Kateryna Dovbnya so loved Indian movies that she went to the theater whenever they were shown in her native Nikopol, a Dnipropetrovsk Oblast city located 510 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. She even taped the songs so she could enjoy them anytime and also learned Hindi.
More than three decades later, Dovbnya teaches Hindi at Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University and has become a go-to person for discussing Indian-Ukrainian cultural ties.
“I liked a lot the exotic atmosphere of this country: the unique art, dance, songs, music. After I got fascinated by an Indian film, I subscribed to a special magazine called ‘India’ published by the Indian Embassy in the Soviet Union in order to broaden my knowledge about India. Indian culture got really deep into my soul.” She adores, in particular, the seminal book, “The Discovery of India” by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.
Dancing as cultural code
Indian culture has found many ways to permeate Ukrainian life, from academia to sport, dance to yoga.
Ksenia Suslova teaches classical Indian dance of the Odissi style.
“Indian classical dances used to be traditionally performed by danseuses in temples as a devotion for gods and goddesses. Each dance carries content and shows textuality, for each movement is filled with content,” said Suslova, who lives her dream in her Silk Route oriental dance studio in Kyiv.
A dancer rehearses before a concert at the Silk Way Oriental Dance school in Kyiv on Jan. 14, 2020. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Indian dancing is practiced in a few Ukrainian cities and the Indian Embassy helps several dance schools across Ukraine with rent and utilities. The embassy also supports several Indian dancing festivals. The Rhythms of Joy festival in Kyiv and the Clatter of Bracelets event in Kharkiv attract participants from all over Ukraine as well as neighboring countries.
“You must train every day like eating, drinking, and sleeping,” Suslova’s guru told her. She sees her mission as popularizing Indian culture in Ukraine, where classical dance is not as popular as Bollywood and other contemporary styles.
Suslova believes that the Indian and the Ukrainian cultures have lots of similarities, especially in their roots. To prove the point, there are Indian and Ukrainian fusion dances. “We put on stage a dance called ‘Ukraine-India,’ where we used the Indian moves and the Ukrainian moves and some of them are very similar, so we brought two of them together.”
Ticket to cricket
Indians boast a sizeable business community of about 1,000 families in Ukraine “doing good business in pharma, in metals, IT, sunflowers and different other businesses,” according to Alok Bansal, who is in charge of the India Club in Ukraine and has co-founded the International Society for Indian-Ukrainian Friendship.
Bansal estimates that there are several hundred Indian businesses in Ukraine and the club is there to promote “sports, culture, tourism and all.” As India Club in Ukraine is primarily a business association it is “having some good contacts with local government in case anybody is having some kind of problem and in any case we do cultural functions here.”
A player hits a ball during the finals of the Champions Trophy 2017 cricket game on Sept. 3 in Kyiv. The India Club in Ukraine supports the development of cricket in Ukraine and seeks official recognization of the game. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
Indeed, when it comes to celebrating the Indian festivals of Holi and Diwali, the Indian business community is always ready to help and participation is high.
“Some 400–500 people are coming to that party — Indians, Ukrainians and, of course, a lot of diplomats and friends from different countries like Turkey, USA, UK and all,” Bansal explains.
The club’s members miss cricket badly in Ukraine as the game “is a religion in India” like football in Argentina. To ease the pain of staying idle in Ukraine Indians have teamed up with the Australians and other expats to run cricket championships in Kaharlyk, a small town lying 80 kilometers to the south of Kyiv.
Dr. Alok Bansal heals patients in Kyiv and leads the activities of India Club in Ukraine. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
As for Ukrainians in cricket, “they can join and they are already playing.” Indeed, Kaharlyk native Oleksiy Lyubchych even became Ukraine’s cricket champion with his Ananta Riders team. Upon winning the title Lyubchych shared that his “heart would keep stopping for the last 50 minutes of the match and then sped in such a rhythm that the chest almost exploded.”
“Ukraine’s and India’s relations, notwithstanding any geopolitical changes, have always been positive and steady, which is pleasing,” Dovbnya sums up and notices that “many Ukrainian specialists have helped independent India develop … and taking that into consideration we have always enjoyed good relations.”
Growing through yoga
India’s preeminent cultural gift to the world is likely yoga.
Yoga is “a way of development, which transcends nationality or preferences. By itself yoga is nonreligious,” says yoga teacher and founder of YYoga studio in Kyiv Yaroslav Tokarev. He concedes that “although the sources of our knowledge about yoga came from India and we rely on them, yoga does not presuppose that a person sticks to the Indian way of life or views.”
This universality might be key to yoga’s popularity. Tokarev sees yoga as “a system of complete development of a person on the physical, mental and spiritual levels.”
Yoga teacher Yaroslav Tokarev teaches a class in his YYoga studio on Jan. 16, 2020 in Kyiv. Yoga has grown in popularity in Ukraine and is now practiced by thousands of Ukrainians at home, work, or in professional yoga clubs. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Spirituality is not to be mixed with religion, Tokarev warns. Yoga is not a religion but a practical art for achieving goals through “feeling, perceiving, and realizing, actually unlocking your potential.”
Tokarev believes that the multiculturalism of India and the Indians’ acceptance of others’ creeds and attitudes go hand in hand with yoga’s teachings. “I respect and love India for having learned from the abundance of creeds that each of them is to be treated with tolerance,” he says.
