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MOBILIZING INDIA
Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad
By TEJASWINI NIRANJANA DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3828-4
Chapter One
"The Indian in Me": Studying the Subaltern Diaspora
Doh let me catch you in that foolishness Trying to reach the Indian in me ... Boy I am Trinbagonian I like soca action Take your Mohammed Rafi And bring Scrunter or Bally Only then you be talking to me. -Rikki Jai, "Sumintra" (lyrics by Gregory Ballantyne)
To be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside the region.... You don't go to Trinidad ... expecting to find Hindu pundits scuttling about country-roads on motor-cycles; to see pennants with ancient devices fluttering from temples; to see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against the usual Caribbean buildings of concrete and corrugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street names of one whole district of Port of Spain.... To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely. It is, in addition to everything else, to be the embodiment of an old verbal ambiguity. -V. S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon
The term "Indian" was used for more than a hundred years for the inhabitants of any newly-discovered country, and even Africans were so described. There are varieties and species of Indians allover the world.... [A]n East Indian means an inhabitant of the East Indies. This starts to be bewildering ... for when we have East Indians born in Trinidad, we should have to call them East Indian Trinidadians. And the people living in these islands are called Westindians. So by definition, what we have here is really an East Indian Trinidadian Westindian. Christopher Columbus must be killing himself with laugh. -Sam Selvon, "Three Into One Can't Go-East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian"
Today I hold no stronger conviction than that the Caribbean is our own experiment in a unique expression of human civilization, and that there can be no creative discovery of this civilization without the central and informing influence of the Indian presence. -George Lamming, "The Indian Presence as a Caribbean Reality"
India in the Subaltern Diaspora
I suggested in the introduction that the commonsensical basis for comparative study, in India as in many parts of the formerly colonized world, has been the implicit contrast between Europe (and now North America) and the rest. I went on to suggest that altering the primary reference point might yield new insights into, and fresh perspectives on, our contemporary questions. The altered frame of reference that informs this book tries to bring together two Southern locations in an effort to set up new comparisons.
This chapter explores the possibility of contrasting the formation of the "Indian" in the subaltern diaspora with the hegemonic construction of "Indians" in India, focusing on the indentured migration to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. In this particular attempt at comparative research, the history of the context being compared is profoundly entangled with my own in ways that have been made invisible in the postcolonial present. One cannot, for example, talk about Trinidad without talking about India, over 40 percent of the island's population being of subcontinental origin, the descendants of indentured laborers taken there between 1845 and 1917. The obverse, however, is clearly not true. One can talk endlessly about India without the Caribbean or most other Third World regions, including India's closest neighbors, featuring in the conversation. What difference might it make to how we in India think about our past-and perhaps how we think about our present, as well-to reflect on that which binds India to a west that is not the West?
The special challenge of comparative research when the two contexts are historically linked would be not to show how the cultural-political formations in each are "similar" or "different," but to find out how each situation is actually marked by the other. My attempt in this book will be to seek the kinship between representations of "Indianness" in India and those in Trinidad, but also to argue, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by indirection, that who the "Indian" is in Trinidad is likely to have implications for assertions of cultural identity in India.
My interest in Trinidad comes out of my long-time involvement in the teaching of West Indian literature and dates back to my first serendipitous visit to the island in 1994. I was spending three months in Jamaica, doing research on cultural politics in the Anglophone Caribbean. Having come to understand the West Indies through the reggae of Bob Marley, the poetry of Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, the cricket writings of C. L. R. James, and through Garveyism and Black Power, I, like many other researchers, saw the Caribbean as profoundly "African," its otherness from my own Indian context framed primarily in those terms. Of course, the demographic fact that Jamaica, the largest West Indian island, is overwhelmingly Afro-Caribbean in terms of its population only confirmed my conviction regarding the culture of the Caribbean at large. Having heard a great deal about Carnival in Trinidad, in the eastern Caribbean, a five-hour air journey away, I decided to make a short trip there to witness the festival. Before I left Jamaica, I was told by friends of the stark differences between that island and Trinidad, the Protestant seriousness of the one contrasted with the Catholic exuberance of the other. But nothing had prepared me for the visual shock of seeing a Caribbean population of which nearly half looked like me. In Jamaica, I was-safely-a foreigner, our Third Worldist solidarities undisturbed by conflicts of race or ethnicity. In Trinidad, I felt claimed by the East Indians as a fellow "Indian" and inserted sometimes into oppositional formations that asserted themselves against the dominant "African" culture.
I was deeply disturbed at being implicated in this manner, and my first impulse was to disavow all the tacit claims made on me and dismiss the East Indians as a marginal and reactionary group who could only undermine the possibility of conducting dialogue across the South. Much later, however, as I became more familiar with the details of Caribbean history and with contemporary Caribbean politics, I began somewhat unwillingly to recognize the salience of the "Indian" in that part of the world and to perceive how the dominant narratives of West Indianness excluded a large proportion of the population of at least two major countries: Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. As I see it now, one of the main causes of my discomfort in Trinidad was the encounter with "modern Indians" whose modernity did not seem to have been formed by the narratives of nation and citizenship that were part of my own interpretive and existential horizon in India. What I did not seem to understand in particular was the kind of negotiation with the "West" that Trinidadian Indians had undertaken in producing their modernity. Most disconcerting of all was my interaction with East Indian women, the semiotics of whose bodies and lives I could not read.
This book represents the attempt of a scholar from India to come to terms with the claims made on her by the Caribbean East Indian presence and to make a case for why critical arguments in India should take the East Indian seriously. My subjectivity as a modern Indian woman is tied to the other possibilities that opened up for Indian women elsewhere. More strongly put, I am what I am because of who the East Indian woman in Trinidad is. A central concern of this book, therefore, will be to create a space where we might productively bring together the question of women in India with the question of women in Trinidad in such a way as to reposition and add nuance to the frames within which both are customarily discussed.
Studying the Diaspora from India
There are specific problems associated with the study by Indians from India of the older diasporic communities, problems that are now becoming fore-grounded as the category of the non-resident Indian (NRI) not only acquires greater importance in the economic, political, and cultural realms, but also comes into currency in academic writing.
It is hard to think of the older diaspora as being "immigrant" in the sense in which Indians in the metropolitan countries can be described today, since the term suggests a certain recentness in the achievement of that status. East Indians, for example, reached the Caribbean as early as 1838 as indentured laborers and kept coming until 1917, when the system of indenture-ship was abolished. Large-scale Indian migration to the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and other First World countries, however, took place from the 1950s onward, to different destinations in different periods. A major percentage of the latter-day migrants to the Americas has consisted of highly educated professionals, usually upper caste and upper class, and their access to a Western-style education is what has facilitated their entry into their new homelands. The links these migrants maintain with the Indian Subcontinent are strong and tangible; in fact, they have, of late, become participants in what Benedict Anderson has called "long-distance nationalism" or "e-mail nationalism." In contrast, the older diasporic groups-although they also participate in the two-way traffic that expanding communication and transport networks have made possible-do not have access to the same kinds of contacts with the ruling elite in India that allow First World NRIS, for instance, to be players in contemporary Indian politics. Indeed, much of the present-day popular discourse on the Indian diaspora is inspired by the visibility and economic success of First World NRIs. As Arvind Das suggests, the role model for upwardly mobile Indians is not the "foreign-returned," as in earlier times, but the "foreign-settled." In the popular imagination, the latter category would include First World NRIS but not, for example, people of Indian origin in Fiji, Mauritius, or the Caribbean.
At a time such as now, when research agendas for diasporic studies in India are being shaped, it may be worth reminding ourselves that those who occupy positions in academic institutions are not exempt from the "common sense" that informs the general interest in NRIS and designates only certain varieties of them worthy of attention. In fact, we might want to reflect on the skewing of research questions in certain directions caused by how we define the NRI, as well as the subsequent lopsidedness in the allocation of funds for research: "There are no Fulbrights to Guatemala," to quote a former student in the English Department at the University of Hyderabad who wanted to study Latin American literature but could not find the finances to conduct research in that region. Relating that concern to the study of peoples of Indian origin, I shall examine the selective disavowal of certain kinds of "Indians" in the process of fashioning the new citizen of India as well as the new Indian in the world at large.
At a historical conjuncture in which the stakes in defining oneself as "Indian" are being reexamined both in India and in many overseas communities, it seems increasingly important to analyze the many complex ways in which different groups of people in different spaces claim "Indianness" and the various kinds of significance attached to this sort of claim. We would need to investigate the implications of the claim, it seems to me, for Indians both in the location where it arises and in India. I suggest that the construction of "Indian" identities in Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, Fiji, Mauritius, Tanzania, or South Africa (or even, to mention a different kind of context, in the Persian Gulf countries) is differently relevant to Indians in India compared with the NRI identities being shaped in the metropolitan, postcolonial diaspora located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, or Canada. This is not to deny the class differences between Indians in metropolitan locations, but to emphasize the cultural differences that still exist between the metropolis and the erstwhile colonies. A person of Indian origin living in a former colony like Trinidad would not be viewed with the respect accorded to one living in the United States. At the level of state recognition, this differentiation came to the fore at the 2003 celebration of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Day of the Traveling Indian or the Indian Abroad), during which the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Indian government announced the granting of dual citizenship to people of Indian origin from "dollar and pound" countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, but not from the other former colonies.
The general argument of this book is that an understanding of the discourses and practices of nationalist modernity, and of the formation of modern subjectivities, in India could be deepened by (1) an investigation of the processes by which subaltern migrants are disavowed; and (2) an inquiry into the contemporary cultural practices of those migrants. I argue that indentureship enabled a different sort of access to modernity for the subaltern diaspora from that which was being consolidated in India in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I draw here on the West Indian thinker C. L. R. James's notion that Caribbean society, with its plantation system based on the carefully regulated labor of slaves that was in place as early as three centuries ago, is in terms of organization of industrial production and ways of living the first "modern" society in the history of the world. Indentured laborers, both men and women, therefore entered into a capitalist system of production long before most of their counterparts in India. Moreover, they entered a system that had already created, through slavery, modern subjects who were not of Western origin. The composition of postslavery Trinidad society, then, left a significant impress on the forms of modernity that took shape among the East Indian migrants.
Migration through Indenture
When the British took over Trinidad in 1797, it had been a colony of Spain for nearly three centuries. The population consisted approximately of a couple of thousand whites, a few thousand free blacks, and about ten thousand slaves. At the time of the Haitian Revolution, there was a massive influx of French planters and their slaves (after 1782), and French-speakers (or those who spoke French-based patois) came to make up nearly 95 percent of the population. The slaves in Trinidad, as elsewhere, engaged in numerous forms of rebellious activity, ranging from feigning sickness to stealing to burning cane to "maroonage" (running away and forming free communities). After the abolition of slavery, refusing the offer of apprenticeship in near-slavery conditions on the plantations, the ex-slaves settled in villages they established around Port of Spain, along the Eastern Main Road, and in southern and central Trinidad. To meet the shortage of labor in the fields, planters-supported by the colonial government-resorted to promoting immigration, first of free blacks, Portuguese, and Chinese, and later of Indians, this last group being numerically the largest, at a count of over 100,000 laborers coming to more than ten times all the others put together.
As the historian Kusha Haraksingh points out, the kinds of human resources and infrastructure available in present-day Trinidad all came out of the sugar industry. Sugar is a difficult crop, needing labor at a particular time-labor that can be controlled. When slavery was abolished in 1838, the British colonies expressed a need for sugarcane-plantation labor to replace the freed slaves, who for the most part chose to work elsewhere than on the scene of their former exploitation. A more crucial factor leading to indentureship, some historians have suggested, was the need to depress the wages of free labor in a context in which former slaves had begun to agitate for better wages. About 8,000 African immigrants were brought over to increase the labor pool and resolve the problem, but many more would have Cane fields in Central Trinidad. Photo by Tejaswini Niranjana. been required for wages to come down. Neither increasing African immigration nor initiating immigration from China proved feasible. Eventually, a system was devised for recruiting laborers from the Indian Subcontinent, from areas where long spells of drought and famine had pauperized agriculturists and driven peasants away from their villages in search of work. Between 1845 and 1917, about 143,900 Indians were brought to Trinidad (with a total of over 500,000 to the Caribbean). While about 22 percent of emigrants (Haraksingh puts the figure at one-third) returned to India at the end of their period of indenture, several hundred of these reindentured and went back to the plantations. However, promise of a return passage was part of the early inducement to migrate, and returning migrants' tales contributed to the attractions of employment in the Caribbean. In Haraksingh's own case, his father's father was a soldier who ran away from India after the Mutiny of 1858. After serving his indenture, he claimed his return passage and went home to India but returned to Trinidad to look after his daughter when she was widowed.
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