Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad 9780822386094

Citation preview

CALLALOO NATION

A book in the series Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations Series editors: Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University Irene Silverblatt, Duke University Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of California at Los Angeles

CALLALOO NATION Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad

AISHA KHAN

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Durham and London 2004

∫ 2004 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For the older heads

CONTENTS

About the Series

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

2

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

3

Locations and Dislocations

61

4

The Problem of Simi-Dimi

101

5

Carving Knowledge from Ways of Knowing

6

‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

7

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

8

Mixing Metaphors Notes

233

Works Cited Index

253

241

221

1

27

159 185

121

ABOUT THE SERIES

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad interplay of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing process of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, that rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, that assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and that, correspondingly, demands that the practices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny. During the nineteenth century, Indians were recruited by the British to work as indentured labor in Trinidad and Tobago. They were part of a growing South Asian diaspora that was to transform the fabric of life in much of the English-speaking Caribbean. Outside of area specialists, that page in New World history has remained relatively unknown, and we are excited to include Callaloo Nation in our series not only because of Aisha Khan’s contribution to an understudied field, but because of the original way with which she has approached it. In this age of identity-stereotyping, we hear talk about the Caribbean’s

Indian community, but we haven’t heard about the community’s extraordinary complexity. Callaloo Nation, unlike other studies, analyzes its fault lines—of which religion is the most freighted. There is no one Indian community in Trinidad and Tobago, there are several—Hindu and Muslim comprise the two oldest and largest. With sharp ethnographic skills and a deep respect for history, Aisha Khan presents the ways these two protagonists have developed in relation to, in opposition to, and alongside one another. Callaloo Nation is not just an Indian affair—Khan sees ‘‘otherwise.’’ Even though Indian experiences and identities remain Khan’s focus, she situates them inside a broader Trinidadian context, and the Trinidadian inside a broader Caribbean context, and the Caribbean inside the globe. All this, without sacrificing the richness, openness, and receptivity of the best ethnographies.

x

About the Series

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to a number of people and institutions, who, at various stages of this project, gave generously their encouragement and support. Foremost are the people of South, without whose assistance and friendship this study would not have been possible. Special appreciation goes to: Mati Ramroop, the Ramroop family, the Rooplal family, the Ballyram family, the Ramlakhan family, Aqila and Willie Khan and family, Nana Umraw, Baby Pathay and family, the Rajoon family, Maulana Dr. Waffie Mohammed and family, Shafina Karim, Imam Skip and family, Imam Dixie and family, Jennifer Khan and family, B. J. Ballyram, Joyce Lalla, Jainsee Sampath, Mimo and Frank Karim, the Ganpat family, and the Umraw family. The Ramroops, Rooplals, Ballyrams, Ramlakhans, and Rajoons have remained especially close friends, inviting me, another ‘‘aunty,’’ into their extended kindred. Northward, I was greatly aided by Angela Harper, Austin Corbie, Marjorie ‘‘Moms’’ Hazel, the Latchman family, and Ravi-Ji. At the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, deserving special mention is Rhoda Reddock, whose scholarship and generosity are consistently inspiring; several other faculty have also been both agreeable colleagues and scholars to emulate: Bridget Brereton, Ken Parmasad, Kusha Haraksingh, Kelvin Singh, and Brinsley Samaroo. Finally, I have received indispensable assistance from the staff at the University of the West Indies library, the National Archives, and the Central Statistical Office. Outside Trinidad, as well, I have benefited from support and intellectual inspiration. Eric R. Wolf was my mentor, my advisor, and believed in me from the start. I hope I conveyed to him how important that was, as I navigated my way through the strange cultural terrain of the academy. And in trying to do justice to all that he taught me, I also hope this book

would have made him proud. Daniel Segal has most generously given me friendly critique and great encouragement over the years. Barbara Weinstein continues to provide indispensable guidance along with friendship. Sidney Mintz and Donald Brenneis have been advocates and sources of helpful feedback even before we ever met. Sally Price has graciously applied an expert editor’s fine-tooth comb to my contributions to New West Indian Guide, and, as a result, taught me about better writing. And Percy Hintzen and John Kelly lent me their ears early in my research, and continue to be sources of insight. Several grants and awards have supported this project: Fulbright U.S. Student Program for dissertation research abroad; Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Student Grant-in-Aid; Sigma Xi Society research grant; Leonard Silk Dissertation Award (cuny Graduate School); Joyce-Knight Pre-Doctoral Fellowship (Carleton College); Joel Dean Faculty Grants (Swarthmore College); Faculty Research Award (Pitzer College); Library Travel Grant, University of Florida, Gainesville/ Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Nuala McGann Drescher Affirmative Action Leave Program (suny-uup); and Richard Carley Hunt Memorial Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation. I have always put a lot of stock in a little help from my friends. Buoying me with their camaraderie, these close confederates have been essential sources of affection, information, advice, and intellectual energy. I am forever indebted to: Allyson Purpura, Gerald Creed, David Maynard, Pieter Judson, Stephen Stuempfle, Carla Freeman, Niels Sampath, Bill Guinee, and Elizabeth Barnum. I must also give many thanks to Beverly Haviland and Roman de la Campa, who read the original prospectus for this book and gave me crucial advice; to Barbara Weinstein, Dan Segal, Gerald Creed, and Yvie Fabella for reading parts of the manuscript, and to Allyson Purpura and Monica Patterson for reading all of it (with special thanks to Monica for her patient scrutiny that made all the difference); to Ann Stevens for her French translations; to Adrian von Hassel for his German translations; to Eleanor Zelliot for sending me key news items from the South Asian diaspora; to Barbara Frank and Fred Myers for all their hard work on my behalf; to Valerie Millholland for being so agreeable and enthusiastic an editor, and to Pam Morrison for her work throughout the production process; to S. N. Sridhar and Meena Sridhar for their Hindi translations and clarification of some South Asian materials; to Robert Hoberman for his Arabic translations and assistance with sources on Turkish; to cartographer Gerry Krieg for my maps; to Karen Kramer for good debates about anthropological approaches; and to my students at Carleton College, Swarthmore College, Pitzer College, Stony Brook University, and New York University, who shared my enthusiasm for the material, enlivening my task in the process.

xii

Acknowledgments

Appreciation also goes to Phoebe and Peri, whose antics encouraged me to leave the house for my office every day. Last but not least, I am grateful for the unfailing encouragement of my mother, Sylvia, who consistently reminded me that challenging and, at times, daunting tasks are indeed surmountable. Some of the material in chapter 4 was originally published in Aisha Khan , ‘‘ ‘On the Right Path’: Interpolating Religion in Trinidad,’’ in John Pulis, ed., Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999); thanks go to Taylor and Francis Publishers. Some of the material in chapters 6 and 7 was originally published in Aisha Khan, ‘‘Homeland, Motherland: Authenticity, Legitimacy, and Ideologies of Place among Muslims in Trinidad,’’ in Peter van der Veer, ed., Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 93–131; thanks go to the University of Pennsylvania Press. Note: In the following pages every name in this book is a pseudonym, with a few exceptions for commonly known public figures. Any name that might accidentally resemble or reiterate the name of an actual person is entirely coincidental.

Acknowledgments

xiii

1 ‘‘THIS RAINBOW HAS TEETH’’

Working in the cane, in South. Photo by author.

I

n au g u s t 1 9 9 7 , on one of my return visits to Trinidad, I ran into a colleague who teaches at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. We talked about my project on the construction of religious identities among Muslim and Hindu Indo-Trinidadians, and how those identities are constructed in a culture profoundly influenced by racial ideologies, notably those concerned with various forms of ‘‘mixing.’’ Nodding appreciatively, my colleague shared with me that in her university classes students frequently ‘‘confuse,’’ as she put it, religion and race in their essays. Moreover, she said, on forms or questionnaires she has seen them write down their religion when asked to note race. In much of the world today, struggles over identity—whether in regional, national, diasporic, or communal forms—persist as a tenacious element of social organization and power relations. Such struggles have become commonly glossed as the politics of identity (or identity politics), and consist of contests and debates over the construction, maintenance, and preeminence of particular emblems of culture, history, and custom. These emblems distinguish one entity—a nation, a people, a community—from another, and thereby confer rights and recognition to them. Such contests and debates are a critical expression of what matters most to people as they define livable spaces for themselves, where differing ideologies of ‘‘nation,’’ ‘‘people,’’ and ‘‘community’’ both challenge and accommodate the hierarchical structures that shape them. A crucial dimension of these processes is the notion of ‘‘mixing,’’ a literal and metaphoric expression for all forms of experience where biogenetic, social, or cultural boundaries are challenged or transgressed. ‘‘Mixing’’ is among the most persevering of cultural themes in most Caribbean and Latin American countries, coming in a variety of forms, such

as the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago’s ideology of a callaloo nation; Martinique’s contemporary creolite movement; Brazil’s ideology of racial democracy yet presumption of embranquecimento (whitening, or the gradual progression toward European appearance and cultural practices, concepts shared by such varied neighbors as Costa Rica, Argentina, and Colombia); nativist representations of mestizaje in Mexican nationalist movements; or mixing’s imagined undoing, as in the ideology of hispanidad so enthusiastically championed by Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. However it is expressed, the notion of mixing holds central importance in forming interpretations of identity and self-worth, of place in the world, and therefore interpreting the quality of relations among individuals, communities, nation-states, and regions. Identities are not stable, secure, pure, or essential, and yet in diverse places and periods people have found meaning in ideas of cultural or racial purity, religious orthodoxy, and related traditions. People have multiple, and sometimes contradictory, reasons for being invested in particular identities, and thus diverse concerns about moments where identities (of all kinds) are ‘‘mixed,’’ or are in the process of mixing. The notion

Trinidad

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

3

of mixing gives form and meaning to both existential and pragmatic questions about who we are and how we claim a place for ourselves. Spanning more than a decade of ethnographic and archival research, this book investigates the ways Indo-Trinidadian Muslims and Hindus have interpreted their histories and cultural transformations in Trinidad, first as subjects of empire and then as citizens of the nation-state. My aims are several. First, I present a detailed ethnographic portrait of communities who have been only recently written about extensively (and less in ethnographic terms than in the service of theoretical discussions). Such groups have been central to the development of the cultural and politicaleconomic character of the Caribbean region. Second, I propose that ideologies about mixing are causal forces in social processes rather than being simply consequences of other, putatively more significant dimensions of social organization. It has often been assumed that ideas about mixing are secondary in significance to, and derived from, primary (implicitly pure) interpretive categories, such as race and religion. But, as catalysts in their own right, notions of mixing and the ideologies through which they are conveyed constitute multidimensional metaphors that animate the very categories that are supposed to give rise to them. Third, I argue that religion, as a particular category of identity, is discursively constructed and contingent on other identity categories—in Trinidad, notably those of race. Finally, I seek to clarify the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which hierarchies are reinforced in modern, democratic, multicultural states. When they are the raison d’être of a society, ideologies of mixing work both in tandem with and at cross purposes with ideologies of purity (and at times, authenticity) as the essential core of the individual, the nation, and the community. The Work of Metaphors In Trinidad the idea of mixed (or creole, or callaloo) society is both acclaimed and resisted, possessing many meanings, often contradictory, among different sectors of its population. I use the term mixing metaphors to refer to those practices, discourses, or events (rather than strictly figures of speech) where the foundational theme of mixing is communicated through analogy, metonym, images, or motifs, as well as in literal terms. Inquiring into identities requires a dynamic and tangible focus or unit of analysis. Because identities themselves are abstractions (although they are certainly experienced in corporeal ways), their construction must be located within disparate arenas: an event, an activity, a site, a discourse. And because my premise is that we cannot disaggregate the culturally implicit that undergirds all social relationships from the culturally

4

Callaloo Nation

explicit that expresses and reconfigures social relationships, I began by thinking about metaphors as windows into these processes. By metaphor I mean simply a ‘‘figure of speech in which a term is transferred from the object it ordinarily designates to an object it may designate only by implicit comparison or analogy’’ (American Heritage Dictionary 1973:825). Metaphors allow people to ‘‘comprehend and draw inferences about abstract concepts’’ (Quinn 1991:64); they are, Naomi Quinn explains, ‘‘satisfying instantiations of a ‘conventional’ or culturally shared model, capturing multiple elements of that model’’ (1991:79). Thus, metaphors also permit interpreting abstractions. In their ‘‘natural context’’ (Fernandez 1991:9) the components of a concept gain meaning and suasion through association with each other and within particular practices and events, and the discourses they generate. It is the idea of mixing—when transgressions of boundaries can and do occur—that gives potency and significance in local terms to identity categories like ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘religion.’’ This approach helps add a dimension of dynamism and agency in looking at the quotidian performance of interpretive categories. My aim is to avoid reified categories that imply universal meaning and applicability. Instead, I consider how certain forms of daily experience, within structured relations of power, become defined as ‘‘racial’’ and ‘‘religious.’’ In other words, I examine how power creates religion—the ‘‘authorizing process by which ‘religion’ is created’’ (Asad 1993:37) and how it creates ‘‘race,’’ without relying on the very categories I wish to interrogate. In this way I am able to treat race and religion as contingent and fluid, as ‘‘articulated discourses’’ (Hall 1980), as descriptive according to local criteria generated within certain kinds of power relations, rather than as prescriptive, predicting a priori what those relations ought to be. In one sense, this is a book about religion, about the ways Indo-Trinidadian Muslims and Hindus construct their religious identities within broader ideological arenas. I am particularly concerned with mixing metaphors that are generated from, and locally meaningful to, the progeny of laborers indentured to sugar plantations. Brought from India by the British to their Caribbean colonies after emancipation (1838–1917), they are known either as ‘‘rescuers of empire’’ or as ‘‘scabs,’’ depending on the point of view. This book is about religion insofar as religion is defined and made meaningful by local practitioners, all of whom employ—intentionally or otherwise—an array of other forms of knowledge, ideology, and experience to create and recreate their religious selves within unfolding contexts of inequality. I want, therefore, to think about religion beyond its conventional analytical confines, to approach it as a culturally constructed category of experience involving other, varied factors that are not always predictably associated with it. In this way, this book is as much about race,

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

5

class, and history in the lives of a diasporic Caribbean community as it is about religion. This book is not, then, an analysis of the cosmology or theology of Hinduism and Islam. Rather, I focus on Trinidadian practitioners, Hindus and Muslims, in order to draw attention to the everyday practices and interpretations in which people engage as they define themselves as ‘‘Hindu’’ and ‘‘Muslim.’’ Over the course of the history of Hinduism and Islam in Trinidad, the emphasis has changed from what is mutually constitutive in the religions to what is mutually exclusive. Even while Indo-Trinidadians today celebrate a common ‘‘Indian’’ history that includes overlapping Muslim and Hindu practices, other, simultaneous forces give increased prominence to distinct identity categories, ‘‘Muslim’’ and ‘‘Hindu.’’ In certain contexts, they compete with the importance and significance of ‘‘Indian’’ identity. Constructed within a pervasive racial discourse that reflects the respective colonial and post-independence climates in Trinidad, Hindu and Muslim identities have become reified across an increasing expanse of the Indo-Trinidadian population over the several generations they have been in the New World. The attributes that are emblematic of their differences have transformed accordingly. Never completely replacing each other as organizing principles in identity construction, ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘religion’’ do not, however, simply stand for each other, each representing the other as alternative designations. More complexly, they are implicated within each other, a mutually defining diversity rather than simply part of an array of interchangeable interpretive categories. But what does this tell us about the ways variously disempowered communities create livable conditions for themselves while participating in a cultural worldview where identity is a source of equality and simultaneously an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced? ‘‘Mixed’’ in Trinidad By Trinidadians’ own accounting, as well as that of observers in the rest of the Caribbean and elsewhere, Trinidad is the epitome of cultural diversity, and Trinidadian culture is heterogeneous: callaloo, creole, mixed. Trinidadian concerns about mixing and its antithesis, purity, begin in its history as one of the ‘‘part-societies’’ (Mintz 1966:912) of the Caribbean, those colonial enclaves composed of uprooted ‘‘fragments,’’ as Derek Walcott (1993) has written, of other, prior, whole cultures. Societies create taxonomies of difference, and language to describe them, according to the particular social dilemmas that perceptions of diversity conceive. In the context of slave plantation society and European ideologies about human evolution and inequality, race has constituted a foundational theme in

6

Callaloo Nation

Caribbean societies. The structure of social relations in Trinidad had already formed when Indians arrived as indentured laborers; the ideological foundations of mixing, and its attendant anxieties, were already established as well. The idea of race possessed then, as it does now, a logic that necessarily includes its inevitable corollary: race mixing. In the first instance this came in the form of unconstrained Europeans and uprooted Africans producing socially enigmatic offspring. Throughout the colonial period, ‘‘creole’’ was an identity that distinguished someone locally born in the Caribbean rather than in Europe or Africa.∞ But it also indicated newness: emergent cultural, racial, social forms. The distinction between sides of the Atlantic in Caribbean societies had consequences for claims of ancestry and other markers of identity. For New World blacks, creole implied both a loss (or abandonment) of African heritage and the creation of a subsequent, New World identity (although based in part on aspects of African heritage). For New World whites, being creole came with another kind of newness: the suggestion of dubious lineage, a suspicion of indigenous, African, Asian, or even lowerclass European ancestry. Significant numbers of Europeans, then, could claim only partial whiteness—for example, those known in Trinidad as ‘‘Trinidad White’’ and, at times, ‘‘French Creole.’’ From the Caribbean’s beginnings, elite whites, especially, have contended with suspicions about their authenticity as proper Europeans— culturally, morally, and racially. Claims of English, French, and Spanish heritage were vulnerable to insinuation in overseas contexts, but the Portuguese did not enjoy the same dubious honor of falling from racial grace. Not only was Portuguese ‘‘whiteness’’ tainted by the laboring class position from which they left Madeira and in which they remained in large numbers once in the Caribbean, other Europeans held their precociousness in colonizing against them. It was said that despite the successes of their early trade ventures, their association with Africans was their intellectual, economic, and racial demise: ‘‘the dilution of Portuguese blood by Negro blood,’’ for example, allegedly weakened Portuguese state power while it strengthened their fertility, resulting in greater numbers of offspring with Africans ‘‘as compared with other European races’’ (Burns 1948:121; Gomes 1974:153). The double burden of laboring class origins and tainted blood relegated Caribbean Portuguese populations to what might be called a second-tier Europeanness. In many instances they could not claim the elite values, practices, and respectability modeled by the Caribbean ‘‘colored’’ (‘‘brown,’’ or Afro-Euro mixed) middle class. In Trinidad, where elites were ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘whites’’ were elite (Brereton 1998), the two bona fide elite sectors were local English and French. Well into the twentieth century both were preoccupied with, among other markers of legitimacy, birth and breeding. As in the Hispanophone colo-

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

7

nies, they relied on the idiom of blood purity to claim distinction, as in ‘‘blue blood’’ or ‘‘old blood’’ (Brereton 1998:53). As much as local whites fetishized blood (racial) purity, relations with ‘‘black, mixed-race or East Indian women were a well-established convention,’’ although kept to the clandestine corners of their lives in order to maintain claims of ancestral purity (Brereton 1998:54). Despite surreptitious relationships between European men and Indian and Chinese women, mixes—combinations of so-called racial types—were in Trinidad based on a black/white axis. African and European permeations of the biogenetic kind were recorded (and by implication reified) by color terms that catalogued these combinations. Categories consisted of, notably, ‘‘brown,’’ but also ‘‘red.’’ Along with ‘‘brown’’ was the rubric ‘‘colored,’’ which contained color subcategories, as well. At either end of this color continuum were ‘‘black’’ and ‘‘white’’ (Segal 1993). In this period’s ideology and discourse, ‘‘mixed’’ tended to refer to ‘‘colored’’ or ‘‘brown.’’ The conventionally depicted three-tier pyramid of Trinidadian society as ‘‘white, brown, black’’ did not, however, generally emphasize it as a ‘‘mixed’’ society, although much of its population was designated as ‘‘creole.’’ That is, ‘‘mixed’’ and ‘‘creole’’ have not necessarily been synonymous images throughout Trinidad’s history: ideologically, ‘‘exotic’’ immigrants could not be mixed—as in absorbed—into the black-white continuum of race and color, yet the political developments of Trinidad’s mid-twentieth-century independence movement emphasized all racially and ethnically distinct local groups as together comprising the callaloo—creole—nation. With the post-emancipation influx of so-called foreigners (Indian, Chinese, Syrian-Lebanese), creole would increasingly indicate ‘‘mixed’’ society as well as ‘‘mixed’’ individuals. With the rise of the independent nation-state in the mid-twentieth century, mixed signaled the ‘‘callaloo’’ society. As Trinidad celebrates itself as a land of many heritages, a nation of coexisting groups, callaloo symbolizes that felicitous and mutually transforming combination of cultural, racial, and religious diversity. Literally, callaloo is the name of a national dish, not surprisingly, a stew with many ingredients. As metaphors, both callaloo and mixed refer to a heterogeneity that connotes democratic (equal) political representation, a cosmopolitan worldview, and therefore consummate modernity in a global context. More than simply a land of contrasts, Trinidad’s heterogeneous populations—African, Indian, European, Levantine (SyrianLebanese), Chinese, and Amerindian—embody the image of Trinidad as the centerpiece of sanguine multiplicity, a veritable ‘‘rainbow,’’ as the Ministry of Tourism, among others, enthusiastically promotes.≤ European anxieties about identity may have given rise to the bugaboo of mixing, but since the late nineteenth century mixing has come to represent the fraught association between Afro and Indo in Trinidad. By

8

Callaloo Nation

then, Trinidadian society was permeated by what Donald Wood, among others, characterizes as ‘‘the whole intricate experience of the AfroEuropean encounter since the Renaissance, [and] the stereotypes formed by slavery . . .’’ (1968:248); this was the context within which the various sectors of the Trinidadian population interacted and into which Indian immigrant laborers entered. Much of the scholarly literature on Trinidad has commented on the minimal intermarriage between Indo- and AfroTrinidadians. Many have surmised that these two populations carry their aversion to the point of boundaries on sexual intimacy. Indeed, many people in St. Patrick and Victoria Counties, where I conduct most of my field research (see chapter 3), assured me that ‘‘Indian and Negro don’t mix.’’ They meant socially, culturally, and sexually. The number of ‘‘douglas’’ (offspring of Indo and Afro), however, belies this assumption.≥ Also belying this assumption is the less racially concentrated character of urban areas as opposed to agricultural ones, illustrated in John Vandercook’s mid-twentieth-century leering remark, ‘‘the two breeds are getting on splendidly . . . One gathers from the tint and features of a numerous younger generation, getting on by night as well as day’’ (1938:258). Moreover, perspective is significant, if not everything. We can probably take E. W. Howe at his word when he notes that while he was in Trinidad, an ‘‘educated Hindu informed me that his people never intermarried with the negroes; a negro informed me that they did’’ (1910:215–16). The same differentiation was echoed by my own Trinidadian informants more than three-quarters of a century later. Nationalism and Communal Politics In most colonial societies, economic and social boundaries are made to correspond with racial, ethnic, religious, and other communal groups that are differently incorporated into the stratification system of the society. Through this unequal incorporation, which fosters conflictual political and economic interests, adversarial relations can develop between the communal groups (Hintzen 1989:6). In Trinidad’s origins as a colonial possession, a system of stratification based on a class-race-color hierarchy laid the foundations for a postcolonial society whose hallmark has been ethnic group competition, fostered by class inequalities and state control of certain resources, and couched in terms of racial antipathies between Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians. Perhaps one of colonialism’s most significant triumphs in the Caribbean was the legacy of race as an organizing principle in these societies. Yet it was not until 1946 that in the Trinidad census ‘‘a racial question proper was asked for the first time’’ (Kuczynski 1953:339). Although still within the colonial era, 1946 was a year when anticolonial sentiment and

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

9

agitation for independence in Trinidad were vibrant in public discourse, when Caribbean countries attempted (and failed at) a federation of the region. It was also the year that universal suffrage was achieved. The national census initiated increased precision in inquiring into racial identities. The categorical choices were: ‘‘White, Black, East Indian, East Indian Creole (these are persons of mixed East Indian origin, on the whole people who had an East Indian father or an East Indian mother only), Chinese, Chinese Creole (these again are people of mixed origin who had one Chinese parent only), Syrian, and Mixed or Coloured. In addition 26 Caribs were enumerated in the Colony)’’ (Kuczynski 1953:339). After World War II nationalist sentiment became more diffuse, emphasizing, in particular, constitutional reform and universal suffrage. Cultural nationalism also blossomed at this time: as ‘‘the African [AfroTrinidadian] and colored middle class became more prominent, it increasingly sought new symbols with which to define itself’’ (Stuempfle 1995:78–79). Increasingly, attention was given to Afro-Trinidadian folk culture as the standard bearer of the nation. This postwar period was one of massive independence movements across the globe, and ideologies of nationalism cannot be separated from this historical moment of tectonic global shifts. While Trinidadian black and colored (‘‘brown,’’ or Afro-Euro mixed) middle-class activists and intellectuals were stimulated by struggles to break from colonial rule in Africa, Indo-Trinidadian communal identity was encouraged by India’s independence from Britain in 1947, particularly among this population’s own middle class. Stephen Stuempfle (1995), among others, makes the important point that mid-twentiethcentury nationalist movements were by and large efforts of disgruntled middle classes. Among the most common anti-imperialist, anti-Western stances availed was a turn toward precolonial cultural forms—antidotes, it would seem, to European cultural and political hegemony. As Afro-Trinidadians emphasized their folk heritage, this mid-twentieth-century period saw a surge in the construction of masjids (Muslim mosques), mandirs (Hindu temples), denominational schools, and other such public symbols of ‘‘Indian culture’’ (Prorock 1991, 1993), one that ‘‘articulate Indians in the 1950s’’ considered superior to things African (Brereton 1981:240). Both Afro-Trinidadian and Indo-Trinidadian middle classes, however, relied on notions of traditional, authentic (noncolonial) culture to establish affinities with grassroots (poor and working-class) sectors of their own communities. Yet while Afro-Trinidadians unequivocally characterized the ‘‘folk’’ in folk culture as grassroots, IndoTrinidadians wrestled (and do still) with the paradox of agricultural laborers—‘‘bound coolies’’—evincing the ‘‘high’’ cultural forms of an ancient heritage. In his memoir, Through a Maze of Colour (1974), Albert Gomes, a prom-

10

Callaloo Nation

inent Portuguese-Trinidadian statesman in postwar Trinidad, reflects on his career and the vicissitudes of Trinidad’s political development. In discussing the 1946 general election, Gomes assures readers that ‘‘racial assertiveness was by no means the exclusive preserve of the Negroes: Indian advance was equally spectacular and rapid’’ (1974:163). The reason for this, Gomes explains, is that as independence became a reality for ‘‘ ‘Mother’ India,’’ Indo-Trinidadians became equally inspired (1974:163). In IndoTrinidadians’ response to India’s independence, ‘‘Gandhi hats and sumptuous saris suddenly reinforced the exotic and richly varied landscape. It was as if a cult had exploded in our midst and was casting its incongruous abracadabra everywhere . . . From India so-called cultural emissaries descended upon our island . . . India’s patriotic holidays were observed in Trinidad with a fierce jingoistic zeal by the descendants of the immigrants who had come originally as indentured labourers for the sugar estates. The process of assimilation was being reversed’’ (1974:164). In this remark Gomes betrays his disapproval of Indian culture as an impetus for forming an enclave. For our purposes, what is noteworthy is that he links a heightened public visibility of ‘‘Indianness’’ in Trinidad both to events in India and to the ‘‘cultural emissaries’’ who excited the interest of Indo-Trinidadians. Yet Gomes draws a parallel with an earlier event and Afro-Trinidadians’ response. In 1934, when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, ‘‘Trinidad’s Negroes made common cause with their African brothers across the waters. There was a spontaneous burgeoning of beards on black faces that long had prided themselves on their perpetual smoothness’’ (1974:163–64). It is clear, however, that solidarity with Africa among Afro-Trinidadians does not perturb Gomes in the same fashion as Indo-Trinidadian empathies—perhaps because Afro-Trinidadians have not had extensive ties with Ethiopia. By the 1956 elections in Trinidad (the first toward establishing an independent nation-state), Gomes recalls that ‘‘the racial question—indeed, the entire complex of racial questions’’ was brought to the fore (1974:175). The ‘‘dismal fact’’ was that ‘‘exploitation of race had been the decisive factor in the elections, a fact which every one [sic] recognised, even though, as with a guilty secret, people hesitated to make public mention of its existence’’ (1974:175). The idiom of cultural authenticity as a crucial element in resistance to colonialism was a key aspect in the ‘‘racial consciousness’’ that transcended other forms of communal cohesion, notably unity across classes (see, for example, Singh 1994; Hintzen 1989, 1997). Within the ‘‘semiotics of colonialism’’ (Hintzen 1997:54) in Trinidad, the mutually constitutive relationship between culture and race has helped to reify these into terms that seem objective and self-evident, based in nature rather than society. Emphasizing ‘‘race’’ and the ‘‘culture’’ that went with it was a strategy of the first postindependence government in Trinidad, the People’s National

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

11

Movement (pnm), a largely middle-class party of Afro-Trinidadian intelligentsia. Following suit, the so-called ‘‘Indian opposition,’’ the People’s Democratic Party (pdp) and, later, the Democratic Labour Party (dlp), also played to constituencies demarcated by distinct identities of race and culture. Keeping constituencies antithetical on the basis of perceived racial interests, therefore, helped contain the number of competing factions to two, Afro and Indo. It also buttressed ‘‘race’’ as a central idiom in Trinidadian society—the language, imagery, and ideology according to which identities, configured against a particular anticolonial ideology, continued to be constructed. ‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’ As much recent work on mixing (creolization, hybridity, métissage) has shown, mixing, as transgression, can threaten to destabilize or transform the social order. The question, of course, is whose social order, and whose threat? Trinidad claims itself as the epitome of mixedness, a callaloo nation where a stew becomes the primary metaphor of the independent nation-state. In its role in making a modern nation out of a colonial society, Trinidad’s concept of callaloo connotes modernity—democratic political representation, racial and ethnic tolerance, and a cosmopolitan worldview. These accomplishments are not secure: as recently reiterated in 1999 by then–Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, Trinidad’s ‘‘fabled diversity’’ necessarily comes with ‘‘challenges’’ (Taitt 1999:21), the challenge of managing the discord that implicitly inheres in alterity, particularly between the two largest racial communities, Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians. Indo-Trinidadians’ history and culture must be understood in conjunction with their Afro-Trinidadian counterparts. Whether or not they interact face-to-face on a daily basis, they both have shaped, through their presence and contributions, the wider social arena called the nation-state. Currently among the most familiar ‘‘diasporas struggling for recognition’’ in a postcolonial environment (Werbner 2001:133), Indo-Trinidadians now constitute the majority population in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Approximately 78 percent are Hindu, about 16 percent are Muslim, and around 6 percent are Christian. Indo-Trinidadians’ concerns about ‘‘mixed’’ and ‘‘pure’’ have been a critical dimension of their identity as long as they have been in Trinidad. For them (as well as others), mixing is often as much about conservation of boundaries and essences as their subversion; that is, about not mixing. Groups and communities evaluate different forms of mixing according to what they perceive as their own interests and the perceived degree of loss of their own distinctiveness within a larger arena (Khan 2001). A curious combination of forces is at work in Trinidadian society: a ready acknowledgment of its multiple cultural influences and the mixed 12

Callaloo Nation

quality of its history and population, along with an apparently clear ethnopolitical division into Afro and Indo (Khan 1993). The characterization of Trinidad as having experienced its entire history as a callaloo society, the presence of large numbers of variously ‘‘mixed’’ persons in Trinidad, and the existence of the formal as well as informal ethnic category ‘‘Mixed’’ (evident, for example, in the official census and in everyday parlance) pose an interesting, if submerged, conundrum for Trinidadians. On the one hand, an image of cultural, religious, racial, and ethnic heterogeneity and amalgamation is evoked—a ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ nation with Amerindian, African, and European ancestral kinds, subsequently flavored with even more far-flung cultures. On the other hand, in the context of the indenturebased plantation political economy and the postindependence competition for scarce, state-dispensed resources, the cultural legitimacy, distinctive historical roots, and separate-but-equal representation of constituent groups form the discourse through which political struggle is undertaken. Whether as hope or as threat, or both, in virtually every conversation of any length I heard or participated in with Indo-Trinidadians throughout the island and beyond, mixing underlay the ways the past is interpreted, the present assessed, and the future imagined. Mixing is both unspoken bogey and voiced barometer of modernity and progress in a milieu where race and religion—cultural distinctions in Trinidad’s stratified society and key idioms of identity construction—are two dimensions of experience most receptive (some would say vulnerable) to dilutions, impurities, and fraudulence. Within these tensions, Indo-Trinidadian Muslims and Hindus face an uneasy and continuous negotiation of a contradiction: identity is a source of equality and simultaneously an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. On the one hand, the boundaries of orthodoxy can safeguard a political constituency and yet veer dangerously close to being ‘‘racial’’ (racist); on the other hand, the ambiguities of heterodoxy and syncretism ideologically resonate well with the callaloo nation but ostensibly jeopardize group cohesion. For Indo-Trinidadians, concerns about mixing have come in several forms. These include: the difficulty of maintaining caste purity among indentured Hindus on sugar plantations; the consequent potential absorption of Indian cultural identity by hegemonic Euro- and Afro-Trinidadian ones; Muslim and Hindu interaction with Canadian Presbyterian missionaries (beginning in 1868) and the disruption of traditional structures of Muslim and Hindu religious authority tied to conversion to various forms of Christianity; and Muslim and Hindu interdependence as ‘‘Indian.’’ Paradoxically, the latter interdependence developed even as ‘‘Muslim’’ and ‘‘Hindu’’ gradually came to be mutually exclusive ways of being in the New World. The two most highly charged domains of mixing for Indo-Trinidadian ‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

13

Muslims and Hindus are racial miscegenation and religious syncretism. Race mixing ostensibly produces biologically and culturally hybrid offspring, whose lack of inheritance of a clearly defined identity makes Indo/ Afro distinctions ambiguous and therefore, the logic continues, politically unreliable. Even when the political dimensions of an identity are unformed, as in the locally familiar identity category ‘‘dougla,’’ the boundary ambiguity is unsettling enough to cause it to be used with some hesitation, at times with disapproval. Religious syncretism refers to combinations of religious knowledge, beliefs, and practices. Defended by most Indo-Trinidadians as characteristic of ‘‘long time’’ generations who tenaciously sustained ‘‘we culture’’ in any way they could, syncretisms are also decried today as derailing ‘‘correct’’ or ‘‘authentic’’ (pure) practice, forcing contestations over authorized knowledge (orthodoxy), and confusing the role of cultural traditions in religious expression.∂ For Afro-Trinidadians, racial emblems come from the marked category ‘‘African culture,’’ which subsumes ideas about African religious practice. For Indo-Trinidadians, racial emblems come from the marked category ‘‘Indian religion,’’ which encompasses much of what is recognized as Indian cultural practices. In the Trinidadian context, religion has been IndoTrinidadians’ alterity; that is, the marked category largely definitive of the Indian ‘‘race.’’ A major reason for this difference was because by 1845, the time Indians arrived, Trinidad’s white-black racial continuum included a shared Christianity. Indo-Trinidadian community leaders, as well as those in ‘‘Indian opposition’’ political parties, have worked to endorse ‘‘Indian religion’’ as an icon of Indianness, as constituting a natural, national constituency. At the same time, this staging of culture is problematic for IndoTrinidadians, caught between attempts to belong in the national portrait of the callaloo nation, where selected cultural traditions become iconic representations of racial constituencies, and attempts to keep the emblem of their cultural identity, religion, within a special, protected sphere. As Ravi-Ji, a nationally known spiritual leader and newspaper columnist, commented, ‘‘there is a thin line of demarcation in what is cultural and what is sacred’’ in the carnivalized, secular environment of nationalist performance (quoted in Frankson 1990:5). These are instances where the inclusivity of callaloo and the exclusivity of boundaries clash. Race and religion, then, must be understood as what Stuart Hall (1980) calls ‘‘articulated discourses’’: neither is reducible to the other, but they work in tandem to convey and reinforce certain images and assumptions. In defining the boundaries of their constituencies and the structures of authority within these, Muslims and Hindus construct their racial identities through particular forms of religious knowledge and practice, and construct their religious identities through particular forms of racial

14

Callaloo Nation

(pre)disposition and group cohesiveness. They do so partly in relation to Afro-Trinidadian cultural characteristics, and partly in relation to aspects of their own cultural heritage—‘‘mixed’’ both at home on the subcontinent and in diaspora. Changing, and oppositional, concerns about mixing undergird ideas about syncretism and ideas about orthodoxy as ‘‘correct’’ or authorized forms of religious knowledge. The fluidity of local traditions (syncretisms) in Hindus’ and Muslims’ religious practice gives value to Indians’ arrival and establishment in Trinidad by symbolizing their religious and cultural tenacity, and the fellowship between Hindus and Muslims—as ‘‘pumpkin vine kin,’’ as economically cooperative neighbors (chapter 3), and as jahaji bhai (chapter 5).∑ In grassroots communities that prize ‘‘living good with people,’’ Hindus and Muslims have long practiced their respective religions with a good deal of overlap and not much concern for mutually exclusive distinctions. As one person put it to me, ‘‘If neighbors is Hindu and Muslim, you can’t really tell the difference except by the name. Because they mix and grow together.’’ ‘‘Long time’’ (in the past), Indo-Trinidadians profess, forebears sustained Indian traditions from the subcontinent. The celebration of both Indian presence and authenticity is in general compatible with the ideology of callaloo, and makes identity a source of equality where tolerance and harmony characterize broader ‘‘race relations.’’ Yet the humble, untutored practices of long time ways and ‘‘older heads’’ are not always specifically compatible with the kind of knowledge needed to define contemporary Muslim and Hindu constituencies within Trinidadian political culture.∏ An example of this is found in the call for philosophical as opposed to literal interpretations among Hindus (chapter 6), and the call for ‘‘pure’’ practices shorn of ‘‘cultural innovations’’ among Muslims (chapter 7). Both aspirations fortify group boundaries in a nation-state that dispenses patronage on the basis of communally defined groups. Less compatible with the ideology of mixing, they instead evoke hierarchy and the intolerable. In both academic and popular thought, the existence of different groups of people living together under one system of governance has long been seen as a disaster waiting to happen, a disaster that therefore demands containment. Such theory has notably taken shape in the context of colonial regimes’ establishment and management of their empires (e.g., Furnivall 1948; M. G. Smith 1962). The ‘‘plural’’ societies of the Caribbean, and other such places as Southeast Asia, engendered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonization, are perceived to contain distinct groups living side by side, ideally in mutual tolerance if not affection. The extent to which, if at all, they are imagined to combine (rather than simply be juxtaposed), to reconfigure their cultural and other boundaries, or to mix, has long been a problem for political rule as well as a

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

15

cultural predicament. For the concern is about the maintenance of social order and the maintenance of identities within an encompassing social matrix whose configuration of unity and compromise is typically predicated on certain promoted, or ‘‘selected’’ (R. Williams 1977) traditions, values, and worldviews. Social harmony is presumed to be more easily achieved, more organically possible when the social formation is imagined to be culturally or racially homogeneous. When heterogeneity comprises a mixed or callaloo nation-state, such as Trinidad, it begs prediction, and ambiguity begs clarification. Foretelling the social consequences of mixedness generally comes in two forms of discourse. On the one hand, there is the presumption that heterogeneity will eventuate in homogeneity, that is, cultural unity, because proximity figuratively breeds tolerance or because proximity literally breeds ambiguities in recognized group boundaries. On the other hand, there is the idea that, because volatility is inherent in cultural difference, heterogeneity will inevitably generate conflict that must be managed by an overarching authority structure. The former way of thinking is evident in a comment made in the 1950s to Albert Gomes, by a ‘‘Negro professor from the United States’’ (1974:153). The American professor assured Gomes that Trinidadians are ‘‘too mixed a people to breed explosive race prejudice’’ (1974:153). Despite Gomes’s ‘‘concern at the IndianNegro confrontation in Trinidad, I want to believe that the professor is right . . . The ethnic ingredients that have gone into the making of Trinidad’s crazyquilt society would seem to predetermine eventual racial homogenization’’ (1974:153). Here, clearly, Gomes equates racial homogenization with cultural unity. The legacy left by ‘‘plural society’’ authors J. S. Furnivall and M. G. Smith, among others, and the one to which former Prime Minister Panday refers above, is a discourse that defines difference as intrinsically problematic. According to some recent polls, race relations have become particularly aggravated since 1995, when (for the first time in the Republic’s history and only the second time in Caribbean history) an Indo-Trinidadian prime minister and ‘‘Indian’’ political party (the United National Congress, or unc) took office (departing in 2000). As a local patron of a Port of Spain nightclub recently commented in a Los Angeles Times article, 1 January 1999, ‘‘They say we are the rainbow country.’’ Her companion interjected, ‘‘People existed here for a long time on this lie . . . Trinidad as a unified society is what we can only dream of.’’ His pithy summation: ‘‘This rainbow has teeth.’’ While the unprecedented election of the unc arguably created a climate where people could broach the subject of racial tension with less self-consciousness—and less commitment to the rhetoric of rainbows (see Harney 1996)—the election also encouraged a discourse where the antagonism between Afro and Indo is reified and naturalized; that is, its historical foundations and material conditions became talked 16

Callaloo Nation

about as if located somewhere within heritable temperament and disposition, as if this political circumstance further opened the Trinidadian Pandora’s box of animosities that were always and already there. To the same Los Angeles Times reporter, for example, an Indo-Trinidadian man commented, ‘‘Racism in this country has always existed, but we didn’t let it out. It’s too dangerous. After all, you always have in every office black people and Indian people working together. But now people are talking and talking all the time.’’ In Trinidad, then, such talk is never just a healing release. The ambivalent benefits of public discourses that expose the rainbow’s teeth with unambiguous directness are nicely illustrated in the Trinidad Express newspaper’s ‘‘Grab a Grin’’ comic strip. Three men, drawn to suggest what in the United States might be called ‘‘average Joes,’’ are talking together. The first asks, ‘‘Why it is we hearin’ so much talk of race now? Every odder [other] day somebody accusin’ somebody of bein’ racial!’’ The next man says, ‘‘Yeh, yuh [you] have to watch how yuh talkin’ now, yes. If yuh say ah cloud lookin’ black an’ ugly, someone might call yuh ah racist!’’ The third one adds, ‘‘An’ if yuh say cocaine is white an’ evil, someone might call yuh racist, too!!’’ (Trinidad Express 1990:9). Expressing concern over the potential for the sublime to become ridiculous, this cartoon also demonstrates how pervasive racial idioms are in Trinidadians’ everyday talk as well as in the rhetorical strategies of political culture. One might say that Trinidadians are wary that giving voice to something can make it real, and that this realization (reification) can be both advantageous and destructive. In celebrating a callaloo nation, Trinidad affirms its location within a contemporary modern world of democracy and tolerance. Yet, as Selwyn Ryan, a regionally prominent scholar, sums it up, ‘‘Everything gets framed in terms of race here’’ (quoted in Rohter 1997). A paradox exists, resting on a metaphor of purity and mixing: the mutually exclusive, essential differences between Afro and Indo versus their committed efforts at cooperation based on perceived affinities. In August 1997 an acrimonious and public clash over racial name-calling made headlines in Trinidad and abroad, involving, as it did, IndoTrinidadian Prime Minister Basdeo Panday and Afro-Trinidadian businessman Kenneth Gordon (Rohter 1997). This episode, just another in a protracted mutual animosity between these two leaders (and symbolizing Indo-Afro tensions), involved Panday’s belief that Gordon’s newspaper, the Trinidad Express, had relied on racial bias as a mode of critique of Panday’s largely Indo-Trinidadian unc government, and Gordon’s responding with a lawsuit, countering that Panday’s referring to him as a ‘‘pseudo-racist,’’ that is, a calculating ‘‘manipulator of racial feelings,’’ was slanderous (Rohter 1997:E). What is important about their conflict for our purposes is the discourse in which it is couched: a racial divide as neat and precise as its coun‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

17

terimage, the mixed and imbricated callaloo nation. For if the callaloo nation emphasizes cultural diversity, the racial divide reflects the pragmatics of patronage: state allocation of resources that both bolsters local constituencies and acknowledges them. Two years later, in 1999, Panday would address the ‘‘widespread criticism’’ that, as prime minister, he was giving preferential treatment to Afro-Trinidadians to the detriment of Indo-Trinidadians (Taitt 1999:21). Defending himself, he resorted to the refrain that Trinidad is ‘‘a unique laboratory of diversity in which we have been markedly successful in achieving a notable degree of harmony’’ (Taitt 1999:21). In this atmosphere of harmony, however, debates over fair shares continue to be acute. For example, the unc’s Ministry of Culture and Gender Affairs rejected the public accusation that they had been remiss in supporting ‘‘East Indian Culture,’’ reporting for 1999 allocations of $355,000 for ‘‘Hindu/Indian celebrations’’ and $210,000 for ‘‘African celebrations’’ ( ‘‘Fair Share’’ 1999:18). Yet letters to the editor in Trinidad’s national newspapers give voice to contrary concerns. A typical letter, for example, admonished the Minister of Works for planning a Ganesh puja (a Hindu ritual) for the opening of the airport, reminding him that ‘‘this is not a Hindu state . . . it will never be and the airport will not only be used by Hindu worshippers’’ (Newsday 2000:4). She points out that ‘‘we live in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society and the opening of the new airport should be marked by an inter faith [sic] ceremony, where all the major faiths are allowed to do their thing,’’ ending with the clarion call to the ‘‘people of Trinidad and Tobago [to] wake up [,] smell the dictatorship which has now gone beyond creeping, but is up and running before our very eyes.’’ Being ‘‘allowed to do their thing,’’ however, still begs the question of what to name that thing; that is, how to make multiplicity coherent, how to establish a baseline logic, so to speak, within heterogeneity. ‘‘Is All One God, Anyhow’’ By most standards Trinidad constitutes a complex arena of religious traditions, where the so-called ‘‘world religions’’ of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam have interacted with indigenous African and Amerindian beliefs and practices. Each body of thought, moreover, has its internal distinctions, and localized interpretations that derive from differences in social class, locality (region), and cultural histories. Islam, for example, has practitioners among both Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian communities. And just as there are many different expressions of Christianity in Trinidad, Hinduism and Islam also have their own variations, notably ‘‘orthodox,’’ ‘‘folk,’’ or ‘‘reform’’ perspectives, deriving from the subcontinent as well as from local influences. Hinduism’s Sanatan Dharm and the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, for example, represent the predominant 18

Callaloo Nation

perspective among Trinidadian Hindus and Muslims, respectively. At the same time, Arya Samaj teachings have influenced the direction of local Hinduism, as Ahmadiyya interpretations have in local Islam.π Trinidadians face the paradox of acknowledging the heterogeneous, mixed composition of their society even as the society is also seen in certain contexts (especially political) as dichotomized into Indo and Afro. Similarly, formalized religious discourses calling for mutually exclusive choices exist within a multiplicity and fluidity of possible religious affiliations. Most Trinidadians receive some kind of religious instruction for a period of time in their youth, in accordance with the deeply religious character of Trinidadian society (where the most arcane and unfamiliar religion would be more acceptable to a Trinidadian than an avowal of atheism). In the compact communities of towns and villages, moreover, being exposed to other religious instruction in addition to one’s own formal instruction is not uncommon. Many people, therefore, have some degree of familiarity with the tenets of religions not their own. In this environment of many paths to God, an effective social compromise is the moral prescription, ‘‘is all one God, anyhow.’’ Among the most common bromides in Trinidadian nationalist discourse—a discourse that has developed according to colonial and postindependence ideologies about the conflict ostensibly latent in cultural diversity—‘‘is all one God, anyhow’’ signals the equality of all religions because ultimately they are oriented in the same direction; a fundamental sameness smoothes superficial differences. A pervasive rhetorical refrain, ‘‘is all one God, anyhow’’ conveys the compromise, invited by the harmonious callaloo of Trinidadian society, of unity in diversity. Each may have his or her own path toward divine guidance, paths that stem from distinct ancestral kinds, yet all paths have the same trajectory and end objective. Given a context where many ideological and cultural forces are at work, one would expect that intricate processes of creation and recreation characterize religion in Trinidad. An apt portrayal, albeit a fictional one, comes from V. S. Naipaul’s novel The Suffrage of Elvira. In Elvira, ‘‘things were crazily mixed up . . . Everybody, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, owned a Bible; the Hindus and Muslims looking on it, if anything, with greater awe. Hindus and Muslims celebrated Christmas and Easter. The Spaniards and some of the Negroes celebrated the Hindu festival of lights [Divali] . . . Everybody celebrated the Muslim festival of Hosein [Hosay]. In fact, when Elvira was done with religious festivals, there were few straight days left’’ (1958:66). In this passage Trinidad’s diversity is amusing in its very existence, in the carelessness of its zeal. Yet here also is the image of harmony. These residents feel no tension or liminality in a situation that is empirically and theoretically disordered. It is not coincidental, if perhaps not intentional, that Naipaul begins his description of the town by establishing its outrageous mixture. ‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

19

My informants’ observations about their own lives growing up could have been out of Elvira. One ‘‘older head’’ (community elder), my neighbor Rama, reminisced about a time that, according to my calculations, must have been around the late 1920s: My parents took me to Sipari Mai.∫ They made a wish or a vow or a promise and take their sweet oil and candles. Some people carry perfume, incenses, or a gold offering. They would go and make this offering and go about the market and see so many people they maybe haven’t seen for the year. There were groups of people there, like the gypsies. They were the dancers and the fortune tellers from India. They had the saddhus, all of them [were] there. My parents went every year. A true Hindu is a true Catholic, and a true Catholic is a true Hindu . . . Hindu believe in the worship of all the saints but in a different language. In the final analysis all are the same. The Hindus believe in the cross, so the pandits have the white . . . on their forehead: [three prongs for] Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahase—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Catholic and the Hindu use images for the same reason: as a remembrance and this is why so many Hindus are devout believers in Sipari Mai. That is a true saint. A ‘‘true Hindu’’ and a ‘‘true Catholic’’ are equivalent because their worship is the same, only in ‘‘a different language.’’ Is all one God, anyhow; the sincerity of their faith is what binds them commensurately together. As the number of life histories and genealogies that I collected grew, the Elvira theme, so to speak, was repeated. Fatima (a name she took when she embraced Islam), related to me that as a child in the 1950s, although from a Hindu home, she went for a time to Seventh Day Adventist and Pentecostal Bible classes: ‘‘We knew we religion, we knew we was Hindu, we just went because we friends were that [religion] and we had fun, and we parents never told us anything [i.e., not to go]. Not like these days when they say not to mix. Back then it was more freer. But now it have so much snatching away from the religion to the next one.’’ Fatima was referring to the evangelical and Pentecostal proselytizing missions that have successfully swept the Caribbean in the past few decades, ‘‘snatching away’’ Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians to these Christian denominations (see chapter 3). In ‘‘these days when they say not to mix,’’ Fatima is referring, as well, to the specter of mixed marriages, whether religious or racial, that threaten the certainty of group boundaries, something that in her childhood, when ‘‘we knew we religion’’ (that is, were more confident in our identities), was not a problem. Similarly, Shusheela, an acquaintance who had grown up in south Trinidad in the 1940s, was born into a Muslim family and then accepted Hinduism at her Hindu husband’s request. She explained, ‘‘Before, I have a prayers, you have a prayers, we live near and we all in it together, we all 20

Callaloo Nation

does go by everyone. I was so used to it [Hinduism]. Although I in a Muslim home and you is [in] a Hindu home, we all mix together goodgood. Is only now that people get so particular, you is you, and I is I. But to me is all the same. Is all one God we pray to, anyhow, just in different ways, yes?’’ In a mixed-up place like Trinidad, however, this compatibility is not always an easy endeavor; in debates over orthodoxy, syncretism, and who can make authoritative commentary on these, the multiple paths to God are differently (and contentiously) valorized. For everyone, reaching the same God is the ultimate consequence, but along the way are the pitfalls of blurred boundaries through mixing and the possible confusion of information and interpretation—in both knowledge and in the belief and practice that ensues from being able to grasp correctly how to think as well as what to know. Especially in the first and second generation of Indo-Trinidadians’ settlement in Trinidad, contingency-based changes in religious identification were experienced and treated as matter-of-fact adjustments to life’s exigencies. Religious transformations such as Shusheela’s may have been stigmatized to a degree, but not, as we will see, viewed as a problem of great magnitude, as in the contemporary, mid-twentieth-century era. Before Hinduism and Islam became viewed as mutually exclusive, these sorts of shifts did not transgress religious boundaries, nor did they always symbolize the potential cultural and racial dissolution of a community. Indo-Trinidadians surreptitiously engaged in daily devotional rites while indentured to sugar estates, and they have a long history of resisting colonial authorities for their right to hold religious ceremonies and organizing in protest when not able to do so, as in the protest in 1884 (‘‘riots’’ in British colonial parlance) over holding Hosay (Muharram), the annual Muslim commemoration of the martyrdom of Hassan and Hosein, grandsons of the Prophet Mohammed. Religious identities, then, were always a politically charged issue for Indo-Trinidadians. But it was not until about the 1920s that religious practice among them became institutionalized in terms of collective community membership (see chapter 5). At that time, religion became politically charged in two ways: in rights to practice and in claims to increasingly uniform systems of knowledge. As such, religious identities became culturally significant in a different way, as ‘‘culture’’ took on national and international proportions during the years when universal suffrage and constituent mobilization around race were imminent. ‘‘How Does Power Create Religion’’? In the opening line of his first chapter in Religion: A Humanist Interpretation, Raymond Firth points out that a ‘‘major problem in modern thought is the existence and survival of religion’’ (1996:1). As late as the tail end of ‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

21

the twentieth century, scholars were relying on a religion versus science polarity, continuing to ask whether secularism, rationalism, and modernism are putting religion in peril (1996:1).Ω Firth’s response is that organized religion can rarely be eradicated and that, being diffuse, religious belief can endure without being put into ritual practice. It endures significantly, he reminds us, in the form of resistance to the ‘‘materialistic thrust’’ that inheres in the -isms above (1996:1). With Firth, I do not think a single theory of religion is possible, nor, I would add, desirable. Two decades ago Eric Wolf observed that anthropology has learned a ‘‘good deal about what religion does,’’ yet ‘‘we are still far from understanding what religion is’’ (1984:1). Wolf identified as one possible reason our incapacity to supplant notions of ‘‘religious ‘common sense’ drawn from our own religious traditions with culture-free constructs’’ (1984:1–2). Theories by their very nature codify and cohere distinct elements into enough uniformity to be able to speak for any number of phenomena—the more the better, as inclusiveness is viewed as an indication of a theory’s success. The difficult relationship between defining (and theorizing) religion and religion’s diversity of expression in daily life reinforces, ironically, the premise that religion somehow occupies a special domain. That is, even if there are too many religions to enable a universal definition, there still remains the idea that Religion is in a domain by itself.∞≠ Examining the ways in which the theoretical search for an essence of religion encourages us to conceptualize it as separate from domains of power, Talal Asad (1993:29) invites us to loosen religion from its pedestal. Working within Western intellectual traditions, most twentieth-century anthropologists, he observes, have viewed religion as ‘‘a distinctive space of human practice and belief which cannot be reduced to any other’’ (1993:27). Approaching religion in this way implies that it is not necessarily interdependent with other dimensions of culture—such as political or economic (Asad 1993:50). The possession of an autonomous essence reinforces our (Western) image of religion as an essential core of spirit, a metaphysical quality that transcends the corporeal, definitive aspects of our being, and that, as a human propensity, channels yearning, desire, and awe toward (what we conceive as) the supernatural. Construed as transcendent, religion, as an interpretive category, is less likely to be subject to an inquisition about its socially constructed character, in contrast to other interpretive categories, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality. It is instructive here to bear in mind Anna Tsing’s discussion of the putative distinction between nature and culture. In U.S. culture, she argues, the idea of nature allows a tension between ‘‘those forms of agency we best know and those we imagine to be outside our ken’’ (1995:114). In Caribbean societies, as in the United States, hegemonic ideas about race may consign it to a ‘‘fact of nature,’’ but it is a nature

22

Callaloo Nation

that is construed as within our capability to understand—by the scientist and by the layperson, if at different angles of comprehension. Although certainly ‘‘natural,’’ in the sense of normative to human societies, religion belongs to a different image of nature, one that escapes human knowledge, a form of agency that we view, perhaps, as outside our ken. In Trinidad, to roughly paraphrase, people commonly say that God created religion but man makes the comess (confusion, trouble) with it. As in Western tradition, the idea is that religion lies within human nature but at the same time its natural domain lies outside of human faculty. As Firth makes clear, even when counterposed with science or subjected to scholarly scrutiny, the ineffable quality of religion endures. In local and international scholarship, the image of Trinidad’s hyperdiversity resonated with postwar academic and policy inquiries into what gave the world’s multicultural powder keg societies the possibility for, and semblance of, cohesion. Such diverse observers as J. S. Furnivall (1948), Raymond Firth (1957), Michael G. Smith (1965), Raymond T. Smith (1962), and Clifford Geertz (1963) approached the multicultural societies under their respective scrutiny in a similar fashion in at least one respect. In their view, these societies were held centripetally together by various social and political forces, notably colonial authority. In an early look specifically at Trinidad, anthropologist Daniel Crowley answered the question of how a diverse society manages to stay intact by positing a model of ‘‘plural’’ and ‘‘differential’’ acculturation. These two modes of acculturation allowed Trinidadians to cope with diversity in a strategy of fitting in, or acculturating, according to the assessment of needs and situations. Plural acculturation enables learning ‘‘the ways’’ of groups other than one’s own, and differential acculturation enables rejecting ‘‘alien ways’’ to varying degree (1957:823). Hence ‘‘Trinidadians develop a ‘collection of masks’ or personalities, and don whichever mask is suitable for each occasion . . . A Trinidadian feels no inconsistency in being a British citizen, a Negro in appearance, a Spaniard in name, a Roman Catholic at church, an obeah (magic) practitioner in private, a Hindu at lunch, a Chinese at dinner, a Portuguese at work, and a Colored at the polls’’ (1957:823). Although Crowley surely is exaggerating for effect, and sounding rather like Naipaul as he described Elvira, Crowley’s central idea is that Trinidadians feel no ‘‘inconsistency’’ contending with all this difference. They must have learned to cope with difference by becoming chameleon-like, since identities, it has long been assumed, are coherent wholes, firmly bounded and exclusive of contrasting ways of being. Crowley’s characterization is not an entirely incorrect description of Trinidadian society, given the presence of indigenous Amerindians and the numbers of peoples settling in the Caribbean over the past five hundred years. Yet Trinidad’s heterogeneity is also understood, in scholar-

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

23

ship and in popular wisdom, as in essence conflictual, as identities are assumed to be coherent, and cultural diversity is assumed to be a selfevident empirical fact that anticipates ideological embellishments. The problem with thinking about Caribbean religions in terms of the region’s ostensible hyper-diversity is that emphasizing so-called syncretic religions as aggregated segments encourages the distinction we make between ‘‘wholes’’ and ‘‘parts,’’ ‘‘authentic’’ and ‘‘invented,’’ ‘‘great tradition’’ and ‘‘little tradition,’’ ‘‘world religions,’’ such as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, and ‘‘others.’’ In drawing a distinction between syncretic religions’ fluidity and flexibility in contrast to ‘‘world’’ religions, it is not difficult to forget that all religions are ‘‘syncretic,’’ that ‘‘world’’ status is based on such measures as extent of global dispersion, presence of proselytization, longevity, and mode of intellectual engagement (philosophies, epics, written texts, or oral narratives, for example)—criteria that are basically arbitrary, and that come out of a Western canon. There are other, more persuasive differences between, for example, Afro-Caribbean ‘‘syncretic’’ religions and ‘‘world religions’’ like Christianity, such as commitment to religious orthodoxy and dissimilar moral orders, not least of which is the concept of sin (Gordon 1997; Austin-Broos 1997). Yet these ‘‘syncretic’’ religions are not merely chips off ‘‘world religion’’ blocks. Most scholars who write about these religions do not treat them as such, but we still need to probe the problem of implicitly viewing Caribbean ‘‘syncretic’’ religions as somehow ancillary, as significant only among those peoples who practice them, as ad hoc (lacking coherence, doctrine, or consistency), or as being most sensible among the disempowered because historically they have tended to be concentrated among these populations. There is a difficult balance between celebrating the possibilities of alternatives to ‘‘world religions’’ that are offered by ‘‘syncretic’’ ones and at the same time unwittingly reiterating conventional assumptions about the greater grandness and importance of ‘‘world religions’’ through our calculation of what there is to acclaim about ‘‘syncretic’’ ones. A telling and curious example of this is Margarite Fernandez Olmos’s and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s claim that obeah ‘‘is not a religion so much as a system of beliefs rooted in . . . spirituality, which acknowledges the existence and power of the supernatural world and incorporates . . . witchcraft, sorcery, magic, spells, and healing’’ (Fernandez Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 2003:131).∞∞ While this description is intended to convey an appreciation of obeah, we can infer from it that, for these authors, ‘‘religion’’ indicates a conventional Western model of religion as codified, institutionalized, and consistent, as opposed to obeah, a varied collection of elements, somehow sub-rosa (witchcraft, sorcery, magic, spells), that are joined ad hoc in accordance with a specific need. Celebrating obeah as being all that ‘‘religion’’ is not—as implicitly ‘‘little’’ or ‘‘folk’’ traditions

24

Callaloo Nation

rather than as ‘‘great’’ or ‘‘world’’ religions—also reproduces the dichotomy between universalistic and particularistic, one that hierarchically classifies forms of religious belief and practice. As such, this dichotomy is unable to include diasporic religions that are viewed as coming from ‘‘great’’ or ‘‘world’’ religions. The creative energies (accommodating or resisting) that communities and societies put into constructing representations of themselves, inculcating worldviews among a population, and thereby establishing epistemologies, involve the articulation of various discourses: the weaving together of existing cultural themes and metaphors in such a way as to resonate with each other, thereby creating the semblance of consistency and irrefutability. And one of the ways these discourses is challenged or dismantled is to negate or reverse the conceptual mechanisms that link them together. Muslim and Hindu Indo-Trinidadian identities consist of discourses articulated by both the subaltern and the dominant— among Indo and non-Indo alike—drawing on metaphors of mixing, either in terms of the harmony of callaloo or the security of purity. But they draw on the same metaphors toward different ends. Though it advances us in the right direction, the question of discerning what religion is from what it is not still implies that these are or can be fixed distinctions. When religious phenomena are approached as bundles of anticipated beliefs and practices that precisely represent certain predictable groups of practitioners, not only are we not required to ask, ‘‘when is something religion,’’ we are also not required to query ‘‘what makes it so?’’—what constitutes ‘‘religion,’’ ‘‘sacrality,’’ and ‘‘ritual’’ at a certain moment in time and place? In order to explore religion in Trinidad without assuming its particular definition or content, yet acknowledging its necessary permeation by different expressions of power relations, we need to consider at least three distinctions made locally: between the mundane or ‘‘rational’’ and the fantastic; between the faith-driven and what is decried as ‘‘superstition’’; and between authorized or ecclesiastical discourses and those defined as subversive. We also need to consider the moments when these distinctions are still ambiguous. Each of these speaks to the processes whereby a phenomenon qualifies as ‘‘religion,’’ why doing so is important, and to whom. My use of quotation marks certainly does not mean to imply that somehow religion is not real in Trinidad—rather that, in Trinidad, as everywhere else in the world, certain cultural expressions and ideologies become interpreted as being religion in some contexts and not in others, and these interpretations involve racial as well as class hierarchies, forms of power and discourses that are articulated with religious discourses in such a way as to indelibly shape them. There are, of course, common denominators in Trinidadian Islam and Hinduism that historically have

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

25

been an important part of these religions everywhere they occur, recognizable to anyone familiar with them. These include highlighting certain texts, certain doctrines, certain figures both mythical and historical, and certain ways of putting these into practice, such as ritual performances. My point is that these common denominators should not be viewed as touchstones according to which we can recognize with assurance a particular, anticipated religion. They are, instead, forms of knowledge that are imbued with special significance, the nature of which is contingent on time, place, and power. As such, these forms of knowledge symbolize, and summarize, particular conventions and tensions among groups of people with long histories of mutual dependence and animosity. Trinidadian society has long been a setting for abrading cosmological imperatives, clashing hegemonies, and competitive ideologies. Rather than resulting from problems ostensibly inhering in cultural difference, these tensions are generated by the structure of power relations there. Because the ‘‘rainbow has teeth’’ (another mixing metaphor), mixes, we have seen, must be managed—either by local political culture and nationalist ideology, or by instrumentalist designs that become chameleon (duplicitous?) character traits, or as a kind of feckless tolerance, as in fictional Elvira. But these efforts, the ideology goes, take work. The multicultural differences adumbrated above by Naipaul and Crowley are ‘‘naturally’’ occurring, these identities, whether ‘‘Portuguese,’’ ‘‘Hindu,’’ or ‘‘Negro,’’ are viewed as pre-dating or transcending Trinidadian society by originating in parts foreign or, as in the case of Crowley’s ‘‘Colored,’’ in biology; all, the logic continues, must be ‘‘culturally’’ processed into tolerable, and better still, exemplary social relationships.

26

Callaloo Nation

2 A ‘‘CRAZYQUILT SOCIETY’’

Urban house facade with jalousie windows, common throughout nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Photo by author.

C

u l t u r a l , r e l i g i o u s , and racial heterogeneity has been a defining feature of Trinidad at least since the nineteenth-century, when European and North American observers found the assortment of peoples and customs there remarkable. Any historical and ethnographic portrait we have is complicated by the cultural configurations they saw. In the nineteenth century, the science of classification, notably evolutionism, undergirded the perception of heterogeneity, particularly regarding colonized peoples. Colonial observers’ penchant for classifying perceived diversity was a major factor in focusing their gaze on what Albert Gomes called Trinidad’s ‘‘crazyquilt society’’ (1974:153). Constituted by racial and religious discourses, social hierarchies both invented Caribbean peoples and provided substantiating evidence of their identities. Colonial Christianity—itself a racial discourse, as colonial racism was, in a sense, an ecclesiastical discourse—invented and reinvented Asian and African alterity. As articulated discourses, ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘race’’ have long been implicated in each other, and thus are intelligible in reference to one another. The ideological vectors of religious and racial articulation that have central importance in New World identity construction are the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (blood purity) and nineteenth-century British evolutionary theory. These formulations treated religious and racial domains as compatible, often as similes, in establishing and policing difference. The Paradox of Classification Virtually every mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century visitor remarks on Trinidad’s heterogeneity. Partly a legacy of nineteenth-century

classificatory hierarchies and partly a reflection of the observer’s typical parochialism, each traveler is, in the words of one, ‘‘struck by the astonishing variety of types that make up the population’’ (Franck 1920:382). Indeed, Trinidad’s long-claimed cosmopolitan character, based on the heterogeneity of its population, was affirmed, long before independence struggles, by the Honorable E. F. L. Wood in his 1922 official report to Parliament on West Indian colonies. In it he adumbrated Trinidad’s peoples: French Creole, Spanish, East Indian, African, Chinese. ‘‘With a population so constituted,’’ he wrote, ‘‘Trinidad is exceptionally cosmopolitan’’ (Wood 1922:23). A particularly rich example of this reportage is Harry Franck’s travel memoir, Roaming Through the West Indies. Franck carefully notes the ‘‘wide diversities of type’’ he finds in Trinidad; he is meticulous enough to parse the Hindu ‘‘race’’ into ‘‘Madrassis, several degrees blacker than the others,’’ ‘‘Bengalee,’’ ‘‘Mohammedans,’’ and ‘‘Brahmins’’ (1920:383). In a vivid sketch of the ‘‘racial hash’’ of Port of Spain, Franck sets the rest of the typological scene: Abutting the negro residence is perhaps a two-story house with a . . . signboard in Chinese characters . . . Then comes a building placarded in Spanish, ‘Venezuelans very welcome’ . . . On down the street stretch all manner of queer mixtures of customs, costumes, races, language, and names. Sing How Can keeps a provision shop next to Diogenes Brathwaite’s ‘Rum Parlor,’ flanked on the other side by Rahman Singh, the barber . . . Women in the striking costume of the French islands stroll past . . . a man in a red fez pauses to talk to a man with a veritable clothshop wound about his head. Negro Beau Brummels . . . stately black policemen . . . a disgruntled Venezuelan general . . . sallow . . . Portuguese—all mingle together in the passing throng. Then there are intermixtures of all these divergent elements . . . a negro boy with almond eyes, a youth who looks like a Hindu and a Chinaman, but is really neither, a flock of children with unusually coarse East Indian features and woolly hair . . . a mulatto baby . . . ; a few types who look like conglomerations of all the other races, until their family trees must sound like cocktail recipes. (1920:384) The relationship between racial-typological attributes and foreign observers’ constructions of cultural difference is substantiated by their more or less casual (i.e., automatic) reliance on the scientific racism of the day. The majority of travelers also assumed various forms of social hierarchy in their narratives, weaving them, as givens, into their impressions. In what is otherwise a standard accounting of Trinidadian diversity, German traveler Friedrich Gerstäcker includes in his own 1869 tourist report on Trinidad an unusually precise reference to the scientific racism of his day: A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

29

It is remarkable how ‘‘kulis’’ [‘‘coolies,’’ indentured Indian laborers] stick together, not even thinking about ‘‘mixing’’ their families with ‘‘negroe blood.’’ This is prevented by the old spirit of the caste system . . . Handsome, even beautiful and noble figures can be found among them, slimly built, with dark bronze colored skin and almost caucasian facial features—a race that Blumenbach considered to be Malayan. They do however represent an original tribe of our human race in their unusual central position, whereas it is precisely the Malay who are a mixed race of all original tribes of the ‘‘Indian Ocean’’ . . . The kulis do all wear their original, or better termed, native costumes, and the beautiful headscarfs—worn over the dark, expressive, but mostly serious features—are particularly picturesque. (1869:np)∞ In Gerstäcker’s description, custom, race, and culture are nicely folded into one another. Words like ‘‘noble’’ and ‘‘picturesque’’ are applied in conjunction with the ‘‘almost caucasian facial features’’ that Blumenbach’s classificatory system lends them. The urge to classify, to parse the world around us into an organized and systematic order, derives from different kinds of motivations and power relations, depending on historical and social context. By the turn of the twelfth century, for example, ‘‘Christendom’’ and ‘‘Europe’’ were mutually defining entities (Hulme 1994:192; Smedley 1993:62). In the moment of early European imperialist encounters with Asians, Africans, and peoples of the Americas, European conceptions of difference were inflected primarily by the organizing principle of religion. As Michael Ryan tells us, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans were not stunned by the diversity of newly encountered others in the world, but made foreign and unfamiliar peoples intelligible to themselves by analog, assimilating them into the category ‘‘pagan.’’≤ Still viewing itself as ‘‘a Respublica Christiana, paganism was the most inclusive, unambiguous category of otherness’’ (Ryan 1981:525). Notions of ‘‘racial’’ difference emerge gradually and acquire an intelligibility of their own, but one not divorced entirely from notions of ‘‘religious’’ difference, though each is predicated on the idea that they are phenomenologically discrete. By the nineteenth century the inclination to classify human populations, and nature as a whole, was widespread in Europe and North America. As Edward Said explains, constructing typologies involved a process where ‘‘bodily (and soon moral, intellectual, and spiritual) extension . . . could be transformed from mere spectacle to the precise measurement of characteristic elements’’ (1979:119). In other words, a type has a certain character that the observer can then designate with a label; in turn, a designation (label) can become generalized in relation to a broader network of similar designations. What Said calls ‘‘character-as-designation’’ 30

Callaloo Nation

surfaced in the texts of philosophers, historians, and essayists, couched as ‘‘physiological-moral classification’’ (1979:119). That is, the combined qualities of temperament and corporeal traits, like the so-called Asiatic, who is ‘‘yellow, melancholy, rigid’’ and the African, who is ‘‘black, phlegmatic, lax’’ (Burke 1972; quoted in Said 1979:119). As designations became increasingly differentiated, the classifications into human types were systematically multiplied. This amplification arguably created a heterogeneity of multiple kinds (types) as much as it identified what was believed to be already there. At their foundation, these classifications continued to reflect traditional religious themes, in Edward Said’s neat encapsulation, ‘‘a naturalized supernaturalism’’ (Said 1979:121). In short, religion was never entirely supplanted in these creations, even when they were expressed as secular concerns or scientific discoveries. This is clear in the development of depictions of Caribbean peoples. The capacity of the concept of racial difference to take on a variety of discursive modes allows ‘‘race’’ to represent other forms of difference, as it did with religion in fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Spain.≥ While it would be a challenge to determine which—race or religion—is the foundational idea, since they function in articulation, it is clear that understanding race relations in the Americas depends on appreciating the ‘‘symbolic nature’’ of race (Martinez-Alier [1974] 1989:6). The Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre was initially put into effect in order to differentiate ‘‘Old’’ Christians from ‘‘New’’ Christians (Muslims and Jews), the original discrimination against Muslims and Jews being alleviated by their conversion to Christianity. By the mid-fifteenth century, however, the distinction between Christian and non-Christian had been transformed from a doctrine couched in terms of religious faith to a sign of social condition, a ‘‘racist doctrine’’ conferring an ‘‘indelible stain’’ (Stolke 1993:31–32). In other words, the fluidity of blood lines took on the fixed characteristic of blood category (Martinez-Alier [1974] 1989:16). In such a process, religion is made corporeal, and race appears protean, as religion becomes a more stable entity. What gets ‘‘mixed’’—genes, blood, phenotype—draws attention to religion (faith, spirituality, metaphysics) as being subject to the tangible practices of human beings, that is, the reproduction of mixed offspring. This mixing can be a problem for authority structures, colonial and otherwise. In later medieval and early modern Spain, marriage and social legitimacy were guarded by limpieza de sangre rules that allowed Spaniards to separate themselves from subordinated groups. In Spanish America, the concept of race was a handy tool to identify subaltern castas (castes), who consisted of indigenous Amerindians, Africans, and mestizos, or people of mixed—Amerindian, African, European—race (Wright 1990). It is imperative to bear in mind, however,

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

31

the coupling of race and religion. In sixteenth-century Puerto Rico, for example, the mestizo offspring of Amerindians and Spanish were identified as ‘‘children of Christians’’ (Schwartz 1997:10).∂ Race, in its meaning as an interpretive category, did not become a household word in Europe until the sixteenth century, and by then its referent was an alterity differentiated by inherent ‘‘natural’’ tendencies, from not-white physiognomy to not-civilized culture. Although religion, explicitly conceived, takes a backseat to race in classificatory schema as the centuries progressed, it does not cease to inform the most influential of those schema, such as the evolutionary theory that developed in England. The predominant way the term race was used in England from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries was to indicate a lineage, to refer to groups of people, animals, or plants connected by common descent. A central debate connected to this discourse was whether all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve (Banton 1987:xi). A part of evolutionist models, religion was also a barometer of forms of human progress in addition to proximity to God. Thus, in the Western cultural tradition up through the mid-nineteenth century, the Bible offered a guide to interpreting the process of civilization and social evolution (Stocking 1987:11). Idolatry and superstition were viewed as characteristics of the early stages of all human populations (Stocking 1987:313), implicit, for example, in nineteenth-century anthropological ancestor Adolf Bastian’s theory of the ‘‘psychic unity of mankind,’’ his evolutionary model where a small number of elementary ideas are common among all individuals.∑ Reflecting a similar nineteenth-century premise, another anthropological ancestor, Edward Burnett Tylor, posited the notion of cultural ‘‘survivals,’’ where contemporary animistic peoples, discovered by Europeans in their colonial expansion, were the remnants of human antiquity, living examples of our earliest ancestors (Tylor [1871] 1958). Cultural evolution included, of course, advancement to monotheism and the differentiation between socalled natural and supernatural worlds.∏ Between 1870 and 1940, the impulse to classify human beings was most greatly marked by scientific racism, in a mutually affirming combination of racial imagery and scientific schema. In his 1872 book The Science of Religions, for example, Emile Burnouf supported the Count de Gobineau’s model of three races (white, yellow, black) with new physiological evidence. In doing so, he projected the ‘‘ultimate Western fantasy’’: Christ had not been a Jew and therefore Christianity was an Aryan religion (Young 1995:85). Johann Blumenbach’s schema, the nineteenth-century’s most influential pre-Darwinian attempt at racial classification, traced humankind’s five races back to one primeval Caucasian type that ‘‘degenerated’’ into the five racial types perceived by Europeans of the day (Stocking

32

Callaloo Nation

1987:26). George Stocking notes that the ‘‘underlying biblical model’’ is obvious in Blumenbach’s thinking (Stocking 1987:26). In Argentina in 1903, Carlos Octavio Bunge, a prominent educator and lawyer, spoke of both mestizos and mulattos as being ‘‘impure’’ and ‘‘atavistically antiChristian’’ (quoted in Morner 1967:140). Racial purity and religious purity are interconnected here: ‘‘atavistically anti-Christian’’ is a reference to social evolutionary models, non-Christians being throwbacks to a primitive stage of development. Finally, in the 1930s another anthropological forebear, Bronislaw Malinowski, offered in The Sexual Life of Savages the ‘‘well-known truth’’ that ‘‘higher’’ races tend to charge ‘‘lower’’ races with possessing ‘‘mysterious demoniacal powers’’ (quoted in Taussig 1987:215). Even as the concept of race transforms from ideas about descent (such as biblical explanations prominent to the eighteenth century), to type (such as those of classifiers like Linnaeus), to subspecies (such as those of naturalists like Darwin), to the later nineteenth century’s development of social and phenotypical categories (Banton 2000), the association with the domain of ‘‘religion’’ is rarely very far off. I certainly would not equate Tylor’s and Malinowski’s work (limited by the assumptions of the period in which they lived and yet advancing knowledge at the same time) with the twisted point of view of individuals like Bunge.π The point I want to make, rather, is that all of these works rested, to one degree or another, on a conflation of ‘‘racial’’ and ‘‘religious’’ elements. Religion articulates with race not by making it more precise but by expanding the applicability of ‘‘race’’ to peoples perceived as united by their mutual stigma of superstition or estrangement from God, though otherwise racially different. In this way, articulated discourses appear seamless, as not themselves mixed but as coherent representations of sameness that are distinct from other categorically clustered forms of sameness. That is to say, if ‘‘religion’’ only pertains to an essential metaphysical core within us—once it is removed from spurious racial fantasies—it is possible for people to imagine it as purified of the human folly that comes in the form of specific ideologies, hegemonic discourses, and vested interests. Indelibly imprinted with the moral ideals of a particular zeitgeist, however, and necessarily articulated with other forceful discourses of that moment, such as the premises of racial classification, religious belief (not simply its practice) can be composed of some of the very things it wishes to combat. Prefiguring from the Old World As early as the 1850s and 1860s in Trinidad, when Indians were becoming the principal constituency of immigrants, ‘‘ideas about the Indians were

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

33

freezing into a stereotype’’ that would set the tone for race relations up to contemporary times (D. Wood 1968:154). During these early years of indenture, the ‘‘real difference’’ between Indian immigrants and others was cultural, but with contradictory associations (D. Wood 1968:110). On the one hand, it was ‘‘the age when a fascinated and horrified public’’ were reading about British attempts to stop suttee (widow burning) and thuggee (ritual assassination) in India; the ‘‘fear of these sinister aspects of Indian culture was ever present in the middle decades of the [nineteenth] century’’ (D. Wood 1968:110–11). On the other hand, Trinidadian society also recognized that this was ‘‘an alien high culture, satisfied with its own values . . .’’ (1968:111). Although he does not mean to underscore them, Donald Wood raises in these remarks two broad issues central to understanding the ways Indo-Trinidadian social history in the island has been interpreted by both locals and outsiders. One issue is the characterization of Indians in terms of ‘‘paired polarities’’ (Mintz 1977), such as their allegedly possessing high and low culture, being ‘‘Caucasian’’ or ‘‘Aryan’’ and ‘‘black,’’ and being simple and complex—at the same time.∫ This simultaneity created an uncomfortable ambivalence on the part of European (primarily British) colonial commentators as they attempted to fit Indians into nineteenth-century classificatory systems and thereby justify the colonial social order. The second issue is that the differences Wood sees as cultural are instead the product of the mediation of culture by the social allocation of labor (Wolf 1999). In other words, colonial definitions of Indian culture shift in accordance with class structure and the statuses symbolized within it. By the mid-nineteenth century, British colonial ideologies about the classification of human types grew out of Europeans’ direct experience with colonized peoples as much as the ‘‘armchair’’ suppositions and secondhand reports of previous centuries. With imperial fostering in multiple localities at the same time, classificatory schema are a palimpsest of representations, based on various comparisons and contrasts of colonized regions, forming an array of articulated discourses that bring into focus certain constellations of images allegedly emblematic of a specific region or people. The scholarly and popular knowledge produced about Indians contained both explicit and implicit references to two other ‘‘types’’ of people: Chinese and Africans. Although China was not a colony of Britain, that country and its people loomed large in the European (and American) imagination, being written about by such notables as Oliver Goldsmith, Montesquieu, Daniel Defoe, Voltaire, Jane Austen, Karl Wittfogel, and Mark Twain. As Jonathan Spence summarizes, until the 20th century, ‘‘China offered a picture of a vast, unified, well-ordered country, held together by a central controlling orthodoxy, that of Confucianism’’ (Spence 1998:33). In eighteenth- and

34

Callaloo Nation

nineteenth-century European eyes, China was homogeneous and predictable, held constant by two great centripetal forces: one emperor and one religion. As another exotic place belonging to the Orient, India nonetheless presented something different from China’s putative homogeneity. India had long been viewed by Europeans as a heterogeneous and enigmatic land of contrasts.Ω Far from treating India as an undifferentiated mass, Victorians there spent time distinguishing among Indian racial groups, castes, and tribes (Bolt 1971:184; Marshall and Williams 1982). Sir James Fitzjames Stephens, for example, made a trip to India in 1869 as an official of the British government. In reporting on the need for a ‘‘common superior’’ to keep the peace among groups ‘‘inimical to each other,’’ Stephens differentiated among ‘‘Mohammedans, Hindoos, Sikhs, up-countrymen, and Bengalees’’ (quoted in Moore 1995:142). The supposition that conflict inheres in difference is familiar, even as early as the mid-nineteenth century.∞≠ Just as importantly, Stephens disaggregates the five groups he lists as discrete types; other observers, using linguistic, caste, regional, and racial data, discerned even more. In his well-known travel memoir, At Last, A Christmas in the West Indies, Charles Kingsley concludes, during his visit in Trinidad, that ‘‘caste, the physiognomist soon sees, began in a natural fact. It meant difference, not of rank, but of tribe and language; and India is not, as we are apt to fancy, a nation: it is a world’’ (Kingsley 1873:122–23). If one nation (China) could maintain unified order, then an entire world (India) would contain disparate disorder.∞∞ Chinoiserie, the imitation of certain aspects of Chinese culture in France (particularly in the eighteenth century), had, by the mid-nineteenth century, combined four main ‘‘realms or elements’’: a Chinese artistic aesthetic; a Chinese sensuality, both delicate and dangerous; cruelty, barbarism, uncontrollable impulses; and a melancholy land forever lost (Spence 1998:146). While British colonial reportage is shaped by particular social and historical contexts, the Indian social types and practices that British observers described ‘‘show considerable consistency through a two-hundred year period’’ (Cohn 1996:7). The first three of Spence’s realms bear an uncanny resemblance to British colonial images of the Indian character, particularly the paired polarities between mild versus harsh and lofty versus base. These binaries were applied to religious and racial dimensions of subcontinental life. They were, moreover, aligned with one side or another of a duality between ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ cultural forms. In the words of the British journal, The Spectator, in 1871, the ‘‘Hindoo mind’’ was a ‘‘strange pit full of jewels, rags, and filth, of gleaming thoughts, and morbid fears, and horrid instincts’’ (quoted in Bolt 1971:166). In his 1856 Immigration Report, Dr. Henry Mitchell, superintendent of immigrants in Trinidad from 1850 to 1882, distinguished be-

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

35

tween Chinese, who he said became law-abiding after merely a year of indenture, and Indians. An Indian might be ‘‘gentle externally,’’ but ‘‘no length of residence weans him from the love of blood; . . . characterized by the most determined recklessness and ferocity’’ (quoted in Moore 1995:159). Mitchell apparently tries to resolve the duality of civilized/ barbarous and lofty/base by claiming that Indians are gentle only on the outside; what lurks beneath is who they truly are. He even explains the preponderance of wife murders on Trinidadian plantations as being linked to Indians’ religion, which had not yet been exposed to the amelioration of Christianity (Moore 1995:159). He is, moreover, making these claims just eleven years after the first group of indentured laborers arrived in Trinidad, also a sufficient time for significant numbers of Chinese to forego indenture contracts for small business enterprises (notably dry goods and rum shops). To Spence’s realms I would add another that applies to both of these Eastern giants: an orientalist binary between the peasant villager, a drudge as dull as their draft animals (‘‘coolies,’’ in the Americas), and the elite, corrupted by infinite splendors and immediate gratification, ruling as despots. The broad hierarchical division between high and low culture that tends to characterize The Indian also tends to be paired with this class distinction. High culture, not surprisingly, is associated with elite (ideal/ ized) India; low culture with laborers. In the early period of the British Raj, British admiration of Hinduism and other things Indian was explicit. Up through the mid-eighteenth century, commentators identified with India, and likely sought their own reflections in India. That religion was a central principle in Victorian identity and ways of understanding the rest of the world is also significant in the Victorian tendency to treat religion—Hinduism—as metonymic of Indian culture and civilization. Tallied in the colonial census as a minority population subsumed by Hinduism, Islam was considered a phenomenon of the Middle East—an ‘‘Orient’’ distinct from India (Said 1979). Although with its own problems of supposed inferiority to Christianity, Islam presented to Europeans an unequivocal monotheism (at least in its orthodox mode); parsimonious ritual practices, for the most part; veneration of a specific ‘‘great’’ text, the Quran; and a shared family of prophets, not the least of which was a recognition (without the deification) of Jesus Christ. But colonial attention was on Hindu/Indian art, music, literature, written language (especially the venerable Sanskrit), epic texts such as the Vedas and the Bhagadva Gita, and the philosophical principles espoused in these epics. Such evidence of highly evolved culture was interpreted as revealing the inordinate spiritualism, quietude, asceticism, and meditative nature of Hindu culture. Even as late as the mid-eighteenth century British writers were still presenting Hinduism favorably; its monotheism

36

Callaloo Nation

was emphasized and polytheism portrayed as merely figurative (Marshall 1968:61). Europeans also admired the social hierarchies of state formation, which colonial evolutionary models told them were indicative of more highly developed societies. The caste system was also intriguing; esteemed for the social order it provided, if not for the fatalism it allegedly inspired, caste would eventually become the icon par excellence of the subcontinent (e.g., Dumont 1970; compare Appadurai 1986). By the end of the eighteenth century, as colonial perspectives became increasingly disapproving, Hinduism came to symbolize superstition, immorality, and backwardness (Marshall 1968). It was located on the evolutionary scale at the stage of barbarism, or at least well below that of civilized Europeans. Certain traits would thus persist in Hindus/Indians that were incongruous with Hinduism’s estimable attributes. Victorians were salaciously horrified by (mostly secondhand reportage of) suttee, thuggee, Charak puja (mortification of the flesh by swinging from a hook inserted between the shoulder blades), ‘‘fire-walking,’’ or walking on burning coals, and on Caribbean plantations the inordinate number of wife murders (a consequence, primarily, of sex ratio imbalances caused by colonial indenture policies). Although unlikely to have seen any of these practices, news media and other commentators in Trinidad weighed in with their opinion, harshly contemptuous of Indians there. Louis de Verteuil, for example, writes in his 1884 tome on the natural and social history of Trinidad that Indians were sadly lacking in their moral condition (1884:23–27). As the decades passed, opinion increasingly espoused disdain for Hinduism’s putatively slavish obedience and propensity for superstition; a 1911 article in the Trinidad Review charged that Indians were ‘‘people of false religions,’’ with ‘‘strange, pagan mind[s]’’ (quoted in Singh 1994:233, n.86). By 1878 an Oxford University Sanskrit professor, Monier Williams, wrote in his text, Modern India and the Indians, that Hindus have a more ‘‘voracious appetite’’ for ‘‘religious superstition’’ than any other people on earth. Every religious idea in the world, he claimed, goes to ‘‘preposterous extremes’’ in India (quoted in Bolt 1971:163–64). Coming out of a Protestant milieu, this expert’s alarm about fecundity out of control—‘‘preposterous extremes’’—is likely simply a reflection of his own, more restrained approach to religion. Even such a God-given and beneficial dimension of human existence as religion becomes unnatural, bloated out of proper proportion, among peoples who are characterized by excess and passion rather than reserve and circumspection. Hinduism/Indians invited criticism with polytheism (whose differentiated deities certainly had to be evidence of barbarism), arcane rituals (distinguished from the notion of Christian prayer), and mysticism. Although generally far below Christianity on the social evolutionary

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

37

scale, Hinduism remained above Africans’ putative lack of religion. Despite the hindrances of their cultural traditions, there was still potential for Indians’ redemption to be secured through conversion to Christianity and attention to Christian values like Western morality, individual selfdetermination, and simplified ritual practices. Yet, at the same time, Africans, without bothersome barriers like their own cultural traditions to get in the way, also had potential to improve through Christian influence. Africans who had spent enough time in the Caribbean to be fully hyphenated Afro-Caribbeans (many generations by the mid-nineteenth century) could (and should) accomplish the correct forms of Christianity—that is, those practices associated with middle-class respectability, the enculturation of bourgeois values and conduct covered in the Pax Britannica’s civilizing mission. So powerful was this ideology, one claim in the Trinidad press of 1871 championed the idea that ‘‘the cultivated negro, without any admixture of blood, acquires something of the physiognomy of Europe’’ (quoted in Brereton 1979:194). On the one hand, Africans in Africa, colonial discourse assumed, could only approximate ‘‘religion,’’ given the depth of their own superstition and animist traditions, not to speak of the cultural lacunae these traits bespoke. Theirs could not, therefore, be considered real religion, but a primitive precursor. On the other hand, a tabula rasa is there to be imprinted on in Christian contexts like the Caribbean; because of Indians’ entrenched, if inferior traditions, carried over to the Caribbean from the subcontinent, they were seen in Trinidad as ‘‘more like a stone that could only be worked painfully and with much toil’’ (D. Wood 1968:110). India’s diversity apparently threw into relief its cultural differences, differences that were acutely hierarchized by both colonizers and elite Indians. Thus, at the same time that India could claim potent Aryan invader ancestors, it had to admit its hill tribes, who were reputed to be headhunters and wildly ferocious, not to mention wildly backward. Indian princes were viewed by Victorians as inclined toward violence, too, but it was a violence deriving from the nature of ‘‘princely rule’’ rather than the violence of savages like the hill tribes and Africans (Bolt 1971:184). It was also likely assumed by Victorians that Indian princes must have adhered to a very different religion than the hill tribes, who were marginal to Brahmanic Hinduism, still practicing forms that predated the formalization and encroachment of the caste system and its requisite forms of social hierarchy and ritual. The distinction that colonial ideology made between lofty and base religion among Indians was selectively applied. Religious practices and beliefs objectionable to Victorian sensibilities tended to fall within two domains: those given over to ecstatic or emotional release and those given over to the dark forces of superstition and mysticism. Until the early

38

Callaloo Nation

twentieth century Indo-Trinidadians, irrespective of class, were typically charged with superstition, while grassroots Afro-Trinidadians and their ‘‘folk’’ religions, such as Orisha, were judged ecstatic until the late twentieth century. Occasionally the two, ecstatic and superstitious, would overlap, drawing together racial and class characteristics within a religious idiom. For example, in 1877 Trinidad’s New Era newspaper decried the tendency of the ‘‘lower orders’’—Afro-Trinidadian ‘‘blacks’’ as opposed to the ‘‘colored middle class’’—to participate in the ‘‘heathen ceremony’’— the Hosay commemoration—‘‘which seemed strange and contradictory to our character of a strictly Christian community’’ (quoted in Moore 1995:182). In a similar vein, Victorians traced the ancestors of the socalled black races of Southern India to Africa, which explained the ‘‘passionate,’’ ‘‘magnetic,’’ ‘‘wild,’’ ‘‘lurid,’’ and ‘‘demonic’’ aspects of the beliefs, of this ‘‘black race,’’ which were akin to ‘‘African Voodoo’’ (Bolt 1971:168–69). Not surprisingly, India’s designated respectable classes were not included in these classifications. In Victorian Trinidad, Louis de Verteuil echoed these sentiments, declaring that ‘‘notwithstanding the surrounding influences of civilisation, the belief in sorcery is generally and strongly entertained among the more ignorant classes of the population, either Asiatics or Africans. This is a fact which is deplorable indeed’’ (1884:161). When they are members of the grass roots, and therefore exhibit forms of ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘folk’’ culture, Africans and Indians share commonalties that blur the differences between them which are emphasized in hegemonic discourses (see, for example, Reddock 1998). These commonalties were rarely complimentary, however. Such identified collective features as sorcery—and the ignorance and inadequate civilizing that undergird it—went a long way toward ‘‘explaining’’ the subordinate position of these two populations. If religions were placed in their appropriate stages on an evolutionary scale, racial taxonomies were not far off. Articulated together, they lent scientific credence and godly sanction to authorized versions of the Victorian social order. Earlier, in the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel George Morton categorized distinct races based on measuring the internal dimensions of skulls. Among his collection were ‘‘Hindoo’’ skulls, which he equated with ‘‘Caucasian’’ (Banton 1987:36). Morton’s model, linking skull size and race, reflected ‘‘every good Yankee’s prejudice,’’ affirms Stephen Jay Gould. Among whites were ranked Teutons and AngloSaxons first, next Jews, and Hindus at the bottom (Gould 1981:53–54). Although ‘‘Aryan’’ and ‘‘white’’ are not always clearly distinguished, in most of these models Aryan/white is distinct from ‘‘yellow’’ (those other Asians). According to Selig Harrison, the ‘‘caste intellectual’’ Hindu ‘‘takes pride in the fact that the early Aryan migrants who established Hindu society fanned out of a racial core that was neither Negroid nor

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

39

Mongoloid’’ (1960:126). These kinds of notions were circulated locally, in large part via the Trinidadian news media. A lengthy 1884 Port of Spain Gazette article, ‘‘Brahmanism and its Phases in Trinidad,’’ for example, edifies its readers with a rather whimsical portrait: Far back in the hazy past, dimly traced in the obscure historical epochs of cuneiform inscriptions and astronomical myths, unreal and undisciplined times, when metaphysical and fanciful speculations were more in favour than the sturdy logic of our day; by persistent and patient research . . . [scholars] have arrived at an appropriate conception of the origin and history of the Hindu people. A people but never a nation, four or five thousand years have passed away since they branched off from the great Aryan or Indo-Germanic race, our common ancestors in the Caucasus. (January 19, 1884:5) Paradoxically, this imagery and precision in classification increase the categorical ambiguity of Indians vis-à-vis the British. And ambiguities of all kinds are, by their very nature, fertile material from which to fashion contradictory stances and opinions. Almost a century after this religio-racial discourse about Aryans and Indians, the subject was still relevant to two Indo-Trinidadians as they discussed their identities. In a 1967 article, ‘‘Are Indians Coloured?,’’ in Trinidad’s Observer newspaper (the ‘‘monthly organ of Indian opinion’’), H. Bhagwan reports his friend’s comment that ‘‘coloured people like her husband and herself . . . suffered a handicap . . .’’ in the social stratification of the United Kingdom (Bhagwan 1967:2). Bhagwan corrects her premise that she is ‘‘coloured.’’ He explains that it is not easy to forgive the English or the people of Europe. They are people who have been writing and doing research work on the question of the classification of mankind . . . When I was a young lad at school, we used the Royal Readers . . . the human race is divided into five divisions, named 1. The Caucasian or White Race 2. The Mongolian or Yellow Race 3. The Ethiopian or Black Race 4. The Malayan or Brown Race 5. The American or Red Race. The Caucasian Race is further divided into two families—the Aryan and Semitic. Indians [South Asians], Persians, and Europeans comprise the Aryan family . . . It is the Europeans who claim that they have come from the same Aryan stock as the Indians . . . In the face of their own classification, it is not only improper, it is not only invidious to refer to Indians as coloured; it is downright dishonest. (1967:2) Struggling against a subordinate position in a colonial classificatory system that ‘‘handicaps’’ Indians, Bhagwan points to the contradiction within Victorian racial schema, the difference between theoretical divisions of

40

Callaloo Nation

‘‘mankind’’ and empirical experience with alterity. Rather than attacking colonial ideology from without, as false because it is generically objectionable (i.e., racist), he argues its error from within, holding it responsible to its own logic. When Indians’ context and point of reference is India, they are not ‘‘white,’’ but they are ‘‘Aryan,’’ they are ‘‘Caucasian.’’ Caucasian/Aryan are associated with Brahmanical (that is, high culture) Hinduism. As indentured immigrants, however, they are even further from ‘‘white,’’ becoming, as ‘‘coolies,’’ increasingly ‘‘black,’’ both because of and irrespective of their claims to Hinduism in the estimation of bourgeois sectors of Trinidadian society. In India, colonial racial designations were varied and shifted with locality and religion, the latter representing level of development, or civilization. On Caribbean plantations, even with acknowledgment of the ‘‘multiplicity of Indian languages’’ there (e.g., E. Wood 1922:67), the classificatory diversity of the subcontinent was collapsed into a minimum of identities—notably variations on an oppositional contrast between Calcutta/Madras; north/south; Aryan/Dravidian; elite/ peasant; docile/wild; enlightened/superstitious.∞≤ These identities reflected the organization of plantation production, and its need for justification; they thereby emphasized the blackness and precarious barbarism, if not savagery, of the coolie laborer. Notwithstanding the distinctions British colonizers in India made between Hindus and Muslims, these stereotypes would follow both—as ‘‘coolies’’—onto the plantations of the Caribbean. It is in the context of labor tensions and subordinate class position that religious belief and practice in Trinidad take on both pejorative associations and alleged subversive qualities, to the virtual exclusion of the admiration of Indian high culture. Indians in Trinidad could be represented as falling far from their own ideals, as not being, after all, the riddle that so intrigued many colonial observers of India. If Afro-Caribbeans disappoint by not developing sufficiently (that is, into the culture and society of a bourgeois class modeled on European ideals), Indians in the Caribbean fall short by losing what cultural capital (Bourdieu 1993) they purportedly once had. By this I do not mean that the local conventional wisdom held that they arrived in the New World ‘‘culturally naked’’ (Lewis 1983:4), as the story went until quite recently for Africans. In this discourse it is cultural capital that Indians lost, not their culture. That is, what they are said to lack, and what they struggle to reclaim, is the symbolic value of certain attributes and characteristics that anchored them both temporally, in an earlier and nostalgically better historical period, and spatially, in a regional context of the subcontinental homeland rather than that of overseas plantation labor. In the colonial gaze China possessed uniformity but also was distin-

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

41

guished by its binary characteristics of high culture (aesthetic styles and, perhaps most importantly, a long and entrenched state-based system of social stratification) and ‘‘barbarism’’ (fealty, torpor, volatility). SubSaharan Africa was viewed as homogeneous, the people indistinguishable in their ‘‘savagery’’ (a lower stage than ‘‘barbarism’’ on this period’s evolutionary scale), with low or no culture. As Bolt points out with regard to Victorian views of Africa in contrast to India, ‘‘no aspect of religious practice was applauded’’ (Bolt 1971:162). Once in the Caribbean, a lofty Hinduism becomes the base ‘‘Hindoo.’’ Foreign visitors to Trinidad, however, seeking Hindoos and still conjuring the exotic East, tended to draw portraits of Indo-Caribbeans based on their presumptions about the people of India. Their travel memoirs, examined in the next section, provide telling examples of not only the hegemony of colonial representations but also of their internal contradictions, as they articulate different kinds of metaphors and messages into identity discourses. Into the New World Trinidad is conventionally characterized in academic literature as a social class and color pyramid consisting of three strata: upper/‘‘white,’’ middle/ ‘‘colored’’ or ‘‘brown,’’ and lower/‘‘black.’’ A racial and class structure imagined in this way differentiates among classes of Afro-Trinidadians; it also memorializes groups who have almost ceased to exist in Trinidad, that is, the homogeneous category, ‘‘whites,’’ who between 1838 and 1950 were less than 10 percent of Trinidad’s total population, and just 1.9 percent by 1960 (Brereton 1998:32). When they entered Trinidad in 1845, Indians did not just encounter the three-tiered white/brown/black (elite/middle/lower) social pyramid that was already in place. They also encountered an existing worldview about racial and cultural mixing peculiar to the Caribbean. The mixing produced by combinations of Afro-Euro cultural and genetic material has been treated in Victorian colonial ideology in two broad ways: as ‘‘hybrid degeneration,’’ where the offspring of racially distinct populations are deemed mentally and physically inferior, and, conversely, as ‘‘hybrid vigor,’’ heterogeneous improvements where African traits benefit from European input. These tendencies, while contrasting, are not ideologically antithetical. In his official report to Parliament on Britain’s Caribbean territories, for example, the Honorable E. F. L. Wood happily advises that the ‘‘negroes of unmixed descent, who form more than three-quarters of the total population of the Colonies, have a special aptitude for music, especially singing, and little or none for arts like freehand drawing. These facts should be borne in mind by educationists’’ (1922:68). Yet Wood also reveals an appreciation of mixing: ‘‘in the West Indies, there is a considerable popula42

Callaloo Nation

tion of mixed stock, who, while coloured in appearance, possess a large infusion of European blood. Those of mixed race throw up not a few individuals of somewhat exceptional capacity and intelligence, who play a prominent part in the public life of their communities’’ (1922:6). Wood also sees these individuals as inspired by a ‘‘remarkable loyalty to the Throne’’ (1922:6), undoubtedly adding to their ‘‘exceptional’’ qualities. As he wrote in The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Anthony Trollope believed the Caribbean needed the qualities of both European and African, embodied in one race, though these qualities were, of course, unequally ranked. In this new creation, Europeans would have provided the ‘‘intellect for civilization’’ and Africans the capacity for ‘‘tropical labour’’ (1859:74). Interestingly, Trollope advocates a single race of new people (‘‘men’’) to develop the region, rather than the idea that, separately, Europeans will plan and Africans will carry out. The book was published twenty-five years after abolition in the British Caribbean, and keeping the two groups apart in this division of labor probably seemed less feasible in the face of the empirical evidence of mixed populations. The ‘‘colored’’ or ‘‘brown’’ population, middle class and therefore likely thriving, inspired in Trollope a kind of retrospective future, an image of what would be, based on what was. Trollope’s general image of mixed white and black populations comprising the Caribbean was pervasive throughout the region, and came as close to a claim of flourishing indigenous heritage as it could manage. Given the clear-cut designation of the respective gifts emerging from Afro-Euro miscegenation, Indians’ contribution to this Caribbean model of regional efficiency and development was ambiguous. Mixture of distinct population types was viewed as being necessary for settlement (exploitation) in other, Old World colonies, as well. In his Health in the Tropics, for example, W. J. Moore argued that without ‘‘Asiatic mixture,’’ India could not be successfully colonized. Europeans become ‘‘feeble,’’ ‘‘passionate,’’ and ‘‘indolent’’ in the tropics and require ‘‘native blood’’ so that a ‘‘half-caste progeny’’ forming a ‘‘more enlightened race’’ would be able to make India a more stable and productive environment (Moore 1862:277, 280; quoted in Young 1995:143). But in both Trollope’s and Moore’s vision, the successful mixture is a hierarchical one: a lesser with a superior, each contributing its most useful endowments. Mixtures between two lesser populations—e.g., Afro and Indo—could only mean cultural and social, if not biological, degeneration, or at least stasis. All hybrids, then, are not equal. For Indians in British Caribbean colonies, miscegenation with Afro-Caribbeans would remain a frivolous or invisible option in political and social theorizing, as equal implies equality of good types or a balance of good type and bad. It does not apply when neither type is good. These ideas produced a social atmosphere in Trinidad in which local A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

43

opinion about Indians both shaped and reflected views and commentary about other immigrant laborers. While the Trinidadian news media shifted its stance and thus representations of Indians depending on the current political and economic climate, until well into the twentieth century racism in the media was apparent, if not always blatant. By the time a ‘‘second generation’’ of Indo-Trinidadians emerged in the 1880s, labor was still an issue in an environment rife with class prejudices expressed as xenophobia. This environment encouraged looking askance at nonindentured immigrant labor. An unpleasant (but not unique) example, in the Port of Spain Gazette newspaper, points to immigrants from Barbados (almost certainly of African origin). Titled ‘‘The Increase of Crime,’’ it lamented, The immigration from Barbados which has been the main cause of the growing demoralization of the people of Port-of-Spain, may, and probably will, in course of time, turn out a blessing to this country. The current which has first brought to our shores the scum of the people of that island, is gradually being purified, and although the first influx may give us much trouble and cost much money to guard against its ravages, there are evident symptoms of a purer stream whose healthy action will, by and bye, compensate for our first loss and trouble. But . . . a wise and far-seeing policy . . . [must guard] against the present and immediate dangers of this immigration . . . unless stringent measure be taken to counteract the evil influences . . . the hitherto peaceloving, kind-hearted inhabitants of this town will gradually imbibe all the worst characteristics of the more energetic race which the overpopulated island of Barbados sends to our shores. (1884:4) Revealed here, too, is the idea that social hierarchies did not simply reflect invidious distinctions among ‘‘races’’ but shaped these distinctions by combining various traits into alterities not uniformly ‘‘racial.’’ Few would claim that Afro-Barbadians and Afro-Trinidadians did not share a ‘‘racial’’ identity. In fact, most people of the day would have agreed that, since the article uses the terms labourers and workmen in reference to the Barbadians, both would be ‘‘black’’—as opposed to Trinidad’s middle-class category, ‘‘colored.’’ Purifying the ‘‘scum’’ apparently involves thinning the ‘‘stream’’ to a trickle, directed away from job competition.∞≥ Occasionally, outside observers would reproduce local sentiment. Reiterating stereotypes about Caribbean Indians similar to those that, by the turn of the twentieth century, had become engraved into Trinidadian culture, travelers like George Manington disseminated these representations to an even broader field. Speaking of the ‘‘East Indian’’ settlers in the Caribbean whom he (presumably) saw on his visit there, Manington assures readers that the Indian man ‘‘is as jealous as he is faithful’’ to his wife (1925:249). He further asserts that the ‘‘slightest provocation touching her 44

Callaloo Nation

constancy may cost her her life, and the man will willingly suffer the penalty of his crime, for he believes that as soon as his spirit leaves his body it will return to his beloved native land’’ (1925:249). Relying more on lore than on firsthand acquaintance, Manington creates a palimpsest from his vague familiarity with news items about domestic violence among indentured laborers, his infirm grasp of Hindu theology, and his interpretation of Indians’ allegedly passionate nature. These he reduces to what passes for an objective, indelible portrait of disposition and character—that is, an identity. Less equivocally denigrating portrayals of IndoTrinidadians were far more common, however, throughout the indenture period (1845–1917) and later, and reflected the immediacies of labor tensions and economic competition. Two kinds of contrasts predominated: between Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians, and between Indo-Trinidadians and subcontinental Indians. Most of the literature on Indo-Trinidadians, whether scholarly, in the news media, or popular, from the time they began to be written about in the Caribbean (on the eve of their arrival) to the contemporary period, has tended to gloss them in cultural rather than class terms; they are typically presented as more identifiable by their (foreign) culture than by class distinctions (the opposite being true for Afro-Trinidadians, who tend to be discussed in the literature in terms of a middle- and working-class distinction and, until the twentieth century, with comparatively little attention to cultural forms). Initially treated, if not viewed, as a homogeneous group of Hindu coolie labor, Indo-Trinidadians were in colonial opinion analogous to, yet distinct from, poor and working-class Afro-Trinidadians. In many of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives of travel to Trinidad and the Caribbean, the writers almost without exception describe Indo-Trinidadians with reference, directly or obliquely, to AfroTrinidadians. Harriet Chalmers Adams, writing in 1907 a piece commissioned by National Geographic and clearly intended for foreign fantasies, put it rather straightforwardly: ‘‘Perhaps it is by contrast with the coarse Africans, who form the greater portion of the population of the West Indies and the Guianas that these people of an ancient race stand out in the traveler’s remembrance as a more fitting type in lands of such great natural beauty’’ (1907:485). While Indo-Trinidadians are not specifically presented as distinguished by class position, their industriousness, their restrained temperament, and their incongruous clothing all speak to the given image of what the local Afro-Trinidadian is not—and what the foreign Indian putatively is. By 1931 reports like that of A. Hyatt Verrill could still affirm that ‘‘many [Hindus] still adhere to their native customs and costumes, and add a most picturesque Oriental touch . . . but unfortunately the younger generation is adopting conventional garments and European customs, though still retaining the turban or tight-fitting skull-cap of the Orient, and mainA ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

45

taining their religions and their dialects’’ (1931:186). And as late as 1950, Patrick Leigh Fermor writes in his travel memoir, ‘‘When their time was up [indenture contracts expired], most of these immigrants remained and settled on the land which was granted to them . . . wide tracts of Trinidad are now, for all visual purposes, Bengal. The same vegetation is here, the same villages of mud and thatch, a semblance of the same clothing, and everywhere little Hindu cemeteries with scarcely identifiable idols and epitaphs on the headstones inscribed in Urdu characters’’ (1950:166). Caught between Afro-Trinidadians and subcontinental Indians, IndoTrinidadians were sometimes both, and sometimes neither. In unabashedly uncomplimentary characterizations of Indo-Trinidadians, impoverishment and therefore lower-class position are readily apparent. As just one example, E. W. Howe writes that it ‘‘does not seem possible to fatten a Hindu. Those living in Trinidad are well fed, and prosperous, but they all look thin, hungry and humble. They go barefoot and barelegged, and their legs look exactly like very old dried beef’’ (1910:219). In apparent defense of the indenture system (which would have seven more years to go in Trinidad), Howe asserts that Indo-Trinidadians’ appearance belies their good condition. Despite being ‘‘well fed’’ and ‘‘prosperous,’’ their phenotype, mien, and material culture reveal who they really are or must be. By contrast, local nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discussions of Indo-Trinidadians, for example in the press, tended to highlight the negative not by implicitly emphasizing their alien appearance, but with such imagery as ‘‘dark’’ and ‘‘uncivilized,’’ thereby highlighting either Indo-Trinidadians’ inferiority to Afro-Trinidadians or the supposed commonalties between them. Whether Indo-Trinidadians were worse than Afro-Trinidadians or equivalent depended on the social class of the AfroTrinidadian referent, as well as the particular issue or controversy at hand, labor or immigration, for example. There were moments in these discussions when admiration was combined with derision, as when diversity within the Indo-Trinidadian population was being gauged. Louis de Verteuil, for example, the well-known contemporary chronicler of latenineteenth-century Trinidad, and patriarch in what Bridget Brereton calls ‘‘Trinidad’s leading French Creole family’’ (Brereton 1998:66), made a distinction between ‘‘Hindoos’’ and ‘‘Hindoos of the Mahometan faith’’ (de Verteuil 1884:161). This was in contrast to many of his colleagues abroad (and a number at home), who commonly collapsed all Indo-Trinidadians as ‘‘Hindoo.’’∞∂ In his comprehensive tome on Trinidad, de Verteuil informed his readers that ‘‘Mahometan Hindoos’’ have been found, on the whole, more intelligent, active, and industrious and orderly than those of the Gentoo [Hindu] and other castes of India. Many among them can read and write. These Asiatics still 46

Callaloo Nation

adhere to their own peculiar creeds and habits; they even continue, with rare exceptions, to wear their country costume, and but few have become converts to Christianity, or have persevered in the new faith . . . This may be attributed partly to the unfortunate arrangement which insures their return to India after a term of ten years’ residence in the colony. They are thus naturally led to retain most of those habits which they expect to resume in full force on revisiting their native land. The Coolies seem disinclined to send their children to the public schools, except they are established purposely for them. (1884:161) In a shift that was probably unconscious, de Verteuil uses the term Asiatics in the context of cultural authenticity, those indications of traditional cultural forms, and the term coolie when the context is one of labor and social marginality. Those whom we must take to be Muslim IndoTrinidadians (‘‘Hindoos of the Mahometan faith’’) are considered more advanced in de Verteuil’s typology, largely by virtue of being more closely associated with the customs of their ‘‘native land.’’ Yet, as we have seen, it is only certain native customs that lend legitimacy to so-called foreign culture. De Verteuil records from Trinidad’s population census of 1861 that there were 65,053 Christians and 4,547 ‘‘Mahometans and heathens’’; he shows the census of 1871 as logging 80,300 Christians and 27,000 ‘‘Heathen Gentoos and others’’ (1884:172). ‘‘Mahometans’’ are distinguished from ‘‘heathens,’’ the latter of whom are apparently Hindus. In fact, Gentoo was, by 1884, an old-fashioned (c.1630–1640) term for ‘‘Hindu,’’ derived from the Portuguese gentio, or gentile (Random House College Dictionary Revised Edition 1980:551). While earlier Portuguese speakers employed the term gentile to indicate a generalized other or outsider, perhaps de Verteuil’s later use of the term implies a connection between backward, heathen, and southern Indian—Dravidian, as opposed to Aryan—peoples. The word coolies rather than Asiatics had a much clearer proximity both to unskilled labor and to blackness. The articulated discourses of class and race are interwoven such that few observations of these sorts can be taken at face value, given the multiple implicit assumptions they contain. The ‘‘coolie village’’—evidently a common tourist destination in Trinidad until recently—drew another early-twentieth-century traveler, Ida May Hill Starr. Starr confides that ‘‘it was with mingled sensations of awe and fear that I beheld [the] unexpected Hindoo’’ (1903:280). She is cautiously captivated by the ‘‘straightfeatured, well-poised East Indians’’ (1903:292). Sixteen years before, in 1887, about a visit to the ‘‘cooly quarter’’ of San Fernando, Trinidad, William Agnew Paton says, ‘‘Certainly, everything and everybody I beheld were strange enough to warrant such a confusion of [East and West] loA ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

47

calities in my mind. The cooly men . . . except for the blackness, their faces are characteristically European. Their features are the features of thin and emaciated Italians, Frenchmen, Englishmen—in a word, Caucasians’’ (1887:198). Once again, this time in the New World, we see the enigma of Indians’ disconcerting cultural exoticism, palpably conspicuous in phenotype, for Starr and Paton both reassuring and incongruent. Culture and phenotype or race are mutually shaped, with Western European types constituting a touchstone; as culture becomes more unfamiliar, phenotype is less comparable. But as phenotype becomes more strange, cultural affinities can also be renounced. For example, referring to Indo-Trinidadians’ general comportment, late Victorian traveler Alfred Radford writes of ‘‘coolies’’ in Trinidad, ‘‘were they not black, I could easily have taken them for great gentlemen’’ (1886:35). Clearly not ‘‘Caucasian,’’ or even near ‘‘Caucasian’’ in Radford’s estimation, it could not matter how ‘‘proud’’ and ‘‘civilized’’ these ‘‘coolies’’ also seemed to him (1886:35). Black bespeaks of their social position (disdained immigrants) and their social class (agricultural laborer); thus they are walking contradictions of their cultural accomplishments. As puzzling as Indo-Trinidadians’ perceived ‘‘blackness’’ coupled with ‘‘fine’’ (read Caucasian, or near-Caucasian) features was to colonial observers, explanations were forthcoming in certain classificatory schema, racialized geographies, and other, similar components of nineteenth- and twentieth-century evolutionary theory. More difficult to interpret was the contrast of ‘‘high culture’’ arts and philosophy and ‘‘primitive culture’’ cosmology and ritual. This comes across in the writings of numerous other visitors to Trinidad throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As late as 1938, for example, John Vandercook writes that ‘‘ancient fakirs in white turbans and voluminous shirts and loincloths sat at the edges of the sidewalks and scratched themselves and chatted as naturally as if they were in the gutters of Hyderabad’’ (1938:257). Although Vandercook derides what he sees with imagery like sitting on the ground, scratching, and gutters, he is also impressed by the longevity and implied asceticism of these men. Both ancientness and abstinence or purity, compatible with an orientalist canon, are qualities esteemed in Western value systems. In a sense, religion is where the best and the worst is found. Ideas about class and race, folded into one another, can also produce discourses of the exotic, where, to the consternation of the foreign observer, cultural self-presentations contradict class position and make more acute the enigma of Indians in the Caribbean. A telling example is traveler J. H. Collens’s comparison: ‘‘Fancy the wife of an English peasant having a dozen silver bangles, or a beautiful and valuable necklace of gold coins! The thing is incongruous, and as difficult to imagine as it is unlikely, and yet it is a common occurrence with these people’’ (1888:239).

48

Callaloo Nation

The contradiction that this parallel represents—the inconsistency of portable luxury items being brandished by agricultural laborers (unsuitable for and undeserving of this finery)—was significant in underscoring the cultural alterity and exoticism of Indian immigrants. In other words, it was not only that Indians’ ‘‘Eastern’’ customs were in some abstract sense a contrast with ‘‘Western’’ ones; it was also that the particular tradition of jewelry-as-portable-wealth flew in the face of their foremost local identity as members of a ‘‘peasant’’ laboring class. These sorts of representations may also partly explain why Indo-Trinidadians are not often contrasted with Trinidad’s Chinese population. In addition to the divergent configurations of India and China within the Euro-colonial gaze, Trinidadian Chinese are stereotyped as petit bourgeois entrepreneurs, not as agricultural labor, nor as ‘‘coolies’’ (as opposed to in North America), lending Chinese a distinct otherness. In contrast to Afro-Trinidadian grassroots culture, the ‘‘high culture’’ of authentic tradition and ancient, traceable roots promulgated by IndoTrinidadians since the late nineteenth century grew from middle-class sensibilities—both Indo-Trinidadians’ own and those from outside. Appealing to subsequent generations of Indo-Trinidadians were the laudatory claims made by Indologists as well as by Indians themselves, admirable to Christians even if their religion was not preferable to Christianity. Yet even approval has been couched in patronizing terms, based on a hegemonic Western-Christian litmus test of veracity and authenticity. In her feature on Trinidad, Harriet Chalmers Adams blurs the distinction between Indian ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ culture by draining much of the former’s legitimacy. Describing Indo-Trinidadian men as ‘‘solemn-looking creatures, with those all-knowing eyes of the Far East,’’ Adams finds the ‘‘long-haired priests’’ to be ‘‘positively uncanny’’ (1907:491). She elaborates: ‘‘In passing one of these ‘holy men’ on the highway, I invariably looked over my shoulder furtively, expecting to see blossoming rosebushes springing out of space and lads climbing skyward on invisible ladders. We engaged one of the magicians to perform for us at our hotel, but evidently he was not ‘the genuine article’ or we were so skeptical as to dispel all illusions. We felt at his departure that we had not received our two shillings’ worth of ‘thrills’ and that sword-swallowing detracted from the dignity of an adept’’ (1907:491). In her compound imagery, Adams underscored derision and doubt: North American magicians pull roses out of top hats and South Asian fakirs propel rope out of baskets skyward, which presumably they can climb. Conveying, as does J. H. Collens, the suggestion of deceit, Adams both derides what she takes to be Hindu religious practice and implies that these same practices are analogous to carnival con artistry, especially when confused with presumably secular (not to speak of circus) skills like sword-swallowing. The alleged ‘‘holy’’

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

49

man is both a magician (subscribing to inferior beliefs—‘‘magic’’ as opposed to ‘‘religion’’) and a fake (using these beliefs in a fraudulent way). But Adams’s disappointment and charge of fraudulence rest on a contrast: the authentic holy men who are ‘‘the genuine article.’’ Presumably, real priests represent the enlightened, spiritual, transcendental Brahmins, those for whom the body corporeal, and its gratification through subsistence, is incidental. In description after description, late-Victorian- and early-twentiethcentury observers note the vibrant colors, brilliant jewelry, romantic garments, dignified carriage, and Caucasian or Caucasian-like features (marred only by skin color) of Indo-Trinidadians. What is interesting is that these depictions have as their point of reference a far away, indeed imaginary, Orient. William Agnew Paton exclaims, ‘‘Walking through the cooly quarter of San Fernando, I could scarcely realize that I had not been transported from the Western to the Eastern Hemisphere by the mysterious art of an occultist sorcerer who had carried me from the New to the Old World’’ (1887:197). Strolling further, Paton and his companions ‘‘noticed a cooly woman squatting in the door-way . . . [she] was loaded down—adorned would faintly express her preposterous state of ornamentation—with all the different varieties of precious metal work known to the members of the trade [of smiths] . . . she was truly a sight to be seen— and if seen but once, never to be forgotten’’ (1887:200). Generally portraits like this one are meant to be complimentary; Indo-Trinidadian women tended to be admired, if exoticized, by both local observers and foreign travelers to the region. Paton, like many European observers, found remarkable the contradictions posed by the exotic embodiments of religion—women and religious specialists. Perhaps the apogee of the iconography of religious specialist and feminine exoticism is captured in Charles Augustus Stoddard’s reflection on his 1903 visit to Trinidad. He tells readers that an agent from ‘‘Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth’’ made his appearance while we were at Port of Spain, and engaged passage for a curious collection of Indians from South America, to which he added as stars for the ethnological department of the show, the Hindu priest of the coolie village, and ‘‘Julia,’’ a beautiful specimen of a coolie woman. The agent paid these Hindus twenty dollars a month for a six months’ trip . . . Several of the Indians succumbed to the cold of a New York April, but the others survived. I saw the priest and Julia in the ethnological procession at the Madison Square Garden . . . It seemed sad to see them marching around the dusty ring in company with a lot of bushmen and barbarians, and I only hope that they will get back to their simple life in the coolie village without disaster. (1903:205–8) 50

Callaloo Nation

Stoddard quotes a New York newspaper reporter’s comments on the 1903 arrival of the ship Madiana, carrying Barnum and Bailey’s retinue: With ‘the sword of Adam and Eve’ before him and ‘the rod of Moses’ under his arm, the Right Reverend Barbajee, high priest of the island of Trinidad, descended the gang-plank . . . with stately tread . . . Attired in full sacerdotal robes, with the sacred turban upon his head and a smile of trustfulness upon his genial, ebony countenance, Barbajee has come to convert America through the channel of Barnum and Bailey’s peripatetic summer camp-meeting . . . Barbajee was not unattended . . . There were five Accawai Indians and four Warrihoones from the Orinoco River, four Caribs, four Hindu Creoles,∞∑ two Hindus, and three Barbadians in the lot . . . Barbajee is a great evangelist. Next to Barbajee, the star of the West Indian combination was Julia Blare Lall. Julia is the belle of Trinidad, and her fortune is her face, and the golden ornaments thereof. Julia talks good English . . . she promises to be a success in New York society.’ (1903:206–7) One has to wonder what was going through the mind of a man who must have been a pandit (‘‘Barbajee’’) as he presented an affable mien and circus parody of his religious beliefs to inquisitive audiences. ‘‘Barbajee’’ and ‘‘Julia,’’ the pandit and the femme fatale, both clearly specimens of exotica, were considered objects suitable for the undignified peregrinations around the ring endured by the other cultural specimens. At the same time, however, they posed a superior contrast to the ‘‘bushmen’’ and ‘‘barbarians,’’ categories themselves nothing more than simply generic indexes of types more primitive than these two South Asian ‘‘Indians’’ on view. Much smaller and more local venues than Madison Square Garden were sites for the routine presentation of Indian culture. On her visit to the Caribbean in 1883, for example, Lady Annie Allnut Brassey had an opportunity to tour a Trinidadian sugar estate, ‘‘the residence of a West India planter’’ (1885:158). Her accommodating host sat them on the veranda for afternoon coffee and local color: ‘‘Presently a band of coolies employed on the estate came up to the house in order to dance and sing for our entertainment. It was a very pretty sight; and I believe that if we could have understood their language we should have been greatly amused, many of their songs . . . improvised in honor of our visit’’ (1885:160). Even in the midst of the plantation setting, where Indian culture becomes distilled into idioms of blackness and unskilled (‘‘peasant,’’ agricultural) labor, what is thought of as the artistic dimensions of Indo-Trinidadian cultural alterity—song and dance—can be revived as needed. Such performances help to distinguish Indo-Trinidadian from Afro-Trinidadian, whose cultural forms, even if ‘‘foreign’’ enough to be worth dramatizing, would be too close to the ‘‘folk’’ element of grassroots sectors. At the same time,

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

51

these distinctions would be too close to the ‘‘primitive’’ element of lineage ancestors, and therefore considered by both Europeans and middleclass Afro-Trinidadians in the pre-independence (and, to an extent, postindependence) era as not ‘‘respectable’’ enough, as too ‘‘African.’’ In pre-independence Trinidad, Indo-Trinidadians’ cultural performances underwrote and underscored, even if via negative comparisons, their authentic exoticism. In postindependence Trinidad, when cultural performance has become the modus operandi for all ‘‘racial’’ groups’ competition for state patronage, Indo-Trinidadians’ authentic exoticism has been fraught with contradictory pressures—the need to appropriately belong to a Western, Afro-Christian nation while at once maintaining a sufficiently distinct (and thus perhaps riskily extraneous) cultural profile. Finally, distinctiveness begs the question of selection—which versions of history and culture should represent the community, and who, then, is ‘‘the community’’? Hierarchical classifications of types collapse the bio-genetic (nature) and disposition (culture). This collaboration proved a useful tool in colonial rule. Colonists in the continental United States, for example, routinely identified (American) Indians and African Americans as different kinds of people, largely because of their belief that they ‘‘possessed a natural antipathy for each other’’ (Jordan 1969:191). Throughout Trinidad’s history, as well, there has been a conviction that Afro and Indo have a natural antipathy. These kinds of beliefs rationalize and thus help sustain the prevailing structure of social inequality, not only by keeping competitive groups apart but by implying their unity is an impossibility. We even see this resonating in early versions of the Caribbean plural society model (e.g., M. Smith 1962), wherein deep-seated cultural differences, particularly values, are inevitably at odds. Where there is the suggestion of inevitability, there is the concomitant suggestion of a natural state of things. Thus, when the nineteenth-century British statesman Thomas B. Macaulay declared about Indians that, ‘‘there never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke’’ (Macaulay 1823:329; quoted in Thompson 1997:11), he was cementing his assertion of colonial rule by conflating ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘habit’’: people are what they do. Of course, tautologies arise, since in these racist equations, what people do is also what they are. Mechanism (how) and motivation (why) become interchangeable. In India, the British colonizers viewed Indians as an enigma; Indians represented a bundle of contradictions that stimulated the oscillation between admiration and affinity, denigration and distancing, evident in Victorian discourses about the peoples of the world. British colonizers defined Africans in Africa as having an absence of culture. In the West Indies, however, Indians were most acutely present as immigrant labor-

52

Callaloo Nation

ers, not as ‘‘oriental gentlemen.’’ Consequently, they were viewed for the most part as having failed at their civilization’s high culture. There is also, however, the issue of the context in which contrasts are made. Local Trinidadian commentary is shaped by specific critiques of Indians, such as that against the scab labor the indenture project intended them to be; it is also shaped by specific critiques of Afro-Trinidadians as allegedly lacking in the admirable qualities Indians possess. Commentaries from outside observers generally reflect an implicit comparison between Indian immigrants and what is imagined about the Indian subcontinent; the foil is another (better) kind of Indian rather than another (similar or worse) kind of uncivilized laborer in the New World. These kinds of distinctions are especially apparent when different sorts of narratives are juxtaposed. Although approximately fifty years apart, the following two statements are typical of the general attitudes they reflect. The first is a response in 1852 from the Trinidad Free Press to the news that the colonial government had made plans to import an additional one thousand indentured laborers into Trinidad from Calcutta. The newspaper editorialized against this decision, referring to the laborers as ‘‘pagan,’’ with ‘‘vicious, brutal and superstitious habits,’’ who brought ‘‘barbarism’’ into Trinidad. ‘‘Coolies,’’ more so than any other of the ‘‘human race,’’ are brutish with regard to ‘‘clothing, food or other care of the body . . .’’ going about ‘‘almost naked . . .’’ the coolies’ ‘‘immorality cannot be deeper than it is . . . The half naked, deeply degraded, and herb-eating Coolie’’ is scab labor, unfairly advantaged to save ‘‘the greater part of his twenty cents wages’’ through natural cupidity (quoted in Moore 1995:180). This choice of adjectives is meant not only to underscore the inferiority of the indentured laborers (not incidentally referred to as coolies rather than as Indians or Asiatics). It also insinuates the potential occidental respectability of Afro-Trinidadians (even while some of the same adjectives could be levied at poor and grassroots Trinidadian ‘‘blacks’’). The representation of Indians reduces them to barbarism, a key point of contrast with Trinidadian locals, particularly through their ‘‘heathen’’ religion, another emblem of alterity inapplicable, in this context, to Afro-Trinidadians. The second statement comes from a turn-of-the-century travel memoir, Cruising Among the Caribbees, by Charles Augustus Stoddard. Stoddard writes that among the ‘‘most interesting excursions which the traveller can make in Trinidad is to the coolie villages’’ (1903:201). He observes that the Hindu’s ‘‘features are delicate and clear-cut, his manners are those of a civilization . . . which indicates the sway of mind over matter. He may be a degraded heathen and know little more than the African, but he does not thus impress the visitor. He has the gravity of the sphinx, and an aristocratic bearing which is out of harmony with his environment . . . [there is something about them] that indicates mental

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

53

power, a descent from a cultured ancestry’’ (1903:202). Stoddard is impressed by what he sees as Hindus’ (Indians’) location within Victorian evolutionary hierarchy: they have civilization, delicate features, aristocratic bearing, cultured ancestry.∞∏ At the same time, however, they do not possess much more knowledge than do Africans, and their level of evolutionary development is stymied by their status as degraded heathens. Although to Stoddard regal Hindus seem incongruous with their environment of physical labor and minimal material belongings, this inconsistency becomes smoothed over in criticisms of Indians as illegitimate, immigrant—scab—labor. Indians’ high culture is tarnished by association with the degradation of work. (Although, as we will see, IndoTrinidadians subsequently offer counterhegemonic interpretations of their relationship to work.) This degradation is couched in terms of the central (developmentally lagging) quality of their very being: religion. When Indo-Trinidadians are depicted in romantic imagery that emphasizes their superior evolution, as in Stoddard’s description, or quaint customs, picturesque clothing, and spiritual propensities, as in other narratives above, the portrait is one that transcends daily life, suggesting a people not quite real, but more appropriately of story books. Subsumed within Trinidadian racial ideology, Indians became increasingly epitomized by the colonial hierarchy as ‘‘coolie’’ and occasionally as ‘‘black,’’ as opposed to the subcontinental ‘‘Aryan’’ or ‘‘Caucasian’’ and noble (or at least with majestic lineage), even as observers continued to notice their ‘‘Caucasian’’ features. The cultural symbols of class position came to the fore, distinguishing Indo-Trinidadian from Afro-Trinidadian in structural as well as phenotypic terms. The closer to manual labor and economic fragility Indians have been, the greater their similarities to grassroots AfroTrinidadians (the ‘‘folk,’’ the ‘‘black’’) and thus the greater their differences from the ideal Afro-Trinidadian—middle-class and refined, or at least further along the way toward those states. Through the popular print media, ‘‘imagined communities’’ (Anderson 1983) of Indians have formed internationally, employing to their own advantage Victorian racial and religious ideologies within diverse social and political milieus. In 1942, for example, D. P. Pandia, an Indian congressman visiting Trinidad, wrote an article in The Observer newspaper, ‘‘My Country and My Religion,’’ where he informed Trinidadian readers that India is not a little island, nor a poor country inhabited by savages . . . In northern India the people are of the same racial stock as the Greeks, the Romans and the English. Though their skin has been browned by the merciless sun, their features are as regular and as refined as those of the Europeans . . . When two or three different religions claim that they contain the revelation of the very core and 54

Callaloo Nation

centre of truth and the acceptance of it is the exclusive pathway to heaven, conflicts are inevitable . . . To obliterate every other religion than one’s own is a sort of bolshevism in religion which we must try to prevent. We can do so only if we accept something like the Indian solution which seeks the unity of religion, not in a common creed, but in a common quest. (1942:11–12) In a seamless transition from racial idiom to religious doctrine, Pandia makes a case for why India should matter—that is, be recognized in the world—through the litmus test of Victorian standards about superiority, and in oblique contrast to the island of Trinidad: India possesses size (is not small), wealth (is not poor), evolutionary development (is not savage), and ancestry (shares the same racial stock as England and such venerable occidental forebears as ancient Greece and Rome). None other than the founder of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Sir William Jones, viewed human civilization as arising among the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and then expanding into the ‘‘five nations of the East’’—Hindus, Arabs, Tartars, Persians, and Chinese (Bearce 1961:21).∞π Pandia’s apparent intention is to legitimize Indian people through a Victorian construction of race, and to legitimize Indian religion—read Hinduism (e.g., Marshall 1968)—through a Victorian construction of moral superiority. As Pandia implies, Indian religion beats Christianity at its own game of morals. In 1942, words like bolshevism, exclusive pathway, and obliterate would have resonated with contemporary fears associated with the world war against Nazism and other totalitarian regimes. The Indian ‘‘solution’’ Pandia offers is one possible through what he suggests is intrinsic to Indian religion, an emphasis on fellowship (‘‘unity’’) and fairness (diversity of creeds). In other words, we do not have to think alike to be involved in the same journey. The latter sentiment is a version of the rhetorical device still quite common among Indo-Trinidadians: ‘‘is all one God, anyhow.’’ Indian religion, Pandia conveys, can (and should) be distinguished, through its basic flexibility and the value it places on democracy, yet be treated equally in the gaze of the First World, due to its long-shared racial ancestry with those peoples. Although Victorians had multiple discourses about Indians on the subcontinent, laudatory and derogatory both, the image of Indians became less ambiguously inferior in the Caribbean, less of a puzzle to many Victorian observers. From the first generation in Trinidad, for example, to well toward the end of the century, Indians were at best struggling and marginal workers and at worst reduced to vagrancy and starvation (Laurence 1994; Brereton 1981; Singh 1994). As either falling from the grace that was bequeathed them through Victorian ideas about human evolution, or presenting a reassuring confirmation of Victorian ideas about Africans’ inadequacies, proving Western (Euro, Afro) superiority, or substantiating the A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

55

steadfastness of their own identity, Indians have been characterized, and have characterized themselves, as having carried their cultural heritage with them in diaspora. This mode of thinking has shaped other, more local, scholarly analysis. Explanations for the antagonism between Indo-Trinidadian and AfroTrinidadian have crossed two centuries but essentially form one consistent, if broad, narrative of cultural necessity. Trinidadian historiography and received wisdom draw from an array of hegemonic cultural motifs that constitute the building blocks of ideologies. In a grim admission, Alfred Radford, a late-Victorian traveler to Trinidad, concluded that, ‘‘We [the English] are hated and detested by everyone—that is clear; yet, all the other races also hate each other in a lesser or greater degree’’ (Radford 1886:46). Radford’s declaration is a good example of the presumption and authority with which European observers interpreted, for the rest of the world, subject peoples and their relations with each other. In attempting to explain antagonisms among what would be called, by the midtwentieth century in the colonized world, ‘‘ethnic groups,’’ observers occasionally sought a halcyon past. Scholar Percival Spear, for example, wrote that between 1700 and 1750, the early years of English-Indian interaction, in ‘‘thought and opinion there was separation and disapproval without contempt,’’ there was ‘‘no trace of racial feeling or talk of inferiority’’ (1932:129; quoted in Moore 1995:139). Rather, what ensued was ‘‘a period of cosmopolitan intercourse,’’ where Englishmen enjoyed ‘‘hunting with the Indians’’ and ‘‘loved their feasts’’ (Spear 1932:129; quoted in Moore 1995:139). We can infer that Spear is speaking of relations between English and Indian elites; it is safe to assume that not too many peasant villagers or urban workers hunt and feast on a regular basis. The mutual feelings of cultural and racial inferiority (and contempt) likely were muted by recognition of class affinities. It is less likely that tribal peoples, the low caste, or the unlettered would have been viewed with such benign notions of alterity—by the English or their Indian counterparts. Thirty years later, another scholar of India, Selig Harrison, sees only discord, and locates it in the ‘‘pyramid of color snobbery’’ within the ‘‘Hindu social structure’’ (Harrison 1960:125). This color line ‘‘not only divides Indian from Indian and north from south, but cuts off Indians from other colored peoples . . . [and] inevitably complicates Hindu relations with Negroid races’’ (1960:125). While Harrison glosses Indian and Hindu interchangeably, he does acknowledge the stratigraphy of social hierarchy: the ‘‘upper caste Hindu who traces his history back to the same racial roots as Western white peoples lays down a psychological barrier before the Negro as solid as it is without malice’’ (1960:125). For Harrison, context does not mitigate the meaning of color; rather, color is a static signifier of difference, that, irrespective of place and time, is a barrier to mild

56

Callaloo Nation

(not complicated) social relations. It even predicts what are destined to be situations of conflict between Indian and African—as in the Caribbean. This obstruction to equality is rendered unavoidable: located in the psyche, it is beyond conscious will. Cooperation between these two peoples will therefore always be tenuous—mimicked rather than authentic. Such writings as Spear’s and Harrison’s were informed by far earlier presuppositions, which themselves were part of the culture of British colonialism in India and Africa. Writing in 1883, for example, H. V. P. Bronkhurst, a British observer in Trinidad proclaims, ‘‘No wonder that the two races [Indian and African] do not, and it is to be feared never will, amalgamate; that the Coolie, shocked by the unfortunate awkwardness of gesture and vulgarity of manners of the average Negro, and still more of the Negress, looks on them as savages, while the Negro, in his turn, hates the Coolie as a hard-working interloper, and despises him as a heathen’’ (Bronkhurst 1883:390). Bronkhurst is telling us more about European attitudes than about perceptions among the two groups in question. But the prerogative of the dominant to speak for, as well as about, the subaltern is clear. Making this approach somewhat more explicit more than eighty years later, J. D. Speckmann argues that antipathy between nineteenth-century Indian indentureds and Afro-Trinidadians is not sufficiently explained by fears of ‘‘economic threat’’ (that is, labor competition). Rather, ‘‘from the very outset,’’ Indians held negative views of Afro-Trinidadians, ‘‘mainly based on an aversion to the black colour of their skins,’’ dating to the Vedic times of ‘‘light-skinned ‘Aryans’ ’’ versus ‘‘dark-complexioned ‘Dasyus’ ’’ (Speckmann 1965:351). Like his intellectual forebear, Bronkhurst, Speckmann assures readers that Indians’ psychological predisposition, irrespective of context or moment, steers their social relationships with others. Much of classic Trinidadian historiography perpetuates this narrative. Donald Wood, for example, claims that during Trinidadian indenture, ‘‘sexual rivalry between Indian and Negro hardly existed’’ because a ‘‘basic inhibition was at work among the Indians. They encountered negroid people for the first time in their lives when they landed in Port of Spain and they found them physically unattractive’’ (Wood 1968:137–38; see also Ramdin 2000:76). Bridget Brereton argues that contempt between Indian and African in Trinidad was mutual, also relying on the narrative of cultural tautology—when distinct entities mix, trouble brews. As ‘‘heirs to the system of caste,’’ Indians ‘‘soon decided . . . the blacks were hopelessly polluted’’ (1979:188). Moreover, the ‘‘characteristic Northern Indian contempt for darker-skinned people was brought by the immigrants to Trinidad, reinforcing the existing network of prejudices surrounding race and colour’’ (1979:189). Trinidadian scholars such as Selwyn Ryan, John Stewart, and John La-

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

57

guerre also give currency to these arguments. Correctly pointing out that the ‘‘arrival of the Indians generated a conflict situation’’ (Ryan 1972:21), they emphasize culturally inherent hostilities, where Afro-Trinidadians were quite hostile to the newcomers, whom they regarded as ‘pagan’ and ‘heathen.’ They felt themselves more ‘‘native’’ and more civilized . . . This hostile attitude was reciprocated by the Indians, who found the Africans [Afro-Trinidadians] ‘‘awkward, vulgar in manners and savage.’’ It appears that the colour of the Africans led Indians to identify them with the followers of Rawana, the demon king of the Hindu Ramayana epic, and they feared that contact with the Africans would be polluting. The newcomers were decidedly rigid in their determination to preserve the ‘‘purity of the Indian race.’’ (21–22) Stewart and La Guerre also find Rawan serving as a powerful symbol in Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian relations. Rawan functions as ‘‘a barrier to social intercourse’’ due to his association with ‘‘blackness’’ (La Guerre 1974:50–51); Rawan explains ‘‘a certain predisposition among Indians in respect to the sexual stereotyping of Afro males,’’ where black Rawan in the Hindu scripture is a ‘‘sexual interloper’’ (Stewart 1973:55). In the context of Indo-Afro conflict, privileging the domain of ideas, and attenuated ones at that, permits the agency of Indians to be merely a negative, atavistic one. Aside from the problem of assigning a date to a feeling or proclivity (in this case, aversion), and the question of whether an ideology (regarding color, for example) can be uniform in definition and predictable in meaning for thousands of years (such as, since Vedic times), what is absent is an explanation of the objective basis for defining a ‘‘negroid’’ phenotype. Furthermore, why do all ‘‘negroids’’ (apparently) look the same? Why could not Indians have looked ‘‘negroid,’’ too (as we have seen, some certainly did according to some British colonial estimations)? Did other populations of Trinidadians (‘‘mixed,’’ Chinese, etc.) necessarily look any better to the Indian immigrants? The suggestion of predispositions deriving from cultural memory, used to interpret other groups by stereotypical classifications, is again a harking back to a notion of static remains of culture that exercise inordinate influence across time and space. The position taken by Indo-Trinidadians today, by and large, is that ‘‘we culture’’ has served to sustain the community in trying circumstances. The position taken by other Trinidadians, by and large, is that it is this culture that has insulated Indo-Trinidadians and thereby hindered their assimilation. But these debates are not simply a matter of a neat cleavage into two stances. In engaging both colonial and postindependence discourses, Indo-Trinidadians began to place new kinds of emphases on the ‘‘high culture’’ of their ancient civilization, great traditions, and authentic

58

Callaloo Nation

heritage. The importance of the distinctions among ‘‘black,’’ ‘‘coolie,’’ ‘‘Aryan’’ or ‘‘Caucasian,’’ laborer, and elite took on a different sort of urgency than it had on the subcontinent, despite the pervasiveness of the British Raj. These attributes were interpreted through ideologies about the essential core of human progress (and identity), resting in a construction of religion significantly shaped by racial hierarchies, and in racial hierarchies significantly shaped by ideas about religion. Today Muslims and Hindus in Trinidad continue to recreate themselves as they struggle over the meaning and content of high culture, ancient civilization, great tradition—and who can lay claim to these.

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

59

3 LOCATIONS AND DISLOCATIONS

Bringing sugarcane to the weighing station. Photo by author.

I

n t h e b r i t i s h c a r i b b e a n ’ s postemancipation era, beginning in 1838, the British colonial government wrestled with ways to meet the needs of sugar plantation production, particularly with respect to providing cheap and ready labor. Several strategies were debated among members of parliament and other officials, both in England and in the colonies; some strategies were experimented with. In Trinidad, postemancipation immigrant and indentured labor came from China, Madeira (Portugal), West Africa, other Caribbean colonies, and the United States (after 1812). The majority of laborers, however, came as indentured immigrants from India. Indian immigration to the British West Indies began in 1838 and lasted until 1917, with workers leaving from such places as Uttar Pradesh, Oudh, and Bihar, and shipping out of ports in Calcutta and Madras. Over 55 percent, or 238,909 people, went to Guyana (then British Guiana); second highest in number were the Trinidad-bound, who were over 33.5 percent, or 143,939; fewest went to St. Kitts, amounting to a little more than 300 persons, with Jamaica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent falling in between, in that order of magnitude (Look Lai 1993: 19, 276). In the rest of the region, Indian immigrants also went to Martinique, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, and Surinam. In May 1845 indentured laborers, ‘‘bound coolies,’’ first arrived in Trinidad. By the turn of the century, and particularly after 1917 when the indenture system officially ended in Trinidad, most workers had left the estates and settled near them in small, dispersed village communities. Until the end of World War II, Indo-Trinidadians remained involved in subsistence agricultural sectors disproportionate to the population as a whole. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that social and economic

transformations and political independence began to reverse this concentration. Even then, during the two-and-a-half decades between 1920 and 1946, Indo-Trinidadians had the lowest literacy rates in the total population of the Republic. For example, in 1921, over 87 percent of IndoTrinidadians over age ten were illiterate; by 1946 the percentage had dropped to 51, but the Indo-Trinidadian middle class was still ‘‘extremely small’’ (Singh 1996:230). The final year that the census disaggregated Indo-Trinidadians by occupation was 1931; at that time, just 9 were in the legal profession, 7 in medicine, with 440 in teaching (368 men, 72 women)—primarily in Presbyterian schools (Singh 1996:230). Among those most subordinate in the social hierarchy, Indo-Trinidadians have been a strong presence in agricultural production for many decades. In addition to continuing estate labor, independent crop growing, and subsistence gardening, they undertook other livelihoods, particularly small-scale entrepreneurial activities and manual labor, indicative of an increasing move into a variety of urban and rural occupations. This movement constitutes a gradual upward social mobility that has been based primarily on successful entrepreneurship and formal education, the latter significantly achieved through conversion to Presbyterianism, before Hindu and Muslim denominational schools became more common in the mid-twentieth century. These transformations have contradictory symbolic significance among Indo-Trinidadians. Social mobility has represented to Indo-Trinidadians a confrontation between forms of assimilation that could culturally subordinate them in the hegemonically Afro-Trinidadian national arena (these conflicts did not abate with an Indo-Trinidadian prime minister), and forms of assimilation that could empower them through fortifying identities as distinct, nationally recognized, racial-cultural constituencies, recognized on the basis of certain key emblems. The most encompassing of these has been religion, the discourse and practice of which communicates, through metaphor, the attention to cultural and other forms of mixing. Yet, as we have seen so far, in rendering religious practice compatible with nationalist criteria and community identity, there has never been a simple or tidy dichotomy between going ‘‘modern’’ and staying ‘‘traditional.’’ On the one hand, identity can lie in traditions made authentic by being rooted in subcontinent-based ‘‘peasant’’ (agricultural) culture, expressed largely through knowledge and practice of what the West has called ‘‘little tradition’’ (i.e., mixed: heterodox, syncretic) Hinduism and Islam embodied in specific generations of indentured and their customs, often evoking a ‘‘jheel (lagoon, subsistence plot) mentality’’—that is, backward, narrowly communal thinking. Nonetheless, as Indo-Trinidadians tell it, these generations not only laid a critical foundation for Indo-

Locations and Dislocations

63

Trinidadian future progress, they themselves moved forward in life, making the best of things. Identity can also lie in traditions made authentic by being rooted in elite (learned, scriptural, or philosophical) culture of what the West has termed ‘‘great tradition’’ orthodox Hinduism and Islam, practiced by edified proficients and experts, though disembodied from specific actors, thereby transcending temporal boundaries. At the same time, Indo-Trinidadians also recognize the dangers and disappointments of cultural loss (whether a mark of progress or subordination, or something more ambiguous), concerns that intimately figure into everyday life. Hierarchies of Culture, High and Low The collision between romanticized imagery and the coarseness of real life reveals itself in an essay by Derek Walcott. The subtext of class within the much-recited text of Indo-Caribbean culture is dimmed in the brilliance of his imagery, an imagery that evokes not only an authentic past but Oriental splendors. Walcott writes of a visit to Felicity, which he describes as ‘‘a village . . . on the edge of the Caroni plain’’ (1998:65). This description more accurately captures the Felicity of Morton Klass’s 1950sera research there; today it is a neighborhood in the ever-burgeoning Chaguanas, which has become a bedroom community for commuters to the capital. The reason for Walcott’s visit is to bring friends from the United States to see a Hindu performance of the Ram Lila, the dramatization of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, that has been performed by Indo-Trinidadians all across the island since the very early years of their settlement. Walcott confesses his initial anticipation of a forlorn reenactment, bereft of stateliness, and interprets this as his ‘‘writer’s view of things,’’ which produced low expectations of the Ram Lila being simply ‘‘theatre,’’ performed ‘‘poorly’’ on a ‘‘raft . . . in this ocean of cane’’ (1998:66). While not directly relying on terminology that indicates class, a grassroots, rural proletarian context is evoked with such images as villages, rafts, and oceans of sugar cane. Walcott decides his view is wrong when he realizes he ‘‘was seeing the Ramleela at Felicity as theatre when it was faith’’ (1998:66). For these performers, nothing was illusory, as one would presume it would be for actors, because they were not actors. They had been chosen; or they themselves had chosen their roles in this sacred story . . . They were not amateurs but believers . . . Their acting would probably be as buoyant and as natural as [the characters’] bamboo arrows crisscrossing the afternoon pasture. They believed in what they were playing, in the sacredness of the text, the validity of India, while I . . . searched for some sense of 64

Callaloo Nation

elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes. I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. (1998:66) Walcott decries his initial elitism by bending backwards into the sentimental. In a laudable effort to eschew unfair or inappropriate standards, he rectifies his expectations the best way possible. He depicts Felicity more fancifully than as a commuter locale, and reads the performance no longer as poor people’s playacting but as religion. Believers as opposed to dilettantes, performing naturally as opposed to proficiently, propelled by faith as opposed to rehearsal—what Walcott sees is redeemed: it is real rather than imitative, admirable rather than pathetic. Indo-Trinidadian culture out here on ‘‘the edge’’ is not, Walcott discovers, impoverished replications by diasporic flotsam and jetsam searching vainly for their true selves; it is, rather, ineffable spirituality that must be expressed, irrespective of context. Anticipating meeting ‘‘a visual echo of History—the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants’’ (1998:67), Walcott contemplates his miscalculation of IndoTrinidadian culture: Consider the scale of Asia reduced to these fragments: the small white exclamations of minarets or the stone balls of temples in the cane fields, and one can understand the self-mockery and embarrassment of those who see these rites as parodic, even degenerate. These purists look on such ceremonies as grammarians look at a dialect, as cities look on provinces and empires on their colonies. Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed . . . In other words, the way that the Caribbean is still looked at, illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized. ‘‘No people there,’’ to quote Froude, ‘‘in the true sense of the word.’’ No people. Fragments and echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken. (1998:67–68) What is not being acknowledged here is that any ‘‘self-mockery’’ or ‘‘embarrassment’’ that may be expressed by Indo-Trinidadian purists is an ideological, highly politicized, and therefore local and specific phenomenon, debated according to vested interests. It is not, as Walcott implies, the recognition of a universal notion of inferiority and shame. Echoes, fragments, severed limbs, and mongrels, to pursue this logic, represent the failure to be dominant, to be those with armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants. Moreover, when what is lacking is culture, or, more accurately, high culture, the ethnos, or peopleness of a population comes into question, and the shift from ethnos as ‘‘culture’’ to ethnos as ‘‘race’’ is not a distant one, hence ‘‘mongrelized’’ (mixed, hybrid, creole) encapsulates nuLocations and Dislocations

65

merous faults which rest on a race-culture axis. And echoes and fragments and severed limbs are only able to produce other fragments: the ‘‘small white exclamations’’ and ‘‘stone balls’’ of Muslim and Hindu religious observance. As the social conditions for Indo-Caribbean populations change, imagined and real processes of cultural retention and loss shape scholarly discourse and popular debate. Such formal, or ideal, models of Indian culture, along with the typical representations of its substantive practices overseas are as much statements about class structure and the cultural symbols that signify particular strata as they are theoretical approaches to diasporic populations. The Culture of Landscape According to the latest census figures, Trinidadians divide themselves into six ‘‘ethnic groups,’’ 40.3 percent Indian, 39.6 percent African, 18.4 percent Mixed, 0.5 percent Chinese/Syrian/Lebanese, 0.6 percent White/ Caucasian, and 0.6 percent not stated other (Central Statistical Office Demographic Report 1990:100). Focusing on the southern districts where much of my fieldwork is conducted—the region Trinidadians refer to simply as ‘‘South’’∞ —further disaggregations by minor ‘‘divisions,’’ show that in Victoria the population is 197,729, of which 122,918 (approximately 62 percent) are Indian, 50,603 (approximately 26 percent) African, and 22,462 (approximately 11 percent) Mixed (cso Demographic Report 1990:50). In the Division of St. Patrick, population 112,492, 63,069 (approximately 56 percent) are Indian, 34,550 (approximately 31 percent) African, and 14,359 (approximately 13 percent) Mixed (1990:54). Abutting St. Patrick, in Siparia Division, total population 72,519, 48,651 (approximately 67 percent) are Indian, 14,901 (approximately 21 percent) African, and 8,661 (approximately 12 percent) Mixed (1990:54). While these figures are not surprising in terms of the far greater concentration of Indians in southern districts, they also belie the familiar claim among Indo-Trinidadians that AfroTrinidadians are minimal in these areas and that, not coincidentally, mixed peoples are few. Out of a total population of 1,125,128, the Republic identifies twelve religious affiliations, plus ‘‘none’’ and ‘‘others’’ (cso Demographic Report 1990:102). Twenty-four percent of the population is Hindu (267,040 total), 6 percent Muslim (65,732), and 3 percent Presbyterian (38,740). Victoria (197,729) is approximately 36 percent Hindu (71,560), 10 percent Muslim (18,824), and 7 percent Presbyterian (13,000) (1990:120); St. Patrick (102,492) and Siparia (72,519) divisions are, respectively, 38 percent Hindu (43,220), 5 percent Muslim (5,753), and 5 percent Presbyterian (5,749), and 47 percent Hindu (34,282), 6 percent Muslim (4,432), and 6 percent Presby-

66

Callaloo Nation

terian (4,621) (1990:124,126). While not distinguished by ‘‘ethnic group’’ (for example, there are Afro-Trinidadian Muslims, though IndoTrinidadian Muslims far outnumber them), Hindus and Muslims are further distinguished according to schools of thought (a phrase I prefer to the word sect). The census recognizes two forms of Hinduism, ‘‘Sanatanist’’ and ‘‘Other.’’ The former is represented by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (sdms) and the ‘‘others’’ by various bodies, such as the Arya Samaj, Seunarine, Kabir Panth, and Divine Life Society. Islam is also parsed in two, ‘‘asja’’ (Anjuman Sunnat-ul-Jamaat), and ‘‘Other,’’ including Ahmadiyya and the Trinidad Muslim League (tml), among others. While I do not have further breakdowns for St. Patrick and Victoria, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the sdms and asja had the majority representation there among Hindus and Muslims, if one counted the numbers of their affiliated temples and masjids, respectively.≤ asja is itself part of a broader body, the Muslim Coordinating Council—comprised of asja, tml, the Tackveeyatul Islamic Association—and the United Islamic Organisation—including the Muslim Credit Union, the Islamic Missionaries Guild, Islamic Dawah Movement, and the University of the West Indies Islamic Society (Trinidad Guardian Sunday Magazine, 13 March 1994, 4). The religio-cultural associations under the Muslim Coordinating Council umbrella are the oldest in the country. As such, they symbolize a particular kind of religious and cultural authenticity and authority that celebrates forebears who tenaciously struggled to keep their ‘‘traditional’’ worldview a means of stabilizing a profoundly uncertain environment. At the same time, this kind of authenticity confronts other, ‘‘modern’’ notions of authenticity in the discourse about Indian culture, underscoring the contradictory aspects of Indo-Trinidadians’ past, both venerable and inglorious. We must begin with the official, if bare bones, data that outline national and regional history. It is apparent from the census data that regional patterns reflect national ones. When one considers these kinds of data an apparently straightforward and orderly portrait emerges: populations tallied in terms of activities and preferences. Yet the relationships these broadly drawn communities have had with each other are not predictable according to what their respective numbers suggest. What is not revealed are the ways various populations interpret their own statistical patterns and why. Similarly, what power relations exist among groups irrespective of their relative numbers? And how do other kinds of representations shape the ways localities and communities are understood in cultural terms? These characterizations are no less entrenched for being unofficial. Key sites of estate (plantation) production, St. Patrick and Victoria Counties have histories indelibly tied to the practice of concentrating indentured laborers into specific regions and relegating them to certain kinds of work. Yet a place only has meaning through the stories that are

Locations and Dislocations

67

‘‘South’’ (Victoria and St. Patrick Counties)

told about it. South Trinidad consists of spatial coordinates on a flat surface; it is soil, shore, forest, and field; it is government statistics; it is literal and figurative; it has been invisible and inescapable. Agricultural labor, whether slave or free, was a necessary factor in the establishment and maintenance of British Caribbean colonial societies; the consequent rise and importance of various forms of peasantries would become characteristic of the region. Since slave emancipation in Britain’s colonies in 1834, Caribbean peoples have established many patterns of land occupancy and tenure alongside the dominant plantation system of agricultural production, a labor form that persists in some areas today. One consequence of the intimate relationship between plantation labor and independent subsistence farming in the Caribbean is that for peoples of the region, land may represent the indignity of servitude or the dignity of autonomy and self-preservation. For many decades after Indians first arrived in Trinidad in 1845, they remained geographically distinct from other populations largely because of their assignment to sugar estates. The originally unequal participation of Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians in the principal sectors of the national economy resulted in a division of labor in which the urbanization of Afro-Trinidadians and the ruralization of Indo-Trinidadians prevailed in many parts of the island (Sebastien 1980:126). Concentrations of particular populations in certain sectors of the island created what would remain, in popular wisdom, a mutually exclusive geography, where an Afro-Trinidadian, urban north is elevated in contrast to an Indo-Trinidadian, rural south. Even in the areas where population heterogeneity was, and is, the empirical reality, the metaphoric racial landscape still prevails (Khan 1997).

68

Callaloo Nation

In presenting Indian recruitment for Trinidad’s sugar estates as culturally sensible, planters fostered the notion that indentured immigrants brought with them to the sugar colonies some kind of affinity for agricultural production through their previous experience as peasants. In 1901, for example, the Trinidad Mirror commented that ‘‘agricultural labour in Trinidad was not attractive to those people ‘who have got beyond the stage of civilisation that is satisfied with a loin cloth and a pot of rice’ ’’ (quoted in Singh 1985:36). We can infer from this comment that an implicit contrast is being made between Afro and Indo racial groups as well as between grassroots and middle-class (assimilated) Indo-Trinidadians. Two decades later, in 1920, the East Indian Herald wrote that Indians had contributed significantly to the local economy by lending a ‘‘stimulus to the pursuit of agriculture’’; they ‘‘had brought their native love of agriculture’’ to the Caribbean (1920:2). Retrospective accounts, as well, explain time-expired (or never indentured) Indians’ concentration in agricultural pursuits as reflecting a ‘‘special love for the land’’ (Brereton 1985:27). According to V. S. Naipaul, his father, Seepersad Naipaul, in his collection of short stories The Adventures of Gurudeva, characterized ‘‘Indian immigrants in Trinidad, and especially the Hindus among them,’’ as belonging to ‘‘the peasantry of the Gangetic plain . . . part of an old and perhaps an ancient India . . . many of the customs, . . . with us in Trinidad, . . . were still like instincts, [having] survived from the pre-classical world’’ (1976:13). Comparing his fictional town of Cacande with the real Debe and Penal, Naipaul described it as ‘‘a little India . . . cows there are as sacred today as they are in India itself’’ (1976:81). His son, V. S. Naipaul, often invokes the cultural habits of agricultural life. In his classic, The Mimic Men, he draws a connection among countryside, race (as primal urges), and thinly disguised IndoTrinidadians, in his description of ‘‘rural workers, picturesque Asiatics . . . ever ready to listen to the call of the blood’’ (Naipaul 1967:206). And as recently as 1993, Walton Look Lai explains the preponderance of IndoCaribbeans in the agricultural sector far into the twentieth century by invoking ‘‘their social backgrounds in India, their innate love for and knowledge of the land and its cultivation, [which] made them over time the classic farmers and food producers of Trinidad and British Guiana’’ (Look Lai 1993:220). Yet the reverse is also possible. Using history to interpret rural identities avoids reliance on speculative adjectives and on timeless essences of character. By 1860 a peasant class was established in Trinidad (E. Williams 1962). As indentured and later free laborers, Indo-Trinidadians were for generations accustomed to perceiving themselves as workers in an economic hierarchy (Sammy 1976:16–17). Developing an existential sense of themselves foremost in relation to ‘‘an omnipresent plantation system,’’

Locations and Dislocations 69

they developed values, codes of behavior, and beliefs that established them as a group, with common ideals and goals (Sammy 1976:16–17). For example, Ralph Sammy argues that the ubiquity of kitchen gardens and the priority placed on family survival are strategies connected to the insecurities of seasonal unemployment or underemployment inherent in plantation production, rather than to transhistorical cultural habits. Although they remained predominant in agricultural regions until the late twentieth century, even long before the turn of the century IndoTrinidadians also lived and labored in urban areas. By the 1890s, for example, unindentured Indians were employed in the Public Works Department, working on railways and roads, and in the Botanic Gardens in Portof-Spain (Brereton 1985:27). They contracted with the government to clear bush or to participate in the extraction of asphalt from Pitch Lake. They participated in the informal economy as gardeners, grooms, watchmen, porters, scavengers, and domestics. Another common occupation was in transport, where they drove or hired out their own carts, carriages, and, later, motor vehicles.≥ Many Indians were jewelers, others sold milk, still others engaged in petty trade of small commodities (such as textiles), some were shopkeepers. Those with sufficient capital sometimes engaged in money lending; usury at high interest rates made a few individuals wealthy (Brereton 1985:27). Despite the variety of their occupations, indentured Indians were concentrated by colonial authority in specific arenas of production—literally placed in and figuratively associated with plantation agriculture. The early analogous structural positioning of ‘‘blacks’’ and ‘‘East Indians’’ (‘‘coolies’’) did not elide the ideological association between Indians and agriculture that developed during estate indenture. Nor did it mitigate the tensions that grew between them, because these tensions were a consequence of their competitive roles as workers. Partly due to the organization of plantation production and the machinations of colonial labor control, and partly through historical cultural and linguistic differences, Indo-Trinidadian and Afro-Trinidadian communities engaged in distinct ways the structural position in which they found themselves and the ideas that helped keep the structure intact. Their responses contributed to the making of their histories, among themselves and with each other. Agricultural production and manual labor became in Trinidadian received wisdom synonymous with ‘‘Indian culture’’ and, in a reverse trajectory, with Indian heritage, partly out of the local hegemonic equations of Indian and rural and partly from Indo-Trinidadians’ own co-optation of some of this imagery. IndoTrinidadians build on this colonially created landscape by valuing, and decrying, their own interpretations of ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘authentic’’ heritage and social status. I had not been long in Trinidad when I became particularly interested in the conventional wisdom that informed people’s characterizations of the quality and culture of various communities. 70

Callaloo Nation

The conflation of agricultural and rural, Indians, indenture, and authentic tradition became condensed into the local gloss, South. Local friends and informants consistently echoed each other’s advice that if I wanted to experience ‘‘real Indian culture’’ I ‘‘must go to South,’’ to an alleged rural heartland of authentic tradition and ‘‘long time ways.’’ The localities repeatedly suggested were Penal, Debe, and Barrackpore (particularly Penal), all three the epitome of the rural, where progress and modernization ostensibly have not fully penetrated, and thus had not jeopardized this region’s ‘‘real’’ culture. By contrast, Afro-Trinidadians, more thoroughly incorporated into town-centered occupations, and, from about the 1920s, particularly well-represented in the petroleum industry, became culturally associated with ‘‘North,’’ a space of modernity and cosmopolitanism. Ironically, greater Penal, where much of my research takes place, historically has been a principal area of subsistence and cash crop production, and a major marketing center. Situated only about thirty minutes’ drive from Trinidad’s ‘‘industrial capital,’’ San Fernando, it is in the midst of Trinidad’s oil producing region (St. Patrick County). The contradiction of an ostensibly isolated, timeless trove of authenticity ensconced in such a central (and thus indeed ‘‘modern’’) location intrigued me. There, agriculture is an identifiable industry; ‘‘rural’’ is a cultural concept. Yet the concept of rural depicted in literature on the Caribbean tends to be made synonymous with agriculture. An empirical and a conceptual space are equated with a means of production, and it is assumed that occupations within the rubric ‘‘agricultural’’ do not significantly differ. Occasionally, comments about rurality or life in South are transparent references to class stratification. An acquaintance of mine, for example, talked with me about the difference between rural and urban Indo-Trinidadians, while we enjoyed sweet drink (soda pop) and biscuits (cookies) one afternoon, a respite he offered after I had traveled the good three hours up to ‘‘Town’’ (Port of Spain) from home. Ali is a wealthy and urban young man who had no direct experience with the agricultural regions of his country but who nonetheless had certain notions of the ways these regions contrasted with his own environment. Comparing Penal, where I was living, with his own neighborhood, a wealthy enclave on the outskirts of the capital, he reflected: I never knew I was Indian, I grew up thinking I was a Muslim and a Trinidadian. Anything Indian, food, music, was like them, that was Caroni [the quintessential cane-producing region] . . . Christianity and Islam are very similar. We’re westernized, civilized, not like the backward, rural Indian. That Indianness, that was backwardness . . . The Beverly Hillbillies, those are the nouveau riche Indians running out of Caroni. We are not about flash, we are about education, solid Locations and Dislocations

71

values, and contributions to the community . . . ‘Town’ means that you’re accepted into the mainstream, it means leadership, not in a geographic sense. Even upward mobility can be subject to a litmus test of legitimacy. Backward Indians, Ali implies, are Hindu, in turn a metonym for rural (low) culture. The latter may be the roots of Indo-Trinidadian history, but one can situate one’s history, and therefore identity, in a number of ways. ‘‘Caroni’’ can never really be left behind, since, as this urban, elite young man sees it, the food, music—and, importantly, labor—that constitute rural life for Hindus and Muslims are subsumed by it. Caroni is the symbol of both hardship and Hinduism, and, implicitly, untutored (grassroots) Islam, which, for Ali and many others with whom I spoke, is a rather different Islam than the one he compares with Christianity, its analog being Hinduism. The strong association between rurality and Hindus (and, implicitly, urbanity and non-Hindus) also has a foundation in historical fact. For one thing, as the census data above show, Hindus have been a significant majority in southern Trinidad. In addition, the increasing participation of Indo-Trinidadians in the political culture of the island helped to chart agricultural areas as Hindu localities. Trinidadian statesman Albert Gomes, for example, thinks back to the 1946 general election and his support for a candidate for office, Dr. David Pitt, ‘‘a Negro’’ (1974:165), who was running in a predominantly Indian area against an Indian opponent. As Gomes tells it, One Sunday morning we decided to invade the enemy’s stronghold, the village of Penal, where almost every other person is an Indian . . . I have a vivid recollection of our entry into a hushed, hostile gathering of Indians and of subsequent proceedings that were dominated by the pundit present who early took charge of affairs . . . several impassioned speeches were delivered—in Hindi . . . The pundit, eyes bulging and inflamed and face choleric with passion, seemingly lost for words in a paroxysm of sheer violent anger, exploded with ‘Take Dr. Pitt and put him in the pit with the sh—!.’ It was enough for me. I began the delicate retreat, crabwise. . . . (1974:164–65) Judging by the way Gomes ends his recollection, he intends to be humorous. Later, however, his no-nonsense skepticism toward this region and its inhabitants is bared. He tells us that when India achieved independence in 1948, an Indian Commissioner appeared on the scene, appointed by the Government of India, obviously with the consent of Her Majesty’s Government, but certainly not with the approval of any of the elected

72

Callaloo Nation

representatives of the people of Trinidad and Tobago . . . the appointment looked suspiciously like gratuitous reinforcement of the general mischief of communal promotion . . . On the surface, of course, it all seemed above board and in the cause of culture, but to my keen instinct the sinister purpose was unmistakable. Indian separatism was being sedulously fostered . . . the glories of India’s history and her widely diffused cultural influences were feverishly flaunted. (1974:166–67) The partition of India, combined with the demographic predominance of Hindus working in Trinidadian cane fields, the influential leadership of local pandits and imams, who would, of course, have garnered increased attention during visits from the subcontinent, and the language of equal representation espoused by the growing numbers of Indo-Trinidadian politicians representing agricultural areas—all served to reinforce the image of ‘‘real’’ Indianness contained in, naturally belonging to, certain regions, regions demarcated by certain means of production. As history and ideology merge, town and country people are very much construed ‘‘in a geographic sense,’’ despite Ali’s assertion to the contrary. Geography, a surface phenomenon in Ali’s terms, turns out to be a way of speaking about much deeper, essential, qualities, which, in turn, rest on a theme of soil and toil. Yet Indo-Trinidadians have also actively engaged these colonial images of the natural and cultural landscape by creating and evaluating their own interpretations of ‘‘traditional’’ heritage and the kinds of social status it confers. Among my most reflective friends in Trinidad was Diane, an upper-middle-class, middle-aged widow who had been ‘‘born in Hindu’’ from grassroots beginnings, but in an area without cane estates or much history of indentured labor, and with decades of infrastructure like main artery roads, electricity, and running water. Consequently, she carefully distinguished herself from Indo-Trinidadians from South. Having married Samuel, a wealthy Anglican, ‘‘mix-up kinda guy’’ (sans euphemism, a dougla), Diane experienced dramatic upward mobility and thus a very different quality of life, not least of which was enjoying a post-secondary school education. Samuel died unexpectedly; to console herself, Diane turned to active participation in a neighborhood church, as well as becoming a rather contemplative person. In one of our many conversations, this one in 1995, Diane had this to say about Indo-Trinidadian identity: When you talk about Debe and Penal you cannot talk about change. Because they maintained their traditions, all their Indian cultural values. They sort of isolated themselves, the population, they’re not too mixed . . . Well, the Hindus and the Muslims, the Indians, but not the Presbyterians. They [Presbyterians] tried to be absorbed. The

Locations and Dislocations

73

East-West Corridor [running from the capital to the center of the island] is where you seeing the change. Debe and Penal was always [political] opposition, their little India. The past couple of years they going back to their roots, away from the westernization. Implying an affinity among all Indo-Trinidadians, irrespective of region or religion, Diane reflected, I never used to want to wear shalwar or sari, but now I do. There’s an ethnic consciousness pervading the society, making you just want to think Indian. We have a great civilization. Before, European cultural imperialism making you feel that what you have is not good. Now more things happening Indian in the mass media, the TV, the newspaper . . . I myself used to play my Indian music very low. You didn’t want people to know, because it was a inferior kind of music. You want them to hear you playing Beethoven and calypso. [Indian] dress, [Indian] dance, chutney [music], tassa [drumming], puja [Hindu ritual, see chapter 6], these always in Penal. But in the East-West corridor it’s happening in abundance now. Since the last ten years, yes. Middle-class and elite Indo-Trinidadians can capitalize on the greatness of Indian civilization, allowing them to share a return to their ‘‘roots, away from the westernization.’’ Grassroots people in ‘‘little India,’’ given their attenuated relationship with ‘‘westernization,’’ consistently have evinced their Indianness. What Diane was conveying is something tacitly understood (if not always agreed with) by all Indo-Trinidadians, and many others. The cultural symbols of Indian identity can be shorn of their associations with soil and toil and be reconstituted as high culture appropriate for middle-class and elite iconography. Recognizing one’s grassroots brethren is an ambivalent exercise; the appeal of magnanimity and the possibility of material benefits (for example, resource access) that accrue from claims of unity are undermined by the real and imagined differences between rural and urban, backward and modern, those who have given in to feeling inferior and those who resist (‘‘we have a great civilization’’). A productive and prudent place to turn in search of acceptable commonality is to the past. Forebears and grassroots contemporaries, who are in certain senses equated, enable these rediscoveries by the very lives they have led, ideologically keeping essence intact and thus identity alive. When I was still early in my first stay, still trying to grasp even the rudiments of IndoTrinidadian culture, my septuagenarian, Afro-Trinidadian friend Mabel offered me some advice. Mabel counseled that ‘‘Indians of today live a higher-class life, so you won’t see nothing Indianish in them. Real Indians live a kind of low-class life. When you have more education and a better life [standard of living] you lose your lifestyle, you live like white people, not like Indians. You have maids, servants, a big house.’’ I had been in 74

Callaloo Nation

Trinidad long enough to not be surprised that Mabel’s analysis of the relationship between social class and Indian culture was similar to Ali’s, despite the generational, gender, religious, and ethnic differences between them; I was learning that this was hegemonic discourse. The tenacity of the rural/urban distinction as a meaningful spatial opposition will likely persist, despite urban growth rates. In the half decade between 1990 and 1995, for example, urban growth was virtually twice as high as rural, respectively, 1.9 percent and 0.8 percent (World Resources 1996–97:151). The World Resources Institute estimates that by 2025 the urban population of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago will be at a staggering 84 percent (151). Given the longevity of Trinidad’s rural/urban opposition, however, and its symbolic currency in demarcating racialcultural sectors of the population, it may perhaps even become more powerful, where rural is the Indo-idealized antithesis of urban realities. Despite the equation of Indo-Trinidadian with rurality and Afro-Trinidadian with urbanity, which helps substantiate their inimical differences, Indian indentured immigrants initially found themselves in structural terms akin to ‘‘black’’ grassroots Afro-Trinidadians—who were socially and racially distinguished from the ‘‘colored’’ middle class. Indian and Afro-Trinidadian shared the bottom of a segmented labor market and a cultural hierarchy fundamentally replicating British colonial ideology. As upward mobility increasingly became an option for Indo-Trinidadians, through the rise of merchant entrepreneurs and access to formal education, and as social stratification became more marked with the development of remittance economies and the amplification of state patronage, classes formed and transformed. In many instances, however, upward mobility through individual entrepreneurship was not accompanied by other forms of social and material capital like education, remittances, or government work. Saeed, a relative of my friend Dalia, for example, grew up in a cocoa-producing area. His story, as Dalia recounted it to me in 1997, was that his father had eloped with the daughter of the overseer of a nearby cocoa estate. Neither side’s parents was pleased, one objecting to marriage to ‘‘an Indian boy,’’ and the other concerned about marriage to ‘‘a local white. Well, to them [his parents] she was white. Anybody not Indian or black was white. But we’d know her today as a Spanish.’’ The young couple moved to another cocoaproducing area and prospered. By 1940 Saeed had bought a truck to transport goods. He eventually became the chairman of that area’s county council, ‘‘from that one truck.’’ He bought properties, and he built another business that would eventually become a department store. ‘‘He took a number of years to build it. Every time he got extra money from his transport business . . . he would put it in [the store]. Remember, in those days it was hard to get cash from the bank. He wasn’t white, he was a

Locations and Dislocations

75

black coolie-man. He was competing with the local whites, the cocoa proprietors, the O’Malleys, the McCarthys, the Marleys. And here you had the little Indian man coming in, emerging.’’ Saeed’s children eventually dropped their agricultural involvement in cocoa altogether, concentrating on Trinidad’s burgeoning mid- and late-twentieth-century market for consumer goods. That these kinds of changes are not necessarily monumental in any obvious or conventional sense does not mean that they are minor or epiphenomenal. Change is defined and interpreted by those who undergo it, in addition to other measures like quantitative indications of stratification and mobility. For example, by the 1920s, with additional cash wages secured by hiring themselves out for work in nearby communities, indentured laborers in Debe were beginning to replace their tapia huts with plank houses (Richardson 1975:248). When I first arrived in Trinidad in 1984, and for many years thereafter, house construction in grassroots Indo-Trinidadian communities included floors made from lipe, a mixture of dung and clay. By the end of the 1990s, lipe floors seemed to be a thing of the past, replaced by cement or tile or wall-to-wall carpeting. These three materials, each necessitating a greater financial investment than the other, and thus a quantitative indication of upward mobility, also represent a fading of heritage whose passing is ambivalently perceived. As Indo-Trinidadians adjust to the new social orders that class transformations have helped to establish they often experience an intensification of nostalgia. But these changes also give rise to tensions about what is perceived as cultural diminution; that is, culture trivialized by colonial ideology and diluted by diaspora. Even today, 160 years post-arrival, IndoTrinidadians grapple with how to mix, expressed in various metaphors, which share the conundrum of both disarticulating and reconciling class relations and cultural hegemony. Rama and His Kin As M. K. Vassanji notes in The Gunny Sack, his novel about the Indian diaspora in East Africa, through life stories we can trace ‘‘the crazy dance of history.’’ In the abbreviated genealogical narrative that follows, my late friend Rama conveys what life in early- and mid-twentieth-century agricultural regions of Trinidad was like for many people. His story is organized around a theme of ‘‘hard work’’ (see chapter 5), the necessity of labor that structured the lives of Indo-Trinidadian forebears and shaped the ways Indo-Trinidadians have interpreted who they are and how they have come to be that way. What is striking in Rama’s account is the diversity and combination of subsistence strategies far beyond ‘‘making garden’’; many of these forms

76

Callaloo Nation

of work cannot be glossed as ‘‘rural’’ although they occur in agricultural regions. A common denominator of economic and social marginality, however, persists. It is this marginality, a matter of class differences, that becomes subsumed within a discourse of cultural authenticity. As evident even in the contrasting observations of Ali, Diane, and Mabel above, the discourse of Indian culture—authentic, spurious, innovative—is in large part the struggle to interpret class disparities and the implications they have for establishing racial and religious distinctions, essential or mutable. The period of time Rama covers is roughly the end of indenture, 1917, through the end of my first research stay, 1989. Absent from Rama’s musings was any form of periodizing his narrative with conventional watershed moments, for example, the political independence of the Republic, wars, economic booms or busts. The apparent seamlessness of his account is not, however, an indication that these rural proletarians’ lives have been sequestered from ‘‘modern society,’’ as Trinidadian (and some social science) received wisdom has long held; rather, the way his sketch unfolds points more to the glaring and most important immediacies in their own lives. People did on occasion, however, share stories about watershed moments. One middle-aged woman, my friend Iram, who lived in a neighboring agricultural village in greater Penal, described the days of American military presence on the island during World War II: ‘‘When we school children hear the American troops’ Land Rovers coming, we throw ourselves down in the drain [ditch] to hide, since the story went that Yankees taking Trinidadian children’s livers and feeding them to the race horses, to make them run fast to win races.’’ Different friends, also old enough to remember, told me a terrible story from those days. Occasionally locals would go by the American base to look for discarded useful items, anything from tools to household goods to spare rations. Early one morning a couple of men from down Penal side spied a rolled-up mattress, which they enthusiastically inspected. Unrolling it, they discovered bloodstains and the dead body of a young girl, abandoned in haste and anonymity. The assumption was that she had been offering sexual favors, an amateur prostitute, as many were during this period (memorialized, for example, by the Mighty Sparrow’s famous calypso, ‘‘Jean and Dinah’’). Whether or not this story is apocryphal, the experience of war was clearly very much in people’s awareness, a very real occurrence. Yet it, and similar kinds of national and international events, were generally not what people recalled as punctuating their lives. Agricultural production has steadily declined in Trinidad. In 1951 it accounted for almost 18 percent of the gdp. By 1968, it accounted for only 8 percent (Sammy 1976:30). Despite this dramatic descent, little has been

Locations and Dislocations

77

as immediate, and therefore memorable, to Rama and so many others like him, as the unfolding exigencies of eking out a living—‘‘h-a-h-d-w-u-k,’’ as one of my neighbors, George, once deliberately spelled out for me, in pointed underscoring of the untutored dignity of life in South. These exigencies, as well as pleasures, define grassroots life in agricultural regions; as such, grassroots summarizes the cultural symbols of class identity. By highlighting particular aspects of the experiences of selected couples in Rama’s family, I mean to illustrate both the range of possibilities available to folks in these parts during and after indenture, and a sense of the limitations or constraints on opportunities with which they contended. These lives in precis are also flesh-and-blood examples of the abstractions that ‘‘rural’’ and ‘‘South’’ and, some hold, ‘‘them people behind God back,’’ have become. When we met, Rama Lal was seventy-seven years old, born down Penal side in 1910, seven years before indenture was officially over. Like his father before him, Rama had just one name, adopting a surname only as a young adult when he entered the colonial wage economy as a laborer. His father, Munna, had come to Trinidad ‘‘as bound coolie’’ from Gajpoor, India, when he was ‘‘around nineteen years,’’ Rama guessed. Vasavi, Rama’s mother, was from Gajpoor, too, having married eighteen-year-old Munna when she was twelve, and joined him in his journey to the New World. They were indentured in Gasparillo, Central Trinidad, five years on the same sugar estate. At some point after their contracts had expired they managed to buy some cocoa land to the south, in Penal, which always had more acreage devoted to cocoa production than did the surrounding areas, with their commitment to sugar cane. As one middle-aged friend of mine in the neighborhood told me, ‘‘Long time, South was really cocoa, hardly any cane. Cane was just private farmers, not as estate and thing.’’ In addition to wage employment on cane estates, Munna and Vasavi tended their few cocoa trees for the export market, intercropped with citrus (oranges) and fig (bananas) which they sold wholesale locally in ‘‘Penal self.’’ Rama was ‘‘the last child for [his] mother,’’ of the nine who survived infancy. Ranga was the eldest, and she married Kushal, from a neighboring village in the same county of St. Patrick. Kushal’s work was agricultural, ‘‘planting rice, cocoa, and coffee’’ on land he rented by the acre from other farmers, as he had no land of his own, paying rent with cash after the harvest. He and Ranga ‘‘made garden,’’ too, which provided their subsistence crops. Later they ‘‘took contract’’ on forest land a couple of miles away in order to grow cocoa, coffee, and citrus for export. This practice was not uncommon: land could be contracted for agricultural use, with the exception of cane, which was always controlled by ‘‘the Company, the usine company’’—Usine St. Madeleine, built in 1872. Contracts were

78

Callaloo Nation

drawn between individual farmers and those ‘‘who have plenty land,’’ often other Indians, which they had purchased from the Crown. Contracts were for a stipulated number of years, during which time crops would be developed. At the end of the period ‘‘the contractor and the landlord will get a valuator to value the cocoa trees, coffee, citrus trees, and they total all together and pay the contractor, and the landlord take over everything again.’’ Around 1928, because ‘‘land was cheap those days,’’ Ranga and Kushal were able to buy one acre, on which they built their house, with profits they made from developing the contracted Crown lands, as well as ‘‘by minding cow, sheep, goat, pigs, make garden, sell provision [vegetable crops], accumulate money.’’ Ranga and Kushal could neither read nor write and had no children, but, Rama hastened to assure me, they held Hindu ritual commemorations, a prayers or pujas, as they are locally called (see chapter 6), such as ‘‘Satnarine puja, Surujnarine puja, Suria puja, on a yearly basis.’’ It seemed clear to me that Rama was pointing to their religious assiduity, so I asked him about Hindus minding pigs; I was also curious because I knew that some of our Hindu neighbors had tended swine well into the 1960s, something no Hindu would consider doing by the time I arrived in the late 1980s.∂ (Practicing Muslims would likely never have done so, for religious reasons; Presbyterians were unlikely to, as well, because of their concentration in the middle class, where there was little need to rely on tending animals, as well as their seldom disinheriting their Hindu [or Muslim] roots.) Rama responded to my question matter-of-factly with a neatly logical explanation: ‘‘Those pigs in the Bible [pointing upward] was unclean, but these pigs was clean. Ent [didn’t] Jesus cast the devil and he [the devil] went among the swine? Them pigs was unclean.’’ Whatever stricture against swine there may be, Rama reasoned, Hinduism does not have Satan’s contaminations to worry about. Another girl, Sundari, was the second child of Munna and Vasavi. When she was about seventeen, she married Shashi, who was almost twenty and did agricultural labor by hiring himself out to work on other people’s land: cane, cocoa, rice, pigeon peas, ‘‘whatsoever it may be.’’ Sundari ‘‘minded cattle, fowl, goat,’’ because ‘‘who [stays at] home have to see about cooking, washing, see about animal.’’ Shashi and Sundari met because Vasavi ‘‘tell a fella she have a daughter to married and the fella say alright, and in moving about he met Shashi father and he tell the old man if you have a good boy we have a nice girl, all we could fix up family. This man was a aguwah, a matchmaker.’’ In this patrilocal community, Sundari went to live away in Fyzabad, with Shashi’s family. After a brief period, they both returned to Penal to live with Vasavi and Munna and their remaining children. Rama explained, ‘‘you know, families can’t [always] agree . . . when plenty family in the house you have rough talking sometime.’’ After

Locations and Dislocations

79

about a year, Sundari and Shashi took out a five-year contract on cocoa land, built a house on it, and lived out their lives there. A third sister, Popti, married Lal. They both worked for a time in Buentiempo Quarry, ‘‘a red clay quarry, used to build up roads.’’ Their job was ‘‘raking up gravel, making it up in heap for the truck to load and carry.’’ Popti, in fact, started in the quarry ‘‘about age thirty, after she was a housewife [i.e., wife and mother],’’ following World War II, and remained there for several years. The Buentiempo Quarry was owned by an IndoTrinidadian named Ramdas (today a well-known millionaire) who purchased the quarry with money he had accumulated, Rama said, by working in the oil fields as a contractor, building roads and excavating. ‘‘Long time,’’ Rama said, ‘‘ladies worked in quarry: Morne Diablo Quarry, Buentiempo Quarry.’’ Like Popti, who engaged in the hard, physical labor of quarry work to make extra income, women garnered cash by working for wages, whether quarry, cane field, or some other occupation, in addition to their ‘‘domestic duty’’ as housewives. The latter, as we have seen, involved animal husbandry, field labor, child rearing, and household chores. The image promoted both by Indo-Trinidadians and others, of a patriarchal community, at best protective and at worst oppressive, where obedient women remained at home, ignorant of worldly ways and safeguarding traditional Indian customs, is as much a statement about class as about culture. Cultural ideals are hard to practice in reality under the force of exigencies like the need for cash.∑ The image of Indo-Trinidadian women’s role as keepers of tradition is evident in nineteenth-century foreign observers’ assumptions about Indian culture and Indo-Trinidadian social organization. But the image became entrenched among Indo-Trinidadians themselves as upward mobility, and its attendant cultural accoutrements, became more widespread among them. In the years leading up to World War II, Kusum, another sister, married Chandrashekhar. She was about sixteen and he was a few years older. As was the norm in those days (and as is not uncommon today), it was an arranged marriage, linking two villages as well as families. Chandrashekhar always worked for private contractors, Rama recalled, ‘‘building road, spreading sand, digging earth, all kinda thing, man.’’ His last employment was with Ramdas, the quarry owner, who ‘‘employed so many people in Penal, Rock Road, Siparia.’’ Kusum ‘‘never work outside, she did domestic duty, a housewife.’’ They had seven children, four girls and three boys. ‘‘The boys now have they own houses. One is mechanic, one is taxi driver, one working the oil field in Fyzabad. One girl working as a secretary for Justice of the Peace . . . one is a receptionist for a doctor, one in school and the last at home helping she mother with she parlor.’’ Parlors are common in the Trinidadian landscape, an economic venture

80

Callaloo Nation

requiring little start-up capital, unregulated by the authorities, and garnering some amount of cash income. Anyone whose home has a spare window sill facing a road can extend an external shelf and awning, stock up on a handful of common goods, and wait inside as potential customers pass. When I asked Rama if there is a difference between a parlor and a shop, he assured me, yes, ‘‘a parlor does have sweetie [candy], cake, sweet drink [soda pop], exercise books, chalk, pencils. Shop have flour, sugar, potato, rice, rum, everything just as a parlor, and more. You can’t support you family on a parlor but you can on a shop.’’ This contrast may have spurred Rama to interrupt himself in order to explain that in the time of his youth and young adulthood there were three kinds of people in Penal and its environs: farmers, laborers, and shopkeepers. Those who owned land and hired others to work for them were called farmers. Laborers worked for farmers, and were not ‘‘all the same nation [caste]; you could hire anybody who want to work, Brahmin and all.’’ Shopkeepers and farmers were ‘‘all mix-up nation,’’ as well. Big estates, say, more than forty acres, estimated Rama, were often owned by white farmers. A few Indians and ‘‘creoles,’’ or Afro-Trinidadians, also owned large estates. In her study of Hindu women in Penal, Sitara Sharma observes that there has been a ‘‘noted stratification pattern existing in the district’’: large house owners, older heads, the formally educated, and persons with good contacts were all ‘‘looked up to’’ by other residents (Sharma 1976:21). Sharma is pointing to significant, if subtle distinctions. These status categories symbolically represent different kinds of authority, which I take up in subsequent chapters. She also discerns material representations of this ‘‘noted stratification pattern’’ in types of dwellings—not often differentiated by outside observers. Wattle and daub, thatched roof ajoupas were the homes of cane farmers and laborers; taxi drivers and estate workers had small wooden houses, with separate kitchens and without running water or electricity; schoolteachers and garden owners tended to have ‘‘small modern concrete homes’’; village leaders, shopkeepers, and store owners enjoyed ‘‘large modern homes’’ (Sharma 1976:21). With the exception of ajoupas being quite rare and there being many more large, ‘‘modern’’ concrete homes by the time I arrived in South, Sharma’s classification, and the class and status distinctions it suggests, still applied. Madan, another of Rama’s brothers, married Amita and they worked as laborers, ‘‘together, as married couple,’’ in the cane estate near their village, at the Usine St. Madeleine ‘‘when it was still Tate and Lyle,’’ the British corporation (it became nationally owned, as Caroni, Ltd., in 1975). In the late 1970s, Rama said, ‘‘they gone to America.’’ They initially intended only a vacation, but ‘‘a friend tell them America was a good place and he would get a job for them. You know, long time, things was much easier to go in foreign country to live than now, you know. Nowadays

Locations and Dislocations

81

when you going you have to go for a holiday and you have to come back but long time it wasn’t so. When you go and stay by a friend and he get a job for you, you working [i.e., you are established]. Now, if you hiding and you working and they catch you out, they deport you.’’ Vishwanath, ‘‘a next brother,’’ lived in San Francique, hiring himself out as a laborer ‘‘in other people garden,’’ and ‘‘working for heself’’ on his own land. His wife, Janaki, worked in their subsistence garden but also occasionally hired herself out as a laborer. ‘‘A lot of women want work and they can’t get. That side is estate area and [so] they get work.’’ For the first few years of their marriage they lived with Shashi and Sundari but they ‘‘branched off’’ after a couple of years when they saved enough money to buy land. The provisions they produced on their land they consumed themselves; surpluses were sold in the market. Rama’s sister Ganga was married ‘‘at around sixteen years’’ to Devilal, who ‘‘had about twenty-one.’’ They were married for eighteen months and then they separated, ‘‘owing to a lot of quarreling with the mother-in-law and father-in-law, and he [Devilal] took his parents’ side.’’ Ganga returned to her parents’ house, having been asked by her in-laws to leave. Rama says that ‘‘long time, this happened in many cases, though now is more.’’ That is, marriages and engagements are unstable and, more often than readily admitted, dissolve. Neighbors in their village reassured Vasavi, ‘‘ ‘Don’t mind that, it’s not your daughter alone that married and left.’ ’’ Ganga remained in her mother’s house about a year; ‘‘then my mother tell people, ‘Look, I have a grown-up daughter that married and left, see if you could help out and get a boy to put her with, because she is a woman and she must have a husband.’ And the fella, the aguwah, really went on investigation and he get a boy, yes. And we put Ganga to the boy, Sridhar. He was looking, . . . as long as it’s Hindu . . . [Rama reflects a minute] But look at my nephew what went to Canada. He married to a Brahmin’s daughter and he’s a Vaish self. They going good-good. It [intercaste marriage] happens so much more today.’’ Ganga did not wed Sridhar. ‘‘We just call a few people and make a farewell.’’ Sridhar ‘‘himself married and left, some disturbance at home.’’ The aguwah had to look for someone who had already been married. ‘‘Ganga couldn’t marry a boy who hadn’t yet married. That was the ruling. You can’t married again, especially the girl. The first time is the real marriage, you perform all your rituals with the priest [pandit], and so on. Afterwards, when you left [separated], no marriage again.’’ Subsequent partners were called ‘‘a keeper,’’ the term generally being applied to the woman. Ganga and Sridhar left for Carapichaima, toward Central Trinidad, but there ‘‘it was only cane work, six months you work and six months no work. That was the sugar belt. Oh, people suffered a lot.’’ So they returned ‘‘Penal side,’’ where ‘‘it have plenty garden work and they could do better,

82

Callaloo Nation

work for other people. Cocoa, coffee, you getting work throughout the year.’’ Although cane estate work offered the benefit of free barracks housing, ‘‘who could do better, they move.’’ Even if not entirely free of the estate, during the idle six months ‘‘some would come down to the cocoa and coffee lands and stay for awhile, cutlassing, picking cocoa, draining off the water in the rainy season.’’ Ganga and Sridhar, with financial help from Vasavi, built a carat (thatch) and wood post house, moved in, and hired themselves out to farmers as agricultural labor. Rama had saved himself for last in his story. He was nineteen in 1929 when he married Gayatri, who was then fourteen. She was from a village in Debe, not very near in those days to Rama’s village in Penal. Their marriage being no different than others, their respective families were alerted to their availability by an aguwah who, ‘‘throws a talk to each side to fix up’’; in other words, approaches the parents in both families and sets the arrangements in motion. Like most others in this region at the time, Gayatri could neither read nor write, though Rama considered himself one of the lucky ones to have had a primary school education, perhaps, he speculated, because he was the youngest child. All of their eight children (who are themselves grandparents today) attended primary school, a few with college (high school) or university education. At least one son lives abroad, in North America, having married Genevieve, from Bangladesh, ‘‘a Muslim girl, before they both turn Pentecostal.’’ One daughter also married a Muslim, ‘‘but he was a healthy, hard working fella,’’ so Rama had agreed to the match. Four children are Presbyterian, as are their spouses, some through conversion after marriage. The two remaining ‘‘married in Hindu and it remain just so.’’ Gayatri had died before I came to Trinidad. Whether she had been engaged in any form of wage labor I am not certain, as Rama said only that she was involved in her ‘‘domestic duty and minding fowl, cattle, and goat, sheep, and work in the garden.’’ Rama’s working life began, as was usual, as a young teen, on his parents’ cocoa, coffee, and rice land. When he was twenty-nine he got a job in the neighborhood ‘‘Chinee man shop. That man treat me nice, man. When I hard up for food . . . [he] give me ten pounds of flour.’’∏ After two years, Rama ‘‘branched off’’ from there to work for a contractor in a nearby oil field, ‘‘digging foundation to build new roads in the oil field area . . . When it ent [did not] have work on the road it have garden work, planting cabbage, melongene (eggplant), tomatoes for the white people [the oil company managers and executives].’’ In 1943, when he was thirty-three years old, Rama’s cousin told him about vacancies at the Ministry of Works, Public Works Department. ‘‘I was a manual laborer, cutlassing, draining, making outlets, patching road. I retire in 1973, I had everything going smooth, so I didn’t bound to work for anybody again.’’

Locations and Dislocations

83

Down Penal Side In 1878 Indians established settlements in Chaguanas and lower Caroni (Boston 1967:13). From there Indians moved to the southern parts of the island, notably where Crown forest lands could be cleared and subsistence agriculture, enhanced by wage work, could be undertaken. St. Patrick County consists of about 14 percent of the total land area of Trinidad, whose topography still contains forests, swamps, and lastrajo—bush, or abandoned farm land that has reverted to bush (Sammy 1976:71). Little has been documented about Penal, Debe, and their immediate environs in St. Patrick and Victoria Counties. It was not until 1946 that Penal was accounted for in the national census (Anthony 1988:199), and documentation since the beginning of the twentieth century largely consists of agricultural surveys and economic reports on the area’s major cash crops: cocoa, sugarcane, coffee, and citrus fruits. Not surprisingly, these reports convey little if any of the experiences of day-to-day living that constitute the memories and stories of the folks who have made their homes there. Penal began as a village in the early 1900s, when mobile Indians and newly time-expired indentured laborers were fanning out from Victoria’s cane estates toward the forests and swamplands of Oropouche Lagoon (Anthony 1988:196). One example that illustrates this movement is a story that Latchman, one of my neighbors, told me. His parents came here from India as full grown people, past thirty . . . My father came from Goa in 1890, to Trinidad as indentured. He worked on several sugar estates, on three- and five-year terms. You know, Usine St. Madeleine and some smaller estates like Cedar Hill, Brontee, Hermitage. He came individually [not married]. In 1914 there was a conscript by the British government to go to war. People began to scatter, run and hide, take to the bush. People ran away from the estates in groups and build little huts and settled themselves. They met up in different places with the old French Creoles. But there weren’t only males running, there was females, and this was exactly how my father find he wife! [Laughs heartily.] By 1918 the war was over so they [the estate owners] went looking for the runaways, not to punish them but to work . . . Usine St. Madeleine was the big mother estate. Then there was smaller estates, not so big or far from each other. So you could have Dumfries, Hermitage, Union, Esperance, Cedar Hill, Cooper Grange, Brontee, all next to each other, like a block in the United States . . . So the people called back worked in these different estates. But they are in a close proximity and socialize. You know about jahaji? [See chapter 5.] Well, so it was. By 1905 many Indo-Trinidadian laborers had settled in the Penal region, and as early as 1910 it was recognized as an agricultural center. Afro84

Callaloo Nation

Trinidadians from eastern and southern parts of the island also populated Penal, eventually forming a sizeable community there (Anthony 1988). The eclipsing of Afro-Trinidadians from the nation’s rural portrait notwithstanding, it is typical in rural Trinidadian villages, as John Stewart notes, that ‘‘laboring class Afros and Indos share the same communities’’ (1973:13). The name Penal originally carried a tilde over the ‘‘n’’; it was a Spanish term designating the parts of swampy areas that rise slightly above swamp level (Anthony 1988:196). Then, as now, this area was known for its muddy and swampy condition (Anthony 1988:197) and for the flooding that, in the early years of settlement, cut off one household from another (Richardson 1975). Today flooding can still cut off the rest of the island when roads and power lines go out—adding to Penal’s ethos of marginality and anachronism. Rice, vegetable, and watermelon farming, and, in the 1920s, cocoa production, promised a decent livelihood, especially after the government began to build a main road through Oropouche (Anthony 1988:196) and the swamp began to be drained. The first land reclamation drainage scheme, in fact, was implemented in 1922 as part of the leasehold agreement for an oil company (Boston 1967:22). In the 1950s the major oil companies (including Shell Oil) drilled wells in Oropouche. The wage employment offered by the oil companies helped develop this area economically, but not without also producing tensions between farmers and oil companies. While land allocation was an issue, more serious was the oil seepage from drilling operations that damaged crops (Boston 1967:18). Allowed to petition a company for compensation, farmers also were rumored to sabotage the installations (Boston 1967:18). These are the dramas of new frontiers and the people who forge them. Power struggles like these have not been incorporated into either Trinidad’s image of the bucolic, ‘‘simple’’ peasant Indian or that of the backward, ‘‘isolated’’ rural proletarian Indian. Such modernities as oil company battles have been recorded, certainly, but somehow without being memorialized, without leaving an imprint on contemporary discourse. By 1910 and thereafter people began to settle into what was then called ‘‘the penal,’’ building their houses on stilts as protection from mud, water, and mosquitoes. In a brief review of San Francique in 1924, an agricultural locale arguably part of Greater Penal, the East Indian Herald wrote that ‘‘about fifty years ago San Francique was a dense forest, inhabited by wild beasts, water birds and mosquitoes. Gradually, man in his search for timber penetrated this forest, and while successful in his object, saw before him the great difficulty of getting this out, as also the product of his garden’’ (1924:19). In the previous issue, the Herald reported the efforts of the Honorable A. A. Sobrian, who attempted to ‘‘secure better road facilities for the peasant proprietors of the Debe district.’’ Sobrian’s interest derived from a strange situation: ‘‘in the absence of any road leading from Locations and Dislocations

85

the interior of the district to the main road, a few persons travelled along the railway lines for a short distance when they were arrested by an agent of the railway authorities.’’ They were resentful, ‘‘contending that there was no other way of ingress or egress’’ (1924:11). The ‘‘hardship suffered by these people’’ was raised before the colonial secretary, who assured Sobrian that the road would be ‘‘constructed early’’ (1924:11). (We are not certain what, if anything, was actually done.) Other hardships became infamous: in a 1928 issue of the East Indian Weekly, under the heading ‘‘Penal News,’’ it was reported that ‘‘the scanty supply of water has now begun to show its deadening effect in this district. It is becoming a contagious disease . . . and will continue to be so until there is established an adequate system of water supply . . . [siphoning nearby natural springs would result in] far less complaints made as regards insanitary [sic] conditions here, and on the whole the health of the population would be much improved’’ (1928:6). Five years earlier, in 1923, the East Indian Patriot newspaper reported about Penal that ‘‘among the latest improvements in this district [is] the re-opening of the side-drains along the Penal-Debe road, bordering on the rice fields. In pursuance of their project of draining away water from the greater part of the swamp, Oil Company employees are now engaged in effecting a clear headway . . . One great boon resulting from this . . . is . . . [ridding] those awful . . . mosquitoes . . . On the other hand, rice-planters have much to fear from the probable deficiency in water supply’’ (1923:15). A number of areas have only very recently (as late as the mid-1980s) received electricity, telephone wiring, or pipe-borne water. This is largely because government priorities, whether colonial or postindependence, have been elsewhere. In fact, one major problem still in many parts of South is access to water; in addition to drinking, bathing, and washing, water is used to hand-irrigate gardens (although rice planting relies on mehris [banks] to keep water in). I was told by people that it was only after the 1986 election of the National Alliance for Reconstruction party that many areas in South got pipe-borne water. Although there is little archival information about the history of South, the oral histories of older heads provide vivid portraits. An acquaintance, Shafiq, explained the story of settlement in a way that would echo many such narratives I would be told during my various stays: When first people came, it was only a man, his wife, one or two little children, less family, then, and you plant only a little bit, with a little cattle, a little cocoa, and they living with that. There wasn’t no store for twenty or thirty miles so people had to cut they own dry wood, get water to wash and drink, make their own pounded rice, ghee, coconut oil, make everything, yes. It didn’t have road and thing, just people with their five acres, each minding they own little thing, in a little bit 86

Callaloo Nation

of piece of that five acres. But it was much easier now. India was a hard country. Indenture was hard. So when they got to they own land, they save, and they make [advance]. It wasn’t hard [compared to India and indenture]. Within the stories people tell, certain motifs appear that serve as moral counsel, conveyed as lessons—either explicit or as subtext to absorb. Images of betrayal, suffering, hard work, and achievement, as well as of a former golden age versus present social and cultural deterioration, are passed down through the generations. These images serve to remind younger people about the importance of dignity, humility, and achievement as inalienable aspects of Indo-Trinidadian (Indo-Caribbean) identity. They also remind them of a past not of ‘‘shreds and patches’’ but of high culture and great tradition, seeds of which have been sustained in the New World. Among the most poetic of these narratives was told to me by an imam in a nearby community. Mr. Shah’s devotion, which comes through clearly in his moral lesson, was as much for his father’s generation’s sustained efforts to hold on to their character as for the religion they fostered: My father was the sole [religious] authority here, for a time. That was about 1902. Eighteen ninety-six he came from India, spent five years. Then he came down and established heself down here in the district. Here he started his religious work. He took up with some old people that came together with him in the boat. Well, they were young people at the time, eh? They came together and they discuss, they say, ‘Look, I have some knowledge and let we establish a jamaat.’ Through their help and my father’s intelligence, they establish a little jamaat, a community. They get together and they say, ‘We are going to do so and so.’ They discuss it and they start . . . from below a mango tree. They had no place [no building]. They started from under a mango tree, keeping up Friday prayers under a mango tree. That was it, only Friday prayers. They was now trying to get the people [just beginning to amass congregants]. When the people start to come in, they make a little place, a masjid, out of carat and local wood and thing. They continue so for a short time, not too long. Then they make a bigger one. That stayed for about a couple good years. After that they make a galvanize one, with concrete, and flat. And [then] they made another one, well, this is the fourth good structure. But this one was not made in my father’s days, it was made after he dead. Since he dead, that masjid is existing about eighty-four years in one spot, this spot here. In 1907 Presbyterian missionaries started the first school in Penal, to convert the growing population there as well as to discourage the PresbyLocations and Dislocations

87

terian converts newly arriving from neighboring areas like Fyzabad from reverting to the Hinduism and Islam predominant in Penal (Anthony 1988:197). In 1913, the Trinidad Government Railway Line opened in nearby Siparia, ensuring that ‘‘this little village became one of the most thriving centres in County St. Patrick’’ (Anthony 1988:198). My informants recalled a succession of stages in the history of the region that can be distilled into the following chronology: pristine forest or swamp/ lagoon, arrival of white, and some Indian, planters—owners of cocoa and sugar estates—departure of these planters, florescence of peasant proprietors of cocoa and agricultural products, introduction of oil industry, and the gradual demise of agricultural production, both cash crop and subsistence. Despite its agricultural importance, the thriving commerce at its wholesale-retail market, and its railway line, neither the government nor the rest of the country has taken much account of Penal. The most traversed, and principal, highway running along a northsouth axis in Trinidad is the Southern Main Road. On the western coast, connecting the capital, Port-of-Spain, and its environs, with communities all the way to the southwestern edges of the island, the Southern Main Road stretches from the limits of North, through ‘‘Central,’’ and proceeds toward San Fernando, the ‘‘industrial capital’’ of Trinidad and the locality that heralds the beginning of South. The approximately two to four hours’ driving distance (depending on where one is going) between northern and southern communities is perceived by Trinidadians as being much greater than it actually is. For distance here not only refers to a somewhat prolonged ride in a vehicle but to changes in demography, and differences in style of living, in political representation, and in means of production. It is along the Southern Main Road that I traveled, back and forth, from South, through Central, sometimes to North, probably a hundred times between 1987 and 1989, and many times since. Most often sitting alone and staring out of the window of a maxi-taxi (van), I was able to take this time to sort out my thoughts, write in my field journal, and watch the landscape change as I traveled northward, from the familiar agricultural fields of my adopted home in Penal to the urbanized, and thus ‘‘creole,’’ density of San Fernando and beyond. On the way back from Town (the capital), the first symbol of South is the looming and grand San Fernando Hill, reportedly much larger in prequarrying times but still an immense landmark, seen for many miles in any direction. Once beyond the hill, one notices the beauty of gently undulating land, green gardens, cane fields, and the vastness of open space punctuated by an occasional tree or residence. To either side of the highway are small communities, some would say villages, ‘‘inside’’—that is, away from the main road. Connected by a maze of back roads, marketing arrangements, kinship ties, the organization of sugar production or the oil industry, and the towns to which some escape, these villages are the basis of community life here in these parts. 88

Callaloo Nation

Despite the pattern of settlement and infrastructural inequality that help to demarcate South, distinctions among communities within the region are not always self-evident, especially as one leaves the definitively urbanized environs of Trinidad’s bigger towns and two cities. Defining a community’s, or even a village’s, boundaries often depends on vantage point; it was soon apparent that Penal existed in geographic space according to an observer’s own residence and/or familiarity with the area. Therefore, Penal tends to be seen as synonymous with South by those in Central, North, and even in southern Trinidad. As one moves further inside and nearer to cultivated fields, distinctions become sharper and Penal is differentiated from Debe (its immediate, and overlapping, neighboring community to the north) and Siparia (an overlapping, neighboring community to its south). Penal is conventionally understood by local residents to encompass about a five-mile radius. On the ‘‘Penal side’’ of either of these northern and southern borders, it yet again is differentiated into smaller segments: Rock Road (village) is distinct from Penal (village), as are San Francique (village) and Lachoos Road (village)—all of which can, under other circumstances, be considered ‘‘Penal.’’ A purist might claim, however, that the real Penal encompasses only the Junction, or central roundabout, and its few side streets (on one of which I lived). The Junction is the indubitable heart of Penal, where the police station, post office, government health center, central market, and abattoir (official animal butchering center) are located. It is where one gets taxi (car) and maxi-taxi (van) transportation to towns and villages (or to Port-ofSpain) many miles away, as well as home to neighborhoods a mile or two down the road; it is where one can get a family portrait, new shoes, a photocopy, or various kinds of fast foods; it is the convergence of rum shop relaxation, news exchange, and shopping. Friends told me that the Junction never used to be so ‘‘bright,’’ that is, crowded and busy. Long time, perhaps sixty or seventy years ago, the Penal market was located outside, under an immense tree that no longer is standing. Very few businesses were yet established, and people rode in donkey carts the better part of a day to reach San Fernando, now about thirty minutes away by car. In the words of a neighbor who had seen the Penal market grow, ‘‘Long time, people meet at market, or, say, at a cane weighing scale, say, No. 2 Barrackpore, the estate [was] coming to pay once or twice for the week. People selling clothes, aloo [potato], or whatsoever, everybody going to sell there because after pay, everybody go buy something to carry home. They didn’t have Penal market stall to sell meat, no doctor to check it, or license. Anybody who have hog or goat could kill it there [at the weighing scale], anybody could sell. Penal market got bright after the war [World War II].’’ By the 1980s the market had for decades been relocated indoors, in an enormous, steaming shed divided up into about two hundred individual Locations and Dislocations

89

sellers’ stalls. These vendors are on the retail end of a complex marketing system, where fruit and vegetable provisions grown all over the gardens of St. Patrick are sold to wholesalers in San Fernando and, since about 1989, in Debe, as well, and retailed at Penal’s market in the Junction. Women, and sometimes men, can be seen vending produce along the side of the main road and, as a settlement draws near, on the curbs of street corners and intersections. Occasionally they are Afro-Trinidadian residents of communities inside, who grow provisions (vegetable produce), rice, and sometimes cane, or who raise animals such as pigs or chickens. Mostly, however, these vendors are Indo-Trinidadian women, set up with orange crates or collapsible tables and chairs, scales (required by law), and change box, with their goods—aloo, baigan (eggplant), tomato, bhagi (a kind of spinach), dasheen (greens), ochroe (okra), bodi (a kind of string bean), or mango and other seasonal fruits—spread out for buyer inspection. While daily there are provision vendors along the sidewalks, formal market days in Penal are Friday and Saturday. It is especially obvious at these times how significant gardening remains to the people of these areas, despite a very real decline in agricultural production in Trinidad, particularly since the 1970s. ‘‘Doubles’’ (chick peas and hot pepper sauce between two fried lentil patties) and sweets vendors abound; cars with the loudspeakers that have traditionally announced marriages or deaths make sure to pass; taxis compete to carry back home those marketers without other transportation; children, young people, and many adults lime (hang out) amid all the activity, small businesses do a brisker trade than on other days; and acquaintances meet and share news. As one enters South, another hallmark of the landscape appears. To the right of the highway, in Debe, lining the road in what were glorified parlors until the early 1990s, are the ‘‘Indian delicacy’’ shops. Literally and symbolically, they herald the presence of Indian culture. Although Indian foods are available throughout Trinidad (prepackaged as well as homemade), people come from all over the island to buy from these ‘‘authentic’’ fast food vendors who make fresh daily sahina, phoulourie, kachowrie, and doubles. Continuing down the road, the scenery in the late 1980s and much of the 1990s was predominantly residences and small businesses, including groceries, restaurant-bars, barbershops, newspaper stands, music shops, beauty parlors, bakeries, butcher stands selling chicken (always designated halal or not), clothing shops (generally carrying imports from Venezuela), and the most ubiquitous: pharmacies, auto parts and repair shops, and rum shops. As much as anything else, taxis and maxi-taxis embody Trinidad, particularly since they represent the dominance of the automobile in this part of the world. They are also evidence of the capacity for absorbing surplus labor during times of high unemployment, for allowing an alter-

90

Callaloo Nation

native to wage employment, and what is often a kin-based form of entrepreneurial activity. While taxi driving is a common source of income throughout Trinidad irrespective of ethnic group, among Indo-Trinidadians in South, it has been a particularly important means of livelihood, as formal sector employment has not been dependable. Thanks to the oil boom–derived increase in disposable income, people began to ‘‘travel’’ more, that is, to visit people and go places by way of public transportation. Virtually every household could afford at least one car or van and sons, brothers, fathers, and uncles were able to step into this occupational niche instead of, or in addition to, wage employment. People also began to travel more often abroad, to New York, Toronto, other Caribbean countries, and especially on frequent shopping trips to Caracas and Miami. This activity subsided considerably during the post-boom ‘‘recession’’ years—the latter half of the 1980s through the 1990s. In the late 1980s the economic recession peaked. Based primarily on oil revenues, the Trinidadian economy enjoyed an enormous boom period for about a decade, approximately 1973–84. Despite the extensive government resources devoted to expanding the civil service, and the extensive investment of revenue abroad by individual elites, wealth spread far, if not evenly, across the society. Even in agricultural areas the boom times were apparent: expansion of entrepreneurship of all kinds, increased disposable income, amplified employment. When oil prices fell in the mid 1980s, the grassroots and newly middle-class populations suffered the consequences of growing unemployment, increasing crime rates, and an allegedly depleted state treasury. In 1965, for example, 3,100 Trinidadians (of all ‘‘races’’) emigrated; in 1970, the number had grown to 17,400, and of that figure, 10,912 were professionals (Ali 1995:6). In 1986 the National Alliance for Reconstruction was elected into office and by 1988 had conceded to the International Monetary Fund’s call for wage reductions and currency devaluations (Sampath 1990:9). The World Resources Institute, for example, records that between 1980 and 1990 in Trinidad, 39 percent of ‘‘rural’’ people were living in absolute poverty (World Resources 1996– 97:151). Between 1980 and 1990 reported crimes more than doubled, going from 2,290 to 4,857. By 1993, 22 percent of households were below the international poverty line; a year later, the unemployment rate would be at 18 percent (Ali 1995:6). This increasing impoverishment had repercussions of varying intensity among agricultural communities. In the cane-growing regions, cane farmers had turned away from the estates during the boom years, taking up opportunities in the burgeoning construction industry. News reports in late 1988 noted a return to self-employment in cane farming, the Trinidad Island-Wide Cane Farmers Association (ticfa) estimating an increase of one thousand farmers in 1989, to make about six thousand in total (Maha-

Locations and Dislocations

91

bir 1988). The response of other regions, St. Patrick and Victoria Counties among them, was in the form of an exodus out of the country, principally to North America. In the summer of 1988, the St. Augustine Research Associates (sara) poll discovered some ‘‘alarming’’ numbers: 26 percent of Afro-Trinidadians and 34 percent of Indo-Trinidadians wanted to emigrate (Trinidad Express, ‘‘Alarming Numbers,’’ 15 July 1988b, 1,3). Calling themselves ‘‘economic refugees’’ in order to conform to the current Canadian immigration criteria (broader at the time than that of the United States), droves of Trinidadians applied for exit visas, passports, and holiday leaves. The Central Statistical Office recorded that between 1 January 1988 and 30 April 1988 there were 81,848 ‘‘holiday travellers’’ (Marajh 1988). As one Presbyterian reverend explained to a news reporter in the Christmas season of 1988, people were ‘‘ ‘escaping . . . the despair and hopelessness that is saturating the society’ ’’ (Partap 1988:1). The reporter added that the situation was compounded by a shortage of baby milk, the ‘‘daily plague of retrenchment’’ (lay-offs), the ‘‘miserable potholes on the roads,’’ and the ‘‘inability of young people with one and two academic degrees to find a job . . . There are people in the rural villages in south Trinidad who . . . flew out to Canada . . . with nothing but the clothes on their backs’’ (Partap 1988:17). That more than three out of ten Indo-Trinidadians (8 percent more than Afro-Trinidadians) told the sara pollsters they wanted to emigrate is not surprising, given the conditions of immiseration in South. In an article in the Trinidad Express, 23 May 1988 (‘‘Sudama: Oropuche Getting a Raw Deal’’), a member of Parliament for Oropouche, Trevor Sudama, was quoted as saying that County St. Patrick had the highest unemployment rate, at 24 percent, yet ‘‘government had not taken steps to encourage economic activities in the region to provide employment.’’ If one speaks out in this way, Sudama lamented, ‘‘they charge you with making public statements calculated to divide the party membership along racial and regional lines.’’ By 1988, ‘‘racial and regional lines’’ were arguably already drawn in the political culture of the nar (National Alliance for Reconstruction) government. By 1989 these lines had become cleavages, and were straightforwardly expressed in an Express (‘‘St. Patrick Residents’’) article, 3 April 1989, by the vice president of the South Trinidad Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Sandra Chin Yuen Kee. She decried that ‘‘the people of St. Patrick . . . have moved from being owners of wealth to that of poverty,’’ asserting that St. Patrick ‘‘is standing up today . . . and saying to the rest of Trinidad and Tobago we want to be counted. We want to be recognized . . . We do not want handouts. We need skills and expertise and the capital.’’ In a country with a total population of only about 1.2 million people, these tremors were causing great uncertainty, and sometimes drastic mea-

92

Callaloo Nation

sures were taken. Yet despite the real poverty for some, and major cutting back for others, there were also counter-forces: remittances sent ‘‘from away,’’ opportunities large and small for bobol (graft), opportunities to study abroad, a government on the defensive, and acute contrasts among forms of authority and social order on the village community level. Daily reminders of these contrasts came in many forms. Young religious scholars, back from universities in India, Pakistan, and Britain, raised concerns about the authenticity and contemporary direction of Hinduism and Islam. Unaccustomed, ‘‘new’’ forms of Christianity—evangelical, Pentecostal—seemed to pinpoint what some people experienced as emotional dissatisfactions and disassociation from environments that had come to feel unfamiliar. Thanks to the boom years, women were joining the wage labor force in increasing numbers. But they also were more readily perceived as ‘‘working’’ when now in pink- and sometimes white-collar jobs (banks, offices, schools) as opposed to what earlier generations of IndoTrinidadian women had done—in field, quarry, and kitchen. Vacationing emigrant Indo-Trinidadians, or second-generation Indo-Trinidadian– Canadians and Indo-Trinidadian–Americans on short visits from Toronto, New York, and Miami, were at that time obvious in crowds and on the streets of small communities. They could be ridiculed, sotto voce, by those who had stayed behind, for looking ‘‘like they bought they accent in boutique,’’ an ambivalent reference to the intangibles of a ‘‘Western’’ presentation of self—carriage, body language, conversation. These appraisals were yet other modes of debating class mobility and the consequent flux in associated symbols of cultural identity. In the early 1990s the agricultural, rural areas of St. Patrick and Victoria Counties began to undergo a great transformation, what one Trinidadian friend described as ‘‘rapid, man, drastic.’’ When I first arrived in this area in 1987, I was also told how things were so different, so much ‘‘brighter’’ than ‘‘long time.’’ But during my frequent return trips throughout the 1990s I noted that changes were occurring, not for the first time certainly (although that is how people’s portrayals sounded), but far more rapidly and extensively than the decade before. I noticed that just about everyone under age sixty was comfortable using the North American greeting hi, whereas ten years earlier my habituated hi was awkwardly foreign to people who were accustomed to more formal greetings like, hello, good night. Ten years later, by the late 1990s, one of the established local groceries carried commercial dog food; shortly thereafter one could buy ‘‘frozen American vegetables, like broccoli,’’ as another friend put it, from any grocery, and a twenty-four–hour convenience store opened near Penal’s border with Debe—something previously unimaginable. Goods like pet food, bottled water, and frozen vegetables—imported commodities, in other words—had been for many years standard staples up north in Town,

Locations and Dislocations

93

but now ‘‘Penal getting even more bright,’’ as is the common expression. The interesting contrast was that up until recently it was generally the older heads who commented with incredulity about how different things had gotten; by 1995 the younger folks, in their twenties and thirties, had entered this discourse. In June 2001, Bhavani, one of my Penal friends, emigrated to New York as a newlywed. When I visited her in Queens I asked her what she thought of all the changes happening down Penal side. She became even more animated than usual, saying that Penal now has so many ‘‘new and restructured buildings,’’ that ‘‘Debe isn’t Debe anymore, so many new businesses, everybody is traveling to America, everybody wearing the latest styles.’’ Her comments echoed almost exactly the proud claims that Trinidadians everywhere in the island made to me during my very first visit there in 1984, assuring me of Trinidadian cosmopolitanism and modernity. Yet I agreed with Bhavani that there was a palpable difference now, as the changes seemed to be faster, and more widespread across social classes, over the past ten or twelve years than had been the case previously. As I pressed her for her thoughts, Bhavani explained that in greater Penal, people ‘‘became so westernized, so modern, people traveling more, they became so updated and more aware of what is going on in the outside world. Everybody’s into modern technology, computer, cell phone, Internet, everybody now driving new foreign used car. The schools are pretty violent now. Businesses are creating money. And the unc create a lot of jobs, too.’’ I was intrigued to know what Bhavani meant by ‘‘westernized.’’ She pondered for awhile and then offered, ‘‘Westernization playing a whole big role in people’s lives . . . When you think of the Western world you think of fast cars, bright lights, cable TV, teenagers walking up and down on the street cursing. American, I’m trying to say.’’ The arrival of the television satellite dish to Trinidad in the 1990s, combined with increasing emigration abroad, particularly to North America, and the consequent influx of remittances are three factors largely responsible for the contrasts that Bhavani and I were talking about. For example, when Bhavani said that ‘‘today everybody more aware of education, without an education you can’t get anywhere, everybody want their children to go to university and get their education and then get married,’’ she is not suggesting that parents wanting their children to be educated is something new for Indo-Trinidadians. Rather, her comment points to the increased likelihood today of postprimary education for grassroots people down Penal side, whether Indo-Trinidadian or Afro-Trinidadian. The frequency of going abroad—temporarily and saving foreign currency, or permanently and sending remittances back—along with the infusion of technology (particularly television and the Internet) are to grassroots and rural people encouraging symbols of the possibility of attaining a higher edu-

94

Callaloo Nation

cation. These changes also provide new uses for formal education once they have it. Arguably, the last two decades are among the most important periods in twentieth-century Trinidad, and for Indo-Trinidadians in South, perhaps the most significant since independence. As Sylvan, another young friend in South said during my visit there in 2002, ‘‘To me, these changes is more than amazing.’’ And Bhavani recalled about émigrés: ‘‘Before, people say, ‘Oh, these people going away, they must be rich!,’ but now you say, ‘Oh, see you when you get back.’ ’’ In spite of (or because of) her interpreting the new Penal as increasingly Westernized, Bhavani hastened to assure me that in Penal they live their little country lives. [ak: What does that mean?] They break out [of their insulated existence], but even when I say break out and get this American value they still manage to hold onto their own values. Respect for people, stay somehow a bit reserved, that is their way. Respect their elders, themselves. [ak: What do you mean by respect?] They would wear a short skirt, say, but not up their behind. Decent-like, up to their knee. Like there’s a limit to everything, they know their limits. And another big thing in these peoples’ lives, they always maintain their religion! Their elders . . . from their ancestors, they always kept that tradition. They always think that it’s important to keep their tradition alive. The concurrence of cosmopolitanism with morality, dignity, and an unbroken connection with religious heritage—a modernity with limits, one might say—are motifs that have been consistent during all the years I have had discussions with Indo-Trinidadians about their history, their culture, and their class position in Trinidadian society. ‘‘Living Good with People’’ The official ship’s records of indentured passengers from India to Trinidad during the seventy-two years of this labor scheme reveal a preponderance of Hindus registered. This largely reflects that the majority of indentured servants came to Trinidad from the north of India, notably Uttar Pradesh, Oudh, and Bihar. Historically in these regions Muslims lay within a Hindu majority and sphere of influence. Furthermore, in various generations during and after indenture in Trinidad there have been Hindus who have converted to Islam as well as Muslims who, through marriage or other reasons, engaged in the practices of Hinduism, further causing some traditions to converge. Muslim and Hindu Indo-Trinidadians are acutely aware of these overlapping histories. As my informants explained to me, however, a Muslim/Hindu distinction was not necessarily meaningful in the daily life of the immigrants

Locations and Dislocations

95

and their descendants. The reason for this was not simply a reflection of the narrow, pragmatic accounting of colonial authorities. As the indentured laborers spread out from estates and formed villages nearby, a rural proletarian culture was growing, under new conditions of relative freedom. In these early years identities were forming within the context of resistance to the still fresh, and for many, ongoing ordeals of the estate. Establishing oneself in that world was based on the inseparable connection between one’s position as a particular kind of worker in Trinidad’s social hierarchy and the status that one’s cultural heritage held within it (see, for example, Haraksingh 1986). Part of this reconstitution entailed elaborating on traditions and practices inhibited under indenture; many of these were rituals that are religion-specific, such as Hindu pujas and Muslim Quranic readings (see chapters 6 and 7, respectively). Textual, cosmological, or philosophical differences between Islam and Hinduism, however, were not necessarily meaningful as ways to distinguish among neighbors and kin. This has to do with the contexts of religious observance: who are the actors involved and how do other aspects of social organization shape local religious practice? This was brought home to me by a middle-aged Hindu acquaintance of mine, Deo, a successful barrister who had long since left behind the rural poverty of his childhood for an urban professional’s life. He explained that ‘‘now there is more difference . . . My mother, a Hindu, and her neighbor, a Muslim lady, only differed in who didn’t eat beef and [in] religion. Otherwise there was no cultural differences. Dress, curry, orhni (head scarf), everything the same. Only religion was different.’’ Deo’s sentiment was not idiosyncratic; it was one I have heard repeatedly. Compare the conversation I had with my friend Subrata, an elderly Hindu man. Trying to catch a cool breeze on his gallery (veranda) one typically hot and humid afternoon, we were talking together about Hosay. Subrata mused, Most of the Muslims . . . are against Hosay, they are the more purer Muslims. The Hindus’ connection with the old Muslims from India is what keeps Hosay going down here. Jahaji means the Hindus and Muslims came together in one boat, they live like one family [see chapter 5]. It had a maulood [Indo-Trinidadian Muslim ritual] and Hindus come. It had a kuttha [pandit’s sermon during a puja] and Muslims come. Not like today. The loyalty and friendship between both isn’t here today. That is why we could benefit from them [forebears] today. They, the Hindus and the Muslims, built up this country. Throughout Trinidad [today], Hindus and Muslims haven’t that unity. Time change and people change. But before, there was not ‘‘Hindu’’ and ‘‘Muslim’’ . . . Now the segregation come like Indian and Creole [Afro-Trinidadian]. But long time, Hindus invited to noor nama [Indo-Trinidadian Muslim ritual] and maulood, but not now. 96

Callaloo Nation

In saying that ‘‘only religion was different,’’ Deo was acknowledging the contrast between the ideal and the real in religious forms of knowledge. In other words, that their religions were philosophically distinctive was not, Deo reflected, particularly relevant to their daily interaction. Subrata’s nostalgia was elegiac. It was also, however, an acknowledgment that the meaning of Muslim and Hindu has attained a mutual exclusivity that he found unfamiliar when thinking back to long time days. Changing times and fissures cleaving their population are typically not topics Trinidadians apply to their experience with Christianity. Even after more than a century of conversion, beginning in 1868, Presbyterian IndoTrinidadians maintain a close affinity with Hindu and Muslim kin. They can be embraced without censure because, for one, non-Christian religions are not seen by Presbyterians as particularly threatening to Presbyterian practice, due in part to Christian hegemony in Trinidad. As importantly, highly valued cultural roots lie in Indo-Trinidadians’ ‘‘traditional’’ heritage of Hinduism and Islam, heritages that claim almost everyone’s parent, grandparent, or great-grandparent. Hindus and Muslims today still express a profound gratitude toward the Canadian Presbyterian Mission for providing, since 1868, what would be the sole means of formal education available to thousands of Indo-Trinidadians for many decades. Conversion to Presbyterianism was for a very long time the only avenue of upward mobility, primarily through teaching and administration in Presbyterian schools. These relationships help underscore the distinction among Indo-Trinidadians between Anglicanism and Catholicism, primarily, as hegemonic Euro-colonial authority, and Presbyterianism as both avenue of class mobility and locus of ‘‘pumpkin vine’’ kin. Evangelical Protestantism, and Pentecostalism in particular, however, have a different historical relationship with Hinduism and Islam in Trinidad. Gathering momentum around the 1970s, fundamentalist, ‘‘small church’’ Christian proselytizing, especially out of North America, began to make significant inroads into the Hindu community, and, albeit to a lesser extent, into the Muslim community, as well. For example, within thirty years, from 1960 to 1990, the numbers of Pentecostals in the Republic increased by 82,371, going from 1,695 to 84,066 (Singh 1996:251, n.40). By 1980, in Trinidad as a whole, the proportion of Indo-Trinidadians who were Christian increased to almost 10 percent through the proselytization efforts of North American evangelicals (Clarke 1993:121–22). By 1990 the Central Statistical Office estimated that there were 45,326 more Pentecostals than Presbyterians—84,066 and 38,740, respectively (Singh 1996:251, n.40). While Indo-Trinidadians are not distinguished from other Pentecostals, the greatest numbers of Pentecostals are in areas predominantly Indo-Trinidadian, including the historically sugar-producing regions of Victoria and Caroni (Singh 1996:251, n.40).

Locations and Dislocations

97

Evangelical and Pentecostal proselytizing in Trinidad comes in the form of visiting preachers (and their entourages) performing at local stadiums and other public venues, and on Christian television programs beamed in from North America, particularly the United States. Among the most common criticisms levied by preachers are those about ‘‘idol worship’’—clearly, though rarely directly, admonishing Hindus (and occasionally Catholics, as well). The reaction of Christian Indo-Trinidadians (here distinct from Presbyterian) tends to be somewhat muted, but Hindus and Muslims generally react vociferously to this negative discourse. As just one example among many, Phoolo Danny, in his column in the 25 December 1988 issue of the Trinidad Sunday Express, says, ‘‘It has become common practice in recent times for preachers of various religions to poke fun at or simply criticize another’s medium of worship in the hope of acquiring attention and eventually an increased flock of followers . . . The latest such topic under duress was ‘idol worship’ which was always assumed by some preachers to be perpetuated by Hindus and Catholics and which was considered a sin.’’ Some non-Protestants harbor strong feelings of antagonism toward these new, potentially threatening ‘‘small’’ churches. In addition, some newly converted Pentecostals and evangelicals are encouraged by members of their leadership to reject as much of their former religious affiliation as possible, through a reformulation of their Indian identity away from ancestral indigenous cultural customs and beliefs. Here is an interesting instance where cultural authenticity is not coveted. In the couple of households where I had some born-again friends, when a Hindu or Muslim ritual took place, evangelical or Pentecostal family members consistently left the premises for the duration of the event. They did not do so in protest; they did it in order to reinforce the cultural as well as religious boundaries between themselves and other household members. Moreover, although they, too, tended to be endogamous, Pentecostal and evangelical Indo-Trinidadians engage in more heterogeneously mixed social relations through church activities; that is, with Afro-Trinidadians. Hence they can form a broader group identity through a religion that is not mainly associated with Eastern heritage. Kelvin Singh suggests that the increased interest Indo-Trinidadians have in these new Christian movements is largely on the part of younger people. Comparing a ‘‘traditional [Indo-Trinidadian] elite’’ who are in agricultural regions and representative at ‘‘the mass level’’ and the ‘‘modernizing Indo-Trinidadian elite’’ concentrated in the professions and urban centers, Singh offers that Pentecostalism is attractive to younger generations who no longer feel an affinity with the public image of Indo-Trinidadians promoted by traditional elites. This imagery is ‘‘alien’’ to the ‘‘increasingly urbanized Indo-Trinidadian population’’ because the selected cultural ac-

98

Callaloo Nation

tivities through which Indo-Trinidadians’ image is projected are ‘‘a pale reflection of the culture of ancient and medieval India, village India, in an environment that is overwhelmingly Western/creole’’ (Singh 1996:246). In short, the cultural elements advanced by an (implicitly) slow-to-modernize, grassroots-centered, traditional religious leadership is not in sync with upwardly mobile, urban-oriented (even if not urban-residing), modernizing, new generations. Singh is correct in recognizing that there is indeed a perception among Hindu and Muslim leaders in agricultural areas of a troubling difference between the constituency they envision and the constituency’s vision of itself. Whether or not there is definitive evidence that specifically links the Pentecostal turn among Indo-Trinidadians to disillusionment with anachronistic constructions of Indian identity, consternation over what sorts of imagery and representations Indo-Trinidadians should project about themselves is acute. Ultimately the mission becomes one of constructing Hinduism and Islam as epistemologies, or systems of knowledge that can be effective in a Western and historically unwelcoming environment. That said, individuals’ multiple religious affiliations, or nonexclusive conversions, along with ‘‘mixed’’ marriages, result in intricate family genealogies and households, such as that of Rama’s above. In fact, households and families commonly comprise various combinations of Hindu, Christian, and Muslim members. Typical as the real, if not the ideal, this diversity contradicts images of putatively uniform Muslim or Hindu communities. At the same time, various local religio-cultural associations attempt to institutionalize homogeneity and establish exclusive/inclusive boundaries. Tensions exist, moreover, among community religious leaders over flexibility of belief and practice that involve interpretations of authenticity, legitimacy, and purity. From the gallery of my apartment, I could look out over the corrugated iron and uneven green canopy of my neighborhood, to the rooftops, gardens, cane fields, and cocoa estates beyond. Perhaps the most singular sensation I recall is that of sound. Carried by warm, damp breezes, the everyday noises of living permeate the air, and even at the height of activity, perhaps on a Saturday morning of marketing, cooking, cleaning, visiting, and laboring, there is a reassuring quality to the steady drone of bustling, often punctuated by a robust voice or honking horn. Penetrating the stillness during the more peaceful moments of dawn and dusk are the calls to prayer at the nearby masjid or the conch shell blown during a puja. Dotting the landscape of South are numerous and beautiful masjids and mandirs and, more rarely, churches, all of slightly different design, along with the occasional shop that sells the necessary articles for Hindu rituals. Pervasive, too, are the banners, signs, and decorations on telephone poles, on fences, on walls, inviting the public to ritual performances:

Locations and Dislocations

99

weddings, yagyas, pujas, or Ram Lilas for Hindus (see chapter 6), mauloods or Quran sherifs for Muslims (see chapter 7). People passing by know that an event is imminent when they see piles of bamboo posts (for tents), masses of folding chairs, or the gigantic metal cooking pots needed to feed the often hundreds of participants who come to any given ritual. These familiar visual cues reveal how ubiquitous and important ritual performances are in daily life. There is always, moreover, news of ritual performances passing back and forth among community residents, especially among kin and neighbors. On market days, especially, people hear about imminent yagyas, pujas, mauloods, haqikas, the most common rituals performed. In a somewhat patronizing short story, the accomplished Trinidadian man of letters, Alfred Mendes recounts a visit he and his friends made to the Sipari Mai Festival on Maundy (Holy) Thursday. There they met an Indo-Trinidadian, ‘‘a large-boned man, his feet tucked away under his haunches in a most comfortable manner. His beard was at least four inches long.’’ ‘‘Salaam, sahib,’’ the man greeted them. They answered, ‘‘How much?,’’ referring to the packets of channa (fried chick peas) he was selling. Mendes says that they bought the snack ‘‘as a bribe for [the man’s] willingness to answer’’ their question, ‘‘you go to church tomorrow?’’—referring to the Catholic Church, La Divina Pastora, where Sipari Mai is located and revered. The man replied, ‘‘Must go, sahib.’’ They countered, ‘‘That’s not your church.’’ The man’s response: ‘‘All God one God’’ (1932:7). Still among the most common refrains in Trinidadian discourse—a discourse that has developed according to colonial and post-independence ideologies about the conflict latent in diversity—‘‘is all one God, anyhow’’ signals the equality of all religions because ultimately they are oriented in the same direction. A fundamental sameness smoothes, soothes, and renders superficial contrasts and differences. It also points to the need for cooperation and a degree of trust in one’s neighbors and kin. In an environment of many paths to God, it is an effective if rhetorical social compromise.

100

Callaloo Nation

4 THE PROBLEM OF SIMI-DIMI

A blue bottle upended on a stick protects crops from the possible maljo of passersby. Photo by author.

T

h e p ro b l e m o f simi-dimi, what we might call mumbo-jumbo, or superstition, is nicely encapsulated in a cartoon from the local Trinidadian comic strip, ‘‘Sweetbread,’’ in the Express, 12 August 1997. A woman walks across her yard to her neighbor, another woman, saying, ‘‘A-A [hey]-Neighb, yuh eh hear [haven’t you heard] Doris bad talkin’ mih [me]. She say I believe in Devil—an’ she so spiritual. Yeh . . . Dat is why she always seein’ spirit . . . If is not lagahoo [werewolf], is some jumbie [ghost].’’ In the final frame, her neighbor looks at the reader in amusing, wide-eyed puzzlement. In a clever play on words, the speaker defends herself against uncomplimentary gossip, highlighting the ambiguity of the supernatural world, where it is a matter of definition, of authoritative knowledge, as to which phenomena can legitimately be claimed as correctly ‘‘spiritual’’ and which must be recognized as ‘‘spirits’’ and relegated to the realm of the devil. Such manifestations as the lagahoo and the jumbie are a familiar part of the supernatural world but are contested characters—ethereal agents, as I call them—in religious discourses that compete for hegemony largely by asserting particular forms of knowledge. Knowledge, like everything else, is created, interpreted, and put to use within social terrains that are unevenly empowered. Sanctioned knowledge, in this case religious, typically receives social approbation. Illegitimate knowledge typically receives disapprobation, often in the form of a pejorative, superstition. Simi-dimi consists of phenomena that people perceive as both manifestly real and dubiously proper; sanctioned knowledge also entails an intellectual and emotional struggle between establishing ‘‘correct’’ and ‘‘true’’ forms. That is to say, there is competition among heterodox versions of religious belief and practice—syncretic com-

positions—which may consist of variously sanctioned ways of knowing, and the orthodox doctrine that seeks to be the preeminent body of knowledge. Religious syncretisms may involve bits of simi-dimi along with elements of other religious beliefs and practices, even while they may be collected under one label. And as we will see in chapters 6 and 7, Trinidadian Hinduism and Islam are conspicuously charged with practitioners’ concerns about syncretic mixings and orthodox purities within them. The substance of knowledge is important, but the idea of knowledge—as cultural capital to be possessed and mastered—is equally so. The phrase simi-dimi has a possible derivation from Arabic. The Dictionary of Modern Standard Arabic defines dhimmi as ‘‘a free Muslim subject living in a Muslim country’’; dhimma means ‘‘protection, care, custody, security of life and property’’ (also see Ghosh 1994).∞ The Urdu language, brought to the Caribbean by indentured Indian immigrants, consists of numerous Arabic words (in addition to Farsi and Hindi). If in the new, hegemonically Christian society these terms came to be negatively associated with obeah (magic, folk religion), then speakers might have transformed its possibly original meaning, a kind of supernatural protection in an alien and precarious environment, to a subsequent rhyme connoting spurious mumbo-jumbo. In Trinidad, as in most other places, superstition refers to beliefs and practices that fall outside the dominant ideology that determines what ‘‘correct’’ ideas and practices should be. Calling something superstitious is a gatekeeping strategy, a way of reinforcing mainstream values.≤ Yet the concept of superstition is not limited to distinguishing the rational from irrational, ‘‘true’’ religious knowledge from ‘‘false.’’ While decrying ignorance, the concept betrays fear, as well, conferring disapprobation and possible censure; the potency and the potential danger of illicit or marginalized beliefs and practices are not necessarily in doubt. This in turn reflects concern over the proper definition and interpretation of beliefs and practices that belong to ‘‘religion.’’ Power is at issue here: the authorizing power of canonical forces, and the power vested in beliefs and practices authorized by being determined ‘‘religion,’’ whether canonical or not. As ways of knowing the world, simi-dimi and its religious ‘‘correctives’’ (whether unproblematically syncretic or avowedly orthodox) do not exist in a divided domain of ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘supernatural.’’ All are located in the domain of the natural, in the sense that they are both part of the same ‘‘plausibility structure’’ (Berger 1969:45–47). Although they may involve mysterious or supernatural occurrences, and be deemed above human history, they are an integral part of everyday life. Within this shared domain, simi-dimi, on the one hand, occupies a space outside of human agency, where people assume its possibilities without comment (if selfconsciously), except when challenged by sanctioned forms of religious

The Problem of Simi-Dimi

103

knowledge. Sanctioned forms of religious knowledge, on the other hand, stand out in relief from the quotidian, clearly elaborated in terms of the vested interests that promote them. In a sense, the quotidian is equated with cultural traditions: the normative, habituated ways that people live their lives. Orthodox doctrine, however, must be retrieved from the mixed muddle of cultural traditions that are conjoined with religious tenets. While such retrieval is a more pronounced issue among Muslims, Hindus also engage in similar practices and debates. As with simi-dimi, people may have hesitations about accepting a version of orthodoxy, or accepting that their particular mode of practice is marred by syncretisms that position it as heterodox and thus antithetical to ‘‘proper’’ and ‘‘correct’’ methods. But these hesitations come with awareness that human agents may have self-serving aims, and with the idea that when it comes to simi-dimi (as illegitimate knowledge), giving it credibility is an affront not simply to humans but to God. Peter van der Veer suggests that while religious authority reflects local contentions, religion is not ‘‘simply a black box in which everything can be put according to the interests of the principal actors in a political arena. Religion is not an infinitely plastic resource for pursuing political interests’’ (1996:132). While religion is not infinitely plastic, it is precisely because religion is protean, receptive, and mercurial that it possesses parameters; in other words, it is the ideological struggle within bodies of belief not to be infinitely plastic, and practitioners’ reliance on certain cultural elements in these efforts, that gives religion its plasticity. Because religion, as an interpretive category, can be shaped according to multiple (albeit not infinite), and diverse criteria, it can become recognizable as ‘‘religion.’’ These multiple and diverse criteria derive not only from both sacred and secular domains, but also from other interpretive categories that are typically distinguished, by both practitioners and external observers alike, from that of ‘‘religion,’’ notably ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘class.’’ When grassroots or ‘‘folk’’ religious beliefs and practices among AfroTrinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians have been interpreted (by locals and outsiders alike) as constituting simi-dimi, Afro and Indo become far more comparable. When codified, tutored forms of religious beliefs and practices among Afro-Trinidadians and Indo-Trinidadians are interpreted (by locals and outsiders alike) as legitimately authoritative, Afro and Indo, as well as Hindu and Muslim, become less comparable, if not inimical identities. The issue of plasticity can be understood, in the Trinidadian context, in terms of the foundational idea of mixing. Each moment or site of struggle to establish correct (orthodox) knowledge from illegitimate (heterodox or simi-dimi) ways of knowing (Borofsky 1994) is a mixing metaphor: the articulation of various interpretations of doctrine and practice are judged to be either appropriate or unacceptable. This valuation

104

Callaloo Nation

hinges on notions of purity, correctness, and authenticity—all of which have been, or must be, purged of objectionable ways of knowing, and thus ways of being. The construction of interpretive categories like religion, then, and the allocation of certain phenomena as belonging inside or outside of them, do not reflect universally recognizable realities. What appears universal is usually a matter of hegemony—where certain ways of conceptualizing the world are taken for granted as somehow natural and based in supposedly objective fact. When knowledges compete, however, hegemony crystallizes into ideology (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991), and idealizations of purity come to rescue the comess of mixing. Taking Shape on Trinidadian Ground Writing about Trinidad in 1886, Victorian traveler Alfred Radford comments that ‘‘clericalism has kept most countries back, and probably the superstitions of Catholic Trinidad will also keep the island behind in prosperity’’ (1886:51). The Catholic presence, which came from eighteenthcentury Spanish and French settlement, was still strong in Trinidad in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. In Radford’s disapproval it is evident that gatekeeping concepts like superstition are widely applicable; in this case he surely draws an unfavorable contrast between Catholicism and the rational, spare Protestantism of his own probable persuasion. The discourse of religious condemnation, however, particularly in its charges of superstition, was far more apt to be levied at non-Christian religions; in particular, as we saw in chapter 2, African obeah and, later, the ‘‘little traditions’’ of Indian ‘‘folk religions’’ (Niehoff and Niehoff 1960:158). Eager to instruct his readers, Charles Kingsley defines obeah as ‘‘simply a system of incantation, carried on by a priesthood, or rather a sorcerer class . . . a Fetish . . . is a spirit, an Obeah, Jumby, Duppy . . . That spirit belongs to the Obeah, or Fetish-man; and he puts it, by magic ceremonies, into any object which he chooses. Thus anything may become Obeah’’ (Kingsley 1873:287). Kingsley gives examples of the obeah toolkit, such as ‘‘a bottle containing toad, spider, rusty nails, dirty water, and other terrible jumbiferous articles’’ (1873:286). Early nineteenth-century traveler R. R. Madden wrote that, ‘‘Few, very few, indeed, of the native Africans who have been instructed in their creed or their superstition, which you please, have given up their early rites and observances for those of the religion of the country they were brought to’’ (quoted in R. Richardson 1987:64). Ronald Richardson points out that obeah was among the main threats to planters’ political and cultural hegemony, and that their attempt to control belief among Afro-Caribbeans was ‘‘psychological warfare’’ (1987:65).

The Problem of Simi-Dimi

105

This suggestion is persuasive especially when compared to British colonial contempt for religions in India (see chapter 2). More likely a reflection of proselytizing zeal than fear, the Christian Literature Society engaged in a similar kind of psychological attack discrediting the Hindu religion and its leadership, also in terms of correct/pure and spurious/impure contrasts: ‘‘There are no such beings as Vishnu, Siva, or Durga. Hinduism is an invention of priestcraft to enrich Brahmans. Christianity leads us from the False to the True—from imaginary deities, stained with vice, to the one living and true God of spotless purity and boundless benevolence’’ (Christian Literature Society 1895:139). While there is no subtlety to this text, its subtext is one of non-Christian ignorance, not simply of the true God, or of formal education, but, as importantly, ignorance in the sense of the inability to discern chicanery, of mentally simple naiveté. Superstition, therefore, covers a multitude of sins. About this same period, local news media in Trinidad were following suit. In an article titled ‘‘Brahmanism and Its Phases in Trinidad,’’ 19 January 1884, the Port of Spain Gazette cautioned: There are now 50,000 [Indians] more or less who probably mean to stay and already their movements are watched with anxiety . . . The coolies have nothing in common with the rest of the population of Trinidad and instead of alienating themselves from their old traditions as many educated natives are now doing in India, in this colony where no pains have been taken to educate the imported element, there appears to be growing up with the acquirement of wealth a marked spirit of Hindu revivalism. This is more particularly to be observed amongst those not entitled to high caste rank, inasmuch as the latter having accumulated properties and funded capital by well remunerated labour or shopkeeping they have excited the cupidity of the Brahmins . . . The comfortable sleek old Brahmin who has consecrated a good number of . . . god children . . . is set up for life and the mischief created on many estates by this baptism and the creation of Saddhus, or religious anchorites, is not easy to be conceived . . . the result of turning agricultural laborers into Saddhus is that they take to Gunja [sic] smoking and skulk work . . . in many villages Painted and Seminude Brahmans [sic] have equally succeeded in their pernicious trade. They invariably thrive and their ignorant victims are not only well fleeced and bamboozled, but in too many instances, it leads them into excesses in Gunga [sic] smoking and opium eating thereby rendering them unfit for any useful occupation whatever. The image of pandits as con-artist magicians—engaging in mumbo jumbo?—is clearly stimulated by the competition for authority between colonial planters and traditional religious leadership. To be superstitious is to bear the double indignity of being fooled by both the visceral (mortal) 106

Callaloo Nation

and the ephemeral (supernatural), to not be able to tell true from false, real from artifice. The theme of duplicity, and thus of superstition, was fostered by foreign observers, as well, particularly those with vested interests. In his memoir of Trinidad, Dominican missionary Bertrand Cothonay describes ‘‘the biggest celebration of the heathen Coolies of Madras, the Timeditel, or fire walking’’ (1893:80). Cothonay laments that another missionary, Father Marie-Francois, ‘‘has been fighting against this celebration by all means within his power. In 1877, he tried to abolish it through such vigorous measures that he alienated the spirits of the poor Hindus without causing them to change their habits’’ (1893:80). Father Cothonay recounts Father Marie-Francois’s efforts, which sound similar to Richardson’s notion of psychological warfare. Spurred by the alleged disturbance the Timeditel was causing Catholic Hindus, the father ‘‘had a notice written in English, in Madras and Calcutta coolie [languages] posted in the small savanna adjacent to the Catholic Church. Embarrassingly, the bill challenged SaintJames pagans, very proud of their annual Timeditel festival’’ (1893:82). Offering a wager, the notice proclaimed that running across fire is ‘‘a big mystification, since it is impossible to burn oneself while running. But, five dollars will be donated to every coolie who will stay five minutes in a burning fire; if he cannot, he will lose five dollars, etc.’’ (1893:82). Cothonay goes on to give more details of how the father set up the site of the challenge, telling us eventually that the two men who took the bet ran away, shamed, after they realized that, according to the way the father had arranged the conditions of the fire (complete with kerosene), they would be horribly injured. The latter is, for our purposes, the point here. As Cothonay explains, that was all the priest wanted: ‘‘take away from the coolies the false impression that the pagans acquired from their idols the power to go through fire. He proved to them that if the runners did not burn themselves while running through the fire, that was not due to a miracle, but simply due to a law of nature . . . All the Catholic coolies who witnessed the event, after having laughed about the cowardly act and the misfortune of their idolatrous brothers, went into the Church to pray God for their conversion’’ (1893:84).≥ Such efforts as these probably were more effective as reassurances to the already converted than as persuasions to convert. As Cothonay confesses, ‘‘despite all . . . instead of converting rowdy characters, he [Marie-François] frustrated them, and once more, in the end, they threatened to have him killed’’ (1893:84). Although Father Marie-Francois was ultimately unsuccessful in his exertions to stamp out the ‘‘big mystification,’’ he was successful in demonstrating, at least to some, that to believe in pagan rites was to succumb to superstition. Blindness to ‘‘a law of nature’’ leaves one vulnerable to other forms of intellectual and spiritual darkness. While observers like Charles Kingsley equated African obeah and the The Problem of Simi-Dimi

107

work of ‘‘the priest of Southern India’’ with ‘‘idolatry’’ (1873:288), more contemporary attempts to explain Indo-Trinidadian religions by comparison with those of Afro-Trinidadians did not last long (although promising calls to revisit this line of inquiry have begun to appear [e.g., Reddock 1998]). In scholarly and other accounts Indo-Trinidadians would, by the second quarter of the twentieth century, become a precisely distinguished racial-cultural population. There are, however, some notable exceptions, such as the work of Arthur and Juanita Niehoff. In their early work among Trinidad’s ‘‘Oropuche Indians,’’ that is, Indo-Trinidadians in South, the Niehoffs noted that due to the early ‘‘religious incorporation’’ of Indians in Trinidad, they are rarely certain from which religion spirits or deities derive (1960:158). The Niehoffs viewed Hinduism in particular as ‘‘diffuse,’’ ‘‘difficult to define and difficult to circumscribe,’’ and thus promoting syncretism (1960:159). Consequently, Indo-Trinidadians have ‘‘supernatural beliefs which are a part of no recognized religion on the island, but which are nonetheless very important to the daily lives of the people, regardless of their professed faith. . . . This is the folk religion of the people which can be divided into two parts: the world of jumbies or spirits, and the practice of obeah or sorcery’’ (1960:158). In fact, the Oropuche Indian area was surrounded by a world of spirits especially active at night, notably the lagahu (werewolf) and sukoiyãã (vampire) (1960:159). The Niehoffs drew the ‘‘most important conclusion that can be drawn’’ from Oropouche Lagoon and the ‘‘other rural Indian communities’’ similar to Oropouche: with regard to ‘‘spirit beliefs’’—that IndoTrinidadians ‘‘borrowed heavily from their Negro neighbors. Almost all the traditional spirits derived from Negro culture’’ (1960:168, 182). Mixing begins on the subcontinent with ambiguous distinctions between Muslim and Hindu practice, and continues in the New World with ambiguous distinctions between ‘‘coolie’’ and ‘‘creole’’ grassroots traditions. These sorts of mixing took on new significance from the mid-twentieth century on, as they undergirded the dilemma of distinguishing between true and false, enlightened and mystified, religion and simi-dimi. But the issue of what exactly can be deemed proper religion, and thus knowledge and practice, long precedes the contemporary era. In an article titled, ‘‘The Coolie Hosein’’ (Hosay Festival), 1 March 1884, the Port of Spain Gazette had this concern: In connection with the abominations of the Carnival, we think, it behoves [sic] the Government to reflect seriously on the increasing proportions which the Coolie Hosein is yearly acquiring, and to take timely measures to check, with a firm hand, the abuses which have gradually crept into what was, formerly, a simple religious rite. We are bound not to interfere with the religion of the Indian immigrants introduced here by the Government. This forms part of our contract 108

Callaloo Nation

with them. In examining the question of the Coolie Hosein, therefore, it is our duty carefully to ascertain where the purely religious rite ends, and were [sic] abuses begin. There can be no difficulty in fixing the limits within which the coolies should be kept. It is utterly absurd to pretend that the monster processions which, on a given day, inundate our principal towns with thousands of fanatical and drunken coolies, can form any necessary part of their religious ceremonies. The prohibition by ‘‘contract’’ against intrusion into the immigrant laborers’ religions made it imperative to distinguish between the protected domain of ‘‘purely religious rite’’ and ‘‘abuses’’ of practice that both defamed real religion (even if it is non-Christian) and fostered unruly masses in the liberties they took with their freedom. Fanaticism in this context assumed the connotation of inappropriate, wrong-headed religion, much like the comment, quoted in chapter 2, made by an Oxford University Sanskrit professor in the mid-nineteenth century about the ‘‘preposterous extremes’’ of Indian religions (quoted in Bolt 1971). Part of what makes for correct religious knowledge and practice is guarding against those preposterous extremes and abuses, whether they are viewed as heretical, fanatical, or ignorantly backward. The Right Path to the Right Knowledge While conducting research in northeastern Trinidad villages in 1939, Melville and Frances Herskovits collected data on the supernatural world and its ethereal agents. Covering maljo (the evil eye), soucouyants, and lagahoos, they next turn to ‘‘obia.’’ They quote an informant who explains that people do not discuss obeah much, as the ‘‘law is against it.’’ Still, the Herskovitses learned that obeah ‘‘performs good and evil’’ and ‘‘cures as well as harms’’ ([1947] 1976:225). Managing to locate an ‘‘obiaman’’ (‘‘one of the most prosperous of the region’’) who was willing to be something of an informant, the Herskovits note that the first few times he spoke with them, he ‘‘pointedly denied that his form of healing had anything to do with obia’’ (227). Claiming that ‘‘Satan is the source of obia,’’ this obeahman explained that genuine curative power came from the four elements, earth, water, fire, and air, and that people sought him out when medical doctors have failed them (227). In his conversation about healing, however, he added that cures must be ‘‘performed with the right knowledge,’’ that ‘‘it is important to talk about ‘natural science,’ ’’ since simply speaking in terms of ‘‘supernatural aids’’ would generate ‘‘trouble with the law’’ (227). An obvious element of this healer’s narrative is avoiding possible confrontation by the authorities; yet the idiom he chooses is not simply the sanction of science. It is combined with the idea that knowledge (‘‘the right knowledge’’) comes in many forms, some being more appropriate The Problem of Simi-Dimi

109

than others for a given circumstance. It is, therefore, not simply a matter of knowing or not knowing; it is a matter of knowing how to know. Religious rituals among Muslims and Hindus in Trinidad are what we might call tutorials: key ways to both know and to learn how to know (i.e., correctly). Lacking knowledge, or possessing the wrong kinds, alleges a number of potential inadequacies: alienation from one’s culture, underdeveloped piety, and subordinate class position. Regarding the latter, Diane Austin-Broos observes that in Jamaica, as religion became an inherent part of Jamaica’s color class stratification, religious practice among the black lower classes ‘‘was typified by middle-class observers as both superstitious and immoral . . .’’ (1997:8). The label of superstition was associated with healing, and immorality with the exuberance of religious practice as well as the absence of a formal marriage rite (Austin-Broos 1997:8). Among Muslim and Hindu Indo-Trinidadians, the class issue is somewhat more knotty than a working-class/middle-class opposition. Grassroots Indo-Trinidadians are simultaneously prime examples of the struggling rural proletarian origins of Indians in the Caribbean and repositories of authentic knowledge and thus wisdom. Irrespective of how they are linked, ways of knowing and class position are inextricably bound together. Examples come from diverse sources, ethnographic and literary. A good illustration of the latter is in Edgar Mittelholzer’s novel, A Morning at the Office. We are told that Josephine, one of the characters in the story, has had a quarrel with her mother because she refused her mother’s advice to sprinkle rice in, and draw chalk marks around, her home, ‘‘to safeguard her house against the soucougnant [sic] . . .’’ ([1950] 1979:229). Josephine’s rationale, Mittelholzer tells us, is that ‘‘apart from being well educated, [she] was rising in society (she had married a Spanish creole of wealth and real, not sham, gentility), and could not afford to jeopardize her chances of admission into the Country Club’’ (229). We are not told whether Josephine is ambivalent about the existence of soucouyants and other such ethereal agents, but it is clear that whatever she may feel, there is only one correct way of selfpresentation in middle-class society. Other distinctions are also evident, perhaps more so in ethnographic encounters than in literary ones. One such distinction is generational. During a casual conversation I had in 1999 with some close friends in Trinidad, the subject of the supernatural came up. Sheri mentioned that she ‘‘saw on the news it have a survey of people in Trinidad does believe in soucouyant and thing. I think it say that the young people doesn’t believe but the older ones does believe so.’’ Kamla responded, ‘‘I believe. Yes, I does believe, it could happen.’’ Sheri said, ‘‘I don’t believe in them things.’’ Shakuntala weighed in: ‘‘Once it have prayers, well, then it possible. It have good prayers and [pauses] . . . prayers on the other side, then.’’ Kamla

110

Callaloo Nation

had the last word: ‘‘Yes, all of this could be, because you have magic, and magician self. And all of that is dealing with magic.’’ While Sheri stated outright that there is a difference between the perspectives of young and old, and the two present who were least torn, Kamla and Shakuntala, are in fact, significantly older than the others present, their statements also contain an effort to rationally interpret and explain the ineffable. Simply believing in something, or blind faith, bespeaks of being superstitious (and therefore backward and ignorant), but belief tempered by knowledge suggests an ability to understand the world clearly. Fluid ways of knowing are reconciled with orthodox knowledge by couching one’s discourse in terms of authorized idioms like the Western, Manichean dualism of good and evil, and the possibilities for mysterious events (magic) that are opened up when dealing with the supernatural domain. Intrigued by the conversation I had with my friends above, I asked another friend, Diane, directly about these phenomena. I was interested to learn what her perspective might be, as an upper-middle-class, urbanized, educated, Indo-Trinidadian woman. She told me, I know there is jumbie but I don’t believe in them. I saw one owl on a lamppost on the highway from Princes Town to Moruga [owls represent one form of ghosts]. You associate jumbie with witches, the devil. I believe there are two existing forces in the world, an evil force and a good force, a positive and a negative that everything goes by in the universe. It’s never in equilibrium, the evil force always tries to weaken the good force. If I believe it can, then it will. So, yes, witches, jumbies exist, but they can’t affect me. This makes me strong, this belief in goodness. Diane is expressing a common Trinidadian mode of thinking, that to believe in something means to approve of it. Awareness of something (‘‘I know there is . . .’’) is not synonymous with embracing it. Even though the owl sighting evidently was disturbing, Diane’s interpretation accords with her ideas about Christianity (good/evil, the devil) and natural science (the universe in disequilibrium). Altogether, she is made ‘‘strong’’ by her rejection of malevolent forces both by means of her belief in ‘‘goodness’’ and the way she knows what she sees. At other times the performance of rituals themselves pushes ambivalent feelings to the surface. One example of this occurred after I had attended a friend’s mother’s funeral cremation. After the ceremony, the other visitors and I returned to my friend’s house and carried out a series of ritual actions to purify ourselves before passing across the (symbolic) boundary that marked the beginning of the open area living space under the house, and the end of ‘‘outside.’’ Before entering, we rinsed our hands with water poured from a lotah (brass vessel) by one of the women who

The Problem of Simi-Dimi

111

had remained behind to cook the meal, touched once a cutlass (machete) that was stuck into the ground in front of the house, passed our palms over a small fire burning on the ground in front of the doorway, and drank a sip of sugar water from a juthaa cup, that is, one shared among everyone that thereby symbolically commingled our saliva, an otherwise polluting bodily substance (see Khan 1994). Only after completion of all these in proper sequence could we pass into the area of the house and move about freely. As the eldest grandson of the deceased (then about twenty-two years old) took his turn at the rites, he sang out rather self-consciously, ‘‘I ain’t superstitious,’’ to the tune of American songwriter Stevie Wonder’s song, ‘‘Superstition,’’ to the great amusement of the children present. Doubtlessly known to this young man is the song’s refrain: ‘‘When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.’’ Significant tension inheres in the proximity of the sacred and the suspect within the supernatural world. Deciding what is sacred or, indeed, if degrees of sacrality within the religious universe are possible, contributes significantly to determining what is appropriately religious and what is merely and regrettably superstition, and thus what will prevail as the terms of religious discourse are debated. Although they are both part of the world of supernatural phenomena, the relationship between spirits (suspect) and spiritual (sacred) is ongoing, and fraught. Most people with whom I interact in the field express some ambivalence about the variety of explanations possible for perplexing phenomena. These lie between (1) authorized (acceptable or safe) solutions located either in the natural world of science and modernity or in the supernatural world’s sacrality, and (2) marginalized or unauthorized (furtive or dangerous) solutions, belonging to other dimensions of the supernatural world. The former is what people know they ought to believe and the latter is what they often discount with difficulty. The concept of superstition is not limited to distinguishing the rational from the irrational, ‘‘true’’ religious knowledge from ‘‘false.’’ While decrying ignorance the concept also betrays fear. Superstition mediates legitimate and illegitimate, but the potency, the potential danger of illicit or marginalized beliefs and practices are not necessarily in doubt. This in turn reflects concern over the proper definition and interpretation of beliefs and practices as religion. In play here is not merely the authorizing power of canonical forces, but the power legitimated by beliefs and practices that are authorized simply by virtue of their being determined ‘‘religion.’’ Being characterized as superstition also confers disapprobation and possible censure. The degree of censure, however, varies. A person may face disapproving clergy, whose influence over village communities has been profound, or the relatively minor discomfort of personal embarrassment. 112

Callaloo Nation

One afternoon, on my usual rounds of visiting my neighbors and other people in the outlying communities, I stopped by the home of Leela, one of my older head friends. Leela was not formally educated, and, like most people of her generation in this part of Trinidad, had spent a lifetime laboring in the fields and, with her husband (long since deceased), raising several children. Also visiting that day was one of her daughters-in-law, Frannie, a young woman whose work was ‘‘staying home minding children’’ in this patrilocal household. As we sat talking in the hammocks strung between pillars (found in most Indo-Trinidadian open-air first floors), Leela pointed to a mark she had on her thigh. She asked us what we thought it was. Frannie identified it as a bruise, but Leela countered that it must be from a soucouyant; ‘‘soucouyant suck me,’’ she affirmed. Frannie shifted uncomfortably, glancing at me to see my reaction. She worried what I, a formally educated, respectable and presumed (by her) an arbiter of truth and fiction, would conclude about Leela’s lack of sophistication and modernity, and what I would, therefore, conclude about all of them. Her unease threw into relief intellectual struggles concerning ways of knowing. Determined to eschew certain beliefs and practices she felt to be anachronisms that exposed ignorance, Frannie sought both my approval and her own self-affirmation in dismissing her mother-in-law’s ‘‘old time ways.’’ Soucouyants are ethereal agents whose personae belong to the supernatural world, yet are manifested in ‘‘natural’’ ways, so invoking them usually connotes superstitiousness. This connection, paradoxically, ousts them from the domain of ‘‘religion,’’ and thus denies their existence, yet affirms their existence by recognizing their potential danger or harm. Rejection and affirmation of a particular interpretation or belief are often simultaneous in an individual’s assessment, one perspective not necessarily ever entirely being replaced by its opposite. The superstitiousness of this ‘‘spirit’’ and its designation as lying outside the category ‘‘religion’’—while remaining something to be reckoned with—speaks to the material and ideological transformations that different generations, and hence social classes, of Indo-Trinidadians have experienced. Undeterred, Leela proceeded to talk about scattering salt around a house’s entrances to keep soucouyants out; she also mentioned sleeping with both a Quran and a pouch with (undisclosed) protective items under her pillow.∂ She said she knew this was not right, not a ‘‘proper combination,’’ but, unresolved about making a choice, she continued this method, as she continued to find no contradiction in her acceptance of the existence of ethereal agents like soucouyants, who inhere in the literal and figurative atmosphere. Leela was born in the sugar estate barracks and had lived as a rural proletarian all her life. As a formally educated, somewhat more prosperous person growing up in a world two generations removed, Frannie’s The Problem of Simi-Dimi

113

obvious unease about Leela’s matter-of-fact acceptance of something suspect was telling. There have been massive changes in material conditions between the early 1900s, the time of Leela’s birth, and the 1960s when Frannie was born. Moreover, the protracted influence of Christianity, along with the leverage of variously emphasized tenets espoused by local village pandits and imams, has over time encouraged employing the category ‘‘religion’’ to interpret supernatural phenomena in increasingly exclusive ways. To call one belief or practice religion and another superstition is not only to guard the valid from the invalid, but to comment on a historical progression from ‘‘traditional’’ to ‘‘modern,’’ from backward to enlightened. Religion is not a bracketed set of phenomena that, as it were, travel. Rather, what someone considers ‘‘religion’’ is contingent on the experience of a community that consciously deems it such. Dichotomies classify phenomena, but their distinctions are not necessarily definite or consistent. Multiple interpretations can hinder neat classifications of phenomena as belonging to the mundane or profane, the sacred, or the suspect. The existence of alternative explanations encourage thought about how to classify and decipher potentially mysterious phenomena, especially when ambivalence in belief in the supernatural can leave people torn between a desire to interpret something as supernatural and feeling that it is somehow shameful to do so. When my friend Nyla’s eldest brother died, the family held a strictly observant Hindu cremation. After the cremation, I sat with Nyla at her home (along with several other people), partly to comfort her and partly to show respect for the deceased. Nyla recounted a story to me that might have been inspired by the general atmosphere of the evening, contemplative and charged with particular awareness of the passage from this- to other-world. Late one evening before her brother’s death, she was driving home from the weekly lecture given to surrounding communities by a visiting educator from India. Along the highway she saw, ‘‘an old Negro [Afro-Trinidadian] lady walking through the cane.’’ When she later told this to some of her friends, they suggested she had seen ‘‘some sort of evil spirit or jumbie.’’ Nyla was clearly divided as to which explanation she believed to be true. The more I pressed her to clarify her feelings, the more she seemed eager to interpret the vision in natural, this-worldly terms, as an actual person wandering about—‘‘maybe somebody[’s] senile grandmother.’’ As her experience became more stark through verbalizing it, Nyla became selfconscious and reluctant to seem ‘‘backward’’ and ‘‘superstitious.’’ The irresolution as to how to think something properly is an ever-present issue. Unlike possible ethereal agent sightings, which may have no consequences, the forces of obeah always garner results. One must go to a ‘‘seer man’’ or religious specialist (often reported to be a pandit, rarely an imam,

114

Callaloo Nation

and never, to my knowledge, a priest or minister) who has access to esoteric knowledge and who can control the malevolent forces, conjuring or nullifying. These forces, which seem ubiquitous in their being constantly experienced and discussed among my friends and informants, particularly the grass roots and older heads, are an ever-present challenge to ‘‘living good with people.’’ They are also a continual challenge to authorized religious belief and practice, and, as such, push the boundaries of ‘‘religion’’ as an interpretive category. The gravity of not ‘‘living good with people’’ sometimes leads to interpretations of causes that commingle the scriptural and what some might call superstition. This can result in gray areas that people must navigate, as they attempt to ascertain how to think about things properly, how to meet the (shifting) criteria of ‘‘religion.’’ For example, djinns, spirits that can assume animal or human form and exercise supernatural influence over people, are discussed in the Quran and are a legitimate part of Islamic theology. They can, as well, be associated with a larger matrix of supernatural forces. Sajida, a devout IndoTrinidadian Muslim, said, Me personally, I believe in it. There are good and bad djinns. What I know is hearsay, I never get involved in this djinn affairs, thank God. But some people might tend to want to lead a good life, doing the right thing and being religious . . . through this they’re prospering. Other people might be jealous of that person, so they get into this act of putting a djinn on you . . . They would put this djinn to destroy what you have, to make you crazy . . . I believe, and Hindus believe in this thing [too]. All religions believe in this, but they’ll call them different names, like obeah. But what is obeah, really? A serious but less frightening consequence of obeah, not to my knowledge associated with the work of djinns, is marital infidelity and the stress and conflicts that accompany it. For example, twenty-five years after the fact, an acquaintance recalled vividly ‘‘a family’’ [relative] who went ‘‘in 1964’’ to a seer man to ascertain the cause of troubles with next-door neighbors. The seer man revealed that the comess (conflict, trouble, confusion) this man was experiencing was linked to cuckoldry (perhaps his own; this part of the story was left vague), explaining that the neighbors ‘‘had worked obeah’’ on him and his family, ‘‘put[ting] graveyard dirt and many other things in a buried heap’’ under the outside stairs. I asked why no obeah was, in turn, worked on those neighbors and was informed solemnly, ‘‘That is evil, God would punish.’’ In another case of infidelity I was told about, a wife took a photograph of her husband to a pandit, who pronounced that the ‘‘other woman use obeah, or something.’’ The pandit added that he could not undo it, as he ‘‘had not the powers.’’ What he meant was not that he was ineffectual or insufficiently knowledgeable,

The Problem of Simi-Dimi

115

but that he did not involve himself with those particular kinds of (suspect) forces. The friend telling me this story assured me that she does not ‘‘believe in it [obeah], but people say it happen.’’ Her comment illustrates the different levels of meaning that obeah carries, at least for many persons concerned with being pious. To practice obeah is to engage, more or less, in evil. To believe in it seems a logical assessment of empirical reality. Obeah has the power of efficacy (it causes intended things to happen); it can be offset by the stronger (sacred) power of God/s; few admit to ‘‘working it’’ but most ‘‘know’’ that it has been done. A final example bears presentation in its entirety, as it is a particularly interesting instance of articulated discourses: ways of knowing the supernatural world and their bearing (or lack thereof) on religious identity. Mr. Sammy is an engineer, trained abroad, but a son of South who returned home with his certification. After having been married a few years to a beautiful but little-educated, grassroots woman, troubles began, and he initiated the proceedings for what he characterized as a ‘‘terrible divorce.’’ He knew his wife was ‘‘working obeah on’’ him, partly because her sister ‘‘is known for’’ dabbling in these powers, especially in the ones that cause difficulty in motor coordination. The wife’s family are ‘‘barracks people,’’ he explained, living in extreme poverty in a neighborhood of old barracks buildings on what originally had been a sugar estate. He also knew she was ‘‘working obeah on’’ him because he tapped his wife’s phone and heard her making plans with an obeahman, who was giving her directions on what to do without being discovered. These plans included leaving talismans, ‘‘like tabeej’’ (amulet) hidden in all corners of the house, and putting things in his food. One evening, before the divorce, during dinner, he noticed that his amchar (mango condiment) was light brown and his wife’s was ‘‘a nice, dark color’’; he also noticed that when he ‘‘drained’’ (drank up) his cup of tea, it had a strange residue in it that his wife’s cup did not have. When confronted, she asserted that she did not see what he was questioning her about. Finally, while at work one afternoon in his office, he felt his limbs stiffening, in a way that seemed to suggest his former sister-in-law’s methods. He thinks now that he even married in the first place due to obeah. But, he assured me, he has since withstood all the attempts to bring him under his wife’s and her family’s spell. His story continued in another conversation with me a couple of years later: These are things I observed myself. [Former wife] has been burying things around the house [outside]. I didn’t dig them up [discover anything], but the ground looked different, dug up, fresh. Also, I had been finding things hidden where people wouldn’t think to look, like in niches inside the cupboards and drawers, bottles filled with sweetsmelling stuff like honey and sugar water, with pieces of paper with 116

Callaloo Nation

my name and other names. One piece of paper was [folded] in a rectangle with my name written on the edge and with a Hebrew word in the middle. I have been looking at what people claim are the lost books of Moses, numbers six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.∑ I have copies of two [of these] books and they have a lot of Latin and Hebrew, charms and spells to achieve ends. These things that are used in obeah and vodou. There’s an old man and before he died he gave me the books . . . He told me these books were advertised in a [local] newspaper way in the past. He said he had to order them from abroad. You know that Trinidadians respect quite a lot of any foreign works, especially German and English. Those people know more than others. There was another piece of paper with a hole cut out in the middle, with a lot of names on it and my name and my ex-wife’s name. There was also a lot of red lavender in my underclothes and socks. I don’t know what it [red lavender] does but I know it’s used a lot in obeah. Also there’s something called ‘‘compelling powder’’ that was used on my smallest baby in place of the baby powder . . . It wiped off on me. There is quite a lot of supernatural out there. The data is too much and too strong. Definite signs, not somebody imagine it. It’s not easy to discount. I’ll tell you one story. A family member was accustomed to throwing his walking stick at any cat or dog. After he died we heard the stick falling, the noise about twelve in the afternoon, but the yard was clear. You couldn’t deny it. But I use yoga exercises to control my mind . . . If somebody is depending on obeah, there’s always something that can nullify it. And I was using my science to bug the phone. I could plan for them with technology. Obeah can’t win against science. I consider myself a scientist. I never believe before. I never pay much heed to supernatural experiences. But now that I have experienced them for myself, I now realize that science doesn’t have all the answers. In his account, Mr. Sammy makes two things abundantly clear. As someone educated in the Western sciences, he employs technology and other innovations of science to protect himself from the power of obeah. Even though technology ‘‘wins,’’ the ubiquity of obeah ensures that its power cannot be denied or explained away by the protective methods at Mr. Sammy’s disposal. He has thus found a way to accept the ineffable without sacrificing his commitment to the rational and the scientific, which are the very hallmarks of his class as well as his profession. Not antithetical to science, even if contrary to simi-dimi, religion in Trinidad suffuses state, civil, and daily life. Irrespective of ethnicity, gender, region, or class, religious affiliation among Trinidadians is always assumed. Emotional or philosophical commitment to God/s is a requisite for a worthy character and a successful life. Within this broad, commonThe Problem of Simi-Dimi

117

sensical understanding, however, lie various paths toward (as well as degrees of) realizing worthiness and success. Although most people assume implicitly that their own religious affiliation is the best choice, there also exists a public discourse of equality. Here the adage, ‘‘is all one God, anyhow,’’ becomes a rhetorical device that conveys tolerance and harmony—two important symbols of national definition in this selfconsciously multicultural society. Trinidadians, moreover, recognize that religious belief and practice occur in broad historical and cultural contexts, and through the negotiation of social relationships; hence, both worship and devotion are perceived as being subject to human frailty as well as to good will. Some expressions of worship and devotion are understood to be attributable to particular vested interests and linked to larger agendas, and are therefore contested. A legacy from seventeenth-century Europe, if not from other places and times, as well, the concept of superstition rests in part on the idea that ‘‘it is possible to give oneself over to superstition without meaning to and without knowing it’’ (Belmont 1982:13). In an important sense, then, resisting superstitious thinking can symbolize empowerment for those who, like Indo-Trinidadians, are concerned with historical vulnerabilities of being ‘‘fooled’’ into indenture contracts, of being cunumunu—a simpleton (often a cuckold)—of having a ‘‘jheel mentality,’’ or a worldview constrained by the limits of the jheel, or ‘‘lagoon’’—where rice and vegetables have been cultivated by Indo-Trinidadians for more than one and a half centuries. As Edgar Mittelholzer remarks, ‘‘English people and Americans always thought West Indians superstitious’’ ([1950] 1979:229), and, as we saw above, grassroots Indo-Trinidadians and Afro-Trinidadians have been treated synonymously with respect to their ‘‘folk’’ or ‘‘little traditions’’ (especially in the early years of Indian immigration to the Caribbean). Such assumptions about who gets fooled into indenture and confined by manual labor and illiteracy have lent a ‘‘racial’’ valence to the notion of superstition, but one modified by class. That is, superstitious beliefs evoke populations who possess the cultural inheritance of ‘‘little’’ or ‘‘folk’’ traditions that define their essence as a people—in this case, as plantation ‘‘coolies.’’ Any Trinidadian, Afro or Indo, who is urban, middle-class, educated, or some combination thereof will likely learn to know, and to express it correctly. As a tenacious crucible of ‘‘little traditions’’, however, grassroots South is a racially marked territory, where superstitiousness has a decidedly non-Christian (and by implication non-African) flavor. Articulating Discourses As that which can lead one away from what is correct, simi-dimi not only begs the question of what religion is, but also points to the array of issues

118

Callaloo Nation

and perceptions that go into determining what religion is good for. Power is always an integral dimension of religion, through (1) the distinction made, at least in Western traditions, between the material and the mystical, the kind of relationship natural and supernatural forces are perceived to have with each other; (2) the debates about which interpretation of a given religion is correct, legitimate, or superior; and (3) disputation about what kinds of forces (natural, supernatural) can be determined ‘‘religious’’ at all, which in turn has implications for the way we understand social and cultural phenomena. For imagining a priori that certain forces, events, and beliefs are firmly rooted in the category religion actually reflects assumptions about the character of religious phenomena as these are constructed out of power relations. At work is an ‘‘authorizing process by which ‘religion’ is created’’ (Asad 1993:36). Rather than remaining an essentialized and reified analytical category, religion is better approached as, most basically, certain socially compelling combinations of worldviews, beliefs, moral values, and consciousness that work together according to particular cultural histories, social contexts, and vested interests. The impetus and vigor of these compelling combinations are therefore distributed differently. Recognizing the fundamental mixedness of religion, and the discourses that assert and contest this, requires understanding the ways religious phenomena are defined and interpreted, as well as their relationships with other domains of experience. Practitioners attempt to establish as well as resist compelling authorizations of knowledge and practice, out of a mixed bag of hierarchically ordered traditions, recollections, and reinventions. The resulting forms could be characterized as ‘‘syncretic’’ religions, since all religions are syncretic. The conventional understanding of Islam and Hinduism as ‘‘world religions,’’ however, by practitioners and observers alike, presents major challenges for local practitioners. One is establishing purity out of cultural traditions whose very authenticity (i.e., rooted in pre-diaspora homelands) may contradict ever-emerging authorized religious tenets. Another challenge is maintaining uniformity of religion (another kind of purity) in a national milieu celebrated for its callaloo character. More than forty years ago, Arthur and Juanita Niehoff characterized ‘‘Indian culture’’ in Trinidad as comprised of two ‘‘realms,’’ a ‘‘religious sphere’’ and ‘‘social organization’’ (1960:188). While they saw the latter as ‘‘unreceptive’’ and ‘‘highly structured,’’ the religious sphere, by contrast, is ‘‘always receptive to innovations,’’ borrowing ‘‘very heavily’’ (188). Monitoring diffusion, managing borrowing, and imposing (or reimposing) structure become the central charges of pandits and imams as they create, by means of rituals, orthodox order out of either heterodox or simi-dimi disorder. Comparing ‘‘contemporary religious syncretism’’ with ‘‘hybridity,’’ Pnina Werbner observes that these processes are ‘‘collec-

The Problem of Simi-Dimi

119

tive condition[s] perceived by actors themselves to be potentially threatening to their sense of moral integrity, and hence subject to argument, reflection and contestation: a highly politicised form’’ (1997:12). Treating religious syncretism as a dimension of the mixing of certain articulated discourses, we are primed to consider how Hindus and Muslims create themselves and their moral integrity out of both contestation and cooperation. The sites at which these processes occur with great acuity and frequency are religious rituals, ‘‘a prayers’’ or ‘‘functions,’’ as these performances are locally known. Before ‘‘functions’’ can be examined, the historical moment and cultural climate in which they have developed need to be considered. If we approach diaspora as a multilayered discourse rather than as an abstract rubric, we can identify three discursive dimensions: narratives of rupture and betrayal that memorialize certain historical and apocryphal moments in the indenture experience; narratives that emerged from print media, notably Indo-Trinidadian newspaper publishing; and narratives of older head and younger Indo-Trinidadian pandits and imams. These religious leaders are beacons of ritual and, as such, definers of ‘‘religion’’ and (often clashing) guardians of identity in a world that is, if not simi-dimi, then rife with heterodoxy, and therefore orthodoxically challenged.

120

Callaloo Nation

5 CARVING KNOWLEDGE FROM WAYS OF KNOWING

A jharray cure for mild distress, using peacock feather and religious recitation. Photo by author.

I

n t r i n i da d , a rich array of referents, images, experiences, and stories form the cultural matrix of religious and sacrilegious phenomena. These generate a common base from which people comment on and explain enigmatic occurrences. Shared experiences and stories are exchanged through everyday social proximity and are buttressed by the pervasive ideology of a callaloo nation that calls for harmony; they are also interpreted by the practitioners of most religions as fertile ground for syncretic mixings of all sorts. This potential for syncretism poses a challenge to creating discourses whose objective is to make religion and religious affiliation uniform and homogeneous. The difficulty lies in having to counter conditions that allegedly encourage a random, multiple, and more or less idiosyncratic fusing of diverse beliefs and practices. The effort to reverse or forestall the forces of syncretism is more onerous, local thinking goes, than in other, putatively less mixed societies, those that engender internally coherent and distinct-but-equitable arrangements of diversity into clear and bounded entities. Simi-dimi amounts to what we might call undisciplined ways of knowing, in the sense that simidimi does not have fixed or necessary forms of expression, nor must its component ideas work together in a predictable manner. Involving contested notions of ‘‘spiritual’’ (sacred) and ‘‘spirits’’ (suspect) in supernatural events and phenomena, and contested notions of authorized (acceptable or safe) and marginalized (furtive or dangerous) explanations of religious events and phenomena, as well as various combinations of these, simi-dimi is not only fluid, it is potentially subversive. As ways of knowing, simi-dimi challenges authorized forms of knowledge. This chapter explores the significance of mixing metaphors through another form of knowledge, what I call the discourse of diaspora. Rather than

thinking about ‘‘diaspora’’ as an abstraction (e.g., Brah 1996; Clifford 1994), my attention is turned toward diaspora discourse from within, so to speak; that is, toward unpacking the dimensions of its meaning according to Indo-Trinidadians’ experience. From this angle, ‘‘diaspora’’ is a multilayered mixing metaphor expressed primarily in patterned narratives, speaking in both oblique and obvious ways to religious and racial identities. Made up of varied, and closely entwined, elaborations on the historical moment of the British postemancipation labor scheme in the Caribbean, diaspora discourse allows us to see how the distinction between abstract idea and concrete circumstance is neither irreconcilable nor universal. One element of Indo-Trinidadians’ (Indo-Caribbeans’) diaspora is the romanticization of their history contained in the phrase, kala pani (in Hindi or Urdu, dark or black water). Lacking the historical specificity of the ‘‘Middle Passage’’ or the ‘‘Triangle Trade,’’ or even the historical moorings of the ‘‘Black Atlantic’’ that are used in conjunction with African history in the Americas, ‘‘crossing the kala pani’’ symbolizes Indians’ transition from ostensibly situated agriculturalist to itinerant laborer, from cultural purity to cultural hybridity. Prior to the modern era’s indenture migrations, kala pani figured in Hinduism’s ideology of purity and its preservation through avoidance of travel too far afield from one’s place of belonging. A stock image of the Indian indentured laborer’s version of the Middle Passage, it is as much poetry as science.∞ Despite the emblem of kala pani, however, the relative historical recency of the Indian indentured labor scheme and the extent of its official documentation mean that in this diaspora events can be corroborated and living memories can flesh out disembodied discourses. Rather than inviting challenges to the reliability of ‘‘authenticated traces’’ within diasporic histories, instead favoring discerning ‘‘distinctive tropes’’ (Scott 1991:278), the Indo-Caribbean diaspora comprises both empirical traces and imaginative tropes.≤ Travel across the kala pani, and the visions of the Indian homeland that grew out of nineteenth-century migrations, produced a discourse among Indo-Trinidadians about their diaspora that emphasizes their relationship to the estate and the dignity of labor, the maintenance of religious and cultural knowledge that kept a distinct racial character in this displaced population intact (vis-à-vis Euro and Afro), and the possession of mental acuity and awareness, also viewed as crucial forms of knowledge. As a metaphor for cultural transformation (and mixing) resulting from displacement, Indo-Trinidadians’ discourse of diaspora can be distinguished by three narrative themes. Each of these is concerned with how cultural knowledge (religious, historical, and so on) informs identity, and what the value of certain ways of knowing has for cultural preservation

Carving Knowledge

123

and community success. One narrative can be considered as both historical and apocryphal. As a reflexive commentary on rupture, it relates the journey of Indians in diaspora from their forfeited ancestral India, focusing on their transformation from ‘‘pure’’ Indian identity (in the sense of culturally ‘‘authentic’’ or religiously ‘‘correct’’) to their variously defined mixed identity as contemporary Indo-Trinidadians. For even if forebears in India are recognized to have routinely combined forms of Hinduism and Islam, their mooring in an ancestral place of cultural and racial purity throws into relief the heterogeneity and imbrication—the mixing—of social and cultural assimilation in Trinidad. A second narrative within diaspora discourse comes out of the importance of nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Indo-Trinidadian newspaper publishing. The importance of savvy, as erudition, as know-how—in an unfamiliar and precarious new life— took on new significance among the emerging Indo-Trinidadian elite, the ‘‘organic intellectuals’’ (Gramsci 1971:5–6) who wrote for and published the public texts of the ‘‘Indian voice’’ that were influential (if not pervasive) throughout Trinidadian society. The third narrative within diaspora discourse deals with the role of ritual and its ambassadors, pandits and imams, with respect to carving orthodox knowledge from heterodox ways of knowing. The issue of religious identities promoted through religious practices becomes particularly salient as generational differences between older heads and youth come to the fore. A word about the term discourse is in order. At its most basic, I think of discourse as the words people say to each other, the ideas and beliefs they exchange, the conversations they have. Discourses, however, entail more (see, for example, Foucault 1972). They have built-in parameters within which, and according to which, words, ideas, beliefs, and conversations are expressed. These parameters comprise images, symbols, and practices that establish the meaning of what we say, but also impose limitations on what we say, or channel or guide our thoughts to emphasize or take for granted particular ideas and assumptions. Discourses are, in short, disciplined conversations, guided talk. Mixing metaphors, meaningful to ordinary people in everyday contexts, do not always radiate out from conspicuous representations, such as that of the callaloo nation, or Trinidad’s race-color continuum (Segal 1993), or Indo-Trinidadians’ explicit concerns about the purity and coherence of Hinduism and Islam (see chapters 6 and 7). Mixing metaphors also come in more attenuated forms, such as the meaning and importance that IndoTrinidadians give to their diasporic past, to the challenges to what the public profile of Indo-Trinidadians should be, levied by the voice of a class that is ‘‘for itself’’ even as it speaks for others, and to the more ‘‘authentic’’ but perhaps not ‘‘correct’’ traditions they have left behind. A diaspora is a particular kind of historical experience, with far-reach-

124

Callaloo Nation

ing implications for cultural forms and social relationships; that is, the very fact of uprootedness has shaped the sense of self of entire communities. For this reason we can understand certain populations to be diasporic. All peoples throughout human history have experienced migration in some form, and all cultural forms have undergone transformation over time. But only some populations have become communities based in large part on a shared ideology of displacement that actively has inspired their culture, and cultural production. The difference between ‘‘diaspora’’ and ‘‘migration’’ is not simply about retaining a feeling of belonging to a homeland or the creation over time of communities symbolically connected to ancestral origins. It is also about interpreting one’s culture as indelibly marked for all time by the experience of being uprooted. A Diaspora of Betrayal While stopping in Trinidad during her round-the-islands Caribbean voyage in 1883, Lady Annie Allnutt Brassey visited a sugar estate. As part of her sight-seeing, she purchased two ‘‘very old’’ silver bracelets from the ‘‘coolie-women’’ vending jewelry there (1885, vol. 1:176). Intrigued by the antiquity of the bracelets, Brassey ‘‘tried to trace their history’’ (177). Apparently not comprehending, the vendor recited back through time her patrilineal kin. In response, Brassey comments to the reader that ‘‘one is scarcely accustomed to think of a coolie as having traceable ancestors’’ (177). While their ideas about their origins entail abstract images of an august and ancient civilization, Indo-Trinidadians’ conception of their diaspora into the Caribbean is also corporeal, largely resting on ‘‘having traceable ancestors.’’ The importance of flesh-and-blood forebears who were both the mental repositories of cultural and religious knowledge and the physical ‘‘sinews of empire’’ (to borrow from Craton 1974) give the notion of ‘‘diaspora’’ a distinctly human rather than intangible face, the embodiment of passage as labor. The phrase South Asian diasporas, Sandhya Shukla remarks, connotes peoples who have left the Indian subcontinent but lacks the accent on forced expulsion that is associated with African or Jewish diasporas (2001:553). The Indo-Caribbean diaspora, however, requires careful unpacking of its discursive dimensions, given its emphasis on the visceral experiences of real people under conditions not of their own making. At their broadest, Indo-Trinidadian diaspora narratives suggest a more nuanced view of voluntary versus coerced, calling into question the notions of free labor and free choice. Made concrete in connection with indentured labor, the concept of diaspora is shaped by two basic organizing themes: betrayal and land. Both are contexts of diaspora and symbolize a state of being, but betrayal is discursively more powerful as apocryphal story and land is discursively

Carving Knowledge

125

more powerful as historical memory. Notions of betrayal and land in turn give rise to related themes: reclamation, or the search for roots; jahaji bhai relationships; hard work; and global movements of Hindu and Muslim missionaries and educators. Each harks back in some way to the discourse of Indians’ diaspora of betrayal, a betrayal that was the moment of their displacement and the touchstone of their subsequent transformation and self-realization.

betrayal Stories of betrayal are allegorical narratives that symbolize a ‘‘dramatic reference point’’ (J. Gould 1998:264) among Indo-Trinidadians emphasizing their deception, ‘‘being fooled,’’ as it is locally expressed, into overseas indenture, which represents a monumental rupture in self-determination. The stories feature an enterprising yet gullible Indian, an unscrupulous British colonial indenture scheme, and Indians’ eventual vindication.≥ With the passage of time, the influence of local cultural themes, and each succeeding generation’s own embellishments, the empirical history of the journey (to Trinidad, in Trinidad) has taken on the gray shading of apocrypha. It has been documented, however, that recruiters in India, at the emigration depots and throughout the territories of recruitment, were indeed unscrupulous and at times treacherous about obtaining their per capita payment. Ajai Mansingh and Lakshmi Mansingh (1976), John Kelly (1990), Jan Breman (1990), I. M. Cumpston (1953), Jan Breman and E. Valentine Daniel (1992), Marina Carter and Kahl Torabully (2002), and Hugh Tinker (1974), among others, all note that artifice and chicanery were involved in enlisting workers. Immigrants in Trinidad ‘‘said they had spent their first year in Trinidad ‘crying’ as they remembered their homes and realized how badly they had been ‘tricked’ ’’ (Tinker 1974:181).∂ Indeed, my own friends and informants, especially the older heads, often repeated the story that their forebears were tricked into thinking they were being brought not to Trinidad, but ‘‘Chinidad’’ (chini is sugar in Hindi and Urdu), where they were to ‘‘sift sugar,’’ perceived as an easy task, for an inordinately high daily wage. ‘‘Being fooled’’ into coming to the Caribbean is commonly juxtaposed with another motif: the claim of rescuing the postemancipation British empire. In this account, the indentured laborers ‘‘saved’’ the sugar industry from ruin at the hands of allegedly uncooperative, free Afro-Trinidadians, and the vicissitudes of metropolitan capitalism and the world sugar market. Among the many dozens of these stories I was told, the following story encapsulates nicely the theme of betrayal. It was told to me in 2002 by Vishnu, an Indo-Trinidadian friend who had left Trinidad for North America more than a decade earlier. It is worth noting that Vishnu is only in his

126

Callaloo Nation

early thirties, yet the story is as important to him, as much a part of his identity as an Indo-Trinidadian, as it was to the man three generations earlier, to whom the story refers. As Vishnu recounted, Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Indians tell the same story. They came [to the Caribbean] with a willing mind, but they were fooled into thinking they’d find a pot of gold there. Because that’s the way the white people told them. My great-grandfather’s parents in India sent him to the grocery store to get sugar. On his way to the shop, the people [the indenture recruiters] came up and they told him, he was a young boy, ‘‘Come on this ship, there’s lots of candies there, so much things to eat.’’ The next thing you know, he was in Trinidad. He grow up on the cane plantation. Then the time came to give people [timeexpired laborers] parcels of land [Crown lands in lieu of passage fare or a lump sum]. And that’s why he had so much land. So that’s how he ended up down there [in Trinidad]. Then he got married, had children, started sharing up the land. I have heard stories where ‘‘being fooled’’ entailed complete duplicity on the part of recruiters, along the lines of kidnapping. The general contours of Vishnu’s story, however, match the vast majority of others I heard. In it, the amenable and diligent, if gullible migrant (in Vishnu’s version a child, but usually an adult) is led down an unknown path with false promises, but makes the best of it and thus makes good.

reclamation Diaspora narratives have been told and retold, as oral tradition, from one generation to the next, and in this way remain salient in Indo-Trinidadian historical memory. They are also kept alive by more formal means, planned encounters between the present and the past. In the early 1980s a local travel agency, serving what was then a primarily Indo-Trinidadian clientele, conceived the Purkhon ke Desh ki Yatra (A Journey to Roots), ‘‘a record of a sentimental tour to those places in India from whence came our Forefathers’’ (Sunday Guardian Supplement, 24 April 1983, 1). Billed as ‘‘more than just a tour’’ of historical sites ‘‘in the Asian sub-continent,’’ A Journey to Roots was publicized as ‘‘the biggest ever cultural breakthrough since the first indentured Indians sailed into Port of Spain in 1845’’ (2). On that apparently inaugural 1983 trip, the tour took 150 ‘‘Trinidadians of Indian descent back to India on a symbolic repatriation trip to Mother India’’ (10). While this program was due in part to a marketing effort to boost tourism to India, it also tapped into a zeitgeist where the economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s was still reverberating in the form of disposable income spent on luxuries. Some of these were cultural

Carving Knowledge

127

or religious, such as pilgrimages of various sorts, whether making Hajj among Muslims or journeying to ancestral roots among Hindus and IndoTrinidadians in general. Diminishing somewhat as the economic recession took hold in the mid-1980s, these sojourns into the past were a popular activity among the middle class, as travelers sought to reconstitute the genealogical and territorial links that lend authentic substance to the forms of Indian culture that have become emblematic in the ‘‘mixed’’ environment of the Caribbean. Although the number of people who were able to participate in these trips was minimal in proportion to the IndoTrinidadian population as a whole, word of mouth as well as media coverage (particularly in the press and on the radio), helped to reinforce the desirability and the importance (‘‘the biggest ever cultural breakthrough’’) of retracing the steps of one’s ancestors both literally and figuratively (cf. Rushdie 1991).∑ What is most important is not how many numbers of ‘‘roots’’ tourists actually made this trip, but how receptive the moment and the population were to this kind of endeavor. As the Sunday Guardian Supplement wrote, 24 April 1983, The highpoint of the ‘‘Journey to Roots’’ was that symbolic and historic event titled ‘‘A Date with Destiny’’ in Calcutta. It was on this day, February 23 one hundred and thirty eight years ago that the ship ‘‘fatel razak’’ sailed out of Calcutta with the first group of Indians bound for Trinidad in the West Indies. They were lured by agents of the British planters to go to a place called ‘‘chinidad,’’ where there was an abundance of sugar and thus much money to be earned . . . The group [of ‘‘roots’’ tourists] . . . boarded two boats to begin a symbolic cruise down the River Hoogly, a large tributary of the Ganges. As the boats moved off from the pier there was open weeping, especially among older members of the group, who recalled that this was almost a direct reenactment of the way their ancestors left their native land. But there was more to come for as the boat turned around to return to the docks, the weeping become [sic] louder and very open as they realised that for their parents turning back was never to be in all those sailings between 1845 and 1917. Back on land the group mingled, holding each other for support as the full impact of indentureship hit them for the first time. But there have been many prices paid for indentureship. While this article is clearly written to excite as much pathos and empathy as it possibly can, the sentiments of the participants did not need embellishing. The text is also unsurprising in reiterating images of ingenuous Indians being lured by the corrupt agents of power, and the point of no return for the emigrants. (About 22 percent of the emigrants did return to India between 1845 and 1917 [Ramesar 1996:195; Laurence 1971:57]).

128

Callaloo Nation

By 1994, Shamshu Deen, a local Indo-Trinidadian author, had selfpublished a genealogical manual, Solving East Indian Roots in Trinidad, and in the foreword, C. Lakshmanna observed that ‘‘journey to roots has been, for many a person of Indian origin in Indian diaspora, a great passion, aspiration and hope to enkindle and revive the relations and associations which have disappeared into the quicksand of time. They [contemporary roots seekers] undertook arduous and tiresome journeys to the people from whom their forefathers and ancestors had separated to proceed on indentureship or otherwise . . . These efforts never ceased and they go on hoping to find some benevolent clue which could open up new vistas before them’’ (1994:vii). Here, a tone of regret is artfully mingled with an air of romanticism. It is a nostalgia that honors both a heritage of immigrant (colonized) labor and a heritage of lost treasure. In 1997, then–Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, made a ‘‘roots’’ tour of his own, visiting the hamlet in Azamgarh district, Uttar Pradesh, where ‘‘his cousins twice removed from his mother’s side live’’ (‘‘Trinidad Prime Minister,’’ 7 February 1997, 22). Waving away the motorcade, Panday felt he should, instead, ‘‘walk to smell the earth and breathe the air.’’ Sharing a ‘‘full 10 minutes’’ embrace with the only living octogenarian member of the ‘‘clan,’’ brought Panday to tears and prompted the elder to say that it ‘‘was like meeting God. Now I can die in peace.’’ Panday was introduced to three other of his subcontinental cousins, spent a brief family reunion with them, and donated a gift of 1.5 million rupees (about $42,000) toward developing this ‘‘village of his ancestors.’’ In a sense, successful rediscovery and reunion are a kind of exoneration for ‘‘being fooled’’ into becoming separated in the first place. The reclamation, or search for roots, has such resonance among Indo-Trinidadians not only as a means of corroborating claims to a ‘‘real,’’ empirical rather than imagined past. Its meaningfulness also lies in its generation of knowledge about a heritage that was stolen but then reclaimed by able and capable progeny—those children and grandchildren, on down, who not only survived, as the narrative goes, but who persevered and prospered.

jahaji bhai Survival, perseverance, and prosperity depend in part on collaborative relationships of all sorts, whose consequences are ‘‘living good with people.’’ The journey across the kala pani lasted for months. Even if not from the same locale, those on a ship were thrown together in the same predicament and formed bonds of friendship known as ‘‘jahaji bhai,’’ or ‘‘brotherhood/brothers of the boat.’’ Established on the voyage over, in many cases jahaji bhai relationships remained intact after immigrants were assigned to a particular estate. When shipmates were split up into work cohorts,

Carving Knowledge

129

jahaji bhai relations were likely to have been one of the ways that immigrants remained connected. Founding generation indentured laborers ‘‘kept up we religion’’ often by surreptitious means, taking unauthorized leaves from the estate to meet with fellow Muslims or Hindus and worship together. By the 1880s, as a means of curbing labor unrest, colonial policy enforced laws governing the movement of indentured laborers off their assigned estates. In this period laborers could not freely communicate with laborers on other estates ‘‘without risking a jail sentence’’ (Moore 1995:103). In addition to legalized punishments were controls in the form of contemptuous ridiculing of traditional forms of authority. The 1882 report of the British Guiana Coolie Mission Committee, for example, commented on the activities of Indian religious leaders on the estates, referring to ‘‘those lazy, self-styled Brahmins who . . . travel about the country for alms . . . for the sake of filthy lucre, [they] go about from one estate to another reading and parading their own superstitions’’ (quoted in Jayawardena 1966:226–27). Another model of allegedly authoritative accounting comes from travel memoirs (see also chapter 2). In his 1888 A Guide to Trinidad, for example, J. H. Collens draws a distinction between ‘‘the wily Babagee’’ and ‘‘ignorant countrymen’’ (233). Cunning and not overburdened with morals, Collens assures readers, the pandit or sadhu (‘‘Babagee’’) reads from the Ramayana to the unsuspecting untutored and provides them other services such as conducting rituals, thereby making a good livelihood. For a large fee, the ‘‘crafty’’ Brahmin will also minimally ‘‘initiate’’ an affluent non-Brahmin into ‘‘the mysteries of Hinduism.’’ Yet often when a laborer ‘‘becomes a Sadhu he takes to Ganja, spends his time in idleness, and lives at the expense of his deluded countrymen, whom he does not forget to fleece’’ (1888:234). Chipping away at any suggestion of expertise and competence among the laborers (whose religious practices hindered production, as the Coolie Mission report complained) amounted to a kind of ‘‘psychological warfare,’’ to borrow Ronald Richardson’s phrase (1987). The desired outcome of these efforts was to secure hierarchical power relations and erode labor solidarity. The diaspora discourse that memorializes these activities works to countermand a legacy of pejorative images of grasping, dishonest, and lazy immigrants. In a conversation I had with Mr. Zayn, an older head imam and community leader in St. Patrick, he talked about his father, an indentured immigrant who arrived in Trinidad in the early twentieth century. A learned Muslim, his father traveled among sugar estates surreptitiously in the night, in order to spread knowledge of Islam among fellow indentureds. ‘‘My father tells a story that apparently a person . . . carried news [gossiped, tattled] to the bosses on the estate that he used to cross his boundary [leave the estate], and they held [caught] him one night. They

130

Callaloo Nation

gave him one night confinement in jail for crossing the boundary without permission. Then after a request from some of the indentured people, they give him a little freedom, so that he can continue doing his religious duties. They let him go and come, but he must report.’’ These kinds of activities, clearly forms of cultural resistance to plantation authority, surely strengthened the loyalties and resolve among immigrants. It is likely that the men and women who comprised Mr. Zayn’s father’s jamaat either had been acquainted with him on shipboard or knew of his talents from shipmates, especially given the curbs on mobility imposed on estate laborers. In this way a jahaji bhai sentiment might be formed among immigrants even if they had not traveled on the same ship. Shipmate attachments were likely to have served the practical needs of reciprocity on arrival in the new land. My older head informants often spoke to me of marriages arranged, cooperative labor organized, jobs secured, and other alliances based on trust and a perception of affinity that characterized their parents’ and grandparents’ interdependence.∏ Hari, for example, talked with me about the bond of jahaji bhai: I was roughly eight years old when my father moved into a cocoa estate in Penal [in 1925] . . . He was employed there as an overseer . . . so he had a little bit of privilege . . . He dead in 1952, and I am left here . . . In my young days this was just a trace [narrow track], and there was a spring well . . . There was a few older heads, the jahajis of my father. Two of them was my father’s shipmates, from the same boat, and the others, well, they all came from India and they formed a community. ‘‘Jahaji bhai, kai san hal?’’ ‘‘How are you?’’ They planted rice together, [renting] from people who had land, for eating. They also work for rice farmers harvesting rice on a six-day basis. Three days for money [cash] and three days for rice. These things was done to sustain life, for survival. In a more cooperative form, a ‘‘hand-tohand’’ we call it. Hari’s recollection is among the most specific reflections about jahaji bhai I heard, but the idea is invoked frequently, especially among older heads. As a theme in diaspora narratives, jahaji bhai recalls a past, ‘‘long time,’’ that was better, in its being a time of greater solidarity among Trinidadians of Indian descent. As many informants commented to me, a Hindu/Muslim distinction was not necessarily meaningful in the daily life of the immigrants and their nineteenth-century descendants. What was important was the encompassing ‘‘Indianness’’ they shared, derived in part from the bonding experience of ‘‘the boat.’’ Mourned as no longer influential, jahaji bhai and other inclusive relationships are perceived to have given way to greater emphasis on mutual exclusivity among Muslims and Hindus. In my experience, rarely do peo-

Carving Knowledge

131

ple offer documented events as evidence of diminishing unity between Hindu and Muslim; most often, they invoke this narrative of the past in symbolic contrast to the very different, and less desirable, present. While located in the historical moment of indenture, ‘‘long time’’ is at the same time indefinite, where Indo-unity implies homogeneity, a solidarity that comes from not succumbing entirely to the mixing pressures of settlement and incorporation into Trinidadian society. Jahaji bhai is a symbol of resistance to colonial domination but also to postcolonial relations of power, where groups must compete and boundaries among them must be drawn. In a nobler time of cooperation based on affinity, jahaji bhai relationships transcended the specifics of religion. These relationships foiled the colonizers’ betrayal of the immigrants because, as the narrative has it, the subcontinent-based forms of interaction, shared by all Indians and brought across the kala pani, sustained them in a new and uncertain environment whose power relations underscored laborers’ ignorance.

hard work The discourse of jahaji bhai consists, in part, of nostalgia about unity without diversity. But it also represents strength in the face of suffering. As raison d’être, destination, and destiny of their diaspora, land—initially represented by the estate and later by the subsistence plot—has been the definitive experience in Indians’ own Atlantic passage. It is what connects diaspora, in unfolding sequences of time, first as displacement (from the subcontinent), then as marginality (during the vulnerable period of assimilation in the colony), and finally as unique identity (equals in the callaloo nation). The land is what anchors who Indians were in the homeland and how they see themselves as having transformed (or not) in the New World. Turning hegemonic assumptions about Indians’ inherent connection to agricultural pursuits to their own advantage, Indo-Trinidadians use land as a gauge of what they have accomplished, and a standard for the value of those accomplishments. Land, in the form of the estate, was the primary site of their resistance to colonial domination, through their ‘‘keeping up we religion.’’ Land remained a focal point among Indo-Trinidadians, persisting in spite of their diversification by the 1880s into different vested interests and points of reference: indentured, time-expired, and locally born with or without estate experience (Seesaran 1994:332). Indo-Trinidadians’ discussions of ‘‘long time’’ are typically didactic, containing, as Kevin Birth correctly notes, ‘‘stories of work and discipline in the past’’ (1999:25). Stories about long time are reminders of Indian presence in, and contribution to, empire and, later, nation; they are commemorations of ancestral culture-bearers; they constitute a rejection of the established social order of subordination in which many Indo-Trinidadians still tend to see themselves vis-à-vis the state. The rest of Mr. Zayn’s 132

Callaloo Nation

narrative underscores the importance of hard work and all it symbolically encompasses (land, labor, dignity, perseverance, redemption) as an edifying and prescriptive lesson for younger folks. In it, this older head imam honors his father’s role in propagating Muslim tradition among fellow immigrants around the turn of the century: This country was under British rule, people came as immigrants . . . Our teaching, according to history and by the sunna, says Muslims should be missionaries, one to another, so when they came here as indentured laborers, they were quite satisfied, they got nothing worse here than what they got in India . . . The problem comes here now, how they should go about teaching Islam, preaching Islam to all those who are not that . . . much educated. So they have to make contact with the various groups of Muslims who got scattered throughout the island . . . But they had this iman, this faith, and they knew their fundamental duty to teach the religion. They could not do that during their working hours, their masters were on them all the time, and they couldn’t go about as they pleased. So they waited ’til midnight, when the lights of the bosses was off, and they traveled by foot from one district to the other so they can find out where the other people were and get them together in one place, one house, for teaching Islam. This is a personal experience from my father’s life. In this area there were about four or five estates . . . These . . . are the areas my father traveled about in the night. Classes were kept by my father . . . He [had been] a maktab teacher in India . . . I’m telling you these things to give you a contrast to those people who doing religious work today and those before. You see how they sacrificed. There’s one thing in building a mosque. A Muslim supposed to build a mosque with their own finances and own person—labor, then [that is]. Though their pay was 25 cents per day in about 1900, in the estate, they built their mosque with their own hands and without the assistance from other religions . . . The children of today must understand that their fathers were like one, like brothers, and so we, too, the first generation. We had the same respect. An important source of pride as well as corrective touchstone for presentday moral and spiritual failings, clandestine travel among estates for religious revitalization (whether Hindu or Muslim) and proselytization (Muslim) is acclaimed as a special quality of vigilant forebears, motivated to share what knowledge they had. The message of resistance is celebrated as a religious idiom, where the determined preservation of traditions usually was in the form of ritual knowledge and the recitation of sacred texts. In his story, Mr. Zayn is communicating several messages. He is reassuring listeners of the dignity and solidarity among Indo-Trinidadians’ ancestors, who were truly pious and zealous; he is reminding listeners Carving Knowledge

133

that struggle over identity is a fundamental and valued aspect of immigrants’ experience; he is admonishing listeners, however gently, about their not knowing real forbearance (as opposed to their sacrificing elders), and having circumstances too easy, such that religious work has become increasingly routine; and he is suggesting that his listeners’ piety is a dim reflection of those now deceased, who ‘‘loved the din’’ (Muslim way of life). Illiteracy, barracks life, plantation work, and ‘‘making garden’’ are seen as indicative of Indians’ presence in the Caribbean, but these are endowed with a celebratory dignity that contemporary generations invoke when they speak of founding forebears. Rather than deny a proletarian past, even middle-class and elite Indo-Trinidadians speak in hagiographical terms about long-time older heads. The discourse is about leaving behind the proletarian past, but not a rejection of it. As the quintessential Indian cultural signature, working the land is an authentic and honorable pursuit, one that is a channel for the bonds of community and the locus of an unambiguous identity. Recognizing the ambivalent relationship between hard work and modernity, my friend Diane, herself a member of the middle class, lamented about the tenacity of stereotypes: ‘‘even when Indians rich, make a lot of money, they are seen as just able to work hard and save, and maybe to do business. But still they have no class, the people [non-Indo-Trinidadians] see them as not able to participate with them.’’ In other words, Diane is commenting that Indo-Trinidadians lack cultural capital in the wider society even as they amass material wealth. They are represented as unable to adopt elite culture; they remain ignorant of the appropriate status symbols. One way Indo-Trinidadians resist this kind of oppressive imagery is to embrace and valorize their roots: peasant farmer heritage in the subcontinent, agricultural heritage in the colonies, and a retention of ancestral culture in part through hard work on the land. Even if wider Trinidadian society still denies the successful, middle-class Indo-Trinidadians their rightful respect, they can lay claim to an alternative—and superior in its ancientness and loftiness—cultural stratification. The perspective of the grass roots on work and class offers a different connotation from that of the middle class, in emphasizing hard work, selfsufficiency, resolve, and productivity, an indispensable salt-of-the-earth character. As Nikhil expressed it: Right, what is grass roots? People who have been maintaining a religious identity, people who were able to maintain a work identity, knowing that not only if I work, if I plant garden, not only I would benefit. I would [be] able to feed my nation with it. He [an IndoTrinidadian] looks at it in a very broad perspective . . . The people who belongs to the grass roots is people who genuinely concerned about 134

Callaloo Nation

theirself, their immediate family, their religion, and their country. There could never be [Indo-Trinidadian] millionaires. Because they [millionaires] go for class, they in the upper class, the elite group. But there’s no [organic] elite in Indians, so they have to try to buy their way into the white man’s elite group! Although Diane, who possesses a rather injured sense of entitlement as a middle-class Indo-Trinidadian, emphasizes a different aspect of hard work and Indo-Trinidadian identity, she shares with Nikhil the view that the essential Indian has maintained cultural coherence through religious constancy (whether Hindu or Muslim) coupled with a ‘‘work identity’’ of honest and productive toil. These qualities have produced the humble grandness of the morally and culturally superior, rather than people of the ‘‘loin cloth and a pot of rice’’ (Trinidad Mirror, 1901; quoted in Singh 1985:36). In an article on the role of the pandit in Trinidad, the Indo-Trinidadian author observed that Hindus ‘‘are no longer restricted to the canefields but have begun to establish themselves in the wider society, socially, economically and politically’’ (Bolan 1994:58). For the author to phrase it ‘‘have begun to establish themselves,’’ 149 years after the arrival of Indians in Trinidad, is not, however, simply an anachronism. It is a reflection of the vividness with which the theme of hard work, striving successfully against the odds, remains a salient part of Indo-Trinidadian identity. Knowledge as awareness of the strengths of one’s culture, as the contribution of one’s work to the development of the country, and as the wherewithal to turn a hegemonic cliché into an example of cultural superiority is another kind of challenge to ‘‘being fooled.’’

transnational legacies A lively oral tradition about their diasporic history is one way IndoTrinidadians remain connected to an identity which was not discussed in formal education or otherwise valued by the state until relatively recently. As a commemoration of a particular version of historical past and physical presence in the Caribbean constructed by Indo-Trinidadians themselves, diaspora discourse is also counterhegemonic. It acclaims the lives of the foundational generations of Indo-Trinidadians through stories kept alive by those who have had direct experience with this life as well as by those who have not. Another factor shaping diaspora discourse has been the influence of visiting missionaries and educators who came to the Caribbean from India in the late nineteenth century, and from Pakistan, India, and Britain in the twentieth. The impact of missionary activity occurred largely on the level of a particular religious community or religious organization. MisCarving Knowledge

135

sionaries came as emissaries of certain bodies of belief; their assertions and guidance about belief and practice shaped diaspora discourse by raising two issues: cultural transformation—‘‘disintegration’’—across space and time, and the relevance to overseas communities of contemporary religious movements and reforms on the subcontinent. As self-defined cultural role models and arbiters of religious interpretation, missionaries and educators exposed Indo-Caribbean people to religious instruction as it was being undertaken in India and Pakistan, complicating among overseas communities the issue of the authority, prestige, and credibility of local religious leadership. Whether shoring up or challenging IndoTrinidadian forms of worship, these outsider visitors (who were simultaneously insider experts on Hinduism and Islam) stimulated local religiocultural organizations to develop in certain directions and encouraged diaspora discourse to emphasize certain kinds of continuity and discontinuity with ancestral heritage. Representatives from the subcontinent came largely at the behest, and through the financial means of, well-to-do local Hindus and Muslims, generally urban-based and often themselves active in religio-cultural organizations. Partly to reinforce Hindus’ and Muslims’ acquaintance with ‘‘authentic’’ (germinal) forms rooted in the motherland and partly to reinforce their own standing in their respective communities, IndoTrinidadian hosts sponsored visits from accredited representatives. In March 1929, for example, the East Indian Weekly printed ‘‘My Observations of East Indians of Trinidad, at the Eve of Departure,’’ a piece by visiting Pandit Jaimini, described as a ‘‘Vedic Missionary.’’ In a grateful farewell, he wrote: In the early part of 1928 I was invited by Pundit Ram Narine of Demerara to visit British Guiana and see the condition of East Indians— isolated and forgotten by their Motherland since so long . . . Meantime I received a letter from Pundit Hari Persad of Marabella to break voyage at Trinidad and stay for some time to see and enlighten East Indians concerning Motherland . . . [I] enjoyed for full three months amidst my East Indian brethren . . . During this period I visited some 38 towns and villages, delivering some 79 lectures on Unity, Education, Indian-Culture, Indian Philosophy, Sublimity of Vedas, Indian civilisation and condition of India, political, economical, cultural and geographical . . . Theatrical Halls, Palace Cinema, schools and town halls were overcrowded by the audience consisting of whitemen, creoles, negroes and Indians. The intellectual gentlemen took keen interest in attending and making meetings successful. Honourable members of council, doctors, barristers, mechants [sic], missionaries (Europeans and Indians), catechists, headmasters, Pandits and Mohammedans of influence presided at the meetings. . . . (6) 136

Callaloo Nation

Spending almost 88 percent of his stay giving lectures to more than three dozen towns and villages across a relatively small island would have given the pandit a broad reach for delivering his lessons on the greatness of India and his message of the vitality of subcontinent-overseas ties.π In the latter regard, it is interesting to note that either the pandit himself or the newspaper gave him the title of ‘‘Vedic Missionary.’’ Unlike in Christianity and Islam, where a major aim of proselytization is conversion, among visiting Hindus the ‘‘mission’’ tended to emphasize the connection between India and Indians abroad, through educational and inspirational addresses about the glories and benevolence of the mother country. At the same time, Pandit Jaimini assures his readers that the ‘‘public are fully aware that my lectures are free from communalism’’ (9). He is also eager to record that his audiences consisted of an interethnic (read cosmopolitan) array of the educated middle class. Although this reportage may have been embellished, it is likely that attendance at the events involved predominantly middle-class Indo-Trinidadians (even in agricultural areas), although this pandit’s message, like those of other visiting educators and missionaries, would have been gradually disseminated to the grass roots through the activities of village mandirs and neighborhood conversations. Nine years earlier, in August 1920, the Indo-Trinidadian newspaper East Indian Herald reported: Among the passengers who arrived here from London last week was Moulvi Faez-Ul-Karim . . . a native of Punjab, India, and a graduate of Indian and English universities. He is considered to be a modern language and Oriental (Sanskrit and Arabic) scholar, having to his credit a brilliant academic career. He has ben [sic] sent out by the Muslem [sic] League of Woking, Surrey, England . . . He came ashore in a special launch and was introduced on landing . . . by Shafi Mohammed, Secretary of the local Islamic League . . . a reception was held at Mr. M. A. Ghany’s residence . . . Mr. Asgar Ali Syne’s motor lorry conveyed the remaining East Indians to the reception. The Moulvi’s mission in this colony is to conduct missionary work. He will deliver addresses on Mohammedanism at different centres throughout the island in English and Hindustani . . . ‘‘The East Indian Herald,’’ while according the worthy Moulvi a happy welcome, wishes him a successful mission amongst his people, and hopes he will ever bear in mind what is known as Hindoo-Muslim Unity: it is the only means by which our peoples can know and love each other better—and for that matter, Indians of whatever creed, must stand united as a nation. The local luminaries mentioned here—Secretary Mohammed, businessmen Ghany and Asgar Ali Syne—were early members of the Indo-Trinidadian urban elite, whose families remain so today. Those people with mo-

Carving Knowledge

137

tor lorries and homes fit for large and formal receptions would be the obvious candidates to host such honored guests. Chances are, however, that it was not until these sorts of activities were sponsored or hosted by Hindu and Muslim religio-cultural organizations, with their necessarily wide reach, rather than by wealthy individuals, that the grassroots, agricultural population would have turned out in large numbers to see the visiting emissaries. While we cannot know what special points of view Pandit Jaimini and Moulvi Faez-ul-Karim expressed during their respective lecture tours (we know only what general topics Pandit Jaimini covered), it is clear that diasporic communities of Indians in the Caribbean (and elsewhere) were regularly included in a global circuit of individual emissaries bearing certain information and forms of knowledge (indeed, Pandit Jaimini had been on his way back from a similar assignment in Fiji). Diasporic communities have also felt the tremors of clearly pronounced religious movements on the subcontinent. Two far-reaching transformations made their way to Trinidad (and the wider Caribbean) and left their imprint there. One was the Arya Samaj movement in Hinduism, the other Islam’s Ahmadiyya movement. Founded in 1875 in India, Arya Samaj is a Hindu reform movement that calls for equality among all Hindus by renouncing the caste system, emphasizing achieved status (rather than ascribed), and promoting a Vedicbased monotheism. Arya Samajis were particularly disposed to sending well-prepared pandits throughout overseas Indian communities, the first arriving in the Caribbean in 1910 (Forbes 1984:20). Arya Samaj missionaries continued to arrive periodically (1914, 1917, 1928, for example [Forbes 1984]), stimulating a reawakening of interest in India among the IndoTrinidadian population. Missionaries entered the formal educational system through building a school and, in at least one instance, serializing Arya Samaj teachings in a local magazine (Forbes 1984). As importantly, Arya Samaj missionaries also challenged pandits affiliated with the local (and preeminent) proponent of Hindu ‘‘orthodoxy,’’ the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (sdms) religio-cultural organization. Their engagement encouraged debate over religious knowledge, in the form of expertise and authority, the parameters of orthodoxy, and the role of literacy and other symbols of sophistication, such as familiarity with Sanskrit and stance on ‘‘idol worship’’ (Forbes 1984:49–51). While Hindu leadership was primarily not from the grass roots, the majority of Hindus were, especially at that time. Thus what was argued through a religious idiom was also an issue of class tension: those Indo-Trinidadian Hindus who were followers of Arya Samaj teachings were disproportionately members of the middle class and elite. Not only were they economic leaders in the community, they were sympathetic to what were deemed ‘‘modern’’

138

Callaloo Nation

and ‘‘Western’’ values (Forbes 1984). Ever conscious of remaining ‘‘backward’’ and ignorant—the ‘‘loin cloth and pot of rice’’ constituency—IndoTrinidadians, and particularly those of the grass roots or those who represent them, struggle with trying to be culturally conservative (keeping close to authenticity of traditions and purity of heritage) while at the same time being recognized by the wider society as socially progressive (modern, educated, canny, democratic in their cooperation with the callaloo nation). Striving to establish a profile deserving respect and recognition, Sanatan Dharma Hindus could not ignore the transnational changes in Hindu thinking that the Arya Samaj represented. The attention IndoTrinidadian Hindus paid to Arya Samaj teachings, whether critical or supportive, led to the lasting integration of some Arya Samaj ideas into the development of Trinidadian Hinduism. At the same time, religio-cultural organizations such as the sdms were motivated to reinterpret and reinforce their notions of orthodoxy in the face of such ‘‘Western’’ and ‘‘inauthentic’’ challenges. Once again, the possession of knowledge and appropriate ways of knowing are implicated in the meeting of local and transnational Hinduism in Trinidad. The social and cultural impact on Indo-Trinidadians came through international missionaries and their encounters with the practitioners of traditions deemed provincially or universally pure—depending on point of view. Although in Trinidad today there are individuals who profess themselves to be followers of Arya Samaj, the force of Arya Samaj Hinduism is felt mostly in its legacy to Hindu thought there. The self-characterized ‘‘orthodox’’ Hindu religio-cultural organizations remain dominant. The Ahmadiyya movement also had a lasting influence in Trinidad (and the Caribbean) as it disseminated new ideas. Emerging in India in 1889, Ahmadiyyas proposed several reforms of Islam, among the most notable being the claim that the movement’s founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was the last prophet, coming after Mohammed. In the following decades the movement sent missionaries throughout India, Pakistan, West Africa, and the Caribbean. In Trinidad, several prominent Muslims arranged with the Woking Mission in England to send over an Islamic missionary, who arrived in 1921 (Smith 1963:168). He established a school, debated local Christian and Muslim clergy, and assisted in the education of an IndoTrinidadian Muslim man sent to Lahore. This local man returned to Trinidad in 1930, disseminating the teachings he had learned. Not many Ahmadiyya missionaries came to Trinidad, perhaps due to their controversial ideas which resulted in their condemnation in the Muslim umma (global community). Another missionary came to Trinidad in 1953 (Smith 1963:171), but he was one of very few Ahmadiyya missionaries to visit. These early proponents inspired a good deal of conflict and competition;

Carving Knowledge

139

they also forced some scrutiny and clarification of the non-Ahmadiyya, that is, Sunni or Hanafi, ‘‘orthodox’’ Islam practiced by Muslim community leaders and religio-cultural organizations like the Anjuman Sunnatul-Jamaat (asja). While there are currently at least two Ahmadiyya masjids and their associated jamaats in Trinidad, Ahmadiyyas are not prominent. By and large, local feeling toward Ahmadiyyas mirrors that of the rest of the Muslim umma, which is condemnatory. The tensions that stem from this censure are more pronounced, however, among younger generations. Older heads who follow the teachings of Sunni Islam may have close, ‘‘pumpkin vine,’’ kin ties with Ahmadiyya Muslims. These bonds can in some respects override doctrinal differences. Younger Muslims lack the lifetime of emotional bonds of kinship, friendship, cooperation, and succor—in short, a lifetime of daily ways of ‘‘living good with people.’’ For both Hindus and Muslims, the possession of knowledge and the ways of knowing something are themes arising from their role as diasporic hosts. Honing the Public Voice In a recent newspaper column, N. S. Rajaram comments that like many other Hindus, he finds it difficult to explain what Hinduism is. This problem is especially acute for ‘‘modern’’ Indians, he says, who live ‘‘in the West,’’ notably the ‘‘ ‘educated Hindu’ who has unconsciously acquired the habit of looking at himself and his civilization through Christian eyes’’ (1999:13). The author is echoing an issue that has more than a hundred-year history among persons of Indian descent in Trinidad and applies to Muslims and Hindus alike. If ever it was an unconscious habit, the propensity to see themselves through a Western, Christian gaze was punctuated by Indo-Trinidadians’ self-searching concerns about who they were becoming as immigrants grew into settlers and settlers diffracted into diverse communities. This consciousness about identity attained, and honed, its public voice notably through the rise (and waning) of the Indo-Trinidadian press and the rise (and flourishing) of Indo-Trinidadian political and religio-cultural organizations. From the 1870s on, a generation after their initial arrival in Trinidad, the transformation of Indo-Trinidadians into various constituencies involved the development of what Bridget Brereton calls Indian ‘‘group consciousness,’’ represented by the advent of ‘‘Indian opinion’’ in the Trinidad press and increasingly public objections to the ways Indians and IndoTrinidadians were being characterized in the media (Brereton 1979:191). Virtually no Indian or Indo-Trinidadian would have appreciated the pejorative characterizations they received in the popular media, but it took a generation (about twenty-five years) for a critical voice to emerge that

140

Callaloo Nation

had some familiarity with the environment (both adversarial and sympathetic) and which also had some audience if not clout. This growing ‘‘group consciousness’’ reflected a concern with both self-presentation and social perception, and reveals an intracommunity class and educational hierarchy. The earliest groups, clubs, and other organizations were primarily political, philosophical, and economic in character rather than being religiously inclined. Literary and debating clubs as well as friendly societies existed along with the politically engaged East Indian National Association (formed in 1897), the Indian League of Tunapuna (formed about 1910), and the East Indian National Congress (formed in 1909). Led by middleclass and elite intellectuals who were primarily Presbyterian converts, Westernized, and urban, these groups pressed for the rights of IndoTrinidadians on the basis of a particularly configured cultural umbrella of ‘‘Indian,’’ encompassing Hindu, Muslim, and Christian rather than distinguishing among them. Although they were concerned about preserving ‘‘Indian culture’’ and the quality of life of Indo-Trinidadians, these groups were generally not inclined to establish ties with the masses. They preferred to speak for, rather than directly to, grassroots communities. Other groups with contrasting agendas emerged, like the Young Indian Party (formed in 1921), who promoted the preservation of Indian culture but rejected the ‘‘ritualizing’’ of the ‘‘dead past.’’ A key theme in this discourse was the attempt to interpret the connection between culture as emblem of heritage, and culture as emblem of class position, within the broader context of negotiating relationships with the white elite, colored middle class, and black masses.

the press Although the vast majority of them lasted less than a decade each, throughout the nineteenth century Trinidad had about forty-five newspapers (Tikasingh 1977:2). Several of these, such as the Koh-i-Noor Gazette (begun in 1898), the East Indian Herald (begun in 1919), the East Indian Patriot (begun in 1921), and the East Indian Weekly (begun in 1928), represented ‘‘the Indian community.’’ They grew out of a desire for forums to discuss issues relevant to their own interests, such as use of the terms coolie (for example, East Indian Herald, November 1919, 1:3; see also Brereton 1979:191) and immigrant (for example, Port of Spain Gazette, 14 September 1897, 3), as well as their objections to the condescension with which they were treated by the popular media (Samaroo 1977:3). The following excerpt, from an article written in the Port of Spain Gazette, 19 January 1884, is no doubt the kind of text that would have inspired ire. On the subject of immigration, the article warns against the ‘‘serious and

Carving Knowledge

141

immediate’’ danger to ‘‘our sugar industry’’ that the Indian population poses. Fifty thousand people amounts to ‘‘fully 25,000 able-bodied men,’’ the reasoning went, who represent ‘‘tremendous power’’ if ‘‘united as one man, obedient to the same impulse and easily fanaticized beyond control.’’ The article offers a solution: that government ‘‘devise a means to break down the power of the Brahmins’’ by not recruiting high-caste immigrants, by educating immigrant children, and adopting a ‘‘decency law,’’ as in the French colonies, making it illegal to appear in public ‘‘in the semi-nude state which in this country, constitutes the ordinary costume of these people.’’ The assault against Indians is clear: denigration of custom, of character, and of religious authority. Self-defense was expressed in Indian newspapers’ mission statements. Sometimes these were oblique, as in the East Indian Patriot’s statement on page 1: ‘‘The East Indian Patriot is a monthly organ which will be devoted to the Social, Intellectual, and Moral Advancement of the entire community, and will be largely edited ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ ’’ (June 1923, 2[10]). Other times self-defense came out in a more overt manifestation, as in the East Indian Weekly’s mission statement on page 1 providing its reason for publication: ‘‘in view of the large number of our Indian colonists, comprising a full third of the population, and in view of their wealth and importance in the community, we realized the necessity for an organ primarily devoted to the representation of their interests . . . [their columns will cover] the full and fearless discussion of all matters, especially those relating to their [Indian] race . . . Indian racial questions, as all other peculiarly racial questions, have an odour of their own which might seem lost in the general make up of a journal that does not strictly cater to Indian tastes.’’ Language as well as stance is significant here: ‘‘immigrants,’’ ‘‘laborers,’’ and ‘‘coolies’’ become ‘‘colonists’’; their population percentage is celebrated for its contribution to the colony (‘‘wealth and importance’’), and they are described as having their own needs, based on a distinct racial constitution that required special attention.∫ Yet Indo-Trinidadians’ efforts to reappropriate the power to define their own identities had to address what that identity should be. The self-consciousness of class position indelibly marked the way Indo-Trinidadian print media crafted Indo-Trinidadian selves. Often explanations have emphasized cultural rather than class factors. The East Indian Weekly, posits Brinsley Samaroo, ‘‘accurately reflected the dilemma of the West Indian East Indian—an individual torn between the traditions of his ancestral culture on the one hand and the unformed, evolving patterns in the New World, on the other’’ (1977:27). While it is true that an aspect of assimilation is always the contentious articulation of previous and current ways of life, the advent of Indo-Trinidadian newspapers was linked to the coalescence of an Indo-Trinidadian educated elite. The major issues taken

142

Callaloo Nation

up by the East Indian Weekly speak for themselves: fostering leadership in the Indo-Trinidadian community, including developing improvement societies; raising the position of Indian women, including social service in the public sphere; covering Indo-Trinidadian social events, especially marriages, festivals, and selected obituaries; and supporting the efforts of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (founded in 1897) against both child labor and paying workers’ wages in rum shops (Samaroo 1977:12–13). Another, equally significant consideration is the question of audience: who had access to and was reading these newspapers? As late as 1946, 51 percent of the Indo-Trinidadian population was not literate; in 1921 the number was over 87 percent (Singh 1996:230). In 1942, the Observer, another Indo-Trinidadian newspaper, published two pieces by Dennis Jules Mahabir, ‘‘Teach Them to Read and Write’’ (1, no. 3) and ‘‘We Have Our Problems’’ (1, no. 2). Citing the amount of illiteracy among IndoTrinidadians as a ‘‘cause for alarm,’’ Mahabir notes that just 19 percent of the 119,000 ‘‘non-Christian’’ Indo-Trinidadians were literate, compared to the 70 percent literacy or partial literacy of Christian Indo-Trinidadians (1, no. 3:19). Mahabir also notes the regional difference in illiteracy rates: less than 10 percent in Port of Spain and almost 64 percent in the sugar belt of Caroni County (19). It is likely, then, that the readership of these papers would have been mostly urban and educated, and would probably have included a number of Euro-Creole and colored middle class. While reassuring readers that he is not advocating ‘‘a complete segregation of the Indian community,’’ Mahabir points out that ‘‘Indians here have particular problems,’’ among the most serious of which is education—or the lack thereof (1, no. 2:21). He argues against what he calls ‘‘class consciousness,’’ what we may infer is ethnic communalism, and instead advocates class mobility through ‘‘greater equality for all’’ (21). ‘‘How,’’ he asks, ‘‘can the so-called educated Indians possibly hope to realise their aspirations and take their places among the people of the island, when such a large number of their countrymen remain sunk in ignorance and degradation? . . . Unless these people are gradually raised to a higher level, morally and intellectually, how can they possibly understand our thoughts or share our hopes or co-operate [sic] with us in our efforts?’’ (21). Mahabir ends with a call to form an association from among ‘‘the young members of the community’’ who can make recommendations for ‘‘social reform’’ after careful and scientific study of the problem (21). In 1928 an issue of the East Indian Weekly wrote that it was necessary to publish a vehicle that would ‘‘establish a nexus with our dear Mother India that is so necessary to keep alive the spark of nationalism and racial affection that burns in the breast of every son of India’’ (quoted in Samaroo 1977:5). The reconnection with ‘‘Mother India’’ was in part, as Samaroo

Carving Knowledge

143

suggests, because ‘‘East Indians were losing their Indian identity as their time-distance from that country increased’’ (1977:5). Equally significant, however, was that the vitality of ties with India permitted excavating emblems of high culture and ancient heritage so necessary for local social status—even for the largely Presbyterian editors and writers of the IndoTrinidadian press. Nationalist and racial affections would keep alive images of a motherland that possessed, as the Koh-i-Noor Gazette expressed it in 1898, ‘‘an ancient but magnificently artistic civilization, permeated throughout with all the modern improvements . . . [where] Spires of gold glitter in the sun. Turrets and gilded spheres shine like constellations . . . Why, these people had artists and mechanics of the highest grade when John Bull painted himself blue and ran around with a stone axe’’ (vol. 1, no. 2:3). Losing sight of these facts, the logic went, would dim perception of Indo-Trinidadians’ contribution, potential, and intracommunity diversity, reducing them to a uniform (and lowly) group of immigrant laborers. Indo-Trinidadian educated elites nonetheless were self-assigned protectors of immigrants and arbiters of their culture. The paternalism that surfaces from their texts is noteworthy, complicating both the presentation of racial and cultural affinity and the rhetoric of commonality. While educated, elite Indo-Trinidadians identified with the larger IndoTrinidadian population, as a community they also set themselves apart, implicitly distinguishing between a symbolic and a literal ‘‘Indian.’’ The literal Indian at the end of the diaspora (Trinidad) had to possess knowledge in order to rise out of ignorance, servitude, and backwardness; the symbolic Indian at the beginning of the diaspora (Mother India) was, along with the practicalities of Western formal education, a kind of knowledge to be possessed. A curious example of this tension is the first print voice of ‘‘Indian opinion,’’ the ‘‘Mountain of Light,’’ the Koh-i-Noor Gazette, which was started in 1898 by Lallapee, a Port of Spain ‘‘Indian and Colonial Merchant.’’ In its first volume, for example, it writes, ‘‘We are in Trinidad a most heterogeneous mass, and the sooner that is welded into a homogeneous whole the better for its prosperity’’ (1, no. 28:2). The Koh-i-Noor’s agenda was, in essence, to recuperate Indians’ public image; the strategy it took involved—perhaps more than any subsequent newspaper—the discourse of empire. The Tuesday, 4 October 1898, inaugural issue announced that it ‘‘chronicles a new departure,’’ where fifty-three years after the first ship of indentured immigrants landed in Trinidad, [a] fair proportion of these colonists by virtue of their temperate and frugal habits, combined with a strict attention to business, have massed competencies and realizing the vast progressive influence of the Press, are now resolved to lay that foundation stone of civilisation which will bring them into touch with the general community and 144

Callaloo Nation

the universal interest thereof. With this object in view we launch the ‘‘Koh-i-Noor’’ hoping that as its name implies, ‘‘Mountain of Light’’ it may light up the ways of those who are still struggling in the darkness of ignorance, and shed rays of instruction and amusement on one and all. Imagining a community as much as demonstrating one, the Koh-i-Noor educates as it entertains. An appreciation of the sizeable number of virtuous immigrants-turned-colonists, it is also a beacon for those IndoTrinidadians who remain ignorant. The Koh-i-Noor straddled hegemonic and subaltern cultures and values by promoting an image of Cultured (with a capital C) Indo-Trinidadian citizens of empire, a cosmopolitan and educated community who were the vanguard of the Indo-Trinidadian population and who were models of where the rest of Indo-Trinidadians were headed. The discourse of its text produced a readership who would embrace articles like ‘‘The Happiest Work-People in the World,’’ in which the newspaper asserted that ‘‘the happiest work people must be those who being perfectly contented with the wages they earn, have no need of trades unions and strikes . . . The happiest and most contented workman in the world is undoubtedly the Kanaka labourer in Queensland . . . When you look at him he grins . . . Compared to the bush nigger of South Africa he is an angel’’ (1898, 1, no. 7:2). Less bizarre but perhaps no less disturbing is another issue of the first volume, where nineteenth-century environmental determinist discourse expounds on the effects of tropical climates on Anglo-Saxon development. Readers are taught that the reason Anglo-Saxon settlements did not grow into ‘‘great self-governing commonwealths’’ as did North America and Australia is because ‘‘the tropical climate is not congenial to men of Germanic blood’’ (1898, 1, no. 54:2). Other pieces covered ‘‘The Labour Question’’ (1899, 11, no. 76:2), sprinkled with French expressions like sois disant (self-styled), which not many Indo-Trinidadians would have understood (particularly among the grass-roots) despite Trinidad’s embedded French heritage, and at the same time reports on such specifically IndoTrinidadian—and largely grassroots—events as ‘‘A Pancheyte or Indian Meeting’’ (1899, 11, no. 79:3). Not surprisingly, panchayat has an unusual spelling and is translated into English—those who would be likely to attend such a meeting, however, would be unlikely to need a translation. Many of these pieces appeared under the column, ‘‘Thik Bat,’’ Hindi and Urdu for ‘‘Straight Talk,’’ as the newspaper translated (literally, correct words); its byline was ‘‘Effendi Bey.’’ These Turkish terms would likely have been unfamiliar to most readers; those who knew them could have appreciated what we might guess was the author’s in-joke. Efendi means ‘‘master’’ or ‘‘gentleman,’’ bey is ‘‘sir’’ (Lewis [1953] 1973:138); together they form a double honorific, either self-mocking or self-congratulatory. Carving Knowledge

145

One thing we can speculate with more certainty: that the occasional use of a range of languages besides English—French, Hindi and Urdu, Turkish—was probably meant to suggest a cosmopolitan and erudite readership, united by elite class culture and divided from the rest of the society, certainly from grassroots Indo-Trinidadian society, even while the newspaper claimed an Indo-Trinidadian identity in its raison d’être (chronicling ‘‘a new departure’’) and its speaking for those ‘‘still struggling in the darkness of ignorance.’’ While the Indo-Trinidadian press covered numerous stories and topics from the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century, one theme in particular stands out. It is a message of indentured immigrants’ humble but dignified origins, their striving, the benevolence of other sectors of society, and Indo-Trinidadians’ eventual uplift. A particularly clear example comes from a 1920 issue of the East Indian Herald. Partly meant to praise the Canadian Presbyterian Mission’s efforts to educate IndoTrinidadians, the article invokes conventional rhetoric: Amongst the immigrants were found men of culture who were trained in most of the languages of their Mother Country and also in the English language. But these were few in number. Most of them were illiterate . . . Their religion was that of the Hindoo accustomed to worship idols or as the Mohammedan not believing in Jesus Christ . . . the Presbyterians set forth to . . . bring the heavenly light to their dark and ignorant minds. Seeing the intellectual neglect of the immigrants, the Presbyterians combined the teaching of religion with education . . . The young generation of East Indians was educated in the English language. They had received the help and guidance of [Presbyterian] religion. They now desired something more than to be mere labourers . . . They became teachers, catechists, peasant proprietors and shopkeepers. They who came bound to the soil became masters of the soil. In every walk of life, by their industry, by their thrift, by their inborn ability and resource, they became useful and capable citizens. (no. 1:7–8) Sometimes with religious undertones, sometimes without, a chiaroscuro of darkness into light metaphorically traces progress through knowledge, whether gained through formal education or through exercising practical reason. Symbols of progress always beg the question: by what means? Another avenue, as we have seen, was to laud selected aspects of Hinduism and Islam in contrast to praising Presbyterians. Glittering spires, gilded spheres, and a ‘‘magnificently artistic civilization’’ had to be given a contemporary value, which posed its own problems. In a letter to the editor of the East Indian Weekly, 6 April 1929, the author, Junius Junior, charges

146

Callaloo Nation

the ‘‘Mesdames’’ he is addressing with being ‘‘hypocrites’’ for disdaining their ‘‘less fortunate sisters’’ as if they were ‘‘superior to them’’: You seem to vie among yourselves as to who are more Europeanised than the other and look with a spirit of contempt and false pride upon those who still wear the garments which your grand-mothers, and some of your mothers wore only yesterday . . . most of you have come to look upon the wearing of a pretty dress, the powdering and rouging of your faces and going to the Library and Movies as the be all and endall of your existence, and despite the fact that you have adopted some of the vices of the West you stand with a feeling of cringing inferiority when near the other races. You must realize that you are Indians first and Indians last . . . as descendants of Sita and Savitri you are the happy possessors of a heritage of which the women of any nation would be justly proud. Junior is admonishing that the privileges and frippery of elite culture reinforce invidious distinctions within the Indo-Trinidadian population that are destructive to it, as well as distancing Indo-Trinidadian women from their true identities—‘‘Indians first and Indians last.’’ But these identities are marked by glorious models, Sita and Savitri, and a proud and ancient heritage. In 1941, twelve years and many articles later, similar tensions are discussed in the Observer, ‘‘Monthly Organ of Indian Opinion,’’ with M. Deeraj’s query, ‘‘What About Our Indian Girls?’’ The average Indian parent has realized to a certain extent, that education . . . is ‘‘the thing’’ . . . But what about our Indian girls? Are they still being relegated to the region of pots and pans, and smoke and dust, while their brothers learn to read and write, and talk and think? . . . [Indo-Trinidadian] parents and the Indian community look upon the young [Indo-Trinidadian] doctor with contempt and prejudice when he marries an American ‘‘Lady’’ or an English woman. Who can blame him? . . . the modern, unfettered and athletic girl of this 1941 is certainly an advance over the repressed, neurotic and hothouse variety of 1891 . . . If Indians in Trinidad are ever to hold their own, if ever they want recognition, marriage within the race is desirable.Ω Despite the early feminist stance, the real distinction among young women being made here is of class difference, one where Western, modern, and probably Christian is celebrated against Eastern, backward, and probably Hindu and Muslim. Deeraj is warning against mixing, calling for purity through fortifying the race by avoiding racial-cultural exogamy. Men look outward for mates, thereby jeopardizing the race, when their own kind does not measure up to the standards of middle-class achieve-

Carving Knowledge

147

ment: reading, writing, talking, thinking. Yet too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing: incorrect dosages can lead to the problems which Junior, above, warns against.

the organizations As the Indo-Trinidadian press covered (and created) the news, it charted the issues and debates of concern to the community of readers it served, and presumably to the wider Indo-Trinidadian population as a whole. Also giving voice to abiding and emerging concerns among Indo-Trinidadians were the organizations that they formed—as political and social clubs, as lobbying groups, and, later, as religious custodians. These organizations can be divided roughly into two types, based on both ideological mission and historical moment. The earliest and best known include the East Indian National Association (eina), established in 1897 ‘‘to offer social, economic, political protection and to assist in the advancement of the intellectual, moral and cultural growth of the Indian community’’ (Seesaran 1994:345); the East Indian National Congress (einc), established in 1909 to defend Indo-Trinidadian, especially indentured laborers,’ status and rights (Samaroo 1972), the Young Indian Party (yip), established in 1921, which emphasized their ‘‘young ideas’’ and the aim of politically educating Indo-Trinidadians in order to increase their political involvement (Singh 1996:233), and, of lesser impact, the East Indian League (eil), established in 1930 for the purpose, as the East Indian Weekly put it on 20 December 1930, of ‘‘representing the claims of the suffering classes of [destitute and homeless] East Indians (quoted in Niehoff and Niehoff 1960). Occasionally these organizations clashed in their perspectives. In 1929, for example, a debate between a representative of the yip, Mr. Hosein, and a representative of the einc, the Reverend Lalla, over forms of representative government was covered in the East Indian Weekly. According to Hosein, Lalla argued against elective representation because of the ‘‘danger of their political identity being absorbed,’’ thus advocating communal representation. Hosein agreed that ‘‘there is a pressing danger’’ of the ‘‘racial identity of East Indians’’ being ‘‘absorbed,’’ and that ‘‘means should be adopted to prevent this and to preserve the purity and pride of race.’’ He did not, however, see how the purity of the race will be ‘‘contaminated’’ by the elective principle; in fact, ‘‘the process of denationalization of the Indian born of this colony is even now proceeding rapidly apace and unchecked; and there is every indication that the younger generation of East Indians will be completely assimilated with and absorbed by the coloured race. . . .’’ In order to be ‘‘a political factor to be reckoned with,’’ according to Hosein, Indo-Trinidadians require elective representation (12 January 1929, 3–4). 148

Callaloo Nation

While they do not question the right and wisdom of British colonial rule, these two representatives differ on the condition of Indo-Trinidadians’ racial purity, political absorption, and race pride. Lalla’s stance implies a strengthened communalism while Hosein’s suggests that mixing is already underway. Furthermore, Hosein argues, attending to IndoTrinidadian interests requires, in a sense, pressing mixing further, by joining the nation at large and swaying it from within. While these organizations were not always in accord with one another, the profile they created for themselves suggested a congruity of purpose and philosophy. For example, the East Indian Herald protested, in an article titled ‘‘Advice to Our Young Men,’’ January 1920, that IndoTrinidadians are ‘‘not represented in the activities of this island, according to the ratio of our population . . . The ancient civilization of India and her claims to greatness are indisputable; but how long shall we boast of the India that was, and of her great deeds? That will not better our position here in Trinidad. The dawn of a new era has fast come into being . . . The test of the ‘survival of the fittest’ will be the standard for the future.’’ The article goes on to say: It is our duty to make our brethren at home [India] feel that we who have migrated are not a distinct loss to the Motherland, but a great asset for a growing Indian nation. The East Indian National Congress and the East Indian National Association are well established, and are there to represent Indian interests. Every educated and influential Indian in this colony should take a lively part in its affairs . . . If influential East Indian gentlemen in the chief centres of Indian population in the island were to devote some of their time in helping or establishing Indian friendly societies and give it their paternal care, in a short time Indian life in Trinidad will be raised to a much higher standard. Part of these affairs included emulating what the Indian National Congress of India had managed to do: they ‘‘molded a vast heterogeneous population into a homogeneous whole . . . If this has been possible in India, it is doubly possible here.’’ In striving for proper recognition of IndoTrinidadian contributions to the colony, the einc and eina worked to render homogeneity from heterogeneity and advance the population toward a scientific (quasi-Darwinian) modernity. Another important characteristic these organizations shared was their ecumenical tenor. The social and political agendas of the Indo-Trinidadian elite, for example in the einc, fostered among them an ‘‘interreligious unity’’ that lasted until the late 1940s (Samaroo 1972). Abdul Aziz, the eina leader in 1905, lobbied the government to legalize Muslim marriages (Niehoff and Niehoff 1960). Yet with their broadly reformist objective, Aziz’s efforts were not viewed as religiously sectarian; the philCarving Knowledge

149

anthropic energies of a group sharing similar privilege is what gave the eina its cast. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these Indo-Trinidadian spokespersons for various kinds of social reform did not reach the majority of the Indo-Trinidadian grass roots (see also Niehoff and Niehoff 1960:182). Whereas this earlier public voice and leadership gave religious differences very little attention, relying instead on paternalistic interventions based on class privilege, the rise of a competing public voice to represent Indo-Trinidadians emphasized religious doctrine and practice as the key to retrieving and maintaining a discernable (and pure) identity within the mix. Singh calls this voice, led by Hindu and Muslim religious leaders, the ‘‘traditional elite,’’ whose ‘‘major preoccupation was to vindicate their religions from the slurs and denigration by Christian evangelists, as well as to preserve their traditional ceremonies, their languages, their forms of dress, their music, and their dance forms’’ (1996:230–31). During the period between 1917 (the end of indenture) and 1956 (the stirrings of independence), both ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘modernizing’’ elites concentrated on issues concerning Indo-Trinidadians, but by the midtwentieth century the traditionalist custodians of religion superseded their urban, formally educated, largely Christian, nongrassroots ‘‘modernizing elite,’’ in public profile and community influence (Singh 1996). Despite their differences with so-called modernizing elites, however, traditionalists were not invested in a rejection of modernity, but rather sought to face modern problems in distinct, if comparably modern ways. The modern ways they identified were defined in terms of their appropriateness to contemporary life; thus, old and hallowed religious and cultural traditions were not necessarily anachronistic. In fact, they could be even more instructive guides for the present. These traditions were also more immediately accessible identity markers among grassroots people far from the means of upward mobility and the material and symbolic trappings of middle-class and elite urbanity, as called for by the ecumenical organizations. These religious custodians formed organizations based on their interest in cultural preservation through proper religious conservation. The Tackveeyatul Islamic Association (tia) was founded in 1925, the Anjuman-Sunnat-ul-Jamaat (asja) between 1931 and 1935 (depending on the source), the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (sdms) in 1932, and the Trinidad Muslim League (tml) in 1947. Today the tml runs a large and important masjid in northern Trinidad (St. Joseph) and the sdms and asja are state-sanctioned representatives, respectively, of Indo-Trinidadian Hindus and Muslims. In contrast to the earlier organizations like the eina, einc, and yip, the religio-cultural organizations had a grassroots, agricultural base in addition to representing urban communities.∞≠ While the leadership tended to be middle-class or wealthy, they were not necessarily part of the formally educated elite; many were successful merchants and entrepreneurs. 150

Callaloo Nation

Sponsoring and hosting missionaries and educators from India (and later Pakistan) gave these organizations invaluable symbolic capital in terms of their credibility and authority among the Hindu and Muslim population as well as wider Trinidadian society. When visiting experts engaged in lecture tours promoting the glories of ancient civilization, high culture, and venerable religions, these organizations could celebrate IndoTrinidadians’ belonging to a ‘‘race’’ who were the ‘‘torch-bearer[s] of the world’’ (Singh 1996:238), yet who were anchored to (an honorable) grassroots heritage. With the rise of religio-cultural organizations and their Hindu and Muslim leaders projecting the public image of Indo-Trinidadians through select cultural or religious traditions, identifying religious distinctions and emphasizing their importance became increasingly salient throughout the century. As documented in earlier studies of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, there has been a gradual consolidation of heterogeneous religious beliefs and practices into homogenized doctrine as Indo-Trinidadian communities consolidated themselves, postwar and, especially, postindependence, into distinct ‘‘ethnic groups’’ (e.g., van der Veer and Vertovec 1991; Vertovec 1996).∞∞ As Singh points out, the demise, from mid-century onwards, of ‘‘modernizing elites’’ from positions of cultural leadership at the popular level has been a significant factor in the entrenchment of the biracial political system exploited by Trinidad’s political leadership (1996:246). In this way, as well, race and religion are articulated discourses, both reflecting and shaping the construction of Indo-Trinidadian identities in mixed environments, which knowledge and ways of knowing must negotiate. (Center) Staging Rituals: Performing ‘‘A Prayers’’ Indo-Trinidadian discourse about their diaspora memorializes a ‘‘long time’’ of naive journeys, suffering, commitment, and eventual triumph. Over the decades that produced new generations and new social divisions, their public voice grew. The effort to establish themselves as subjects with rights as well as responsibilities became increasingly explicit, notably in their newspapers and in their organizations. The possession of knowledge, for negotiating a present social environment and claiming a past cultural one, was a consistent theme in these discourses. As religious identities increasingly became the metaphoric source of ‘‘we race,’’ the idea of needing to construct consistent identities from a social universe that defined itself as multiple and mixed grew stronger. By the mid-twentieth century, note Arthur and Juanita Niehoff, IndoTrinidadian Hindus and Muslims had ‘‘become much more self-conscious in regard to their own heritage’’ (1960:83), and villagers had become ‘‘less self conscious about their ritual affairs’’ (1960:126). In addition to erecting Carving Knowledge

151

denominational schools and promoting ‘‘the flourishing of religious festival pageantry’’ during this postwar period (1960:125), Hindu and Muslim religio-cultural organizations also became predominant in the public image projection of Indo-Trinidadian identities. They emphasized the role of rituals as vehicles of cultural and religious knowledge, whereby the authority of pandit and imam as arbiters of that knowledge became more pronounced and more prescriptive.∞≤ Ritual performances became increasingly large-scale, extra-community events intended as public statements beyond neighborhood or village worship. Increasingly formal and codified in presentation, these performances were acts of resistance among disfranchised immigrants and indentured laborers. In subsequent generations rituals have become their own kind of tutelage, another kind of ‘‘battleground’’ (to borrow van der Veer’s metaphor [1996:146]) in performing culture. In an overview essay on religion and ritual, Maurice Bloch argues that rituals are ‘‘anti-intellectual’’ (1996:734) and that they ‘‘create by drama, not by exegesis’’ (735). Among Muslim and Hindu Indo-Trinidadians, however, rituals are performances very much about exegesis, about the creation of knowledge from ways of knowing (Borofsky 1994). By ways of knowing I mean understanding that is ‘‘fluid and flexible’’; by knowledge I mean ‘‘understanding that is definite and delineated’’ (Borofsky 1994:335), crystallized from multiple heterodoxies; a key feature in Muslim and Hindu rituals is creation and instruction in a particular orthodoxy. Rituals are both culturally stabilizing performances, reminding practitioners of their identity through connection with the past, and culturally transforming tutorials, emphasizing identity through connections with the present. As sites where diacritic emblems are reproduced, rituals clarify the ambiguities of both heterodoxy (the array of religious possibilities) and syncretism (when those possibilities converge into other, new forms). They do this by repetition of certain rites, thereby establishing or fortifying boundaries between what is appropriate and what is incorrect. But rituals involve greater agency than mere reiteration, in their emphasis on the leadership of the pandit and imam. From the ‘‘formal point of view,’’ van der Veer reminds us, ‘‘rituals can be characterized by conventionality, condensation and repetition’’; it is these formal aspects that ‘‘make their continuity so tenacious’’ (1996:144). In Hindu, and, I would add, Muslim ritual, therefore, ‘‘there is much emphasis on correct performance. Despite all the evidence of change and contingency, the performers try their hardest to exclude creative innovation’’ (144). Referred to as ‘‘lectures’’ by Indo-Trinidadian practitioners, the sermons that most Hindu and Muslim rituals highlight are, however, discursive spaces where formal continuity and creative innovation meet. While the issue of correct performance is always present, appreciation of the meaning and significance of perfor-

152

Callaloo Nation

mance is taught by the messenger (pandit or imam as learned authority) rather than simply through the medium (the ritual). Different generations of leadership claim authority not simply through carrying out the rites, but through their ability to guide practitioners intellectually. Their claims reflect competing interpretations of Indo-Trinidadian cultural history and religious identity. By teaching about religion, ritual performances augment educational opportunities more readily available to the socially privileged, but they also instruct in the way ‘‘religion’’ ought to be constituted, and why. With the guidance of religious leadership and their lectures, the lack of knowledge or the possession of the wrong kinds of knowledge can signal among practitioners a number of potential inadequacies: alienation from one’s culture, underdeveloped piety, or subordinate class position. Knowledge and ways of knowing are always, then, in dialectical tension; rituals are intended to be revelatory and transformative as much as they are meant to reiterate and confirm. Thus they are potential sites of dynamism, not simply stasis. The ritual performances I attended involved both family and larger neighborhood and kinship networks. These networks make religious activities possible through cooperative efforts based on ties between households and families across diverse communities and religious affiliations. These connections are central in maintaining cooperation and reciprocity among religiously, economically, and occasionally ‘‘racially’’ diverse sets of people. Importantly, there are also class disparities, and people are expected to contribute more or less according to their means. With no exceptions of which I was aware, however, everyone attempts to meet the social expectation of reciprocity. This anticipated exchange is reminiscent to what, long time, was called a gayap, or cooperative work group. Comprised largely of voluntary work, reciprocity networks are another means of ‘‘living good with people.’’ Particularly necessary is reciprocity with regard to subsistence activities or other kinds of organized labor such as that needed to hold ritual performances. Even at their smallest, where small can mean sixty people (and usual, three or four hundred), the necessary tasks require a division of labor that involves some combination of gathering, preparing, and cooking provisions; butchering and cooking any meat (usually goat and chicken, occasionally beef if a Muslim ritual, but not often, out of respect to Hindu guests); preparing and cooking the ‘‘bus’ up shut,’’ or paratha; drawing the dozens of gallons of water most of these activities require; handcrafting and putting up decorations; building the appropriate structures whether tent, platform, bedi (pandit’s altar), and so on; gathering and returning masses of folding chairs; collecting fuel (propane or wood) for cooking; scrupulously cleaning the site; and attending to all the small details and last-minute tasks that inevitably arise.

Carving Knowledge

153

This is an environment that depends on carrying out as much as possible the principle of egalitarian cooperation that ‘‘living good with people’’ demands. Resisting colonial authorities for their right to hold religious ceremonies and organizing in protest when not able to do so, or surreptitiously engaging in daily devotional rites while indentured to sugar estates, have long been a part of Indo-Trinidadian history, and show religious identities to have always been a politically charged issue for Indo-Trinidadians. But it was with the rise of an Indo-Trinidadian press and religio-cultural organizations like the sdms among Hindus, and asja among Muslims that religious practice became politically charged not only in terms of the right to proclaim and profess in public arenas, but as uniform systems of knowledge and the promotion of orthodoxy. Mandirs, masjids, and posted announcements are among the most common visual cues indicating how frequent and ubiquitous religious rituals are in the daily life of South. Generally referred to as ‘‘a prayers,’’ largescale rituals are also called ‘‘functions’’ and are open to all, sponsored by a well-to-do individual, an organization, or a neighborhood mandir or masjid. They often commemorate calendrical events. Smaller rituals are typically glossed as ‘‘a prayers’’ or ‘‘a thanksgiving’’ and are usually held in a person’s home—still generally open to any interested public—and often for personal devotional reasons. Providing a setting for showing devotion to God/s is the main work of ritual prayers. But a prayers also imparts blessings to all who attend, irrespective of religion. Moreover, related to the blessings that are ultimately ecumenical because ‘‘is all one God, anyhow’’ and the cooperative labor that is a requisite of ‘‘living good with people,’’ is that the work of a prayers is to teach and to enlighten. The most common Hindu ‘‘prayers’’ are pujas, yagyas, and sat sanghs. A puja is a devotional ritual in worship of one or more deities, involving textual exegesis by the pandit, usually the Ramayana but also the Gita, as well as host family participation in the rites. A yagya is like a puja, only by definition on a larger scale, over three, five, seven, or nine nights, and almost entirely centered around the reading and explication of portions of a sacred text: Ramayana, Gita, sometimes Puranas. There is a general sequence of activities in pujas and yagyas (see, for example, Vertovec 1992:178). The pandit invokes the presence of a deity, represented on the bedi (altar) by a murti (a physical representation of a deity). The shrota, or participants who make offerings while the pandit directs and chants mantras, make a series of offerings, ideally sixteen. They then anoint a bamboo pole, attach a jhandi, or flag, to the top, and raise it somewhere in the yard outside (usually the front yard) with the other jhandi. Each puja honors a standard set of deities before worship of the main one. Throughout ‘‘a prayers’’ the pandit explains the rites, in terms of their ritual mean-

154

Callaloo Nation

ing and religious significance. In his sermon, or kuttha which can be relatively brief (say, twenty minutes) or more lengthy (more than an hour), depending on the scale of the prayers, he explains a portion of a sacred text, drawing contemporary referents to enhance participants’ appreciation and understanding. It is here in the kuttha, the most explicitly tutorial moment of the ritual (in addition to the ongoing explanation throughout), where knowledge is carved from ways of knowing. Among Muslims, the most common functions are Quran sherifs and maulood sherifs. Distinct from the call to prayer inside a masjid, these occasions are held in people’s homes, in the masjid hall, or in another public venue, and involve gatherings of any size. The central activities are reading and interpreting suras, or chapters of the Quran, and singing qasidas, devotional songs usually sung in Urdu. The basic chronology is an opening dua or prayer, after which the older head men read from the Quran. All who are present read certain suras quietly, aloud or silently. Everyone who cares to joins in singing qasidas, followed by the imam’s sermon, or khutbah. When his ‘‘lecture’’ ends, all present recite the tazeem, a prayer in praise of the prophet Mohammed, and voice the closing dua. Concentrated here, in the khutbah, is the imam’s tutelage of correct knowledge. In the process of establishing orthodox knowledge from heterodox ways of knowing, religious syncretisms (mixing) are interpreted as either missteps taken out of improper understanding, or small steps taken on the path toward reassemblage of the proper (correct) form and content. Pandits and imams, through the directives of their craft as they interpret them, must preserve their respective communities’ boundaries while managing exclusivity and the charge of ‘‘being racial.’’ These challenges are nicely illustrated in a conversation I heard one afternoon in 1988, while waiting at a home in South with a group of grassroots older heads for the arrival of the imam to begin their ‘‘thanksgiving prayers’’: Sajida: All of we have religion. All of we have God. Let them who want to turn Christian or worship idol, is their business. Everybody praying to the same one God, you know. [We] must not criticize, that is where race coming in, provocation. Do not criticize people religion. If it in the book self, don’t say it [criticism]. We have to live here. Them is our neighbors. The priest [imam] does come and leave, but the people, the neighbors you does invite to your function, is not all Muslims. We living between them, and you must invite your neighbor . . . Long time, they didn’t used to talk critical about other religions. They explained the book, what is in the book. So much prayers I go and I never hear anything [negative]. But I feel too small [unimportant] to tell people . . . [not to be critical]. The fittest person to say [something] is Ma. She needs to say [to the imam, as his generational Carving Knowledge

155

equal], ‘Bhai-oh [hey, brother/friend] . . .’ If I say [something] they might think . . . well, they read more, they more educated, so I can’t speak to them. Shahed: Mamu is a imam. And he does go all about to all functions and speaks for all people. He don’t separate the people [does not discriminate]. Betty: The pandit does not only have the Bhagwat Gita. They does read the Quran, front to back. That is why they can say so-so is on this part of the Quran. Rookmin: God didn’t tell us what to eat, only not to eat animals with big teeth, like shark . . . We is a cosmopolitan country. We cannot be so rationalized about the religion. If they worship idol, that is they affair. Clear in their discussion is the desire, indeed necessity, of ‘‘living good with people.’’ At the same time they are aware of shifting identity discourses, where promotion of mutual exclusivity and fostering of orthodox knowledge create group boundaries often inimical to the quotidian complications of close-knit and closely dependent communities. Yet as ambiguous differentiations become increasingly important to Hindus and Muslims, the requirements of ‘‘living good with people’’ come into question. In just one of several examples, an Indo-Trinidadian Muslim friend, Ramjohn, explained about ‘‘long time’’: In the Hindu . . . religion, certain individuals have to listen to prayers for certain developments in their life, allegiance to their gods at each stage . . . others can flit in and out [of the prayers], or prepare meals, or don’t know what going on . . . Same thing here for Islam. When we have a prayers people come to your house. Imam is reading [from the Quran] and the family still cooking, dressing, not ready to participate . . . Maybe this is influence from Hinduism . . . over the years this has changed for Muslims . . . [now everything] stops when the imam is ready to begin, and . . . everyone joins the prayers and participates fully. Ramjohn is pointing out what he sees as inherent differences in the worship practices of Hindus and Muslims. Implicit is the ‘‘traditional’’ informality of the un-, or improperly, tutored versus the ‘‘modern’’ formality of disciplined participation. Also informing his contrast is a class transformation that he reads (as do many scholars) in religio-cultural terms. In grassroots prayers, participation is more fluid—with ‘‘flit[ting] in and out,’’ food and other preparation, and casual attention to time—rendering both the overall rites and the role of the imam (or pandit) equal in importance to each other, and the khutbah or kuttha is often focused largely on the specific residents and issues in a particular congregation or neighborhood. 156

Callaloo Nation

In a prayers organized by middle-class devotees, attire is more elaborate (and never secular), attentive solemnity is emphasized, the opportunity to ‘‘gain a little something from the lecture’’ is paramount, and the formal qualifications of religious leadership are of central focus. An edifying lecture requires both a satisfying message and a satisfactory messenger. The terrain on which older head (traditional, grassroots) imams and pandits meet younger generation (modern, middle-class) imams and pandits shifts as debates about expertise and leadership are engaged. Mixing well is ‘‘living good,’’ tolerating one another’s neatly delineated differences; it is also the free play of beliefs and practices. Not mixing well comes from being unrestrainedly critical of difference; it also implies the problem of heterodoxies which can lead to syncretisms and simi-dimi that obfuscate differences. These contradictions are not the same for older head and younger generations of pandits and imams, who draw from contrasting, and often competing, stores of authority and different forms of knowledge. Contributing to this generational difference are the relatively recent upward class mobility among Hindus and Muslims in South; the ideological distinction between literal versus philosophical, and intuited versus tutored, that help shape the ways Indo-Trinidadians interpret religion and its rituals; and the assimilation into hegemonic values and priorities that formal education invites if not demands. These factors together make ‘‘progress’’ an ambiguous and ambivalent goal. Embodying diaspora in distinctive ways, pandits and imams are like repositories of a journey yet unfinished. Pandits and imams of distinct generations claim authority through the medium of ritual prayers; their claims reflect competing interpretations of Indo-Trinidadian cultural history and identity. Older heads and younger generation leadership both valorize ‘‘tradition.’’ For both, the notion of tradition parts from what is conventionally, and more simply, thought of as going back to authenticity, away from an oppositional ‘‘modernity.’’ Instead, ‘‘authentic’’ modes of belief and practice have more to do with how certain ways of knowing one’s religion define a person, and a people—how appropriate forms of knowledge, in other words, allow them to know their ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘essential’’ selves. What are expressed as generational conflicts about leadership and intracommunity conflicts about religious interpretation are in fact broader commentaries on—metaphors of—mixing in a precarious world. These broader commentaries both stipulate and retract ‘‘correct’’ and ‘‘authentic’’ ways of knowing into knowledge (and therefore ways of being in the world), and tensions between orthodox purities and heterodox mixings reveal Hindus’ and Muslims’ attempts to forge identities that call for social equality and yet may reinforce social hierarchies as they do so.

Carving Knowledge

157

6 ‘‘NO BHAKTI, ONLY GYAN’’

Hindu devotions at home. Photo by author.

A

f ew y e a r s ago, one of my neighbors, Dharma, an elderly widow, hosted a Hanuman puja. The gathering was substantial and many there were her peers, older heads who had shared ‘‘young days’’ with each other as neighbors and kin. As is typical on these occasions, the large front room of her house had been cleared of its furniture, tidied thoroughly, and decorated with additional pictures of Hindu deities, Sai Baba, and any other religious iconography the household may have owned that was not already on display. A clean sheet had been placed on the floor for those present to sit on (everyone sits at the same level as the pandit). At one end of Dharma’s front room was a gallery (balcony) onto which the overflow crowd spilled. Near the gallery end of the room sat the pandit, on a foam mat for extra comfort, while he attended to the rites of the puja. As is customary, the pandit interspersed his activities with explanation, carrying through the theme he wished to emphasize that afternoon, the importance of bhakti—devotion or sacrifice. At one point he admonished the group, ‘‘We can attain nothing without bhakti, sacrifice, and gyan, knowledge. Bhakti isn’t going about listening to yag[yas]. That is not bhakti. That is sat sangh. You must sacrifice yourself to gain bhakti.’’ In the meantime, while the pandit was speaking, two older head women sitting next to me on the gallery were having a quiet but intent discussion about the recent theft of a neighbor’s tires from his car one night, although it had been parked in the carport of his house, inside a locked gate. Those of us near the women were enjoying their humorous recap of the event; although disapproving, they were impressed with the skill required to execute such a daring deed. In characteristically Trinidadian sardonic humor, they concluded, facetiously and apropos of the pandit’s discussion, that ‘‘the t’iefs have no bhakti, only gyan!’’ The pandit was by now ‘‘gettin’ vex’’ with the chatter, and so the story came to an end.

Inverting the value of bhakti and gyan, the women were suggesting (in a spirit of fun, not disrespect) that the innocent party had an unexpected bhakti (sacrifice), and that bhakti (devotion) will not necessarily get you as far as the right kind of gyan (knowledge) did for the thieves. The pandit intended that the two concepts be understood as complementary and equal, but in deliberately misconstruing both concepts for effect, the women were transposing their value. Indo-Trinidadian Hindus’ discourse about tradition, modernity, religious authority, and community leadership takes place within a heterogeneous, heterodox environment. Their juxtaposition of sacrifice (equated with belief or faith) and knowledge symbolizes generational and class contrasts between the sacrifices of grassroots older heads and the formal education of the younger middle class. The merits of each are relative and contested. These themes are expressed in ‘‘a prayers’’ and the guidance of pandits as ritual specialists and pedagogues. I treat these rituals as greater than the sum of their parts, as comprising a complex of socially significant practices that is meaningful in a more encompassing way than an individual prayers (puja, yagya) is by itself. As codified events with ‘‘authentic’’ heritage rooted in ancient Indian culture, they constitute the principle means by which certain religious beliefs and practices are legitimated. Doing so involves both pandits and participants, and reflects the wider social relations and social tremors in which all are engulfed. Profile of A Prayers Pujas and yagyas vary in size and duration according to the particular reasons they are held. These reasons include devotional worship for personal reasons (such as celebrating a success at school or asking for divine intervention in an illness) or in commemoration of a larger event (such as Divali or Sri Ram’s birthday). The financial condition of the host household at the time of a prayers also helps determine the size of the event, though this contingency is offset to an extent by the cooperative labor and reciprocity that is always elemental to a prayers. Single day or evening pujas are usually held in the home, involving household residents, other kin who may wish to participate in the rites, and the pandit. Participation is not limited to family, but most typically a puja is organized by a household for its own members and for ‘‘pumpkin vine’’ kin. When a puja is undertaken on behalf of an individual, or individuals, it is often referred to as ‘‘a thanksgiving’’ (a term used for some Muslim and Presbyterian prayers, as well).∞ The objective is to give thanks to God in order to show appreciation or gratitude for a personal achievement, for the ability to have successfully withstood some hardship, or simply to demonstrate religious devotion and sincerity. Thanksgivings are often explicitly held in lieu of other forms of celebration—parties for birthdays, anni‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

161

versaries, retirements, and the like. A higher plane is being sought; the alternative, more broadly ‘‘cultural’’ (thus mixed, in the sense of profane and secularized) commemorations, and merrymaking involving music, dancing, and perhaps drinking, are being replaced with a purely ‘‘religious’’ event. Thanksgivings are, then, an important symbolic statement about personal piety, on the part of the individual as well as the family with whom she or he is associated. The message is that an often difficult choice has been consciously made, one away from immediately more tempting but ultimately less gratifying means of celebration. People who consistently hold thanksgivings and other prayers instead of parties generally raise their community status as they represent themselves as particularly pious and moral, and Hindu. A prayers held at home can accommodate a large attendance of extrahousehold persons, such as neighbors, friends, and coworkers, in addition to comprising smaller events. Some scholars have observed that during a prayers it is mainly older women and children who watch the proceedings, that, as Steven Vertovec notes, ‘‘many individuals present pay little attention,’’ that ‘‘people go in and out of the house and talk amongst themselves as they please’’ (1992:179). This is not considered ‘‘disrespectful or irreligious’’; what is important is that members of a household are having a ritual there (179). While there are always people milling about, and it is the shrotas for whom a prayer is most important, at these events the emphasis is on everyone’s listening and learning in addition to the symbolic value of holding a prayers. Indeed, pandits are often emphatic in exhorting people to ‘‘gain a little something from the lecture.’’ Irrespective of size, of major importance in a prayers is the ‘‘sharing out’’ (never ‘‘serving’’) of food at the requisite communal meal, and the sharing out of prasad. A blend of flour, milk, ghee (clarified butter), sugar, and often some kind of dried fruit, prasad is offered to the deities, along with fruit and other items, by the pandit during a prayers. The pandit places a portion into the ritual fire while reciting sacred prayers; another portion of prasad is kept to one side during this rite and reintegrated into larger vessels of the same contents, conveying the blessing of the deities to the entire mixture. From these vessels parcels are made up and passed out to participants and the neighborhood, to be consumed along with the food that is eaten during and after a prayers. Eating prasad is a blessing; an important aspect of a prayers is the wider distribution of blessings through sharing out prasad. The act of distribution is one important means of symbolically affirming bonds of camaraderie, reciprocity, and affinity among kin, neighbors, and friends. Through sharing out this confection, blessings are distributed among the greatest number of people, irrespective of their attendance or religion. Sharing out food is another constant of a prayers. Often starting the

162

Callaloo Nation

night or even day before (and rarely later than the early hours of that morning), many women and men begin preparation by gathering provisions (such as the vegetables that will be consumed), the sohari leaves on which food is served to participants, and basic ingredients (such as flour, sugar, and oil). Also collected will be chairs and tables for the guests, and any materials needed by the pandit for the rites. Depending on the financial ability of the sponsors of a prayers (and the impression they wish to make), or the importance of the particular occasion, more than twenty different (vegetarian) dishes might be prepared. Certainly, no less than a half dozen kinds would be provided, except in the poorest of households. Even there, the communal meal would likely consist of three or four dishes, rice, and roti, whether provided solely by the hosts or with the assistance of others. As cooking commences, in enormous iron pots hoisted onto gas flame burners on the ground, with large metal and wooden utensils for stirring, the area where the function will take place must be cleaned and set up for the pandit and the participants. The entire house will be thoroughly cleaned prior to a prayers, as a requisitely purified space for the pandit and the rites he will undertake. The division of labor is gendered, by and large. Men engage in the work that is culturally defined as requiring more strength, or that is a reflection of men’s greater mobility, such as securing large quantities of folding chairs and kneading and ‘‘busting up’’ the huge mounds of dough cooked into ‘‘bus’ up shut’’ (paratha). Women see to the food preparation, site decoration, clean up, errands. All the while, small children must be minded, meals cooked for those who are working, and regular chores and responsibilities of daily subsistence must be attended to—from tending livestock to driving taxis. It is plain that in order to carry out this magnitude of task, the cooperation of family, neighbors, and friends must be secured and orchestrated. Not ‘‘living good with people’’ severely jeopardizes the likelihood that this labor will be carried out without difficulty and strain for the hosts, who have no choice but to undertake it. Yagyas have their origins in the Bhagwat, or ‘‘week-long series of pujas and readings from the Bhagavata Purana’’ (Vertovec 1992:164); the bhagwat has been an important element of religious observance among IndoTrinidadian Hindus since before the turn of the century. While the scale, organization, and sponsorship had changed dramatically by the post– World War II period, what has been maintained under the general classification of ‘‘yagya’’ are the consecutive days of pujas, reading from scripture (the Ramayan and Bhagavad Gita were gradually added), music, and prasad (Vertovec 1992:165). Although Steven Vertovec states that yagyas in Trinidad ‘‘are of at least seven days’ duration’’ (1992:166), it is not unheard of for people to have a yagya for five days; ‘‘a seven nights’’ or ‘‘a nine nights,’’ have been, however, most common during my fieldwork.

‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

163

The essential structure of yagyas, as I have observed them, corresponds with Vertovec’s description: a puja is performed by the pandit (or pandits) on each night; parts of one or more texts are recited and interpreted by the pandit; a hawan (offering of ghee and fire) is conducted; the arti is performed (the veneration of deities, honored guests, and/or Hindu religious leaders by rotating three times clockwise a brass taria (tray) containing a small flame and flowers in front of a person or photo image, prasad is shared out; a feast is offered to all persons present. Bhajan singing by one or more groups of musicians takes place at various points during and after the hawan and the pandit’s exegesis. The most significant aspects of a prayers are not limited to formal enactments of specific rites. Also meaningful are the blessings gained from the interactions among persons in addition to the communication between person and deity or deities. These include the sharing out of prasad and the dispensing of small dakshina parcels (‘‘provisions’’ of agricultural products and other edibles) to invited Brahmins, who can be men or women but are generally older heads. On the other end of the social hierarchy, ‘‘vagrants,’’ as they are called locally, are sometimes invited to a yagya, whose duration of several days gives these men a secure place to sleep, predictable meals, and perhaps some work to assist with. One afternoon of a prayers at which I was present, Shalini, an acquaintance from the area, was quite frank that having a prayers ‘‘is important for feeding people and thanking God. It is better to give to those who don’t have than to give to a pandit alone, who eat and drink he belly full every day.’’ On a similar occasion, someone else expressed the same sentiment, as we talked about the concepts of blessings and charity: ‘‘In 1986 I had a seven nights, and some Indian and Negro vagrants stayed there the whole time, sleeping in a place we make for they. It considered a blessing to do this. The vagrants lime [hang out] during the day, helping out a little here and there, and they eat in the night.’’ Also quite common among the reasons people give for hosting a prayers is that they ‘‘make a promise’’ to have one, usually on a regular basis, as a demonstration of gratitude and piety. One woman explained that she ‘‘made a promise’’ to have annual Divali prayers when she was first married because she and her husband were ‘‘poor and wanted to get nice things from God.’’ While they were of the mind that hard work and perseverance would also play their part, they were certain that their wishes would be fulfilled if they had a prayers each year. A childless couple who live a few blocks from my field site apartment have a Hanuman prayers every year. As the wife explained: ‘‘it’s a sort of customary thing, for the mister [husband], for guidance, to guide him through, at work, at home, protection, [for keeping] on the right path. It have Shiva, too [in this puja], because when I was sick I made a promise to have a puja for him. I had very serious major surgery, and I say if I come through I will make a prayers for he.’’ 164

Callaloo Nation

A prayers can be ad hoc, as well. A couple in a neighboring village I was visiting told me that they had decided to do a Lakshmi prayers because the pandit said to do it when he checked the wife’s patra (astrological calendar) to see if she had any grah (problems, difficulties). They had gone to see the pandit several months earlier, ‘‘just to see how the life going, to see if you going to encounter difficulties. Sometimes you check two or three different pandits and they tell you different things. You pick the puja that will offset the difficulty coming up first. The pandit will tell you the number of grah pujas to do. You must do each as the difficulty comes up. People will check their patras every so often.’’ On another spontaneous occasion, my friend Polly held a puja at her home, where she ‘‘had a prayers just for the family, just a small affair, my husband, me, my two sons, and two family [relatives]. I had it because [my son] just came home from his first year away in medical school and the family was all together.’’ Polly expressed mild discomfort when I asked her if this was a Saraswati puja, held to bolster her son’s success in school—a reason several other people had given me over the years for having a prayers, particularly for Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, near school exam periods. Polly confirmed that the puja was indeed for Saraswati (and also for Lakshmi, the goddess of light and the home/hearth), but added quickly that ‘‘the prayers were more like a thanksgiving.’’ As with Nyla (chapter 4), Polly’s manner suggested that she was anxious to make clear she had been participating in a devotion, a thanksgiving, made legitimate by lying clearly within the ‘‘religious’’ domain, and thereby distance herself (partly for my benefit) from any impression that she would engage in simi-dimi, the superstitious invocation of questionable supernatural forces. This kind of self-conscious distancing is not specific to any one class or group of people. As a middle-class professional who had experienced dramatic social mobility away from her grassroots past through her own education (Polly is a teacher) and her marriage to a professional man, Polly was acutely aware that, within the parameters of her religio-cultural world, engaging a puja for pragmatic reasons, to get something concrete and relatively immediate posed a contradiction to the ‘‘pure’’ reasons for puja devotions, which are abstract dedications to God. These abstract dedications certainly have a focused purpose, but approaching pujas as vehicles to ‘‘make things happen,’’ whether it be a child’s academic success or getting ‘‘nice things from God’’ can veer too closely to (mis)treating the sacred like the occult. What mitigates this potentially dangerous (and, at the least, embarrassing) confusion of pure and mixed (impure) domains is the possession of knowledge—the right kind of knowledge. Knowing the meaning of rites, when and why to undertake them, and grasping their content are signs of progress away from ignorance and, importantly, from vulnerability. Indi‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

165

viduals gain knowledge by self-taught as well as formal means, and pandits safeguard knowledge in their duties and responsibilities to community and to God(s). The Pandit’s Mission Different historical moments in scholarship have emphasized the work of pandits according to academic fashion and the changing role of pandits over time. In her 1976 study of pandits in Penal, Taramati Ramdeo noted that the pandit is a very important ‘‘medicine man’’ in Penal, sought by older women for various problems after doctors have failed and by younger women to cure infertility (28). These services would certainly have been an important part of what we might call the holistic craft of traditional, older head pandits, whose art, as healers, can be effective only with close perception and intimate understanding of their community, whether Hindu devotees or others. Eighteen years later, Indira Bolan approached the pandit as a kind of cultural broker. With the ‘‘most consistent presence in the life of a Hindu,’’ the pandit is astrologer, advisor, performer of rituals, and, ‘‘most importantly,’’ a ‘‘spiritual guide or ‘guru,’ ’’ a ‘‘translator,’’ required to ‘‘expound philosophy and perform rituals that have been translated from Hindi and Sanskrit into the vernacular’’ (1994:54–55). As Indo-Trinidadian Hindus increasingly seek answers to questions about their place in wider society, Bolan states, pandits ‘‘must demonstrate a sense of knowledge,’’ and ‘‘be educated to be able to cope with the probings of the Hindu as well as the wider society . . .’’ (58). Bolan identifies the weak link in the connection between pandit-as-mediator and the ‘‘wider society’’ as being ‘‘deficient’’ training (58). Succinctly encapsulating the problem of practice versus philosophy, she laments that after ‘‘having mastered the art of performing rituals,’’ the pandit ‘‘goes off on his own hoping to pick up philosophy at a later stage. This undermines the authority from which the pundit can speak, since he will lack knowledge’’ to fulfill his role; ‘‘this ignorance will prevent the pundit from being able to help the society build cross cultural bridges’’ (58). The idea is that as the world becomes more advanced, the pandit, as guardian and interpreter, must be able to keep apace. The implicit assumption is that merely carrying out rituals, albeit heartfelt and with care and devotion, was enough for ‘‘long time,’’ but in today’s modern world, it takes knowledge on a philosophical level to garner authority and respect, and to be effective. The tension between ritual expertise as a job for the hands (or sleight-ofhand, see chapter 2) and expertise as a job for the mind was an issue before conceptions of modernity became paramount. In his book of short stories, for example, Seepersad Naipaul writes with barbed humor about pandits, with protagonist Gurudeva as pandit in the making. One could interpret

166

Callaloo Nation

the entire book as a look askance at the profession and its aspirations, as well as the gullibility of those who follow. For our purposes, however, of particular interest is that Seepersad’s son, V. S. Naipaul, in his introduction to the book, characterizes his father as having ‘‘something of the puritan brahmin prejudice against pundits,’’ whom he saw as ‘‘stage-managers of ritual, as ‘tradesmen’ ’’ (1976:13). In one story, Gurudeva recalls that his father had told him that ‘‘in some parts of India itself priests were looked down on as mere ritualists—a low class of Brahmins’’ (74). Ensconced in the estates of the Caribbean, after their migration across the kala pani, pandits were critically important in the revival and survival of the Hindu population (and arguably of the Muslim population, as well— just as Muslim religious leaders were vital to the well-being of immigrant and indentured populations, whether Muslim or Hindu). Pandits contended with colonial stereotypes of the ‘‘wily Babajee,’’ that crafty and shrewd trickster who conned his way to fortune (see chapter 2); they also contended with intracommunity stereotypes, like those of Seepersad Naipaul above, of the ‘‘tradesman’’ engaging in arcane acts (more similar to ‘‘magic’’ than ‘‘religion’’), not in arcane ideas. These pejoratives have lessened considerably in the particular context of Indo-Caribbean history, yet some older heads in South still occasionally chuckle over puns made with the similarity of the words pandit and bandit (I suspect this would be a more tender issue among younger folks, who might be more defensive about the subject). Pandits are supposed to be striving toward asceticism, toward moksha (liberation from the material and corporeal), or maya (detachment from same), yet they are human and may succumb to material temptations. They are especially challenged by the frontier conditions of the estate, a context where, several informants explained, local history and environment have worked against the prescriptions of purity. In calling attention to the pull between cupidity and austerity (and, by implication, profane and sacred, mixed and pure), this punning also raises the issue of the quality of knowledge possessed by a pandit, and to what extent, if any, he will baboolal, or fool you. As my octogenarian, grassroots neighbor once said to me, ‘‘That pandit don’t know Hindi. He just baboolal you! That’s a shortcut. He scampish, he fooling you. He just run off from the puja to the next one, get he one hundred dollars and go!’’ If erudite and well-versed, a pandit will not have the need to baboolal; if attentive and well-informed, a devotee will not have the need to consider it. The perceived distinction between ‘‘practical’’ and formal training has yet another dimension. In the words of a pandit with only ‘‘practical’’ knowledge, There are pandits who are in it for the money, there are pandits who are in it for the love of it . . . But people know the difference. A man [pandit] ‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

167

come in to do your prayers, knocks off your prayers in a half hour, and in forty-five minutes time he leaves. As compared to the man who comes by you, sits and chats with you for an hour before the prayers start, takes an hour to do his prayers, very casually, comfortably, sits down another hour and chat with you, wait ’til you done prepare a meal, and two o’clock sits down to have a healthy meal with you, chat with you, and then leave you. He’s a man who always have time. He is different from the man who comes and slam, bang, thank you, ma’am, and go his way. I do one prayers a day. Never more than one. The difference is how you carry about yourself with them [devotees]. The kind of dedication described here contains a subtext: this dedication cannot be had with mere access to higher formal education, which is more often a prerogative of the middle class than of the grass roots. Furthermore, dedication does not necessarily connote sincerity, since zeal can be attributed to acquisitiveness. In claiming that he never does more than one puja per day, this pandit wants to underscore both his selflessness and his expertise, an expertise based equally on scriptural knowledge and on understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of people’s domestic and other personal affairs. A tangible example of being in it ‘‘for the love of it’’ as opposed to being in it ‘‘for money’’ is the dakshina or seedha that the pandit receives as nominal compensation for his services. Technically this refers to ‘‘provisions’’ (agricultural products) and other edibles, but in a general sense all that is given to the pandit ‘‘comes like a seedha.’’ Although a pandit ideally does not anticipate remuneration, it would be unthinkable among Indo-Trinidadian Hindus not to offer him something as he is ready to depart. It is more comfortable, however, for people to talk about their expenditures for the ritual items they must provide the pandit than it is for them to divulge what they give to him directly. As Polly explained, to think about it would be to show an inappropriate attention to material, worldly concerns and imply a reluctance to place piety above all else: ‘‘God didn’t ask you to do a prayers. You do it as a willing mind. You have to do it free[ly], so you don’t check on it [calculate the cost].’’ (Polly did, however, allow that most people give the pandit between tt $50 and tt $100. Amounts have increased over time.) Nonetheless, while people are not comfortable specifying contributions to individual pandits, a common theme in discourse among Hindus is that pandits can be shrewd and amass wealth from seedha and other gifts. Two breakdowns, calculated between 1989 and 1991, of the costs to household members for hosting small, home-based pujas illustrate what a pandit might receive for his work. On one occasion, Polly summarized that she and her husband provided the pandit with two five-yard pieces of ‘‘good sari material, one for each goddess [honored in the puja],’’ one pound 168

Callaloo Nation

each of lentils, rice, potatoes, garlic, and onions, and tt $40 in cash. She estimated that the pandit received in total about tt $200 from them that day, adding that the sari material ‘‘was tt $16 for the yard,’’ quite costly for Trinidad. On the other occasion, a couple gave the pandit one dhoti (linen swath, draped like trousers) costing tt $25, one large towel costing tt $60, two pounds of rice, two pounds of potatoes, one can of condensed milk (a scarce commodity at that time), one pound of channa (dried chick peas), tt $65 in cash. ‘‘We usually give a blue note [tt $100],’’ the wife said, ‘‘but this is a recession year.’’ The ritual items she and her husband bought included one twenty-six-ounce bottle of ‘‘cattle butter’’ (ghee) and a ready-made jhandi. They estimated that their total cash outlay was approximately tt $286, plus about tt $160 to the pandit, ‘‘not including his meal,’’ her husband noted. Whether pujas or yagyas, all the functions I have attended had Sanskrit, Hindi, and English components to them. Usually the pandit recites and chants from a text in Sanskrit and Hindi, following this up with an explanatory ‘‘lecture’’ or ‘‘lesson’’ in English, drawing from the inspiration of the text(s). Although the following quotation comes from a particular Ramnowmi puja (celebrating Sri Ram’s birth), this message was imparted, in one form or another, by pandits in virtually every prayers I have attended: ‘‘We will get the kuttha simple and in English. I will try to explain as simple as I could. Regardless of color, creed, race, religion is one. God we serve. None of us [should] try to criticize or condemn others’ religion because there’s one God. Let us love one another, show peace and harmony to one. The spark of Ram is in all of us, and that cannot be destroyed. It lives on and on and on.’’ Here, the pandit reminds devotees that what is to follow is a lesson. Then he instructs people to carry the credo of Hinduism’s much touted flexibility, tolerance, and universalism into their daily lives.≤ But the final statement, if guarded, is a message of resistance and resilience, meant to be as much about the political and cultural state of Indo-Trinidadian Hindus as about Ram. Sometimes these messages are quite direct, though often only to a knowing ear. For example, an especially turbulent period during my first stint of fieldwork was when, in 1989, the current prime minister of the then-ruling National Alliance for Reconstruction party, A. N. R. Robinson, fired three key people from his cabinet, members who were Indo-Trinidadian Hindus. Shortly thereafter, I went to a prayers deep in agricultural St. Patrick, at the time of Phagwa (Holi). Two honored guests who were invited to speak included as a major part of their address references to Hindu mythology, particularly as concerning the evil characters in the Phagwa story, and in some other stories, as well. These characters were presented in such a way that their analogy with actual political leaders in the current conflict was quite clear to those familiar with the mythology, creating a sense of shared commonality

‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

169

through shared understanding. To the few people present who were not familiar with these stories (including myself), the recitations were merely religious homilies rather than political exhortations. Depending on the effect a pandit wishes to create, as well as the message he may want to communicate, a pandit can emphasize in a prayers, or any other setting in which his reflection is appropriate, worldly affairs or current events; he can employ much Sanskrit and Hindi to connote great piety and erudition; he can be ‘‘jokey,’’ as locals term it, with references to life abroad (in the United States, Canada, or, less so, the United Kingdom), and to the familiar banalities of daily life; he can engage in code switching (dialect shifts) from standard English to what is locally called ‘‘broken’’ English (the dialect of the grass roots) in order to emphasize his belonging to a community or his familiarity with a community’s quotidian trials. Each style is its own strategy for creating a certain kind of atmosphere, impression, and affinity. One evening of a nine-nights yagya I attended in 1991, the pandit said that the lesson of that evening was going to be on devotion. He continued, winking, ‘‘On Divali, boys and girls meet and all they think about is pleasure. They don’t think about prayer and devotions. They show other devotions.’’ On another occasion, at a different prayers, the pandit commented that young Indo-Trinidadian Hindus today ‘‘don’t know about lotah [the brass vessel used in rituals, usually along with a taria, or brass plate], only lota [a very common and minor skin fungus].’’ These puns were much appreciated by the respective audiences, and did not convey that these pandits were not serious or sincere in their message. Rather, the effect was that they were attuned to their devotees and the symbolic community of Indo-Trinidadian Hindus that the devotees embodied. On another nine-nights yagya that I attended, the pandit introduced the proceedings by informing us that ‘‘tonight’s devotional service is taken from the Holy Gita. There is a difference between hearing and listening. Listening is completed when you put into practice what you’ve heard.’’ As he read in Hindi from the text, the pandit painstakingly explained the words in English, literally and idiomatically. Then he summed up, The lesson of tonight was on devotion. A hunter became a transformed man, a devotee. We are hunters, and what are we seeing? The symbolism of man is satisfaction of [worldly] pleasures. If you use prayer and devotion to Lord Shiva, you can overcome temptation . . . The basic principle of Hinduism is we . . . must think of the happiness of others and lend a helping hand to others . . . The older heads must also do work so that others may benefit. Don’t just lie in a hammock playing with your grands [grandchildren] or calling out to the doolahin [bride] for ‘a tablet, nuh, gyul’ [bring me some medicine, now, girl]. [Audience laughs.] 170

Callaloo Nation

At the close of the evening he said, ‘‘Tomorrow night we do chapter 9, the practice of bhakti. Read it before and bring your questions.’’ Afterwards, a friend reflected, ‘‘Pandit Roshan make everything so simple, so that even the littlest person could understand.’’ And a second person added, ‘‘I prefer this pandit. He’s very knowledgeable in the scriptures and has a university education, which makes his lectures more clearer, more informative to the devotees than [that of] uneducated pandits. They go into the scriptures but they can’t talk about the meaning of the symbolic stories. Everything with philosophy is symbolic, everything conveys a meaning, and this is covered better by a educated pandit.’’ To gain authority and a community of devotees, a pandit must both ‘‘make it simple’’ and yet convey the idea that the material is complex. He also must negotiate a fine line between accommodating simplicity and not insulting participants by implying that they are chupidee—ignorant, stupid. The latter is managed, in part, by being approachable, humble, and, at appropriate times, ‘‘jokey.’’ The general idea is that difficult, esoteric material (sacred texts) is made accessible by the pandit’s superior knowledge and formal education—as opposed to merely ‘‘practical’’ (applied) training—but these are diffused with self-effacing caveats. Here, too, knowledge is corrected, in the sense that the right way of perceiving, thinking, and understanding stems from a lofty base but must be tempered by other ways of knowing that do not derive from books but from social relationships. As we have seen, however, emphasis on the former has superseded emphasis on the latter over the last half of the twentieth century. The pandit has a dual mission. It involves him being both a conduit of devotions to the deities and blessings to the devotees and a source of wisdom and tutelage both to his chelas (godchildren) and community of devotees. One older head man told me, ‘‘The people are mostly interested in the text being read and the pandit can provide it for the people. And also, the pandit always comes to the family for things like a wedding, funeral, puja, and then people can get to know him on a personal basis.’’ This personal basis ideally encompasses a wide spectrum of assistance that a pandit can offer if asked. Yet it also begs the question of expertise: the distinction between dilettante and specialist. During one of several interviews I had with one pandit, he explained that in addition to ritual services, he also attends to services ‘‘off the record.’’ I asked him what he meant by this. Well, solving their problems. Problems not ‘‘on the record.’’ Private problems, domestic problems, job problems, health problems, you name it. Religion is only like the cover. Religion is your basic rule, right? But you divert from religion into the personal aspect of the people themselves. Because there’s a need for it. When they come with ‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

171

their domestic problems, most of the times you become a counselor . . . and you advise them . . . You become an intimate part of the family . . . You know their personal problems. And yet you mix with everybody in the family. And the problems of the daughter [for example] should not be known by anyone, right? And this builds a relationship up. The transition from matters ‘‘on the record’’ to ‘‘off the record,’’ however, is not always smooth. One of my friends, Hardeo, ‘‘a Chamar caste’’ by his own description, symbolically rose above this low-caste identity, as well as above his grassroots background, by achieving an island scholarship and going to medical school, returning to enter the ranks of the upwardly mobile, educated middle class in South. He reflected that ‘‘they [pandits] are not taught theology well, they are not teaching from the scriptures, they talk their own opinion, start to talk politics—the Christians this, [former Prime Ministers] Chambers and Robinson, that. They are supposed to show the beauty of it [sacred texts] and analyze it a little. They just get a platform to air their beliefs on certain things . . . Long time, people used to cry at yags [yagyas]. Now you don’t see that.’’ While my impression differs from Hardeo’s (it was my experience that most people do become moved at a prayers, at times to tears), the relevant point is that as a first-generation formally educated person, he sees pandits as expressing idiosyncratic opinion over universal fact and, moreover, opinion that reflects inappropriate reference to current social and political issues. The latter, according to Hardeo, not only takes time away from the more important, hermeneutical matters at hand but also inject a tenor of divisiveness, one whose significance is in ‘‘being racial.’’ That is, the metaphor of mixing that underlies Trinidadian identity politics is assumed to also infuse any reference to group conflict with racially based discord. Even if the apparently self-evident and commonsensical structure of ranked social and cultural attributes (the color-class-race hierarchy) are to one degree or another accepted, these create a divisiveness that flies in the face of the democratic and universalistic ideals espoused by both Hinduism and Trinidad’s philosophy of representative politics. Hence, this divisiveness is yet another jeopardy to ‘‘living good with people,’’ and its acknowledgment should be avoided if at all possible. The Politics of Expertise In addition to celebratory acknowledgment of the prevailing of ‘‘Indian ways’’ symbolized by older heads, there is a more general cultural value placed on ‘‘ageable persons.’’ This cultural value influences the importance that generation has for ideas about knowledge and those who purvey it. As Breckenridge and Appadurai observe, increasingly, ‘‘diasporic groups have memories whose archaeology is fractured. These collective 172

Callaloo Nation

recollections . . . sometimes correspond to generational politics’’ (1989:ii). The following observation by an older head sums it up nicely: ‘‘Young people think the best, but old people think careful.’’ There is no absolute merit to ‘‘best’’ or ‘‘careful.’’ In the context of their juxtaposition, and association with distinct interests embodied in panditi (the work of pandits), ‘‘best’’ and ‘‘careful’’ become the idealized cultural symbols of a coherent Indian ‘‘race’’ demarcated by a special voice of Hindu religion. This contrast has become more marked after independence and the institutionalization of communally mobilized party politics. It also has become more marked as younger generations have produced greater numbers of pandits. As late as the last quarter of the twentieth century, Taramati Ramdeo noted that in the Penal area, young pandits are a minority (1976:18). The closer to numerical parity older heads and younger folks come, the more stark the comparisons among them. The older head pandit who contrasted ‘‘best’’ and ‘‘careful’’ thinking above illustrated these tensions in terms of his own life history, which I will abbreviate here: We were a poor family. My father plant rice, mind cow, make garden . . . I do labor work from a very young age . . . My father . . . was raised from India and was highly versed in Sanskrit and Hindi, so these made him a scholar . . . I got coaching up from my father . . . I began pandit work [at forty-four years old] . . . I was just a laborer, working road maintenance. But I import for myself many books from India. I always wondered, ‘‘What is the reason for this and that.’’ I want to know facts, research to find the proper answer, not just follow the old talk [idle conversation] of the older heads . . . You find young people more educated today, and they know English plenty better than me. But nobody understand nothing in Hindi . . . Probably the young people want more grammatical English . . . to understand the puja or the kuttha. Otherwise is of no use to them . . . But the majority don’t know Hindi so they can be fooled more easily . . . They don’t get the right explanation. In his narrative, this pandit underscores his humble beginnings (which are in themselves commendable), and his self-taught training based on research and facts. But no matter how humble his beginnings, the explanations that he generated are authenticated, and are in fact superior, by virtue of their source in tradition rather than modern education. A younger-generation pandit echoes the same sentiment, also careful to laud the ancestors: I am looked up to in my community because I deal with people basically around my age and younger. When I took over the community from my father, he was dealing with a fifty-, sixty-, seventy-year-old crowd . . . He could have only reached out to them. Because of his ‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

173

education and background. Ten years from now people won’t listen to me. They’ll go for the younger pandits who come out of UWI [University of the West Indies] with a master’s degree. Although [my father] have a master’s degree in planting cassava and yam, it has no bearing on anything. The people who have [a formal] degree will sit down and listen to the man who have the [formal] degree, although he may be a damn fool. While asserting that he, as a younger person, is most appropriate to minister to the needs of his devotees, he also lends rhetorical respect to older heads with his remark that with a formal degree, even a fool can be authoritative. The issue, then, is not simply a formal degree but the quantity, quality, and sources of knowledge that are imparted by religious leadership. Some years ago I attended a seven-nights yagya hosted by a family in a village in South. The occasion was the fiftieth wedding anniversary of the household heads, and they spared no expense in making this an impressive affair. One of the most prestigious pandits in the country officiated, out-of-season foods were served, more than one musical group was hired, high status individuals in the national Hindu community were invited, and elaborate packages of prasad were distributed. Often the first couple of nights have the smallest attendance, with participants gradually increasing as a prayers progresses. On the final night I counted six hundred people present. Each evening, regardless of the number of participants, the principal pandit or his assisting pandit (in this case, his brother) couched the kuttha in terms of an opportunity for edification. Beginning the first evening with the assurance that ‘‘Hinduism is a very scientific way of life,’’ the pandit offered an example: ‘‘Darwin in his theory of evolution, combined matter with spirit. So [thus] you can combine science and Hinduism.’’ That night he addressed the questions ‘‘what is bhakti, what is gyan?’’ The following nights we heard a ‘‘lecture on parental responsibility to children,’’ explication of certain terms such as mantra, karma, fate, and ‘‘some of the things evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart criticize’’ (such as multiple deities). On the final night the pandit began, ‘‘Tonight is regarding the quest for knowledge related to your religion. We are going to spend the time answering questions, some related to Lord Shiva and some to Hinduism in general. Then we’ll answer criticisms made to Hinduism . . . Everything in the pictures [of the deities] has a meaning, it makes sense. See how scientific Hinduism is? Everything has a meaning.’’ The third evening had a special guest, a nationally known Hindu community leader, who was asked to say a few words to the gathering: The only qualification our first pandits had was that they worked hard in the cane fields. They weren’t permitted to walk with the scriptures from Calcutta where they were recruited . . . They had to 174

Callaloo Nation

hide them in tattered bits. Even around 1950, 50 percent of Hindus couldn’t read and write . . . We transformed Hinduism in one generation. The sweat and blood of your fathers and mothers built these schools and mandirs. The only ones without external help [state patronage] are the Hindus . . . Many of our pandits now are university educated. We are not fools, we understand. We are Western-oriented, we know what is going on. Some listeners objected to the overt mixing of ‘‘politics’’ and ‘‘religion,’’ particularly in such hallowed space as a yagya. Yet the convictions this guest speaker espoused carry over into individuals’ interpretations of the meaning of religious activity in their lives. Traveling back home one night after another yagya, for example, my friend Rose made reference to the pandit’s lecture being a part of the Ramayan. I responded that the pandit had taken his material from the Puranas (which I thought I had heard him mention at one point during the prayers). Rose became quite annoyed, insisting that ‘‘all yag[ya] business is a part of the Ramayan! The pandits make it as simple as possible so that everyone could understand. I know about Hinduism! We know we bit. We can’t be fooled.’’ The confluence in a prayers of the ‘‘quest’’ for knowledge, the affirmation of not being ‘‘fooled’’ and being savvy as to ‘‘what is going on there,’’ and the need to be able to address Hinduism’s critics with informed understanding are as much what makes a prayers ideologically critical to assertions of power and identity as are the rites themselves. The importance and endurance of a discourse in which these concerns recur continually draw attention to the relationship between pandit and devotee(s). As religious specialist and community leader, the pandit is indeed present to ensure the ritual is carried out correctly as well as to guide and inspire the participants. But the pandit operates within a social environment that, in Rose’s words, does not ‘‘put up with high and mighty,’’ and that values, at least as an ideal, ‘‘living good with people.’’ This egalitarian stance shapes, in part, the religious discourse and activities of the pandit with respect to the people he serves. A common rhetorical device is used that tempers with humility the hierarchy within which a pandit’s authority is embedded. At one Ganesh puja I attended, I noted the familiar statement by the pandit that I had learned to anticipate, where he echoed a message made constantly by pandits and imams alike. Ending his kuttha, he said, ‘‘With my shallow knowledge I have tried to pass on a few words of advice to you.’’ By making this declaration the pandit was not confessing that his knowledge is superficial, nor is it likely that anyone listening to him thought so. What he was conveying, quite consciously, was his hope that his efforts at learning his craft, and any sagacity that is a consequence of these efforts, would be helpful and enlightening to those present. ‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

175

Expertise is certainly sought in a pandit, but the way it is conveyed, in both substance and style, is crucial to the way religious identity is constructed and related to other dimensions of social relations. When, for example, an informant remarked that ‘‘it have [there are] some young priests [pandits] now who explain to the people exactly what they are doing [in a prayers]. Most of the older ones just talk in Hindi and they gone,’’ several points were being made: that ability to explain invites confidence on the part of devotees and thus authority on the part of the pandit; that younger pandits (read formally educated, middle-class pandits) are better capable of effective explanation; that Hindi is both a grassroots heritage (as opposed to Sanskrit) and still not accessible enough to devotees. Hindi is generally less accessible to the younger folks who have grown up only or primarily with English, and are therefore more susceptible to having a pandit ‘‘baboolal you,’’ as another, older-head friend chuckled. Competing praise of older-head pandits draws on similar themes, if with different emphases. One man, a Hindu who has had a long-standing involvement in the Hosay commemoration in southern Trinidad, spoke of a local, older-head Muslim religious leader, a mujawar, in his community. In praising the mujawar’s effectiveness as a religious authority, this man contrasted belief and training, each being informed by a different, yet not always equally valuable kind of knowledge. He commented that ‘‘the older heads have more faith, the younger ones just follow. Because of their [older heads’] guidance, we just [naturally] develop the belief . . . You don’t need to be able to read the books or understand, to have faith, just you need the belief. The belief develop over the years, from teachings.’’ Sincere and sustained involvement, in this scenario, runs deeper and more true than learning to read and understand books. To command authority in his community, in his explanations and lectures a pandit must be esoteric enough to convincingly demonstrate authenticity and command over arcane and profound knowledge. He must also be understandable to masses of unevenly educated participants who want to feel educable yet need some sense of mystery. This sense can get lost when the material is too accessible, and yet when it is too mysterious, it seems incomprehensible and opaque, thus bordering on simi-dimi. That is, if a pandit gives an inadequate explanation or incomprehensible kuttha, there is the danger of the prayers appearing as simi-dimi; when meaning appears enigmatic, or when an explanation appears mysterious, or when pedagogy seems insufficiently text-based and codified, what can result is not legitimate knowledge but illegitimate perception. As one pandit put it, Hindu rituals are too easily characterized by critics as ‘‘simidimi thing. This entire Hindu society is so prostrate, but it can be powerful. We lost intellectual virility. We need to move off from superstition

176

Callaloo Nation

and follow our scriptures.’’ But as this pandit would likely concur, there is no necessarily neat dichotomy between simi-dimi and scripture because much depends on the purveyor of scripture and how that person interprets and presents the material. Finally, to command authority in his community a pandit must also suggest his own piety through the frequency of his ritual services and his style of interaction with participants. As regards the latter, the way a pandit shows sincerity, which is a good deal of his effectiveness, is not in being merely learned and conducting rites properly. He must also expand his ritual responsibilities. This kind of dedication contains a submerged message: it cannot be had with simply higher formal education, it takes being a part of the community, as opposed to the more distanced presence of the formal specialist. As speakers above have indicated, the communities of South are changing demographically and culturally, throwing into relief the very purpose, definition, and value of authenticity and ancestry as these apply to group identity. In a conversation I had with a teenage boy about the yagya his household had recently sponsored, he remarked that older-head pandits often lack enough breadth of scriptural knowledge—‘‘what we can comprehend these days’’—and that pandits keep what knowledge they do have to themselves to preserve their power in the community. The latter charge was making a contrast between the older head who has spent a lifetime ensconced in community comess (confusion, trouble) and therefore might not be able to rise above taking sides, and the younger pandit whose formal religious training has focused on religion as a phenomenon transcending gritty quotidian realities. Hindus in South today, this teenager’s reasoning goes, are more intellectually capable of grasping a greater quantity of deeper knowledge. Among the most important capabilities among people ‘‘these days’’ is the ability to distinguish between the literal interpretations of text and metaphor and allegory. A younger-generation pandit offered me an example: The Gita is not a scripture, like the Ramayan. It is a philosophy, it goes to a higher level. Philosophy is not religion. Religion tells you how you should live in your religion. The Gita tells you there is a God . . . And that God could be anything. It’s a philosophy. People don’t understand that. For we have come from a grassroots background. So when you sit down and you read the Gita, that God has a thousand arms and a thousand eyes . . . they [devotees] say you crazy! But now you interpret it. It mean that God can see everything, it doesn’t literally mean something. His example is an unfavorable comparison between a putatively simplistic, uninformed, and superficial apprehension of texts as words, and a pro-

‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

177

found grasp of the messages extrapolated from symbolic allusions. There is, moreover, the concern that a story is heard while its more abstract moral injunctions are missed. It is the correct forms of knowledge that lift one up from the literal to the philosophical. A younger-generation woman (in her thirties) explained that ‘‘some customs is traditional. When we start from the word culture we see people with their own way of life, and this hand down from one generation to another. These people know it is a story or maybe a history, and they keep onto that. The advanced, educated ones of nowadays are able to think, believe in logical, scientific explanation, and [they] are spiritual, too. Through research, pandits can come to this kind of understanding that is not tradition.’’ As a guest lecturer at one prayers reproved, ‘‘Hindus here and in India who are uninformed have superstition, not knowledge.’’ The attempt to reconcile practicality with spirituality speaks to the ways religious leadership can effectively serve and represent their local communities, and in the process, how to both construct Hinduism and distinguish it from simi-dimi. Critique of older-head pandits generally includes a call for their mastering Sanskrit and Hindi not as handed-down traditions but as ‘‘philosophy.’’ But such learning is generally only acquired by those who will teach themselves, since formal education in Trinidad does not provide this kind of instruction (except perhaps minimally at the university level), and because religious study abroad is still relatively uncommon for most people. Being successfully self-taught is possible, however, only after a certain competence in basic education is achieved. The relatively recent upward class mobility among IndoTrinidadians has thrown into relief the distinction between informal and formal education, and between being self-taught through the hands-on practice of handed-down custom or through the accretion of expertise based on engagement with principles and concepts. These distinctions generally mirror the generational contrast between older heads and younger folks. The syncretism, or mixing, that is at issue here involves high- and lowculture versions of Hindu belief and practice and their resonance with the contemporary West. This resonance in Trinidad allegedly invites a dilution of the ‘‘Eastern’’ boundaries that define ‘‘the Hindu community,’’ where middle-class sensibilities imperil grassroots values and hence the very foundation of that community. Class tensions within communities in South are often couched in the idiom of high and low culture, but there are times when hierarchy is challenged on its own terms. During my first stint of fieldwork, for example, someone observed the following about pandits and community leaders: ‘‘Brahmins, Maharajs, they think they have exclusive right to Hindu culture. [But] who came on the boat? Not really no high class Brahmins, but slaves [indentured laborers].’’ Several years later, in commenting on the difference between pujas and sat sanghs, 178

Callaloo Nation

an informant explained that in a puja, a pandit officiates, a sequence of rites is carried out, these rites can only be undertaken with the possession of esoteric knowledge, and participation in pujas is equal among the grassroots and middle-class populations, though ‘‘older heads does prefer it [puja].’’ In contrast, the sat sangh has no rites comparable to the puja and needs only (male) individuals who can read from the Hindi text and lead the prayers and bhajans. This knowledge is accessible to interested parties through books from India, which are not difficult to obtain. Finally, the participation in a sat sangh, the ‘‘demand’’ for them, as this informant put it, is comprised of ‘‘mostly rich Sai Babas, and the younger people.’’ In a conversation I had with a pandit one afternoon, he assured me that ‘‘we had it [sat sangh] all the years in Trinidad.’’ Perhaps because pandits are not required to hold a sat sangh, however, not everyone is sanguine about them. This pandit felt that with the influences of the Sai Baba movement≥ (see Klass 1991) and Presbyterian and evangelical conversions (all of which pose alternatives to Hinduism), holding sat sanghs are a way of being Hindu shorn of the baggage of low culture. He asserted his critique in unequivocal terms: ‘‘they don’t want to associate with Hindus, they want to be an internal order of aristocrats . . . They are people who want to associate with Indians but not with real, die-hard Hindus and Muslims.’’ While the vast majority of Indo-Trinidadians would include the sat sangh as a legitimate, authentic, and desirable part of Hinduism, the not-uncommon critique that they are for ‘‘aristocrats,’’ the ‘‘mostly rich’’ and young, shows that the discourse about anachronism, authenticity, and legitimacy in religious belief and practice is not simply a cultural discourse, but inextricably bound with reflexive judgments about the impact of social division and hierarchy within communities. The same pandit who said, only half facetiously, that his father has ‘‘a master’s degree in planting cassava and yam,’’ pressed his point about the connection among generation, class differences, and religious authority, in his observation that some of the pandits from North are suspicious of us from South. We are more broad-minded. Some of them fear us. [ak: Why?] We know more than them. South pandits might be stupid academically, but religiously they’re super. They devote their time to you. North pandits can’t, because they hold two jobs. He’s a schoolteacher by day and a pandit by night. Whereas the average pandit from South, although he will have an academic education, he either takes up an academic job or he takes up his religious job. And whichever one he takes, he sticks by that. Although this man was decidedly part of the younger generation, his own grassroots background and lack of formal education probably encouraged him to pose a rather crude, and unfavorable, contrast between academic ‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

179

achievement and religious diligence; many others, pandits and laypersons, would take issue with the assertion that, in this day and age, there are markedly fewer academically accomplished people in South (and they would be right). Also, many pandits in South are like their northern counterparts in holding other jobs. Yet this pandit’s words draw attention to the symbolic association between South, grassroots, tradition, and merit that arises repeatedly in identity discourse. Put in kinder terms, the same message is conveyed in another pandit’s discussion with me about knowledge and traditional culture: The average class of people believe in the physical, what they can see and touch. But those who are advanced in spiritual knowledge, they see God here, there, and everywhere, in everything, internal and external. . . . Statements such as those above tend to be made in general terms and are rarely levied against a specific individual. On the contrary, individual pandits, particularly older heads, are praised by devotees as having abiding and personal investments in the members of client households, which afford them greater insight and sensitivity; as having wisdom in addition (or as opposed) to knowledge; and, implicitly, as being ostensibly more pure given their attenuation from worldly desires of various kinds. Yet the opposite argument is also made, another informant advising that ‘‘young people these days think different. The younger pandits are more likely to give money away to charitable causes.’’ The latter virtue is, in the eyes of this speaker, one similar to the philosophy of middle-class and elite IndoTrinidadian reformists in chapter 5, suggesting that philanthropy is in sync with progressive, universalist ideas about leveling the hierarchical distinctions within the Indo-Trinidadian community, thereby bringing it up to modern standards. Another dimension of discourse about pandits as custodians of religious and ritual knowledge recalls the theme of ‘‘being fooled.’’ Once again, class, education, generation, and the forms of knowledge they represent are couched in the meaning of tradition, shaping ideas about IndoTrinidadian identity in a racially, culturally, and religiously mixed milieu. One afternoon on a beach in South, during the purifying rites of the holy days of kaartik, I spoke with a man who identified himself as an evangelical Christian, having been a Hindu ‘‘before.’’ He was there ‘‘just to visit with family for a day at the beach,’’ he said, indicating that his presence was secular and therefore could not be interpreted as supporting the shoreline pujas and ritual sea bathing that were taking place. He attributed his embracing of Christianity as partly due to his feeling that ‘‘Hindus here [are] just following tradition. They don’t really know, they just do the rituals and don’t ask questions.’’ Hindus who echo this man’s claim

180

Callaloo Nation

but who choose to remain practicing Hindus tend to place on pandits the responsibility for the problem of practice without knowledge or reflection. ‘‘Former’’ Hindus who are currently involved with other religions, however, often locate the reason in the Hindu religion itself. This charge, generated from a competitive, and hegemonic Christianity, helps generate Hindus’ preoccupation with the ways various cultural traditions are defined and practiced. When Indo-Trinidadian Hindus speak about a heritage of ‘‘tradition,’’ it is in a variety of contexts and often with a number of different referents. Two dimensions in particular are salient. One is the great tradition of Sanatan Dharm, which, even if at one level is understood to be located in India, transcends time and place as religious patrimony. The other dimension is an ancient cultural lifeway and worldview perceived as so deeply rooted that it provides the means to heal the ruptures of diaspora. Particularly with respect to a prayers, both dimensions of tradition are important: in the lessons and rhetoric of kutthas, and in participants’ reflections on these explanations and their own participation. Here, then, where a prayers constitutes a pedagogical arena, the notion of tradition incorporates both religious and cultural knowledge. Knowing what the correct rites are, their sequence, and their meaning, as well as understanding the philosophical messages of the sacred texts (interpreted by the pandit) increases cultural knowledge, where being informed about the social patterns and history of the motherland informs the boundaries delineating religious and ‘‘racial’’ groups—making oneself or one’s group, in a sense, palpable, ‘‘real.’’ Frank, another informant, put this very thoughtfully one evening when we were talking about the importance of Hindu rituals: ‘‘You must know where you coming from. To know how the religions were formed and how the people were living in India while English people were taking over. All we really know since we know ourselves here [in Trinidad] is how the English carrying on. Except for the Indian scholars coming here from India and giving lectures.’’ For Frank, and many others, ritual participation is the awareness and continuity of history. Pandits, by definition, are the tutors and custodians of this history; their methods and outlook (as presented by themselves and judged by others) help determine what Indo-Trinidadians’ history both is and was. An encapsulation of these themes is evident in one part of a kuttha given on one of the nights of a yagya held several years ago in South. The pandit reflected, ‘‘Friends, we as Hindus must be able to understand what scriptures preach and what others preach. Rites and rituals have their place in religion. Who is responsible for the survival of Hinduism? The old pandits . . . Because of them we can sit and discuss today . . . any time we break from rites and rituals, Hinduism crumbles.’’ That ‘‘rites and rituals’’ are the cornerstone of Hinduism is an idea that would not be challenged by

‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

181

the majority of Hindus in Trinidad, who follow the orthodoxy of the Sanatan Dharm. It is the connection, rather, between ritual and scripture that is at the heart of these conflicts, and what forms of knowledge and expertise should have precedence, one based on ‘‘traditional ways,’’ and the inclusivity that derives from those traditional ways, or one based on synchronicity with ‘‘modern’’ progress, largely through Trinidadian nationalism’s public venues for showcasing exclusively constructed group identities as a means of pressing the state for resource distribution. At the same time, traditional ways are not accessible to outsiders, and a significant aspect of modern nationalism is an all-embracing ‘‘one love,’’ where staged performances of distinct identities command the public eye. In the public sphere, as ‘‘highly visible projects,’’ to quote one pandit in whose home I have enjoyed many visits and conversations, Hindu prayers become interpreted as ‘‘cultural’’ rather than ‘‘religious’’ symbols. While ritual is certainly considered religious practice, as rites become carried out in wider social arenas they are more apt to be treated by the variegated composition of people present as secular events, particularly if they are events that are ideally common to ‘‘every creed and race’’ in the Trinidad nation. As we saw in chapter 1, the sacrality of ‘‘religion,’’ and its specificity to certain groups may be jeopardized within a national cultural embrace. According to another Hindu acquaintance in South, in the sanctity of the home, the religious presence is a stronger thing, but out there in the national stage, because it has invited itself into a greater vision, the eyes of the public, it speaks now in different mediums and softens the religious tone so that it will get greater acceptability. In Trinidad we promote only one aspect of culture, what can be staged, and deny other aspects of culture, which are the more abstract, more living out of principle. The living ability of culture has been denied into the stageability of culture. It [‘‘stageability’’] has given a knockout to the living ability of culture. Here again we see echoes of the value placed on abstractions, on philosophy, in other words, rather than on the literal interpretation of religion as something to be dissected into public art, performances that are not ritual enactments for a select number, but ‘‘highly visible projects’’ for all. It is in these wider contexts, too, that pandits must manage the impressions they make, in terms of the authority they exercise, the forms of expertise they promote, and the knowledge they impart. At a multicommunity Phagwa (Holi) celebration I attended a few years ago, one of several masters of ceremony admonished the mostly juvenile and adolescent participants: ‘‘While we engage ourselves in the pomp and gaiety and merriment of Phagwa, we must be careful not to carnivalize Phagwa. We must resist temptations to let emerge in our religious celebration a car-

182

Callaloo Nation

nival merriment . . . We have no fear of our rich culture or very great religion diminishing. This is a very religious occasion.’’ Ideally grounded in scripture and contained as they are in the intimate space of mandir or home, a prayers in theory is not as subject to the potential incursions of ‘‘carnivalization,’’ the ultimate in mixing—a cultural, racial, religious bacchanal. The debates about the content and meaning of a prayers, and on the pedagogical style and technical qualifications of pandits, however, are a good indication that protection against carnivalization can only be an ideal (and ideological) goal. The intimate space of mandir and home can be affected by more distant, profane influences through misinterpretation of traditions and through transformations in pedagogy. Traditions and pedagogy are each in a dialectical relationship with so-called public space (which, paradoxically, both blurs and buttresses distinctions between public and private). As pandits work to make ritual prayers emblematic of particular ways of knowing, they necessarily engage on a continuous basis the swirling forces of Trinidadian mixing. As certain ways of knowing grow to be authorized knowledge, they become emblematic of a specifically, exclusively yet tolerantly, Hindu identity.

‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’

183

7 ‘‘YOU GET HONOR FOR YOUR KNOWLEDGE’’

A masjid in South. Photo by author.

I

s l a m p r e s u p p o s e s , at least ideally, a coherence that renders actual or possible variations in practice a matter of discussion on the part of clerics, lay practitioners, or scholars. While never completely determining social relations, orthodoxy, or the ‘‘correct model,’’ is pivotal in Islam; ‘‘argument and conflict over the form and significance of practices are . . . a natural part of any Islamic tradition’’ (Asad 1986:15, 16). This discourse is, as Talal Asad points out, more than merely a body of opinion; it expresses a distinctive relationship of power, through debate about what is correct and what must prevail. Among my most hospitable and committed informants has been a septuagenarian imam living in a village in South. Born and raised in estate barracks with indentured parents, Imam Rahim was ‘‘self-trained,’’ he quietly but proudly mentioned when we first met, having worked at agricultural and other manual labor his whole life. For decades a community and religious leader of his area’s jamaat, he took pains one evening over dinner to explain that the difference between an imam and the rest of the jamaat ‘‘is nothing necessary.’’ He continued that there are two kinds of religious education in Islam, an elemental one that all Muslims must have, and a specialized one that at least one person in the community must have. This person, who possesses specialized knowledge and expertise is usually (though not always) the imam. In his statement is Imam Rahim’s effort to pinpoint (for both of us) the relationship between the anti-hierarchical constitution of Islam and the power relations, the form of differences in status and authority, that obtain within a given jamaat. Imam Rahim was acutely aware of the debates about the definition and interpretation of orthodoxy, and who wields a particular point of view most forcefully, that have been a characteristic of Muslim communities

everywhere. As the twentieth century advanced in Trinidad, new generations of the upwardly mobile and formally educated were brought forward. At the same time, international arenas for these debates and discussions became increasingly connected transregionally, intensifying both agreement and disagreement. These transformations were, and are, registered within local communities, and by individuals. Reminiscing that ‘‘before’’ (in his youth) a person’s status in the community was unambiguous, Imam Rahim continued his contemplation: ‘‘In your community, people respect you. They say, ‘He is a imam.’ You get a good seat, you get honored by that. You get a good place, they don’t keep you in the back, you get in the front. They give you a honor, to put you in the front all the time, because you are a leader. You get honor for your knowledge. For living the din [in his meaning, a life guided by Islam], and for true service towards Islam and the community.’’ A day or two before our visit, the imam had attended a ‘‘function’’ (‘‘a prayers’’) and for the first time he could remember, he was not, in his estimation, accorded the proper deference from the hosts or those attending. His disappointment was not from personal vanity, but from a realization that as an older head imam representing a particular kind of interpretive tradition, he was losing ground— to younger, formally educated, in some ways more strident Muslim leadership. Although older and younger Muslim leaders share a commitment to Sunni Islam and the Hanafi school of thought, within these rubrics refractions occur. Making a rueful comment on what he perceived as his own diminishing stature in the community, Imam Rahim emphasized the recognition accorded to a leader, which for him was most valuable in its manifestation as honor. His reference to being given ‘‘a good seat,’’ then, is both literal and figurative. With the promotion of a nontraditional form of Islam, the knowledge claimed by Imam Rahim, and, importantly, the community service he is diligent in providing, become reevaluated, as part of a stalwart ‘‘long time’’ past but as perhaps also contradicting the universalist objectives of the present. Like most Trinidadian Muslims, Imam Rahim views Islam as a model for realizing harmonious social relations among groups, and its practice as a model for Muslim unity. Its practice is also seen by practitioners, however, as potentially revealing qualitative differences among Muslims. These differences not only indicate the diversity of expressions of Islam in local contexts. They also tell us about wider social and political processes in the societies in which they are embedded.∞ Shifts in debate and the predominance of certain forms of difference over others are not limited to intellectual domains; they are manifest in the everyday experiences of practicing Muslims. An example of what Dale Eickelman has called ‘‘dispersed, transregional, ‘minority’ Islamic groups’’ (1984:11), Indo-Trinidadian Muslims’

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

187

concern with depth of belief and correctness of practice gains salience through their perception that they lack a deep cultural history of Islam such as exists in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These concerns, connected to narratives of diaspora, fuel a good deal of religious discourse among various Muslim groups in the country. A further complication is one of heritage, the historical development of Islam in Trinidad; that is, the course of its ‘‘Indianization.’’ The Muslim heritage brought to the New World with Indian indentured laborers was one greatly influenced by Hinduism and the cultural patterns of the Indian subcontinent, as opposed to those of the Middle East. As Samaroo remarks, ‘‘in modern-day Trinidad and Guyana, where there are substantial Muslim populations, there is much confusion, often conflict, between these two types of Islam’’ (1987:7). The issue of diaspora, or rupture, and the issue of heritage, or roots, form the discursive framework within which Indo-Trinidadian Muslims interpret Islam and construct their identities as Muslims. As we have seen in previous chapters, ideologies of authenticity are key to the (diasporic) disruptions over time of Indo-Trinidadian cultural and religious lineages. Diaspora and heritage are each mixing metaphors for the problem of authenticity, which figures prominently in local contests over orthodox doctrine, heterodoxy, and simi-dimi, as well as in orthodoxy’s definition and everyday applications. Both metaphors contain the problematic of continuity and change in the practice of Islam in overseas, transregional contexts. In contemporary, so-called multiethnic nation-states, certain cultural forms are validated as ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘authentic’’ culture and are compared unfavorably with devalued, ‘‘unauthentic’’ cultural forms that are categorized as simply adaptive, as superstitions, or as deviant behavior (see also Williams 1990:112). As reified notions, these attributed cultural qualities work in Trinidadian society as diagnostic emblems for establishing racial, religious, or class identities, and describe group identity insofar as the quality and boundaries of that identity are assessed: how much culture, what kinds of tradition, how grand the heritage, how attenuated the roots. Among Indo-Trinidadian Muslims, central to these issues is how the definitions and interpretations of culture, tradition, heritage, and roots are expressed in religious terms and contexts. These definitions mark not only religious boundaries but the authenticity of the practices or characteristics they encompass. Authenticity connotes origination from a source—unaltered, untainted, and unabated. But this original source is both timeless and very much mired in the actions (and frailties) of human beings. On the one hand, traditions, beliefs, and practices have historical and empirical origins (‘‘Vedic times,’’ the ‘‘time of the Prophet Mohammed,’’ the ‘‘long time’’

188

Callaloo Nation

of indentured immigrants), which place them squarely within human agency. On the other hand, traditions, beliefs, and practices that authentically represent a people, the thinking goes, also transcend specific human actions. The factor of human activity is inescapable in at least one aspect: authenticity is also located in personal conscientiousness, which in religious terms is read as correct and sincere belief and practice, indices of one’s piety. Although piety ideally is absolute (one possesses it or does not), it is measured in relative terms (a person evinces more or less of it, ‘‘it’’ being gauged by specific criteria of correctness and authenticity). Therefore, piety must be managed. Overzealous correctness has the danger of conveying intolerance or exclusivity, which are contrary to the social ideas of the callaloo nation and ‘‘living good with people.’’ Seemingly effusive sincerity has the danger of appearing to be what is locally decried as ‘‘hypocritical,’’ a false, excessive protesting that is presumed to mask self-serving and hence unreligious motives, or appearing irrationally ‘‘fanatical,’’ another local image connoting inappropriate degrees, expressions, and contexts of religious practice. During a large prayers I attended one year, for example, a man came into the masjid hall wearing a burnoose. He was secretly ridiculed by others present for ‘‘breakin’ style,’’ showing off. His self-presentation suggested to his fellows either, on the one hand, an inappropriate preoccupation with his appearance, revealing an un-Islamic worldliness and superficiality, or, on the other hand, an inappropriate exaggeration of piety, which suggested an incorrect expression of belief even while it would be recognized by those present as appropriate for Muslims in other (e.g., Middle Eastern) contexts. Indo-Trinidadian Muslims’ discussion about correct methods of religious expression and authentic identities focus largely on ritual ‘‘functions’’ (also called ‘‘a prayers’’). As ubiquitous as those of Hindus, functions (the more common term among Muslims) are pedagogical, as well. Embodied in the personas and practices of imams and other religious leadership, functions are arenas of discourse and debate about correct religious knowledge, the definition and place of authentic cultural traditions in religious practice, and the implications these have for a Muslim identity that ideally is consonant with ‘‘Indo-Trinidadian,’’ ‘‘Trinidadian,’’ and ‘‘Islamic’’ identities. As we saw in previous chapters, there is in Trinidad a fine line distinguishing identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which hierarchies are reinforced. Religious purity that emphasizes distinctions must reconcile with the social imperative of harmonious cooperation, of ‘‘living good with people.’’ This directive resonates with the larger metaphor of mixing in Trinidad, where racial or ethnic purity must reconcile with the need for equality and cooperation, and where cultural or traditional purity aids resistance to the hegemonic social order yet must reconcile with the pursuit and incorpora-

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

189

tion of modernity and ‘‘progress.’’ The tensions that exist in debates about progress, measured against the litmus test of ‘‘purity,’’ may have precursors and parallels in South Asian or Arabian Islam, but this icon of purity is vital, and complete, only insofar as it articulates with other, local Trinidadian ideologies of difference—racial, cultural, religious, class. These distinctions help shape the meaning and significance of the search for purities in a mixed environment. Afro-Trinidadian Muslim Interlocutors The history of Islam in the Caribbean is not well documented relative to other religions that found their way there. Although in small numbers in Trinidad, Afro-Trinidadian Muslims have been politically visible for two decades and more, particularly since the government coup attempted in 1990 by the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen and its leader, Imam Abu Bakr (see, for example, Ryan 1991). They have also gained in visibility through the growth of racially mixed Muslim organizations, such as the Islamic Missionaries Guild. Partly due to the issue of race and partly due to the issue of religious orthodoxy and its interpretation, Afro-Trinidadian Islam has been, from its increasing profile since the 1980s, an important interlocutor in Indo-Trinidadian Muslims’ interpretation of Islamic belief and practice. This section highlights critical aspects of Afro-Muslim presentations of Islam and their influence on Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. Islam is shared by both Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians, but in contested and negotiated ways that reflect two important and interlinked dimensions: their contemporary relations with each other vis-à-vis the Trinidadian state, and their relation to their respective social and cultural pasts. There are no reliable figures on the number of Muslims among the AfroTrinidadian population. Verbal reports vary from one or two thousand to many thousands, depending on the source. Some Africans, as enslaved or free immigrants, arrived in the New World as Muslims (Warner-Lewis 1991). In a fascinating travel narrative of their visit to the West Indies between 1840 and 1841, to witness ‘‘the effects produced upon both the emancipated laborers and their former masters,’’ three Society of Friends representatives describe meeting in Trinidad a ‘‘Mahometan priest, named Emir Samba Makumba’’ (Truman et al. 1844:108). Greeting them in Arabic and conversing with them in French, the Emir ‘‘was by descent a chief and a priest among the Mandingoes in Africa’’ and ‘‘belonged to the tribe Fullah Tauro’’ (108). In 1795, when he was twenty-one, he was brought to Trinidad, having been ‘‘purchased from a slave ship by a French planter, who gave him the name of Simon Boissere’’ (108). Eventually he was able to buy his freedom and, along with others who had done the same, ‘‘formed . . . an association to maintain their religious profession, Samba acting as their

190

Callaloo Nation

priest’’ (108). When new slave ships arrived in Trinidad, the Emir and his fellows inquired after the ‘‘Mandingoes’’ on board and ‘‘ransomed them immediately’’ (108). The Friends counted ‘‘several hundred of them at present in this island,’’ who ‘‘continue their form of faith and worship’’ (108). At the beginning of the nineteenth century an active Muslim presence in Trinidad was still evident, continuing for several decades (Campbell 1974); the legacy of this presence is seen today in such place names as Mandinga Village, a small community in the southwestern part of the island. Their legacy also continues in the local Trinidadian slang term for Muslims, Madinga, which Indo-Trinidadian Hindus occasionally use in jest. Finally, and more importantly, awareness of the two centuries of African Muslims’ presence in the Caribbean, along with the far longer history of Islam in Africa, prompts Afro-Trinidadian Muslims to refer to themselves as ‘‘returnees’’ rather than as ‘‘converts.’’ By the mid-nineteenth century ‘‘an effective, vibrant Black Muslim presence in the Caribbean had disappeared’’ (Samaroo 1988:6; Campbell 1974). Never having disappeared entirely, however, a number of international developments have significantly shaped the character of AfroTrinidadian Islam. The rise of an international Black Power movement in the 1960s and North American Islam influenced and inspired AfroTrinidadian Muslims (including Imam Abu Bakr), shaping a good deal of their ideology about local social reform. Postwar anticolonial movements in Africa seeking political and other forms of independence provided another, earlier influence. As one Indo-Trinidadian Muslim, well-versed in Trinidad’s history of Islam explained, ‘‘When the African states began to achieve independence . . . the people of African origin [in Trinidad] also began to look at what was happening in the African continent . . . ‘What about the African culture?’ Islam was the religion of the African forefathers . . . The more people became conscious of African culture . . . they had to realize that Islam is part of Africa.‘‘ When discussing their ideas about Islam, the Afro-Trinidadian Muslims I spoke with did not invoke Africa as a particular kind of cultural space as much as Indo-Trinidadian Muslims tended to do when referring to AfroTrinidadian Muslims. Indo-Trinidadian Muslims treat Africa as an enraced and encultured place that must affect religious heritage, akin to the ways they view India’s cultural traditions and racial identities as inherent in religious heritage. This perspective does not translate into Indo-Trinidadian Muslim complacency about the presence of cultural traditions in religious belief and practice or the racial identities these traditions suggest. Yet Afro-Trinidadian Muslims seem more uniformly inclined to see place (as a site of culture and race) and religion as distinct—although involving an important historical relationship. An Afro-Trinidadian Mus-

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

191

lim informant said, ‘‘The African people who came to Trinidad basically were from West Africa, and more specifically from the Mandingo and Fulani tribes. And all these people who came here were Muslims, so the African presence of Islam has been here from the inception, four hundred years ago, and not twenty years ago!’’ Here the significance of (West) Africa anchors an ancient and supralocal religion, Islam, to a specific geographic entity, Trinidad, and to one of its key foundational populations, diasporic Africans. The point this man was making was not to promote the idea that (African) cultural influences have a place in Islam. Instead, he underscores both the legitimate presence of a more encompassing, non-Indian–influenced Islam in Trinidad, and the authenticity of claims to it by Afro-Trinidadians. For IndoTrinidadian Muslims, Afro-Trinidadian Muslims’ ability to claim an ‘‘Arabian’’-derived Islam (that is cultureless and raceless) stimulates IndoTrinidadian Muslim debates about orthodoxy. These debates about the ‘‘correct’’ model of Islam often address the problem of ‘‘traditional ways’’ that hint at exclusivity, particularism, and disharmony. Such ways are perceived as incompatible with the democratic ideals of tolerating difference required by the mixed (callaloo) nation. Afro-Trinidadian Muslims’ emphasis on an all-embracing Islam does not, however, mean an uncritical acceptance of state policy and authority. Among Afro-Trinidadian Muslims, at least with reference to the largest and most active of the jamaats, interpretations of the nature of Islam combine with perceptions of Africans’ history in the Caribbean. These then create a Muslim identity oriented toward critique of, and resistance to, political and economic oppression. The bases of state power and distribution of resources are to be queried rather than tolerated, as some Afro-Trinidadian Muslims charge Indo-Trinidadian Muslims with doing. In contrast to what they see as concessions on the part of Indo-Trinidadian Muslims, through political enervation, as well as their tradition-based religious innovation, many Afro-Trinidadian Muslims view an authentic Islam as challenging structural inequalities that go against the grain of Islamic egalitarianism. Contemporary Afro-Trinidadian Muslims are largely from the urban grass roots; among them Islam is seen as a way toward social as well as moral and spiritual uplift. Espousing resistance to hegemonic Christianity, Euro-American colonialism, and social inequality, these Afro-Trinidadian Muslims identify the state with a set of values and priorities associated with elite interests. For many Afro-Trinidadian Muslims, then, practicing Islam in an authentic, noninnovative way ideally provides a corrective to class and race disparities. For many Indo-Trinidadian Muslims, however, practicing Islam is an instructive critique of their own communities. The construction of intracommunity authenticity is directly relevant to the way groups are posi-

192

Callaloo Nation

tioned in the larger structure of state patronage. Shoring up ‘‘correct’’ but temperate religious practice in a ‘‘Western’’ environment that is inherently rife with both distracting temptations and an ‘‘Eastern’’ history of other than Islamic influences is regarded as a more pressing demand than directly challenging the state. The more uniform class composition of Afro-Trinidadian Muslims versus Indo-Trinidadian Muslims is certainly a contributing factor in underscoring class inequality and social injustice in Afro-Trinidadian Muslim ideology. As one Afro-Trinidadian Muslim, very active in community-based social welfare programs among black, urban, grassroots neighborhoods, told me: ‘‘For them [Indo-Trinidadians], Islam is a private thing, to keep in their bedrooms [endogamy] or in the mosque. But . . . Islam has all social, political, economic requirements for life, but they [Indo-Trinidadians] didn’t project this.’’ Couching his comments in terms of religious purity and authenticity, this speaker looks unfavorably on the way Indo-Trinidadians practice Islam: ‘‘When the African [Muslim] presence came to Trinidad, all these [religious] innovations became clarified and that began a sort of ideological friction in the community . . . a lot of ideological conflicts because the African community saw it [Islam] in other places in the world and know the Quran.’’ Conflicts over doctrine and its application were a lively part of IndoTrinidadian Islam before this most recent, late-twentieth-century engagement with nonsubcontinental points of view. But the rise of a concerted Afro-Trinidadian Muslim voice and its attention to ‘‘cultural innovations’’ tainting ‘‘pure’’ religious expression became an important interlocutor in Indo-Trinidadian Muslim discourse. What this speaker also conveys, however, is the larger, historical conflict between Afro and Indo in Trinidad, albeit couched in terms of religious purity and mixing. Despite their less strident disapproval, critique of class inequalities is certainly not absent among Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. For one thing, such critique is a key element informing the generational tensions between older head and younger religious and community leaders (see also chapter 6). For another, it is more often focused on Indo-Trinidadian Muslims’ internal social hierarchies and made within their communities. Unlike the examples of Mauritius (Hollup 1996) and Bangladesh (Gardner 1995), which also have histories of population diasporas and ethnic and racial diversity, in Trinidad the emphasis on Islamic purity and cultural innovations is not primarily concentrated among the educated, urban population. While urban elites certainly have a long history of involvement in these kinds of discussions, grassroots people of South have been similarly absorbed by them. In the early years of the twentieth century, Indo-Trinidadian Muslim ritual ‘‘functions’’ were more the prerogative of urban elites, given their financial ability to host them and their interest in constructing an iden-

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

193

tity based partly on certain forms of class privilege, notably formal education and expert knowledge. The East Indian Herald, for example, reported on a wedding function in Siparia in 1919, emphasizing that the ‘‘guests who attended were numerous, being all leading Mahomedans in their districts’’ (16). Concern about Islamic purity and cultural innovations constitutes a discourse that becomes more emphatic later in the century, and crosses class boundaries. Among the grass roots, it is often a commentary on unjust social differences that are encouraged by ignorance or misunderstanding of religious knowledge. When expressed in a religious idiom (which is a safer discourse because the moral imperative is attached to things sacred), challenges to social hierarchies connected to class position can be made directly. One of my Indo-Trinidadian Muslim informants, Keno, disapprovingly called a ‘‘Wahabi’’ by more ‘‘traditional,’’ that is, India-oriented, Indo-Trinidadian Muslims, told me: ‘‘Islam got away from the slaves in Africa. But the indentured slaves [Indians] tried to keep it, with these little functions [a prayers]. But people today keep up the functions and leave off the rest . . . People believe in too much functions. The Quran tells us, ‘Don’t forget the needy,’ and in functions you only see the strong and wealthy ones. They are the people that are the most invited in functions, some sort of recognition of high, big personalities.’’ In Trinidad, a ‘‘Wahabi’’ is a proponent of the view that certain aspects of Islam are inappropriately influenced by cultural traditions not emanating from sacred texts or the practices and edicts of the Prophet Mohammed.≤ It also can have the connotation of ‘‘fanatic’’ for some, and is thus avoided as a descriptor by most people, even if they consider themselves of a ‘‘reformist’’ bent. For this reason people referred to Keno as ‘‘a Wahabi’’ only quietly, and, I noticed, not to his face. Most Indo-Trinidadian Muslims are not of the opinion that there are ‘‘too much functions.’’ Yet Keno’s stance is a critique of status he views as inimical to authentic Islam: decrying preferential treatment for the ‘‘strong,’’ ‘‘wealthy,’’ ‘‘high,’’ and ‘‘big’’ in ritual performances. Keno’s disapproval of the pomp and ceremony of functions is, then, a commentary on social inequality. But it also stems from his rejection of exactly what Imam Rahim, an older head with a ‘‘traditional’’ viewpoint, spoke about— the satisfactions of honor. Whereas Imam Rahim felt honor is due those who possess special knowledge, with which they serve the community, Keno is of the opinion that when proper knowledge gets derailed, false values that betray the correct form of Islam prevail. Profile of Functions and ‘‘A Prayers’’ Viewed through a Western lens, Muslim rituals, at least those that follow an orthodox model, often do not appear to have the ‘‘intrinsic symbolic

194

Callaloo Nation

richness’’ (Bowen 1989:615)—the intricate and apparently arcane procedures—that tend to characterize Hindu devotional rites. A more relativist stance, however, (including Bowen’s own [1993]) perceives that complexity also lies in other domains, notably the text-based recitations and khutbahs that are key aspects of functions, and the debates over certain ritual practices of which functions are comprised. The pedagogical role of Muslim functions, as among Hindus, concerns the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, knowledge construed as both information and edification. The emphasis on pedagogy derives from the particular social and cultural history of Indo-Trinidadian people; among Muslims it has been advanced, as well, by formal injunctions to teach about and proselytize Islam, such as daw’ah. In Trinidad the objective is to increase one’s understanding and appreciation of the religion, thereby strengthening piety and extending one’s distance from the ‘‘carnivalized’’ atmosphere produced by unchecked mixing. Always present, as well, is the related objective of sharpening one’s mind as a form of social empowerment, in order to minimize vulnerability and possibilities for being ‘‘fooled.’’ Furthermore, the recitations and khutbahs in rituals provide information and edification which are marks of upward mobility that can be claimed even by those lacking formal education or middle-class position. Locally glossed as a ‘‘Quranic reading’’ or a ‘‘maulood sherif,’’ virtually all functions include either reading and interpreting suras (chapters) from the Quran and/or singing qasidas.≥ The basic chronology of Quranic readings and maulood sherifs is the opening dua (prayer), in which everyone participates; fifteen- to thirty-minute readings from the Quran, usually by male older heads; group reading (aloud or silently) of certain suras from the Quran (usually the last ten chapters); group singing of qasidas; a lecture or special address (sometimes more than one, depending on the scale of the event); the tazeem, participated in by all; and finally the closing dua, also involving everyone present. Variations reflect the particular purpose of a function, the amount of time spent on each of its constituent activities, the qasidas chosen, the specific content of the khutbahs and addresses, and the kinds of other activities that might be a part of the event. The latter may include performances of text recitals, songs, or religious poems by adults and children who are jamaat members, and the speeches of honored guests from other jamaats near or far. At times activities may also include animal sacrifice. Goats are typically sacrificed, as for the haqika (see below), but also cattle for the major event, Eid ul-Adha (Bacra Eid). Functions that are held in the masjid hall tend to be of a grander, more ambitious constitution than those held in a home. The home is where personal commemorations occur, unless the event is particularly important or the household capable of sustaining considerable cost. Halls

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

195

built as structures attached to masjids are generally the sites of large-scale functions, especially calendrically based Islamic events, which virtually always have some sort of public observance.∂ The variety of occasions for which functions might be held further distinguishes them into identifiable types, which can be grouped into two general categories. There are those officially based on the Islamic calendar; others are locally or individually determined rites of worship. Examples of the former are Eid ul-Fitr (the feast breaking the fast of Ramadan), Eid ul-Adha or Bukra Eid (the feast of sacrifice on the tenth day of the month of Zil Hajj), Milad ul-Nabi (the prophet Mohammed’s birthday), meeraj (the prophet Mohammed’s ascension to Heaven), and qurbani (sacrifice of goat or cow as an act of piety during the month of Zil Hajj).∑ Local noncalendrical observances include the haqika, which, in Trinidad, is pledging oneself to Allah and to living according to Islamic teachings (expressed in part through ritual sacrifice of a goat), and the life-cycle celebrations of individuals such as birthdays or anniversaries, observed as religious occasions in lieu of a party—a secular and ‘‘mixed’’ (impure) affair. Maktab classes tutor community residents of all ages in the principles of Islam, in reading Arabic, and sometimes in learning qasidas. Not belonging to what are locally understood as functions, maktab classes nonetheless offer instructional opportunities about material often included in a function’s program. Some local jamaats have ladies groups, which are also sites of instruction and discussion. Here, women come only appropriately attired in shalwar chemise (tunic and loose trousers), and rarely saris, with heads enwrapped in orhni (scarf) or hijab (full head covering), to participate in similar activities of reading texts and discussing their content. The popularity of maktab classes and ladies group meetings wax and wane, depending on the broader religious and political climate. Older heads speak of attending maktabs when they were children, or their parents attending (or teaching) them, which would mean these classes were being held at the turn of the century and probably much earlier. During the time I have been working in South (1987–present), there have always been maktab classes offered by at least a few jamaats. My impression is that they are not extensively attended—although consistently attended by some. During the late 1980s I attended several meetings of our local jamaat’s ladies group, and there were usually a half dozen to two dozen women present, depending on how highly charged the atmosphere was. Factors that might stimulate the vitality of the group and the regularity of meetings include: the arrival of a visiting missionary from abroad, an increase of local residents making Hajj during that period of time, or an individual’s personal experience—either a distressing one or one that required gratitude. Throughout the 1990s this particular ladies group occa-

196

Callaloo Nation

sionally stopped meeting altogether and then reconstituted itself with renewed vigor, generally with a small kernel of the same members. Religious activities that are ancillary to functions ebb and flow. Functions themselves, however, whether small and modest estates or large and conspicuous in masjid halls and middle class and elite homes, have been a continuous presence in communities throughout the island, and their core has remained fairly consistent over time. In 1919, for example, the East Indian Herald covered a wedding ceremony (needless to say, between members of two elite families), that was reportedly followed by ‘‘an address touching [on] the obligations and duties of married life,’’ delivered by Sheikh Hafiz Yacub Ali Hanafi Kadri (16). Then another honored guest, Rukhmudin Mean, briefly lectured in the Urdar [Urdu] dialect touching [on] the oneness of God, giving a biographical sketch of Mahomed the Prophet. Zahur Khan and other priests read out the Maulud Shireffe, explaining each passage. Ismail and Amir Ali read the English translation of a lecture by Khwaja Kamab Uddin in England, published in a recent number of the Islamic Review (London). The speakers then offered up prayers in English suited to the occasion . . . [The event] was brought to a close by the leading priest, Sheikh Hafiz. Another major newspaper of the Indo-Trinidadian press, the East Indian Patriot, reported in 1923: The Mohammedans anniversary viz: ‘Shabrat’ was celebrated by the Muslims of the district [Cedros, St. Patrick County] . . . The function began at 7:30 p.m. with the following. 1. Quoran [sic] was read by the Imam Mohammed Ali, assisted by Juman Miyan [Mean] and Sammad Miyan. 2. Isan [Isa] Namaj [namaaz] was offered by the Imam followed by the rest. 3. Juman Miyan addressed the congregation, explaining the meaning of the word Shabrat, and how it came into existence. 4. Maulood was recited by the Imam assisted by Abdul Summad Garib and Juman Miyan. 5. Fajar namaz [sic] or morning prayers was offered by the Imam followed by the rest. The function terminated about 6 a.m. on Monday. (vol. 2, no. 10:17) An ethnographic description from the late 1950s by Arthur and Juanita Niehoff suggests that noncalendrical functions have retained some consistency over the past several decades: At irregular intervals, devout Moslems give prayer meetings, popularly called ‘‘kitabs,’’ at their homes . . . These ceremonies serve about the same function as the Hindu puja and are similar to them except that instead of the elaborate Hindu ritual, the reading of the Koran is the essence of the function. The ceremony is conducted at the home ‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

197

of the sponsor who offers it to bless the house, to honor the dead, or simply as a periodic thanksgiving ceremony. When the guests assemble, the imam gives a reading and interpretation of a part of the Koran, gifts are given to the poor, the blessed food, sherni, is distributed to each person, and then all guests are served a meal. In the middle of this ceremony, as in most Hindu rituals, a small bottle of perfume is brought around and a dab is put on each guest. This custom is explained as ‘‘making everybody clean.’’ (1960:141) With the exceptions of purifying with perfume (which, while standard at Hindu prayers, occurred, in my experience, only very rarely at Muslim functions, surely because of the Hindu/India connotation) and gifts being given to the poor (undertaken nowadays in a more formally organized manner as zakat), the ‘‘kitab’’—now called ‘‘a thanksgiving’’—would be familiar to any Muslim or Hindu today.∏ Functions refer to both sacred events or periods marked by the Islamic calendar and the particular personal commemorations of individuals. In Trinidad I have attended many occasions of both kinds. While some functions have remained consistent in content and frequency, others have become more commonplace and formalized than in past decades. Of the latter, the haqika is a good example. Over forty years ago, Robert J. Smith observed that the haqika ‘‘rarely takes place in modern Trinidad’’ (1963:84). More specifically, Smith states that ‘‘no Hakika ceremony took place in [his field site] during one year, 1957–58, nor was [he] able to learn of such Muslim observances in other areas in the Island’’ (1963:84, n. 2). During my own fieldwork, however, if a function were being sponsored by a household in South, it would not be unusual to find a haqika as one of its ritual objectives. A possible reason for this was suggested to me in 1995 by an Indo-Trinidadian Muslim woman, who speculated that ‘‘some of the people having a function who are holding [killing] a couple of goats, anyway, say, ‘Why not do a haqika one time [simultaneously]?’ So you get a dual function. Your function is a thanksgiving, and a haqika for a couple of your kids. A lot of people have been doing it like this over the past couple of years.’’ Another possible reason for the increasing frequency of haqikas is economic: upward mobility, fostered by both the oil boom of the 1970s and the remittance economy of the late 1980s and 1990s, allowed for greater disposable income and conspicuous consumption. This has been coupled with the augmented influence of religio-cultural organizations, who encourage demonstrating religious identity in publicly visible and correctly learned, authentic ways, such as by holding functions. My friend Khadija explained about the haqika, ‘‘People are hearing more about it through lectures.’’ ‘‘People get smarter now,’’ her sister added. A haqika is a ‘‘form of assurance that a child will be blessed with God and live a life in consonance with God’s teachings. Like 198

Callaloo Nation

insurance for a vehicle . . . you can insure for the better,’’ as one imam defined it. Often occurring as part of the life-cycle changes that people experience, ones that make them decide to become more demonstrably pious, haqikas are sponsored by adults for themselves as much as for children. Now most haqikas in Trinidad are not undertaken for infants because most parents cannot afford goats for multiple children; ‘‘it’s done when the child gets on his own, he has his own done,’’ another informant explained. The two haqikas I describe here were sponsored, respectively, by the families of a twenty-three-year-old woman, Parveen, and a woman in her late forties, Jasmine. Both said to me that they had simply decided it was time. Both functions were household-based (rather than held in a masjid hall); Parveen’s was small, private, and brief, Jasmine’s more ambitious, involved a few neighboring jamaats and an entire afternoon. Present at Parveen’s haqika were her mother, her mother’s sister, the imam (her mother’s sister’s husband), her mother-in-law (the imam’s sister), her father-in-law, one grandson of the imam, her friend (a neighbor), and myself. In the outside area behind the house, all of us remained to one side as Parveen stood by the goat and held the sacrificial knife to its throat while the imam uttered the requisite prayers in Arabic. When he completed the prayers, she moved away, handing the knife to two men who were present to carry out the act, and as the imam continued to pray audibly, the animal was sacrificed. Throughout, the imam’s wife splashed buckets of water over the area to keep it clean. The goat’s blood was drained into a shallow channel cut through the concrete of the enclosed space (for such purposes); then it was cut up into equal thirds to be distributed to the household, the extended family, and the poor (‘‘only for the really needy, who you know!,’’ one of the participants admonished). During the carving the imam again took Parveen to one side and she repeated after him in English a prayer of self-dedication and submission to Allah. The goat’s liver was cooked for the niaj (ritual offering) and everyone present ate a piece of it. This was the end of the haqika, except for the task of dividing the portion of meat designated for the needy into one-pound heaps and putting these into small plastic bags for immediate distribution by Parveen. I did not learn that a major reason for Jasmine’s function was her haqika until after I had arrived. Jasmine’s husband explained that they were combining their annual prayers with her personal, ‘‘once in a lifetime,’’ as he put it, dedication. There were approximately one hundred and fifty people in attendance; most were women, and among these, several were Hindu (largely neighbors).π In this grassroots household, most of the women were attired in fancier versions of Western dress, although wearing orhnis. Even as the person to whom this ritual was devoted, Jasmine wore a rather

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

199

plain, standard Western-style dress, though again with orhni. Had this been a function in a masjid hall, or one sponsored by a middle-class family, the women would have worn shalwar chemise, and many not with orhni but with hijab (which is associated with ‘‘correct,’’ non-Indian Islamic traditions).∫ This indicates the more self-conscious, public orientation of large-scale functions and the extra effort participants may make to demonstrate correct piety and sincere commitment. A more ambitious production than Parveen’s, Jasmine’s function followed closely the large-scale, masjid hall affairs in its program and organization. (If the event is large enough, printed programs are passed out among the assembly. Hindus may also do this if a prayers is extensive enough.) Around a table at the front of the area sat six men, including the imam and Jasmine’s husband (being one of the hosts). On the table were the standard accoutrements—flowers, a pitcher of water and glasses, and incense sticks (lobhan) burning in a small vase. First on the program, the imam prayed aloud in Arabic, then offered an English translation. This consisted of a formal greeting to the gathering, an explanation for the occasion, and ‘‘calling the name of the Lord before proceeding.’’ Next was the opening dua. Following this, the assembly engaged in a collective reading of suras, in booklet form, from the Quran (most reading the last ten chapters) for fifteen minutes. Before initiating this, the imam let us know what would happen after the group reading was complete: ‘‘We will go to a second part of the program. With the limited knowledge that I have I will try to discuss with you the present-day living.’’ During this portion, the imam read his passages into a microphone; some at the table read silently, though with the requisite moving of the lips; others sat with hands on their laps, eyes downcast, contemplative or respectful. Next commenced the singing of qasidas. Each one was led by a different volunteer, male or female, who, subsequent to their rendition, read out the standardized ‘‘meaning’’ from the printed qasida booklet. During the first qasida, Jasmine’s adolescent daughter brought out a bowl of sirni [ritual sweets, same ingredients as prasad] and placed it on the table. In all, four qasidas were sung. At this point, the imam stood and began to address us: ‘‘All praise is due to God. My beloved brothers, sisters, friends, children. May the blessings of the Almighty be showered on us all. We have been granted permission by the Lord to gather here with [Jasmine and her husband] to celebrate the Lord and shower blessings on his Prophet, peace be upon him.’’ The imam proceeded with his lecture on present-day living, focusing on maintaining faith and vigilance in a crime- and comess-ridden world. As a narrative strategy familiar in these kinds of addresses, the imam then introduced a parable to illustrate his message: ‘‘I will now go into a short story, not the details, but the main part of Joseph’’ (Genesis 37– 50). After relating the basics of the tale, the imam emphasized that Joseph

200

Callaloo Nation

did not punish his brothers and that ‘‘this is the type of love and strength he had, and that we need in order to live . . . We need to have love and respect for the other religious organizations in the world. Instead of love today, we have ministers preaching hate. I listened to a [evangelical] crusade the other day . . . I heard in this crusade that the people shouldn’t go to any other religious function, and if they do, they shouldn’t eat the food! What kind of religion is this?’’ The imam ended by entreating the assembly to ‘‘just put 1 percent into practice and the 99 percent will come. Then you will be on the ship to a righteous path.’’ Last on the program, we stood for the tazeem, then performed the closing dua. Finally, the imam reminded us to partake of the food that ‘‘God had blessed this family with.’’ Apparently not necessary for public viewing, the haqika for Jasmine had taken place elsewhere on the premises at some point during the function. In the effort to encourage jamaat members and wider community residents to consistently attend and sponsor functions, hosts as well as imams (or one of the few but growing number of maulanas, or Islamic scholars) often remind participants why functions are imperative. This is not because participants are unaware of why they have come; it is, rather, a rhetorical device that serves to strengthen the sense of community among local Muslims, both at that particular moment and, it is hoped, into the future. The bonds of community develop as much from the social relations of daily interaction as the inspiration of piety. Two examples are illustrative. First, at one annual household Quran sherif, the masjid president gave the opening address, which included the statement, ‘‘We have all attended today in order to honor a dear neighbor’s invitation, to honor Allah, and to gain knowledge.’’ Second, at a meeraj commemoration, an honored guest invited to give an address asked rhetorically, ‘‘What is the purpose of this function today? To socialize in Islamic society and atmosphere—carnival is not for us all!—to get education, and to be spiritual.’’ Certainly, if asked directly, most Muslims in Trinidad would state that honoring Allah and the prophet Mohammed is a function’s principle purpose. But it is precisely this accepted wisdom that allows quotidian social relations to be incorporated as an integral dimension of functions. This is apparent in several related ways among jamaats. First, a valued aspect of functions, that of honoring neighbors’ invitations and socializing in Islamic society and atmosphere, amount to the imperative ‘‘living good with people.’’ Thus, the concept of edification is broadened to include more than familiarity with laws or scripture, Arabic script, correct enactment and understanding of rites, or related text-based knowledge. It also encompasses being informed about ‘‘brothers and sisters in Islam.’’ Keeping informed about persons—neighbors, acquaintances, friends, pumpkin vine kin—spread among jamaats provides opportunities in which one may apply one’s religious ideals to actual situations, inasmuch as a person

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

201

may demonstrate piety by attending in some way to the social welfare of jamaat brethren. Another important social dimension of functions is that the knowledge that comes with function (and masjid) attendance is conveyed through the shared ideas and observed actions of peers. Many ‘‘practical [practicing] Muslims’’ feel that an important part of the revitalizing capacity of functions comes through exposure to other people’s knowledge in addition to the formal messages of khutbahs and lectures. Indirectly acknowledging the postwar transformations in household organization among Indo-Trinidadians, my friend Shireen’s comment counsels against blindly following religious traditions. She links the proliferation of nuclear family households to religious practice: ‘‘Just because you see your parents doing it, maybe you don’t know why or what it is . . . You can’t just stay home again [anymore]. You have to go out and look for it [knowledge about correct practice]. Who going to teach you [at] home? Long time, everyone in the family would stay as one, under one roof or yard. But now, as soon as the children married, they gone. So how they going to learn? My children will only know what they see me doing, not nobody else.’’ Perhaps Shireen’s insistence that people need to supplement what they learn at home is because she ‘‘born and grow in Hindu’’ and ‘‘married in Muslim,’’ changing her name from her original Hindu one and becoming among the most devout members of her jamaat. Shireen was acutely aware of the need for outside instruction. Nonetheless, her words convey the same message I have heard repeatedly, that more nucleated or dispersed families necessitate ‘‘going all about and see[ing] what to do,’’ as another person put it. Nuclear family households in South are more common among the middle class than among the grass roots. As grown children marry, migrate, and move up in class position—due to such factors as neolocality, partible inheritance, and increased educational and travel opportunities—families and households are dispersed to sometimes distant localities. When multiple generations no longer ‘‘stay as one,’’ and social environments become more greatly mixed, family instruction is said to diminish. Thus religious knowledge must be sought from external sources, and brought back within the homogeneous fold of correct knowledge even as the larger environment feels increasingly heterogeneous. The question of who, and what, constitute appropriate agents of instruction, however, can become problematic when the correctness of religious knowledge is debatable. At a ladies group meeting one evening I overheard the following conversation, quite familiar though I did not know the women: Woman 1: Even at my age we can still learn, as people will laugh at us in the masjid and say, ‘‘She is so old and hasn’t learned the right thing?!’’ 202

Callaloo Nation

Woman 2: Sometimes you have to draw a reference to clear things [up]. Say you come and meet me at the mosque and you follow me [in a certain practice], but I doing the wrong thing. But since there are so many books to tell us the right thing, is time we find out the right way and do it, and not just follow each other since we don’t know who of us knows right . . . Nowadays it have sheiks, maulanas, and all, to learn from. Preoccupation with sources of authority (historical and contemporary, textual and oral), with the attendant tension among generations seen to represent different foundations of knowledge, and with the potential indignity of being incorrect are all distilled in this brief exchange. As Muslims strive, in their involvement with functions, toward piety, knowledge, and a clearly defined identity, the spiritual fulfillments of worship articulate—at times grindingly—with the routine of ‘‘living good with people.’’ If not delicately balanced with social mores, striving to gain correct knowledge and demonstrate piety can be interpreted as ‘‘breakin’ style’’: showing off in a boastful and self-serving manner. Both humility and zeal shape religious practices. While fervor can be perceived as overzealousness that reveals an inappropriate fanaticism, it can also be understood as possibly jeopardizing a pure piety by being too public and, in turn, too much like a staged performance—thus crossing the symbolic boundary from sacred (pure) to profane (mixed). What could be seen as an exhibition is felt to be more about breakin’ style than about devotion, and elaborate performances are thought by some Indo-Trinidadian Muslims to reflect cultural (and thus not religiously legitimate) ‘‘innovations’’ from nonIslamic cultural heritages. In his khutbah at a maulood sherif I attended, the imam counseled twice that ‘‘no prestige person will be able to help us on Judgment Day.’’ The guest maulana who was present urged, in his address, ‘‘Unless we are educated and taught how to educate others, we are lost in a dark world. We must save ourselves from corrupted doctrines coming into our religion and unnecessary arguments among ourselves. As the Prophet says, ‘Knowledge isn’t compulsory, but to seek knowledge is compulsory’ . . . Shaitan [Satan] would not [however,] bow to Adam because he feel he too knowledgeable and too pious. So we must not let our knowledge make us feel too big and too proud.’’ The problem of negotiating hierarchical tendencies that may surface in the process of undertaking large-scale functions (whether in a household or masjid hall) is firmly embedded in the day-to-day interactions among community residents. One aspect of this problem became apparent to me after a haqika given by some of my neighbors in their home. Somewhat anxiously, the wife asserted, ‘‘I wanted a prayers that would be really nice. This is why I invite [two religious leaders] to lecture, to spread the mes‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

203

sage of Islam. But if you look at how we [family] did it, it came [seemed] like a show. So I asked [the maulana] if I was doing the right thing, and he say, ‘Yes, it’s the intention that is important.’ ’’ This woman’s trepidation, not uncommon, about the family’s function appearing like a ‘‘show’’ reflects two related issues: that she and her household would seem to be breakin’ style, particularly objectionable in a religious context, and that their function might forfeit some of its spiritual value through becoming akin to an exhibition. In the retrospective accounts of older heads, a common subtext emerges about the interpretation of changes in the form and content of functions. The elderly mother of a local community religious leader echoed the equivocal way in which the size of functions is perceived: ‘‘Long time, things only done in the Muslim [the one correct] way . . . The heads [elder men] gathered, exchanged ideas, [they were] more together. Now Melad un-Nabi is in a big way, different, a big function, a big lecture . . . Long time there was only a few people. But they keep their religion close.’’ Indeed, not only laypersons are sensitive to these issues. At the end of a maulood sherif, the presiding, older head imam indicated that he had made a sufficient contribution to the event in his statement, ‘‘What I give you was like a big function, and sometimes people want the big things without always knowing the little things.’’ Beautifully encapsulated by this imam, it is precisely the tension between determining what are the ‘‘big things’’—that is, depending on point of view, important, correct, or grandiose—and what constitute the ‘‘little things’’—that is, depending on point of view, crucial, misguided, or insignificant details—that fuels debates over innovation and orthodoxy. Cultural Innovations and Orthodox Purifications By the mid-1930s in Trinidad, two processes were well underway in the consolidation of an Islamic identity among Indo-Trinidadian Muslims. First, Muslim religio-cultural organizations were becoming increasingly institutionalized, orchestrating the building of masjids, the contributions of overseas visitors, and the promotion of certain doctrines of orthodoxy, as well as authorizing the imams that represented these doctrines. Second, a more formalized role for imams as community and religious leaders was developing, in part a response to the flourishing of local religiocultural organizations and in part a result of connections with Muslims in other parts of the world, particularly in terms of hosting missionaries and educators from abroad. The overall effect of these processes was a formalizing and codifying of Islamic doctrine out of somewhat divergent traditions and pedagogies, explicitly in the spirit of learning, teaching, and knowing.

204

Callaloo Nation

At its most broad, the construction of orthodox knowledge from heterodox and simi-dimi ways of knowing among Indo-Trinidadian Muslims can be described as what Burton Benedict has called ‘‘sunnification.’’ Referring to the Sunni branch of Islam, to which the majority of Indian Muslims in nineteenth-century labor diasporas belonged (owing to their regions of origin in India), Benedict was pointing to the homogenization of doctrine and increasing orthodoxy that was occurring among Indian Muslims in Mauritius. There, sunnification meant ‘‘the abandonment of local and sectarian practices in favour of a uniform orthodox practice’’ (1965:38). The concern with identifying and eschewing certain practices deemed inappropriate to its basic tenets is a historically characteristic aspect of Islam. In Trinidad, this practice has at its center the problem of ‘‘culture.’’ That is, potentially inappropriate acts and beliefs are discredited as ‘‘innovations,’’ characterized as ‘‘cultural’’ and ‘‘traditional,’’ and traced according to their accretion through social and cultural influences rather than through demonstration by or dictum of the prophet Mohammed. These concerns are, of course, certainly not unprecedented or unique to Trinidad. In Trinidad, however, ‘‘cultural innovation’’ as the antithesis of orthodoxy, has three symbolic associations specific to local conditions. One has to do with culture as national identity. A young, wealthy, welleducated, and urban Indo-Trinidadian man illustrated this very thoughtfully as we enjoyed a long conversation, at his home in Port of Spain, about Islam ‘‘in the West,’’ as he put it. An ardent and active Muslim, Abdul was trying to explain to me what kinds of contradictions can arise in being committed to Islam in an environment that is culturally not conducive to it, even if rhetorically supportive. He confided, Part of [my] strong feelings about Islam are about culture. Something [that] gives me a base to deal with society . . . Culture is a broad word. In Trinidad [Islam] means not being creole. Not just Negro, but creolization. Eventually Trinidad will be a melting pot of a creole culture, the basis of state cultural policy, for example, what is portrayed as ‘‘Trinidad culture.’’ [The state’s] types of cultural activities don’t support the diversity. Creolization is a cross between African [AfroTrinidadian] capitalist culture and North American black culture. Culture means Indian [too] but [it means] not being creole more. In North America it [creole] means ‘‘Third World’’ . . . and [in Trinidad] there’s an obliteration of Indianness, or non-Africanness, let me say. As an urban elite, Abdul would feel acutely the dissonance between the way of life he had long taken for granted and an Islamic way of life that countermanded much of what contributed to his quality of life ‘‘in the West.’’ As a ‘‘good Muslim,’’ in his estimation, he had to curtail his social

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

205

activities and focus on a more somber life of religious introspection and social good works. Abdul’s way of parsing various types of ‘‘culture’’ and their respective degrees of permissibility is typical of Indo-Trinidadian Muslims’ (and Hindus’) analytical unpacking of Trinidadian ‘‘culture.’’ As he says, ‘‘culture is a broad word’’: Islamic culture (really, the practice of an innovation-free Islam) allows him a means (‘‘a base’’) to live in society with few compromises. It allows him to not be creolized, that is, indistinct and immoral in the creole mix of national culture. It also allows him to critique creolization as an unhealthy mix of racial hegemony (‘‘Negro’’ and ‘‘North American black’’) and capitalism (which would include materialist values, immoral conduct, usury, and imperialist domination). Although Abdul, of Indian ancestry, grapples with assessing the appropriateness of things ‘‘Indian’’ in his life as a Muslim, ‘‘not being creole’’ (for all ‘‘creole’’ stands for) is as important. The problem of cultural innovations and tradition is multidimensional, encompassing Trinidadian national culture and the blackness and whiteness it represents. For Abdul, these hegemonic or imperial influences pose more of a problem than the internal debates among Muslims about orthodoxy and its correct forms. For others the latter is of greater concern. The point is that Trinidadian Muslims always navigate through parts within a greater whole: culture as nation. Approaching the problem of culture, and cultural hegemony, in religious identity from a similar stance, Jamal, an older head Indo-Trinidadian Muslim who ‘‘born and grow in South,’’ explained: ‘‘What we call acculturation, if it means acculturation into what passes for the majority culture of Trinidad and Tobago, it will be equally or more offensive to Muslims than to Hindus. By acculturation I am meaning that someone would see nothing wrong in scantily dressing on a Carnival day and performing like anybody else in any of the bands. Well, strict Hindus wouldn’t like this [either]. That’s what I mean by acculturation.’’ While Abdul and Jamal are distant in age, class, education, and worldview, it is a secular, immoral, and, with the symbol of Carnival, implicitly AfroTrinidadian, cultural environment that racializes religious identity. Religious purity, in this context, means remaining unmixed ‘‘racially’’ as much as it means remaining unmixed (homogeneous) in doctrine and method. A second association is culture as racial signifier. At times this is equally applicable to both Indo- and Afro-Trinidadian Muslims, when Afro-Trinidadian Muslims are viewed by others as retaining a cultural heritage. As one Indo-Trinidadian Muslim man said in an evenhanded critique of culture-as-race, ‘‘They [Afro-Trinidadian Muslims] have brought in their African culture into their way of life, as distinct from the Islamic faith. Just as the Indian brought in their culture. This demonstrates, in my

206

Callaloo Nation

view, not an Islamic but a racial identity.’’ For this speaker, both Afro and Indo are equally culpable for the trespass of culture into ‘‘faith,’’ thereby confusing the clean separations between proper and illegitimate religious expression. At other times the racialized culture of Afro-Trinidadians is viewed by Indo-Trinidadian Muslims as antithetical to their own. Indo-Trinidadian Muslims place great value on Islam’s ideal of racial equality; at the same time, in real terms, greater interaction with Afro-Trinidadians fosters the less-than-desirable mixing that Abdul spoke about. Even among AfroTrinidadian Muslims, integrated, mixed jamaats or, more likely, jumma (Friday prayers) and other congregations, may promote other, more permanent forms of group boundary crossings, such as intermarriage. Again, because of their concerns with absorption into hegemonic cultures not their own, Indo-Trinidadian Muslims, like other Indo-Trinidadians, maintain an animated discourse about Afro-Trinidadian Muslims’ ‘‘Arabian’’derived orthodoxy and their own forms of orthodoxy, which are tinted by the dialogue these forms necessarily have with ‘‘Indian’’-derived nonIslamic influences. The issue is how close an Indo-Trinidadian Muslim orthodoxy can come to being shorn of cultural innovations before it becomes indistinct, through being absorbed by orthodoxies that erase or make irrelevant the very (Indian) boundaries that distinguish them in national society and in the world. Moreover, while the mixing of integration and syncretism can evoke equality, the correctness demanded by mutually exclusive interpretation can affirm hierarchy and intolerance. This brings us to the third symbolic association of culture. Indo-Trinidadians’ idea that indigenous culture figures into the constitution of Islam creates a two-pronged complication. If culture is an authenticating vehicle for Indo-Trinidadians in historic terms—that is, it is part and parcel of the cultural heritage of India—in contemporary terms it is that which threatens the perpetuation of Islam through the incursions of cultural innovations. These come notably from Hinduism, rendering IndoIslamic practices at best incorrect and at worst, possibly simi-dimi. Among the most common practices that foment ideological divisions among Muslims occur in ritual: saying prayers over food, celebrating the Prophet’s birthday and meeraj, singing qasidas during rituals, and standing for the tazeem (praise sung for the Prophet Mohammed). An IndoTrinidadian Muslim man whose leanings are toward, as he and others put it, a ‘‘purified’’ reforming of Indo-Trinidadian Islam explained, ‘‘Way back in the fifties and sixties I just thought I was a Muslim, because I was born in a Muslim family, and that made me Muslim. The practices in my environment, though, were different from what I later read . . . We had in the past, and we still have, a lot of practices that we got from our foreparents in India. We are grateful to them for keeping up Islam, but people

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

207

are not trying to learn more. They are just listening to what is said. They go to functions and sit, but do not educate themselves.’’ In these remarks, this person makes a comparison that is key to having the intellectual tools to identify and avoid innovations and strive toward a purified orthodoxy. He contrasts habituated lifestyle, learned though reproduced practices, and hegemonic in the sense of being taken for granted and handed down from ‘‘foreparents in India,’’ with formal study of both enculturated, heterodox traditions and purified orthodox practice. At the heart of the distinction between the legitimacy of customary or traditional religious practice and tutored religious practice guided by religious authority is the high value placed on self-conscious, achieved knowledge—in essence, doing something correctly and understanding its significance. The means of attainment for Muslims is not, ideally, through what many understand to be ‘‘ritual.’’ As one person asserted, ‘‘Ritual is when you just believe in something because someone else does, and does it for you.’’ For this woman, the connotations of ritual are doing something rote, without consciousness or agency. The idea is that out-ofawareness acts may lead one unknowingly into simi-dimi. They can also, as the woman above was implying, mirror Hindu practice—someone does something for you and you follow the routine. At a wedding I attended, a woman commented approvingly to her friend about the officiating imam, ‘‘You must talk proper, make the sermon meaningful . . . You must take time to explain it all. And make it solemn. You shouldn’t do it just as a ritual. You should make it meaningful.’’ In another conversation I was not a part of but overheard, this time at a maulood sherif, an influential hajji’s comments suggested the centrality and multidimensionality that ‘‘meaning’’—through functions—has among Indo-Trinidadian Muslims: ‘‘Islam is a complete way of life, not of rituals, like Christianity and Hinduism. Going to church just on a Sunday, or the pandit putting all these little things together here and there [on the bedi (altar)], these are just done by the people without thinking. Where is the meaning? Where is the practice? Haqika, qurbani, these are not ‘rituals.’ They are part of the complete way of life of Islam.’’ While the majority of imams and other religious leaders would exercise more tact than this speaker’s unvarnished reservations about other religions, both would convey the importance of correct knowledge and the personal agency that is required to exercise it. The quest for meaning may be heightened for individuals as they comprehend religiously charged moments in the Islamic calendar. In explaining what the month of Ramadan is about, for example, my friend Rashida said that it is a time when she ‘‘always learn something new, whether it is a sura, a lesson, or whatsoever.’’ She ‘‘soaks up the lectures’’ given during this period’s numerous functions and tries to take time out everyday to read; her bed is always ‘‘covered with books the whole month.’’ This is a time, she says, of much better concentration for her; at other times ‘‘her 208

Callaloo Nation

head is so distracted with so much a this and that.’’ During the weeks of Ramadan, however, she can ‘‘really learn something for the month.’’ As community residents invoke the idea of ‘‘meaning’’ in their reflections on an individual’s attitude in undertaking rituals and on the nature of religious practice, meaning becomes both reified and a master symbol. In local usage meaning encompasses distinct referents; in doing so it articulates these referents into what is familiar religious discourse. At the household-based function for a youngster’s birthday, a celebration in lieu of its secular (and profane) alternative, the jamaat president (the child’s father’s brother) addressed the small group gathered in the living room: ‘‘Today’s khutbah was a very opportune one, touching on many aspects of our religion. When he [imam] quoted so extensively [from the Quran] and explained the Arabic words, he put so much meaning into our din, the way we should follow. I felt [realized] I knew so little about our religion. It was a real treat today, and instilled in us some sort of commitment. I think that’s why we have all come out today to show our sincerity. And that is my topic that I will talk about now: to be sincere.’’ After the president’s address, the imam spoke: ‘‘Is only when we get together like this we can get the message. Our weakness is [lack of] knowledge, knowledge of Islam, and how to run our lives. Today a person talks [in order] to use you with iklas, in Arabic, ulterior motives. Trying to trick you. And it is only by practice you can perfect your salaat [worship].’’ In the first speaker’s comment, ‘‘meaning’’ is treated as a desirable consequence of explication, but textual recitation and interpretation not only aid in knowing better one’s religion, they are also instrumental in encouraging piety—‘‘commitment,’’ ‘‘sincerity.’’ In the second comment, ‘‘meaning’’ addresses the theme of being ‘‘fooled’’; here, worldly knowledge (not succumbing to trickery) and religious knowledge (perfecting salaat) enhance each other. Through group edification—‘‘get together like this’’— such as that which occurs during functions, ‘‘meaning’’ ameliorates gaps, slippages that are threatening in both sacred and secular terms. It is gaps like these that imams must fill as they work on the precision of their craft. The performances of older head imams and their ‘‘long time ways’’ as they serve their jamaats are particularly susceptible to charges of practices that seem too much like ‘‘ritual,’’ and thus too Hinduinfluenced, too India-derived, and therefore too innovative with mixed cultural, as opposed to purely religious, traditions. Imam Rahman, an older head ‘‘reformist’’ imam, as he identified himself, explained, ‘‘Traditional practices are different from the handed-down practices of the Prophet . . . Traditional means practices of old . . . But the reforms were found through research, like [in] the HadithΩ . . . We don’t make naj [prayers] over sirni. We question putting food for the dead, the dead cannot eat . . . and this was never done in the days of the Prophet. This was brought in as a innovation from India . . . a Hindu relic.’’ ‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

209

For all the weight that Imam Rahman’s words have among many IndoTrinidadian Muslims, India yet looms large in the Indo-Trinidadian worldview. Whether a place to go on pilgrimage, a holiday spot, a ‘‘roots tour’’ destination, or, of monumental importance, the ‘‘old country’’ of one’s parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents, India is a vivid image, even if in some contexts one not to be emulated. Among some Indo-Trinidadian Muslims, Pakistan or Mecca are taking the place of India as sites of heritage identification. But as much as it can be critiqued, India is difficult to dispense with entirely, for it is still the consummate Indo-Trinidadian symbol of their arrival, survival, and success in the country. A common distinction Muslims make is one between a ‘‘practical Muslim’’ and a ‘‘Muslim in name only.’’ This differentiation also reflects the move, over the past three or four decades, toward tutored practice and away from the heritage of both India (which colors the practices of a Muslim minority) and Hinduism. A practical Muslim is one who practices the religion. While this designation includes those who engage in untutored practice based on insufficient knowledge, some form of commitment to orthodoxy or correct practice is assumed. In other words, a Muslim in name only does not follow the dictates and expectations of the Quran or the Hadith, but is simply ‘‘born into the religion,’’ symbolized most obviously by a Muslim surname. Hence, referring to someone in this way is something of a reproof. To be a practical Muslim is not, however, simply about observance; it involves some degree of self-consciousness about what kind of practice—informed and correct, or not—one is undertaking. The idea is that rather than simply being a rote ‘‘Muslim,’’ a person is a knowledgeable practitioner of ‘‘Islam.’’ Before the second half of the twentieth century these designations were not salient. From what older heads say, the environment was one where ‘‘Muslim’’ had fewer qualifications. One older head reminisced about a time when Urdu was still in common usage and, at least in the grassroots South, the grand and elaborately orchestrated functions were the exception rather than the rule: When I de [was] ten years old [around 1932], it had [there was] a old man from India who live next door, in the same yard, named Amal Exchange, because he was bought by a white man from Exchange Estate, from the ship. He used to all the time come and tell stories. ‘‘Kisa’’ in Urdu, ‘‘bayan’’ in Arabic. One of his stories was ‘‘Yusufa and Zaleka.’’ He would come to the house and they would ask, ‘‘Mean’’ [Muslim honorific], ‘‘bhol na kisa,’’ ‘‘tell us a story.’’ He said, ‘‘Acha, Laila Majnun ke bayan,’’ ‘‘Okay, I’ll give you the Laila and Majnun story.’’ He would go all about with his stories and we de [did] learn a lot from them. And sometimes I went to maktab class with my uncle. 210

Callaloo Nation

Stories such as these inspire among Indo-Trinidadians the recollection of a community-based Islam that was grounded in an everyday life where ‘‘religion’’ was not bracketed so neatly from the rest of culture (which would soon require its own reifying quotation marks). Another informant, a man who counted himself among the relatively small number of Ahmadiyyas in Trinidad, raised memory to historical generalization: Long ago, most of the customs observed by most of the Muslims were also partly that of Hindus, as well as some of the Hindu customs were taken from the Muslims. That is because of the social way of life in Trinidad. They had no alternative, they came to this country as slaves, more or less. They came indentured to different estates and they lived in a humble way, barracks, and they kept their religion alive in some way. They came from India together and lived together in Trinidad, so their customs and habits were vicey versa. They associated with each other in their different religious functions. And so it went on, the life the Muslims lived. Today some Muslims still practice some of the things of their ancestors, like this forty-days business [ritual observance on the fortieth day after a person’s death]. This is one the Hindus observe very much. Gradually, throughout the course of the twentieth century, and especially in the latter half, ‘‘a relatively new development’’ occurred, as Jamal (above) related, ‘‘where some people want a break with some of the things that had been practiced in the community that they feel give it a tinge of Indianness. Some of the practices which came down through our forefathers, which have nothing un-Islamic about them, some people are objecting to now . . . and a lot of it comes from Middle Eastern influence . . . The areas that we came from in India, clearly our foreparents must [be] of the Hanafi interpretation.’’ Even practices that ostensibly fit well within the rubric ‘‘Islamic’’ become questionable under the scrutiny of orthodoxy. Over and over again others recited the contrast between truth and supposition, roughly following a discursive progression from the sincerity of older heads’ long time ways (which is its own kind of Muslim authenticity even if not pure and correct), to emphasizing heightened consciousness of the mixed character of Indo-Trinidadian Muslims’ religious beliefs and practices, to greater identification of misapplications of ‘‘tradition’’ and Hindu elements, to reifying ‘‘facts.’’ As Jasmine told me emphatically, ‘‘facts’’ are knowledge—of correct practices and their meanings—and provide the antidote to the comess of mixed ways of knowing and of behaving. She explained that ‘‘tradition is what is handed down by you parents, which might not all be true. Older people can tell you the wrong thing;

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

211

they saw and follow their parents . . . Tradition is different from true sayings, true teachings from the Quran, the Hadith, true facts. People follow and not know the reason why they doing it.’’ Nazish added, ‘‘A traditional Muslim [is] one who has followed the practice of religion which he has found in his home and in his family and who has not . . . managed to study the religion . . . He is merely a member of the crowd . . . and does not have any personal, deep conviction on the principles of faith, which you get through being educated.’’ The culmination of this discourse into an ambivalent appraisal of ‘‘foreparents’’ is poignantly clear in Owais’s comment: ‘‘Even now, you see a old man [for example], about eighty-something, and you look at how he comports himself and you can see that was the upbringing. I have a suspicion that part of the Indian is the primitive, the backward.’’ Under the corrective of orthodoxy, not only is tradition synonymous with backwardness, it has taken on the aura of primitiveness. Certainly the vast majority of Indo- or other Trinidadians would not be inclined to employ that term; nonetheless, the residue of invidious distinctions deriving from colonial and postcolonial ideologies remain to slant the construction of persons and of groups. As might be expected, exactly what constitutes orthodoxy and the correct model is by no means uniform or unilateral. For example, one of the original members of an early Muslim organization in Trinidad critiqued another Muslim organization: [They] go in a lot for tradition, in their garb and in certain religious practices, in the mood and manner of life generally . . . This is very narrow . . . In this day and age, searching for the moon before you start your fast, this is very retrograde, very backward. When it’s overcast you have to go to your watch to see when it’s time for namaaz [prayers] . . . But these mullahs still adhere to these traditional practices . . . We don’t like to subjugate people so that life is [merely] working, eating, and reading. Why limit things like music and song? In a fascinating inversion, this older head, arguably the most ‘‘traditionally’’ inclined due both to his age and the age of his organization, charges the other’s doctrine with being limiting, underdeveloped, and oppressive. For him, ‘‘tradition’’ is clearly anachronistic and ill-equipped for such forms of modernity as checking a timepiece before prayers, and not allowing for permissible pleasures, one might say spiritual pleasures, like music and song. If challenged that, in the national context of Trinidad, music and song are too easily seduced into carnivalization and creolization, this man might respond that the music and song accompanying devout immigrants from a godly motherland is the remedy for local hegemonic culture and necessary to fortify effective kinds of alterity, that is, the right kinds of

212

Callaloo Nation

Indo-Trinidadian Muslim identity. This is evident in a similar comment by an older head imam: ‘‘Qasidas are invitations to us to be better Muslims, if we understand them . . . We all must try to get the lessons from the qasidas. Let us try to come to more of these functions, but not only to sing qasidas and make speeches. Make yourself a better Muslim when you go home.’’ Here the imam is negotiating a compromise. By affirming the rightness of qasida singing he affirms a certain constitution of Islamic orthodoxy, but he can do this most convincingly (in the sense of reaching the greatest number of people) by modifying tradition with modernity in the form of knowledge. That is, he advises that performing the songs is insufficient; the lessons they have to offer must be mined, and then applied outside of functions, in daily life. The Imam’s Mission, and Measures of Expertise The reverence for older heads and their religious and cultural tenacity may also be seen as anachronistic and a hindrance to wider social progress. In the words of one local observer, ‘‘There is some conflict between the new and old generation among the Indian Muslims.’’ This tension is particularly animated among younger and older head imams. Here, young often denotes chronological age relative to older head. But it also connotes a divergent way of thinking about Islam. This divergence mirrors the religious discourse on authenticity, innovation, purity, tradition, and fanaticism that is at issue among Indo-Trinidadian (and Afro-Trinidadian) Muslims. One person, veering toward nontraditional sympathies, observed that although there are indeed ‘‘elders involved in this new, well, the true Islam the Quran speaks about, it is divided up. The young people are picking up the true Islam [more].’’ A key objective of religious revitalization among Indo-Trinidadian Muslims (as we saw with Hindus in chapter 6) is to avoid being a prisoner of blind faith by apprehending meaning through availing oneself of the knowledge that is gained at functions. Unschooled belief does not only potentially result in superficial enlightenment. It is also one more unpleasant indication of the historical betrayal experienced by Indian indentured immigrants, who were ‘‘fooled’’ by British colonial projects. In this way, the reification of knowledge, as a thing to own, becomes its own kind of authenticity. To paraphrase various informants, the argument goes that when certain ways of doing things have lasted for a long time, we lose connection to the ideas that fuel them because we become complacent; the old days were an age of faith where beliefs were blind and filled with superstitious ideas which must be distinguished from more appropriate ways of knowing. The concept of ‘‘belief’’ is multidimensional. Mechanically following

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

213

someone else through a rite or custom can expose one’s backwardness (as well as allegedly one’s predilection for Hinduism), which veers uncomfortably close to superstition. An older head imam explained: Long time imams tried to keep the population in a mystical way, in a darkness kind of way. For instance, when a imam was going to have a Quranic reading by a Muslim home, long time they [imam] will give instructions to the people to buy a white cock only, making it . . . difficult for the people. They [imam] want to make it something too important, to get the people to feel that they [imam] is so knowledgeable in these things, attaching self-importance to themselves. But of recent times, after people went to study Islam abroad, imams [are] getting to know this is not necessary. The white cock rule wasn’t from a book. Now self-important means learning it from the right books, from the right source, getting a better knowledge . . . When somebody studied abroad they study the laws and the traditions of Islam . . . so now there are learned scholars in the country who can give their verdicts according to the law and tradition of Islam [rather than those based on ancient practices of long time]. When people does not know something by law, they use their common knowledge. Common knowledge is undisciplined knowledge, in the sense of both untrained and unruly. As such it invites comess, particularly in the form of simi-dimi. Yet this imam’s emphasis on the ‘‘right source’’ does not preclude his own generation, relegating ‘‘mystical’’ and ‘‘darkness’’ to a time long preceding his own. Similar to the religious and social services pandits provide, those provided by an imam (or, less often, a maulana) are negotiated with regard to territory and rewards—both material gain and renown, which generally leads to greater influence over wider territory. As one imam told me, ‘‘We have a rule: asja imam could operate anywhere in Trinidad and Tobago. But we don’t do it so. We stick to our own district. But if you invite me in a next [another] jamaat, I will come. But you must ask your imam permission.’’ Theoretically, an imam or other religious specialist does not require compensation for their services to individuals and households; no imam with whom I spoke stated that he expected anything except if providing marriage certification at weddings. Not having a comparable honorarium like dakshina, after a function, as a gesture of appreciation and support, Muslims tend to give the presiding imam(s) cash, ‘‘howsoever you could afford,’’ as virtually everyone affirmed. No different from Hindus, however, jamaat members are in general sanguine about offering honoraria. It is my impression that imams probably garner not less than tt $50, and perhaps as much as three or four times that amount, for an individual function, depending on its importance, duration, and an imam’s

214

Callaloo Nation

particular role in it, as well as the financial ability of the hosts and the amount contributed by family and neighbors. Aside from material gain, the more abstract dimension of reward is the demand for an imam within and across jamaats, which grants him authority. The symbolic capital of deserving approbation and effecting influence is powerful in its potential to be translated into an enhanced leadership role in the jamaats of the region, and perhaps into ascension through the local or national offices of the religio-cultural organization with whom the imam is affiliated. Yet even if amplified authority in the form of leadership is not sought (and most, if not all, imams would be reluctant to claim this as a goal, given the cultural emphasis on humility), intensified authority, in the form of reputed erudition, ethics, and moral fortitude, is highly desired. One would never, however, explicitly strive for this as a self-serving end in itself; rather, an imam’s worth would be read in terms of the promulgation of Islam. As among Hindus, themes of humility and simplicity are celebrated in narratives about Islam in South: Ever since I know myself [very young] . . . we had a mosque, . . . I was born in ’38 . . . We go there to read namaaz, go and make wuzu [ablutions]. We have to go upstairs for namaaz . . . Underneath, when you’re passing . . . people used to have their cow and goat . . . tied under the place, and it was in a state! And you just go upstairs and read namaaz. All I could remember is that the people used to go there maybe twice for the year, for Eid and maybe Eid-il-Adha. Then, after that, the older heads who had a little Islamic knowledge in them, right?, they find the place was not fitting for them to worship . . . So one of the brothers, he gave his place [plot] to the Muslim community. And at that time . . . there was no cars. It was about four miles from where I was living. Some of the nights walking we’d shelter from the wet under a tree. But we never used to mind that because we always remained with this [idea], that we serving the Almighty God. From out of these fairly infrequent, if consistent, gatherings of untutored but observant Muslims emerged a religious leadership who gradually organized more formal services. Ameena, a first-generation older head woman, talked to me about her father and brother: My father was one of the early [imams] in town. He was from u.p. India. We had maktab classes [at] home. We begin with home training . . . [My brother] around age twenty-one went for training by a missionary. You had to go far then. He [missionary] was from Lahore. He came through the asja. With him you get Quranic teaching, recitation, translating Arabic into English, and interpretation—why a verse came down, the time, what purpose it was. And he used to have ‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

215

a weekly paper that goes to the various mosques, which he prepared, and [my brother] typed it up. A newsletter with a sermon, different topics for the khutbah. This woman’s family was probably, from the information she provides, among the nascent elite class forming among Indo-Trinidadians by the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the urban centers. The family was located ‘‘in town’’; her father, a recognized imam, was probably affiliated with asja; her brother could be spared from household contribution to study with a visiting missionary; in typing the newsletter, clearly her brother was literate. Indo-Trinidadian capital and the power accruing from it were not nearly competitive with that of the ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘colored’’ middle class until at least the second generation, and even then it would have involved relatively few people. As we have seen, however, status differences, based on both symbolic and material criteria, were emerging throughout the course of their settlement. It was generally men who had access to some kind of formal education or wealth that, combined with religious works either undertaken by themselves or in support of others, translated into the local authority that helped sustain a community of believers. A more clear-cut example of the link between affluent individuals or families and philanthropic religious work was given to me by an urban, elite older head who had been one of the original founders of the tia: ‘‘My grandfather sent my father at age eight or nine to study for six months, . . . to learn Islam and Arabic from a learned man from India. My father . . . started a maktab . . . there was not one there [in his area] at the time. My grandfather paid maktab teachers and made sure it was free for anyone.’’ Yet other informants told stories of harder fought accomplishments: ‘‘My husband was a cane farmer. That is all. He was like a substitute imam, going about the different jamaats around the place to fill in for the imams when they couldn’t do the service. He would also do Quran sherifs and other functions. And so he learned . . . It have this Punjabi fellow in [South], and he taught him [too].’’ Within these narratives is a message of credibility—practice and intention—that is embedded in what are ultimately assertions of piety: against the odds of grassroots hardship and disadvantage (faced even by the first generation of future elites), a pure core of Muslim belief and practice remains steadfast. As among pandits, this theme of credibility is embodied most clearly in the imam, a figure who represents the continuity of tradition and, therefore, is an ambiguous source of knowledge. According to one IndoTrinidadian Muslim woman, for example, Twenty years ago a sprinkling of people only fasted and kept to the general principles of Islam . . . People didn’t frequent the mosque.

216

Callaloo Nation

Twenty years ago the people were kind of illiterate, you know, and anything to do with religion they put it squarely on the shoulder of the imam. Now there is more mosque attendance and more observing religious principles . . . Now there is more exposure to the religion through a lot of publications, books, teachers, the availability of the highest standard of religious leaders, like a maulana. This woman is describing the increase in literacy and other advances through formal education, along with a concomitant rise in formal, public expressions of religiosity—forms, significantly, not dependent on the guidance (and implicitly the authority) of imams. Specialists, ‘‘like a maulana,’’ with their modern credentials, are, she implies, better mentors, representing authoritative, exclusive command, as modernity seems to demand. These changes always have been circuitous processes. Writing about burials among Indo-Trinidadian Muslims, the Niehoffs noted that ‘‘nowadays women sometimes go to the cemetery although this is a recent innovation’’ (1960:147). Twenty years later they did not go to the cemetery; not going was interpreted in hindsight by one informant as a transformation of the ‘‘authentic tradition’’ with which she had been familiar as a youngster. Both of these observations interpreted the respective current situation as modernization, even though the observers were each looking back in time. While a unilinear trajectory from past to present does not exist, there is still a direction to these transformations, even if the direction doubles back on itself at some other time. At issue are the expertise and authority of older head imams, who are themselves iconic of a specifically configured past. Older heads (imams and laypersons both) expressed their conviction in varying but congruent ways. Another older head imam reminisced, ‘‘My father [an imam] was no university man, but he did well. He was a religious scholar. Preach and teach Islam, and convert people. He had Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit. You can’t fool he! You can’t tie him up [confuse him] no how. You come with this, he’ll pick it up and read it and say, ‘No, is not so and so, is so and so.’ And [he] keep his jamaat going good-good, everybody in harmony.’’ Here, once again, is the theme of mental acuity and common sense compensating for lack of formal education. The important factor is having the ability to avoid being fooled. For this man’s father, a laborer on a sugar cane estate at the turn of the twentieth century, education even in the first few standards (grade levels) would have been unusual, much less opportunities to attend college (high school) or university. Yet he was the religious leader of a jamaat, which he kept ‘‘going good-good,’’ in the ‘‘harmony’’ so valued by the Trinidadian nation-state. In warm praise of the older head imam who had long served her jamaat, Mariam recalled that, ‘‘Hassan Mian, the old imam, used to go by every‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

217

body house, and correct nobody. He was nice too bad [really nice]. When [today] some of the Mian saheb have to say, ‘This ent right, that ent right,’ well, Hassan Mian had nothing to say. If you has [only] a cow pen, he used to sit down.’’ Another older head imam reflected, ‘‘The imam must be the most knowledgeable in religion and have tekwah, piety. He must have a mature age, since only a ageable person can control themselves, act like a gentleman.’’ For Mariam, who appreciated so well the egalitarian humility of her imam, being corrected, even for the purpose of religious practice, was tantamount to the ‘‘high and mighty’’ that most people of South distrust. To the imam, real knowledge and true piety can only be evinced by older heads; self-control and respectability are garnered mostly through temperate behavior regarding alcohol and sexuality. (Acting ‘‘like a gentleman’’ in these ways would be assumed to be more of a challenge for a younger man; moreover, alcohol, while prohibited for all ‘‘practical Muslims,’’ is still a vivid memory in the minds of teetotaling older heads who in their youth were more free with rum.) Less gingerly, another stated that, ‘‘People have less regard for elders now . . . The majority, from the time they see a gray hair on your face they say you’re outdated, you’re a old man, you’re a retired man . . . They don’t realize that the age that pass on a man bring experience to him. It bring experience! It is different now. Money make you proud!’’ This older head disapproves of informal age discrimination through a critique of class hierarchy. Echoing his position, another imam said to me, ‘‘We humble weself to learn . . . If you feel you know too much, you will not come by me. I can’t speak English well. What you going by me for?! I haven’t got education. And you is a university graduate. What you want by me? If you want some information, it’s simple! You want to get the gist of something . . . I can’t learn [teach] you English. But that don’t mean he [someone] can’t give you some facts! I have some facts that you mightn’t get [elsewhere].’’ Acutely aware of a shift in values about quantity and quality of education and the authority it confers, these imams work to underscore, for themselves as well as for others, the caliber of wisdom gained through experience. ‘‘Wisdom,’’ in this sense, is favorably contrasted with ‘‘knowledge.’’ Younger generation imams have their own counterarguments. As one asserted, ‘‘A more educated imam has more right to decide right from wrong. A ordinary imam don’t know the details, just the facts.’’ While some younger imams told me they felt older head imams do not, in fact, know ‘‘the correct facts,’’ given their proclivities toward a ‘‘traditional’’ orientation, even the importance of ‘‘the details’’ begs the question of what older heads have to offer.∞≠ One older head hajji with very high status in his community in South, deriving from an extensive family history of wealth and religious philan-

218

Callaloo Nation

thropy, told me one day that he felt the authority of imams should not be questioned, and that the deference for imams has waned somewhat, compared to long time. He added, however, that imams are also not needed ‘‘to keep us all on the straight path, only we can do that for ourselves,’’ and that imams are ‘‘mostly to lead us at jumma [Friday prayers].’’ His thoughts do not only reflect the changes in community ties undergone by residents with respect to the role of religious leaders (imams and pandits) among them. He was also pointing to two simultaneous, and contradictory processes. On the one hand, the leadership role of the imam is primarily in the domain of prayer, which is text-based—‘‘technical,’’ as some described it—and potentially highly authoritative through the expertise implied. On the other hand, there is a belief that imams no longer command respect as they did long time. The contradiction, perhaps without resolution, lies in the feeling that imams are needed in fewer situations that require authority, yet their diminished authority is lamented, symbolizing a turning point in religious identity and social and cultural futures. The larger significance is that a division of labor is continuing to unfold, where new (or at least recent) estimations of religious knowledge and its attendant comportment are shaping the boundaries of what constitutes ‘‘Muslim.’’ Older-head imams are symbols of a time when IndoTrinidadian Muslim communities were configured differently—less selfconsciously, perhaps, and certainly with different, and fewer, criteria for the diagnostic emblems of group boundaries. ‘‘Long time Islam in Trinidad was more pure,’’ declared one older head imam. But as an older head he has a certain evaluation of what purity is. By ‘‘more pure’’ he does not mean more correctly orthodox, nor less subject to cultural influences. These attributes he would concede to the knowledge possessed by formally educated, middle-class, younger generation experts. Rather, he means a purity closer to its ancestral source, ancestral not as an abstract symbol but in terms of flesh-and-blood ancestors who kept purity alive under diasporic duress. A purity of intention and commitment to egalitarian values based on concrete, abiding communal social relationships for him supersedes, if ambivalently, the ideological purity that imagines religious practice shorn of its cultural specificity, and thus readiness to be inclusive of race—without itself possessing one.

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’

219

8 MIXING METAPHORS

One house, with three styles of architectural design and construction, represents the successive upward mobility of each generation in this family. Photo by author.

I

n t r i n i da d , as in the wider Caribbean and Latin America, ideologies about the mixing of cultural, racial, religious, or ethnic elements (practices, phenotypes, worldviews) have been foundational in establishing societies. Whether represented as a blend (e.g., mestizaje) or a medley (e.g., callaloo), as New World literary scholars, for example, have recently put it, ‘‘miscegenation merits consideration as the supreme metaphor of the entire American experience, North, South, and Central’’ (Fitz 2002:243). The attention to mixing, in law, in public discourse, in the cultural imagination, emerged from colonial encounters with alterity— the construction and evaluation of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them,’’ ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘different,’’ ‘‘superior’’ and ‘‘inferior’’—on the part of Europeans, Africans, Asians, and indigenous peoples. In Europe various models of different types of beings, designating some as clearly human and others as perhaps not, pre-date Europe’s concerted expansion into what would become its territorial possessions. From the sixteenth century, however, when the Caribbean began its key role on colonialism’s stage, the notion of mixing would be an organizing principle of this region, inflected toward an emphasis on racial and religious identities, and the cultural qualities they have been assumed to signify. I have emphasized in this book that flesh-and-blood people live through perceived mixings of all kinds, investing them with meaning and struggling with them on a daily basis, often in the form of creating polarities and essentialisms. Not simply a matter of the difference between real and ideal but through different levels of engagement, Indo-Trinidadians live callaloo and idealize purity. Racial and religious discourses in various contexts reflect diverse perceptions of their social place and others’ recognition. Histories, cultural forms, and relations of power necessarily render

all social and cultural processes miscible all of the time, although in certain ways, in particular moments, and with certain forms of recognition. By considering metaphors, we can see that ‘‘race’’ makes its appearance in ways more oblique than biogenetic precepts and more opaque than antagonistic challenges. We can also see that ‘‘religion’’ can anchor the ineffable and metaphysical to corporeal boundaries—of a group, of a people. Never completely replacing each other as organizing principles in identity construction, then, ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘religion’’ do not simply stand for each other as alternative designations. More complexly, they are implicated within each other, a mutually defining diversity rather than simply part of an array of interchangeable parts. During an interview I had with an Indo-Trinidadian farmer years ago, our conversation turned to a very different, but regularly recurring subject among most people I know there, that of politics and racial conflict. He said, When John F. Kennedy got shot, in 1963, I was in Atlanta . . . I look at a cafeteria across the street, and I see a large, conspicuous signboard, ‘‘Nigger, read and run.’’ I was hungry. I ignore the sign, and, anyway, the country I came from hasn’t these things. I walk across and push the glass door. The whole place came to me at the door but I was already inside. They ask me what I doing there. I say, ‘‘Well, I hungry and I want to eat.’’ They ask me if I didn’t see a sign outside. I told them, ‘‘No, I see the food inside of here.’’ They put me way back in a corner, and ask me where I come from. I say I from India and show them my British passport . . . So they serve me the food but ask me why I could come in, seeing that sign. I said my country [Trinidad] have all kind of men, African, Indian, Syrian, Chinee, British, European, and I didn’t know about it [segregation]. I kept my cool and used my wits very fast. I knew what the sign mean, they want no colored people, but I ignore it because I hungry. After . . . I told them if this is the case here, I was sorry [disapproving] and would not come here again. Later, I came to understand that they had this sign because there was a lot of what you call second-generation and thirdgeneration mischievous black people there. When I asked him why ‘‘second and third generation,’’ he replied, ‘‘I speaking of the Trinidad experience. [As douglas] multiply, there would be a new type of thinking, with the mixing of Indian and Negro . . . If you have a herd of milk cow and you breed it with a beef bull, the first generation would be half-milk and half-beef, neither one nor the other . . . Do you know what an epidemic it would cause a country when a generation loses its morality, spirituality? Gang war, looting, smashing. A human tragedy.’’

Mixing Metaphors

223

A palimpsest of messages, this narrative reveals an awareness of white or colonial power and its propensity to make analogous the structural position and lived experience of Indo and Afro in Trinidad. This awareness of relations of power in Trinidad can also, however, become translated into discourse on Indo-Trinidadian subordination by Afro-Trinidadian hegemony and the not-unrelated fears, as on the part of this farmer, of chaos (‘‘gang war,’’ ‘‘looting,’’ ‘‘smashing’’), estrangement (loss of ‘‘spirituality’’), and immorality. Chaos (as disorder or confusion, colloquially tagged as comess), erosion of the spiritual, and the breakdown of morals are the typical concerns underlying the voiced fears of ‘‘mixing,’’ the dissolution of cultural and racial boundaries (for example, embodied in douglas) and the disempowerment (through loss of what is perceived as ‘‘Indo-Trinidadian,’’ ‘‘Muslim,’’ or ‘‘Hindu’’ group cohesion) that this dissolution implies. This farmer could be ‘‘sorry’’ about, and frustrated by Jim Crow laws on his visit to the United States, yet could come to ‘‘understand’’ them to be a justified response to ‘‘mischievous black people.’’ The consummate ‘‘Caribbean man,’’ the dominant regional narrative goes, is a combination of many elements.∞ Yet Trinidad, as the consummately heterogeneous country within a larger, consummately heterogeneous region, is mixed by virtue of its variety of distinct constituencies, living (with effort, ‘‘good’’) together, interacting but not necessarily intermixing: combination rather than amalgamation. A mixed person, therefore, symbolically celebrates diversity, but safely. Problems arise when too many mixed people, as in the farmer’s hypothetical portrait, jeopardize the clarity of distinct boundaries (and the putative purities they enclose) among constituencies whose political significance shapes their self-definition and structural position. When applied to on-the-ground, quotidian social relationships, mixing (and its kindred theoretical models) begs the question of how, when, and why such notions are important, and to whom—the challenge often lying in local efforts to be both universal and particular at the same time. Where nationalist ideologies exult in civilizing ostensibly inimical cultural, racial, or other ‘‘essential’’ differences through an ideology of harmonious democracy, tolerance, and universal representation, a contradiction arises: the consolidation of group boundaries that denotes group differences and an erasure of group boundaries that connotes group similarities (that in turn connote unity). Articulated and mutually constitutive, mixing metaphors capture the praise, the condemnation, and the ambivalence that ambiguous distinctions and identities create. Often expressed obliquely, mixing metaphors are not always conspicuous; they are both overt and insinuated. Racial referents within mixing metaphors do not necessarily or obviously involve biology, genetics, or color, elements that are conventionally associated with race. Rather, notions and symbols of race and

224

Callaloo Nation

religion are more ideologically and culturally diffuse. What I sought, among other things, were discursive patterns, buttressed by or reflected in the values, behavior, and conversations of people in South. As monumentally important as ideologies of race remain in shaping New World patterns of social relationships, political and legal policies, and sub rosa fantasies, it is ideologies of mixing that give meaning to these patterns. I am not suggesting that the concepts of race or other identity categories do not each possess their own symbolic associations and forms of experience. Rather, I am suggesting that these categories are meaningful and possess agency only in conjunction with one another—as articulated discourses. Instead of seeking subsequent extensions of racial meaning into other, previously racially unclassified domains of experience (Omi and Winant 1986:64), I have sought to uncover the racializing processes that fashioned contemporary Trinidad by looking at identities and relationships as simultaneously suffusing (mixing) racial ideologies with other, stratified criteria of difference, notably religious. Mixing, then, is not derivative, the passive product of such allegedly generative and discrete identities as ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘religion,’’ or ‘‘culture.’’ It is instead an encompassing symbol; that is, it is an ever-present cultural theme in dialogue with the interpretive categories and classifications that are made of the same ideological material and that, to a large extent, are animated by it. With this suggestion I am slightly rearranging cart and horse: rather than viewing interpretive categories, like race and religion, as each existing prior to subsequent concerns about their potential mixing, I see these categories as developing simultaneously with thoughts about the state of their boundaries. Mixing is a continuous operation in all human cultures rather than a Venn diagram–like space where two pure domains overlap. These domains are concocted ideologically from the messy mix of everyday life; it is the social perturbations that these concoctions generate that energize identity categories and make them distinct. The ideology of boundaries always, then, constitutes a dialectic between classification and occurrence.≤ Mixing is a multilayered metaphor that registers the ways identities necessarily work in articulation in social life, thereby engendering social forces that are both dangerous (diffusing the boundaries that demarcate difference) and desirable (fusing difference into cohesive unity). My assumptions in this regard, illustrated in the preceding pages, are that categories of similarity and alterity are not inherent, uniform, stable, or predictable; that even seemingly basic identities, such as racial or religious, are instead complex instantiations of articulated discourses and practices, and that relations of power always determine the way people interpret who they are and their place in the world. In electing to consider discourse as a key variable in identity construction, I have tried to emphasize

Mixing Metaphors

225

that discourses grow out of determinate conditions that are simultaneously material and symbolic. Identities are constructed out of the nexus between discourses and practices, where subjectivities are produced and spoken about in particular ways (Hall 1996:5–6). Discourses are not, however, unencumbered narratives that, free-floating, order lived experience. A couple of decades in the making in scholarly discussion, this point of departure is by now not novel in academic circles. Not as common is its normative acceptance in the much larger arena of contemporary society, where racial, religious, and ethnic groups, in nation-states and regional territories, continue to ardently espouse claims to rights and resources on the basis of timeless traditions and inherent authenticity. Even of late, what Mahmood Mamdani characterizes as ‘‘widely held culturalist assumptions’’ are fostering a growing tendency to locate causes of nonrevolutionary political violence, notably the ‘‘political resurgence of ethnicity,’’ in the problematic (alleged) fact of cultural difference (2001:651– 52). One of my aims in this study was to inquire closely into an ethnographic case rich with these issues, in order to examine the ways such theoretical concepts as the ‘‘articulation’’ of interpretive categories and the ‘‘social construction of identity’’ unfold in concrete terms on a daily basis among those whom I came to see as extraordinary ‘‘everyday’’ people, living out, as most of us do, ordinary lives. In tackling these questions, I marshaled a wide array of material: primary sources such as life histories, travelers’ narratives, local newspaper reportage, formal interviews, and informal conversation, along with secondary sources spanning more than half a century. With these, I focused on two models of merging: one, called ‘‘mixing,’’ manifests itself empirically among Trinidadians as affirmations of, and challenges to, nationalist ideology; the other, termed ‘‘articulation,’’ is an analytical device. ‘‘Mixing’’ is conceived ideologically as combinations—prohibited or promoted—of discrete elements; its forms are a product of specific sites and historical moments. Metaphors of mixing, then, emerge from on-theground relations of power in struggles and debates about vested interests and how they might be realized. ‘‘Articulation’’ is the theoretical framework with which I identify and explain the connections among domains (such as ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘religion’’) that are typically submerged within the mixing metaphors that express them. What is being mixed (or not) is generally quite clear to the people living through these moments. ‘‘Articulation’’ tells us about meaning and significance on a broader (more encompassing) as well as deeper (more historical) level. In Trinidad ‘‘mixing’’ is marked as ‘‘callaloo,’’ as ‘‘creolization,’’ and at times as ‘‘miscegenation.’’ Through its pervasiveness—as colonial ideology, as postindependence politics, as cultural discourse, as locally (and supralocally) observed sociocultural processes—mixing shapes the ways

226

Callaloo Nation

groups constitute and reconstitute themselves over time. As discourse, mixing is not expressed as a single, uniform concept deployed in certain contexts. Rather, mixing is expressed diffusely through numerous articulated metaphors through which people make abstract and static concepts concrete and dynamic as these metaphors are brought to bear on specific events or experiences and thereby explain them, memorialize them, or define them. As both willing and critical participants in Trinidad’s callaloo embrace, Indo-Trinidadian Hindus and Muslims engage in an uneasy and continuous negotiation of this contradiction—identity as a source of equality and as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. In other words, Indo-Trinidadians understand their histories and construct their religious identities within, among other dimensions, racial idioms that contend with the simultaneous forces of inclusion and exclusion. Ironically, neither inclusive nor exclusive ideologies necessarily wholly escape racial models of cultural types. Over the course of their history in Trinidad (and beginning on the subcontinent), Hinduism and Islam have gone from being mutually constitutive, and indicative of a more expansive category of identity, ‘‘Indian,’’ to being equally, and at times predominantly, mutually exclusive, indicative of more confined identity categories, ‘‘Muslim’’ and ‘‘Hindu.’’ Constructed within a pervasive racial discourse that reflects both the colonial and postindependence climates in Trinidad, Muslim and Hindu identities have been increasingly reified over the six generations they have been in the Caribbean; the attributes that are emblematic of their differences have transformed accordingly. In pre-independence Euro-colonial ideology, ‘‘Indian’’ was a racialized category in that its boundaries emphasized the distinction between nonwhite and white (even then at times ambiguously), and tended to elide distinctions between Hindu and Muslim. In this earlier historical period, both religions indicated the more expansive racial category (glossed as ‘‘Hindoo’’ or as a degeneration of ‘‘Aryan’’ or ‘‘Caucasian’’—though rarely, if ever, ‘‘white’’). In the period of anticolonial activity and then postindependence, ‘‘Indian’’ retained significance but the increasingly mutually exclusive categories ‘‘Hindu’’ and ‘‘Muslim’’ were becoming more common and important. From the mid-twentieth century on, Hindu and Muslim more often, and in certain contexts more effectively, indicated restrictive, mutually exclusive identities. This narrowing of identities has been encouraged, ironically, by globalization (beginning with missionaries’ and educators’ visits in the mid-nineteenth century), where greater homogeneity and exclusivity of identities are advantageous in the creation of universally recognizable constituencies of Hindus and Muslims.≥ This shift resonates throughout the Trinidadian population, among Indo-Trinidadian

Mixing Metaphors

227

and Afro-Trinidadian alike, especially given that it is linked to the emergence of the independent nation-state. This places the shift squarely in Trinidad’s public sphere, where demonstrations of piety and authenticity among Hindus and Muslims must represent distinct communal political constituencies while at the same time remaining untainted by the secular (worldly) domain. In other words, these categories occur, paradoxically, within a sociopolitical discourse calling for the harmony of an ‘‘all ah we is one’’ callaloo modernity, and a philosophical and ecclesiastical discourse emphasizing ‘‘is all one God, anyhow.’’ For Indo-Trinidadians, in what remains a problematic nationalist agenda, the relationship between religion and culture lies in a dual sense of culture. On the one hand, religious practice, in the sense of personal commitment, is a principal way to be ‘‘cultured,’’ which demonstrates the possession of ‘‘high’’ culture and authentic culture. These, in turn, represent a pure essence (not marked by spurious, foreign cultural influences or ‘‘incorrect’’ ways of knowing) and precisely traceable origins (reverse trajectories toward roots). Religious practice is also a key way to be ‘‘cultural,’’ in the sense of the public performance of specific, delineated identities—ubiquitous functions and prayers—and thereby practice is a vehicle for political redress in Trinidad’s callaloo nation. In the shadows of practice and conscience lies simi-dimi, those beliefs and practices that defy legitimacy but which nonetheless possess their own logic, rationale, and modus operandi—even if self-conscious or surreptitious. Not sanctioned as ‘‘religion,’’ and thus absent from the religious rubrics ‘‘functions’’ or ‘‘a prayers,’’ simi-dimi is not, according to Trinidadian cultural hierarchy, ‘‘high’’ culture, and therefore is more porous ground for mixing. As such, it is a problem in epistemology, involving both what to know and the paths that people take toward how to know it. Explicitly, simi-dimi represents the ingression of heterodoxy; implicitly, it represents the consequence of comess. Ultimately it means dilution and loss of identity—absorption into the cultural hegemony of Afro and Christian Trinidad. As a state of mind or character trait, superstition is viewed by IndoTrinidadians as something to be avoided or corrected because it implies the weakness, naïveté, and ignorance that mark submission. Not being superstitious is being empowered—with knowledge and sophistication that signal resistance to, or competence within, the status quo. Superstition, then, is not ultimately about religion per se, it is about power, power expressed in the debates over what is permissibly viewed as correct, that is, truly ‘‘religious,’’ phenomena, and what is not. Being perceived as superstitious means being inferior, in ways that are particularly vulnerable to doubt about one’s value and place in the world. In order to be effective, a prayers or functions must be seen as pure, in the sense of credibly sacred (indubitably ‘‘religion’’) and credibly authentic

228

Callaloo Nation

(indubitably ‘‘correct’’). While I have argued that they are fundamentally pedagogical (and thus more mundane than esoteric), rituals also serve as a symbolic buffer against what Indo-Trinidadians deem profane, for example, state or civil encroachments. What are expressed as intragroup conflicts about religious interpretation and as generational conflicts about leadership are also broader commentaries on—metaphors of—mixing in an uncertain world. The production of a prayers and functions, then, must distinguish and announce distinctly Hindu and Muslim identities, within a daily reality where rituals are ‘‘busy intersections’’ where many distinct social processes converge (Rosaldo 1989:17). In proper ritual performances, busy intersections are presented as long boulevard stretches of guarded uniformity. Among Hindus and Muslims in Trinidad, rituals are both culturally stabilizing (reminding practitioners who they are through connection with the past) and culturally transforming (emphasizing who they are through tutorial commentary concerning the present). ‘‘Knowledge’’ and ‘‘knowing’’ are always, then, in dialectical tension; rituals are intended to be revelatory and transformative as much as they are meant to reiterate and confirm. Thus they are sites of dynamism rather than simply static repetitions. Indeed, the fluid translation from doctrine to practice is where orthodoxy is most precarious. Committed to embracing what they understand to be authentic and correct forms of knowledge, yet simultaneously leaving room for multiple means of establishing who they are in the world and improving on it, Hindus and Muslims in South search for knowledge, as correct forms hewn from heterodox and simi-dimi ways of knowing. These contestations of mixing are what in large part keeps these communities acute, articulate, and, to an extent, agents of their own futures. Hindus and Muslims in Trinidad have been molded by simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal forces for more than one and a half centuries. In other words, they have been enmeshed with each other as well as with other communities, and thus see themselves in a variety of others, however reluctantly at times. Both religions symbolize to these communities a shared past, retrievable and coveted, yet all the more problematic for being shared. Consequently, each is the other’s interlocutor in debates about pure, essential forms of religious and cultural knowledge versus mixed, protean forms of religious and cultural knowledge, and what these imply for establishing oneself in a ‘‘racial’’ world, where Christians as well as non-Indian practitioners of Islam and Hinduism (in whole or in part) have helped to frame the debates. Treating religion, race, class, or gender as givens that are then sought out to explain certain proclivities for embracing a particular identity does not appreciably advance our understanding of the ways identities are constructed. More appropriate is to explore

Mixing Metaphors

229

the formation of, and relationships among, religious constituencies, the cultural elements they draw upon, and the contexts of class transformation of which they are a part, to consider how these reinforce or challenge racial hierarchies and the foundation of putatively natural, essential differences on which they are based. Glancing back on his relationship with his native soil, V. S. Naipaul writes in one of his essays about Indo-Trinidadians: ‘‘To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one’s group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage’’ (1990:69). In one sense, Hindu and Muslim identities in Trinidad have been, from colonial beginnings to postindependence elaborations, forged in terms of the views the outside world had of them, and IndoTrinidadians’ remaking of those views. Implying the historical uncertainties and mysteries in diasporic communities’ cultural pasts, an acquaintance of mine in Trinidad said solemnly to me in 1988, ‘‘When there is no other proof, history becomes law.’’ I suspect he was alluding to the realities of power: histories get told by everyone, but the versions that turn into law through determinations of proof are those of the victors. With rage comes revision. Lest we assume that mixing, creolization, hybridity, and callaloo are issues peculiar to the Caribbean or limited to the theoretical, we need simply to look at their prominence in the national discourse of the United States. As Arjun Appadurai observes, the United States is organized around a political ideology where pluralism is necessary to democratic life and where being a land of immigrants is central to its character. In ‘‘today’s postnational, diasporic world, America is being invited to weld these two doctrines together, to confront the needs of pluralism and of immigration, to construct a society around diasporic diversity’’ (Appadurai 1996:173). Reiterating these themes, Newsweek magazine inaugurated the new millennium with a 1 January 2000 special double issue, ‘‘The 21st Century: A User’s Guide.’’ In it Newsweek covers ‘‘What we can expect. What we can look forward to. What we should worry about’’ (24). Assuring readers that the ‘‘good news’’ far outweighs the ‘‘worry abouts,’’ the editors predict that ‘‘the bright side is [that] . . . Racial friction will ease as the population becomes more racially blended’’ (24). Certainly not the first nor only ones to herald these agreeable tidings, Newsweek relies on the familiar premises that difference is inherently conflictual, that ‘‘blending’’ (synonymous here with mestizaje rather than callaloo) can be measured empirically across various terrains by the same standards for all peoples and regions, and, most importantly, that self-congratulations are in order, as racial blending is a sign of increasing modernity, being more tolerant and democratic, and thus more civilized. One way we in the United States measure progress, then, at least according to contemporary nationalist ideology and

230

Callaloo Nation

its boosterism, is the degree to which we are ‘‘naturally’’ (biogenetically) One Nation. Out of the racist foundations of slavery and Manifest Destiny, we want to see ourselves advancing forward, away from segregation and toward assimilation. Social and cultural integration are the preferred modes, but if biogenetic integration is inevitable, anyway, then we will at least in theory celebrate it as progress in the right direction. With Indo-Trinidad as its focus, this book accents the pervasiveness of ‘‘mixing metaphors’’ in our contemporary world, some of the reasons for this ubiquity, and the ways that putatively distinct dimensions of identity—racial, religious, cultural, ethnic, and so on—are necessarily implicated in each other. These dimensions are mutually constitutive even when some manifestations are decried (such as racial hierarchies and ethnic separatism usually are) and others lauded (as is generally the case with religious expression). Ultimately, efforts toward inclusiveness, political and economic justice, and cultural equality must be predicated, in part, on understanding the ways in which these aspects of our identities are inseparable and complicit. From ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ in parts of Europe and Africa, to religious fundamentalism in parts of Asia and the Middle East, to changes in social mores (not to speak of immigration patterns) that lead to growing ‘‘multiculturalism’’ in North America, to Indo-Trinidadian struggles over rights and recognition in Trinidad, mixing metaphors are more pervasive, and more powerful than we have tended to recognize. As the sites of overlapping contact that invigorate ostensibly discrete and distinct identities, mixing metaphors and the ideologies and assumptions they communicate are key to unraveling who we imagine ourselves to be in the world, and, as importantly, why.

Mixing Metaphors

231

NOTES

1 1

‘‘This Rainbow Has Teeth’’

The term creole has many meanings and uses, and extensive discussion in the literature. See, for example, the special issues of Caribbean Quarterly (1998) and Plantation Society in the Americas (1998). 2 In his recent interview with David Gonzalez, a New York Times reporter, on 9 January 2002, Imam Yasin Abu Bakr, leader of the Jamaat al-Muslimeen, made it a point to declare about his four wives that he has ‘‘one wife who is mixed, an African [Afro-Trinidadian] wife, an Indian [Indo-Trinidadian] wife and one who is another mixture of Chinese and Indian . . . I now have the whole United Nations in my family.’’ (‘‘Failed Rebel’s Boast: At Least He Rules the Street.’’) The image of the UN that Bakr employs is meant to represent ecumenism and harmony, although conveyed with something of a wink. Academic abstractions, on the other hand, currently tend to characterize the Caribbean and Trinidad as beyond global political requirements for nations to be ‘‘modern’’ in terms of a UN–like realpolitik, instead emphasizing their symbolizing new directions in theory-building. Mary C. Waters, for example, suggests that ‘‘West Indians are perhaps the quintessential postmodern peoples’’ due to their engagement with capitalism, the preponderance of cultural mixing in the region’s ‘‘created societies,’’ and the importance of migration in their lives (2001:202). Waters’s study focuses on Afro-Caribbeans, who are generally characterized as engaged with modernity on a global scale; Indo-Caribbeans—with their allegedly intact traditions—have more recently begun to be portrayed in this way. 3 The term dougla is derived from Hindi, and refers to a person with one Afro-Trinidadian parent and one Indo-Trinidadian parent. ‘‘Long time’’ (until about the mid-twentieth century), however, it was used by Indo-Caribbeans to identify a person of mixed Indian and any non-Indian parentage. With current interest in aesthetic forms of ‘‘cut-and-mix’’ hybrids in popular culture, along with North America’s new attention to ‘‘multiculturalism,’’ dougla seems to be losing a good deal of its stigma. 4 Contrasting with internal perspectives are the external ones of scholarly observation. As Michael Taussig recognizes, syncretism, as it has been traditionally employed, often lacks specific reference to power relations; he calls for thinking in terms of a ‘‘folding into’’ each other of colonizer and colonized, ‘‘a chamber of mirrors—reflecting each stream’s perception of the other’’ rather than an ‘‘organic synthesis’’ (1987:218).

5

6

7

8

9 10

11

2

Jahaji, or jahaji bhai, roughly translated, means ‘‘brotherhood of the boat,’’ and is a term meaningful to all Indo-Trinidadians and most other Trinidadians (as well as other IndoCaribbeans), memorialized in many ways—from formal celebrations like the annual Indian Arrival Day, to oral histories passed down through the generations, to calypso compositions. It indicates the bonds of affinity formed on shipboard among indentured immigrants, and to my knowledge generally refers to men. In local Indo-Trinidadian parlance, an older head is an elderly man or woman, but age here connotes wisdom and experience and older head is thus an implicit term of respect when referring to those who have reached the stage of having grown children. Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyya are reformist movements arising in nineteenth-century India that called for fundamental changes in the doctrine and practice of Hinduism and Islam, respectively. These social movements would have long-term, global reverberations. The annual festival, on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, where a small black statue, known as Sipari Mai, or the Mother of Siparia (the town in which the church, La Divina Pastora, is located) is venerated by being offered gifts like those Rama is describing, to give thanks or to make a request. Sipari Mai has aspects of both the Virgin Mary and the Hindu goddess Kali, and her devotees are most often women who come about fertility and child health issues. In Holiness and Humanity: Ritual in the Making of Religious Life (1999), Roy Rappaport raises what for him is also a key issue: the reconciliation between ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘religion.’’ Nicole Belmont points out that, etymologically, there is no common Indo-European term for the word religion, and that ‘‘in ancient civilizations this institution is not set apart from other institutions,’’ so that the ‘‘need for a special term to designate it only makes itself felt when religion is set apart out [sic] and it becomes possible to know what belongs to religion and what is outside it’’ (1982:11). Obeah means magical practices involving supernatural powers, deriving from West African divination and healing practices. It is a monumentally important force among African, European, and Asian populations in the Americas, during slavery and beyond.

A ‘‘Crazyquilt Society’’

1 2

Translation from the original German by Adrian von Hassel. Anthony Reid (1994) makes a similar point: Portuguese conquistadors in the early 1500s typically described their Gujerati and Arab adversaries as ‘‘white,’’ along with the Chinese. Reid suggests this implies that ‘‘European skin-color was not seen as novel by either side’’ (1994:274). 3 See also Banton 2000. 4 As another example, the 1977 primer on Ecuadorian national development contrasted a ‘‘new type of Ecuadorian’’ with an indigenous type. The latter’s ‘‘consciousness is magical in character [see also Taussig 1987]; he sees his situation in terms of euphemisms and sophistries. He is prejudiced, superstitious, and taboo-ridden’’ (Stutzman 1981:71). Moreover, Christiano is the ‘‘preferred form of reference to self . . . the word for human being in the lexicon of cholo [mestizo] ethnicity . . . It designates people as opposed to animals’’ (82). 5 Coincidentally, Bastian, a widely traveled ethnographer, died in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on a return voyage (‘‘Adolf Bastian, 1826–1905,’’ http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/information/ biography/abcde/bastian adolf.html). 6 Ronald Stutzman’s (1981) discussion of Ecuadorian scholar Ligdano Chavez’s midtwentieth-century analysis of the religious aspect of Ecuadorian nationalism reveals Chavez’s position that indigenous religion had not yet reached its inevitable evolution toward monotheism, interrupted as it was by Spanish colonialism (1981:65–66). See also Charles Kingsley’s (1873:288ff) discussion of whether African and Southern Indian idola-

234

Notes to Chapter Two

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

try represent ‘‘primaeval man’s creeds’’ or ‘‘the mere dregs and fragments’’ of ‘‘older superstitions’’ (1873:288). For example, the rest of Bunge’s quotation reads, ‘‘[mestizos and mulattos] are like the two heads of a fabulous hydra that surrounds, constricts and strangles with its giant spiral a beautiful, pale virgin, Spanish America’’ (quoted in Morner 1967:140). Ashis Nandy (1990:102) observes that British colonial writings contained ‘‘the usual inconsistent stereotypes of the Indian men as violent and amoral on the one hand, and effeminate and overly philosophical on the other.’’ Amitav Ghosh notes that as early as the twelfth century (and perhaps earlier), Arab geographers thought of China (‘‘al-Sin’’) as ‘‘a single state, an empire whose provinces were merely constituent parts of a larger political unity.’’ India (‘‘al-Hind’’) was, however, ‘‘divided into several kingdoms, large and small . . .’’ (1994:282). Gyanendra Pandey remarks that by the end of the nineteenth century, ‘‘the dominant strand in colonialist historiography was representing religious bigotry and conflict between people of different religious persuasions as one of the more distinctive features of Indian society, past and present’’ (1990:23). Majeed suggests that in the late eighteenth century, the Asiatic Society of Bengal was instrumental in beginning the consolidation of the ‘‘vast collection of myths, beliefs, rituals, and laws into a coherent religion, and shaped an amorphous heritage into the faith now known as Hinduism’’ (1992:36). In his memoir, Journal d’Un Missionnaire Dominicain des Antilles Anglaises (1893), Dominican Order missionary Bertrand Cothonay makes an unusual reverse contrast between Indian immigrants from Calcutta and Madras: ‘‘These Coolies from Madras are perhaps less intelligent than those from Calcutta, who work the sugar cane plantations, but they are more docile and more steadfast once converted [to Christianity]’’ (1893:394; translated from the original French by Ann Stevens). The distinction between Madras and Calcutta ‘‘types’’ typically made by Euro-colonial observers, authorities, and planters was that ‘‘Madrassis’’ were more wild in behavior, closer to Africans in phenotype, more fierce, and thus implicitly less evolved than ‘‘Calcuttans,’’ and hence less desirable as plantation labor (see, among many examples, Wood 1968; Brereton 1981). The conventional hierarchical ordering of Calcuttan over Madrassi, however, persists even today in some Trinidadian quarters. According to Beverley Steele, the ‘‘religion of the Madras Indian, which is different from the type of Hinduism practised by the Indians from the more northerly regions of India is regarded as unholy, evil and superstitious. The Kali Puja [sic] of the Madrassee is regarded as barbarous’’ (1976:31). Fourteen years later, on 16 October 1898, the newspaper, Indian Koh-i-Noor Gazette reported that Trinidadian planters had ‘‘requisitioned fos [for] two thousand emigrants from Barbados and St. Vincent.’’ The ‘‘Breadfruiters,’’ those from Barbados, have the reputation, as reported by the paper, that ‘‘they eat well, and drinks well, but when they get a job of work they feels all of a tremble.’’ An interesting example of the invisibility or marginality of Muslims within the gaze of the West is in S. M. Zwemer et al. (1906), The Mohammedan World of To-Day, in which there is no mention of Muslims or Islam in the Caribbean or Latin America, despite the final chapter, ‘‘Statistical Survey and Comparative Survey of Islam in Asia and the Entire World.’’ An essay in the Port of Spain Gazette on 21 September 1897, lists Indians in Trinidad as consisting of ‘‘natives of India’’ and ‘‘Indians born here or, as it will be convenient to call them in this article, Creole-Indians.’’ Sometimes these qualities connoted ‘‘the meek Hindu,’’ an image promoted, for example, by the British consul in 1884, arguing that Indians were ready to be indentured on overseas sugar plantations (Emmer 1986:187). In the seventeenth century, ‘‘Hindus had usually been depicted either as idolatrous gen-

Notes to Chapter Two

235

tiles in the manner of the Old Testament or as proto-Pythagoreans as in Greek and Roman geography’’ (Marshall and Williams 1982:103). In Indian physiognomy a shared Western foundation may be revealed, and in religion there are parallels, if not coalescence.

3 1 2 3 4 5

6

4

Locations and Dislocations Hereafter I will be using local parlance when referring to South, e.g., in South, from South, and the like. In her survey of mosques in Trinidad, Carolyn Prorock notes, however, that ‘‘a number of jamaats named by asja in its literature did not identify themselves as asja’’ (1993:44). See, for example, Shiva Naipaul’s (1973) The Chip-Chip Gatherers. Arthur Niehoff reports from his mid-twentieth-century fieldwork in Penal that, ‘‘one end of Penal has a heavy concentration of low-caste Hindus, most of whom raise pigs’’ (1967:156). In an interesting aside in an article on Indians in Cuba, Jaime Sarusky mentions that among the aspects of Indian behavior that ‘‘appeared strange to their Cuban hosts,’’ was that ‘‘women worked side by side with men in farming activities’’ (1989:75). Lara Putnam notes that indentured Indian women labored in sizeable numbers on banana plantations in Jamaica (2002:9). In researching shop records in cane growing communities between 1940 and 1970, Kusha Haraksingh observed that they ‘‘reveal a fairly consistent pattern of indebtedness . . . The entire account was seldom liquidated, it being considered good form on the part of both the customer and the shop-keeper that the arrangement between them should not be seen to have come to an end’’ (1988b:285). During the second part of the year, after harvest, when there was little work required, a customer’s ‘‘deficit would steadily mount’’ since her/his expenses remained the same. ‘‘In this period, the line of credit extended by the shopkeeper to the worker was his greatest resource’’ (286).

The Problem of Simi-Dimi

Some material in this chapter was published in an earlier version in Aisha Khan, ‘‘ ‘On the Right Path’: Interpolating Religion in Trinidad,’’ in John Pulis, ed., Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999); thanks go to Taylor and Francis Publishers. 1 Thanks to Robert Hoberman for his assistance. 2 According to Belmont, superstitio in Latin signifies an anachronism, a superfluous remainder (1982:10). In ancient Rome, superstitio began to be contrasted with religio, indicating a hierarchy of normative versus exaggerated and primitive (1982:12). 3 Thanks to Ann Stevens for translating the original French. 4 Almost a century earlier in Trinidad, Andrew Gayadeen, an Indian convert to Presbyterianism, recalled that ‘‘in regard to [Christianity] . . . the only thing I knew about the Bible was to buy one and place it under my pillow and the jumbee [ghosts] will keep away’’ (Morton Papers, Extracts and Transcripts, c. 1890–1909, Presbyterian Church in Canada, archive 1973–5009–3–26). 5 The Books of Moses are ‘‘popular Euro-American nineteenth-century magical manuals . . . esoteric treatise[s] of occult science and philosophy’’ (Chireau 2003:164, n.28).

5 1 2 3

Carving Knowledge from Ways of Knowing See, for example, Carter and Torabully (2002). See Richard Price’s (2001) thoughtful critique of Scott (1991). As the narrative instructs, standing on the moral high ground are the duped; mired in crimes against fellows are those irresponsibly using their power.

236

Notes to Chapter Five

4

5

6

7 8 9

10

11

12

6 1

2

See P. C. Emmer (1986), who counters that there is little evidence for deception and kidnapping with regard to indenture quotas. As far as I can tell, this is not the majority opinion. As Breman and Daniel conclude, the ‘‘struggle of the coolie has been the struggle to recover an identity that is not fractured, not alienated from place, skill, and a moral centre’’ (1992:291). These retraced discoveries contradict the encompassing claim made by Salman Rushdie that ‘‘exiles or emigrants or expatriates’’ will always seek what they cannot find. Reclaiming what was lost is impossible, so, instead, fictions rather than actual places are created, ‘‘invisible,’’ ‘‘imaginary homelands,’’ ‘‘Indias of the mind’’ (1991:10). In his discussion of Indo-Guyanese plantation workers, Chandra Jayawardena (1963, 1968) describes mati, another kind of bond indicating feelings of affinity and cooperation. A significant difference between mati and jahaji bhai is that mati seems to be an institutionalized part of Indo-Guyanese social organization. Among Indo-Trinidadians, jahaji bhai functions more as a metaphor for ideal, and idealized, past social ties that are not institutionalized but emerge spontaneously between individuals. If three months is counted as ninety days, and is divided by seventy-nine lectures, the total is 88 percent. It is particularly intriguing that the owner and publisher of the East Indian Weekly was an Afro-Trinidadian named Leonard Fitzgerald Walcott (Samaroo 1977:7). The article continues, bravely, ‘‘Let her [Indo-Trinidadian girls] learn subjects that will be worthwhile . . . and for goodness’ sake, don’t let her be a sex illiterate . . . She will not go to extremes in the ecstasy of her new liberation; she is sure to find the happy medium’’ (Deeraj 1941:4). As just one example, the East Indian Patriot reported in 1923, under the heading ‘‘Rusillac—La Brea’’ (agricultural areas deep in St. Patrick County), that they were ‘‘pleased to announce that a ‘Sanatan Dharm Ka Sabha’ has been organized in our district. A ‘Kootiya’ [humble dwelling] is built in which the ‘Sookh Sagar’ [The Ocean of Happiness, an important religious text, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar] is read on Sundays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. to the Hindoo brethren and other friends who attend the ‘Sabha’ ’’ (2 [10]:15). In Seepersad Naipaul’s collected short stories, The Adventures of Gurudeva, he includes a supposed newspaper story about the lecture of a visiting pandit in an agricultural region; in a ‘‘kuti’’ (which Naipaul defines as ‘‘a grass-thatched hut’’ [1976:68]) ‘‘packed with people,’’ the pandit lectured ‘‘on the Sanatan Dharma (orthodox Hinduism)’’ (1976:101–2). Earlier, Naipaul’s characters discuss a different visiting lecturer pandit, portrayed as a reformist, possibly Arya Samaj (1976:88). As van der Veer points out, Hinduism has long been understood as not constituting a ‘‘fully integrated family of ideas and practices,’’ yet it has for centuries been marked by ‘‘longterm processes of centralization and homogenization’’ (1994:46). The majority of non-Christian primary schools were built between 1950 and 1956 (Ramsingh 1969:5).

‘‘No Bhakti, Only Gyan’’ Some pujas on behalf of individuals are not ‘‘thanksgivings,’’ and are mandatory. These would include the special rites held for a person one year after their death. In this case the pandit’s ritual work is of a special nature, and while food and prasad sharing are also features of this puja, there would not be music or kuttha, though, as usual, the pandit provides a running explanation of what he is doing during the ritual. At the last one of these pujas I attended in Trinidad, in 2002, on the evening before, the family held something like a sat sangh, primarily with bhajan singing. Robert Hefner notes that among the various reformist efforts in recent Hindu ‘‘regeneration’’ is the ‘‘elevation of tolerance as a distinctive feature of Hindu tradition’’ (1998:94).

Notes to Chapter Six

237

3

7

1 2

3

4 5

6 7

8

9 10

Hindus throughout the Caribbean and elsewhere in diaspora (e.g., North America) make much of this ideology of ecumenism. It is consistently raised in prayers of various kinds, and in print (e.g., Rajaram [1999]:13). An international movement, Sai Baba is a form of worship that subscribes to the teachings of Satya Sai Baba. A spiritual world leader centered in India, Sai Baba’s message of truth, moral conduct, love, and nonviolence has influenced Trinidadian Hindus’ form of worship, particularly among the middle class (see, for example, Klass 1991).

‘‘You Get Honor for Your Knowledge’’ Some material from this chapter has appeared in Aisha Khan, ‘‘Homeland, Motherland: Authenticity, Legitimacy, and Ideologies of Place among Muslims in Trinidad,’’ in Peter van der Veer, ed. Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 93–131; thanks go to University of Pennsylvania Press. For a striking parallel with Trinidad, see Hollup (1996) on Mauritius. According to Lansine, ‘‘The Wahhabiyya . . . derives from the name of Muhammad Ibn-alWahab, a religious leader born in ad 1703 in . . . Central Arabia’’; concerned with ‘‘religious and moral laxity’’ (1974:3), in about 1744 he engaged in a ‘‘revivalist campaign’’ to return to the ‘‘purity of Islam’’ (ibid:4–5; Al-Azmeh 1993:104ff; Hodgson 1974:152). The Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam (1953:365–67) defines mawlid, or mawlud as ‘‘time, place and celebration of the birth of anyone, particularly of the Prophet Muhammad (mawlid al-nabi) . . . One element in particular is very prominent, and that is the most characteristic one of the later celebrations, namely the recital of mawlids, i.e., panegyrical poems . . . which start with the birth of Muhammad and praise his life and virtues in the most laudatory fashion.’’ (Thanks to Robert Hoberman for his assistance.) See, for example, Prorock (1988) on masjids as public statements about ethnic identity. A qurbani is ‘‘any practice that brings one closer to God. In particular it means sacrifice, and especially the animals sacrificed in the Id-al-Adha (’Feast of Sacrifice’)’’ (The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam 1989:327). It is a compulsory part of making Hajj. (Thanks to Robert Hoberman for his assistance.) To my knowledge, kitab is no longer commonly used to refer to functions. That they were Hindu was evident in their holding back from engaging in the function’s specific rites, such as prayer and singing qaseedas—though remaining attentive, not surprisingly perhaps, to the lesson of the khutbah. Another indication is that the ones older than about age fifty all had a goadna, the purifying tattoo, on their arms or hands. To my knowledge, no Muslim women of any age ever have goadnas, unless, of course, they later ‘‘married in Muslim,’’ being Hindus prior to marriage. In the Muslim functions sponsored by elite jamaats (mostly in the north), some women wear saris. Saris are, however, not the rule, and were very unusual in Muslim functions in South. The very few saris I saw tended to be at Hindu prayers, worn by Hindu women making their own fashion statements about pious authenticity. The Hadith is the traditions—recorded words and deeds—of the prophet Mohammed. As I have noted, these tensions are not unique to Trinidad. Amitav Ghosh (1986, 1994), for example, discusses generational shifts in authority among Muslims in his field site village in Egypt, where ‘‘no one had time for old-fashioned Imams who made themselves ridiculous by boiling herbs and cutting hair’’ (1986:136); and a young man disapproves of an old man: ‘‘Nowadays people laugh at his sermons . . . He doesn’t seem to know about the things that are happening around us, in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel’’; someone else shrugged, ‘‘He’s from another time . . . What he knows about religion is what he learnt from his father in the village Qur’an school’’ (1994:141).

238

Notes to Chapter Seven

8 1

2 3

Mixing Metaphors A typical example is from an internet Web site, where a Guyanese dramatist publicizes himself as a mixture of ‘‘Chinese, Amerindian, Welch, African, Scottish, Portuguese, and East Indian’’ (http://www.kencorsbie.com). See also, for example, Edwin Ardener (1982) and Renato Rosaldo (1995). Ashis Nandy perceptively observes that ‘‘the diaspora has created identities which do not open up the older Indian identities but narrow them’’ (1990:104). Hinduism in diaspora, for example, is defined ‘‘according to the dominant Western concept of religion,’’ resulting in a more globalized, more Brahmanic, and more semiticized version of Hinduism abroad (104).

Notes to Chapter Eight

239

WORKS CITED

Adams, Harriet Chalmers. 1907. ‘‘The East Indians in the New World.’’ National Geographic 18 (July):485–92. Al-Azmeh, Aziz. 1993. Islam and Modernities. London: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anthony, Michael. 1988. Towns and Villages of Trinidad and Tobago. Port-of-Spain: Circle Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. ‘‘Is Homo Hierarchicus?’’ American Ethnologist 13:745–61. ———. 1990. ‘‘Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.’’ Public Culture 2(2):1–24. ———. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ardener, Edwin. 1982. ‘‘Social Anthropology, Language and Reality.’’ In David Parkin, ed., Semantic Anthropology, 1–14. London: Academic Press. Asad, Talal. 1986. ‘‘The Idea for an Anthropology of Islam.’’ March. Occasional Paper Series. Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University. ———. 1993. Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Austin-Broos, Diane. 1997. Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Banton, Michael. 1987. Racial Theories. London: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. ‘‘The Idiom of Race: A Critique of Presentism.’’ In Les Black and John Salomos, eds., Theories of Race and Racism, 51–63. London: Routledge. Bearce, George D. 1961. British Attitudes Towards India, 1784–1858. London: Oxford University Press. Belmont, Nicole. 1982. ‘‘ ‘Superstition’ and Popular Religion in Western Societies.’’ In Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, eds., Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History, and Myth, 9–23. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ‘‘Beneath Notes of Trinidad Harmony Play Undertones of Racial Discord.’’ 1999. Los Angeles Times, 1 January, A9. Benedict, Burton. 1965. Mauritius: The Problems of a Plural Society. London: Pall Mall Press. Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. 1992. The Repeating Island. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Bentley, W. 1967. ‘‘The Trinidad Negro.’’ The Observer 26(5):2. Berger, Peter. 1969. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday.

Bhagwan, H. 1967. ‘‘Are Indians Coloured?’’ The Observer 26(1):2. Birth, Kevin. 1999. ‘‘Any Time Is Trinidad Time’’: Social Meanings and Temporal Consciousness. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Bloch, Maurice. 1996. ‘‘Religion and Ritual.’’ In Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper, eds., The Social Science Encyclopedia, 2d ed., 732–36. London: Routledge. Bolan, Indira. 1994. ‘‘Building Cross-Cultural Bridges in Multi-Ethnic Societies: The Role of the Pandit.’’ Caribbean Quarterly 40(3–4):54–60. Bolt, Christine. 1971. Victorian Attitudes Toward Race. London: Routledge. Borofsky, Robert. 1994. ‘‘On the Knowledge and Knowing of Cultural Activities.’’ In Assessing Cultural Anthropology, 331–47. New York: McGraw Hill. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boston, R. A. S. 1967. ‘‘Social and Physical Factors Affecting Farmers in Two Areas of the South Oropouche Lagoon.’’ Diploma in Tropical Agriculture Report, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Bowen, John. 1989. ‘‘Salaat in Indonesia: The Social Meanings of an Islamic Ritual.’’ Man, n.s., 24(4):600–619. ———. 1993. Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge. Brassey, Lady Annie Allnutt. 1885. In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties. Vols. 1 and 2. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz. Breckenridge, Carol and Arjun Appadurai. 1989. ‘‘On Moving Targets.’’ Public Culture 2(1):i–iv. Breman, Jan. 1990. Labour Migration and Rural Transformation in Colonial Asia. Amsterdam: Free University Press. Breman, Jan, and E. Valentine Daniel. 1992. ‘‘Conclusion: The Making of a Coolie.’’ Journal of Peasant Studies 19(3–4):268–95. Brereton, Bridget. 1979. Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1981. A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962. London: Heinemann. ———. 1985. ‘‘The Experience of Indentureship: 1845–1917.’’ In John La Guerre, ed., Calcutta to Caroni, 21–30. St. Augustine (Trinidad): University of the West Indies. ———. 1998. ‘‘The White Elite of Trinidad, 1838–1950.’’ In Howard Johnson and Karl Watson, eds., The White Minority in the Caribbean, 32–70. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Bronckhurst, Rev. H. V. P. 1888. Among the Hindus and Creoles of British Guiana. London: T. Woolmer. Burke, John G. 1972. ‘‘The Wild Man’s Pedigree: Scientific Method and Racial Anthropology.’’ In Edward Dudley and Maximilian Novak, eds. The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, 259–80. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Burns, Sir Alan. 1948. Colour Prejudice. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press. Campbell, Carl. 1974. ‘‘Jonas Mohammed Bath and the Free Mandingos in Trinidad: The Question of Their Repatriation to Africa 1831–1838.’’ Pan African Journal 7(2):129–52. Carter, Marina, and Khal Torabully. 2002. Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora. London: Wimbledon Publishing. Central Statistical Office, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. 1990. Demographic Report. Chireau, Yvonne P. 2003. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Christian Literature Society. 1895. History of Christianity in India: With Its Prospects. A Sketch. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Clarke, Colin. 1993. ‘‘Spatial Pattern and Social Interaction among Creoles and Indians in

242

Works Cited

Trinidad and Tobago.’’ In Kevin Yelvington, ed., Trinidad Ethnicity, 116–35. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Clifford, James. 1994. ‘‘Diasporas.’’ Cultural Anthropology 9(3):302–38. Cohn, Bernard. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Collens, J. H. 1888. A Guide to Trinidad: A Handbook for the Use of Tourists and Visitors. London: Elliot Stock. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cothonay, Bertrand. 1893. Trinidad: Journal d’un Missionnaire Dominicain des Antilles Anglaises. Paris: Victor Retaux Et Fils. Craton, Michael. 1974. Sinews of Empire: A Short History of British Slavery. New York: Anchor Press. Crowley, Daniel. 1957. ‘‘Plural and Differential Acculturation in Trinidad.’’ American Anthropologist 59(5):817–24. Cumpston, I. M. 1953. Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834–1854. London: Dawsons. Dayan, Joan. 1995. Haiti, History, and the Gods. Berkeley: University of California Press. Danny, Phoolo. 1988. ‘‘Idols a Part of Worship.’’ Sunday Express, 25 December, 18. Deeraj, M. 1941. ‘‘What About Our Indian Girls?’’ The Observer 1(1):4. Desmangles, Leslie. 1992. The Faces of the Gods. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dumont, Louis. 1970. Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eickelman, Dale. 1984. ‘‘The Study of Islam in Local Contexts.’’ Contributions to Asian Studies 17:1–16. ‘‘Eid at Skinner Park.’’ 1994. Trinidad Guardian Sunday Magazine. 13 March, 4. Emmer, P. C. 1986. ‘‘ ‘The Meek Hindu’: The Recruitment of Indian Indentured Labourers for Service Overseas, 1870–1916.’’ In Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour Before and After Slavery. Comparative Studies in Overseas History, vol. 7. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ‘‘Every Creed Must Find an Equal Place Mister Baksh.’’ 2000. Newsday (Trinidad), 9 June, 4. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press. ‘‘Fair Share of Indian Culture.’’ 1999. Express. 20 August, 18. Fermor, Patrick Leigh. [1950] 1984. The Traveller’s Tree. New York: Penguin. Fernandez, James. 1991. ‘‘Introduction.’’ In James Fernandez, ed. Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Fernandez Olmos, Margarite, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. 2003. Creole Religions of the Caribbean. New York: New York University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1957. ‘‘Factions in Indian and Overseas Indian Societies: I. Introduction.’’ British Journal of Sociology 8:291–95. ———. 1996. Religion: A Humanist Interpretation. London: Routledge. Fitz, Earl E. 2002. ‘‘From Blood to Culture: Miscegenation as Metaphor for the Americas.’’ In Monika Kaup and Debra Rosenthal, eds., Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues, 243–72. Austin: University of Texas Press. Forbes, Richard. 1984. ‘‘Arya Samaj in Trinidad.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Miami. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language. New York: Pantheon. Franck, Harry. 1920. Roaming through the West Indies. New York: Century Co. Frankson, Geoffrey. 1990. ‘‘Sacred and the Profane.’’ Sunday Express, 11 March, 5. Furnivall, J. S. 1948. Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Works Cited

243

Gardner, K. 1995. Global Migrants, Local Lives: Travel and Transformation in Rural Bangladesh. London: Oxford University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1963. ‘‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States.’’ In Clifford Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States, 105–57. New York: Free Press. Gerstäcker, Friedrich. 1869. Nieue Reisen. Vol. 3 of Venezuela. Jena: Hermann Costenoble. Ghani, Ashraf. 1998. ‘‘Route to the Caribbean: An Interview with Sidney W. Mintz.’’ Plantation Society in the Americas 5(1):103–34. Ghosh, Amitav. 1986. ‘‘The Imam and the Indian.’’ Granta 20:135–46. ———. 1994. In an Antique Land. New York: Vintage. Gomes, Albert. 1974. Through a Maze of Colour. Port-of-Spain: Key Caribbean Publishers. Gordon, Shirley. 1997. ‘‘ ‘God is Dumb Until the Drum Speaks’: Religious Life in Jamaica Before Emancipation.’’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 17(1):145–56. Gordon, Edmund. 1998. Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gould, Jeffrey. 1998. To Die in This Way. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Guinee, William Fenton. 1992. ‘‘Suffering and Healing in Trinidadian Kali Worship.’’ Ph.D. diss., Indiana University. Hall, Stuart. 1980. ‘‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.’’ In Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, 305–45. Paris: unesco. ———. 1996. ‘‘Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?’’ In Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity, 1–17. London: Sage Publications. Haraksingh, Kusha. 1988a. ‘‘Culture, Religion, and Resistance among Indians in the Caribbean.’’ In U. Bissoondoyal and S. Servansing, eds., Indian Labour Immigration. Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute. ———. 1988b. ‘‘Sugar, Labour and Livelihood In Trinidad, 1940–1970. Social and Economic Studies 37(1–2):271–91. ———. 1988c. ‘‘Structure, Process, and Indian Culture in Trinidad.’’ In Howard Johnson, ed., After the Crossing: Immigrants and Minorities in Caribbean Creole Society, 113–43. London: Frank Cass. Harney, Stefano. 1996. Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora. London: Zed Books. Harrison, Selig. 1960. India: The Most Dangerous Decades. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hefner, Robert W. 1998. ‘‘Multiple Modernities: Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism in a Globalizing Age.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 27:83–104. Herskovits, Melville, and Frances Herskovits. [1947] 1976. Trinidad Village. New York: Octagon Books. Hintzen, Percy. 1989. The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. ‘‘Reproducing Domination Identity and Legitimacy Constructs in the West Indies.’’ Social Identities 3(1):47–75. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. 1974. The Venture of Islam. Vol. 1, The Classical Age of Islam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hollup, Oddvar. 1996. ‘‘Islamic Revivalism and Political Opposition among Minority Muslims in Mauritius.’’ Ethnology 35(4):285–300.

244

Works Cited

‘‘Hon. A. A. Sobrian.’’ 1924. East Indian Herald 2(11):11. Howe, E. W. 1910. The Trip to the West Indies. Topeka, Kan.: Crane and Co. Hulme, Peter. 1994. ‘‘Tales of Distinction: European Ethnography and the Caribbean.’’ In Stuart Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings, 157–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘‘The Increase in Crime.’’ 1884. Port of Spain Gazette, 26 April, 4. Jaimini, Pandit. 1929. ‘‘My Observations of East Indians of Trinidad, at the Eve of Departure.’’ East Indian Weekly, 16 March, 6. Jayawardena, Chandra. 1963. Conflict and Solidarity in a Guianese Plantation. London: Athlone. ———. 1966. ‘‘Religious Belief and Social Change: Aspects of the Development of Hinduism in British Guiana.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 8(2):211–40. ———. 1968. ‘‘Ideology and Conflict in Lower Class Communities.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 10(4):413–46. Jordan, Winthrop. 1969. ‘‘American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies.’’ In Laura Foner and Eugene Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World, 189–201. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Kelly, John. 1990. A Politics of Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Khan, Aisha. 1993. ‘‘What Is ‘a Spanish’?’’ Ambiguity and ‘Mixed’ Ethnicity in Trinidad.’’ In Kevin Yelvington, ed. Trinidad Ethnicity, 180–207. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ———. 1994. ‘‘Juthaa in Trinidad: Food, Pollution, and Hierarchy in a Caribbean Diaspora Community.’’ American Ethnologist 21(2):245–69. ———. 1995. ‘‘Homeland, Motherland: Authenticity, Legitimacy, and Ideologies of Place among Muslims in Trinidad.’’ In Peter van der Veer, ed., Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora. 93–131. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1997. ‘‘Rurality and ‘Racial’ Landscapes in Trinidad.’’ In Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed, eds., Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, 39–69. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. ‘‘ ‘On the Right Path’: Interpolating Religion in Trinidad.’’ In John Pulis, ed., Religion, Diaspora, and Cultural Identity. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. ———. 2001. ‘‘Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol.’’ Cultural Anthropology 16(3):271–302. Kingsley, Charles. 1873. At Last, A Christmas in the West Indies. London: Macmillan. Klass, Morton. [1961] 1988. East Indians in Trinidad. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press. ———. 1991. Singing With Sai Baba. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press. Kuczynski, R. R. 1953. Demographic Survey of the British Colonial Empire. Vol. 3, West Indian and American Territories. London: Oxford University Press. La Guerre, John. 1974. ‘‘Afro-Indian Relations in Trinidad and Tobago.’’ Caribbean Issues 1(1):49–61. Lakshmanna, C. 1994 Foreword. In Shamshu Deen, Solving East Indian Roots in Trinidad, vii– ix. Self-published. Lansine, Kaba. 1974. The Wahabiyya: Islamic Reform and Politics in French West Africa. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Laurence, K. O. 1971. Immigration into the West Indies in the Nineteenth Century. Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press. ———. 1994. A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875–1917. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Lewis, G. L. [1953] 1973. Turkish. London: St. Paul’s House Warwick Lane. Lewis, Gordon. 1983. Main Currents in Caribbean Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Works Cited

245

Look Lai, Walton. 1993. Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mabardi, Sabine. 2000. ‘‘Encounters of a Heterogeneous Kind: Hybridity in Cultural Theory.’’ In Rita De Grandis and Zila Bernd, eds., Unforeseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity in the Americas, 1–20. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Macaulay, Thomas B. 1823. ‘‘Speech on the Government of India.’’ In G. M. Young, ed. 1970, Macaulay: Prose and Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Madden, R. R. 1970. A Twelve Months’ Residence in the West Indies. 2 vols. New York: Negro Universities Press. Mahabir, Mickey. 1988. ‘‘More Cane Farmers in 1989.’’ Guardian, 7 December. Majeed, Javed. 1992. Ungoverned Imaginings. London: Oxford University Press. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. ‘‘Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacy of Colonialism.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 1:651–64. Manington, George. 1925. The West Indies, with British Guiana and British Honduras. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Mansingh, Ajai, and Lakshmi Mansingh. 1976. ‘‘Indian Heritage in Jamaica.’’ Jamaica Journal 10(2–4):10–19. Marajh, Camini. 1988. ‘‘Getting Away From It All.’’ Express, 19 July, 1:10. Marshall, P. J. 1968. Problems of Empire: Britain and India, 1757–1813. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Marshall, P. J., and Glyndwr Williams. 1982. The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Martinez-Alier, Verena. [1974] 1989. Marriage, Class, and Color in Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McCarthy-Brown, Karen. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodoo Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mendes, Alfred. 1932. ‘‘Good Friday at the Church of La Divina Pastora.’’ The Beacon 2(2):7–8, 10–11. Mintz, Sidney. 1966. ‘‘The Caribbean as a Sociocultural Area.’’ Journal of World History 9(4):912–37. ———. 1977. ‘‘North American Anthropological Contributions to Caribbean Studies.’’ Boletin de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 22:68–82. Mittleholzer, Edgar. [1950] 1979. A Morning at the Office. London: Heinemann. ‘‘Mohammedan Bishop Arrives.’’ 1920. East Indian Herald 12:10. Moore, Dennison. 1995. Origins and Development of Racial Ideology in Trinidad: The Black View of the East Indian. Tunapuna, Trinidad: Chakra. Moore, W. J. 1862. Health in the Tropics. London: Churchill. Morner, Magnus. 1967. Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown. Naipaul, Seepersad. 1976. The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories. London: Andre Deutsch. Naipaul, Shiva. [1973] 1983. The Chip-Chip Gatherers. New York: Penguin. Naipaul, V. S. [1958] 1985. The Suffrage of Elvira. New York: Vintage Books. ———. [1967] 1985. The Mimic Men. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1990. ‘‘The Shadow of the Guru.’’ New York Review of Books 37(20): 69–76. Nandy, Ashis. 1990. ‘‘Dialogue and the Diaspora.’’ Third Text 11:99–108. Nevadomsky, Joseph. 1983. ‘‘Economic Organization, Social Mobility, and Changing Social Status among East Indians in Rural Trinidad.’’ Ethnology 22(1):63–79. ———. 1985. ‘‘Developmental Sequences of Domestic Groups in an East Indian Community in Rural Trinidad.’’ Ethnology 24(1):1–11. Niehoff, Arthur. 1967. ‘‘The Function of Caste among the Indians of the Oropouche Lagoon, Trinidad.’’ In Barton M. Schwartz, ed., Caste in Overseas Indian Communities, 149–63. San Francisco: Chandler.

246

Works Cited

Niehoff, Arthur, and Juanita Niehoff. 1960. East Indians in the West Indies. Publications in Anthropology, vol. 6. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Museum. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge. Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pandia, D. P. 1942. ‘‘My Country and My Religion.’’ The Observer 1(3):11–12. Partap, Harry. 1988. ‘‘We Must Not Condemn Those Who Wish to Flee.’’ Sunday Express, 18 December, 1:17. Paton, William Agnew. 1887. Down the Islands: A Voyage to the Caribbees. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. ‘‘Penal News.’’ 1928. East Indian Weekly 1(2):6. Price, Richard. 1998. The Convict and the Colonel. Boston: Beacon. ———. 2001. ‘‘The Miracle of Creolization: A Retrospective.’’ New West Indian Guide 75(1– 2):35–64. Prorock, Carolyn. 1988. ‘‘Hindu Temples in Trinidad: A Cultural Geography of Religious Structures and Ethnic Identity.’’ Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University. ———. 1991. ‘‘Evolution of the Hindu Temple in Trinidad.’’ Caribbean Geography 3(2):73–93. Prorock, Carolyn, and Mohammed Hemmasi. 1993. ‘‘East Indian Muslims and their Mosques in Trinidad: A Geography of Religious Structures and the Politics of Ethnic Identity.’’ Caribbean Geography 4(1):28–48. ‘‘Purkhon Ke Desh Ki Yatra—A Journey to Roots: A Sentimental Tour to those Places in India From Whence Came our Forefathers.’’ 1983. Sunday Guardian Supplement, 24 April, 2:9– 10, 14. Putnam, Lara. 2002. The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1879–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Quinn, Naomi. 1991. ‘‘The Cultural Basis of Metaphor.’’ In James Fernandez, ed., Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, 56–93. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Radford, Alfred. 1886. Jottings on the West Indies and Panama. London: William Whiteley. Rajaram, N. S. 1999. ‘‘Looking Into Hinduism (A Column Supplied by the Maha Sabha).’’ Trinidad Express, 9 August, 13. Ramdeo, Taramati. 1976. ‘‘A Socio-Economic Study of the Institution of Pandits (Hindu Priests) in Penal.’’ Caribbean Studies Thesis, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Ramdin, Ron. 2000. Arising From Bondage: A History of the Indo-Caribbean People. New York: New York University Press. Ramesar, Marianne. 1996. ‘‘The Repatriates.’’ In David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., Across the Dark Waters, 175–200. London: Macmillan. Ramsingh, Hardeo. 1969. ‘‘The Historical Development of Muslim Schools in Trinidad and Tobago.’’ Caribbean Studies Thesis. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Holiness and Humanity: Ritual in the Making of Religious Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reddock, Rhoda. 1998. ‘‘Contestations over Culture, Class, Gender and Identity in Trinidad and Tobago: ‘The Little Tradition.’ ’’ Caribbean Quarterly 44(1–2):62–80. Reid, Anthony. 1994. ‘‘Early Southeast Asian Categorizations of Europeans.’’ In Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understanding; Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounter between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, 268–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ‘‘A Response to ‘A Son of India.’ ’’ 1897. Port of Spain Gazette, 21 September. Richardson, Bonham. 1975. ‘‘Livelihood in Rural Trinidad in 1900.’’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65(2):240–51. Richardson, Ronald Kent. 1987. Moral Imperium: Afro-Caribbeans and the Transformation of British Rule, 1776–1838. New York: Greenwood Press.

Works Cited

247

Rodney, Walter. 1981. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rohter, Larry. 1997. ‘‘High Level Name Calling Across the Racial Fence.’’ New York Times, 20 August. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth. Boston: Beacon. ———. 1995. Foreword. In Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures. Translated by Christopher Chiappari and Silvia Lopez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rushdie, Salman. 1991. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books. Ryan, Michael. 1981. ‘‘Assimilating New Worlds in the 16th and 17th Centuries.’’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(4):519–38. Ryan, Selwyn. 1966. ‘‘The Transition to Nationhood in Trinidad and Tobago, 1797–1962.’’ Ph.D. diss., Cornell University. ———. 1972. Race and Nationalism in Trinidad and Tobago: A Study of Decolonization in a Multiracial Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 1991. The Muslimeen Grab for Power: Religion, Race, and Revolution in Trinidad and Tobago. Port-of-Spain: Inprint Caribbean. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Samaroo, Brinsley. 1972. Constitutional Change in Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine: University of the West Indies. ———. 1974. Foreword. In Albert Gomes, Through a Maze of Colour. Port-of-Spain: Key Caribbean Publications. ———. 1977 ‘‘ ‘The Vanguard of Indian Nationalism in Trinidad’: The East Indian Weekly, 1928– 1932.’’ In 1977 Conference Papers, Ninth Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, 3– 7 April, Cave Hill, Barbados. ———. 1987. ‘‘The Indian Connection: The Influence of Indian Thought and Ideas on East Indians in the Caribbean.’’ In David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., India in the Caribbean, 43–59. London: Hansib. ———. 1988. ‘‘Early African and East Indian Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago.’’ Paper presented at the Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, England, 1988. Sammy, Ralph Victor Allen. 1976. ‘‘Survival Strategies among Domestic Pure Peasant Farmers in St. Patrick County, Trinidad.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario. Sampath, Niels. 1990. ‘‘ ‘De Country Gone T’rough’: Trinidad East Indian ‘Refugees’ to Canada, 1988–1992.’’ Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, November, Washington. ‘‘San Francique.’’ 1925. East Indian Herald 2(3):19. ‘‘The sara Poll: Alarming Number Want to Migrate.’’ 1988. Express, 15 July, 1:3. Sarusky, Jaime. 1989. ‘‘The East Indian Community in Cuba.’’ In Frank Birbalsingh, ed., Indenture & Exile: The Indo-Caribbean Experience. Toronto: tsar. Schwartz, Stuart. 1997. ‘‘Spaniards, Pardos, and the Missing Mestizos: Identities and Racial Categories in the Early Hispanic Caribbean.’’ New West Indian Guide 71(1–2):5–19. Scott, David. 1991. ‘‘That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African Diasporas in the New World.’’ Diaspora 1(3):261–84. ———. 1994. Formations of Ritual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sebastien, Rafael. 1980. ‘‘A Typology of the Caribbean Peasantry: The Development of the Peasantry in Trinidad, 1845–1917.’’ Social and Economic Studies 29(2–3):107–33. Seesaran, Rosabell. 1994. ‘‘Social Mobility in the Indo-Trinidadian Community, 1870–1917.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. Segal, Daniel. 1993. ‘‘ ‘Race’ and ‘Colour’ in Pre-Independence Trinidad and Tobago.’’ In Kevin Yelvington, ed., Trinidad Ethnicity, 81–115. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ———. 1994. ‘‘Living Ancestors: Nationalism and the Past in Postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago.’’

248

Works Cited

In Jonathan Boyarin, ed., Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace, 221–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sharma, Sitara. 1976. ‘‘A Study of the Hindu Women in Penal.’’ Caribbean Studies Thesis. St. Augustine: University of the West Indies. Shukla, Sandhya. 2001. ‘‘Locations for South Asian Diasporas.’’ Annual Review of Anthropology 30:551–72. Shrage, Laurie. 1995. ‘‘Ethnic Transgressions: Confessions of an Assimilated Jew.’’ In Naomi Zack, ed., American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity, 287–96. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Singh, Kelvin. 1985. ‘‘Indians in the Larger Society.’’ In John La Guerre, ed., Calcutta to Caroni: The East Indians of Trinidad, 33–60. St. Augustine: University of the West Indies. ———. 1994. Race and Class Struggles in a Colonial State: Trinidad 1917–1945. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. ———. 1996. ‘‘Conflict and Collaboration: Tradition and Modernizing Indo-Trinidadian Elites (1917–1956).’’ New West Indian Guide 70(3–4):229–53. Smedley, Audrey. 1993. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press. Smith, Michael G. 1965. The Plural Society in the British West Indies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Raymond T. 1962. British Guiana. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Robert J. 1963. ‘‘Muslim East Indians in Trinidad.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. Spear, T. P. R. 1932. The Nabobs. London: Oxford University Press. Speckmann, Johan Dirk. 1965. Marriage and Kinship among the Indians in Surinam. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. Spence, Jonathan. 1998. The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York: Norton. Starr, Ida May Hill. 1903. Gardens of the Caribbees: Sketches of a Cruise to the West Indies and the Spanish Main. Vols. 1 and 2. Boston: L. C. Page. Steele, Beverley. 1976. ‘‘East Indian Indenture and the Work of the Presbyterian Church among the Indians of Grenada.’’ Caribbean Quarterly 22(1):28–39. Stewart, John. 1973. ‘‘Coolie and Creole: Differential Adaptation in a Neo-Plantation Village, Trinidad, West Indies.’’ Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Stocking, George. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. Stoddard, Charles Augustus. 1903. Cruising Among the Caribbees. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Stolke, Verena. 1993. ‘‘Is Sex to Gender as Race is to Ethnicity?’’ In Teresa del Valle, ed., Gendered Anthropology, 17–37. London: Routledge. ‘‘St. Patrick Residents: We Want Help, not Handouts.’’ 1989. Express, 3 April. Stuempfle, Stephen. 1995. The Steelband Movement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stutzman, Ronald. 1981 ‘‘El Mestizaje: An All-Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion.’’ In Norman Whitten, ed., Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ‘‘Sudama: Oropouche Getting a Raw Deal.’’ 1988. Express, 23 May. Taitt, Ria. 1999. ‘‘Panday: As the World Watches, Let’s Get Along.’’ Express, 17 August, 21. Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Patrick. 2001. ‘‘Dancing the Nation: An Introduction.’’ In Nation Dance, 1–13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Thomas, Nicholas. 1996. ‘‘Cold Fusion.’’ American Anthropologist 98:9–16.

Works Cited

249

Thompson, Alvin O. 1997. The Haunting Past. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Tikasingh, Gerald. 1977. ‘‘The Trinidad Press and the Issue of Immigration.’’ In 1977 Conference Papers, Ninth Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, 3–7 April, Cave Hill, Barbados. Tinker, Hugh. 1974. A New System of Slavery. London: Oxford University Press. ‘‘Trinidad Prime Minister Visits His Roots.’’ 1997. India Abroad, 7 February, 22. Trollope, Anthony. 1859. The West Indies and the Spanish Main. London: Chapman and Hall. Trotman, David. 1991. ‘‘The Image of Indians in Calypso: Trinidad 1946–1986.’’ In Selwyn Ryan, ed., Social and Occupational Stratification in Contemporary Trinidad and Tobago, 385–98. St. Augustine: iser, University of the West Indies. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. Truman, George, John Jackson, and Thomas Longstreeth. 1844. Narrative of a Visit to the West Indies, in 1840 and 1841. Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 1995. ‘‘Empowering Nature, or: Some Gleanings in Bee Culture.’’ In Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, eds., Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, 113–43. New York: Routledge. Tylor, Edward Burnett. [1871] 1958. Primitive Culture. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Vandercook, John. 1938. Caribbee Cruise. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock. van der Veer, Peter. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1996. ‘‘Authenticity and Authority in Surinamese Hindu Ritual.’’ In David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., Across the Dark Waters, 131–46. London: Macmillan. van der Veer, Peter, and Steven Vertovec. 1991. ‘‘Brahmanism Abroad: On Caribbean Hinduism as an Ethnic Religion.’’ Ethnology 30(2):149–66. Vassanji, M. K. 1989. The Gunny Sack. London: Heinemann. Vertovec, Steven. 1992. Hindu Trinidad. London: Macmillan. ———. 1996. ‘‘ ‘Official’ and ‘Popular’ Hinduism in the Caribbean: Historical and Contemporary Trends in Surinam, Trinidad, and Guyana.’’ In David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, eds., Across the Dark Waters, 108–30. London: Macmillan. Verrill, A. Hyatt. 1931. West Indies of Today. New York: Dodd, Mead. Walcott, Derek. 1998. What the Twilight Says. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. 1991. Guinea’s Other Sons: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. Dover, Mass.: The Majority Press. Waters, Mary C. 2001. ‘‘Growing Up West Indian and African American: Gender and Class Differences in the Second Generation.’’ In Nancy Foner, ed., Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York, 193–215. Berkeley: University of California Press. Werbner, Pnina. 1997. ‘‘Introduction: The Dialectics of Cultural Hybridity.’’ In Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood, eds., Debating Cultural Hybridity, 1–26. London: Zed Books. ———. 2001. ‘‘The Limits of Cultural Hybridity: On Ritual Monsters, Poetic License and Contested Postcolonial Purifications.’’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(1):133–52. Williams, Brackette. 1990. ‘‘Nationalism, Traditionalism, and the Problem of Cultural Inauthenticity.’’ In Richard Fox, ed., Nationalist Ideologies and the Production of National Cultures, 112–30. Washington: American Anthropological Association. Williams, Eric. 1963. History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. London: Andre Deutsch. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Eric R. 1984. Introduction. In Religion, Power, and Protest in Local Communities, 1–14. Amsterdam: Mouton. ———. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

250

Works Cited

Wood, E. F. L. 1922. West Indies Report. Visit to the West Indies and British Guiana, December 1921–February 1922. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. Wood, Donald. 1968. Trinidad in Transition. London: Oxford University Press. World Resources Institute. 1996. World Resources 1996–97. Washington: World Resources Institute. Wright, Winthrop. 1990. Cafe Con Leche. Austin: University of Texas Press. Young, Robert. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race. New York: Routledge.

Works Cited

251

INDEX

acculturation, plural versus differential, 23 Adams, Harriet Chalmers, 45, 49–50 Africa, 11, 38, 42, 191–92 Afro-Caribbeans and Christianity, 38 Afro-Trinidadians: contrasted with IndoTrinidadians, 45–48, 52–54, 68; cultural nationalism of, 10, 11; culture as folk and primitive, 51–52; as Muslim interlocutors, 190–93; in Penal, 85; racialized culture of, 207; religion judged as ecstatic, 39; sexual stereotyping of males, 58; urban identification of, 68 agriculture: land contracts, 78–79; production decline, 77–78; and rural identity, 69– 71; sugar cane production, 1, 61, 78, 91–92. See also indentured laborers aguwah (matchmaker), 79, 83 Ahmadiyya movement, 139–40, 234 n.7 ajoupas, 81 ancestors, traceable, 125, 127–29 Anjuman Sunnat-ul-Jamaat (asja), 67, 140, 150, 236 n.2 Anthony, Michael, 85, 88 anthropology, and interpretations of religion, 21–26 ‘‘a prayers.’’ See functions (Muslim ‘‘a prayers’’); pujas and Hindu a prayers; ritual practices and performance articulation, as theoretical framework, 226, 227 Aryan racial category, 39–40 Arya Samaj movement, 138–39, 234 n.7

Asad, Talal, 5, 22, 119, 186 ‘‘Asiatics,’’ 46–47 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 235 n.11 asja (Anjuman Sunnat-ul-Jamaat), 67, 140, 150, 236 n.2 assimilation, 58–59, 63–64 Atlantic passage (kala pani ), 123, 129 Austin-Broos, Diane, 110 authenticity, cultural: born-again Christians’ rejection of, 98; and cultural performance, 51–52, 64–65; diaspora, heritage, and Islam, 188; and piety, 189; and religious knowledge, 157; traditional versus modern, 67 authority: of imams, 215–19; of pandits, 176–77; plantation resistance, 131; ridicule of traditional forms of, 130 Aziz, Abdul, 149 ‘‘Babagee’’/‘‘Babajee,’’ 130, 167 Bakr, Imam Yasin Abu, 233 n.2 Barnum and Bailey circus, 50–51 Bastian, Adolf, 32, 234 n.5 ‘‘being fooled’’: blind faith, 213; into indenture, 126–27; and religious knowledge, 175, 180, 209 belief: authentic, 157; blind faith, 213–14; folk, 104; ways of knowing, explanation, and superstition, 109–18. See also religion Belmont, Nicole, 118 betrayal, and diaspora discourse, 125–27 Bhagwan, H., 40

bhagwat, 163 bhakti (sacrifice or devotion), 160–61 Bible, 236 n.4 Birth, Kevin, 132 blackness, class and culture interwoven with, 48. See also race Blumenbach, Johann, 32–33 Boissere, Simon, 190–91 Bolan, Indira, 135, 166 Bolt, Christine, 42 boundaries, ideology of, 224–25 Bowen, John, 194–95 Brassey, Annie Allnut, 51 Breadfruiters, 235 n.13 ‘‘breakin’ style,’’ 189, 203–4 Brereton, Bridget, 8, 57, 140 British colonial ideologies. See colonial ideologies British Guiana Coolie Mission Committee, 130 Bronkhurst, H. V. P., 57 brownness, 8 Buentiempo Quarry, 80 Bunge, Carlos Octavio, 33, 235 n.7 burials, 111–12, 114, 217 Burke, John G., 31 Burns, Alan, 7 Calcutta, 235 n.12 callaloo, meaning of, 8. See also mixing Canada, emigration to, 92 carnivalization, 182–83, 206 Caroni, Trinidad, 71–72 caste, 35, 82 Catholicism, 105 census, Trinidadian, 9–10, 47, 66–67 Chavez, Ligdano, 234 n.6 China, colonial perspectives on, 34–35, 41– 42, 49, 235 n.9 ‘‘Chinidad,’’ 126, 128 Chinoiserie, 35–36 Christianity: conversion to, 38, 97–98; Pentecostalism and evangelical Protestantism, 97–98; Presbyterian missions and schools, 87–88, 97, 146; and racial classification, 32–33; on social evolutionary scale, 37–38. See also religion Christian Literature Society, 106 class: ‘‘breakin’ style,’’ 189, 203–4; Chinese versus Indian populations, 49; colored or brown middle class, 43; and cultural capi-

254

Index

tal, 41, 134; cultural contradictions with, 48–49; cultural symbols of, 54; farmers, laborers, and shopkeepers, 81; and hard work, 76–78, 134–35; high and low culture paired with, 36, 178–80; of imams, 216; impoverishment, descriptions of, 46; and Indian identity, 74–75; and Islam, 192–93; and Muslim functions, 193–94; patriarchy, 80; and press discourse, 142–43, 147; race interwoven with, in travel narratives, 47; and religion as subversive, 41; and ritual prayers, 156–57; and rural identity, 69–71, 74; social pyramid, Trinidadian, 42; and superstition, 110, 118; upward mobility, 73–76; visiting Hindu and Muslim teachers, 137–39; and ways of knowing, 110; and xenophobia, 44. See also indentured laborers; stratification, social classification of race, 28–33, 39–41 clothing, at Muslim functions, 189, 196, 199–200, 238 n.8 cocoa production, 78 code switching, 170 Collens, J. H., 48, 130 colonial ideologies: agricultural identification, 69–71; on China, Africa, and India, 34–36; difference, perception of, 15–16; Indians’ use of, 54–55; Indo-Afro contrasts, 45–48; Madras and Calcutta ‘‘types,’’ 235 n.12; nature and habit conflated, 52; oriental exoticism, 45–46, 48–52; paired polarities, 34, 35–36; presumption and authority, 56; racial classification, 6–9, 28–33, 39–41; religion and cultural evolution, 36– 39; on sexual rivalry, 57; stereotypes, early development of, 33–34; superstition and religious condemnation, 105–9 colonialism, resistance to, 21, 130–32 color as static signifier of difference, 56–57. See also race ‘‘colored’’ category, 8, 39–40 commodities, imported, 93 community boundaries, defining, 89 community development, and Muslim functions, 201–2 conflict: heterogeneity and, 16–18, 23–24; India and, 235 n.10; religious interpretation and, 138, 140, 157; traveler explanations of, 52, 56–58 contracts, agricultural, 78–79 conversion, religious, 20–21, 83, 97–98, 107

coolies. See indentured laborers cooperative work groups (gayap), 153–54 cosmopolitanism: and foreign languages, 145–46; and heterogeneity, 13, 29; modernization, with limits, 95. See also modernity and modernization Cothonay, Bertrand, 107, 235 n.12 credit, 236 n.6 cremations, 111–12, 114 creole, as colonial-period identity, 7 creolization, and Muslim identity, 205–6 Crowley, Daniel, 23 Cruising Among the Caribbees (Stoddard), 53 Cuba, 236 n.5 cultural capital, 41, 134 cultural evolution, 32–33, 36–41, 54 cultural nationalism, 10–11 cultural performance and authenticity, 51– 52, 64–65 culture: agricultural identity, 70–71; class distinctions versus, 45; custom and race folded into, 29–30; Hindu and Muslim overlap, 96; limits on modernity, 95; Muslim versus creolized, 205–6; nature versus, 22–23, 52; predisposition from cultural memory, 58; racialized culture, and Islam, 206–7; stageability of, 182; traditional versus modern, 67; upward mobility and perceived cultural diminution, 76 culture, high and low: Africa as uncultured, 42; class paired with, 36; in Hindu belief and practice, 178–80; and India, perceptions of, 35–36; religious practice as ‘‘cultured’’ and ‘‘cultural,’’ 228; and romanticism, 64–66; and rural identity, 72, 74– 75; in travel narratives, 48–53 culture, traditional versus modern: assimilation, 63–64; authentic belief, 157; authenticity, 67; elites, traditional and modernizing, 150, 151; informal versus formal religions, 156; religious and cultural knowledge, 181, 182; rural/urban divide, 73–74. See also orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and tradition dakshina, 168 Danny, Phoolo, 98 Debe, Trinidad, 89, 94 deception. See ‘‘being fooled’’ Deen, Shamshu, 129

Deerjai, M., 147 Democratic Labour Party (dlp), 12 de Verteuil, Louis, 37, 39, 46–47 dialect shifts, 170 diaspora discourse: betrayal and stories of ‘‘being fooled,’’ 125–27; counterhegemonic function, 135; definition of terms, 124–25; group consciousness and Indian opinion, 140–41; hard work and the land, 132–35; Islam, cultural history of, 188, 191–92, 207; jahaji bhai relationships, 129–32; kala pani, travel across, 123, 129; missionaries, Hindu and Muslim, 135–40; narrative themes, 123–24; press, Indo-Trinidadian, 141–48; and ritual performance, 124, 151– 57; roots and ancestry, 125, 127–29; social, political, and religio-cultural organizations, 148–51; voluntary versus coerced, 125 difference, colonial perception of, 15–16 differential acculturation, 23 discourse, defined, 124 discourses and practices, nexus between, 226 djinns, 115 douglas (offspring of Indo and Afro), 9, 223– 24, 233 n.3 East Indian Herald, 137, 141, 146, 149, 197 East Indian National Association (eina), 148, 149–50 East Indian National Congress (einc), 148, 149–50 East Indian Patriot, 141, 142, 197 East Indian Weekly, 136, 141, 142–43, 146– 47, 237 n.10 economy, Trinidadian, 91–93, 127–28 ecstasy, religious, 38–39 Ecuador, 234 n.4, 234 n.6 education: formal versus informal, 173–75, 178–80, 186; maktab classes, 196–97, 215– 16; in Penal, 94–95; and public voice, 143; and religious expression, 217. See also knowledge and ways of knowing ‘‘Effendi Bey,’’ 145–46 Egypt, 238 n.10 Eickelman, Dale, 187 eina (East Indian National Association), 148, 149–50 einc (East Indian National Congress), 148, 149–50 elites, traditional and modernizing, 150, 151

Index

255

emigration, 81–82, 92, 94–95 entrepreneurship and upward mobility, 75–76 environmental determinism, 145 ethereal agents, 102, 110–15 ethnic consciousness, and westernization, 74 ethnos as culture or race, 65–66 evangelical Protestantism, 97–98 evolutionist models, 32–33, 36–41, 54 exegesis, 152 exoticism, feminine, 50–51 exoticism, oriental, 45–46, 48–52 expertise, politics of, 172–83, 217–19 Faez-Ul-Karim, Moulvi, 137, 138 Felicity, Trinidad, 64–65 feminine exoticism, 50–51 Fernandez Olmos, Margarite, 24 fire walking (Timeditel), 107 Firth, Raymond, 21–22 flooding, 85 food, sharing out, 162–63 fooling. See ‘‘being fooled’’ foreign languages, 145–46 Franck, Harry, 29 functions (Muslim ‘‘a prayers’’): ‘‘breakin’ style,’’ 189, 203–4; changes in form and content, 204; and class, 193–94; clothing, 189, 196, 199–200, 238 n.8; components of, 195; correct methods of expression, 189; habitual and rote versus tutored and meaningful, 207–10; haqikas, 196, 198– 201; historical descriptions, 197–98; khutbahs (sermons), 155, 156; knowledge and learning, 195, 202–3; maktab classes and ladies groups, 196–97, 215–16; qasidas, 200, 213; Quran sherifs and maulood sherifs, 96, 155, 195, 238 n.3; sites and occasions, 195–96; social dimensions, 201–2 fundamentalism, 97–98 funerals, 111–12, 114, 217 Gayadeen, Andrew, 236 n.4 gayap (cooperative work groups), 153–54 genealogy, 125, 127–29 generational differences: imams, 157, 173– 80; and modernization, 98–99; pandits, 157, 213–19; superstition, 110–11, 113– 14. See also culture, traditional versus modern; orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and tradition

256

Index

gentiles, 47 ‘‘Gentoo,’’ 47 geographic space, in Penal, 89 Gerstäcker, Friedrich, 29–30 Ghosh, Amitav, 235 n.9, 238 n.10 globalization, 227 goadnas, 238 n.7 goat sacrifice, 196, 199 Gomes, Albert, 7, 10–11, 16, 28, 72–73 Gordon Kenneth, 17 Gould, Jeffrey, 126 Gould, Stephen J., 39 grah pujas, 165 grass roots, and hard work, 134–35 gyan (knowledge), 160 Hanuman pujah, 160 haqikas, 196, 198–201 Haraksingh, Kusha, 236 n.6 ‘‘hard work,’’ 76–78, 132–35 Harrison, Selig, 39–40 healers, 166 heathens, in census, 47 Hefner, Robert, 238 n.2 hegemony, colonial. See colonial ideologies hegemony and universality, 105 Herskovits, Frances, 109 Herskovits, Melville, 109 heterodoxy. See orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and tradition heterogeneity: and cosmopolitanism, 13, 29; and cultural unity versus conflict, 16–18, 23–24; Trinidadian culture, 6–9. See also mixing hierarchies, social. See stratification, social Hindi, 173, 176 Hindu, as category of identity, 6, 25 Hinduism: Arya Samaj movement, 138–39, 234 n.7; bhakti and gyan, 160–61; British admiration and derision of, 36–37, 42, 49– 50; forms of, in census, 67; Indian defense of, 55; kutthas (sermons), 96, 155, 156; psychological attacks against, 106–7; puja, yagya, and sat sangh rituals, 79, 154–55, 160–66, 168–69, 179, 237 n.1; rural association, 72; Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (SDMS), 67, 138, 150, 237 n.10; traveling teachers, 130, 151. See also pandits; religion; ritual practices and performance Hintzen, Percy, 11 histories, oral, 86–87

historiography, Trinidadian, motifs of, 56–58 Hosay Festival, 96, 108–9 Hosein, Mr., 148–49 house construction, 27, 76, 81, 221 Howe, E. W., 9 humor, from pandits, 170 hybrid degeneration versus hybrid vigor, 42– 43 identity: agricultural, 69–71; ambiguous distinctions, 224; and assimilation, 63–64; on Caribbean plantations, 41; and census categories, 9–10; discourses and practices, nexus between, 226; equality versus hierarchy, 12–13, 227; and globalization, 227– 28; group consciousness and public voice, 140–41; and hard work, 132–35; Indian, Muslim, and Hindu categories, 6; mixing as central to, 3–4; modernization and younger generations, 98–99; Mother India, reconnection with, 143–44, 149; nationalism and communal politics, 9–12; political absorption and racial pride, 148–49; postindenture, 96; press as public voice, 142–48; Protestants and evangelicals, 98; religion, changes in, 20–21; and religious organizations, 150–51; rural versus urban, 68–76; shift from ‘‘Indian’’ to ‘‘Muslim’’ and ‘‘Hindu,’’ 227–28; simi-dimi as threat to, 228; subaltern and dominant articulation of, 25; superstition as cultural marker, 118 idol worship, 98 imams: and class, 216; expertise and authority, 216–19; formalization of role, 204; in haqikas, 200–201; history of, 215–17; khutbahs (sermons), 155, 156; knowledge and expertise, 186–87, 213–14; old versus young, 213, 217–19; prayer as domain of, 219; reputation, respect, and honor, 187, 215; territory and rewards, 214–15 immigration: postemancipation, 62–63; press response to, 53, 141–42; ship records, 95. See also indentured laborers (‘‘coolies’’) impoverishment, descriptions of, 46 indentured laborers (‘‘coolies’’): ‘‘affinity’’ for agriculture, 69; as black, 41; Chinese compared with Indians, 35–36; debt to shopkeepers, 236 n.6; identity formation postindenture, 96; immigration history, 62–63; jahaji bhai relationships, 129–32;

marginality, 47; media response to, 53; mobility, curbs on, 130–31; as scab labor, 53; ship records, 95; stories of ‘‘being fooled,’’ 126–27; upward mobility, 75–76. See also labor India: China contrasted with, 35–36; as conflict-ridden, 235 n.10; hierarchization of differences, 38; independence of, 11; missionary connection with, 137; as motherland, 143–44, 149; and Muslim identity, 188, 210, 211; racial and caste differentiation, 35, 41; Victorian ideologies, use of, 54–55 Indian, as category of identity, 6, 227 Indian delicacy shops, 90 ‘‘Indian,’’ symbolic versus literal, 144 Indo-Trinidadians contrasted with AfroTrinidadians, 45–48, 52–54, 68 infidelity, and obeah, 115–16 instruction, religious, 19 intermarriage, 9 ‘‘is all one God, anyhow,’’ 19, 100, 118, 154, 228 Islam: Afro-Trinidadian interlocutors, 190– 93; Ahmadiyya movement, 139–40, 234 n.7; Anjuman Sunnat-ul-Jamaat (ASJA), 67, 140, 150; in census, 67; and class, 192– 94; community establishment, 87; consolidation processes, 204–5; cultural innovation and orthodoxy, 204–12; debate and discussion, 186, 192; diaspora, and cultural origins, 188, 191–92, 207; education, elemental and specialized, 186; in evolutionary hierarchy, 36; history in Trinidad, 190– 92; maktab classes and ladies groups, 196– 97, 215–16; piety and authenticity, 189; ‘‘practical Muslims’’ versus ‘‘Muslims in name only,’’ 210–13; and racialized culture, 206–7; Ramadan, 208–9; Sunni, 140; sunnification, 205; and superstition, 115; Tackveeyatul Islamic Association (TIA), 150; traveling teachers, 130–31, 151; Trinidad Muslim League (TML), 150; unity and differences, 187. See also functions (Muslim ‘‘a prayers’’); Muslims; religion; ritual practices and performance jahaji bhai relationships (shipmate attachments), 96, 129–32, 234 n.5 Jaimini, Pandit, 136–37, 138 jamaats (communities), 87

Index

257

jheel mentality, 63, 118 Journey to Roots, A (Purkhon ke Desh ki Yatra), 127–28 jumbies (spirits), 102, 108, 111, 236 n.4 the Junction (Penal), 89–90 Junior, Junius, 146–48 kala pani (dark or black water), 123, 129 Kee, Sandra Chin Yuen, 92 keepers, 82 khutbahs (sermons), 155, 156 Kingsley, Charles, 35, 105, 107–8 knowledge and ways of knowing: about heritage, 129; and ‘‘being fooled,’’ 180; belief and right knowledge, 109–18; and class, 110; definitions, 152; explanation, 112, 114; facts as true practice, 211–12; formal versus informal education, 173–75, 178–80, 186; gyan and bhakti, 160–61; and imams, 213–14; literal versus philosophical, 177–78; local-transnational connections, 139; maktab classes, 196–97, 215–16; Muslim functions, and learning, 202–3; pandits, practical versus formal knowledge, 166–71; pedagogy in Muslim functions, 195; politics of expertise, 172– 83, 217–19; rituals and orthodoxy, 152, 154, 155–57, 165–66; rote versus meaningful, 207–10; sanctioned versus illegitimate knowledge, 102–5; simi-dimi as challenge of authority, 122; wisdom, 218 Koh-i-Noor Gazette, 141, 144–45, 235 n.13 Kuczynski, R. R., 9–10 kutthas (sermons), 96, 155, 156 labor: cooperative work groups (gayap), 153– 54; ‘‘The Happiest Work-People in the World,’’ 145; ‘‘hard work,’’ 76–78, 132–35; identity formation, postindenture, 96; quarry work, 80; for ritual gatherings, 163; sugar cane farming, 1, 61, 78, 91–92; taxi driving, 91. See also indentured laborers (‘‘coolies’’) ladies groups, Muslim, 196–97 La Guerre, John, 58 Lakshmanna, C., 129 Lakshmi, 165 Lalla, Reverend, 148–49 Lallapee, 144 land, and diaspora discourse, 132–35 landscape, rural and agricultural, 68–75

258

Index

languages, and elite culture, 145–46 languages, and pandits, 169, 170, 173, 176 limpieza de sangre, 28, 31–32 lineage, race as, 32 lipe floors, 76 literacy, 63, 143, 217 ‘‘living good with people’’: egalitarian cooperation, 153–54; and Muslim practice, 203; and obeah, 115; and religious authenticity, 189; religious mixing and differentiation, 95–100, 156; and ritual preparation, 163 ‘‘long time,’’ meaning of, 132 Look Lai, Walton, 69 Macaulay, Thomas B., 52 Madden, R. R., 105 Madinga, 191 Madras, 235 n.12 maktab classes, 196–97, 215–16 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 33 Mamdani, Mahmood, 226 Mandingoes, 190–91, 192 Manington, George, 44–45 maps: Penal Village, 68; South, 68; Trinidad, 3 Marie-François, Father, 107 market, Penal, 89–90 marriage, 8, 9, 82 matchmaker (aguwah), 79, 83 mati, 237 n.6 maulood, 96, 155, 195, 238 n.3 meaning, Muslim quest for, 208–9 media. See press, Trinidadian memory, cultural, 58 Mendes, Alfred, 100 metaphors, 4–5 migration versus diaspora, 125 missionaries, Hindu and Muslim, 135–40 missionaries, Presbyterian, 87–88, 97, 146 Mitchell, Henry, 35–36 Mittelholzer, Edgar, 110, 118 mixing: boundaries, ideology of, 224–25; and church activities, 98; cultural unity versus conflict, 16–18, 23–24; definition of, 2, 226; fears of, 223–24; forms of, 2–3; hybrid degeneration versus hybrid vigor, 42–43; inclusivity versus exclusivity, 12–16; and interpretive categories, 225; as model, 222, 226–27; and modernity, 12–13; plasticity of religion, 104; racial miscegenation concern, 13–14; and racial types, in colonial

Caribbean, 8–9; of religion, 18–21, 99, 108; religious conversion, 38, 83; Trinidadian heterogeneity, 6–9 mixing metaphors: authenticity, diaspora, and heritage, 188; conspicuous representations versus attenuated forms, 124; diaspora as, 123; diffuse expression of, 227; orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, 104–5; purity tensions and reconciliations, 189– 90; religious interpretation and conflict, 157; as term, 4–5 modernity and modernization: cultural limits on, 95; elites, modernizing, 150, 151; globalization and exclusivity of identities, 227–28; and hard work, 134; and mixing, 12–13; and religion, survival of, 21–22; in South, 93–95; and superstition, 113–14; and younger generations, 98–99. See also culture, traditional versus modern; generational differences mongrelization, 65–66 Moore, W. J., 43 Morning at the Office, A (Mittelholzer), 110 Morton, Samuel George, 39 Muslim Coordinating Council, 67 Muslims: as category of identity, 6; identity discourse articulation, 25; ‘‘practical’’ versus ‘‘in name only,’’ 210–13; in travel narratives, 46–47. See also Islam Naipaul, Seepersad, 69, 166–67, 237 n.10 Naipaul, V. S., 19, 69, 167, 230 namaaz, 215 Nandy, Ashis, 235 n.8, 239 n.3 nation, culture as, 205–6 National Alliance for Reconstruction (nar), 86, 91, 92 nationalism and identity, 10–11 nature versus culture, 22–23, 52 Newsweek, 230 Niehoff, Arthur, 108, 119, 151–52, 197–98, 236 n.4 Niehoff, Juanita, 108, 119, 151–52, 197–98 obeah: described by obeahman, 109; forces, dealing with, 114–15; meaning of term, 234 n.11; protection from, 116–17; religion versus, 24–25; simi-dimi connotations, 103; stories of, 115–17; as threat to hegemony, 105–6; Victorian description of, 105. See also simi-dimi (superstition)

Observer, 143, 147 oil companies, 85 older head, defined, 234 n.6 oral histories, 86–87 organizations, political and social, 141, 148– 51 organizations, religio-cultural: in census, 67; and identity projection, 152; orthodoxy conflicts, 138, 140; as public voice, 148–51 oriental exoticism, 45–46, 48–52 orientalism, and culture/class binary, 36 Oropuche Indians, 108 orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and tradition: Hindu rituals, 152–53, 154, 155–57; Islamic debate and discussion, 186, 192; Islamic identity processes, 204–5; knowledge, sanctioned versus illegitimate, 102– 5; Muslim versus creolized culture, 205–7; ‘‘practical Muslims’’ versus ‘‘Muslims in name only,’’ 210–13; ‘‘primitiveness,’’ 212; right knowing, 165–66; rote versus meaningful practice, 207–10; sunnification, 205; syncretism as challenge, 122, 155. See also simi-dimi (superstition) pagan, as category of alterity, 30 Panday, Basdeo, 17–18, 129 Pandey, Gyanendra, 235 n.10 Pandia, D. P., 54–55 pandits: kutthas (sermons), 96, 155, 156; and languages, 169, 170, 173, 176; politics of expertise, 172–83; relationship with devotees, 175–77; role and mission of, 166–72, 181–82; South versus North, 179– 80; visiting missionaries, 135–39 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 24 parlors, 80–81 Partap, Harry, 92 part-societies, 6 paternalism of educated elite, 144–45 Paton, William Agnew, 47–48, 50 patras, 165 patriarchy, 80 pedagogical role of Muslim functions, 195 Penal: geographic space, 89; infrastructure, 85–86; landscape, 88–90; land use and settlement, 84–85; market, 89–90; modernization, 93–95; oral histories, 86–87; origin of name, 85; and rural concept, 71; stages in history, 88; village map, 68 Pentecostalism, 97–98

Index

259

People’s Democratic Party (pdp), 12 People’s National Movement (pnm), 11–12 performance, cultural, 51–52, 64–65 performance, ritual. See ritual practices and performance philosophical knowledge, 177–78 piety, 189 pigs, 79 Pitt, David, 72–73 plantations, Caribbean, and identity, 41 plantation workers. See indentured laborers (‘‘coolies’’) plasticity of religion, 104 plural acculturation, 23 polarities, paired, in characterization of Indians, 34, 35–36 political culture and racial construction, 15– 18, 223 political organizations, 141, 148–50 political parties, and race, 16 population growth, 75 Port of Spain, Trinidad, 71–72 Port of Spain Gazette: on Hinduism, 106; on Hosay Festival, 108–9; on immigration, 141–42; racial taxonomy, 40; racism and xenophobia, 44 Portuguese, and race, 7 poverty rate, 91 power relations: jahaji bhai networks as colonial resistance, 130–32; and press as public voice, 142–43; race and religion, creation of, 5; and religion versus superstition, 103, 119, 228. See also colonial ideologies ‘‘practical Muslims,’’ 210–13 practical versus formal knowledge, 167–71 practice, religious. See ritual practices and performance prasad, 162 Presbyterian missionaries, 87–88, 97, 146 press, Trinidadian: diaspora narrative, 124, 141–48; foreign languages in, 145–46; on Hinduism, 106; on Hosay Festival, 108–9; on immigrants, 53, 141–42; on Journey to Roots tours, 128; Muslim functions, descriptions of, 197; paternalism, 144–45; racism in, 44, 46 primitiveness, 212 proselytizing missions, 20, 97–98, 107 Protestantism, evangelical, 97–98 psychological warfare, 105–7, 130 public voice, Indo-Trinidadian: group con-

260

Index

sciousness and Indian opinion, 140–41; and identity consciousness, 140; organizations, 148–51; press as, 141–48 pujas and Hindu ‘‘a prayers’’: bhagwat, 163; bhakti and gyan, 160–61; costs of, 168–69; death anniversary rites, 237 n.1; definitions, 154–55; division of labor, 163; food, sharing out, 162–63; knowledge and, 165– 66; reasons for hosting, 164–65; sat sanghs versus pujas, 179; size and duration, 161; social function, 164; thanksgivings, 161– 62; yagyas, 154–55, 160, 161, 163–64 puns, 167, 170 purity ideology: ancestral source, 219; and indistinct boundaries, 224; kala pani and diaspora, 123, 124; tensions and reconciliations, 189–90. See also racial purity discourse Purkhon ke Desh ki Yatra (A Journey to Roots), 127–28 qasidas, 200, 213 quarry work, 80 Quinn, Naomi, 5 Quran sherifs, 155, 195 qurbani, 196, 238 n.5 race: in census, 9–10, 66; colonial legacy of, 9; color as static signifier of difference, 56– 58; creole, 7, 8; and cultural nationalism, 11–12; divisiveness as ‘‘being racial,’’ 172; equality and harmony versus distinction and hierarchy, 12–15; history of construction in Trinidad, 7–9; intermarriage and mixed relationships, 8, 9; Islam and racialized culture, 206–7; in local media, 44; miscegenation concern, 13–14; political absorption and racial pride, 148–49; social pyramid, Trinidadian, 42; social threat of, 15–18; white-brown-black distinctions, 8 race, religion articulated with: and colonial classification, 39–41; folk beliefs versus religion, and Indo-Afro comparability, 104; and identity construction, 14–15; inclusion and exclusion, 227; mixing, and meaning, 225; and political leadership, 151; racialized culture, and Muslims, 206– 7; Spanish limpieza de sangre rules, 31–33; superstition and cultural identification, 118

racial ideology, colonial: character portrayals, 44–45; class and culture interwoven with, in travel narratives, 47; colored or brown middle class, 43; conflict narratives, 56–58; features versus color, 48; Indians’ use of, 54–55; lineage, race as, 32; Morton’s skull-size model, 39; oriental exoticism, 45–46, 48–53; and religion, 31– 33, 39–41; scientific racism and classification, 28–33, 39–41; Spanish limpieza de sangre rules, 31–33; violence, characterization of, 36 racial mixing: Caribbean settlement and development model, 42–43; as corollary to classification, 7; in laboring communities, 85; pure versus mixed, 12, 17; in Trinidad history, 8–9 racial purity discourse: in colonial history, 7– 8; and diaspora, 124; and identity, 12; in Indo-Trinidadian press, 147; paradox of, 17; and political organizations, 148–49; Spanish limpieza de sangre, 31–32 Radford, Alfred, 48, 56, 105 Rajaram, N. S., 140 Ram, 169 Ramadan, 208–9 Ramayana, 58, 64 Ramdeo, Taramati, 166, 173 Ram Lila, 64–65 Ravi-Ji, 14 Rawan, 58 reciprocity, 153 religion: in Africa, putative lack of, 38; Catholicism, 105; and class, 41; colonial resistance, 21; consolidation of beliefs and practices, 151; Coolie non-intrusion contract, 108–9; difference, European ideology of, 30, 31; ecumenism and social organizations, 149–50; elites, traditional and modernizing, 150, 151; ethic against criticism, 155–56, 169; feminine exoticism, 50–51; history of term, 234 n.10; instruction in, 19; and jahaji bhai networks, 130; missionaries, 87–88, 97, 135–40, 146; orthodoxy versus everyday practice, 103–4, 122; plasticity of, 104; power relations and mixedness, 118–20; psychological attacks, 105– 7; as separate domain, 22; sermons (kuttahs and khutbahs), 96, 155, 156; specialists, religious, 50–51; ‘‘syncretic’’ versus ‘‘world’’ religions, 24, 119–20; syncretism,

14, 15, 103, 122, 155, 233 n.4; theorization and definition issues, 21–26; traveling or visiting teachers, 130–31, 133, 135–40, 151. See also Christianity; Hinduism; Islam; ritual practices and performance Religion: A Humanist Interpretation (Firth), 21–22 religion and culture: cultural hegemony problem, 205–6; high- or low-culture and Hinduism, 178–80; Hinduism and Indian culture, 36–37; organizations, religiocultural, 67, 138, 140, 150–51; practice as ‘‘cultured’’ and ‘‘cultural,’’ 228; stabilization and transformation, cultural, 229 religion and race. See race, religion articulated with religious identification and affiliation: assumption of affiliation, 117–18; in census, 47, 66–67; changes of identification, 20–21; conversion, 20–21, 83, 97–98, 107; distinctions, internal and external, 18–19, 95–96, 131–32; ecstacy versus superstition, 38–39; evolutionary hierarchy, 36–39; Indian use of Victorian construction, 55; ‘‘is all one God, anyhow,’’ 19, 100, 118, 154; little tradition versus great tradition, 63–64; local distinctions, 25; mixing, 18–21, 99, 108; overlapping practices and histories, 15, 95–97; sacred versus suspect, 112. See also race, religion articulated with; simi-dimi (superstition) religious knowledge. See knowledge and ways of knowing remittances, 93, 94 Richardson, Ronald, 105, 130 ritual practices and performance: and ‘‘being fooled,’’ 180; bhakti and gyan, 160–61; ‘‘breakin’ style,’’ 189, 203–4; carnivalization, 182–83; and class, 156–57, 193–94; cooperative work groups, 153–54; costs, 168–69; as culturally stabilizing and transforming, 229; as cultural symbols, 182; as ‘‘cultured’’ and ‘‘cultural,’’ 228; death anniversary rites, 237 n.1; and diaspora discourse, 124; food, sharing out, 162–63; habitual and rote versus tutored and meaningful, 207–10; and high- and low-culture, 178–80; and history, awareness and continuity of, 181; Hosay, 96, 108–9; languages used, 169; maulood, 96, 155, 195, 238 n.3; on and off the record, 171–72;

Index

261

ritual practices and performance (cont.) orthodoxy, promotion of, 152–53, 154, 155–57; pandits, role and mission of, 166– 72; personal interactions, 164; political commentary in, 169–70; politics of expertise, 172–83; reasons for hosting, 164–65; role of, 124, 151–52; social dimensions, 164, 201–2; as symbolic buffer, 229; understandability balanced with mystery, 176– 77; visual cues, 100, 154. See also functions (Muslim ‘‘a prayers’’); pujas and Hindu a prayers; simi-dimi (superstition) roads, 85–86, 88 Roaming through the West Indies (Franck), 29 romanticized imagery and high/low culture, 64–66 roots tourism, 127–29 rupture, diaspora, 124 rural identity, 68–75 Rushdie, Salman, 237 n.5 Ryan, Selwyn, 17, 30 sacrifice, animal, 196, 199 Saddhus, 106 Sai Baba movement, 179, 238 n.3 Said, Edward, 30–31 Samaroo, Brinsley, 142–44, 188, 191 Samba Makumba, Emir, 190–91 Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha (sdms), 67, 138, 150, 237 n.10 San Fernando, Trinidad, 88 San Francique, Trinidad, 85 Saraswati, 165 saris, 238 n.8 sat sanghs, 154–55, 160, 179 scab labor, 53 scientific racism, 28–33 sdms (Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha), 67, 138, 150, 237 n.10 seedha, 168 segregation, in United States, 223 separation, marital, 82 sermons (kuttahs and khutbahs), 96, 155, 156 settlement, Caribbean, 42–43 sexuality, 57, 58 sharing out food, 162–63 Sharma, Sitara, 81 sherifs, Quran and maulood, 96, 155, 195, 238 n.3

262

Index

shipmates, and jahaji bhai relationships, 129–32 ship records, 95 shops and shopkeepers, 81, 90, 236 n.6 Shukla, Sandhya, 125 simi-dimi (superstition): belief, ways of knowing, and explanation, 109–18; and class, 110, 118; and competition for authority, 106–7; control of fanaticism, 109; distancing, self-conscious, 113–14, 165; ecstatic versus superstitious, 38–39; ethereal agents, 102; and fear, 112; funerals, 111–12, 114; generational distinctions, 110–11, 113–14; good/evil dualism, 111; Hindu ‘‘appetite’’ for, 37; and identity, dilution and loss of, 228; knowledge, sanctioned versus illegitimate, 102– 5; meaning of, 103; mixing with religion, 115; in natural, everyday domain, 103–4; obeah, 24–25, 103, 105, 109, 114–17, 234 n.11; and power, 228; and pujas, 165; and race, 104, 108, 118; resisting, 118; sacred versus suspect, 112; science and technology as protection, 117; soucouyants, 110, 113; superstitio (Latin), 236 n.2 (chap. 4); and syncretisms, 103; and understandability of religion, 176–77; Victorian narratives, 105–9 Singh, Kelvin, 98–99, 150, 151 Siparia County, 66, 89 Sipari Mai, 20, 234 n.8 skull size, and race, 39 Smith, Robert J., 198 Sobrian, A. A., 85 social evolution, 32, 36–39 social hierarchies. See stratification, social social mobility, 63 Solving East Indian Roots in Trinidad (Deen), 129 sorcery, 39 soucouyants, 110, 113 Southern Main Road, 88 South Trinidad (‘‘South’’): census data, 66; cultural associations, 71; Indian delicacy shops, 90; landscape, 88–90, 99–100; map, 68; modernization, 93–95; stages in history, 88; water access, 86. See also Penal Spain, 31–32 Speckmann, J. D., 57 Spence, Jonathan, 34, 35 St. Patrick County, 66, 84, 92–94

stageability of culture, 182 Starr, Ida May Hill, 47 status stratification, 81 Stephens, James Fitzjames, 35 Stewart, John, 58 Stocking, George, 32–33 Stoddard, Charles Augustus, 53–54 stratification, social: in India, 35, 38, 41, 56; marriage, intercaste, 82; patriarchy, 80; race-class Trinidadian pyramid, 42–44; status categories, 81; and upward mobility, 75–76. See also class Stuempfle, Stephen, 10 style, ‘‘breakin,’’ 189, 203–4 Sudama, Trevor, 92 Suffrage of Elvira, The (Naipaul), 19 sugar cane farming, 1, 61, 78, 91–92 sugar industry, narratives of ‘‘saving,’’ 126 Sunday Guardian Supplement, 128 sunnification, 205 Sunni Islam, 140 superstition. See simi-dimi swampland drainage, 85, 86 swine, 79 syncretism, 14–15, 24; and colonialism, 233 n.4; and orthodox knowledge, 155; and shared stories, 122; and simi-dimi, 103, 119–20 Tackveeyatul Islamic Association (tia), 150 Taitt, Ria, 18 tattoos, 238 n.7 Taussig, Michael, 233 n.4 taxis, 90–91 thanksgivings, 161–62, 198 Through a Maze of Colour (Gomes), 10–11 tia (Tackveeyatul Islamic Association), 150 Timeditel (fire walking), 107 Tinker, Hugh, 126 tml (Trinidad Muslim League), 150 tourism in search of roots, 127–29 tradition. See culture, traditional versus modern; orthodoxy versus heterodoxy and tradition travel abroad, 91, 127–29. See also emigration travel among sugar estates, 130–31, 133 traveler narratives: high versus low culture,

48–53; impoverishment, descriptions of, 46; Indo-Afro comparison, 45–48, 52–54; Indo-Afro conflict, 52, 56–58; local context, 53; oriental exoticism, 45–46, 48–53; race, class, and culture, 47–48; racial character portrayal, 44–45; racial classification, 28–30; romantic imagery, 54; on sexual rivalry, 57 Trinidad, map of, 3 Trinidad Free Press, 53 Trinidad Government Railway Line, 88 Trinidad Muslim League (tml), 150 Tsing, Anna, 22–23 ‘‘21st Century: A User’s Guide’’ (Newsweek), 230 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 32, 33 United Islamic Organisation, 67 United National Congress (unc), 16 United States, 223, 230–31 unity: heterogeneity and conflict versus, 16– 18, 23–24; and jahaji bhai networks, 129– 32; Muslim, 187 universality and hegemony, 105 upward mobility, 73–76 urban versus rural identity, 68–76 Usine St. Madeleine, 78, 84 vagrants, 164 Vandercook, John, 9, 48 van der Veer, Peter, 104, 152, 237 n.11 Verrill, A. Hyatt, 45–46 Vertovec, Steven, 162, 163–64 Victoria County, 66, 84, 93–94 Victorian perspectives. See colonial ideologies violence, racial characterization of, 36, 38 voice, public. See public voice, IndoTrinidadian Wahabis, 194, 238 n.2 Walcott, Derek, 6, 64–65 warfare, psychological, 105–7, 130 Waters, Mary C., 233 n.2 watershed moments, 77 water supply and access, 86 ways of knowing. See knowledge and ways of knowing ‘‘we culture’’ and assimilation, 58–59 Werbner, Pnina, 12, 119–20

Index

263

West Africa, 192 westernization, 74, 93, 94. See also modernity and modernization whiteness, 7–8 Wolf, Eric, 22 Wood, Donald, 9, 34, 38, 57 Wood, E. F. L., 29, 42–43

264

Index

work. See labor World War II, 77 xenophobia, 44 yagyas, 154–55, 160, 161, 163–64 Young Indian Party (yip), 148

Aisha Khan is an associate professor of anthropology at New York University. She is the coeditor of Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies (1989). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Khan, Aisha Callaloo nation : metaphors of race and religious identity among South Asians in Trinidad / Aisha Khan. p. cm. — (Latin America otherwise) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3376-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-3388-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. South Asians—Trinidad and Tobago—Ethnic identity. 2. South Asians— Trinidad and Tobago—Religion. 3. South Asians—Trinidad and Tobago—Social conditions. 4. Muslims—Trinidad and Tobago—Social conditions. 5. Hindus— Trinidad and Tobago—Social conditions. 6. Islam and culture—Trinidad and Tabago. 7. Hinduism and culture—Trinidad and Tobago. 8. Trinidad and Tobago— Religious life and customs. 9. Trinidad and Tobago—Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series. f2122.k43 2004 305.8%914%072983—dc22 2004007451