Janjhat

The lives of Indo-Caribbean workers are explored in this novel. Portrayed are their hopes and despairs, their religious life, their poetry, their bawdiness, their sense of cultural continuity, and their awareness that their world has changed. Data and Big-Bye begin their arranged marriage as strangers, sexually ignorant and under the eagle eye of Big-Bye’s domineering mooma, who wants Data to be a proper Hindu daughter-in-law. Data has other ideas, and her struggle for independence sets off...