Every year, Regina has a multi-cultural festival called Mosaic, with 20+ pavilions put on by different ethnic groups. Lots of dancing, ethnic foods, and beer from around the world! Great fun!
There’s always been an Indian pavilion, but this year, there’s both an Indian pavilion and a Punjabi pavilion. Any idea why that would be? Is it something to do with the Indian Pakistani border disputes?
Not that I’m upset by it - means two pavilions with curry, instead of just one! Plus the new Bangladesh one, so that’s three curry fests!! Woo-hoo!
(Plus haggis and piping at the Scottish pavilion, of course - more woo-hoo! And Guinness and step-dancing at the Irish …)
I don’t know a factual answer–you’ll have to ask the organizers that–but I note that you say ethnic groups, not nationalities. India is a huge country with multiple ethnic groups.
I don’t know where Regina is, but imagine how the Scots would react if you told them, “No, we already have a British pavilion, aren’t you part of Britain?”
Well, but for the past 20+ years, we’ve just had an Indian pavilion, so I’m just curious why suddenly this year there’s an Indian and a Punjabi one.
I take your point about Britain - we’ve always had a Scottish pavilion, and an Irish one (note: very definitely Irish culture, not either Republic or NI. Long ago, there was a Welsh one, shared with the Scots. Never been an English one, to the best of my recollection.
It’s the sudden addition of the Punjabi one that I’m curious about.
I don’t know the specific reason either, but Punjab is actually a region that overlaps both India and Pakistan, with states in both countries bearing the name.
If the usual “Indian” pavilion organizers are in fact dominated by southern Indians (speaking a Dravidian language, eating dosas, etc), that might be a reason why the Punjabi folks felt it would make sense to have their own setup. The Punjab region is particularly far, in distance and in culture, from southern India.
And there was once a nutcase independence movement in Punjab, fuelled by Pakistan and the involvement of some Punjabi assholes. A lot of those assholes are now holed up in Canada. They call themselves Khalistanis, and have no love lost for India. That could be one reason.
But I’d say each Indian state deserves its own pavilion; there is so much variety in Indian cuisine that one “India pavilion” hardly does justice to a food festival.
IIRC, Punjab is the home of the Sikh religion. There was an active separatist movement that resulted in the bombing of an Air India plane en route from Canada to Britain. The bomb originated in Vancouver, where disputes over who would control the temples and their lucrative donations spilled into the streets and fights with baseball bats, drive-by murders, etc. The separatist movement culminated in the siege of the Golden Temple of Amritsar, where the separatists thoughtfully gathered with guns so they could be massacred.
Nowadays it seems the more moderate faction(s) dominate the Sikh religion. You don’t have the disputes you used to. But seriously, along with the religion, there’s a serious cultural element tied to the group. The have the people with the dedication no doubt to put together their own show. Don’t think of it a competition, think of it as reinforcement.
As CookingWithGas mentions, India is a huge subcontinent. Might as well ask why there are separate Spanish and Dutch pavilions instead of a European one. IIRC, wasn’t there a separate Tamil pavilion, or and I thinking of a different city’s activities? (Tamil encompasses a large area of southern India and some of Sri Lanka.) It’s a huge diverse region, mainly united by conquest, local and European.
(Actually, the separatists planned two bombings - London and Japan. They screwed up somewhere, a bomb went off the same day in Narita airport killing a baggage handler while being transferred. Either they planned to blow up two planes over water, or they planned to blow up two planes on the ground in London and Tokyo. either way, they couldn’t count time zones and one went off at the wrong time.)
My guess is that the “Punjabi” pavillion is something put up by the local Sikh community. The Sikh religion is centred in the Punjab, and Sikhs are a prominent and wealthy minority in Canada.
These sorts of things generally have only loose central organization. The organizers of the event don’t decide which nationalities or ethnicities they want represented; they just put out a general call for cultural organizations, and then those cultural organizations ask to put up a pavilion representing whatever they want. So what happened this year is that a couple of groups both asked to put up pavilions. One group identifies with India in general, and one group identifies with the Punjab region specifically. Since they’re different organizations, they have different pavilions.
In the same way, you could have a fair with a general “USA” tent sponsored by some sort of broad US association, e.g. maybe the local US Consulate, and also have regional pavilions sponsored by local tourism promoters and/or local companies. E.g. you could have a Hawaiian Pavilion, a Puerto Rican Pavilion, a pavilion co-sponsored by Disney and the Florida Department of Culture and Tourism, etc.
As Chronos said, it looks like the Mosaic organizers just put out a general call for participation, and various cultural associations bid to host pavilions. In many cases Regina has more than one cultural association representing the same ethnic group (or different ethnic groups from the same country), and there’s no reason why they all can’t have their own pavilions.
There’s always been two Ukrainian pavilions. My understanding is that it’s a religious and political divide. I think the China/Cathay split was between mainlanders and Taiwanese, but I’m not sure.
74westy, you may be right. I just don’t recall a Punjab one before.
Cathay was thought to be a separate country north of China. It was a matter of debate for some time. Interesting Wiki link on the word. Had to look it up out of curiosity because of the Cathay Pacific airline .
The Indian government forces were the far bigger assholes involved in that (Khalistan) movement. And don’t forget the ant-Sikh riots (arguably with police help) around India that killed thousands in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards.
