Preston Merchant

The Lord Mayor of Leicester

Manjula Sood and Chris Rhodes, Civic Attendant, with the Lord Mayor’s robe

My profile of Manjula Sood, the Lord Mayor of Leicester, is up on Sepia Mutiny.

Vidhur Luncheon Club, Leicester, UK

Volunteers prepare a meal for fifty in the temple kitchen

For the past eleven years, volunteers at the Geeta Bhavan Mandir in Leicester have been serving food at the Vidhur Luncheon Club, a weekly event for the elderly, most of whom are Hindus from North India and East Africa, who come to enjoy a freshly cooked meal, play cards, and catch up on the latest news.

Prem Khosla helps organize the event and prepare the food, collecting a nominal £2 from each person to offset the costs.  "It's great for the elderly community to have a home-cooked meal and great for the volunteers to do this work," he says.

Many of Leicester's elderly Asians have been in Britain for thirty years or more, laying the foundation for what would become the UK's most multicultural city.

Leicester Temples

The Shree Sanatan Mandir on Weymouth Street

Ramanbhai Barber, temple president, and Ashok Shukla, priest, at the Shree Santan Mandir

The Shree Santan Mandir

The Geeta Bhavan Mandir

The Geeta Bhavan Mandir on Clarendon Park Road

Sandstone columns at the Jain Center

From the Jain Center, looking out on Oxford Street

Rajendra and Mahendra Pandya, the assistant and chief priests at the Jalaram Prarthna Mandal

Women gather to sing at the Jalaram Prarthna Mandal

 The Jalaram Prarthna Mandal on Narborough Road

Southall, London

The Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha Southall on Havelock Road in Southall, London. It is one of the largest Sikh temples outside of India

Jallikattu: Tamil Nadu's Ancient Bull-Taming Festival

Tamil Nadu's annual Pongal (harvest) festival will start on January 15.  I was in South India for the 2003 festivities and shot a photo essay (see below) on Jallikattu, the ancient and violent bull-taming festival, which is celebrated in some rural districts, including at Alanganallur, a village about 15 kilometers from Madurai.

In a cross between a Spanish running of the bulls and Texas rodeo, contestants try to tame a charging bull by grabbing onto the hump and riding -- being dragged -- to the finish line about twenty meters away. They can also pile on the bull, forcing it to stop.  Another goal is to grab the gold coins tied to the horns of some of the bulls.

Jallikattu is mentioned in Tamil classical poetry, suggesting that it dates from before the time of Christ. In the old days, winners walked away with a village’s loveliest brides. Today they take home TVs and gold coins.

"As the festival starts, the door to the stockade is opened and the ferocious bulls are let loose into the arena.  The young tacklers try and lead them in different directions. They pounce on their backs. They hold the bulls’ tails. They seize their necks. They catch hold of their oiled, pointed horns. Somehow the bulls have to be tamed, and the bloody battle between man and beast is on. Suddenly a tackler falls to the ground with his stomach ripped open. It’s part of the risk involved."

(From clickmadurai.com, a website promoting events and culture in the Madurai district)

In the village of Alanganallur, Jallikattu is celebrated as part of a temple festival, with offerings of food and cookware. Stainless steel pots and pans are paraded through the street, with accompanying firecrackers, to be collected and then redistributed as prizes to the contestants. The other prizes include gold coins, bicycles, TV sets, lanterns, tape recorders, lungis, and assorted cots and wall clocks.

Farmers train their bulls to attack, even to thrust their horns, which have been sharpened, at objects on the ground. On the day of the festival, they oil the humps and tails, decorate them with turmeric and vermilion, and garland them with marigolds -- the Pongal festival venerates the cow.

During the 2003 event, Dr. Balaji, the senior physician at the Alanganallur hospital -- one of 14 doctors and 86 medical professionals in total -- counted 269 injured, about 18 critically, with severe head injuries and bleeding, some gored in the stomach and chest, and those with a lost eye, ear, or nose.

All the injured were young men between the ages of 18 and 30. "When they come in, they usually insist that we treat them so they can get back to the fight," said Dr. Balaji. "We need more safety measures to protect the people in the arena."

The wounded are almost entirely the spectators in the street who have overwhelmed the police at the gates and are not the participants themselves. The critically wounded are taken to hospitals in the city, where some succumb to his injuries. Each year a handful of people die at the various Jallikattu events throughout southern Tamil Nadu.

The Madurai adheenam, the area’s senior Hindu priest, said, "I am not against Jallikattu. But I do not want innocent spectators to be killed and grievously injured and their body parts mutilated. Nor should the animal be subjected to torture. The state government should either make sure that adequate security is provided to prevent such mishaps or should ban this practice. We cannot allow this to continue in the present way."

Promoted by the Tamil Nadu Ministry of Tourism, Jallikattu at Alanganallur is the biggest and most established of the bull taming festivals, attracting corporate sponsorship. Alanganallur has been hosting Jallikattu for at least 300 years. The local panchayat, the village council, organizes the event, providing drinking water and toilets for the spectators, who number about 50,000. Private companies build the galleries along the street and charge money for the space. The event is free for the 500 or so registered participants.

The state tourist board buses in foreign tourists from the hotels in Madurai and installs them, wide-eyed and garlanded with flowers, in the VIP gallery.

Children of Phoenix

This essay was published in a recent issue of Pravasi Bharatiya by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (under the title "Revisiting Satyagraha in Phoenix").  It's online in PDF form at that link, but I am posting here where it is easier to read.

No Indian cab driver will take me to Gandhi's house.  Parked in front of the Holiday Inn at Durban's South Beach, the cabbies protest about safety.  Someone asserts that since it has been raining, the main road will be washed out and we will get stuck at the bottom of the hill, unable to flee.  The word impossible comes out a few times, with the sense that going there would be a bad idea, something you just don't do, like wandering through New York's Central Park at night.  I walk back into the lobby, and a few minutes later a young driver, squat and tough looking with gel in his hair, comes in and agrees to take me.  But when we get to the car, an older man intervenes and packs me into the front seat of his rusty Toyota.  We head off — but not to the Phoenix settlement.

Merle, Darlene, and Merle's Niece Kezia in the Phoenix Township

Phoenix is the South African township, on the northern periphery of Durban, that began as an Indian settlement when Mohandas Gandhi, a young lawyer schooled in London, moved from Johannesburg in 1904 to focus his political activities on the plight of Indian laborers in the British colony.  He built a school and a printing press, published a newspaper called the Indian Opinion, and organized a community around his ascetic, non-violent principles.  The trust Gandhi established continued its mission even after he returned to India ten years later, and his style of political activism and passive resistance left its mark on the struggle against Apartheid.  In 1985, during a particularly violent period toward the end of that era, poor blacks from a neighboring settlement laid waste to Phoenix, evicting the Indians and occupying their homes.  An historic, prosperous township became a squatters' community, a slum.  Gandhi's printing press, house, and school were destroyed.

The ruins of a school built in memory of Gandhi's wife, Kasturba

Today Phoenix comprises a  collection of settlements, some Indian, some black.  Many areas are comparatively well off, with apartment blocks and lighted streets, schools and cricket grounds.  Others are shantytowns.  The area around Gandhi's site is a black shantytown.  This is where the Indian drivers refuse to go.