- published: 09 Apr 2011
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Zenana (Persian: زنانه, Urdu: زنانہ, Hindi: ज़नाना). The literal meaning of the world meaning of Zenana is "of the women" or "pertaining to women". It contextually refers to the part of a house belonging to a Muslim family in South Asia reserved for the women of the household. The Zenana are the inner apartments of a house in which the women of the family live. The outer apartments for guests and men is called the Mardana.
The Zenana missions were by women missionaries, who went to Indian women in their own homes with the aim of converting them to Christianity. The Baptist Missionary Society inaugurated Zenana missions to India in the early 19th century. The concept was later taken up by other churches and extended to other countries.
By the 1880s, the "Zenana missions" added medical work to its ministry to encourage conversions and became Zenana Bible and Medical Mission. This involved recruiting female doctors, both by persuading female doctors in Europe to come to India and by encouraging Indian women to study medicine in their pursuit of conversion. They also provided schooling for girls, including the principles of the Christian faith. As a result, the Zenana missions helped break down the male bias against colonial medicine in India to a small extent.
Transglobal Underground (sometimes written as Trans-Global Underground or simply as TGU) is a London-based music collective who specialise in a fusion of western, oriental and African music styles (sometimes labelled as "world fusion" or "ethno-techno"). Their first four albums featured Natacha Atlas as lead singer and their single "Temple Head" was used in a Coca-Cola advertising campaign for the 1996 Olympic Games. In 2008 they won the BBC Radio 3 Award for World Music after the release of their seventh official album, Moonshout. Their eighth album, The Stone Turntable, was released in May 2011 and their most recent release is an EP of remixes from the album, titled We Come To Tear Your Wall Down.
Although Transglobal Underground has always had a fluid line-up, the two core members of the group are Tim Whelan (keyboards, guitar, flute, melodica, programming, vocals) and Hamilton Lee (percussion, drums, keyboards, programming). Throughout the group's history, Whelan and Lee have deliberately clouded their identities via multiple pseudonyms and obscure credits - Whelan generally operating under the alias of "Alex Kasiek" and Lee under the alias of "Hamid Mantu" (also "Man Tu" or "Chris Hamilton"). Whelan has also used his "Alex Kasiek" pseudonym outside TGU work (sometimes combining it with his real name, as he did for his guest appearance on the 2002 Project Dark album Gramophone De Luxe) and has sometimes implied that Kasiek is a separate person. (For the purposes of this article, Whelan and Lee will be predominantly referred to by their main pseudonyms of Alex Kasiek and Hamid Mantu.)