Search Results

This chapter provides background data on Indo-Caribbean history and situates that culture's development in the context of diasporic studies as a whole. It provides an overview of North Indian Bhojpuri music culture and of Indo-Caribbean music culture, with reference to traditional Bhojpuri aspects, creolized entities like chutney-soca, and the ramifications of exposure to North Indian “great tradition” musics—both pop and classical—since the 1940s. It argues that the various trajectories and the form of Bhojpuri diasporic music in general must be attributed primarily not to inherent features of particular genres or to the activities of particular artists but rather to intricate dynamics of diaspora culture—in this case, Bhojpuri Caribbean diasporic culture.

This concluding chapter presents some hypotheses and conclusions about Bhojpuri diasporic dynamics, broader implications for diaspora studies in general, the relation of music genres like tassa to Afrocreole culture, and the implications of this relationship for our understanding of the phenomenon of Caribbean creolization. It suggests that Indo-Caribbean culture, including music culture, can be seen as an ongoing dialectic product of three primary cultural realms—the transplanted but deeply local Bhojpuri little tradition, the imported North Indian great traditions (whether of visiting godmen or Bollywood blockbusters), and Afrocreole culture. The relation between the local Bhojpuri little tradition and the imported Indian great traditions is complex and in some ways competitive. While some cultural activists do lament the hegemony of imported filmsong over local music, others seem to feel that both Bhojpuri traditional songs and Bollywood fare can comfortably coexist.

This chapter identifies a palpable strain of doubt about the nationalist credentials of Indo-Caribbean people in the prominent Windrush novels of the period. Discussing novels by George Lamming and Edgar Mittelholzer, the essay first illustrates how, overtly or otherwise, the period’s literary emphasis on a unified national body offered little room for people in the region’s Asian diaspora. It then points to substantial archival evidence from the two major Indo-Trinidadian periodicals of the postwar years–The Observer and The Spectator–to indicate how, far from their portrayal in the period’s novels, Indo-Caribbeans were intricately and earnestly engaged in imagining themselves into Caribbean nationalism while still acknowledging their Indian inheritances.

This chapter delineates the multilayered Indo-Caribbean experience of the region’s nationalism as it sought to balance pride in the realization of independence from Britain on the subcontinent in 1947 with a recognition of the need to forge permanent affective links within the Caribbean basin. Examining Khan’s The Jumbie Bird in the context of the influential creolization theories of Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant, the author argues that Khan’s book advocates for a version of creolized Caribbean nationalism inflected by its characters’ South Asian lineage. By highlighting the novel’s explicit repudiation of the “back-to-India” movement and its valorization of a syncretic Indo-Caribbean aesthetic practice, the chapter reveals that Khan’s political aesthetic is quite in keeping, on a structural level, with the more celebrated, more Afro-centric theories of creolization in concert with which it arose.

Most of the North Indian music heritage brought to the Caribbean consisted of folk styles and genres that were predominantly text-driven, in that their expressive interest lay primarily in lyric content rather than purely musical dimensions. The vitality of such genres in the Caribbean has been gravely undermined by the decline of the Bhojpuri language. And yet, the fate of these music idioms has not been one of uniform decadence. This chapter discusses three genres of Bhojpuri-region narrative song—birha, the Ālhā epic, and antiphonal Ramayan singing—suggesting how their functions, inherent features, and relation to print culture have conditioned their trajectories in the Caribbean context.

This chapter discusses two distinct traditional entities in Indo-Caribbean music culture—the antiphonal folksong genre called chowtal and the dantāl, a common metallophone—which have flourished in the diaspora. In fact, they have become considerably more widespread, on a per capita basis, than their counterparts in North India. In the process, they illustrate how the neotraditional stratum of the international Bhojpuri diaspora—including both the Caribbean and Fiji—can constitute an entity that shares features that, despite being of traditional Indian origin, nevertheless are distinct from the Bhojpuri ancestral culture. These phenomena illustrate how, in this sense, neotraditional Bhojpuri diasporic music culture is best seen not as a microcosm of its nineteenth-century Bhojpuri-region ancestor, but as an entity with its own distinctive features, in which inherited features may assume trajectories quite distinct from their North Indian counterparts.

This chapter is devoted to the more general topic of the Indo-Caribbean Bhojpuri legacy's confrontation with music flowing from North India itself in the postindenture period, in the form of mass-mediated film music and other pop, including panregional Hindi devotional songs. Of particular relevance is the influence of these imported sounds on wedding songs, Kabir-panthi music, and Ramayan singing. It argues that most Indo-Caribbeans do not regard imported Indian music as a stultifying hegemon; they see it, rather, as an inexhaustible potential resource that can provide a cultural depth and continuity unavailable to Afro-creoles, alienated as they are from the traditions of their African forebears.

This chapter examines Indo-Creole subjectivity in Guyana, and argues that the different trajectories for Indo-Caribbean social and cultural being in the New World still depend upon the manner of achieving and consolidating Creole indigeneity. It considers the links between kala pani or Indian Diaspora, and black Atlantic or African Diaspora trajectories of modernity with regard to labor and native displacement, and examines these links by focusing on social, cultural, and historical writings by Indo-Guyanese, such as Cheddi Jagan. Using the renaming of the Timehri International Airport to the Cheddi Jagan International Airport as a point of departure, the chapter explores the ways in which Indo-Caribbean peoples, specifically the Indo-Guyanese, articulate belonging in the production of a first-person plural connotation that is dialectically structured both materially and ideologically.

This chapter presents theoretical and historical sketches of Guyana and Trinidad. Both countries share a similar colonial history and ethnic makeup, with people of Indian descent representing 39.3 percent of the total population in Guyana and 35 percent in Trinidad. The focus on Trinidad and Guyana, then, stems from the social and political significance of the Indian communities in these countries. The problematic coexistence of the dominant African creole culture and Indian culture in the Caribbean is central to explaining the location of Indo-Caribbean populations within their particular socioeconomic, political, and gendered spaces. In addressing the notion of “Indian identity,” both Indo-Trinidadians and Indo-Guyanese ask whether their respective identities reflect the “purity” of their Indian ancestry. In both spaces, the Indian community must determine the extent to which they want to associate their “Indianness” with India, or with the nation-state in which they were born.

This concluding chapter argues that creolization is not a linear process that leads to a more homogeneous society but rather a dialectical process that is negotiated along lines of race, class, and gender. The fact that Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians are expressing their differences does not negate the creolization process. Many see creolization as a movement toward one homogeneous culture that has elements of all previous cultural influences. However, creolization is a dialectical process whereby multiple changing cultures exist side by side, each reformulating elements within their respective contexts. This ultimately highlights the much broader question of not just how the Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadian communities define themselves within their respective societies, but how they define themselves vis-à-vis the broader Caribbean region and how one goes about analyzing Indo-Caribbean identity within the broader context of a “Caribbean identity.”

This chapter examines the ways in which colonialism and imperial expansion have functioned as engines for processes of religion-making. Before the emergence of "Hinduism" in the early twentieth century, Indian and African Trinidadians frequently came together in temporary ritual communities that defied colonial assumptions about religion and race. They had other ways of imagining and performing sociality. It was only through the disciplining effects of colonial institutions that those assumptions became naturalized for colonized populations in Trinidad.