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The music scene in China is currently undergoing a much needed revival and it’s being stemmed from the capital and cultural heart of the nation, Beijing. Deep inside the city’s university district there is an establishment which is at the forefront of this revival, an venue which is fundamentally changing the way Chinese youth are thinking.

The lyrics being sung from within its walls are a far shot from the cultural conformity which people have come to expect from the largely government-controlled Chinese music industry. For the youth in Beijing, indie rock club D-22 provides refuge from the monotonous sounds of mando and cantopop, which have dominated the party-controlled radio waves in recent times. The bands gracing the stage of D-22 have certainly struck a chord with China’s youth who are more than open to hearing fresh sounds.

One of these bands is P.K. 14, whose front man, Yang Haisong, also runs the independent label Maybe Mars Records with Peking University professor Michael Pettis, known locally as the “Godfather of Beijing Rock.” The label has been instrumental in nurturing the Beijing indie-rock scene, which over the past five years has undergone a major transformation from a somewhat nascent scene to one of the most developed and promising in all of Asia.

Pettis is no stranger to the world of underground rock. During the 1980s, in New York’s East Village he ran the indie-rock club SIN, which played host to a number of groundbreaking bands including Sonic Youth and Swans. From there he moved into the world of investment banking and worked the markets for 14 years in New York before sensing the need for a change of scene. After a trip to Beijing Pettis felt that it was the place to be. Having secured a position as a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management he made the move. Now Pettis finds himself shaping the indie-rock scene with D-22 alongside his professorship just as he did some twenty years ago, albeit in unfamiliar territory. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Kozhikode (Calicut)—A specter is haunting India’s state of Kerala, a supposedly new and secret Islamic weapon known as “love jihad.” Namely, the idea that young Muslim men court impressionable Hindu and Christian women to capture their souls as well as their bodies. In the Malabar region, where the majority of Kerala’s most venerable Muslim community lives, it is whispered that as many as 4,000 women have already succumbed. Can it be? Will seduction threaten the communal peace in this tolerant multicultural state?

By chance, we arrived in Kozikode on the day riot police dispersed hundreds of demonstrators belonging to the activist group Hindu Aika Vedi (HAV) as they marched within a hundred meters of an Islamic social center. It was actually a “conversion center,” the protestors insisted. In reponse, a large crowd led by the Sunni Students Federation (SKSSF) gathered to protect the threatened social center.

In the end, it all ended peacefully, if not amicably. City authorities invoked a law banning provocative assemblies, a riot was averted, and the crowd dispersed. A newspaper account was careful to state that during the agitation, Hindu leaders of HAV escorted a pregnant Muslim woman in a jeep to the local women’s hospital.

It also happened that we were that day meeting two highly respected Muslim leaders: a Congress Party veteran, T. Sadarikkoya, who as a youngster took part in Gandhi’s “Quit India” campaign in 1943; and Prof. M. N. Karassery of Calicut University, a leading authority on Kerala’s Malayalam language and a widely read columnist.

Both agreed that yes, there were communal problems. Fundamentalists have been proselytizing, and its effects are evident in the prevalence of hijabs worn by a growing minority of Muslim women. But Malabar had its distinct civil culture. Whereas Muslims in India’s northern provinces arrived as conquerors, their brothers arrived in Malabar some 450 years ago as traders. With rare exceptions, they have lived in peace alongside Hindus and Christians. Another unifying factor, Professor Karassery stressed, is that while a common language, Urdu, unites northern Indian and Pakistani Muslims, the Malabar Muslims share the same language, Malayalam, with Hindus and Christians. Thus during the bloody exchange of populations that occurred when India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947 there were no riots in Kerala, and few Muslims migrated northward. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Kannur—Cricket in India is not just a pastime, it is a passion. This was confirmed afresh as we arrived today in Kannur, a seaside city on the northern coast of Kerala. The topic dominating the national headlines, prime time news, and everybody’s tongue was a tempest prompted by a seemingly innocuous statement uttered by Indian cricket’s reigning divinity, Sachin Tendulkar. Here is what he said a week ago: “Mumbai belongs to all India. That is how I look at it. And I am a Maharashtra, and I am extremely proud of it, but I am an Indian first.”

If that does not sound like a verbal bombshell, one needs first to know (1) that Sachin’s status within India is like that of Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, and Peyton Manning rolled into one; (2) that Maharashtras are a people defined by their language, Marathi, widely spoken in Mumbai (called Bombay throughout the British Raj but changed in 1995 by linguistic nationalists in the Shiv Sena Party led by a communal supremo named Bal Thackeray); and (3) that the entire furor erupted after an incoming member of the Mumbai assembly took his oath in Hindi rather than Marathi only to be beaten up by Raj Thackeray’s (Bal’s nephew and president of pro-Maharashtra MNS Party) language police.

This happened as all India was celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Sachin’ teenage debut as a megastar batsman. Hence the resonance of his remarks on Mumbai belonging to all India, a comment that Bal Thackeray instantly denounced as breaking his Marathi heart and insulting all true Maharashtras, “who will never accept such language.”

Still, if the initial headlines raised doubts about the sobriety of the world’s most populous democracy, the near-unanimous response dispelled them. In neighboring Gujarat, student demonstrators burnt an effigy of the Shiv Sena Party leader for “insulting” the “maestro.” India’s brace of outstanding English-language dailies joined in ridiculing Bal Thackeray: editorials noted that his real motive was to make Marathi the sole language permissible in local public service tests. Most revealing were the remarks of fellow Hindu nationalists, who prudently distanced themselves from Bal’s diktat, and the blizzard of press comments and letters to the editor, as in this sample:

• “For a Keralite, the tussle between the ‘icon’ and the ‘supremo’ as well as the gush of Marathi sentiments seem absurd. A term like ‘Kerala for Keralites’ cannot be imagined.” M. D. G. Prasad (Indian Express)
• “My father had said in 1966, ‘With Maharashtra for Maharashtrians and Kashmir for Kashmiris, where is India for Indians?” Shashi Tharoor, Minister of State for External Affairs and Congress MP for Kerala (Indian Express)
• “The words used by the Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray—asking Sachin to stick to cricket and dare not tread into the realm of politics—express his skewed mindset. It is time the state marginalized such voices, thereby preserving the fabric of unity in diversity.” V. Chandrasekar (The Hindu)
• “No civilized society can put up with the kind of behavior exhibited by Bal Thackeray and his ilk. They attack students who attend recruitment examinations, bully a legislator for taking the oath in the national language and what not. The Shiv Sena leader has now taken on an Indian icon. It is time leaders promoting divisive forces were told in no uncertain terms that India is one country.” P. A. Shakeel Mohammed (The Hindu)

Obviously, in this test match, the better batsman has (at least for now) prevailed.

VIDEO: Sachin Tendulkar Innings vs Pakistan part 1

Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac are authors of twelve books and many articles. Their most recent book, Kingmakers, completes their trilogy on the theme of empire. Meyer is editor-at-large at World Policy Journal.

This article was originally published by Untold Stories: Dispatches from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Mumbai—We arrived on Wednesday, Nov. 11, in Mumbai, formerly Bombay and India’s financial capital, on the Asian leg of Project Patchwork, our year-long quest for examples of multicultural societies where people of different creeds seemingly live together peacefully. Why Mumbai? One may well ask: a year ago, ten young Pakistani gunmen glided unseen into this great port and in a three-day rampage slaughtered at least 170 Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, purportedly in the name of Islam. And we arrived on the eve of the first anniversary of the November 26-29 bloodbath.

Yet we quickly learned that there is little new Hindu-Muslim tension. “Most people see the killings as an act of foreign aggression,” we were told by Naresh Fernandes, editor-in-chief of Time Out Mumbai and editorial board member of World Policy Journal. “Things have been calm locally during the last four or five years, and the real dispute nowadays is about linguistic nativism.” He was referring to a bizarre controversy over the politically and legally correct language to be used by an elected lawmaker in taking his or her oath of office.