"Left to the imagination": Indian nationalisms and female sexuality in Trinidad

Public Culture

Volumn 11, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 223-243

  Niranjana, Tejaswini ^a  

^a Centre for the Study of Culture and Society   (India)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0033459598     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-11-1-223     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. See my "Alternative Circuits? Third World Scholars in Third World Spaces," unpublished manuscript, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad (1995).
2. I use the term subaltern to distinguish between people of Indian origin in metropolitan countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom (by and large a product of postcolonial migration) and those in nonmetropolitan countries, such as the former British colonies in the Caribbean, as well as Surinam, Fiji, Mauritius, and South Africa.
3. Discussed in James's appendix to The Black Jacobins (1938; reprint, London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 392.
4. See Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People. 1881-1905 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and K. O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana. 1875-1917 (Kingston: Ian Randle. 1994).
5. See Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People. 1881-1905 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and K. O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana. 1875-1917 (Kingston: Ian Randle. 1994).
6. Rhoda Reddock argues that the question of the number of "Indian women" was "a major point on contention and policy" from the very beginning of indenture. See her Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago (London: Zed Books, 1994). 27 (henceforth WLP). As she points out, between 1857 and 1879 the prescribed ratio of women to men changed about six times, "ranging from one woman to every three men in 1857 to one to two in 1868 and one to four in 1878-79. These changes reflected the difficulties and contradictions in recruitmg more women at the same time as recruiting 'the right kind of women' (27-29). See also Laurence. Question of Labour, esp. chap. 4.
7. Rhoda Reddock argues that the question of the number of "Indian women" was "a major point on contention and policy" from the very beginning of indenture. See her Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago (London: Zed Books, 1994). 27 (henceforth WLP). As she points out, between 1857 and 1879 the prescribed ratio of women to men changed about six times, "ranging from one woman to every three men in 1857 to one to two in 1868 and one to four in 1878-79. These changes reflected the difficulties and contradictions in recruitmg more women at the same time as recruiting 'the right kind of women' (27-29). See also Laurence. Question of Labour, esp. chap. 4.
8. Laurence elaborates that during years of labor shortage there were a few attempts to recruit workers from southern India and even, in 1884 and once again in 1905, to reopen the Madras agency. These attempts, however, were soon abandoned as unsuccessful (Question of Labour, 104).
9. Figures are from Bridget Brereton, "The Experience of Indentureship, 1845-1917," in Calcutta to Caroni, ed. John La Guerre (Trinidad and Tobago: University of West Indies. Extramural Studies Unit, 1985), 22. Brereton cautions us against possible errors in these figures due to confusions in recordkeeping.
10. See the articles in Barton Schwartz, ed., Caste in Overseas Indian Communities (San Francisco: Chandler, 1967).
11. Reddock, WLP, 36.
12. Reddock draws our attention to the fact that even as late as 1915, when Commissioners McNeill and Chimman Lal came out to the Caribbean to prepare their report on indenture, they found that only about a third of the women came from India as married women; the rest were either widows or runaway wives, and a small number had been prostitutes (WLP, 30). See also Laurence. Question of Labour.
13. Reddock draws our attention to the fact that even as late as 1915, when Commissioners McNeill and Chimman Lal came out to the Caribbean to prepare their report on indenture, they found that only about a third of the women came from India as married women; the rest were either widows or runaway wives, and a small number had been prostitutes (WLP, 30). See also Laurence. Question of Labour.
14. Prabhu P. Mohapatra, "'Restoring the Family': Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies. 1860-1920," unpublished manuscript. International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden. Mohapatra argues that the planters' need to create a permanent labor force at the end of the nineteenth century led to an attempt to reconstitute the Indian family, so that laboring women withdrew from estate work but did unpaid work, both on the kind and at home, in addition to reproducing the labor force. It is through the colonial effort to prevent "wife murders" (by passing a series of legislations regarding marriage, for instance), according to Mohapatra, that the Indian family in British Guiana is formed.
15. Among others, see Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920 (London:Hansib Publishers, 1993)(henceforth NSS).
16. Although Rodney writes about British Guiana, his analysis is applicable to Trinidad as well (History of the Guyanese, 39).
17. Published in the Sarvajanik Sabha Quarterly Journal, October 1893, edited by Gokhale. See B. R. Nanda, Gokhale (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), bk. 4, chap. 37.
18. Published in the Sarvajanik Sabha Quarterly Journal, October 1893, edited by Gokhale. See B. R. Nanda, Gokhale (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977), bk. 4, chap. 37.
19. Tinker, NSS, 341, 334, 347.
20. Tinker, NSS, 288.
21. In conceptualizing this essay, I have found useful the insights provided by the work of Michel Foucault: "The central issue, then . . . is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said." Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 11.
22. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 121, 127.
23. Gandhi's speech on Indentured Indian Labour, Bombay, District Congress Committee. In M. K. Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. 13 (Delhi: Publications Div., Govt. of India, 1964), 133, 249.
24. Gandhi, "Indenture or Slavery?" in Gujarati, published in Samalochak December 1915. Reprinted in English translation in Collected Works, Vol. 13, 1467.
25. John D. Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 48.
26. Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol. 22, 349.
27. Kelly, for instance, points out that in the case of Fiji the critics of indenture stressed the sexual abuse of Indian women. Kelly, Politics of Virtue, 30.
28. Kelly, Politics of Virtue, 33. C. F. Andrews, Gandhi's emissary on the indenture issue, wrote in 1915: "Vice has become so ingrained that they have not been able to recover their self-respect. . . . The women of India are very chaste; but these women, well, you know how they are, and how can it be different, situated us they are, living the lives they do, brought up in this atmosphere of vice and degradation?" (33-34).
29. Tinker, NSS, 350.
30. Tinker, NSS, 352, 267-68, 340-41.
31. Recent unpublished work by Rhoda Reddock, Patricia Mohammed, and Prabhu Mohapatra makes interesting beginnings in this direction.
32. In spite of the absence of common structures of governance, however, two major Caribbean institutions, the cricket team and the university, are shared by all the West Indian countries.
33. There is also a "mixed" population that is said to be as high as 8 to 10 percent of the total.
34. See Rodney, History of the Guyanese, and also Malcolm Cross, "Fast Indian-Creole Relations in Trinidad and Guiana in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Carribean, ed. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1996).
35. See Rodney, History of the Guyanese, and also Malcolm Cross, "Fast Indian-Creole Relations in Trinidad and Guiana in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and Indian Identity in the Carribean, ed. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1996).
36. For illuminating discussions of the formation of such stereotypes, see, among others, Ramabai Espinet, "Representation and the Indo-Caribbean Woman in Trinidad and Tobago," in Indo-Caribbean Resistance, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (Toronto: Tsar, 1993), and Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Port of Spain: G. Rohlehr, 1990).
37. For illuminating discussions of the formation of such stereotypes, see, among others, Ramabai Espinet, "Representation and the Indo-Caribbean Woman in Trinidad and Tobago," in Indo-Caribbean Resistance, ed. Frank Birbalsingh (Toronto: Tsar, 1993), and Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Port of Spain: G. Rohlehr, 1990).
38. Rohlehr, Calypso and Society, esp. chap. 1.
39. The Canadian Presbyterian Mission was founded in Trinidad in 1868.
40. Cited in Reddock WLP, 42-43. Sarah Morton's comment implies a wilfulness on the part of the Indian woman, while East Indian men seemed more inclined to stress her susceptibility to "enticement," as did the colonial authorities who framed the marriage laws intended to reduce the numbers of "wife murders" in Guyana and Trinidad among the East Indians. All of these, however, concurred in the implicit argument that the indentured woman's "immorality" was due to the disparity in the sex ratio. Reddock quotes a petitioner called Mohammed Orfy who, on behalf of the "destitute Indian men of Trinidad," wrote several letters to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, to the Indian Government, and to others. Orfy described as "a perforating plague" "the high percentage of immoral lives led by the female section of our community." In order "to satisfy the greed and lust of the male section of quite a different race to theirs" [he indicts elsewhere the "Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Chinese"], Indian women "are enticed, seduced and frightened into becoming concubines, and paramours." These women, according to Orfy. "have absolutely no knowledge whatever of the value of being in virginhood." This makes them, says the petitioner, "most shameless and a perfect menace to the Indian gentry." Cited in Reddock, WLP, 44.
41. Cited in Reddock WLP, 42-43. Sarah Morton's comment implies a wilfulness on the part of the Indian woman, while East Indian men seemed more inclined to stress her susceptibility to "enticement," as did the colonial authorities who framed the marriage laws intended to reduce the numbers of "wife murders" in Guyana and Trinidad among the East Indians. All of these, however, concurred in the implicit argument that the indentured woman's "immorality" was due to the disparity in the sex ratio. Reddock quotes a petitioner called Mohammed Orfy who, on behalf of the "destitute Indian men of Trinidad," wrote several letters to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, to the Indian Government, and to others. Orfy described as "a perforating plague" "the high percentage of immoral lives led by the female section of our community." In order "to satisfy the greed and lust of the male section of quite a different race to theirs" [he indicts elsewhere the "Europeans, Africans, Americans, and Chinese"], Indian women "are enticed, seduced and frightened into becoming concubines, and paramours." These women, according to Orfy. "have absolutely no knowledge whatever of the value of being in virginhood." This makes them, says the petitioner, "most shameless and a perfect menace to the Indian gentry." Cited in Reddock, WLP, 44.
42. To understand the material coordinates of the construction of East Indian femininity, we would need to build on the work, among others, of Mangru and Reddock. The work of Basdeo Mangru on British Guiana and of Rhoda Reddock on Trinidad indicates that sometimes as few as ten out of a hundred migrants were female. Basdeo Mangru, "The Sex Ratio Disparity and Its Consequences under the Indenture in British Guiana", in India in the Caribbean, ed. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London:Hansib/University of Warwick Centre for Caribbean Studies, 1987), Reddock, WLP.
43. To understand the material coordinates of the construction of East Indian femininity, we would need to build on the work, among others, of Mangru and Reddock. The work of Basdeo Mangru on British Guiana and of Rhoda Reddock on Trinidad indicates that sometimes as few as ten out of a hundred migrants were female. Basdeo Mangru, "The Sex Ratio Disparity and Its Consequences under the Indenture in British Guiana", in India in the Caribbean, ed. David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London:Hansib/University of Warwick Centre for Caribbean Studies, 1987), Reddock, WLP.
44. I owe this insight to Kirk Meighoo, with whom I have had many useful discussions on the topic of Afrocentrism in the Caribbean. The term Indo-Saxon is employed to refer to "Westernized" Indians, but it does not seem to be as frequently used as "Afro-Saxon."
45. Just as the African in the Caribbean was seen as "Western" or Westernized, one can say that the West too was Africanized, and then Indianized, in Trinidad.
46. Several "African" calypsonians have sung about East Indian women, who appear in the songs as exotic objects of desire. Rohlehr has pointed out that the women frequently appear against a background of the "Indian feast" that the "African" is trying to gatecrash (Calypso and Society, 251-57).
47. As with many musical terms in the Caribbean, however, there is some controversy as to the exact distinction between calypso and soca, although there are separate annual competitions for National Soca Monarch and National Calypso Monarch during the Carnival season.
48. There are also several popular male chutney singers such as Sundar Popo and Anand Yunkarran.
49. Ramaya writes: "About half a century ago, after the birth of a child the women celebrated at the chhatti and sang sohar, songs which were like lullabies, delivered in a slow tempo with measured beats and rhythms. After the sohars, the women diverted into songs that were spicy with faster beats. They were called chutney because of the hot, spicy tempo." Narsaloo Ramaya, "Evolution of Indian Music: From Field to Studio," Trinidad and Tobago Review 14 (1992): 22-23.
50. Much of this information comes from personal conversations with Patricia Mohammed and Hubert Devonish in Jamaica and Rhoda Keddock in Trinidad, February-March 1994. For access to newspaper accounts of the chutney controversy, I am indebted to Rawwida Baksh-Soodeen and the CAFRA archives in Trinidad. See also Haksh-Soodeen, "Power, Gender and Chutney." Trinidad and Tobago Review 13 (1991): 7.
51. It is a measure of post-Independence racial polarization in Trinidadian political life that the two major parties, the PNM and the UNC, have come to be identified as the "African" and "Indian" parties, respectively.
52. Rohlehr, personal communication, St. Augustine, Trinidad, February 1994.
53. A 1993-94 controversy surrounded East Indian MP Hulsie Bhaggan, who became the target of political satire in the calpysos of the 1994 Carnival in Trinidad. In 1996, former Speaker of the Parliament, Occah Seapaul, an East Indian woman, was the subject of some calypsos. Given the space constraints of this essay, I will not go into the details of these controversies.
54. Female East Indian singers and dancers, however, are not necessarily a new phenomenon. There appears to be a tradition of women who took part in public performances, such as Alice Jan in the early part of the twentieth century and Champa Devi in the 1940s. But their performances clearly did not evoke the kind of response that chutney-soca has obtained in the 1990s.
55. Michael Ramkissoon, letter to the editor, Sunday Express, 16 December 1990, 46.
56. Musician Narsaloo Ramaya, quoted in news item, "Critics Rage over Chutney Wine," Sunday Express, 9 December 1990, 17.
57. Kamal Persad of the Indian Review Committee, Viewpoint Column, Sunday Express, 16 December 1990, 43. See also L. Siddhartha Orie, letter to the editor, Trinidad Guardian, 8 January 1991, 8.
58. Kamal Persad of the Indian Review Committee, Viewpoint Column, Sunday Express, 16 December 1990, 43. See also L. Siddhartha Orie, letter to the editor, Trinidad Guardian, 8 January 1991, 8.
59. Jagdeo Maharaj. letter to the editor, Trinidad Guardian, 30 July 1990, 9.
60. "Dougla" is the East Indian term for a person of mixed East Indian and African descent. It is derived from the Hindi word for bastard.
61. Kelvin Ramkissoon, "A Brand of Dancing not Associated with Hinduism," Express, 14 July 1992.
62. Baksh-Soodeen. "Power, Gender and Chutney," 70.
63. Indrani Rampersad of the Hindu Women's Organisation, "The Hindu Voice in Chutney," Trinidad Guardian, 25 December 1990, 10. Here I draw mainly on textual sources for East Indian views on chutney. These probably represent a range from lower-to upper-middle class. Most of my conversations with women and men from this class background indicate that these views are representative. My recent fieldwork (1997), however, suggests radically different attitudes toward chutney on the part of working-class women.
64. The Government of India funds two professorships at the University of the West Indies, one in sociology and the other in Hindi. The Indian High Commission also has a Hindi professor to conduct language classes for Trinidadians. In addition, the High Commission helps bring exponents of classital "Indian culture" to Trinidad.
65. Rampersad "The Hindu Voice in Chutney," 10.
66. The wording is that of reporter Deborah John of the Express, "Controversy Reigns," 23 October 1991.
67. See Baksh-Soodeen, "Power, Gender and Chutney," 7.