Category Archives: Arts

Bringing staff, students and internationally acclaimed artists together to celebrate Diwali

The event, hosted by Birkbeck School of Science in collaboration with local Indian community Adda, attracted students and staff eager to celebrate Diwali and learn more about the folk culture and rural artistry of Bengal.  

Group picture with Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo (School of Arts); visiting artists Prasenjit Bhattacharjee, Esha Chakravarty, Babu Fakir, Subho Karmakar; and Professor Sanjib Bhakta

As part of this year’s celebration of Diwali, Birkbeck was delighted to support an international community-based project between the Government of West Bengal, India and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The project, called Rural Craft and Cultural Hubs (RCCH), is a collaboration between the Government of West Bengal, UNESCO and selected ambassadors to promote folk culture and rural artistry of Bengal. 

Three internationally acclaimed artists, Subho Karmakar, Babu Fakir and Saurav Moni, attended Birkbeck’s 2022 Diwali on Campus event on Monday, 24 October, performing and exhibiting a selection of arts and crafts to Birkbeck students and staff.  

Professor Sanjib Bhakta, based at Birkbeck’s School of Science, and ambassador for the project was one of the event’s organisers. He explained: “Diwali follows the epic story of ancient India, ‘Ramayana’, to represent the victory of good over evil and light over darkness. The symbolism of Diwali is appropriately summarised in the simple act of lighting a lamp or ‘diya’. This is said to ward off evil and welcome the Goddess Lakshmi (the Hindu Goddess of wealth and prosperity) into the house. The positive vibe that comes with the Diwali festival continues to be highly needed in the current challenging environment around the world.” 

An example of the traditional bites served during the event

Brought up in West Bengal, Professor Bhakta was excited to welcome the artists to the event and share with students and fellow staff more of his culture.  The artists played Baul music of Bengal and wore traditional clothing. The Baul are a group of mystics from the Bengal region who mix elements of Sufism and Vaishnavism. Considered to be both a religious sect and a musical tradition, Bauls are a very diverse group with many sub-sects but their membership mainly consists of Vaishnava Hindus and Sufi Muslims. They are often identified by their distinctive clothes and musical instruments, which the artists at the Diwali event also wore.  

The event was well attended, and some Indian students dressed in traditional clothing for the occasion. To reflect the importance of food in Indian culture, and particularly during Diwali celebrations, traditional sweet bites, fresh fruit and drinks were served alongside the entertainment.  

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“Because of Birkbeck I’m living my dream as a writer”

Tasneem Abdur-Rashid has just graduated from MA Creative Writing and is now pursuing her dream of becoming a writer, having just landed a book deal. This is her story. 

Tasneem Abdur-Rashid

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life 

I took the decision to quit my full-time job and go self-employed after finishing my degree at Birkbeck and securing a two-book publishing deal. My days are now filled with writing, reading and going to fancy coffee shops. It’s amazing!  

I started the Master’s degree 16 years after my undergraduate degree 

My first degree was in Writing and Media Studies at Middlesex University. Even after graduating back then I knew I wanted to do a Master’s in Creative Writing, but the timing wasn’t quite right because I chose to move to Dubai in my twenties. I lived there for 7 years, working for magazines and government in communications. I met my husband in Dubai and we returned to the UK to have children. After my second child was born, I had that niggling feeling in the back of my mind – I knew I still wanted to pursue my childhood dream of being an author. That’s when I applied for a scholarship from the Aziz Foundation to help fund my studies at Birkbeck; which I was thrilled to be awarded. 

Life was incredibly hectic  

I balanced studying part-time at Birkbeck with a full-time job in Communications at Barnardo’s and raising my two children, now aged 7 and 5. I also live an hour and a half away from Birkbeck in Essex, so I worked in Barnardo’s head office in Bloomsbury on the same days I had in-person lectures. 

Rejection after rejection 

I had written my book before starting at Birkbeck, but I was growing increasingly frustrated because I kept being turned down by literary agents and couldn’t work out why. When I reached out to my Birkbeck tutor for advice, she said I needed to reduce the word count by nearly half so we reduced it by 60,000 words, cutting down subplots and characters. I pitched it again to agents and secured a two-book publishing deal straight away!  

Tasneem Abdur-Rashid with her mother and sister

At school, I was the kid who bunked off school to go to the local library 

I had three library cards, and even that wasn’t enough! I was a real bookworm and read a huge number of books growing up. What struck me was that none of the book characters were ever like me. As a Bengali woman born and raised in London, I couldn’t relate to anyone in young adult books, because my life was so different. 

My book is the book I wish I had when I was a young girl growing up 

Representation matters, and I want people like me to pick up my book and find characters they can relate to. My debut rom-com, Finding Mr Perfectly Fine, is being published this summer. It is about a 29-year-old Bengali, Muslim woman from London, trying to find a husband because of parental pressure to be married by 30. The inspiration for the main character comes from a mixture of people I know, but I think the story transcends culture because finding a partner is a universal challenge. 

Birkbeck is special because everyone is there to make it count 

It’s a close-knit community, filled with ambitious people. Regular creative writing workshops, where students submitted pieces of work that was critiqued by everyone else, were life-changing. I received so much support and praise for my work, which is when I realised that I could make a career out of writing. We continue to meet every couple of months as a group to share our work and successes, which is so valuable.  

If I had to describe Birkbeck in three words, I would say it is supportive, empowering, and flexible. I would encourage anyone considering studying at Birkbeck to go for it, it might change your life, like it has mine. 

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New toolkit and board game to strengthen Indigenous culture and language

A new Teaching and Learning Toolkit was recently launched, based on Kew Gardens’ Richard Spruce collections from the Rio Negro Indigenous Territory in Northwest Amazonia, one of the outputs of Professor Luciana Martins’ research project ‘Digital Repatriation of Biocultural Collections’.  Here, she shares details of the event and its importance for Indigenous communities.

pic of toolkit and boardgame

  • Can you share details of the event and who it was aimed at.

The event was the launch of the teaching and learning toolkit, composed of a book, A Maloca entre Artefatos e Plantas: Guia da Coleção Rio Negro in Londres (São Paulo: ISA – Instituto Socioambiental, 2021) and board game, A’pe Buese – Aprender Brincando (São Paulo: Instituto Socioambiental, 2021); with illustrations by the artist Lindsay Sekulowicz.

The launch coincided with the meeting of knowledgeable elders at the São Pedro community in the upper Tiquié river in the Northwest Amazon on the occasion of the inauguration of their longhouse (maloca), the centre of their cultural life; and was attended mainly by teachers at the Indigenous schools from the neighbouring communities, with the participation of the Indigenous researchers who visited the European collections.

Attendees at toolkit launch

  • What was the rationale for the teaching and learning toolkit?

This project, funded by British Academy Knowledge Frontiers and Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF QR), forms part of a UK-Brazil research programme that aims to reanimate the objects collected by nineteenth-century botanist Richard Spruce in Amazonia (currently housed at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the British Museum), linking them with the knowledge of Indigenous peoples (partners in Europe include Birkbeck, RBG Kew, the British Museum and Berlin Ethnological Museum; in Brazil: Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro, the Socioenvironmental Institute-ISA and the Federation of the Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro -FOIRN).

The teaching and learning toolkit, associated with these collections, was co-produced with Dagoberto Lima Azevedo, a Tukano Indigenous researcher and translator. It includes a guide for the collections, with scientific and indigenous information about a selection of artefacts, including a broader historical overview of the Upper Rio Negro region in the nineteenth century, European collectors and their collections, and a lesson plan; and an innovative board game that asks players to combine plants and animals used for creating particular artefacts, going through a path by the different habitats where these raw materials are found.

launch of toolkit

  • How do you envisage it being used?

Targeted principally at secondary-level Indigenous schoolchildren, the toolkit aims to enable pupils to have fun while learning about their biocultural heritage kept in European museums. We aim to ensure that the knowledge and skills associated with traditional craftsmanship are passed on to future generations so that crafts can continue to be produced within their communities, providing livelihoods to their makers and reflecting creativity.

  • How does this directly link to the original research?

In the concluding session of a project research workshop at Kew in June 2019, Indigenous researchers highlighted the need to produce, in addition to a proposed project website, printed pedagogic materials to be used in community schools in remote regions, where WiFi and electricity are scarce and unreliable. Responding directly to this identified need, the project plan was revised to include the production of this teaching and learning toolkit based on the biocultural collections. The production of this toolkit in Portuguese, with all the main terms translated into Ye’pamahsã (Tukano) language, fits within the larger context of current linguistic projects in Northwest Amazonia, which aim to strengthen and enhance Indigenous languages.

The online guide is available here and it is hoped that the project website will be launched by the end of November 2021.

Further details of the research can be found here.

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Life as an Indian scholar in London

MA Journalism student Vimal found studying in London a totally immersive experience, so much so he wrote a book about it. Here, he uncovers his own story and shares perspectives on the differences between the media in the UK and India, with a personal take on the COVID-19 pandemic news coverage. This is his #BBKStory.

Vimal Chander Joshi

In 2020, Vimal published his first book though he refutes any notion of being the main character in the story: “I am not Ajay but our experiences are closely linked and all the places Ajay visits are places I’ve either visited or lived in.”

Gentlemen: Stories from London tells the story of Ajay Vashishth, a young man from Delhi who comes to London and lodges in different parts of London including Bexleyheath, Ilford, Southall and Golders Green. Even with the exclusion of the Bloomsbury location, where Vimal would have spent much of his time while studying at Birkbeck, you’d be forgiven for assuming he and Ajay are one and the same.

However, Vimal insists not and divulges the details of his own upbringing, sharing aspects of life within a middle-class family, having a lawyer for a father and a grandfather hailing from Punjab, with family members keen for him to follow a ‘conventional career path’ in either law or medicine. With gentle resistance and with more creative inclinations, he pursued his undergraduate studies in commerce at the University of Delhi then decided on journalism at postgraduate level.

In 2019, his academic transition took him to Birkbeck and a city he’d never visited before. “It was the first time I’d been to London. I enjoyed the opportunity to visit places. I would see people wearing a coat and tie with office bags and a newspaper in hand.”

He accepts that the pre-pandemic period presented him with his best chances of socialisation saying, “I attended all workshops and events which were either very relevant or marginally relevant. I would go and meet people from other departments and would attend most of the events. I never skipped any classes. I would go out with friends. I went to the library as much as I could, including at Christmas. I even met friends from my country.”

Studying an MA in Journalism was a logical choice. He’d always liked writing and was fascinated by India’s booming television industry and the increasing acceptance of a career in the media. Prior to his studies, Vimal had spent ten years working in the media, primarily in India.

He has noticed subtle differences between the news in the UK and India, “The biggest difference is the way in which newspapers are heavily subsidised in India. I couldn’t imagine spending the two pounds or so on a newspaper in India. Of course, the newspapers in the UK can be found across the world but Indian newspapers are less likely to have that international reach.”

With a pandemic still in effect and with India having faced the brunt of it earlier this year with the Delta variant of the virus, Vimal shares his own personal reflections of how the media has handled the coverage: “I felt really pained watching the Covid-19 news. I was there when Delhi had one of its earliest lockdowns and I watched how the media covered the evolution of the virus and the spread of the variant. The media has an important part to play in exposing the pandemic but there needs to be accountability and the true picture should always be reflected. But we should also balance that because the reality of the situation can also spread panic.”

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