in Italy
by Alessandro Vescovi (Le Lettere, Florence, 2011)
Alessandro tells me the words on the cover are taken from The Hungry Tide: “He hunted down facts in the way that a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories – of a kind.”
‘Occupy Art’ might be the name by which the Arte Povera movement would be known had it been launched in this decade instead of the 1960s. Despite the gap in time the analogies are striking. Arte Povera (which is often translated as ‘Poor’ or ‘Impoverished’ art) was born in Turin, where Fiat,
The Old Fiat Factory, Lingotto, Turin
Lancia, Lavazza and many other major Italian industrial enterprises are headquartered.
The cradle of Italian industry, the city nurtured plutocratic dynasties like the Agnellis, owners of Fiat, as well as activists and philosophers like Antonio Gramsci
and Friedrich Nietzsche,
who had a fine view to console him in his exile.
The Palazzo Carignano, now the National Museum of the Risorgimento, Turin
As with the Occupy movement, Arte Povera grew out of a circumstance of deepening contrast and confrontation – which makes it peculiarly apt that the city’s present-day showplace for Arte Povera
should be a grand,
but unfinished, 18th century edifice
- the Castello di Rivoli -
which is now a museum for contemporary art
(and also a spectacular vantage point for viewing the city and its surroundings).
An elegant 18th century room frames
Mario Merz’s ‘Time-Based Architecture – Time Debased Architecture’, 1981.
A work that brings vividly to mind the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti park, in 2011
and the shapes
Occupy San Francisco, October 2011
of its proliferating tents.
It is as if artists could look ahead
Occupy San Francisco, October 2011
from the past
into the present.
In the next room is
a haunting work by Jannis Kounellis (‘Untitled’, 2009).
Ranks of coats lie on the polished floor of this 18th century chamber, conjuring up the ghosts of downsized workers.
Or like Occupy protesters in Seattle,
trying to find a place to sleep on inhospitable streets.
Next door is a work by one of the most elusive and intriguing artists of the late 20th century, Alighiero Boetti. He participated in some of the earliest Arte Povera shows in the 1960s, but then turned in another direction. He traveled to Afghanistan in 1971 and started a hotel in Kabul (it was called the (1) One Hotel). While living in the hotel he created a series of embroidered maps with the help of Afghan craftsmen and -women – these were to become his most famous works.
This embroidered work, titled ‘Catasta’ (Pile) was also made in collaboration with Afghans.
Boetti’s travels are said to have been inspired by an ancestor of his, Giovanni Battista Boetti dei Predicatori who left Italy in 1763 and became a Dominican monk. Later, after traveling to Turkey he converted to Islam and became a Sufi, taking the name Shaikh Mansur. Alighiero Boetti was also to change his name to Ali Ghiero.
Boetti’s reputation is undergoing a revival now, with a major retrospective at the Tate. The show will travel to several other cities – but one place it will not visit
is the National Gallery of Art in Kabul.
But Boetti’s embroidered panel is not the only object to have traveled from afar to the Castello di Rivoli. A few steps away is another panel which came much earlier and from much farther away.
It is a piece of tilework from China, probably Guangzhou, but it looks completely at home affixed to the base of an 18th century column.
Then comes Pier Paolo Calzolari’s mysterious installation
of speaking lightbulbs (‘Untitled’, 1970-71)
which is followed by the Duchess of Aosta’s 18th century dressing room,
transformed by the artist Lothar Baumgartner, son of an anthropologist, into a work called ‘Yurupari’ (1984).
‘The artist began with pieces,’ says the sign, ‘that refer to the German anthropological practice, initiated by Goethe, to tell about a place without ever having seen it…Adopting this method Baumgartner exposes its absurd pretext of understanding and studying the ‘other.”‘
Perhaps the most powerful work of all is Guiseppe Penone’s ‘Breathing the Shadow’, 1999,
in which thousands of bay leaves are attached to the walls, contained by wire mesh.
The room is suffused with the scent of the leaves, which courses through the viewers’ bodies
and into their lungs.
This after all, is what Occupying is about: to remind us that there are more important things than streets and walls.
From Shernaz Italia, a curious tale of ‘connectedness’, taken from: ‘Stansberry’s Investment Advisory,’ November 2011. The article is titled ‘America’s Oil Boom’.
‘Robert Nobel (Sir Alfred Nobel of Dynamite fame & Nobel Prize founder!) surely knew about Zoroastrianism and its flaming temples before he arrived in Baku in 1876. As a wealthy, highly educated Russian it’s likely he read The Travels of Marco Polo. But whether or not he went to Baku specifically for oil, remains a matter of historical debate. His younger brother, Ludvig, had been placed in charge of the remnants of his father’s business – an arms and heavy equipment manufacturer that was best known for its mining operations. It was his younger brother who banished him from the relative luxury of St Petersburg to the wilds of Azerbaijan – reportedly in attempt to go in search of high quality walnut forests, not oil.
‘The dirt rich famous “Nobels Family” who migrated to Russia from Sweden had long been one of Russia’s most prosperous arms merchants … until their fortunes declined in the 1860s. First, Russia’s Czar stopped buying the firm’s legendary mines. Then the Czar cut back on steam engines, too. By the end of the decade, creditors had seized the firm and had sent Robert’s father back home to Sweden in shame.There, Ludvig was trying to revive his father’s company by manufacturing rifle stocks. And he needed more timber. This is the reason, according to most historical accounts, he ordered Robert to travel to Azerbaijan. But Robert Nobel didn’t find any trees…In fact, there’s almost no natural vegetation whatsoever in Baku. It’s extremely dry and windswept. The timber he found wasn’t alive any more. It had been lumbered for oil derricks. Hundreds of them. Robert Nobel claimed he “stumbled” onto perhaps the greatest oil boom in history, by accident … while shopping for timber Robert Nobel decided on the spot that derricks were better than living trees. He began buying leases on the spot. Over the next few years, the Nobel brothers invested heavily in Baku. In 1872, the oil boom took off when the Russian crown auctioned off the rights to hundreds of leases. Refineries built dozens of factories to transform the heavy crude into easier burning kerosene. Demand for which was insatiable. By 1880, the Nobel’s were the leading oil producers in Baku. And by 1900, just 20 years later, Baku was producing half of all the oil in the world.That may be the one of the reason Hitler was attracted to Russia – Oil.When big new resources like this are discovered, the resulting increases to production are often unimaginable. As production greatly increased, the difficulties of storing and transporting Baku’s oil became paramount. At first, refineries simply put the kerosene in wooden barrels and shipped it on barges across the Caspian and up the Volga River to markets in Russia. But this wasn’t as easy as it might seem. First of all the wooden barrels were expensive, there wasn’t any timber in Baku. Additionally, they leaked. That made the process difficult, dangerous and inefficient. Before production could be economically increased further, the challenges of distribution had to be tackled.’Ludvig Nobel became the “King of Baku” primarily because he figured out how to distribute oil – not because he discovered it. His solution? Pump it directly into the hull of a ship that was specially designed to navigate the Volga. Then, and this is an interesting historical fact, It took oil from Baku, across the Caspian and up the Volga, where it could be distributed across Russia. A fleet of such ships made Baku the world’s busiest port. The Oil Tanker ‘Zoroaster’ was launched in 1878.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Nobel
http://nobelsustainability.org/history
http://zoroastrians.net/2012/04/01/oil-tanker-zoroaster/
[The photographs in this post were taken by Krunal Palande: he sent them to me after I replied to this letter. The photographs are posted here with Krunal's permission.]
I hope I have kept you engaged in this letter so far, and if I successfully have, then let me quickly ask you a question. Why is it that you have never written a book with a single protagonist? It’s not that I don’t like them, in fact I love them, and it gives them this epic feel, but I’m just curious to know the reason why you refrain from using a single protagonist.
I would not agree if you reply saying The Circle of Reason or The Shadow Lines had single protagonists. Of course the stories revolved around the characters of Alu and the Narrator in The Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines respectively but they certainly weren’t the only protagonists, for that matter even Bahram Modi wasn’t the only protagonist in River of Smoke.
On the cover of the New York Times Magazine this weekend was a question, printed in large type: ‘Are the Rich Worth a Damn?’
What does ‘damn’ mean here? The question is clearly not about which circle of hell the rich should be sent to (that would be a bridge too far for the NYT): it’s more a way of asking: ‘what are the rich worth?’ and it invokes familiar English usages like: ‘I don’t care a twopenny damn.’
This oath has an interesting history: it is said to have been invented by the Duke of Wellington, aka Arthur Wellesley. And what did the Duke mean when he used the phrase ‘twopenny damn’? Surely he could not have meant ‘twopenny curse’ (as the word’s dictionary meaning would imply)? That would contradict the sense of what the Duke was trying to say: for to curse is to care deeply, while he was obviously trying to say that he cared less than he would for something worth a trivial sum, like two pennies. Or, for that matter, a fig – ‘I don’t care a fig’ was also a common expression once (imagine this on the cover of the NYT magazine: ‘Are the Rich Worth a Fig?’).
What then was thing, worth less than a fig, that the Duke was referring to?
As a young man Arthur Wellesley spent many years in India and was well-versed in military Hindustani. At the siege of Srirangapatnam, in the thick of battle he dashed off a note: ‘when you get possession of the nullah you have the tope.’¶ Wellesley would certainly have been familiar with an Indian coin called the daam. Introduced by Sher Shah Suri in the 16th century, its value was negligible – it was perhaps comparable to today’s paisa which is worth about 1/5000th of a US dollar. It probably looked something like this§:
1803 was the year Maj.-Gen. Arthur Wellesley defeated a Maratha alliance at Assaye: he would later describe this as his greatest accomplishment. 1803 was also the year in which an article in one of Calcutta’s English journals said: ‘This word [daam] was perhaps in use even among our forefathers and may innocently account for the expression ‘not worth a fig’, or a dam, especially if we recollect that ba-dam, an almond, is to-day current in some parts of India as small money.’
Another low-value coin was the damri. Burnett and Yule, in their dictionary, Hobson-Jobson (from which the above example is also taken) write: ‘Damri is a common enough expression for the infinitesimal in coin, and one has often heard a Briton in India say: “No, I won’t give a dumree!” with but a vague notion what a damri meant, as in Scotland we have heard, “I won’t give a plack,” though certainly the speaker could not have stated the value of that ancient coin. And this leads to the suggestion that a like expression, often heard from coarse talkers in England as well as in India, originated in the latter country, and that whatever profanity there may be in the animus, there is none in the etymology, when such an one blurts out “I don’t care a dam!” i.e. in other words, “I don’t care a brass farthing!”’
Or, as people might say in India (in many languages): ‘I don’t care two-pice!’ Could this have been at the back of the Iron Duke’s mind when he coined his famous expression?
Common sense suggests that the original reference was to a very small unit of currency rather than to hellfire. But of course in Hindi and Urdu ‘daam’ is also the word most commonly used to mean ‘price’. This suggests the intriguing possibility that the New York Times may unwittingly have posed a different question: ‘Are the Rich Worth Their Daam?’ To ask whether the rich are worth their price is not the same as asking what they are worth.
Britain’s wars in India left a trail of tiny booby-traps in the English language. Something similar could be happening in today’s Iraq.
_________________________
¶ Weller, Jac: Wellington in India, Greenhill Books, London, 1993, p. 63.
§ Gupta, Parmeshwari Lal: Coins, National Book Trust, New Delhi 2006, pl. XXVI.
From Singapore Chitra Sankaran writes: ‘I wanted to let you know that the edited volume on your novels entitled History, Narrative and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction is finally out by SUNY Press. Please scroll down to see it featured in SUNY Spring collection. The initial responses to the volume have all been most positive. I am keeping my fingers crossed.’
Here is the Table of Contents:
Introduction: Beyond Borders and Boundaries
Chitra Sankaran
1. Diasporic Predicaments: An Interview with Amitav Ghosh
Chitra Sankaran
2. Unlikely Encounters: Fiction and Scientific Discourse in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh
Lou Ratté
3. The Glass Palace: Reconnecting Two Diasporas
Nandini Bhautoo-Dewnarain
4. Resignifying “Coolie”: Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace
Shanthini Pillai
5. The Girmitiyas’ Journey in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies
Rajesh Rai and Andrea Marion Pinkney
6. Shadows and Mysteries: Illusions of Imagined Communities in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines
Crystal Taylor
7. Amitav Ghosh’s “Imagined Communities”: The Hungry Tide as a Possible “Other” World
Federica Zullo
8. Sharing Landscapes and Mindscapes: Ethics and Aesthetics in Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome
Chitra Sankaran
9. Language and Ethics in The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
Tuomas Huttunen
10. Ghosh, Language, and The Hungry Tide
Ismail S. Talib
11. Intertexuality in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
Shao-Pin Luo
12. “Dwelling in Travel”: In An Antique Land and the Making of a Resisting Post-Colonial History
Tammy Vernerey
13. The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery—A Tour de Force Transcending Genres
Ruby S. Ramraj
14. Inner Circles and the Voice of the Shuttle: Native Forms and Narrative Structure in Amitav Ghosh’s The Circle of Reason
Robbie B. H. Goh
Chitra adds: ‘In between my academic endeavours I managed to write a murder mystery novel set in Singapore and Tamil Nadu, India. It has been published by New Dawn Publishers, a UK firm that has been recently set up by a group of Creative Writing graduates from London. The book is being street launched this month. It is entitled Void of Reason. If you are in the mood to read a mystery novel by an Asian, please do pick it up, or alternatively, I could send you a copy.’
Evidently Void of Reason is flying off the shelves: it is already out of stock on Amazon!
My post on Goa’s Japanese slaves has elicited some interesting responses.
From Lucano Alvares, now in Merida, Mexico: ‘This is most fascinating, even more so because of its absolute plausibility and the fact that so few people have acknowledged it. ‘
From the Goan historian Fatima Gracias (author of Cozinha da Goa: History and Tradition of Goan Food): ‘Goa had slaves from various countries and places —-Japanese, Chinese, Arabs, African, Bengalis and so on . Right now I’m reading a manuscript of a forthcoming book which has a chapter with fascinating and detailed information on slavery in Goa.. Slavery ended in Goa in the 19th century.’
From the Goan writer Vivek Menezes, now in Srinagar: ‘Thanks very much for sharing your incredibly interesting post about
Japanese slaves. Though aware of the early Japan-Goa connection, I had no idea at all about these slaves. When I get back, will certainly
look for more. One other interesting connection that comes to mind is that Occidental medicine reached Japan first via Goa! The first western-style doctors in that country were sent from Goa Medical College! In addition, you probably know that Francis Xavier is patron saint of Japan, that ‘pao’ is a Luso loanword not just in Konkani and Marathi but also Japanese, and that tempura also has Luso (and Indian?) roots (is it not just a Japanese bhajjia?!).’
From Cecil Pinto, a link to a fascinating article by the eminent historian, Dr. Teotonio de Souza: Manumission of Slaves in Goa 1682-1760 as Found in Codex 860. Dr. de Souza shows that there were many Bengalis, and possibly Odiya, slaves in Goa in the 17th and 18th centuries: “The presence of Bengali slaves and eunuchs in Goa is mentioned in thecontemporary Jesuit records, and also in the manuscript we are presenting here. In her recent research on Bengal, Rila Mukherjee (2006) has studied the Portuguese joining hands with the Arakanese in large scale slaving as a way of making up for their losing political control in the region in the early 17 th century. This provoked the anger of ShahJahan in 1632 and resulted in the take over of Hughly.”
The article includes an interesting aside: ‘A barber resident in S. Lourenço (Agaçaim) accepted a Bengali boy as free and promised to teach him to be a barber within two years.’
Dr. de Souza’s article was presented at a conference entitled: ‘The African Diaspora in Asia: Explorations on a Less Known Fact. The conference was held in Panaji, Goa, in January 2006, and the papers have been published in a collection edited by Kiran Kamal Prasad and Jean-Pierre Angenot.
On the comments page, Veeresh Malik has posted a link to an interesting article on a Japanese slave in South Africa. There is a peculiar serendipity to this because last week, at Duke University, I had a discussion about a similar subject with Rita Barnard, a South African literary critic. She remembered a farmstead near Cape Town that was named after someone called ‘Van Bengal’, and was said to have belonged to a freed slave.
From Dani Botsman: ‘I am so glad that you found the Nelson article of interest. I enjoyed the comments on your blog immensely, of course. That a large number of the”Japanese” slaves sold by the Portuguese were, in fact, probably Koreans captured by the armies of the Japanese Christian lords who led the invasion attempts of the 1590s adds yet another layer of fascination to it all too I think! Certainly it is interesting to think about the kinds of relationships that might have formed between the different groups of men and women trapped together on those ships from Nagasaki to Goa (not unlike your utterly compelling depictions of the Ibis perhaps?)’
Dani has recently published an article called ‘Freedom without Slavery? “Coolies,” Prostitutes, and Outcastes in Meiji Japan’s “Emancipation Moment”.’
This is how it begins: ‘In his acclaimed work Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, sociologist Orlando Patterson argues that “the Western world” has come to embrace freedom as its “supreme value” as the result of a particular relationship to the history of slavery, which began in antiquity and evolved throughout the Middle Ages. In the “non- West,” on the other hand, Patterson tells us that freedom was “stillborn,” unable to develop and grow because, in the absence of this uniquely Western constellation of ideas about slavery, it was associated primarily with the unbridled power of a ruler (an Oriental despot), protection from whom required “not personal freedom or freedoms but submission to controlled, countervailing authority, the tight protective bondage of the kin-based group.” In all, Patterson devotes just twenty-four pages (out of a total of more than four hundred) to his explanation of the failure of freedom in the non-West, in effect presenting us with little more than the familiar Orientalist binary of a West in which individual freedoms are paramount and a non-West in which the individual remains subservient to the group.’
Dani proceeds to show up the weaknesses in Patterson’s argument through examples of 19th century Japanese court judgements on various instances of slave- and coolie-trading by Westerners. One of these concerns a vessel called the ‘Maria Luz’: ‘A 370-ton barque that had set out from Macao, on the South China coast, at the end of May 1872 to make the long journey back across the Pacific to its home port of Callao, Peru. After a month at sea, the ship was caught in a severe storm, and in early July it limped into the port of Yokohama, where the captain, Ricardo Hereira, requested permission to weigh anchor while the crew made repairs.’
In a recent email Dani writes: ‘One thing I did not end up mentioning about the Maria Luz for reasons of space was that it too seems to have been sailed by a crew made up mainly of “lascars”—so, a Peruvian ship, with an Indian crew, carrying a “cargo” of Chinese laborers from Portuguese-controlled Macao, and it ends up becoming the focus of a trial about slavery in Yokohama, Japan, the final outcome of which was decided by the Russian Tsar! Yet another reminder, I suppose, of the limits of “national” history!’
And in regard to Vivek’s suggestion about the Goan roots of Japanese tempura, Dani writes: ‘With regard to the Tempura question, it would actually make good sense for it to have come from Goa– the Japanese always say it was introduced by the Portuguese in the 16th century, but that does not mean it came from Portugal.’ [I think this deserves a thesis.]
Finally, Pamela de Mello, Associate Editor of the Herald, one of Goa’s leading dailies, wrote a couple of days ago asking if she could print the post in the paper’s edit page. My answer: Yes.
John-Paul Ghobrial, is a Cambridge historian who is working on the life of Elias of Babylon, a 17th century Christian traveler from Mesopotamia. He describes his project as ‘a microhistory about the first Ottoman traveller to South America, ca. 1670′ [see my blog post of March 22, 2012].
John-Paul has been following Elias’s footsteps around Spain for the last few weeks, and he recently sent an update:
Dear Amitav,
I’m just back from a month of archive-hopping in Spain. The good news is that I managed to track down several of my needles in a haystack, in the form of more Eastern Christians in the Americas. More importantly, I figured out that Elias spent the end of his life in a coastal town near Cadiz and. . . . I found a notary register FULL of documents about him. As for the bad news, well. . . see attached.
You will understand what I mean when I tell you I used good old fashioned geniza techniques to figure out what letters I was looking at in an attempt to decipher partial words.
Heart-breaking in many ways but it all adds to the story, I guess.
I met Daniel Botsman recently in New Haven, Connecticut. An Australian by origin, he is a scholar of Japanese history and teaches at Yale. When he heard of my connection with Goa he asked if I was aware that Goa’s population had once included a fair number of Japanese.
I suppose I should no longer be surprised by the ‘connectedness’ of the world, but I confess that I was astonished to hear this. Cosmopolitan as Goa is, I have seen no signs of a Japanese presence there.
But of course Dani was not referring to the Goa of today. He explained that in the 16th century there had been a flourishing transcontinental traffic in Japanese slaves. The Portuguese had taken many slaves from Japan to Portugal, and since Goa was then the capital of the Portuguese empire in Asia, a good number had ended up in Goa.
Shortly afterwards he sent me an article on the subject, by Thomas Nelson: it is called ‘Slavery in Medieval Japan’ (Monumenta Nipponica, vol 59, No. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 463-492). Here are a few passages from the article.
“Portuguese and other Occidental sources are replete with records of the export of Japanese slaves in the second half of the sixteenth century. A few examples should serve to illustrate this point. Very probably, the first Japanese who set foot in Europe were slaves. As early as 1555, complaints were made by the Church that Portuguese merchants were taking Japanese slave girls with them back to Portugal and living with them there in sin. By 1571, the trade was being conducted on such a scale that King Sebastian of Portugal felt obliged to issue an order prohibiting it lest it hinder Catholic missionary activity in Kyushsu.
‘Political disunity in Japan, however, together with the difficulty that the Portuguese Crown faced in enforcing its will in the distant Indies, the ready availability of human merchandise, and the profits to be made from the trade meant that the chances were negligible of such a ban actually being enforced. In 1603 and 1605, the citizens of Goa protested against the law, claiming that it was wrong to ban the traffic in slaves who had been legally bought. Eventually, in 1605, King Philip of Spain and Portugal issued a document that was a masterpiece of obfuscation intended both to pacify his critics in Goa demanding the right to take Japanese slaves and the Jesuits, who insisted that the practice be banned.
‘”I have been informed of a number of abuses and injustices concerning the taking and captivity of people from Japan. My late cousin King Sebastian ordered in 1570 that this be prohibited. I ordered that the said decree should be published and obeyed in those regions. I have no been told that it has been claimed that this edict should be extended to slaves who are legally and properly held. This has created many problems in addition to the damages incurred by the inhabitants of the Estate [of India] as well as the problems in that are likely to arise if they are set free. It was not my intention, nor would it have been the wish of the King Sebastian, to prevent Japanese being held as slaves when there are just and lawful titles and in those cases in which the law permits it to be done, as with the people of other nations. In order to prevent other problems that have been reported to me by the cities of Goa and Cochin, I have enacted the accompanying provision, which you will order to be published so that it will come to the notice of everyone; you will see this is obeyed, taking care that all the abuses presently existing and that hitherto have existed in this matter be prevented, and that the said slaves have the right to seek justice if they claim their captivity is illegal and lacks legitimate title”‘[p. 463-464]
The Jesuits realized that the Portuguese participation in the slave trade was endangering their missionary efforts in Japan (to add further to the ‘connectedness’ of the story, one of the most prominent Catholic missionaries in Japan was an East Indian from Vasai/Bassein, near Mumbai: St. Gonsalo Garcia, who was crucified near Nagasaki in 1597). The Jesuits’ fears, writes Thomas Nelson ‘were confirmed when Hideyoshi, the great unifier of Japan after a century of civil strife, arrived in Kyushu. He shared the disgust of many of his countrymen at the custom, common in Kyushu, of selling Japanese slaves to foreigners, and he questioned the Jesuits sharply on this practice. On 24 July 1587, he sent the following letter to the Jesuit Vice-Provincial Gaspar Coelho, preserved in Luis Frois’s Historia de Japam:
‘”It has come to our attention that Portuguese, Siamese, and Cambodians who come to our shores to trade are buying many people, taking them captive to their kingdoms, ripping Japanese away from their homeland, families, children and friends. This is insufferable. Thus, would the Padre ensure that all those Japanese who have up until now been sold in India and other distant places be returned again to Japan. If this is not possible, because they are far away in remote kingdoms, then at least have the Portuguese set free the people whom they have bought recently. I will provide the money necessary to do this.”‘ [p. 465]
The article is fascinating but leaves many questions. What became of Goa’s Japanese slaves? Some of them must have had children and if so, what was their fate? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to know more.
Karina Corrigan is the principal curator for ‘Asian Export Art’ at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
This is the genre of art that was produced in the major ports of Asia in 18th and 19th centuries – cities such as Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and most notably Canton (Guangzhou).
One of the greatest pleasures of embarking on the Ibis Trilogy was that of being drawn into the exuberantly improvisatory, wildly interfused, kedgeree-and-achar, can-do ethos of the world that produced this genre of art. I have come to love its startlingly innovative creations and the unusual characters who populate it.
I have long known that the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts
possesses what is probably the world’s finest collection of works of this genre, but for one reason or another I wasn’t able to visit the museum until a couple of weeks ago, when I had the immense good fortune of being shown around the collection by Karina herself, and her colleague Susan Bean, who is the Curator of South Asian and Korean Art at the Museum.
I will be writing at greater length about the Museum when time permits, but suffice it to say for now that my viewing of the Museum’s treasures was enormously enriched by Karina and Susan’s erudition and intimate familiarity with the collection.
In the course of the tour I discovered that Karina also supports a voluntary group in Chennai that works on issues of public health and education. Recently she sent me this message:
Do you know anyone interested in a working holiday in India?
This is a great opportunity with Nalamdana, the public health communication non-profit based in Chennai, India with which I am affiliated.
Since 1993, this creative collaboration has created street plays on a variety of health issues, and Nalamdana has reached more than half a million people through street theatre, and many more through other media like tele-dramas, interactive media and print. Nalamdana’s performances are targeted at a semi-literate and illiterate audience in rural and urban Tamil Nadu. They are now launching a radio program with which to reach an even wider audience, so it’s an exciting time to be involved with this dynamic organization.
Would you share this with individuals and/or the universities with which you are connected (or let me know which offices at those institutions to direct this info)?
Here is a link to the page on Nalamdana’s website that has specific information about the working holiday program.