INTO THE INDO-CARIBBEAN

Written By Lauren Baccus

Histories, remembrances and imaginings of the South Asian diaspora

East Indian Immigrants and indentured workers; Guyana, 1870-1931.
The National Archives UK.

Books: Non-Fiction
Lamarsh Roopnarine - The Indian Caribbean: Migration and Identity in the Diaspora
Winner of the 2018 Gordon K. and Sybil Farrell Lewis Award for the best book in Caribbean studies from the Caribbean Studies Association. This book tells a distinct story of Indians in the Caribbean--one concentrated not only on archival records and institutions, but also on the voices of the people and the ways in which they define themselves and the world around them. Through oral history and ethnography, Lomarsh Roopnarine explores previously marginalized Indians in the Caribbean and their distinct social dynamics and histories, including the French Caribbean and other islands with smaller South Asian populations. He pursues a comparative approach with inclusive themes that cut across the Caribbean.

Lamarsh Roopnarine - Indo-Caribbean Indenture: Resistance and Accommodation, 1838-1920
Indo-Caribbean Indenture investigates the relatively little-studied but growing field of the experiences of East Indians in the Caribbean from their arrival in 1838 to the end of indentureship in 1920. It places the indenture period into a larger socio-economic framework of imperialism, the post-slavery attempt to solve the labour shortage and the gender-relations which overarched the whole transaction in human bodies. By utilizing a new analytical perspective offered by current writers on the subject of the subaltern, the work departs from the usual historical approach and offers a fresh interpretation. The work will be of particular interest to historians, sociologists and social scientists who focus on the Caribbean, migration, ethnicity, gender studies, peasant resistance, labour history and cultural continuity and change.

Verene A. Shepherd - Maharani's Misery: Narratives of a Passage from India to the Caribbean
Maharani is a most significant contribution to the new generation of scholarship on the history of Indian indentured migration, deeply researched and sensitive to the new approaches of intellectual enquiry. The author's ability to read the contemporary texts against the grain of official pronouncements and popular prejudice against women in particular and indentured labourers generally, is truly impressive. I have no doubt that this book will find a place on the shelves of every serious scholar of the subject. - Professor Brij Lal, Australian National University, Canberra Maharani's Misery is a major contribution to the "peopling" of Indo-Caribbean history in the late nineteenth century.... It enables us to go beyond the inanimate history which speaks primarily of the power of the indentureship system, the process of controlling the "bound coolies". Here, the "subaltern" has a voice even in the midst of the tragedy one gets a feel for the women as actors, however minor. The work belongs, also, to the history of resistance in the region. - Dr Clem Seecharan, University of North London

Dave Ramsaran & Linden F Lewis - Caribbean Masala: Indian Identity in Guyana and Trinidad
Winner of the 2019 Gordon K. & Sybil Lewis Book Award. In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean under extreme oppression. Dave Ramsaran and Linden F. Lewis concentrate on the Indian descendants' processes of mixing, assimilating, and adapting while trying desperately to hold on to that which marks a group of people as distinct. In some ways, the lived experience of the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad represents a cultural contradiction of belonging and non-belonging. In other parts of the Caribbean, people of Indian descent seem so absorbed by the more dominant African culture and through intermarriage that Indo-Caribbean heritage seems less central. In this collaboration based on focus groups, in-depth interviews, and observation, sociologists Ramsaran and Lewis lay out a context within which to develop a broader view of Indians in Guyana and Trinidad, a numerical majority in both countries. They address issues of race and ethnicity but move beyond these familiar aspects to track such factors as ritual, gender, family, and daily life. Ramsaran and Lewis gauge not only an unrelenting process of assimilative creolization on these descendants of India, but also the resilience of this culture in the face of modernization and globalization.

Brinda J Mehta - Diasporic (Dis)Locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the Kala Pani
Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism.
The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to determine whether the idea of "cultural continuity", is in fact a postcolonial reality or a fictionalized myth. The Indian women who braved the treacherous crossing of the Atlantic, of the kala pani, to Trinidad and Guyana provided courage, determination, self-reliance and sexual independence to their literary granddaughters who in turn used the kala pani as the necessary language and frame of reference to position Indo-Caribbean female subjectivity with equating

Gabrielle Jamela Hosein (Editor) Lisa Outar (Editor) - Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (2016)
Bringing together three generations of scholars, thinkers and activists, this book is the first to trace a genealogy of the specific contributions Indo-Caribbean women have made to Caribbean feminist epistemology and knowledge production. Challenging the centrality of India in considerations of the forms that Indo-Caribbean feminist thought and praxis have taken, the authors turn instead to the terrain of gender negotiations among Caribbean men and women within and across racial, class, religious, and political affiliations. Addressing the specific conditions which emerged within the region and highlighting the cross-racial solidarities and the challenges to narratives of purity that have been constitutive of Indo-Caribbean feminist thought, this collection connects to the broader indentureship diaspora and what can be considered post-indentureship feminist thought. Through examinations of literature, activism, art, biography, scholarship and public sphere practices, the collection highlights the complexity and richness of Indo-Caribbean engagements with feminism and social justice.

Ashti a. Motilall - Growing Up Guyanese: A Memoir About Growing Up as a First Generation Indo-Caribbean in America.
This memoir specifically highlights the experiences of a female of Indo-Guyanese decent growing up in the Midwest. Often confused for being an immigrant East Indian, Ashti offers a brief exposure to a thriving culture that is consistently overlooked. Ultimately, she aims to show others what it is like to be a West Indian living in the United States. As she explains her ethnic background, Ashti also covers the nuances of growing up Guyanese--the struggles she and others like herself face and the comical interactions they have all likely experienced. As it progresses, the book delves deeper into a theme of finding oneself. This occurs as the author reaches adulthood and makes discoveries that all millennials must make in their lifetime. Highly anecdotal, Growing Up Guyanese offers any reader regardless of ethnicity something to which he or she can relate.

Frank J. Korom - Hosay Trinidad, Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora (2012)
The multivocalic rite known as Hosay in the Caribbean developed out of earlier practices originating in Iraq and Iran which diffused to Trinidad by way of South Asian indentured laborers brought to the Caribbean by the British from the mid-1800s to the early decades of the twentieth century. The rituals are important as a Shi'i religious observance, but they also are emblems of ethnic and national identity for Indo-Trinidadians. Frank Korom investigates the essential role of Hosay in the performance of multiple identities by historically and ethnographically situating the event in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Caribbean contexts. Hosay Trinidad: Muharram Performances in an Indo-Caribbean Diaspora is the first detailed historical and ethnographic study of Islamic muharram rituals performed on the island of Trinidad.

Gaiutra Bahadur - Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie”—the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. In Coolie Woman—shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize—her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives.

Pete Manuel - East Indian music in the West Indies : tān-singing, chutney, and the making of Indo-Caribbean culture
Gordon K. Lewis Award from the Caribbean Studies Association, 2000. Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority, Mangal Patasar once remarked about tãn-singing, "You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get." Patasar was referring to what may be the most sophisticated and distinctive art form cultivated among the one and a half million East Indians whose ancestors migrated as indentured laborers from colonial India to the West Indies between 1845 and 1917. Known in Trinidad and Guyana as "tãn-singing" or "local-classical music" and in Suriname as "baithak gãna" ("sitting music"), tãn-singing has evolved into a unique idiom, embodying the rich poetic and musical heritage brought from India as modified by a diaspora group largely cut off from its ancestral homeland.

Rajiv Mohabir - Antiman
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir's Antiman is an impassioned, genre-blending memoir that navigates the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States. Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family's stifled Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his unlettered grandmother, listening to her stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri.

Books: Fiction

Samuel Dickson Selvon (1923-1994) was born in South Trinidad to Indian ancestry. Selvon was educated at Naparima College, San Fernando before joining the Royal Navy Reserve as a part of the World War II effort. Selvon was an editor of the Guardian Weekly from 1946 until he left Trinidad for London in 1950. There, Selvon would focus solely on novels, first publishing A Brighter Sun in 1952.

David Chariandy - Soucouyant
A "soucoyant" is an evil spirit in Caribbean lore, a reminder of past transgressions that refuse to diminish with age. In this beautifully told novel that crosses borders, cultures, and generations, a young man returns home to care for his aging mother, who suffers from dementia. In his efforts to help her and by turn make amends for their past estrangement from one another, he is compelled to re-imagine his mother's stories for her before they slip completely into darkness. In delicate, heartbreaking tones, the names for everyday things fade while at the same time a beautiful, haunted life, stained by grief, is slowly revealed.

Frank Birbalsingh (Editor) - Jahaji: An Anthology of Indo-Caribbean Fiction
Indians have lived in the Caribbean for more than a hundred and sixty years, ever since they took to the ships to work on the sugar plantations. Jahaji (the term meaning ship traveler) brings together a representative selection of Indo-Caribbean fiction from three generations of writers. Together, the sixteen writers included here give us an imaginative depiction of the experiences of their people across a span of fifty years--the hopes, aspirations and frustrations of life in colonial Trinidad and Guyana, the post-independence tribulations of third-world citizens, and the quest for meaning and identity in the second migration to Canada, the United States, and Britain.
Featuring work by: Ismith Khan, Elahi Baksh, Jan Shinebourne, Sharlow Mohammed, Madeline Coopsammy, Narmala Shewcharan, Harishchandra Khemraj, Sasenarine Persaud, Cyril Dabydeen, Rooplall Monar, Marina Budhos, Christine Singh, Shani Mootoo, Rabindranath Maharaj, Rajnie Ramlakhan, Raywat Deonandan

Shani Mootoo - Cereus Blooms at Night (1996)
Set on a fictional Caribbean island in the town of Paradise, Cereus Blooms at Night unveils the mystery surrounding Mala Ramchandin and the tempestuous history of her family. At the heart of this bold and seductive novel is an alleged crime committed many years before the story opens. Mala is the reclusive old woman suspected of murder who is delivered to the Paradise Alms House after a judge finds her unfit to stand trial. When she arrives at her new home, frail and mute, she is placed in the tender care of Tyler, a vivacious male nurse, who becomes her unlikely confidante and the storyteller of Mala's extraordinary life.In luminous, sensual prose, internationally acclaimed writer Shani Mootoo combines diverse storytelling traditions to explore identity, gender, and violence in a celebration of our capacity to love.
More Shani Mootoo
Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab
He Drown She in the Sea
Valmiki's Daughter

Additional reading lists available at:
The Ameena Gafoor Institute

Books: Poetry
Rajiv Mohabir - The Taxidermist’s Cut
The Taxidermist's Cut is a collection that centers the pressures of being a queer brown youth awakening sexually in a racist, anti-immigrant matrix. As an Indo-Caribbean, the queer-countried speaker is illegible as an "Indian" as well as an "American." Haunted by his migration narrative, the speaker tries to make himself fit into his environment by sloughing off his skin and stretching new ones over his body. At stake here is surviving a palimpsest of violence: violences enacted upon the speaker and violences the speaker enacts upon himself through cutting. Mohabir engages with the body and the land as a series of incisions and overlays to cover the damage of memory of a South Asian brown body dealing with aggressions and joys.
More from Rajiv Mohabir
The Cowherd's Son: Poems
Cultish

Shivanee Ramlochan - Everyone Knows I Am A Haunting
Ramlochan's poems take the reader through a series of imaginative narratives that are at once emotionally familiar and compelling, even as the characters evoked and the happenings they describe are heavily symbolic. Her poems reference the language and structural patterns of the genres of fantasy or speculative fiction, though with her own distinctive features, including the presence of such folkloric Trinidadian figures as the Duenne, those wandering lost spirits whose feet point backwards.

Visual Artists

Andil Gosine - https://andilgosine.persona.co/
Indra Persad Milowe - https://www.indrapersadmilowe.com/
Renluka Maharaj - https://www.renluka.com/
Suchitra Mattai - https://suchitramattaiart.com/

Renluka Maharaj, “Liliah” from the Pelting Mangoes series (2020), mixed media on canvas, 30 x 40 inches (photo by Bolder Photo)

Film/Video

Brown Sugar (2013), 120mins, Director: Mahadeo Shivraj. Tale of love, devotion and social injustice on a sugar plantation in Guyana.

Brown Sugar Too Bitter for Me 2 – The Oil Dream (2020), 149mins, Director: Mahadeo Shivraj. Drama of raw greed and power confronting the pathos and humanity of the poor.

Chutney in Yuh Soca: A Multicultural Mix 1996, 21 mins, Director: Karen Martinez. Arts documentary examining the phenomenon of Chutney Soca.

City on the Hill (2015), Director: Perry Polar. Film about cultural heritage in East Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Coconut/Cane and Cutlass (1998), 32 mins, Director: Michelle Mohabeer. Hybrid documentary shot on location in Guyana, communicating a complex, lyrical and touching rumination on exile and displacement. Narrated from the point-of view of a mixed race Indo-Caribbean lesbian.

Coolie Pink and Green (2009), 25 mins, Directors: Patricia Mohammed & Michael Mooleedhar. A girl of Indo-Caribbean descent in Trinidad is torn between the ancient culture of her ancestors and the multicultural world in which is growing up.

Doubles with Slight Pepper (2011), 16 mins, Director: Ian Harnarine. Short drama about a young street food vendor in Trinidad. LINK

Enslaved (1999), 60 mins, Director: William G. Wagner. Drama tracing the origins of slavery from indentured servants onwards.

Festival of Lights (2010), 120 mins, Director: Shundell Prasad. Drama of girl who journeys from New York to Guyana to discover the truth about her family’s mysterious past.

Finding Dowry (2017), 20 mins, Director: Shivanee Loach. This satirical film showcases the development of modern habits and materialistic desires. Coming from a family with strong East Indian traditions, Mohan finds a way to use these customs to his own benefit, and unexpectedly announces that he is ready to get married.

Guiana 1838 (2004), 120 mins, Director: Rohib Jagessar. Drama about indentured immigrants in the Caribbean. LINK

Jahaji Bhai  (2012?), 50 mins, Director: Suresh Pillai. Documentary about the journey from colonisation to Afro-Indian conflicts in Trinidad & Tobago and Guyana.

Mighter dan de Sun (2020), 37 mins, Director: Trevor C. Jugmohan.  Drama about an Indo-Caribbean couple battling mental illness and supernatural forces.

Neither Here Nor There-Indo Caribbean Diaspora | Shades of U.S. (2020) CUNY TV. Through the stories of three community activists in the Indo-Caribbean community of Queens, this episode explores a group identity that began with indentured servitude in the Caribbean and now finds its way through new generations.LINK

Once More Removed (2006), 52mins, Director: Shundell Prasad. Documentary about the journey back to India.

Seventeen Colours and a Sitar (2010), 38 mins, Directors: Patricia Mohammed & Michael Mooleedhar.  Documentary about collaboration between painter Rex Dixon and Trinidadian musician Mungal Pastasar.

Songs of the Sugarcane (1980) Director: Randolph Michael Bhaichandeen. Based on a true story, "Songs of Sugarcane" tells the tale of two boys, an African and an Indian, who are growing up on a sugar plantation in Guyana, as a slave and indentured laborer respectively, trying to re-gain their freedom.

Sweet Tassa: Music of the Indian Caribbean Diaspora (2019), Director: Christopher L. Ballengee. “Sweet Tassa” explores both musical and socio-political elements of tassa performance, focusing on the life and family of noted drummer Lenny Kumar. LINK

Tanty Feminisms: Archives of Caribbean (Post-) Indenture and Coolieween, 2021, 32 mins, Director: Ryan Persadie. Reflections on the director’s artistic practice as a drag artist in an annual photography series produced over the last two years entitled ‘Coolieween’.

The Cost of Sugar (2019), 17 mins, Director: Daniyal Harris-Vajda. Documentary about Wells Estate, Guyana. LINK

Film resources include:
The Ameena Gafoor Institute
Caribbean Film Database

Journal Articles

On Identity
Balaram, A. (2021). Crafting New Narratives of Diasporic Resistance with Indo-Caribbean Women and Gender-Expansive People across Generations. Societies (Basel, Switzerland), 11(1), 2–. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11010002

Baksh, A. (2017). Indo-Caribbean Working-Class Masculinities at Home and Abroad: David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Ian Harnarine’s Doubles with Slight Pepper. Journal of West Indian Literature, 25(1), 94–111. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90005828

Finch, J. (1986). The East Indian Wesy Indian Male in Naipaul’s Early Caribbean Novels. Caribbean Quarterly, 32(1/2), 24–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653651

Khan, C. (2022). Searching for boxes to check: constructing boundaries of second-generation Indo-Caribbean identity through community initiatives. Social Identities, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2022.2148645

Mahabir, J. (2017). Communal Style: Indo-Caribbean Women’s Jewelry. Small Axe : a Journal of Criticism, 21(2), 112–122. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4156822

Ollivierre, J. (2022). After “Indo-Caribbean”: Interrogating Interstitial Identities and Diasporic Solidarities in Conversation with Andil Gosine. Histoire Sociale, 55(114), 445–468. https://doi.org/10.1353/his.2022.0038

Persadie, R. (2020). “Meh Just Realize I’s Ah Coolie Bai”: Indo-Caribbean Masculinities, Chutney Genealogies, and Qoolie Subjectivities. Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 4(2), 56–. https://doi.org/10.23870/marlas.28

Roopnarine, L. (2006). Indo-Caribbean Social Identity. Caribbean Quarterly, 52(1), 1–11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654531

Samaroo, B. (2021). Changing Caribbean geographies: connections in flora, fauna and patterns of settlement from Indian inheritances. Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, 1(1), 16–35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.1.1.0016

Samuel, P. S., & Wilson, L. C. (2009). Structural Arrangements of Indo-Guyanese Family: An Assessment of the Assimilation Hypothesis. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 40(3), 439–454. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41604291

Sankar, T. (2020). “A Creative Process”: Indo-Caribbean American Identity as Diasporic Consciousness. Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 4(2), 127–. https://doi.org/10.23870/marlas.289

On Migration
Dabydeen, C. (1991). The Bowl to Apollo: The Indo-Caribbean Imagination in Canada. THE BOWL TO APOLLO: THE INDO-CARIBBEAN IMAGINATION IN CANADA. Caribbean Quarterly, 37(4), 47–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653790

Roopnarine, L. (2003). Indo-Caribbean Migration: From Periphery to Core. Caribbean Quarterly, 49(3), 30–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654409

Roopmarine, L. (2018). Indian Migration From The Caribbean to India. In The Indian Caribbean: Migration and Identity in the Diaspora (pp. 54–70). University Press of Mississippi. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv5jxnw8.6

On Cultural Production
Brown, K. (2022). Religion in its Diaspora: The Adaptations of Hinduism in the Indo-Caribbean. Caribbean Quilt, 6(1), 82–89. https://doi.org/10.33137/cq.v6i1.36831

Manuel, P. (1997). Music, Identity, and Images of India in the Indo-Caribbean Diaspora. Asian Music, 29(1), 17–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/834410

Ramnarine, T. K. (1996). “Indian” Music in the Diaspora: Case Studies of “Chutney” in Trinidad and in London. British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 5, 133–153. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3060870

Ramnarine, T. K. (1998). “Brotherhood of the Boat”: Musical Dialogues in a Caribbean Context. British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 7, 1–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3060707

On Queer Studies
Persard, S. C. (2018). Queering Chutney: Disrupting Heteronormative Paradigms of Indo-Caribbean Epistemology. Journal of West Indian Literature, 26(1), 25–37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90021224

Persard, S. C. (2020). Coconut/Cane & Cutlass: Queer Visuality in the Indo-Caribbean Lesbian Archive. Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, 4(2), 40–. https://doi.org/10.23870/marlas.290

On Feminism
Mehta, B. (2020). Jahaji-bahin feminism: a de-colonial Indo-Caribbean consciousness. South Asian Diaspora, 12(2), 179–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/19438192.2020.1765072

Pillai, R. (2019). A Question of Voice: Indo-Caribbean American Feminism through Music in New York City. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 47(1 & 2), 65–82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26734044

Puri, S. (1997). Race, Rape, and Representation: Indo-Caribbean Women and Cultural Nationalism. Cultural Critique, 36, 119–163. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354502

Ro(u)ted by Our Stories Collective (2021).Stories the mangroves hold: reflections on Indo-Caribbean feminist community archiving. Journal for the Study of Indentureship and Its Legacies, 1(1), 63–83. https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.1.1.0063

Mehta, B. J. (2010). Indianités francophones: Kala Pani Narratives. L’Esprit Créateur, 50(2), 1–11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26289643

General Register A showing the Futtle Rozack’s record of arrivals. The Futtle Rozark was the first ship to bring indentured labourers to Trinidad. There are 17 registers available at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago. The registers are in chronological order based on the arrival dates of the ships.
COURTESY NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO





Lauren Baccus
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