Vinay Lal
Associate Professor of History, UCLA
Manas
When one thinks of the Indian presence in the Caribbean,
a number of people at once come to mind. In the cricketing
world, the names of Sonny Ramdhin, Alvin Kallicharan,
and most of all Rohan Kanhai are not easily forgotten;
in the political realm, there is Cheddi Jagan, President
of Guyana, and Shridath Ramphal, who for many years
was the Commonwealth Secretary-General. The President
of Trinidad & Tobago for the last seven years
has been Hasan Ali, whose ancestors came to Trinidad
100 years ago. Most prominently, there is V.S. Naipaul,
whose house in Chaguanas, just south of Port of Spain
in Trinidad, still stands -- immense, forbidding,
abandoned, decayed, aloof, desolate, not quite unlike
Naipaul himself.
However, in thinking of the exceptional journey,
from servitude to resistance to freedom, undertaken
by Indians in the Trinidad and the rest of the Caribbean,
it is not the fame and fortune of some Indians that
is most striking, but the manner in which Indians
as a whole, despite the formidable adversities placed
in the way, have been able to retain their self-dignity,
preserve and enhance their culture, and enrich themselves
by a selective engagement with other cultures. The
landscapes, art, music, cuisine, and religious edifices
and customs of Indians in Trinidad provide an illuminating
testimony of the manner in which Indians have been
able to inscribe themselves into the history of Trinidad.
Having been severed from their homes and families,
many Indians made new friends on the long passage
to the Caribbean, only to lose them as each man was
shunted off to some plantation or the other. It was
all the more imperative, in an alien and hostile land,
that Indians be able to inhabit a space which they
could claim as their own, and to which they could
offer their attachment. Those who came from the Gangetic
heartland named many of the streets after the principal
areas from where they had been recruited, such as
Mathura, Kanpur, and Lucknow. Those hailing from Basti
in Uttar Pradesh created Basta Hall, while Faizabad
became transformed into Fyazabad; indentureds from
Barrackpore and Chander Nagar, both in West Bengal,
retained these names for the villages in Trinidad
to which they were despatched. While Europeans were
intent on claiming lands for their sovereigns and
for cartography, transforming land into space, Indians
sought to render space into place, localizing spaces
into habitats for communion with self, nature, and
fellow human-beings. In so doing, they also cherished
memories of the ancestral land.
In conditions of adversity, Indians were bound to
take refuge in their culture, thinking of it as the
bhakta in Indian devotional songs does of the boat
in which she or he is placed, which gathers the storm
unto itself, but they also rowed their boats to different
shores. Again, as in the case of bhakti, the classical
had perforce to yield to the vernacular, and other
transformations and adaptations were inevitable. Those
who have made a communalist reading of Indian history
might well be tempted to turn the history of Indians
in Trinidad and the Caribbean into another communalist
affair, and though this is not the place to enter
into a debate on Indian history, there can be little
doubt that Trinidad's history does not allow of communalist
interpretations. In the nineteenth century, the "Hosein"
festival, a celebration of Muharram, was the principal
festival for both Hindus and Muslims, and the Muharram
Massacre of 30 October 1884, in which at least 16
Indians were shot dead by the colonial police, was
a desperate attempt by the colonizers to infuse Indians
with a distinct and irreconcilable sense of being
'Muslims' and 'Hindus', besides being a brutal assault
on a burgeoning labor movement that paid little attention
to religious identities. In other spheres, too, such
as the celebration of Divali, Indians in Trinidad
have shown an extraordinary pluralism.
In food and patterns of eating, as well, Indians
were to show their capacity for adaptation. Those
caste distinctions that made impossible commensality
in India were, in the conditions of migration, broken
down, and vegetarianism was to have little appeal
among Indo-Trinidadians. Tandoori cooking remains
unknown among Indians in Trinidad and the Caribbean,
and curry is made with a curry powder, rather than
by mixing a curry paste. But it is the prevalence
of "curry" in Trinidadian food that impresses,
and in most respects Indo-Trinidadian food bears an
astonishing similarity to certain varieties of Indian
food. As one author of a cookbook on Caribbean food
was to note in 1974, "the Indians have had a
deep effect upon the Caribbean Cuisine primarily through
their enthusiasm for curry, which is becoming as much
a part of Caribbean as of Indian cooking." Trinidadian
fast food, usually eaten with chutney, is mainly of
Indian origin: their saheena is like pakoras, "doubles"
is a variation on the channa batura, though more in
the form of a chick-peas sandwich, and their kachowrie
has a marked similarity to its namesake in India.
Though many Afro-Trinidadians will not admit it, even
their own main meals are now predominantly Indian
in origin, for alongside callooloo there is curried
goat, and roti is easily the most popular food in
Trinidad. Indeed, to understood just how far roti
has come to be a marker of 'Indianness', and the resentment
felt by some Afro-Trinidadians, consider that in the
1961 election, the black party took up the slogan:
"We don't want no roti government." Roti
shops proliferate, and though in India the middle-classes
have adopted a Western-style breakfast, complete with
poor white bread and corn flakes, in Trinidad roti
with dhal and subzi or tarkari constitutes the bread
and butter of most people at breakfast and dinner
and often at lunch as well. The prevalence of Indian
food is reflected in calypso, and many songs sing,
often with mockery, scorn, and disturbing caricature,
of 'roti' and 'chutney'.
In Trinidad, however, chutney is not only a condiment,
but a form of music that Indians have made their own.
In the arena of music, as in others, there appears
to have been a divide between Afro-Trinidadian music
and Indo-Trinidadian music. Calypso, which occupies
the mantle of the 'national music', complemented by
pan, came to be seen as the exclusive preserve of
Afro-Trinidadians, though Drupatee and a few other
Indians came to acquire a considerable reputation
as calypsonians. Likewise, Indians never made the
music of steel bands their own, though again today
an Indian, Jit Samaroo, is probably the most well-known
orchestrator of pan music. But it was in the creation
of chutney songs and rhythms that Indians found their
own soca or soul music. Taking with easy abandon rhythms
from pan and rap, and drawing from the well-springs
of Indian folk and even more so film music, Indians
evolved a distinct musical form. If the prevalence
of Hindi words in chutney helped to maintain a living
contact between Indo-Trinidadians and those they left
behind in India, today Sundar Popo, Anand Yankaran,
and other chutney singers have become one of the principal
threads around which Indo-Trinidadians in Canada,
the U.S., and the U.K., three countries to which they
have migrated in large numbers, weaves the memory
of the homeland.