The 2004 Indian Cultural Festival gets underway tomorrow in Hsichi's Dream Community, with music, dance, art, handicrafts, lots of authentic Indian cuisine, a puppet show and Kathakali performance. In short, organizers say, it's going to be a complete Indian carnival.
The Indian Music Center and the Wei Gin Yuan Musical Instrument Museum are sponsoring the event and, with the financial backing of the Indian Tourism board, the Indian's Association of Taipei, Taipei City's Department of Cultural Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Council for Cultural Affairs, no expense has been spared to create a festival that organizers hope will become a major yearly attraction.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ORGANIZERS
"We hope to not only provide an exciting opportunity for people of Taiwan to experience colorful Indian culture, but also to promote the interaction between peoples of the two countries," said Jeffrey Wu of the Taipei Indian Music Center.
Topping a long list of must-sees is a Kathakali performance, India's classical dance drama that employs colorful
costumes and symbolic make-up combined with highly stylized movement, postures and mudra, or expressive gestures, to convey its message. In Kathakali, the actors neither sing nor say lines, but let the Malayalam music narrate stories taken from famous Hindu epics like the Mahabaratha, Ramayana or Bhagavadgita.
Tomorrow's performance is taken from the Bhagavadgita and tells a story of Jayanthan, the son of Lord Indra. The story is set in a time when the three worlds were ruled over by the demon Narakasura, who orders his maid, Nakrathundi, to go capture the damsels of heaven.
On her way back with the captured damsels, Nakrathundi happens upon the young Jayanthan and is smitten with his good looks. She devises a plan to take him as her husband by disguising herself as one of the damsels she's just captured. She appears before Jayanthan and dances for him.
"You must marry me!" Nakrathundi tells Jayanthan.
"Heavenly damsel, I will not marry before my father tells me, so please go away," the filial Jayanthan replies.
As Nakrathundi moves to embrace Jayanthan, he sees through her disguise and chops off her nose and breast.
The moral may have become muddled over the centuries, but the music the story is set to remains wonderful.
If you miss the music, you can at least take a gander at some of the many instruments used to create it in an exhibition at the Core Pacific Living Mall (
At the end of tomorrow's activities there will be a lucky draw for two round-trip tickets to New Delhi sponsored by China Airlines.
Festival activities begin at 11am tomorrow at the Dream Community, located at the intersection of Chungshing Rd and Huchien St. in Hsichi (
A viewer's guide to Kathakali
● An oil lamp is a must in Kathakali performances as it is a devotional drama. The flame represents the presence of the goddess Kali.
● Make-up is an interesting an important part of the drama and is used as a sort of color-coding for the characters:
● Pacha, or green make-up, denotes good, noble or royal characters.
● Black make-up indicates characters that are hunters or demons.
● Characters who appear gentle but are brutes at heart have faces painted red.
● Female characters and sages have simpler make-up of a brownish tinge.
Costumes are made of wood and fabric and weigh up to 40kg.
● Kathakali actors train a minimum of six years before performing in public..
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist