AYUMI NAKANISHI / ANAKANISHI@STARBULLETIN.COM Levani Lipton, 28, will dance "Jhankar" at Orvis Auditorium at the University of Hawaii. The dance style is called Bharata Natyam, which is a classical South Indian dance and one of the the oldest forms from the state of Tamil Nadu.

South Asia
fantasia

A local social club puts on
an evening of music and dance
that celebrates cultural ties

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By Gary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.com

A love for "spices, saris and sitar" will be shared with the public this weekend by The Milun ("the meeting") social club.

Club president Saleem Ahmed hopes the event, "Jhankar" ("melodious beats"), will be an entertaining as well as informative evening of dance and music. It's an outgrowth of the club's intimate potluck concerts and performances over its two years of existence.

The program will feature classical and folk dances, as well as instrumental and vocal numbers, including qawwali, songs of devotion and praise in the Urdu dialect that have been made internationally popular by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. In the case at "Jhankar," however, the qawwali will be a lively, lip-synched performance of a musical duet between a man and a woman from a popular Indian movie about a woman's physical beauty.

A bhangra, or harvest folk dance that, according to Ahmed, is indigenous to both India and Pakistan, will close the concert, and the audience will be invited to come on stage afterward to learn the dance.

Approximately 300 to 500 families from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka live in Hawaii, Ahmed said. "People from South Asia share a common culture, where the food, clothing and music are similar," he said. "Prior to the club, we would meet informally and wax nostalgic about our home countries. But what we like about the beautiful community here in Hawaii is that, while significant religious differences are used by politicians back home to create hate, people here realize that religion is a personal matter. Because of that, the club has become a close-knit family."

MILUN'S MEMBERS keep in touch with those back home, raising funds to help victims of an earthquake that devastated parts of India about two years ago.

Ahmed, who was born in India and raised in Pakistan, moved here in 1973. "My wife is originally from here; she's third-generation Japanese. We went back to Pakistan and lived there for nine years. Our two daughters were born there, then the family moved back here. Our daughters are now grown, both married to Caucasians and living on the mainland.

"But it's the beauty of this place that attracts us, and the climate is so much similar to that back home," he said.

"When my wife and I go back to visit both India and Pakistan, I feel so much at home there. It's just a shame that there's so much tension and antagonism between the countries. When the nuclear standoff happened, I'm happy to say that there was no in-fighting here."

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