The shifting geopolitics of the last decade have not left English any less relevant. A lot has been made in some sectors of the introduction of Chinese classes at African schools, as if this augurs the rise of a global challenge to English. But the fact that so many Chinese citizens are learning English should point to China’s lack of faith in its own tongue as a language for the world. For all its growing currency, Chinese remains – and will likely remain – at best a regional or national language, opening only limited vistas for its international students. Much like learning other colonial languages, such as Dutch in Indonesia, French in West Africa, or indeed English in early 20th-century India, learning Chinese in, for example, Zimbabwe (where Robert Mugabe has encouraged its study) merely resembles a now-ancient form of bilateral relationship: that between a centre of political, economic and cultural power and its colonial periphery.

By contrast, what remains striking about English in the 21st century is that its continued spread is not necessarily a function of traditional state power. The truest assertion of Globish (subtitled How the English Language Became the World’s Language) is that contemporary English has taken a life of its own, one in large part untethered from the driving influence of London and Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood. Where it once helped tie the rest of the world to Anglo-Saxon Britain and North America, English is now the major language of international diplomacy, commerce and cultural exchange in almost all regions and contexts.

World in motion

The World Cup will gather together millions of fans supporting their country’s teams, Kanishk Tharoor writes, but the true new face of global football is one of scattered supporters and competing international brands. (Published in The National)

When the World Cup begins today, remember those who are not there. Not the teams and fans of countries like Egypt and Russia, who narrowly missed out on a trip to South Africa. No, not them, but rather those poor souls who never truly entertained the possibility of qualification, for whom even hope is something of a luxury.

For countless millions of football fans, the World Cup has been – and seems destined to always be – the affair of others.

This, of course, does not necessarily prevent them from savouring the tournament.

Accustomed to the eternal mediocrity of the Indian national team, certain rival neighbourhoods in Kolkata festoon their streets with either the blue and white of Argentina or the green-and-yellow of Brazil, thus annexing themselves for one month, every four years, to the distant passions and rivalries of South America. When Argentina do well, fireworks reverberate around the city. When Brazil succeed, it is even louder. Football is a losing sport in India, so everybody knows how to like a winner.

Most remote fans will not flaunt their extra-territorial loyalties so overtly. They may even purport to be disinterested in the outcomes of the matches, to be “neutral”, an awfully rare inclination in a sport known for its passionate, often combative spectators. But they will stay up all night or set their alarms for early in the morning with the same diligence as those lucky citizens of decent footballing nations.

Spare a thought for such people, for those football orphans who experience the joy of the World Cup vicariously over satellite TVs or crackling radios or high-speed internet streams. Every tournament, they can only look forward to taking pleasure in the pleasure of other countries.

Umbro’s stirring anthem for a multicultural England

Heavy-handed it may be, but this World Cup take on God Save the Queen moves Englishness beyond Anglo-Saxon whiteness (published in the Guardian)

There are a lot of tedious hymns among the national anthems of the world, but God Save the Queen must be one of the most tiresome. In its attempt to rouse national passions, it only seems to depress. It will stumble tunelessly from the jowls of thousands of England fans this Saturday, offering its unwelcome benediction, casting a morose pall overRustenburg. And that’s all without even considering its words.

Most national anthems try to evoke some kind of narrative, some kind of heroic claim or at least endearing description of the nation. God Save the Queen does nothing of the sort. Instead, it asks a deity to ensure that those singing can live in eternal thrall to a monarch (“long to reign over us”) – a quite pathetic request in the 21st century. There is little redeeming about the song; its merciful brevity (a little over 30 seconds when sung at football matches) is its most striking virtue.

So it was with a great degree of surprise that I found myself positively stirred by a rendition of God Save the Queen. Ahead of the World Cup,Umbro released an ad featuring its official red England football top. The short TV spot dresses a range of everyday English people in the shirt, poses them in a collage of everyday English locations, and has them mouth the words to God Save the Queen – the soundtrack that builds and wanes over the course of the minute-long film – as if they were England footballers standing to attention before kick-off.

The video succeeds on a number of levels. First, it elegantly evokes the power of national-team football, of how an incoherent country can come together on the pitch, how, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote: “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 people.” Second, the video doesn’t try to glorify the singing of the anthem, but finds dignity in its choice of humble milieu and modest characters.

Last, and most important, it implicitly makes an argument about Englishness by picking half of its cast from non-white minority groups. Some would roll their eyes and dismiss this as “political correctness gone mad”. Others would say it’s heavy handed to leave the closing line to a head-scarfed Asian woman, one of the more potent icons of cultural difference and its discontents in contemporary Britain. Indeed, reactionsto the video (many of which Umbro has removed) suggest that the shriller reaches of the internet were quick to take umbrage at the ad’s racial balancing act.

Cheerleaders shame Indian cricket

The IPL’s reliance on foreign cheerleaders reinforces unsavoury Indian stereotypes about sex and women (Published in the Guardian)

I certainly do not count myself in the ranks of cricket’s innumerable “purists” for whom the plodding rhythms and rituals of the sport carry a kind of holy truth. But there is at least one aspect of the glitzy and compelling Indian Premier League (IPL) tournament that will not win even my grudging acceptance: cheerleaders.

Now in its third year, the IPL has made cheerleaders an integral part of its “brand”, its heady cocktail of world-class sporting talent, rippling corporate muscle, and unabashed Bollywood glamour. Whenever a wicket falls or a batsman clobbers a boundary, dancers leap upon stages at the edges of the field to gyrate for the cameras and the crowds. This sort of impromptu, threadbare jigging was new to both cricket and the landscape of Indian sport, and its introduction has generated no small amount of interest and enthusiasm (as any casual Google, Twitter or Flickr search will reveal). IPL grandees are well aware of the popularity of its mostly foreign, mostly white cheerleaders, organising reality TV shows and fan contests to further cash in on their appeal.

From the inception of the IPL, much of the opposition to cheerleading has come from conservative religious groups, who staged heated demonstrations in 2008 when the dancers first took to the IPL stage. Even this year, a rightwing group in the coastal state of Orissademanded that matches staged there should eschew cheerleaders altogether. While this species of angry conservative austerity may be getting noisier in India, its prudishness is familiar to us all. Social conservatism the world over shares a strange mix of sanctimony and prurience, the mingled terror of and obsession with the flesh.

I’m not offended by cheerleading, more bored by it. In any grown-up context, it offers a dispiriting definition of both leadership and cheer. Many cricket fans, including myself, would be happy to see the (metaphorical) back of these cheerleaders. Their twists and pumps add nothing to what is, in truth, a wonderful sporting spectacle. They are a reminder of the ocean of inanities that commercial modernity promises our lives, drowning all occasions in froth. First the fall from grace, then the flood.