A Festival!

Planning for Different Moons has now started in earnest after meeting with Shamshad Khan (above) and confirmation from the Whitaker (below) that they would be delighted to host an exhibition starting in October 2014. 

With a substantial programme of community workshops in the run up to the exhibition and with a good number of related events taking place during the exhibition, we've decided that  it makes sense to think of the whole thing as a Festival. The Different Moons Festival!

So my research into the history of the community continues. Shamshad and I will soon be meeting with interested individuals and groups, planning workshops and other creative activities; finally the inevitable budgeting has begun with the intention of making funding applications to support the programme. 

A year away...

Haslingden, late 1950s, photograph courtesy of RM Nostalgic Railways. The period when the first of the immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were beginning to arrive in Rossendale to work in the cotton textile mills that were short of a labour force, especially for the unpopular shifts - usually the night-work. 

If you were trying to find this scene today you would be stuck. The station was closed in 1964, the railway disappeared and its route is now the A56 Haslingden By-Pass, opened in the early 1980s. The chimneys have been demolished too.

We also have agreed with the Whitaker (Rossendale's Museum & Art Gallery) to work towards an exhibition in exactly a year's time celebrating the history of the South Asian Community in Rossendale. We've also started planning the next stage of Different Moons, and soon expect to begin working on new projects within Haslingden.   

Attock

I had a meeting at the home of Muzammil Quraishi and Yasmine Choudry on Sunday and, along with the reading I've been doing over the past few weeks, I now have a far clearer idea how to develop this project. Muz and Yasmine gave me a very succinct over-view of the history of the Islamic community in Rossendale. Muz has studied and written about this and I'm very grateful for him loaning me his book which deals, alongside much else, with this history. 

Many of the immigrants to the Haslingden area were from the Chach region north of the modern day town of Attock in the Punjab, Northern Pakistan. Campbellpore (at the bottom of the map) is the old Raj colonial name for Attock. It's north-west of Islamabad. 

Another area from which people emigrated to Rossendale was around the city of Mirpur, in Kashmir, south-east of Islamabad. Here, development of dam projects drove many agricultural workers from their lands just as there was a demand for labour (especially for the dirty, night-shift work) in the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and in the early 1970s these things coincided to direct male emigrants from this area to places like Haslingden. 
(Map copyright YASIR Amin Hazrovi)

The Islamic Supplementary School

A few weeks ago I was invited to a meeting of the Islamic Supplementary School in Haslingden, and was impressed by the families and their children who had created this group in a short space of time to enhance their learning and teachings from the Koran. I was made very welcome, and talked with some of the leaders at the school about 'Different Moons' and how we could use their knowledge in helping put together an exhibition about the history of the south Asian community in Haslingden and the Rossendale Valley. 

Another useful link came through talking with Professor John Hyatt who lives in Haslingden and is the Director of MIRIAD, the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design. John was once a Trustee at Horse + Bamboo, and I often bump into him at art events locally. I know he, and MIRIAD, have strong links with Asian artists, and I asked him about textile artists who might be able to feed into Different Moons in the way that the poet Shamshad Khan has with her writing. John put me in touch with Alnoor Mitha who told me that in 2014 the Asia Triennial will be taking place in Manchester and the region. One of the artists involved will be Nadim Chaudry, from Nottingham and with Punjabi roots, whose stunning work can be seen on his website at http://kashifnadimchaudry.com/portfolio/ . I'm looking into whether we can in any way involve Nadim with Different Moons.

Moving here

There's a very interesting website 'Moving Here' which documents the main groups of people who have migrated to England during the past 200 years. There's an extensive section on South Asian communities and it begins to explain some of the features of the groups that came to Lancashire and other small milltowns in the  period after the end of the Second World war. You can visit the South Asian pages by clicking on this link, http://www.movinghere.org.uk/galleries/histories/asian/asian.htm

The site includes some fascinating photographs. The one above is an early photograph - an on-board prayer time on SS Bengalen, taken in 1910 when south Asian seaman were know as lascars, a word I associate with Victorian novels. It also has a 'trace your ancestors' facility. 

At Haslingden Library

Yesterday's meetings at Haslingden Library were fun, and very useful. My neighbour at the studio, Nusrat, came along and brought a few of her friends. I introduced them to Shamshad and outlined my ideas for the Different Moons project. The group of us then had a good humored and wide-ranging discussion. Among many things, memories of parents; childhood reminiscenses; the state of the country - and poetry. As we talked it became clearer that the idea of an exhibition, celebrating the south Asian community in Rossendale, with one aspect of it being about the history of that community but another a creative programme revolving around poetry and textile work, would be both well received and effective in bringing people together.

Towards the end of the meeting we were joined by Leesa Amin, who talked more about her youth groups, during which it emerged that the library had been fire-bombed, and that rather than respond by adding more security measures the librarians asked for a free-for-all youth room with PCs and other facilities. This - the Headspace - has been a great success, and when we visited Shamshad met two of the young girls she remembered from the work at St James School. One promptly told her that she had gone to on to find out the meaning of her name (a task Shamshad had suggested) and that it was ' strong'. For the work with the 11-19 age group Shamshad suggested that she worked alongside a rapper/poet, Avaez Mohammed,  who she knew from Blackburn.

Later we were joined by Esther and went to the new Positive Start centre in Rawtenstall. Here we met with Shaju Ahmed; heard about developments at the centre, and discussed ways in which the two organisations could work together to find funding for the project. All very impressive. 

A day of meetings...

Tomorrow I've a series of meetings that I hope will set Different Moons on a clear route forward. The idea of aiming for an exhibition about the local south Asian heritage community has been well received in informal discussions, and both the Whitaker (Rossendale's museum) and Haslingden Library have expressed an interest in hosting aspects of it. So the first meeting will be with Shamshad in which we'll look at how we can create an exhibition which is both informative and has at its heart a core of individuals stories and reminscences about their personal experiences. 

Then we're meeting some of the interested partners at Haslingden Library, including Nusrat Rahmen from the sewing group, and Leesa Amin who runs the youth group at the library. After peeking in at the youth group we'll head down to Rawtenstall to talk to Shaju Ahmed from Positive Start. Positive Start is a Rossendale-based organisation set up "to support and assist young people, particularly from a disadvantaged and Black Minority Ethnic groups..." It was set up in 2003 and has recently raised the money to open a new youith centre in Rawtenstall. Esther met with their committee a few weeks ago and explained the ideas behind Different Moons. They were highly enthusiastic, and tomorrow we end the day by following up that first meeting.