Please join us as we discuss liminal spaces, Afghan culture, the role of artists, and the future of South Asia:

Sunday, March 29, 2009 
3:00 pm film screening - 3:30 pm discussion

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Screening Room
701 Mission St @ 3rd
San Francisco, CA 94103

$7 General Admission

Panelists

Bina Sarkar Ellias
Editor and Publisher, International Gallerie

Kosha Shah
Author, India and the Future of South Asia

Tamim Ansary
Author, West of Kabul East of New York

Gordon Knox, Moderator
Stanford Humanities Lab

Background

Prior to the 18th century, Afghanistan (along with Tajikistan, north-eastern Iran, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) was for much of its long history a part of a greater region known as Khorasan, which shared a liminality – an artistic ebb and flow with greater Hindustan, the location and meaning of which has shifted with the arrival and departure of various rulers. The excellence of this cultural exchange and the memory of it has declined over the last three hundred years but remains beneath the surface in music, aesthetics and the inspiration of the lotus as symbol. In the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore wrote “The Fruit Seller from Kabul” in order to rekindle an understanding between Bengal’s flourishing port-city middle classers and their Pashtun neighbors to the west. Some still recall that story today but for most South Asians Afghanistan has become an alien land.

In a more contemporary approach, Bina Sarkar Ellias, one of the leading international publishers of art journals based in India, dedicated the entire 23rd issue of her magazine, International Gallerie, to the artistic expression emerging from Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora. Does a liminality continue to exist between India and Afghanistan? In what form? How has it changed and why does it matter?

As President Obama promises to send 17,000 troops to Afghanistan in addition to the 65,000 to make the region safer, and Pakistan and India increasingly make the country a pawn in their hostilities – another Indian author, Kosha Shah, questions the continuability of South Asia without a regional identity and cooperation in her book India and the Future of South Asia. Is culture poised to re-unite the sub-continent?