The ‘Public Life’ of the Bengal Diaspora: Performing Religion,Gender and Generation in the Boishakhi Mela

Abstract

It has become a theoretical truism that diaspora encompasses both mobility and settlement, change and continuity, roots and routes. Nevertheless, sociological accounts of diaspora identities have been largely focused on diaspora identities as part of a process of placemaking and claims-staking in the place of arrival. Such accounts have largely downplayed questions of origin, continuity and connection, and of the role of history and structure in shaping diasporic cultures ‘on the ground’. Focusing on the annual Boishakhi Mela in East London, this article explores some of the tensions and ambiguities of diaspora spaces and cultural practices. It empirically examines the encounter between ‘authentic’ and ‘commodified’ cultures and the contested faultlines around gender, generation and religion that are played out in this public spectacle.

Introduction: Boishakhi Mela 2008

Each May the streets and parks around Brick Lane in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets play host to the annual Boishakhi Mela, celebrating Bengali New Year in the heart of East London. The year of our fieldwork, 2008, saw the staging of the 11th Boishakhi Mela, with the Grand Parade proceeding from Allen Gardens, past Brick Lane Mosque and the restaurants of Brick Lane, the gates of Altab Ali Park and the East London Mosque towards the final destination of Weavers’ Fields in Bethnal Green. Headed by a ‘Grand Emperor’ and including models of a tiger, a full size elephant and rickshaws, the procession of children carrying colourful masks of animals, young women in traditional dress, Bengali drummers and restaurant workers carrying banners, mixed in with Bengali families, locals and tourists as over 80,000 people flooded Weavers’ Fields, where four soundstages presented a programme of traditional Bengali music and dancing, contemporary popular artists, drama and poetry, flanked by stalls selling Bengali food and clothes and funfair rides.

The Boishakhi Mela punctuates the annual cycle of Bengali diaspora life in East London and elsewhere. A public, joyous and occasionally raucous celebration of the eternal cycle of rebirth and renewal, the Mela functions as a performance of Bengali identity, an evocation of the ties to the homeland and to other Bengali communities in diaspora and a claiming of space in the place of arrival: what we have described elsewhere as the ‘rituals of diaspora’ (Alexander et al., 2016). Such events inscribe Bengali presence in time and space, through an appeal to places and points of origin, and through the enactment of the fragmented (trans)formations of contemporary diaspora identities. They enact multiple temporalities and spatialities, including the more local histories of British Bengali communities. The Boishakhi Mela in East London, for example, emerged as part of the bigger Banglatown project (Eade and Garbin, 2006; Shaw, 2008, 2011), and is integral to the local (hi)story of diasporic community building in Tower Hamlets (Alexander, 2011; Alexander et al., 2016). These local dimensions are nevertheless interwoven with broader British and transnational imaginaries, which provide constitutive and competing frameworks for signification, which shape Bangladeshi diaspora identities in Britain. At the same time, these rituals constitute contemporary sites of struggle, which tell a more tangled story about the struggle for recognition and belonging, and which open up space for more demotic and discordant narratives.

This article explores some of the complex workings of the rituals of diaspora through an exploration of the Boishakhi Mela in East London. The emphasis is on the cultural and performative dimensions of diaspora (Kalra et al., 2005), whereby rituals of celebration, such as the Mela, are understood as forms of cultural identity work which exemplify some key transitions and conflicts in Bengali diaspora identities. The Boishakhi Mela is, then, examined as a performance of diasporic cultural identity, which is taken up in a context of British multiculturalism both as a way of contesting hegemonic representations of Bengali/Muslim marginalisation and as a key site for the commodification and commercialisation of ethnicity and ‘culture’ (Eade and Garbin, 2006; Eade et al., 2002). At the same time, the Mela provides an illuminating lens through which to view the shifting contours of Bengali identity, notably the struggle over religious, gendered and generational identities (Hoque, 2015; Riaz, 2013). Tracing the life of the Mela from its beginnings in Bangladesh, through its re-routing and re-rooting in East London, to its fragmented and contested present, the article aims to empirically examine the multiple scales through which diaspora is lived, translated and performed.

The article arises out of a larger three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project on ‘the Bengal diaspora’ (Alexander et al., 2016). This project ran from 2006–2009 and was a study of the experiences of the migration of Muslims from and within the Indian state of Bengal in the period following Partition in 1947. The bigger project was concerned with how diaspora movement and settlement can and must be understood empirically and historically, through structures of power and in relation to particular places. Our starting point in Britain was in Tower Hamlets, which is home to around one-fifth of Britain’s Bangladeshi population and is viewed as the cultural ‘heartland’ of the British Bangladeshi community (Alexander, 2011). Acutely aware of its iconic status in the Bengal diaspora, in 2008 I completed a series of interviews with a range of key local community figures, drawn from a cross-section of religious, political and cultural leaders, businessmen, cultural practitioners, policymakers and activists.

Unlike the broader sweep of interviews, which focused on the life histories of ordinary and invisible migrants, these semi-structured interviews took the ‘life history’ of Tower Hamlets as its main subject, in which these influential individuals had played a significant role across the previous four decades. The Mela is just one aspect of this life history and should be understood as part of a wider history of movement, settlement and transformation of the British Bengal diaspora, across a range of scales (transnational, national and, particularly, local) and domains (economic, political, social and cultural). It provides insights into a particular time, as well as place, in the staging of diaspora. The article uses material from these interviews to tease out just one strand of this richer tapestry and explore some of the layered meanings and tensions inherent in this event. While the timing was, in retrospect, serendipitous, the mid-2000s are a telling ‘moment’ in the longer history of the Bengal diaspora in Britain, particularly around issues of religion and generation. Riaz (2013) notes that in the wake of the 2005 London bombings, issues of religious identity were being publicly played out in Tower Hamlets – for example, the emergence of the Respect Party and the public protestations around the Brick Lane film (see Alexander, 2011) in 2005, and the visit of controversial Islamist preacher Delwar Hossain Saidee in 2006. Some of these tensions are captured below but, importantly, need also to be contextualised within other local political, economic and cultural shifts.

Placing Diaspora: Performing and Commodifying Culture in London’s East End

The past three decades have seen an increasing sociological interest in diaspora cultures and identities, which stand alongside, and intertwine with, theorisations of migration and multiculturalism as a way of understanding the changing ethnoscapes of the global cities of the north and west (Alexander, 2010; Brubaker, 2005). From a disciplinary perspective, the focus has been primarily on the places of arrival and the processes of settlement, where diaspora cultures are viewed, to quote Brubaker’s (2005: 12, emphases in original) influential formulation: ‘As a category of practice, [where] ‘diaspora’ is used to make claims, to articulate projects, to formulate expectations, to mobilize energies, to appeal to loyalties […] It does not so much describe the world as seek to remake it.’

Spatially and temporally, the emphasis has been very much on the ‘here and now’ rather than on the ‘there and then’ of the places and conditions of departure, or the complex circularities, continuities and transitions on the journey between places, and across time. As Stuart Hall (1990: 225) reminds us, ‘Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But […] they undergo constant transformation.’ However, while sociologists have eagerly seized the second part of this message (Alexander, 2017; Brubaker, 2017), they have eschewed the former: that, as Hall insists, ‘becoming’ requires a reckoning both with history and with structures of power – however constructed, uncertain and diffused. The focus on diaspora space (Brah, 1996) has predominantly been on encounters across difference within particular moments and places. While this has importantly and rightly stressed the significance of materiality and mundane co-presence in shaping everyday urban encounters, such a lens reveals only a partial story, stripping out the rich textures, structures and continuities of diaspora life, and erasing the legacies of the past in the present – of elsewheres and elsewhens. This has led to a deep suspicion of issues of history, of ethnic particularity or ‘groupness’, or of interactions and connections within, as opposed to across, ethnic or religious boundaries. The significance of culture is thus read ‘outwards’, to a broader (multi)cultural and political landscape, rather than ‘inwards’ (and ‘backwards’) to the translations and transitions at work in the (admittedly porous) borders of the diaspora itself, and its places of origin.

On first glance the Boishakhi Mela is a public spectacle that forms part of a broad tapestry of London’s multicultural calendar, which transcends easy appeals to ethnic origins or ownership, or particularistic cultural histories. Indeed, the Mela has more usually been seen as a celebration of London’s diversity, and as part of a broader commodification and commercialisation of ethnicity, linked notably to the proliferation of ‘cultural quarters’ (Keith, 2005), whose identities form the basis of encounter across ethnic/cultural borders in an inclusive urban public space (Amin, 2008). As Picard and Robinson (2006: 2) note, ‘for growing diasporic communities, festivals, carnivals and Melas provide important moments of visibility and occasions of concentrated celebrations of identity beyond the confines of their “host” communities’. Carnegie and Smith (2006: 256) similarly argue in relation to the Edinburgh Mela that ‘Melas have come to symbolise all that is “colourful” about diaspora, transforming ethnicity into a cultural showcase for growing numbers of non-Indian participants and tourist audiences.’

However, what constitutes ‘culture’ in these settings is a source of contention, and has been criticised both for packaging culture as exotica for external consumption in ways which reify and essentialise ethnic difference (Kalra et al., 2005), and for promoting more commercial ‘global and hybridised cultural forms’ (Carnegie and Smith, 2006: 256) creating tensions around authenticity, ownership and appropriation. Michael Keith (2005) has noted further, and specifically in relation to Banglatown, that these ambivalences cannot easily be mapped onto an ethnic minority/majority divide and that the development of ‘cultural quarters’ has often been embraced by local ethnic entrepreneurs only too willing to commodify their history and heritage for business purposes (Jacobs, 1996). At the same time, however, festivals and carnivals can provide a space for subversion and disruption of dominant ethnic discourses and motifs (Picard and Robinson, 2006), if within clearly delimited time and space, and acknowledging the relations of power that structure such discordant encounters.

Locating such practices historically and structurally reveals that performing diaspora is by no means a straightforward or uncontested process. Diaspora cultures run the risk not only of the reification and sedimentation of ‘culture’ and cultural practices, but also of the commodification and commercialisation of ethnic cultures that reinscribe marginalised positions as the exotic ‘other’ within local and national contexts. Within the imagined borders of ethnic communities too, the risk is of homogenisation which ignores or erases diverse positionalities and engagements – for example, around gender, generation or religious identification. There is a need, then, to position diaspora rituals and practices as products of collective organisations and histories, but which are also open to change, resistance, division and transformation, and which take shape as part of broader social, economic, political and cultural fields (Kalra et al., 2005; Kaur, 2000).

The Boishakhi Mela, then, encompasses multiple and contradictory meanings and standpoints. On the one hand, the Mela is claimed by some local Bengalis as ‘expressing the desire to both maintain their ties with their country of origin and to distinguish themselves as an ethnic/cultural “community” in Britain based on a secular nationalist Bengali heritage’ (Eade and Garbin, 2006: 185). On the other, the Mela has been closely tied to the emergence of Banglatown which was viewed more ambiguously, as at once a claiming of space for British Bengalis and a commercialisation of culture and identity, which marketed a reductive and essentialised view of Bengali ethnicity (Alexander, 2011; Frost, 2011; Jacobs, 1996) – what Halima Begum (2004: 12) describes as ‘multicultural capital’. Begum (2004) argues, ‘multicultural capital has helped to sell the new East End [through] […] commodified forms of minority cultures and practices such as cuisine, expressive arts, performances, heritage exhibitions and festivals’ (see Shaw, 2008, 2011). Some have argued, further, that the Mela is a place branding exercise primarily linked to, and promoted by, local Bengali business interests and riven with local sectional political alliances and rivalries (Frost, 2011). Still others have claimed that the Mela represents an ‘invented tradition’ dominated by secularists embedded in the local political structures in opposition to the growing power of East London Mosque (Eade et al., 2002). As Frost (n.d.) argues, ‘Festivals reflect and throw into relief local political, social and religious alliances and divisions, at the same time as providing a useful platform for community expression’.

In what follows, I explore the ‘public life’ of the Bengal diaspora in Britain through the lens of the Boishakhi Mela, examining these multiple layers, overlapping constituencies and ambiguous meanings. The Mela opens up questions of the commodification of culture, the borders of ‘community’ and the contested terrain of everyday cultural practices and rituals of celebration in a context of contemporary urban multiculturalism. In particular, the Mela can be seen as a space in which political, economic, social and cultural interests and processes converge and conflict, notably through the intersection of space, religion, generation and gender.

Re-Rooting the Mela: From Bangladesh to Banglatown

The Mela is traditionally held to mark the start of Bengali New Year on 14 April, and marks continuity with the Hindu Vedic solar calendar, rather than the Islamic calendar introduced by the Mughals or the Gregorian calendar introduced by the British (Eade et al., 2002). The festival itself, however, was first introduced by the Mughal emperor Akbar in 1556 to facilitate the collection of tax revenue, and is associated with rural agricultural communities across Bengal and other parts of India. Van Schendel (2009: 257–258) describes New Year celebrations in Bangladesh as a regional celebration ‘when enormous festive crowds take to the streets of Dhaka to watch brightly coloured floats of huge peacocks, and fantastic animals, observe intricate floor decorations, buy painted pots and toys and listen to songs celebrating the six seasons of the Bengali year’. In East Bengal, traditional New Year celebrations formed part of the ‘cultural’ struggle for Bangladeshi independence and were co-opted as part of a secular liberal performance of national identity in the newly independent Bangladesh – ‘a public tradition with strong political overtones’ (Van Schendel, 2009: 154). One interviewee, who ran a local cultural organisation, linked the Mela to the secular ‘roots’ of Bangladeshi nationhood:

The way we celebrate Bengali New Year in Bangladesh was developed in the ’50s and ’60s as a way of challenging this Islamic Pakistani rule. So Bengali New Year, how we celebrate it here, is also in an ideological dimension. At one level it’s a celebration of Bengali tradition, it’s also a political challenge against the [religious] identity debate.

As Riaz (2013) has noted, the inherent tension between secularist and religious ideologies has become more explicit in subsequent decades through the increasing Islamisation of Bangladeshi political life, reshaping national identity through a religious lens, both at home and across the diaspora (Kibria, 2011). The same interviewee, above, noted that in Bangladesh itself there has been an attempt to rehabilitate the Mela into an Islamic interpretation as part of the reorientation of demotic cultural forms:

You see the Bangla Mela in Bangladesh is the biggest event in Bangladesh… and now the Islamists are trying to claim Bengali New Year because Bengali New Year was invented by the Mughal emperor Akbar… so now the Islamists are using this to say it’s ok to celebrate Bengali New Year because it’s really originally a Mughal thing and linked to the Islamic calendar.

For most British Bengalis, however, the festival captures the interweaving of Bengal’s shared regional history with a secularist, unifying vision of Bangladesh’s national struggle and identity. ¹ Golam Mustafa, Director of Udichi Shilpi Gosthi UK, an arts organisation in Tower Hamlets which was central to the creation of East London’s Mela, explained:

All come to the Mela. The Mela is the picture of the secular Bengali community and this was always the tradition of Bengali culture for thousands of years. In the Mela, it is festive time – everybody is going, Hindu, Muslim, it doesn’t matter… It’s Bengali.

Poet and cultural activist Shamim Azad told us that for her, it was a celebration of Bangladesh’s history and culture, invoking an idealised image of rural life and community:

It’s about Bangladeshi culture, it’s about the Bangladeshi calendar… it’s the Harvest season, when you start up with your new account book and people visit house to house, they have street fairs under the Banyan tree… This is about Bangladesh.

Mahmoud Rauf who, as chair of the Brick Lane Business Association, was a key member in establishing the Mela in Tower Hamlets, also noted: ‘The Boishakhi Mela is one of the most important cultural activities in Bangladesh. Boishakhi Mela is our New Year’s Day, the first day of our Bengali calendar… We observe it like Notting Hill in Dhaka.’

The Mela can be seen as linking the diaspora with the homeland, through an evocation of historical and contemporary political and cultural continuity, which conjures a shared place and time as part of an ongoing struggle for a secular nationalist identity. The Mela in East London, indeed, involved many of the organisations and individuals who were active in the Nirmul Committee, seeking redress for war crimes during the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence (Alexander et al., 2016). However, the event was also closely linked with more London-centred and commercial interests and agendas, which coincided and conflicted with these more cultural agendas, and which suggests a more contested version of Bengali culture in diaspora, re-routing and re-rooting its meaning in local histories and community identities.

Boishakh in Banglatown: Making the Mela in East London

The first Boishakhi Mela in East London was staged in 1998, funded by Cityside Regeneration Fund as part of the process of raising the profile of the Banglatown regeneration initiative (Alexander, 2011, 2013; Begum, 2004; Jacobs, 1996; Shaw, 2008). Unlike later years, when it was moved to the more contained space of Weavers’ Fields, the first event was held along the Brick Lane itself, which was turned into a pedestrian zone, with tables and chairs on the streets outside the restaurants, and three stages for cultural activities, which ranged from traditional baul music to pop music and included poetry, drama and traditional dance (Eade et al., 2002). The festival attracted 25,000 visitors in its first year, a number which rose to 60,000 by 2001 (Shaw, 2011) and then to 80,000 people by 2006 - making it, reputedly, the second largest street festival in Europe after Notting Hill Carnival and the largest celebration of Bengali New Year outside of South Asia. ²

Ansar Ahmed Ullah, of the Swadhinata Trust, told us:

The Boishakhi Mela was started by three community groups – the Nirmul Committee, the Brick Lane Business Association and a cultural group called Udichi. In the second year they got funding from Cityside Regeneration… It was to celebrate Bengali New Year here. It was an open street festival for the Bengali community. And then the council came on board and has been supporting it since then.

The Mela was initiated and funded alongside the Brick Lane Festival, which ran in September and was more explicitly linked to the commercial interests of the growing restaurant sector in the newly branded ‘Banglatown’. Badrul Islam, who worked for Cityside Regeneration at the time, and in 2008 ran the local Ethnic Minority Enterprise Project, emphasised the complementarity of the business and cultural agendas across the two events:

The Brick Lane Festival… [started in] ’96/’97, one year before the Boishakhi Mela… [When] the Brick Lane Festival was launched, some of the Bangladeshi business people and local residents felt that the Bangladeshi element of the local culture needed to be reinforced… so Boishakhi Mela was introduced… Boishakhi Mela was all about Bengali culture and its promotion.

He noted that both events had far exceeded initial expectations:

The biggest Brick Lane Festival… [was] in 2003, I think. The Times the next morning came out with a headline that said ‘250,000 people in Brick Lane’… So now the police and planning authorities restrict the event, Brick Lane Festival, to 50, 60,000 people… Boishakhi Mela is different because it slightly changed in its complexion – it now happens largely around a main stage musical performance which has been shifted from Brick Lane to Weavers’ Field… That accommodates 200,000 people. And Brick Lane still has stalls and music and fashion on it, and there’s a connection corridor created between the two.

There were tensions too, however, particularly around issues of cultural ‘authenticity’ versus commercial appeal. This led to a fundamental ambiguity in the festival’s inception: on the one hand, the continuity with Bangladesh was an important dimension of the Mela in East London and its ‘authenticity’ provided the measure of its success. In its first year, Mahmoud Rauf recalled:

We had a stage and at the stage there were cultural things like song and dance… we had all sorts of shops, handicraft shops with Bangladeshi things, our original cultural merchandise. I mean, we know what sort of things they have in Bangladesh. We cannot replicate it exactly but we try to match it as much as we can. It has to go with the name as well – we cannot just invent something. People know what a Boishakhi Mela is [my emphasis].

The identity of the Mela is, then, closely associated with the local Bangladeshi community, and as a place where Bengali culture was transmitted across the generations. Shamim Azad explained, too, that the Mela was one of comparatively few places where Bengali women were out in public with their families, blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces, the cultural and the ‘multicultural’:

Women are around in public everywhere but this is where they come with the family to enjoy – husbands, children all together. And also, the families in Tower Hamlets, they would like to show some evidence of their culture to their children and on that particular day they wear Bangladeshi dress, they get some T-shirts with Bengali writing… people want to celebrate in a way that is decent and nice… all the people are enjoying it, which is brilliant.

Compared to the more commercially oriented Brick Lane Festival, it was the ‘cultural’ Mela which attracted more people, and has become the more successful commercial enterprise because of its links to ‘community’ and ‘culture’: ‘Boishakhi Mela is bigger because Boishakhi Mela attracts family and children a lot more. Brick Lane Festival doesn’t attract family and children’ (Mahmoud Rauf).

On the other hand, the re-rooting of the Mela in East London also necessitated changes – most ironically around the timing of ‘New Year’ itself. Mahmoud Rauf acknowledged that the unpredictability of the British weather had led to the rescheduling of the festival to increase its appeal:

We had it in 1998 the first year on the 9th of May. Actually the first of Boishakh is 14th of April every year, but we decided not to have it in April because of April showers! But we wanted to do it within the month… so we can stretch up to 9th May… and the May month is a little bit better – dry and sunny – so we’ll stretch to that.

As cultural activist Sayeeda Shikha made clear, many involved in establishing the Mela felt that the event had moved far from its original roots, and that some of its meaning had been lost in translation:

Second generation children get involved with the Mela because they think it is open and they can have fun there. There are no limits, it is held in an open space. They think the Mela is Pohela Boishakh, but the Mela is not Pohela Boishakh ³ – it is a commercial fair.

She and some colleagues in Udichi had started an alternative Boishakh celebration which was held in April – on New Year itself – usually in local community centres, and was focused on cultural identity and intergenerational transmission. These alternative Boishakh celebrations are smaller, more informal and more community oriented:

Did you know that when we founded the Boishakh, the Bengali New Year celebrations, we were not funded… We would just take money from our pockets, putting there, buying food… Elish Maas, Bengali fish… that’s what we served, and we served traditional sweets. We would spend a thousand pounds, more than a thousand pounds to hire the venue and all the activities. We bought everything from our own pockets.

In subsequent years, this alternative, ‘authentic’ Boishakh event gained small amounts of local community sponsorship: ‘The first time we spent money ourselves but loads of people turned up. The second time, the local shops donated mishti [Bengali sweets] and the same the third time.’ Shikha noted that the more public celebrations of the Mela in May were distinct from the celebration of Bengali culture and history that these more local celebrations focused on: ‘Traditional singing, traditional dance, [we] read poems, we do activities for children, art painting – that’s some of the things we do… [it is mainly for] families and children.’ This has led to a split, with a smaller set of cultural events established to celebrate the ‘real’ Boishakh, while the bigger, more commercial event continues to be held in May. Furthermore, as is discussed below, the May Mela itself also exemplifies tensions between the cultural and commercial dimensions and agendas, as well as between its particularistic ‘roots’ and multicultural ‘routes’.

Unmaking the Mela in East London: Community, Culture and Conflict

As Shikha suggests, the significance and initial Bengali ‘community’ focus of the Boishakhi Mela had altered along with the expansion of the festival: from its origins as ‘something which is more community oriented’ (Shiraj Haque), ‘an open street festival for the Bengali community’ (Ansar Ahmed Ullah), the remit of the Mela has expanded to form a significant part of London’s multicultural calendar, which is outward facing and inclusive. Former leader of Tower Hamlets Council Helal Abbas stated, ‘it’s something we are proud to share with other people, Londoners and Bangladeshis’, while local MP Rushanara Ali told us: ‘The Mela is really good… it brings people together… it’s not just for the Bengali community… you’ll see all sorts of people coming to the Mela.’ However, as with Brick Lane and Banglatown itself (Alexander, 2011), this more inclusive vision is rooted in a longer history of local struggles by the Bangladeshi community within East London. Shiraj Haque, a former youth activist turned local restaurateur, who was co-convenor of the first Mela, told us that his original vision for the Mela was very much rooted in the spaces and struggles of the Bangladeshi youth groups in the area in the 1970s and 1980s:

It was a local thing, you know. When I was running a youth organisation, we used to do a festival in Hanbury Street [off Brick Lane]. It was called a youth festival, it was for young people. But then I realised it’s not a community of youth anymore, let’s think about a wider concept because the root of our community is wherever we are now, and the community has established on many fronts and throughout the country, but everyone had a root from Brick Lane.

As it developed and grew, he recognised its broader potential, ‘I realised it has got a more wider impact, that non-Bangladeshis could come’; however, he also claimed that with the growth of the event there had been a loss of control and increasing frictions within the local Bengali community and with the local council:

it’s a lot of work to organise these things and secure funding… unfortunately some of the councillors… became involved with their personal development rather than the community in general… They had been used by some of the white councillors, with a ‘buy and sell’ view of culture.

As Shiraj Haque suggests, the growth of the Mela has attracted competing interests and led to the event being dogged with controversy, threatening its very existence. In its early years, the Mela was developed through a partnership between the community, local businesses and the council. Helal Abbas estimated that the Brick Lane Festival and the Mela together cost around £200,000 annually, predominantly in terms of ‘in-kind’ support. For the council the event was a source of regeneration and employment, as well as offering less tangible benefits around branding and visibility: ‘It highlights the popularity of the borough, it puts them on the festival map’ (Abbas). However, more recently the involvement of the local ‘community’ – and particularly the business community – had declined, undermining the partnership:

The Mela attracts 50–100,000 people at a time but equally it brings in trade for all the traders in the area, but there’s very little support… I cannot see the traders putting £25,000 in. They refuse to put £100 each [for the Brick Lane Festival]. And that really annoys me. (Abbas)

In recent years too, the Mela had been a source of a series of accusations and controversies around illegal immigration and financial mismanagement. Helal Abbas commented:

There’s a power wrangle about who’s going to be on the committee, chairs… There have been a lot of accusations, some of them not entirely without substance, where people have gone abroad and brought in entertainers, celebrities and with them they’ve included 4, 5 other people, and has led to the charge of human trafficking. And I think that has made the council walk away from it.

While Haque and Abbas might disagree on the causes of the breakdown in the relationship, the consequences for the Mela have been clear, with alternative sources of funding being sought. Disagreements over who should organise the Mela have intensified as the festival has grown in size and reputation. Shamim Azad commented: ‘It has got bigger, [there are] more power struggles, more leadership struggles… Because it has become an icon of Bangladeshi identity, and people would love to relish their position by running it.’ This has particularly focused on factions within the local business community. Rajonuddin Jalal, a former youth activist and councillor, noted:

The support has been decreasing because of rivalry between the two groups. They are mainly businesses from Brick Lane area, and they do things according to their own benefits… Otherwise it could have been a vehicle for doing something like the Notting Hill Carnival.

Mahmoud Rauf stated that in recent years these tensions had led him to withdraw from organisation of the Mela, ‘I didn’t want to be [involved] because when it became so famous, everybody wanted to take the leadership. Go and do it!’

The Mela became an independent Trust in 2004, chaired by Shiraj Haque. The control of the Trust was, however, a source of some friction: Azmul Hussain, a rival restaurateur, commented that:

they [the council] will need to find good people who can run this. The old ones will be no good for the community… I don’t want the Mela or any cultural activities to be run by one man with no accountability.

For some, the wrangle over leadership underpinned concerns about the increasing commercialisation of the event and the dominance of business interests over its more cultural/community remit. Golam Mustafa told us:

Lots of fighting was going on in the last Mela… At last the original man at Clifton [restaurant] was running the Mela… and he’s saying it should be totally commercial… But we as an arts organisation are saying that the Mela should be community participation and, most important, community artists… Because the original thought of the Mela was showcasing the best Bengali arts – now nothing, commercial artists are coming and singing and events like cheap dancing or whatever.

Increasingly, as Shamim Azad told us, the elements which showcase Bengali culture, literature and arts have been largely sidelined in favour of a more commercial and populist approach. As with the alternative Mela discussed above, local groups had responded by establishing their own more ‘authentic’ Mela alongside the more commercial venture. Azad noted, ‘We are like a side case, but we will be there… like a fringe festival, because it is not complete if you don’t show the intellectual activity of Bangladesh.’ Sayeeda Shikha stated firmly: ‘You can’t mix everything together. Who are the businessmen? They are business men, they can’t serve the purpose of culture.’

Contesting the Mela: Religion, Generation, Gender and the Struggle for Space

Despite divergent views of the Mela and its role, the majority of the people I interviewed maintained a stake in the continuation of the event itself, agreeing that whatever its parameters, content or organisation, it was better to have the Mela than not, and that the event was central in making the Bengali presence visible and spectacular within the complex tapestry of multicultural London. However the Mela was a point of tension between the secular nationalists and local Islamist groups (Eade and Garbin, 2006; Eade et al., 2002). One interviewee, quoted above, who was a cultural activist but described himself as ‘more in the Islamist camp’, explained:

I think the Mela has done a lot for the community. But… Mela does divide the community as well. The Islamists don’t like it, the imams don’t like it. Because the culture, the activity they promote – the mixing of men and women, dancing, singing, it goes directly against the principles of Islam… At another level, the Mela is also an ideological thing – it’s an ideological, secular fight to keep the Islamists at bay…. At one level, it’s a celebration of Bengali tradition, it’s also a political challenge.

While there have been attempts to reclaim the Mela by Islamist groups in Bangladesh, in East London this compromise did not seem on the horizon, with a sharp divide between the more secular nationalist activists and Islamist groups (Alexander, 2013; Riaz, 2013). These tensions highlighted divisions not only around religious versus cultural stances and claims, but wielded generational and gendered differences as key faultlines within the Bengali community (Hoque, 2015; Kibria, 2011). Dilowar Hussain Khan, Chair of East London Mosque Committee and Shaynul Khan, Director of the London Muslim Centre, which is linked to the Mosque, outlined these objections. First, there were concerns over the origin of the event – ‘religious scholars would never support Melas because the Mela concept comes originally from a Hindu festival’ (DH Khan). Shaynul Khan added, a little caustically, ‘it doesn’t have a religious link at all in terms of the Muslim faith. You wouldn’t get any Muslim scholars saying, you know, let’s have a knees up.’

Sajjid Miah, Chair of Brick Lane Mosque Committee, echoed some of these concerns, but noted the need for compromise:

We oppose elements of it, you know, we don’t want singing and dancing in the street when we pray… But stalls, and promoting business, we don’t have any objection on that. So what usually happens, when they hold those festivals, in front of the Mosque at least they don’t have any of those things. There is nothing here in front of the Mosque.

Perhaps reflecting the Mosque’s more Bangladeshi first generation and business community constituency, and the siting of the Mosque in the midst of Banglatown (Alexander, 2013), Sajjid Miah acknowledged the duality of his role as a Mosque official and as a member of the Bangladeshi community:

Well, if you ask me on a religious level, our Imams are giving lectures against those things. We are not in favour. But as a Bangladeshi and as a community member, we don’t oppose the council and say we don’t want this.

Second, the Mela was seen to promote un-Islamic behaviour, including promoting the consumption of alcohol among young people: ‘You’ve got lots of Bangladeshi young kids who are just going there to get completely plastered’ (S Khan); ‘You know they get drunk and this is not the kind of environment for a family or anything’ (DH Khan). This was linked to disruptive elements from outside the area, conjuring popular myths around ‘gangs’ and setting up a boundary between ‘the community’ and outsiders. Dilowar Hussain Khan thus insisted: ‘A majority of the people don’t like the Mela in this area, but those who come here are usually from the suburbs… A majority don’t go there.’ Shaynul Khan added:

Initially it was all around culture and heritage… it was a lovely idea. But you know you’ve had gang fights going on, alcohol rage going on, people taken to hospital, you’ve got lack of security, you’ve got people who don’t come from the local area… it just didn’t make any sense.

In contrast, supporters of the Mela argued that disruption came not from outside, but from the members of local Islamist groups, who actively demonstrated against the festival (Begum, 2004; Eade and Garbin, 2006; Eade et al., 2002). Sayeeda Shikha told me:

The Islamists campaign against the Mela on the day. They distribute leaflets. They say that the Mela is haram [forbidden under Islamic law]. People should not attend the Mela. It does not make any difference. Every year people come to the Mela… They cannot bar people from coming and celebrating.

Mahmoud Rauf claimed:

These people are fanatic people. They think it is against Islam… They are physically violent against it. They are physically demonstrating against it as well. They are making their objections known to other people on the day itself… [they say] Islam is a religion of sacrifice and not to have any vulgarity.

Third, the Mela was a site for gendered transgressions. Dilowar Hussain Khan insisted:

It’s not only our Mosque – every single imam will not support. Because the kind of activities that go on – loud music, women dancing half naked on the stage, this kind of activity will never be endorsed by an imam or a religious person.

It is interesting to contrast this provocative image with the claims made earlier around the Mela as a place for families and ‘community’, where women appear in their role as wives and mothers, and suggests a generational dimension to these gendered concerns (Hoque, 2015). Mahmoud Rauf thus positioned the Mela as providing a space for young women’s self-expression and pleasure, commenting: ‘The women are under the veil like ninjas… [and] when we do these sort of things, the women are coming out, they are dancing on the stage, singing on the stage, they are enjoying [themselves].’ Others appealed to the inclusive nature of the Mela, reflecting a diverse Muslim constituency. Shiraj Haque was characteristically blunt:

I’m not one of these extremists… They used to lecture to people saying that the Boishakhi Mela is a bad thing to do, but I managed to convince them that ‘look, the way you describe Boishakhi Mela is where you come and see people doing a lot of dancing… but if you don’t bloody like it, then don’t come! We’re not inviting you, but you can’t take away from the fact that we have a diverse community, we have a wider vision. You can’t confine [people] – people who go to Mela go to the Mosque as well.’

Shamim Azad noted that for the Mela-goers themselves, there was seemingly little conflict between their religious duties and more cultural activities:

It’s not about Muslim people, it’s a few people. But most of the religious people in Tower Hamlets, they love to come to Mela – they take their children to the Mosque, as well they come to Mela… You will see a lot of bearded people, hijabs, whatever – this is about Bangladesh.

There are two notes of caution to sound in the framing of the Mela through a primarily religious/secular (or Islamic/national) divide. First, while scholars have explored the emergence of religious, and particularly Muslim, identities in the current political climate as one of a struggle for recognition in the public sphere (Hoque, 2015; Kibria, 2011; Riaz, 2013), this frames both the category ‘Muslim’ and ‘public’ as homogeneous and consensual categories. As this article has shown, what we might think of as a ‘Muslim public sphere’ is itself fractured and contested. Thus, while the criticism of the Mela was articulated in largely religious terms – between what is or is not considered ‘Islamic’ – the tensions can also be read, in part at least, as a contestation over the boundaries of the local Bengali community, and about who or what can be contained within this definition. Second, as I have argued elsewhere (Alexander, 2011, 2013), this requires a more nuanced account of who constitutes ‘the public’ or ‘the community’ at any particular moment. More than this, it is about who can ‘speak for’ or control the space in and around Brick Lane, through not only its physical environment but also its usage: what Raminder Kaur (2000) has labelled the ‘corporo-political’ dimensions of the ‘dramas of diaspora’. Kaur (2000: 343) has defined this as a ‘politics based on lived and organic experiences’, but it might also be expanded to consider the struggle for control over ethnicised and religious bodies in public spaces. This is reflected in both generational and gendered dynamics – most particularly the way in which public space raises concerns over the visibility and activities of young people, and particularly young women. At the same time, the Mela offers an alternative vision and potentially demotic space for young people and women to appear, and to subvert some of these dominant discourses, however temporarily (Begum, 2004, 2008; Kibria, 2011). It is important to recognise, too, that for most people, these institutional and organisational divides and diktats bear little relevance to their everyday activities and choices – that the Mela is, first and foremost, a site for pleasure, relaxation and fun.

Conclusion

In a recent retrospective on his seminal 2005 article, Brubaker (2017: 1560) notes that: ‘A field limited to the study of diaspora as project, claim and stance would be an impoverished field indeed.’ While this earlier work was an important corrective to overly static and ‘substantialist’ accounts of diaspora, Brubaker (2017: 1560) acknowledges ‘the importance of studying the often deep significance of the “then” and “there” in the shaping of subjectivities in the here and now’. Accordingly, the exploration of the ‘public life’ of diaspora, through the lens of the Boishakhi Mela, seeks to illuminate empirically the strengths and limitations of sociological accounts of diaspora cultures and identities. While events such as festivals and Melas can, and should, be viewed as an outward-facing expression of identity, and as a way of staking claims within broader society, there are multiple audiences and registers for such performances, including those within the diaspora itself. The public ‘life’ of the diaspora thus also presents a ‘private’ basis for re-imagination and dialogue, for continuity as well as conflict. In tracing the multiple meanings, temporalities and disjunctures played out through the Mela, the article disrupts monological or teleological accounts of ethnicity, community or identity, while eschewing ahistorical and apolitical assertions of multiplicity and difference evident in many sociological accounts of diaspora. It seeks to re-place attention on the historical, temporal, social and cultural contours of diaspora cultures and identities, on what is ‘at stake’ in the performance of diaspora, and on the shifting and contested pathways that diaspora necessarily entails.

The article argues for the need to build questions of history and of power back in to our understanding of diaspora, without falling back on reductive and essentialised tropes of ethnicity, religion or origin. The arguments are fourfold: first, that the Mela enacts powerful imaginative and emotional ties to idealised notions of ‘home’ and ‘origins’ in Bangladesh among British Bengalis; second, that rather than simply replicating essentialised ideas of Bengali identity and culture, the contemporary shape and significance of these events must be placed within a more locally situated context and (hi)story, conjuring multiple points and moments of emergence and affiliation; third, that these rituals recreate the borders of ‘community’ identity in the UK through appeals to shared national history, experience and ‘culture’ and in so doing generate new borders of inclusion and exclusion (marked particularly through a religious/secular divide and its gendered and generational consequences); and fourth, that these events incorporate multiple histories and (con)temporalities, opening up these sites as demotic spaces of encounter, dialogue and conflict that challenge and unsettle bordering processes.

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In the decade since these interviews were conducted, the Boishakhi Mela in Tower Hamlets has continued as one of the largest street festivals in London. Its curatorship across these 10 years suggests that the ‘private’ contestations outlined above have continued to mark its ‘public’ performance. The Tower Hamlets Council website in 2017 reports that the Mela was organised by the Boishakhi Mela Trust, chaired by Shiraj Haque from 2000 until 2016, although the event was temporarily organised by the council between 2009 and 2011, perhaps as a result of the struggles outlined above. Since 2016, the council has run the Mela, and the website, tellingly, states, ‘with input from a wide ranging Mela Community Engagement Group, and has seen a much more family friendly and cultural focus [my emphasis]’. ⁴ The community partnership, it continues, will ‘ensure that the Mela reflects the interests of local people and the traditional celebrations held in Bangladesh’, ⁵ reasserting the event’s community and cultural ‘roots’, and its links with Bangladesh, as well as its incorporation into the sanitised structures of state multiculturalism (Riaz, 2013). Whether, how and for how long this accommodation holds, particularly in the context of the increasing significance of a globalised Islamic identity for the new generation of the Bangladeshi diaspora (Hoque, 2015; Riaz, 2013), remains to be seen.