Bashabi Fraser’s cultural highlights

Bashabi Fraser is a poet, children’s writer, translator, editor and academic. Her work traverses continents between Scotland and India. The recipient of a CBE (2021) for Education, Culture and Cultural Integration, she was declared Outstanding Woman of Scotland by the Saltire Society in 2015. Awards include an Indira Gandhi Gold Plaque (2024) and the Word Masala Foundation Award for Excellence in Poetry (2017). Bashabi is Professor Emerita of English and Creative Writing and is co-founder and Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University. She is Chief Editor of the academic and creative e-journal, Gitanjali and Beyond and has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee.

Dance Drama: Palash: Flame of the Forest

Staged at the Tom Fleming Centre for Performing Arts, Edinburgh in September 2024 as part of the Tagore-Geddes Festival, this dance drama held the audience spellbound. Its title, ‘Forests are our Future: By Leaves we Live’, was woven subtly into the verse narrative that sang of love being challenged by commercial greed and the destruction of the habitat of tribes and creatures. Patrick Geddes’ words and Rabindranath Tagore’s songs, a collaboration based on deep friendship between the Scottish town planner and Indian national poet, were incorporated seamlessly in a production which saw the narrator, dancers and musicians pour their souls into a hymn to the planet and a plea for its continuity. 

Theatre: Lament for Sheku Bayoh by Hannah Lavery

Hannah Lavery’s play was streamed live in November 2020 from the Lyceum stage in a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and Edinburgh International Festival. Lament for Sheku Bayoh made us confront uncomfortable truths about attitudes to race in Scotland. The cast of unnamed women repeated Sheku’s name, keeping him in the public memory. They asked questions as they recalled that fateful night when the 31-year-old black man did not come home after watching a boxing match. Apprehended by the police, he died within 90 minutes of being held down in police custody. The play reminds us that Sheku Bayoh lived among us, and that his life was taken from him as a result of institutional racism. 

Exhibition: Vibha Pankaj’s Amaranthine 

Past and present collide and intersect in Vibha Pankaj’s landscape paintings. The changing seasonal colours of her native Himalayas travel to permeate the Scottish hills where she walks today, and which she captures in her oil and mixed media experiments on canvas in the exhibition Amaranthine (an imagined, undying flower). Her work beckons with a magnetic, hypnotic power and suggestive evocation of the immortal plant – its magical invincibility embodying nature’s resilience, while affirming the themes of regeneration and renewal that underlie Pankaj’s work. Bold in her choice of colours, she portrays a world where trees dominate, streams sustain valleys, and in which birds cross human boundaries and bridges, connecting life in spite of distances created by time and space.

https://vibhaartist.com/about Courtesy of the artist

Concert: Mone Rekho by Soumik Datta

London-based British Indian sarod musician and composer, Soumik Datta, winner of the 2022 Aga Khan Music Award, shared the mesmerising power of this ancient Indian classical stringed instrument in Mone Rekho (‘remember’ in Bengali). The immersive performance was a dialogue between the musician and his audience at the Edinburgh International Festival. In the account of his musical journey, he recalled his training with his teacher, Buddhadev Das Gupta – rousing laughter at Bengali instructions like abar (again), baarbar (again and again), and even expressions of frustration like gadha (donkey) and chhagol (goat) – as part of the rigorous training from his guru. The experience was delivered with affectionate humour and deep respect for the oral gurukula, or teaching tradition between a teacher and disciple, going back five generations to Murad Ali Khan in the nineteenth century. Soumik had to remember his guru, for, as he suggested, if he didn’t, he might forget how to play on the command bajao – play it – a word he remembered from his sessions with Das Gupta.

Soumik Datta in Mone Rekho, 2024 Image: Courtesy of G5A Foundation for Contemporary Culture

Book: Broken Threads by Mishal Hussain 

Having written on the Indian Partition myself, I realised what I had been missing from reading Mishal Hussain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence (HarperCollins, 2024). The book tells the story of lives uprooted and rebuilt in the newly formed Pakistan, following the 14th of August 1947. The memoir, which gleans facts from diaries, letters, audio tapes and other archival material, as well as through conversations and interviews, weaves the stories of intertwined yet disparate lives through its intimate retelling of a family history. At the core of the narrative are the vicissitudes faced by Hussain’s four grandparents: Shahid and Tahirah, and Mumtaz and his Roman Catholic wife, Mary. All bear witness to those transformational times in the sub-continent’s history. The photographs of family members with friends, and sometimes historic figures, bring them alive. The book offers an even-handed perspective on the story of an India fragmented by tumultuous events which ruptured families and whole societies, for many of whom India remained the home country they could never return to.