A Voyage Less Ordinary
Click here to read this on Rasa Journal where it was first published on Oct 23, 2021.
‘Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!’
‘Aaja! Aaja! Aaja!’
So crooned Parvati Khan for the Bollywood superstar, Mithun Chakraborty, for his movie, Disco Dancer, in 1982. The movie catapulted Chakraborty to international fame, earning him fame in unlikeliest corners of the world. However, it was quite a journey for Khan as well. After all, she had travelled to Mumbai all the way from her hometown in Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. Perhaps, it was even a home-coming of sorts after her ancestors had been deceived into travelling that far away a century ago.
It is a tragic irony that the story of the Indo-Caribbean community begins after the abolition of slavery in European colonies in 1833. The wealthy sugarcane plantation owners still needed workers and the solution came from Sir John Gladstone who had plantations in Jamaica and Guyana. It was him who wrote to a firm in Kolkata, then Calcutta, Gillanders Arbuthnot & Co, if they could arrange indentured labourers to work in West Indies after noting the firm’s success in Mauritius. They responded in affirmative and declared that the potential recruits had nothing better to do than eating, sleeping, and drinking, and were ‘more akin to the monkey than the man’. This dehumanization would go on to shape the experiences of these immigrants for a very long time.
Between 1838 and 1917, over one million Indian immigrants were taken from villages of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu, for indentured labourership. These included Hindus across castes and Muslims as well. They were often called Girmityas after the term, girmit, which was the Indian way of pronouncing the word, agreement. More pejoratively, they were called Coolies. These immigrants, however, often did not know that they were migrating to a different country. “Some thought they were leaving Calcutta and going to Madras or Mauritius,” says Vinay Harrichan, 24, host and producer of The Cutlass podcast, which focuses on the history and experiences of the Indo-Caribbean community. “For a lot of them, Trinidad sounded like Chinidad, as in chini for sugar, and Suriname was the land of Sri Ram to them,” he explains. “They thought they would be able to bring back riches and gold for their families and that they were going away for only a few years,” he adds. This deception was intentionally fueled by the recruits who brought these villagers to Calcutta. Some were even kidnapped and forced to go against their will.
None of these people had any idea that they would be undertaking a ship journey that would last months. In fact, many had never been to a big city like Calcutta either and had never interacted with Europeans. They were not prepared for the journeys they undertook, emotionally and physically, and so, many died on the way.
Of those who survived the first voyage of Fatel Rozack arriving at the islands in 1845, the first person to register his name at the arrival desk was, curiously enough, a man named Bharat. His name was penned down as Bhuruth Suroop. These colonial mis-spellings of Indian names still survive and one can find surnames such as Persaud instead of Prasad, Capildeo instead of Kapildeo, and so on. Even though the community is 2.5 million strong today, it has remained ignored for most part in India. However, the community never lost its touch with India.
The indentured labourers were mostly illiterate and worked in hard conditions. More than 70% of these worked in agricultural fields and rest were employed in worst of manual jobs such as those of scavengers and porters. They were paid miserably and well until 1945, the traditional Hindu and Muslim marriages were not considered legal which prevented transition of properties and the like. Christianity was the religion of the land and English was its language. The two major racial minorities, i.e., the blacks and the Asians, were pit against each other by the British ruling class.
Harrichan, who is an engineer by profession but an archivist and linguist by passion, believes that all of this became more of a reason for them to hold on to their Indian and predominantly Hindu identity. “A lot of times the indentured labourers were not allowed to leave their villages (in the Caribbean) and so because of that, they developed a common language and practiced their religion,” he adds, “I have interviewed people in their 80s and 90s and they talk about how Indian people would light a torch and use the fire to be able to read the Ramayana at the night after working the entire day in the fields”. They would sometimes even fashion musical instruments out of matchboxes and sing Bhajans and folk songs under trees in order to bond with one another.
Festivals like Holi, which is known an Phagwa in the community owing to its Bhojpuri and Awadhi influences, and Diwali became two of the biggest festivals. Even practices like taking a dip in the water as for Kartik Purnima, known as Kartik Nahan in the region, and fasting for days leading up to festivals like Shivratri are still common amongst the community. Hindus didn’t eat beef and Muslims didn’t eat pork.
However, they were also prudent enough to let go of orthodox Hindu practices, especially the ones that didn’t work for them. Inter-caste marriages became much more common in the region than in India itself because of lack of options. For them, Indian inter-caste and inter-faith marriages were preferable to Indians marrying non-Indians.
“They let go of what didn’t aid their survival but they held on to their food, music, culture, and religion,” Harrichan says. “Practicing their culture was their way to rebel, their way to survive,” he adds. A particularly vibrant way in which Indian culture thrived in the Caribbean is in form of what is known as the Chutney music. It started out as the Bhojpuri version of pre-wedding songs sung by ladies on both the groom’s and the bride’s side. Anyone who has ever heard one of those will attest to their naughty or nok-jhok nature and it was this spiciness that got them termed as Chutney. What followed was Chutney Soca. It was supposed to be written as Sokah, where So represented the African Calypso elements whereas Kah symbolized Indian influences as the first alphabet in Hindi is Ka.
Sundar Popo, an Indian musician from Trinidad and Tobago, is credited with being the father of this genre of music. These songs have Indian lyrics, which includes Bhojpuri and Bollywood influences, but also include Calypso beats and rhythms. These songs could be much raunchier than your average Ladies Sangeet but they drove the Indian crowds in the region crazy. They felt so authentically Bhojpuri that even Gangs Of Wasseypur (Part 2), which is set in Bihar and Varanasi, featured a Chutney song, Electric Piya, by a Chutney singer, Rasika Dindial. The song is a variation of a 1950s song of the genre, Bhabhana Aawe Jaaye, originally sung by a Surinamese Indian singer, Ramdew Chaitoe.
Harrichan was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to Florida in the United States with his family when he was three years old. However, that hasn’t isolated him from his culture. “Growing up, there were four to five Hindu temples around which were just for the Indo-Caribbean community,” he says. He has taught himself Hindi and modelled his podcast logo after his grandmothers, both maternal and paternal, who he says grew up shortly after the indentureship period ended. But because their parents still worked on sugarcane plantations, they carried memories of what it was like and which have been passed down the generations to present day members of the community like Harrichan. While the diaspora is like any other Indian diaspora today, its trajectory has been more interesting than most.
It exists as a double diaspora of sorts in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. Each of these countries have their own flavour of the Indo-Caribbean community and the community interacts freely with the larger South Asian diaspora and vice versa. Ryan Rajendra Singh, 25, co-founder of the Indo-Caribbean Canadian Association, says that while traditions often fade away in diasporas, “upkeep of Indian and South Asian traditional elements is revered and strongly embraced by the children of immigrants from the Caribbean”. A government relations consultant at a private firm, he believes that his community’s religion, music, and food are not only aspects to be preserved but also a way of life for him and those of his generation.
But as with regional stereotypical prejudices in India, people of the community too suffer from the ingrained biases. “We are seen as being not really Indian by the South Asians in U.S and U.K and the community is seen being from a lower-class background or that our culture is diluted,” Harrichan says. “There seems to be a lot of stigma around Bihari people and when you tell an Indian person that my ancestor came from U.P, they immediately associate that with rickshaw-wallas or naukars (servants),” he adds, listing experiences he has had while growing up. He adds that whenever he would visit South Asian cultural events, he would see flags of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh mostly. Only recently has he begun to see flags of Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and Guyana.
These changes, however, didn’t arise out of a vacuum. They have been the result of tireless efforts by a number of activists and visionaries across religion, politics, and culture, who have worked towards uplifting the status of the community in the Caribbean and abroad. Some of the most prominent ones is Satyanarayan Maharaj who was instrumental in setting up various Hindu institutions and practices, Kamla Persaud-Bissessar who was the first Trinidad and Tobago’s first female Prime Minister, Gaiutra Bahadur who wrote about the experiences of indentured labour women in her book Coolie Woman, among others. Sham Mohammed, in 1970, launched a show called Mastana Bahar and hosted it for 24 years until his death in 1994. It was a talent show but it doubled up as a platform for the community to bond across the various regional identities and faiths in the Caribbean countries.
And then, there was V.S Naipaul.
A man celebrated for his literary brilliance, he was decidedly ill at ease with his cultural and national identities. He disowned his home country of Trinidad and Tobago, was majorly disappointed in his ancestral country of India, and finally took refuge in the country of his colonizers of United Kingdom. His poignant explorations of identity, however, still have much to offer to India and Indians at large.
In his 1964 book An Area Of Darkness, he laid threadbare the existential crisis that plagued him for most of his life when he wrote, “In Trinidad to be an Indian was to be distinctive. To be an Indian in England was distinctive. Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited a special quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality. Again and again I was caught. I was faceless. I had been made by Trinidad and England, recognition of my difference was necessary to me. I felt the need to impose myself, and didn’t know how.”
Starting from the first of his acclaimed works in 1961, A House for Mr. Biswas, which is a fictional and semi-biographical account of his father’s struggle to build a house for his family, to his work on India, it is easy and a bit tragic to see what search for an identity can do a person. Where the former brings out his desperate discomfort with his and his family’s peculiar life in the Caribbean, the latter is a study of bitterly dashed hopes. And yet, perhaps that is what gave him his perceptiveness when in 1977, he wrote about how India tended to retreat before its conquerors and made itself archaic, intellectually smaller, and vulnerable even in its periods of apparent revival, in India: A Wounded Civilization. He believed that the crisis of India was not political or economic but civilizational where it was working on borrowed institutions and lacked the intellectual means to move ahead.
Naipaul grew up in the post-indentureship period in an influential family but was still unsettled by his status as a poor minority in a poor country. He disowned the archaic Hindu customs of his family and ancestors but was still disappointed with the colonial India that he witnessed in the latter half of the 20th century. He railed against colonialism but still took up the British citizenship and lived in the country until his death in 2018. In all of this, he perhaps had just the right amount of rootless-ness and rooted-ness with respect to his Indian-ness, which gave him a unique insight into the issues of identity that the modern India and Indians across the world find themselves grappling with today.
Looking at how the unlikely voyage of the indentured labourers in 19th century has evolved into the Indo-Caribbean community as well as the its diasporas across the West, it won’t be amiss to conclude that identity is a constant interplay of fluid influences and fixed foundations. Where the former helped the community evolve and stay relevant locally on a cultural, social, and political level, the latter helped them survive on a much deeper existential level.
