Listen for the drumming on the other side

I know I said I wouldn’t write here until September, but if I apologise in the vernacular of a newfound friend, you might forgive me: sometimes words misbehave, they form a mutiny against their incarceration, congregate without permission in the fingertips, and become fugitive…

I am in Bangalore, India. I feel privileged to have been a founding participant in Naduve, which took place from July 12 to 15. Naduve means ‘in between’ in the local language here, Kannada. But I didn’t find it in between, I found it right on, and it felt like the centre of the universe for a few days.

I can share two versions of what I just experienced, the first in descriptive professional jargon, the second as personal testimony.

Naduve is an innovative retreat, training and networking initiative for scholars, activists and artists from the global majority. The first event in India was made financially possible by a response to Bayo Akomolafe’s call for paraphilanthropy, which is about supporting “fugitivity, a longing for the non-legible, and support for social experimentation within undercultures of practice”. The gathering was inspired by the theory, practice and teaching of the Dancing with Mountains Collective, Madhulika Banerjee’s scholarship on the Politics of Knowledge, and it was co-created/curated by Cambridge academic Tobias Müller, mission steward, network weaver and late night dancer Ishaan Aggarwal, and organised collaboratively by a youthful team of ‘rythmn keepers’. 1

The participants were civil society leaders from all over India and others with layered identities from the US, the UK, and South Africa. Civil society here can be understood as neither business nor government, but the shrinking spaces of education, media, ecology, culture, and activism, where people seeking a different kind of world can support each other. The gathering features a multi-modal programme of ideas, music, art, dance and ritual, but the schedule is fluid and emergent. The event took place at The School of Ancient Wisdom in Bangalore, which is an enigmatic place with theosophical influences, good rasam, thin cats, chubby fish, and a statue of a Prometheus-like light-bearer at the centre…

I’m now writing this from my the home of my in-laws, the day after, a few miles away.

I find myself asking: What was that?

For me, Naduve was an unexpected invitation twelve days before the event, and just enough familiarity with the place and some participants to see myself