'South Asianness': new nationality or convenient catchall? The term has achieved wide currency today - often for the sake of political expedience - but it is hotly disputed within the diaspora as well as the regions themselves. Is 'South Asianness' a diverse and resilient state of being or just 'Indianess' in disguise?

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Akademi, in collaboration with the ICA, presents Sunil Khilnani (author of 'The Idea of India' and a forthcoming biography of 'Nehru') in a one-day symposium examining the origin, development and relevance of the terms to those living within the bounds of this pan-national label.

'No Man's Land' also features Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (The Independent), Jeevan Deol (St John's College, Cambridge), Andrée Grau (Roehampton Institute), Shobana Jeyasingh (Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company), Keith Khan (Moti Roti), Pavan Varma (Nehru Centre), Parminder Vir (Carlton TV), Sanjoy Roy (The Guardian) and Sanjay Sharma (University of East London).

Speakers Biographies

Daud Ali is lecturer in Early South Asian History at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London. He is the author of Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming [2004] ) and Querying the Medieval: The History of Practice in South Asia (with Ronald Inden and Jonathan Walter, Oxford University Press, 2000). He is also editor of Invoking the Past: the Uses of History in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a journalist who has written for The Guardian, Observer, The New York Times, Newsweek,The Evening Standard, the Mail and other newspapers, and is now a regular columnist on The Independent. She is also a radio and television broadcaster and author of several books, including True Colours (IPPR) and No Place Like Home (Virago). She is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre and the winner of numerous awards, including the 2002 George Orwell Prize for political journalism. In 2003 she returned her MBE as a protest against the new empire in Iraq and a growing republicanism. In 2004, she will be awarded an honorary degree by the Oxford Brookes University.

Jeevan Deol is Research Fellow in Indian History at St John's College, Cambridge. He has written on security and faith issues for The Times and The Independent and has presented programmes on BBC Radio 4. He is currently a regular contributor to the 'Today' programme's 'Thought for the Day' slot. Born into one of the first South Asian families to have migrated to North America, Dr Deol has lived in the UK for nearly a decade. He is one of the founding members of the UK Punjab Heritage Association, a voluntary organisation dedicated to preserving and promoting the material heritage of the Punjab in the UK and abroad.

Andrée Grau is Reader in Dance and Programme Convener (MA Ballet Studies) at Roehampton University of Surrey. She trained in dance in her native Switzerland and in London, and has carried out fieldwork among the Venda in Southern Africa, the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands (Australia) and in Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, India. She is the author of Dorling Kindersley's Eyewitness Dance (1998) and co-editor of Europe Dancing: Perspectives on Theatre Dance and Cultural Identity (2000), amongst others. She is director of the Leverhulme project 'South Asian Dance in Britain: Negotiating cultural identity through dance' and co-director of the Arts and Humanities Research Board Centre for Cross-Cultural Music and Dance Performance, a collaboration between the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of Surrey Guildford and Roehampton.

Shobana Jeyasingh MBE, born in Madras and now living in London, has directed the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company since 1988. Her choreography for the company includes Transtep (2003), [h]Interland (2002), Phantasmaton (2002), Surface Tension (2000), Palimpsest (1996), Romance ... with Footnotes (1993) and Configurations (1988). Shobana has recently received a NESTA dreamtime award. She was awarded a London Dance and Performance Award in 1988, received her third Digital Dance award in 1992, and in 1993, an Arts Council award in acknowledgement of her valuable contribution to the arts over the past decade. She has also been awarded two Time Out dance awards and in 1993, her company was the overall winner of the Prudential Award for the Arts. Shobana was awarded an MBE in January 1995 and holds an honorary MA from Surrey University and an honorary doctorate from De Montfort University, Leicester.

Keith Khan is a spectacularist. He was trained in Fine Art and worked as a carnivalist for many years. Recent commissions (2003) include Escapade, featuring 150 dancers and film projection, staged on the buildings of the South Bank Centre; and Waterscapes, a performance series in and around the fountains of Somerset House. He was Director of Design for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games 2002, and Artistic Director of Celebration Commonwealth, for the Queen¹s Jubilee Parade (London, 4 June 2002). He is an advisor to the British Government Departments¹ for Culture, Media and Sport, and Education and Skills. Khan is also a founder and Artistic Director of motiroti, an arts led company working with people and new technology. Recent motiroti projects have been presented at the Barbican, Tate Modern, Royal Albert Hall, Romaeuopa, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), New York.

Sunil Khilnani is Professor of Politics and Director, South Asia Studies, at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC. Formerly Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, his publications include Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale University Press, 1993), The Idea of India (Penguin Books, 3rd edition 2003) and as co-editor, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Sanjoy Roy writes on dance for the Guardian, Dance Now, Dancing Times, Dance Theatre Journal, Pulse and other publications. He is author of ´Dirt, Noise,Traffic: Contemporary Indian Dance in the Western City´ in Dance in the City, ed. H. Thomas (Macmillan, 1997).

Sanjay Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies, University of East London. He co-edited the collection, Dis-Orienting Rhythms: the politics of the New Asian Dance Music (Zed Books) and is currently completing a book called Multicultural Encounters: alterity, politics and pedagogy (Palgrave).

Author-diplomat Pavan K Varma has written over a dozen books, including a critically acclaimed biography of the poet Ghalib, a widely praised book on Lord Krishna, and the best selling The Great Indian Middle Class. His new book, Being Indian: the truth about why the 21st century will be India's, has just been launched in India. He has served in New York and in Moscow and as High Commissioner for India in Cyprus. In India, he has been press secretary to the President of India, and official spokesman of the Ministry of External Affairs. He is currently the Director of the Nehru Centre in London.

Parminder Vir OBE is an award winning film and television producer and diversity advisor at Carlton Television, where she has the dual responsibility of developing talent and policy for achieving diversity on and behind the screen. At Carlton she has celebrated diversity by creating and supporting new award ceremonies such as the highly acclaimed MOBO, EMMA and CMAA awards. Before joining Carlton Television, she managed her own independent production company, Formation Films. Parminder was awarded an OBE in the Queen's birthday honours list for services to Broadcasting and is a board director of the UK Film Council, charged with developing a strategy for the British Film Industry.